Men with wider faces are more generous.

Here is an interesting piece from Stirrat and Perrett:

Male facial width-to-height ratio appears to correlate with antisocial tendencies, such as aggression, exploitation, cheating, and deception. We present evidence that male facial width-to-height ratio is also associated with a stereotypically male prosocial tendency: to increase cooperation with other in-group members during intergroup competition. We found that men who had wider faces, compared with men who had narrower faces, showed more self-sacrificing cooperation to help their group members when there was competition with another group. We propose that this finding makes sense given the evolutionary functions of social helpfulness and aggression.

Here are some rambling clips from their discussion:

Human cooperation and altruism have very likely evolved within a long history of conflict between group. Therefore, one would expect people to have evolved either innate responses or innate learning abilities regarding aggression between groups. There are good evolutionary reasons for men to be especially intergroup oriented, because membership in groups (like social status within those groups) correlates positively with the number of mating opportunities for men. As men with wider faces are rated as physically less attractive and display more antisocial behavior that is likely to be unattractive as well, males with wider faces may adopt this stereotypically male strategy of intergroup orientation and within-group helping behavior (including aggressive defense) as a compensatory strategy for affirming their group membership and gaining prestige with both men and women in their group.

Understanding this contingent inter- and intragroup male behavior is crucial to interpreting the relation between appearance and behavior. For example, in a fascinating recent article, Wong, Ormiston, and Haselhuhn indicated that the facial width-to-height ratio of chief executive officers (CEOs) predicted their firms’ financial performance. For Wong et al., the possible salient personal characteristics of the CEO that improve a firm’s performance are power and aggressive and exploitative behavior. Clearly, given the data in our study, it is possible that the correlation between CEOs’ facial width-to-height ratio and their firms’ financial performance is due not to CEOs’ aggressive tendencies, but to their tendencies toward self-sacrifice on behalf of their firms.

A MindBlog Retrospective

Random musings...While doing some abstracting for a personal history, I’ve been looking back over writing and lectures I’ve done since my “Biology of Mind” book was published in 1999. (~15,000-20,000 copies apparently have been sold. I am amazed that several hundred copies of the book are still purchased every year.) The beginning of this MindBlog in Feburary 2006 effectively terminated work on draft versions of a next book, as well as some more popular and creative writing I was playing with. In particular, looking back at MindStuff: Bon-bons for the curious user, I like the lyricism and flow of the prose.... quite different from the chunky style of the writing I do on this MindBlog. Here is a sample:

BEGINNINGS

We are forever barred from recalling the buzzing cacophony that greeted our entry into this world. Our remembering brains had not formed, they had not begun to construct a world for themselves outside the womb. And yet, they had a very ancient kind of knowledge formed over millions of years. They knew to look for a face, they knew to direct muscles of the mouth to draw milk from a mother's breast. From a very rudimentary beginning repertoire they began fashioning a network of sensing and acting to finally generate the extraordinary machines that can read a page like this one.

In both the womb and with the growing baby, the story is a record of sensuality, of kinesthetic, visual, auditory, tasting and smelling histories that form themselves into a predictable order. A sense of past and of anticipation of the predictable future form a base non verbal imaged story line on which the layers of human language begin to build themselves. A smooth continuity informs the transformation of communication from gestures and simple sounds to strings of words with subjects, objects and verbs that form into stories about why, what, how, where. This transformation does not occur in feral children raised by surrogate animal parents, they appear to remain locked in the more present centered mental space of animals - a space that gives no flicker of reflectivity. The requirement is for not only our distinctively human genes but also a cultural context of human communication through gesture and language kept alive, altered, and transmitted by successive generations. We are tools of our our tools.

The programming of our brain regions central to social interactions is just as biological as the workings of a liver or kidney. It involves involuntary linkages of our primitive mammalian or limbic brain and its neuroendocrinology to status, sex, affiliation, power - mechanisms whose fundamental aspects we share with prairie voles and cichlid fish. Unique to humans is the self conscious confabulator or self-constructor that provides a new level of nudging, specification, control over these processes. It is this confabulator that generates what we take to be the world, what we take to be social sources of validation. All are in fact internal self creations that are assayed by their utility.

The MindBlog queue: moral responsibility; evolution of music; booze and hypnosis

During this period of relative inactivity for MindBlog, while I am pursuing other projects, I still accumulate references to work that looks interesting. Rather than letting them disappear into the list of potential posts that has accumulated by now to 50 pages of links, I’m going to post some of the links, with minimal descriptions, to make it possible for readers who find a favorite topic to click their way to the source.

Did your brain make you do it? Neuroscience and moral responsibility.

“Naïve dualism” is the belief that acts are brought about either by intentions or by the physical laws that govern our brains and that those two types of causes — psychological and biological — are categorically distinct. People are responsible for actions resulting from one but not the other. (In citing neuroscience, the Supreme Court may have been guilty of naïve dualism: did it really need brain evidence to conclude that adolescents are immature?)...Naïve dualism is misguided. “Was the cause psychological or biological?” is the wrong question when assigning responsibility for an action. All psychological states are also biological ones.

A better question is “how strong was the relation between the cause (whatever it happened to be) and the effect?” If, hypothetically, only 1 percent of people with a brain malfunction (or a history of being abused) commit violence, ordinary considerations about blame would still seem relevant. But if 99 percent of them do, you might start to wonder how responsible they really are.

Evolution of music by public choice

Music evolves as composers, performers, and consumers favor some musical variants over others. To investigate the role of consumer selection, we constructed a Darwinian music engine consisting of a population of short audio loops that sexually reproduce and mutate. This population evolved for 2,513 generations under the selective influence of 6,931 consumers who rated the loops’ aesthetic qualities. We found that the loops quickly evolved into music attributable, in part, to the evolution of aesthetically pleasing chords and rhythms. Later, however, evolution slowed. Applying the Price equation, a general description of evolutionary processes, we found that this stasis was mostly attributable to a decrease in the fidelity of transmission. Our experiment shows how cultural dynamics can be explained in terms of competing evolutionary forces.

Also check out:

Adaptive walks on the fitness landscape of music

and

Darwin Tunes on SoundCloud

Finally, this unrelated quirky fragment:

Booze enhances hypnotic susceptability

How the mighty have fallen...

I am slack-jawed with amazement on reading that Jonah Lehrer, who I have had great respect for, a brilliant popularizer of psychology and brain neuroscience (“Proust was a Neuroscientist”and "How we Decide") resigned as a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine on Monday after a report that he had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan in the book “Imagine,” published in March. This reminds me of Harvard animal psychologist Marc Hauser’s fall from grace after the discovery that he had falsified data. How could such intelligent and original people, who write with such clarity and lucidity, be so stupid? I guess ambition trumps all.

Added note: Today's New York Times has an interesting piece on the Lehrer/Dylan affair.

Brain correlates of out of body and depersonalization experiences

The NewScientist points to a workshop by Nick Medford at the recent ASSC meeting in Brighton that dealt with a focus on the anterior cingulate and right anterior insular cortex as central in producing subjective feelings about bodies, their continuity and individuality. Abnormal activity is observed in these areas during depersonalization (feelings of detachment or disconnection from one's own mental processes, emotions and/or body) and derealization (feeling like being outside of your own body observing it). Medford's ideas are summarized in his review article with Critchley.

There is now a wealth of evidence that anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortices have a close functional relationship, such that they may be considered together as input and output regions of a functional system. This system is typically engaged across cognitive, affective, and behavioural contexts, suggesting that it is of fundamental importance for mental life. Here, we review the literature and reinforce the case that these brain regions are crucial, firstly, for the production of subjective feelings and, secondly, for co-ordinating appropriate responses to internal and external events. This model seeks to integrate higher-order cortical functions with sensory representation and autonomic control: it is argued that feeling states emerge from the raw data of sensory (including interoceptive) inputs and are integrated through representations in conscious awareness. Correspondingly, autonomic nervous system reactivity is particularly important amongst the responses that accompany conscious experiences. Potential clinical implications are also discussed.

Beyond the blink - the art of delay

I pass on two interesting and related pieces on the limits of rapid spontaneous intuition judgements and actions, contra Malcolm Gladwell. Partnoy describes the spectacle of the initial reporting rush that incorrectly described the recent Supreme Court decision on health care, a case of focused "present bias" that would have been avoided by waiting and reading a bit further into the court decision. Brain pickings points to Partnoy's more scholarly and extended treatment of this issue in its piece on his new book.

Thinking about the role of delay is a profound and fundamental part of being human. Questions about delay are existential: the amount of time we take to reflect on decisions will define who we are. Is our mission simply to be another animal, responding to whatever stimulations we encounter? Or are we here for something more? ...Our ability to think about delay is a central part of the human condition. It is a gift, a tool we can use to examine our lives. Life might be a race against time, but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires pause. The converse of Socrates’s famous admonition is that the examined life just might be worth living.

Aphorisms and the Commodification of Wisdom

I pass on this nice bit from Brain Pickings on some Susan Sontag writing. One chunk:

Aphorisms are rogue ideas.

Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details. Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast, and move on. An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that.

To write aphorisms is to assume a mask — a mask of scorn, of superiority. Which, in one great tradition, conceals (shapes) the aphorist’s secret pursuit of spiritual salvation. The paradoxes of salvation. We know at the end, when the aphorist’s amoral, light point-of-view self-destructs.

Compassion towards one person generalizes to others.

DeSteno does a NYTimes OpEd piece to point to his papers in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychyology (PDF here) and the journal Emotion (PDF here). Clips:

Whether it’s the parable of the good Samaritan in Christianity, Judaism’s “13 attributes of compassion” or the Buddha’s statement that “loving kindness and compassion is all of our practice,” empathy with the suffering of others is seen as a special virtue that has the power to change the world. This idea is often articulated by the Dalai Lama, who argues that individual experiences of compassion radiate outward and increase harmony for all.

...does the experience of compassion toward one person measurably affect our actions and attitudes toward other people? If so, are there practical steps we can take to further cultivate this feeling? Recently, my colleagues and I conducted experiments that answered yes to both questions.

The links provided give the details of the experiments, here are the abstracts, first on the generalization of compassion:

The ability of compassion felt toward one person to reduce punishment directed at another was examined. The use of a staged interaction in which one individual cheats to earn higher compensation than others resulted in heightened third-party punishment being directed at the cheater. However, among participants who were induced to feel compassion toward a separate individual, punishment of the cheater disappeared even though the cheater clearly intended to cheat and showed no remorse for doing so. Moreover, additional analyses revealed that the reduction in punishment was directly mediated by the amount of compassion participants experienced toward the separate individual.

And second, on a technique to foster compassion:

Although evidence has suggested that synchronized movement can foster cooperation, the ability of synchrony to increase costly altruism and to operate as a function of emotional mechanisms remains unexplored. We predicted that synchrony, due to an ability to elicit low-level appraisals of similarity, would enhance a basic compassionate response toward victims of moral transgressions and thereby increase subsequent costly helping behavior on their behalf. Using a manipulation of rhythmic synchrony, we show that synchronous others are not only perceived to be more similar to oneself but also evoke more compassion and altruistic behavior than asynchronous others experiencing the same plight. These findings both support the view that a primary function of synchrony is to mark others as similar to the self and provide the first empirical demonstration that synchrony-induced affiliation modulates emotional responding and altruism.

Half a heartbeat can chill out our response to threat.

Whether we are breathing in or breathing out can have a pronounced effect on our threat detection threshold. Meditation regimes and stress performance training (as for Navy Seals) emphasize prolongation of exhalation as a calming technique. During exhalation, measurements have shown a relative increase in parasympathetic and vagal activity, a relative decrease in amygdala reactivity, and lower reactivity to possible threats. Now work of Garfinkel and colleagues, reported at the recent meeting on the Assoc. for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Brighton, U.K. (meeting abstracts here, 4.7 MB download) shows that the cardiac cycle can influence our emotional response to scary stimuli. Here is a clip from the writeup in The New Scientist:

In one experiment...people were asked to look at a stream of flashing images and highlight when they spotted a face. Some of the faces looked fearful, others looked neutral...Unbeknown to the volunteers, images were time-locked to appear in sync with their heart-beat. Sometimes the images were synced with the systole phase - the part of the cardiac cycle where the heart muscle contracts to squeeze blood out of the heart, at other times they were linked to the diastole phase - the stage where the heart relaxes and fills after contracting...people were better at spotting fearful faces compared with neutral faces, but only when the pictures were timed to appear at the systole phase.

In another study, people saw the same pictures while having their brain scanned using MRI. People had a stronger response in the hippocampus and amygdala - areas of the brain associated with fear - when they were shown fearful faces at systole than when they saw them at diastole. In other words, half a heartbeat was all it took for a person to experience a significantly different response to the same scary stimulus...The finding seems to be mediated by barorecepors - stretch and pressure sensitive receptors in the heart and surrounding arteries which help initiate systole. "When barroreceptors are activated at systole, a flurry of activity is transferred to the brain at that moment," Garfinkel says, which could explain the difference in the brain scans.

It is not at all clear whether this is a functional adaptation, but other studies show heartbeat can mediate other emotional functions, such as empathy and overt fear responses.

Why are conservatives happier?

The New York Times has had a nice chunk of commentary on explanations for why many studies show people of conservative political persuasion report themselves to be happier than liberals. The article by Arthur Brooks who (red flag for Deric) is president of the American Enterprise Institute notes several common explanations based on lifestyle (marriage, faith)

Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.

Some further clips from Brooks:

An explanation for the happiness gap more congenial to liberals is that conservatives are simply inattentive to the misery of others...conservatives do indeed see the free enterprise system in a sunnier light than liberals do, believing in each American’s ability to get ahead on the basis of achievement. Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help.

...one other noteworthy political happiness gap that has gotten less scholarly attention than conservatives versus liberals: moderates versus extremists...People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either “extremely conservative” (48 percent very happy) or “extremely liberal” (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center “moderate” (26 percent)...What explains this odd pattern? One possibility is that extremists have the whole world figured out, and sorted into good guys and bad guys. They have the security of knowing what’s wrong, and whom to fight. They are the happy warriors.

A followup in a "Letters to the Editor" piece contains a number of comments:

"Much research implies that happiness depends on brain chemistry (the pharmaceutical industry thinks so) and might, to some extent, be hard-wired. So maybe happiness makes us conservative, not vice versa...It’s logical that happy Americans would be suspicious of change: that they’d be conservative. And that unhappy Americans, wanting to feel happier, would prefer change: that they’d be liberal...Or maybe some unhappy Americans are unhappy because America is relatively conservative: that conservatism by some breeds unhappiness in others. The happiest countries (according to the World Happiness Report, Denmark, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands) are more liberal than America...Presumably, many people manage to be both happy and liberal, at least by our standards."

"I agree with Arthur C. Brooks that conservatives may be happier than liberals. A parallel may be found in the French society of the 18th century...Versailles and its gardens may testify to the splendor of life for the French aristocrats; similarly, the palaces in St. Petersburg may testify to the sense of well-being among the Russian nobility. This contentment could not have existed without some of the clergy encouraging the aristocrats to enjoy their status and not be concerned with the misery of the lower classes...We know how huge upheavals put an end to this obliviousness, but history is replete with lessons not learned."

"Arthur C. Brooks argues that conservatives are happier than liberals in part because of their emphasis on faith... But the emphasis on faith-based “knowledge” among some conservatives has led to an unwillingness to accept reality. Some deny evolution, or that global warming exists, or that bank misbehavior was a major cause of the Great Recession, and so on...The denial or ignorance of these depressing facts might well explain some of the conservative bliss."

"... “Don’t Indulge. Be Happy,” by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton (Sunday Review, July 8), tells us that once you have reached $75,000 a year, earning more doesn’t really make you happier...It may be that “conservatives are happier than liberals” because they are more likely to have reached that $75,000 income level."

MindBlog summer vacation schedule

I've decided to chill for a bit, relax from the daily postings, take a summer break. (Maybe this is influenced by the amazing heat wave and drought we are experiencing in the midwest. It saps energy and motivation.) So, if the spirit moves me to putter with a posting, I'll do it. If not, that's also OK...

Monday music offering. Faure Barcarolle No. 4

Here is the second of the two Faure Baracolles I did at a May 27 recital and recorded on July 5.

Religion replenishes self-control.

In four experiments Rounding et al. activate god-related concepts in participants without their conscious awareness, using an implicit-priming procedure that required participants to unscramble each of 10 five-word sentences by dropping an irrelevant word. Half of the sentences contained neutral words only ,and the remaining sentences contained one religious-prime word. A procedure like this evokes very little conscious awareness of the primed material, and participants who were suspicious of the primed material or who guessed the hypotheses of the study were excluded from the analyses. Next, participants engaged tasks that tested enduring discomfort, delayed gratification, or persistence with or without ego depletion. A forth condition used primes that were not religious, but suggested morality (such as righteous, virtue, or moral) or death (such as extinct, grave, or deadly). The researcher found religious priming most effective in increasing, or regenerating, self control. Here is their abstract:

Researchers have proposed that the emergence of religion was a cultural adaptation necessary for promoting self-control. Self-control, in turn, may serve as a psychological pillar supporting a myriad of adaptive psychological and behavioral tendencies. If this proposal is true, then subtle reminders of religious concepts should result in higher levels of self-control. In a series of four experiments, we consistently found that when religious themes were made implicitly salient, people exercised greater self-control, which, in turn, augmented their ability to make decisions in a number of behavioral domains that are theoretically relevant to both major religions and humans’ evolutionary success. Furthermore, when self-control resources were minimized, making it difficult for people to exercise restraint on future unrelated self-control tasks, we found that implicit reminders of religious concepts refueled people’s ability to exercise self-control. Moreover, compared with morality- or death-related concepts, religion had a unique influence on self-control.

Scary?..Google X making a digital human brain?

I have a major love/hate affair with google. This MindBlog uses google's blogger service, and so utterly depends on it, all my email addresses forward to my gmail account, I use it to synchronize all my calendar, documents, spreadsheets, and contacts, across multiple devices. I use google voice for phoning, google+ hangouts for video chats, etc. etc. Google's services have become such a prosthesis for me that I am quite helpless away from its Cloud. At the same time, I resist as many of the 'connectivity' efforts as much as I can. I emphatically do not want to know whether a friend is nearby, and don't want people following me. I think we are constantly flirting with the 'uncanny valley' effect, where what might be useful suddenly becomes very spooky.

In this vein, a recent article noting google's efforts to model the human brain made me both excited, interested, and terrified at the same time. Google's brain used an array of 16,000 processors to create a neural network with more than one billion connections, and presented it with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos. Without any instructions or labels, it learned to detect faces, human bodies, and cats! This suggests that the human brain, which has at least a million times more connections than this model, could learn significant classes of stimuli with minimum genetic nudging other than instructions for making nerves cells whose connections can be shaped by the sensory input received. 

Here is the abstract from Le et al.(PDF here):

We consider the problem of building high-level, class-specific feature detectors from only unlabeled data. For example, s it possible to learn a face detector using only unlabeled images? To answer this, we train a 9- layered locally connected sparse autoencoder with pooling and local contrast normalization on a large dataset of images (the model has 1 billion connections, the dataset has 10 million 200x200 pixel images downloaded from the Internet). We train this network using model parallelism and asynchronous SGD on a cluster with 1,000 machines (16,000 cores) for three days. Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not. Control experiments show that this feature detector is robust not only to translation but also to scaling and out-of-plane rotation. We also found that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies. Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8% accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories from ImageNet, a leap of 70% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.

Thinking in a foreign language reduces decision biases.

From Keyser et al.:

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

'Crazy busy' and internet distractions...

I wanted to pass on two recent NYTimes pieces: Tim Kreider makes the point that the 'busy' trap that many people drive themselves into the ground with is entirely a matter of their own choice:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day...More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done...Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

Jenna Wortham notes her experience that taking breaks to aimlessly wander around the Web during focused assignments seemed to make her more efficient. She then notes research asking whether the plasticity of our brains might be allow us to adapt to multi-tasking:

...consensus among scientists and researchers is that trying to juggle many tasks fractures our thinking and degrades the quality of each action. But understanding the plasticity of the brain, or its ability to adapt and reorganize its pathways, is still in its early stages...It may be that the brain — or some brains — can handle certain levels of multitasking and not others, he said. Surfing the Web and talking on the phone may not place the same demand on available cognitive resources as, say, cruising down the highway and sending a text message. It’s an area of research that scientists and psychologists are just starting to explore...if abilities can actually improve, the question is, by how much?

A Faure Barcarolle

I pass on this recording I made a few days ago of the Faure Barcarolle (Gondolier's song) No. 2. It is a piece I did at a May 27 musical at my home that I have mentioned earlier.

Metarepresentations explain human uniqueness.

I pass along this essay by Hugo Mercier:

Humans alone fluently understand the mental states of others. Humans alone rely on an open-ended system of communication. Humans alone ponder the reasons for their beliefs. For each of these feats, and for others too, humans rely on their most special gift: the ability to represent representations—the ability to form metarepresentations. Hidden behind such mundane thoughts as "Mary believes that Paul believes that it's going to rain" is the explanation of human uniqueness.

There are two ways to represent representations: one immensely powerful, the other rather clumsy. The clumsy way is to create a new representation for every representation that needs to be represented. Using such a device, Mary would have to form a representation "Paul believes that it's going to rain" completely independent of her representation "it's going to rain." She would then have to learn anew all of the inferences that can be drawn from "Paul believe it's going to rain," such as the negative impact on the willingness to go for a jog or the increased probability to fetch an umbrella. This cumbersome process would have to be repeated for each new representation that Mary wishes to attribute, from "Peter things the weather looks lovely" to "Ruth is afraid that the Dow Jones is going to crash tomorrow." Such a process could not possibly account for humans' amazing abilities to attribute just about any thought to other people. How can we account for these skills then?

The explanation is that we use our own representations to attribute thoughts to others. When Mary wants to attribute to Paul the belief "it's going to rain," she 'simply' uses her representation "it's going to rain" and embeds it in a metarepresentation: "Paul thinks "it's going to rain."" Because the same representation is used, Mary can take advantage of the inferences that she could draw from "it's going to rain" to draw inferences from "Paul believes that "it's going to rain."" This trick opened for humans the doors to an unparalleled understanding of their social environment.

Most of the beliefs we form about others are derived from communication: people keep telling us what they believe, want, desire, fear, love… Here again, metarepresentations play a crucial role, since understanding language requires going from utterances—"It's going to rain"—to metarepresentations—"Paul means that "it will soon rain here.""

Mentalizing (attributing thoughts to others) and communicating are the most well known uses of metarepresentations, but they are not the only ones. Metarepresentations are also essential for people to be able to think about reasons. Specific metarepresentations are relied on when people produce and evaluate arguments, as in: "Mary thinks "it's going to rain" is a good argument for "we should not go out."" Again, Mary uses her representation "it's going to rain" but, instead of attributing it to someone else, she represents its strength as a reason to accept a given conclusion.

Several other properties of representations can be represented, from their esthetic value to their normative status. The representational richness made possible by recycling our own representations to represent other people's representations, or to represent other attributes of representations, is our most distinctive trait, one of these amazingly brilliant solutions that natural selection stumbles upon. However, if it is indeed much simpler to rely on this type of metarepresentations than on the cumbersome solution of creating new representations from scratch every time, we still face a complex computational task.

Using the example of mentalizing, it is apparent that even when we use our own representations to attribute representations to other people, a lot of work remains to be done. It cannot be metarepresentations all the way down: at some point, other inputs—linguistic or behavioral cues—have to be used to attribute representations. Moreover, when a representation is represented not all of the inferences that can be drawn from it are relevant. When Mary believes that John believes it's going to rain, some of the inferences that she would draw from "it's going to rain" may not be attributable to John—maybe he doesn't mind jogging in the rain for instance. Other inferences Mary may not spontaneously draw—maybe John will be worried because he has left his book outside. Still, without a baseline—Mary's own representation—the task would jump from merely difficult to utterly intractable.

Probably more than any other cognitive trait, the ability to use our own representations to represent representations is what explains humans' achievements. Without this skill, the complex forms of social cognition that characterize our species would have been all but impossible. It is also critical for us psychologists to understand these ideas if we want to continue our forays into human cognition.

I leave the last word to Dan Sperber who, more than any other cognitive scientists, has made of metarepresentations the most central explanation of humans' unique cognition: "Humans have the ability to represent representations. I would argue that this meta-representational ability is as distinctive of humans, and as important in understanding their behaviour, as is echolocation for bats."

Mechanisms of white matter changes induced by meditation.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a noninvasive MRI-based technique that can delineate white matter fibers in vivo, measure white matter’s structural plasticity to demonstrate that training or learning alters brain white matter. Fractional anisotropy (FA) is an important index for measuring the integrity of white matter fibers. In general, a higher FA value has been related to improved performance, and reduced FA has been found in normal aging and in neurological or psychiatric disorders. Posner and collaborators now show more details about changes that occur with only 4 weeks of meditation training (One suspects these changes might reverse after cessation of meditation practice?):

Using diffusion tensor imaging, several recent studies have shown that training results in changes in white matter efficiency as measured by fractional anisotropy (FA). In our work, we found that a form of mindfulness meditation, integrative body–mind training (IBMT), improved FA in areas surrounding the anterior cingulate cortex after 4-wk training more than controls given relaxation training. Reductions in radial diffusivity (RD) have been interpreted as improved myelin but reductions in axial diffusivity (AD) involve other mechanisms, such as axonal density. We now report that after 4-wk training with IBMT, both RD and AD decrease accompanied by increased FA, indicating improved efficiency of white matter involves increased myelin as well as other axonal changes. However, 2-wk IBMT reduced AD, but not RD or FA, and improved moods. Our results demonstrate the time-course of white matter neuroplasticity in short-term meditation. This dynamic pattern of white matter change involving the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain network related to self-regulation, could provide a means for intervention to improve or prevent mental disorders.

Here is their description of the integrative body-mind training (IBMT) used:

IBMT involves body relaxation, mental imagery, and mindfulness training, accompanied by selected music background. Cooperation between the body and the mind is emphasized in facilitating and achieving a meditative state. The trainees concentrated on achieving a balanced state of body and mind guided by an IBMT coach and the compact disk. The method stresses no effort to control thoughts, but instead a state of restful alertness that allows a high degree of awareness of body, mind, and external instructions (5, 16, 19). RT involves the relaxing of different muscle groups over the face, head, shoulders, arms, legs, chest, back, and abdomen, guided by a tutor and compact disk. With eyes closed and in a sequential pattern, one is forced to concentrate on the sensation of relaxation, such as the feelings of warmth and heaviness. This progressive training helps the participant achieve physical and mental relaxation and calmness.

Hierarchy increases group effectiveness.

From Ronay et al.:

Two experiments examined the psychological and biological antecedents of hierarchical differentiation and the resulting consequences for productivity and conflict within small groups. In Experiment 1, which used a priming manipulation, hierarchically differentiated groups (i.e., groups comprising 1 high-power-primed, 1 low-power-primed, and 1 baseline individual) performed better on a procedurally interdependent task than did groups comprising exclusively either all high-power-primed or all low-power-primed individuals. There were no effects of hierarchical differentiation on performance on a procedurally independent task. Experiment 2 used a biological marker of dominance motivation (prenatal testosterone exposure as measured by a digit-length ratio) to manipulate hierarchical differentiation. The pattern of results from Experiment 1 was replicated; mixed-testosterone groups achieved greater productivity than did groups comprising all high-testosterone or all low-testosterone individuals. Furthermore, intragroup conflict mediated the productivity decrements for the high-testosterone but not the low-testosterone groups. This research suggests possible directions for future research and the need to further delineate the conditions and types of hierarchy under which hierarchical differentiation enhances rather than undermines group effectiveness.

Connectivity of prefrontal cortex predicts cognitive control and intelligence

From Cole et al.:

Control of thought and behavior is fundamental to human intelligence. Evidence suggests a frontoparietal brain network implements such cognitive control across diverse contexts. We identify a mechanism—global connectivity—by which components of this network might coordinate control of other networks. A lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) region's activity was found to predict performance in a high control demand working memory task and also to exhibit high global connectivity. Critically, global connectivity in this LPFC region, involving connections both within and outside the frontoparietal network, showed a highly selective relationship with individual differences in fluid intelligence. These findings suggest LPFC is a global hub with a brainwide influence that facilitates the ability to implement control processes central to human intelligence.

Figure - Cognitive control regions, as defined by successful cognitive control. A, Regions of Interest (ROIs) were defined based on brain activity during successful N-back task performance. The following highly selective criteria were used: preferential activation for trials requiring flexible control (lures), correct > incorrect trials, positive correlation with accuracy across participants. All 3 of these regions were hubs (in top 10% connectivity in the brain).

Hygiene can hurt.

I pass on this summary from the Editor's choice section of Science, follwed by the abstract of the work mentioned. It describes further work on how failure to interact with natural environments during childhood can lead to later chronic inflammatory disorders. Also, relevant to this topic is a recent Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes called "Dirtying Up Our Diets.", and this further piece discusses our human microbiome.

As human societies urbanize, chronic inflammatory disorders become more apparent. The hygiene hypothesis suggests that individuals exposed to infection in childhood are less likely to develop inflammatory disease because exposure to microorganisms is important for stimulating responses that maintain epithelial cell integrity. Hence, in urban environments, reduced contact with the full diversity of the microbial world may be leading to the increased incidence of inflammatory disorders. Hanski et al. took a random sample of 118 adolescents from towns, villages, and isolated dwellings in eastern Finland, tested their immune function and allergic responses, surveyed their skin microflora, and investigated the biodiversity within their homes. They found several significant correlations, not least that low biodiversity was surprisingly strongly associated with atopy, and concluded that humans need to interact with natural environments for their physical health, not just for their peace of mind.

Here is the Hanski et al. abstract:

Rapidly declining biodiversity may be a contributing factor to another global megatrend—the rapidly increasing prevalence of allergies and other chronic inflammatory diseases among urban populations worldwide. According to the “biodiversity hypothesis,” reduced contact of people with natural environmental features and biodiversity may adversely affect the human commensal microbiota and its immunomodulatory capacity. Analyzing atopic sensitization (i.e., allergic disposition) in a random sample of adolescents living in a heterogeneous region of 100 × 150 km, we show that environmental biodiversity in the surroundings of the study subjects’ homes influenced the composition of the bacterial classes on their skin. Compared with healthy individuals, atopic individuals had lower environmental biodiversity in the surroundings of their homes and significantly lower generic diversity of gammaproteobacteria on their skin. The functional role of the Gram-negative gammaproteobacteria is supported by in vitro measurements of expression of IL-10, a key anti-inflammatory cytokine in immunologic tolerance, in peripheral blood mononuclear cells. In healthy, but not in atopic, individuals, IL-10 expression was positively correlated with the abundance of the gammaproteobacterial genus Acinetobacter on the skin. These results raise fundamental questions about the consequences of biodiversity loss for both allergic conditions and public health in general.

Life satisfaction and economic growth.

Richard Easterlin coauthored a seminal study in 1974 that attempted to explain why the happiness score in the United Sates and elsewhere had stayed constant while per capita income had gone up. His explanation was that economic growth has a positive effect on happiness with other things being equal; however, it also raises aspirations, and aspirations have a negative effect. Aspirations are determined by society, particularly reference group income. The combination of these two effects gives rise to a Hedonic Treadmill.

He now has coauthored a study on China, an excellent setting for investigating the relationship between economic growth and life satisfaction. Over the period of economic reform, starting in 1978, income per capita rose 10-fold, China’s Human Development Index score improved impressively in all three dimensions, and through its steady, evolutionary reforms, China avoided the hardship that would have accompanied an economic revolution. Surely the Chinese people became happier as a result?

On the contrary, his latest results bear some erie similarities to the unequal effects of our current economic downturn on low versus higher income citizens:

Despite its unprecedented growth in output per capita in the last two decades, China has essentially followed the life satisfaction trajectory of the central and eastern European transition countries—a U-shaped swing and a nil or declining trend. There is no evidence of an increase in life satisfaction of the magnitude that might have been expected to result from the fourfold improvement in the level of per capita consumption that has occurred. As in the European countries, in China the trend and U-shaped pattern appear to be related to a pronounced rise in unemployment followed by a mild decline, and an accompanying dissolution of the social safety net along with growing income inequality. The burden of worsening life satisfaction in China has fallen chiefly on the lowest socioeconomic groups. An initially highly egalitarian distribution of life satisfaction has been replaced by an increasingly unequal one, with decreasing life satisfaction in persons in the bottom third of the income distribution and increasing life satisfaction in those in the top third.

Synchronized brain activity across individuals during emotional arousal.

From Nummenmaa et al.:

Sharing others’ emotional states may facilitate understanding their intentions and actions. Here we show that networks of brain areas “tick together” in participants who are viewing similar emotional events in a movie. Participants’ brain activity was measured with functional MRI while they watched movies depicting unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant emotions. After scanning, participants watched the movies again and continuously rated their experience of pleasantness–unpleasantness (i.e., valence) and of arousal–calmness. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to derive multisubject voxelwise similarity measures [intersubject correlations (ISCs)] of functional MRI data. Valence and arousal time series were used to predict the moment-to-moment ISCs computed using a 17-s moving average. During movie viewing, participants' brain activity was synchronized in lower- and higher-order sensory areas and in corticolimbic emotion circuits. Negative valence was associated with increased ISC in the emotion-processing network (thalamus, ventral striatum, insula) and in the default-mode network (precuneus, temporoparietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal sulcus). High arousal was associated with increased ISC in the somatosensory cortices and visual and dorsal attention networks comprising the visual cortex, bilateral intraparietal sulci, and frontal eye fields. Seed-voxel–based correlation analysis confirmed that these sets of regions constitute dissociable, functional networks. We propose that negative valence synchronizes individuals’ brain areas supporting emotional sensations and understanding of another’s actions, whereas high arousal directs individuals’ attention to similar features of the environment. By enhancing the synchrony of brain activity across individuals, emotions may promote social interaction and facilitate interpersonal understanding.

Cumulative life stress decreases working memory and prefrontal cortex size.

Two of my colleagues here at the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson and Seth Pollack, have collaborated with others in a sobering study that demonstrates brain changes caused by childhood stress:

A large corpus of research indicates that exposure to stress impairs cognitive abilities, specifically executive functioning dependent on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). We collected structural MRI scans (n = 61), well-validated assessments of executive functioning, and detailed interviews assessing stress exposure in humans to examine whether cumulative life stress affected brain morphometry and one type of executive functioning, spatial working memory, during adolescence—a critical time of brain development and reorganization. Analysis of variations in brain structure revealed that cumulative life stress and spatial working memory were related to smaller volumes in the PFC, specifically prefrontal gray and white matter between the anterior cingulate and the frontal poles. Mediation analyses revealed that individual differences in prefrontal volumes accounted for the association between cumulative life stress and spatial working memory. These results suggest that structural changes in the PFC may serve as a mediating mechanism through which greater cumulative life stress engenders decrements in cognitive functioning.

A study in the same vein on rhesus monkeys also notes late life heath effects of early adversity:

This paper exploits a unique ongoing experiment to analyze the effects of early rearing conditions on physical and mental health in a sample of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). We analyze the health records of 231 monkeys that were randomly allocated at birth across three rearing conditions: mother rearing, peer rearing, and surrogate peer rearing. We show that the lack of a secure attachment relationship in the early years engendered by adverse rearing conditions has detrimental long-term effects on health that are not compensated for by a normal social environment later in life.

Finding genes that affect brain integrity and intellectual performance

Chiang et al. have looked at brain images of 472 twins and their non-twin siblings to observe gene network effects on brain microstructure and intellectual performance:

A major challenge in neuroscience is finding which genes affect brain integrity, connectivity, and intellectual function. Discovering influential genes holds vast promise for neuroscience, but typical genome-wide searches assess approximately one million genetic variants one-by-one, leading to intractable false positive rates, even with vast samples of subjects. Even more intractable is the question of which genes interact and how they work together to affect brain connectivity. Here, we report a novel approach that discovers which genes contribute to brain wiring and fiber integrity at all pairs of points in a brain scan. We studied genetic correlations between thousands of points in human brain images from 472 twins and their nontwin siblings (mean age: 23.7 ± 2.1 SD years; 193 male/279 female). We combined clustering with genome-wide scanning to find brain systems with common genetic determination. We then filtered the image in a new way to boost power to find causal genes. Using network analysis, we found a network of genes that affect brain wiring in healthy young adults. Our new strategy makes it computationally more tractable to discover genes that affect brain integrity. The gene network showed small-world and scale-free topologies, suggesting efficiency in genetic interactions and resilience to network disruption. Genetic variants at hubs of the network influence intellectual performance by modulating associations between performance intelligence quotient and the integrity of major white matter tracts, such as the callosal genu and splenium, cingulum, optic radiations, and the superior longitudinal fasciculus.

Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking.

Being a bit curmudgeonly about the whole Happiness industry, and having once been a contrarian guest on a west coast happiness radio program (whose message was to laugh and be positive ALL the time), I thought I should mention a nice book “The Antidote”, by Oliver Burkeman, on embracing uncertainty and rediscovering the power of negative thinking. He offers this animated trailer:

How depressives surf the web.

A brief piece with the title of this post recently appeared in the NYTimes, and is an example of annoying phenomenon: advertising by advance announcement in popular media with reference made to a "forthcoming" article. The points raised are interesting enough that the reader deserves access to what might be more thorough analysis and discussion. I'm thinking the correlations indicated might be quite spurious. For what it is worth, in a study involving the usual gaggle of undergraduate volunteers, the authors claim to have:

...identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression. In other words, we found a trend: in general, the more a participant’s score on the survey indicated depression, the more his or her Internet usage included these (rather technical-sounding) features — for instance, “p2p packets,” which indicate high levels of sharing files (like movies and music).

Our second major discovery was that there were patterns of Internet usage that were statistically high among participants with depressive symptoms compared with those without symptoms. That is, we found indicators: styles of Internet behavior that were signs of depressive people. For example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high e-mail usage. This perhaps was to be expected: research by the psychologists Janet Morahan-Martin and Phyllis Schumacher has shown that frequent checking of e-mail may relate to high levels of anxiety, which itself correlates with depressive symptoms.

Another example: the Internet usage of depressive people tended to exhibit high “flow duration entropy” — which often occurs when there is frequent switching among Internet applications like e-mail, chat rooms and games. This may indicate difficulty concentrating. This finding, too, is consistent with the psychological literature: according to the National Institute of Mental Health, difficulty concentrating is also a sign of depressive symptoms among students... OTHER characteristic features of “depressive” Internet behavior included increased amounts of video watching, gaming and chatting.

Highjacked brain fallacy, and free will illusion going mainstream.

In a series of previous posts on MindBlog I have enjoyed following the continuing back and forth over free will and neuroscience,and my own sentiments are clearly revealed in my introductory web/lecture listed in the column to your left ("The I Illusion"). A raft of books on this subject has recently appeared, an example being Eagleman's "Incognito: Secret Lives of the Brain" as well as several mentioned in a recent Huffington Post essay by Victor Strenger. An interesting variation on the free will question is provided by O'Connor's discussion of a popular analogy that clouds our discussion of addiction, i.e. the portrayal of addition as a disease (not subject to our willful control, thus not the responsibility of the victim) rather than a choice.

In the “hijacked” view of addiction, the brain is the innocent victim of certain substances — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine or heroin, for example — as well as certain behaviors like eating, gambling or sexual activity...drugs like alcohol and cocaine and behaviors like gambling light up the brain’s pleasure circuitry, often bringing a burst of euphoria. Other studies indicate that people who are addicted have lower dopamine and serotonin levels in their brains, which means that it takes more of a particular substance or behavior for them to experience pleasure or to reach a certain threshold of pleasure.

However,

"A hijacker comes from outside and takes control by violent means. A hijacker takes a vehicle that is not his; hijacking is always a form of stealing and kidnapping...The analogy of addiction and hijacking involves the same category mistake as the money switched from hand to hand...It might be tempting to claim that in an addiction scenario, the drugs or behaviors are the hijackers. However, those drugs and behaviors need to be done by the person herself...In the usual cases, an individual is the one putting chemicals into her body or engaging in certain behaviors in the hopes of getting high...There is a kind of intentionality to hijacking that clearly is absent in addiction...Addiction develops over time and requires repeated and worsening use...If we think, however, of addiction as involving both choice and disease, our outlook is likely to become more nuanced.

Linking choice and responsibility is right in many ways, so long as we acknowledge that choice can be constrained in ways other than by force or overt coercion. There is no doubt that the choices of people progressing to addiction are constrained; compulsion and impulsiveness constrain choices. Many addicts will say that they choose to take that first drink or drug and that once they start they cannot stop. A classic binge drinker is a prime example; his choices are constrained with the first drink. He both has and does not have a choice. (That moment before the first drink or drug is what the philosopher Owen Flanagan describes as a “zone of control.”) But he still bears some degree of responsibility to others and to himself...Addicts are neither hijackers nor victims. It is time to retire this analogy.

Exercise bad for you?

My almost religious devotion to exercise has been slightly nudged by this piece by Gina Kolata pointing to a study by Bouchard et al., who do a rather thorough exercise study involving 1,687 people to find that

...about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease: blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterol or triglycerides....But counterbalancing the 10 percent who got worse were about the same proportion who had an exaggeratedly good response on at least one measure. Others had responses ranging from little or no change up to big changes, seen in about 10 percent, where risk factor measurements improved anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent.

The burdens of being a biped

Given my current preoccupation with my failing 70 year old knee joints, I was drawn to a brief piece by Elizabeth Pennisi with the title of this post.  Here I give a summary graphic and a few clips of her discussion:

...a number of musculoskeletal issues are traceable to our past, in particular to the switch to walking upright more than 7 million years ago…Shifting from a four-legged support system to a two-legged one put extra stress on the legs and vertebrae. Adaptations in the feet, knees, hips, pelvis, and spine accommodate these forces, but at a cost…vertebrae that break more easily, weaker bones, and feet prone to heel spurs and sprained ankles…A brief tour of the body reveals a number of design flaws, the legacy of our past…

Spine. Back pain is the leading health complaint in the United States. In dogs, horses, and even chimpanzees, the backbone is a series of vertebrae neatly stacked and evenly spaced to form a relatively stiff, gently curving beam…the human spine… is highly flexible and can even bend backward..this flexibility creates wear and tear on joint surfaces and predisposes us to osteoarthritis…One type of break, called spondylolysis, affects about 6% of the U.S. population and is a leading cause of lower-back pain in teenage athletes. In this condition, the neural arch - a triangle of bone that surrounds the spinal cord - detaches from the rest of its vertebra, allowing the spine to slip forward relative to the back of the pelvis, pinching nerves and causing pain…the problem lies in inadequate spacing between the joints connecting the vertebrae.

Feet. To cope with the added load on just two feet, the foot evolved a shock-absorbing arch by bringing what was a grasping big toe into line with the other toes. When that arch fails to form fully, as in people with flat feet, fatigue fractures can result.

Fragile bones. The added load on two feet also caused knee and hip joints to expand, creating more surface area to absorb foot-fall forces. But the joints—and vertebrae as well—evolved to be bigger by enlarging the spongy, inner bone and thinning the hard, outer bone. As a result, human bones are less dense than those of other primates. Bone...loses mass during adulthood. With humans having ever longer life spans, bones, particularly vertebrae, may become fragile and break spontaneously.

Bipedality leaves its mark in other parts of our bodies, too, for example in the difficulty of childbirth and in our vulnerability to rotator cuff injuries of the shoulder. loses mass during adulthood. With humans having ever longer life spans, bones, particularly vertebrae, may become fragile and break spontaneously.

A musical offering.

As has been my custom, I post on this blog piano video-recordings that I have recently made, this being the Chopin Nocturne in C# Minor that I played at a house concert on May 27, and subsequently recorded on June 10.

Skin Pics

One frequently comes across amazing images in cell biology. This time I felt like passing some on to readers.

The science of gaydar

Yet another study suggesting that we have an ability (if not a proficiency) to correctly judge the sexual orientation of others about 60% of the time, significantly great than chance. This piece in the New York Times points to work by Tabak and Zayas:

Research has shown that people are able to judge sexual orientation from faces with above-chance accuracy, but little is known about how these judgments are formed. Here, we investigated the importance of well-established face processing mechanisms in such judgments: featural processing (e.g., an eye) and configural processing (e.g., spatial distance between eyes). Participants judged sexual orientation from faces presented for 50 milliseconds either upright, which recruits both configural and featural processing, or upside-down, when configural processing is strongly impaired and featural processing remains relatively intact. Although participants judged women’s and men’s sexual orientation with above-chance accuracy for upright faces and for upside-down faces, accuracy for upside-down faces was significantly reduced. The reduced judgment accuracy for upside-down faces indicates that configural face processing significantly contributes to accurate snap judgments of sexual orientation.

Brain correlates of resting, alert, and meditation states.

Posner and colleagues do a nice review of neural correlates of establishing, maintaining, and switching brain states.  I thought I would pass on a few chunks from their article describing the alert state and the meditation state:

The three brain states are compared in Table 1.

The meditation state differs from the alert state induced by a warning signal in several crucial ways. First, the alert state can be induced by the simple instruction to expect a target, without requiring any practice, whereas the meditation state requires specific instruction and practice. Second, the alert state requires an external target, whereas the meditation state may not involve a target event. Third, the alert state involves primarily the neuromodulator NE, whereas dopamine (DA) has often been shown to be important to the meditation state. Finally, the alert state involves a reduction in ACC activity, likely in order to keep the mind clear to perceive and respond quickly to the target. The meditation state, however, shows increased ACC activity that serves to regulate mind wandering. As mentioned previously, Five days of integrative mind-body training (IBMT) increases brain activity in the ACC, insula, and striatum. One month of IBMT improves white matter connectivity between the ACC, striatum, and other regions. Based on these results and related work, we propose the insula, ACC, and stiatum (IAS) as key neural correlates of changing brain states (Figure 2).

Because of its role in attention and self-regulation, we hypothesize that the ACC is involved in maintaining a state by reducing conflict with other states; the insula serves a primary role in switching between states, and the striatum is linked to the reward experience and formation of habits needed to make maintenance easier. The insula and ACC work together to support the role of the autonomic nervous system in maintaining the meditation state.

Your great grandparent's experience might have altered your stress response.

This fascinating nugget from Crews et a. (open access) adds to accumulating evidence on the importance of experience induced modification of our genomes that can be passed between generations. (The experiments are on mice, because obviously you don't do this kind of study directly on humans.)

Ancestral environmental exposures have previously been shown to promote epigenetic transgenerational inheritance and influence all aspects of an individual’s life history. In addition, proximate life events such as chronic stress have documented effects on the development of physiological, neural, and behavioral phenotypes in adulthood. We used a systems biology approach to investigate in male rats the interaction of the ancestral modifications carried transgenerationally in the germ line and the proximate modifications involving chronic restraint stress during adolescence. We find that a single exposure to a common-use fungicide (vinclozolin) three generations removed alters the physiology, behavior, metabolic activity, and transcriptome in discrete brain nuclei in descendant males, causing them to respond differently to chronic restraint stress. This alteration of baseline brain development promotes a change in neural genomic activity that correlates with changes in physiology and behavior, revealing the interaction of genetics, environment, and epigenetic transgenerational inheritance in the shaping of the adult phenotype. This is an important demonstration in an animal that ancestral exposure to an environmental compound modifies how descendants of these progenitor individuals perceive and respond to a stress challenge experienced during their own life history.

MindBlog's other lives

This post is sharing with readers two aspects of Deric's private life.  I studied visual transduction over a 36 year period (1960-1996), and on Saturday May 26, near a 70th birthday in May, my former students  gathered in Madison Wisconsin (one flying from Japan for the weekend!) for a laboratory reunion.  Several former Ph.D. or postdoctoral students now head their own laboratories, are department chairs, have chair professorships, or have won academic prizes.  In preparation for the reunion, I prepared a brief web history of the laboratory, and pictures of the reunion can be found here.

On the next day, Sunday May 27,  my partner Len (on right in the picture below) and I hosted a Social/Musical at our Twin Valley home (an 1860 stone schoolhouse converted to a residence) that was attended by friends as well as many who were at the laboratory reunion.  Music selections were from the romantic literature, by Chopin, Brahms, Faure, and Debussy. Pictures of that occasion can be found here.  Included in this post is a video of the Chopin C Minor Nocture played at the Social, recorded this past Saturday. I hope to do video recordings of several of the pieces played in the next period of time.)

   

Different sorts of suspicion - brain correlates

Bhatt et al. (open access) show brain correlates of the distinction between suspicion based on a person’s general beliefs about people in the world and the situation at hand, versus suspicion that is generated by the behavior of other people:

Humans assess the credibility of information gained from others on a daily basis; this ongoing assessment is especially crucial for avoiding exploitation by others. We used a repeated, two-person bargaining game and a cognitive hierarchy model to test how subjects judge the information sent asymmetrically from one player to the other. The weight that they give to this information is the result of two distinct factors: their baseline suspicion given the situation and the suspicion generated by the other person’s behavior. We hypothesized that human brains maintain an ongoing estimate of the credibility of the other player and sought to uncover neural correlates of this process. In the game, sellers were forced to infer the value of an object based on signals sent from a prospective buyer. We found that amygdala activity correlated with baseline suspicion, whereas activations in bilateral parahippocampus correlated with trial-by-trial uncertainty induced by the buyer’s sequence of suggestions. In addition, the less credible buyers that appeared, the more sensitive parahippocampal activation was to trial-by-trial uncertainty. Although both of these neural structures have previously been implicated in trustworthiness judgments, these results suggest that they have distinct and separable roles that correspond to their theorized roles in learning and memory.

Why the liberals lost Wisconsin, and Obama may lose.

Last Tuesday the liberal bubble of Madison Wisconsin that I live in got reminded of what the rest of the state (and the U.S.) is really like:

I think this graphic from an article by Jonathan Haidt (whose book "The Righteous Mind" I'm reading, and strongly recommend you read) gives the most important part of the story. The conservative stance appeals to five of our evolved moral emotions, the liberal stance to only two.

Deep brain stimulation, fear extinction, and OCD suppression

Interesting work from Rodriguez-Romaguera et al. (open access):

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventral capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS) reduces symptoms of intractable obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but the mechanism of action is unknown. OCD is characterized by avoidance behaviors that fail to extinguish, and DBS could act, in part, by facilitating extinction of fear. We investigated this possibility by using auditory fear conditioning in rats, for which the circuits of fear extinction are well characterized. We found that DBS of the VS (the VC/VS homolog in rats) during extinction training reduced fear expression and strengthened extinction memory. Facilitation of extinction was observed for a specific zone of dorsomedial VS, just above the anterior commissure; stimulation of more ventrolateral sites in VS impaired extinction. DBS effects could not be obtained with pharmacological inactivation of either dorsomedial VS or ventrolateral VS, suggesting an extrastriatal mechanism. Accordingly, DBS of dorsomedial VS (but not ventrolateral VS) increased expression of a plasticity marker in the prelimbic and infralimbic prefrontal cortices, the orbitofrontal cortex, the amygdala central nucleus (lateral division), and intercalated cells, areas known to learn and express extinction. Facilitation of fear extinction suggests that, in accord with clinical observations, DBS could augment the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapies for OCD.

Embodied metaphors and creative acts

K.-y. Leung et al. do a series of studies that suggest that embodiment of metaphors for creativity promotes creative problem solving. Given that across cultures and languages (e.g., English, Korean, Hebrew, and Chinese), metaphors associate creativity with bilateral physical orientations (thinking about a problem “on one hand” and then “on the other hand”), a first study probed divergent thinking (fluency, flexibility, and originality) by asking participants to imagine multiple uses for a university building complex while gesturing with their right hand towards a wall. During a second trial, control participants generated additional ideas while raising the same hand they had raised during the first trial; participants in the experimental condition, however, switched hands by holding their left hand toward the wall and their right hand behind their back while they generated additional ideas (participants were not aware that they would have to generate answers to the same question on both trials until the second trial began.) The experimental subjects who changed hands generated more ideas, which were also more flexible and original.

A second two part experiment looked at the "think outside of the box" metaphor by seating participants inside or outside of a 5x5 ft. box, who carried out a convergent thinking task (think of a word that is related to three cue words. For example, “measure,” “worm,” and “video” might elicit the fourth word “tape”). Participants who completed such a remote associates test while they were physically outside the box generated more correct answers. In a variation on the box theme, divergent thinking was then probed by noting the effect of having participants physically embody a box by walking in a fixed, rectangular path. Participants who could move freely were more creative in imagining identities of ambiguous objects.

Two further studies dealt with the “putting two and two together” metaphor (by noting the effect of physically moving blocks on convergent thinking), and imagining bodily motions in a virtual world similar to those of physically enacting such metaphors (as in the first and second experiments).

Here is their abstract:

Creativity is a highly sought-after skill. Prescriptive advice for inspiring creativity abounds in the form of metaphors: People are encouraged to “think outside the box,” to consider a problem “on one hand, then on the other hand,” and to “put two and two together” to achieve creative breakthroughs. These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition. Inspired by recent advances in the understanding of body-mind linkages in the research on embodied cognition, we explored whether enacting metaphors for creativity enhances creative problem solving. Our findings from five studies revealed that both physical and psychological embodiment of metaphors for creativity promoted convergent thinking and divergent thinking (i.e., fluency, flexibility, or originality) in problem solving. Going beyond prior research, which focused primarily on the kind of embodiment that primes preexisting knowledge, we provide the first evidence that embodiment can also activate cognitive processes that facilitate the generation of new ideas and connections.

The power of network visualization.

A colleague of mine in the campus Chaos seminar pointed us to this 10 minute talk, which I found very engaging. It is given by Manuel Lima, who is senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing:

Unconscious actions of testosterone

Here is an interesting observation from Terburg et al.:

Throughout vertebrate phylogeny, testosterone has motivated animals to obtain and maintain social dominance—a fact suggesting that unconscious primordial brain mechanisms are involved in social dominance. In humans, however, the prevailing view is that the neocortex is in control of primordial drives, and testosterone is thought to promote social dominance via conscious feelings of superiority, indefatigability, strength, and anger. Here we show that testosterone administration in humans prolongs dominant staring into the eyes of threatening faces that are viewed outside of awareness, without affecting consciously experienced feelings. These findings reveal that testosterone motivates social dominance in humans in much the same ways that it does in other vertebrates: involuntarily, automatically, and unconsciously.

Quantitative analysis of language evolution.

Modern computation techniques and the mass digitization of books have made possible the systematic analysis of one of humankind's most important cultural artifacts, its languages. A analysis by Hughes et al. is quite different from studies in the dating of literary works, the analysis of the coarse-grained structure of literary history (and the evolution of genre), and most notably, a recent analysis of Google Books that examined temporal trends in content-word usage. (One of the co-authors of the study is a polymath, David Krakauer, who recently become Director of our Wisconsin Institute of Discovery here at the University of Wisconsin and is also Co-Director of its Center for Complexity and Collective Computation). Hughes et al. focus on the usage of content-free words as the basis of a first large-scale study of the similarity structure of literary style. Content-free words are the “syntactic glue” of a language: They are words that carry little meaning on their own but form the bridge between words that convey meaning. Their joint frequency of usage is known to provide a useful stylistic fingerprint for authorship, and thus suggests a method of comparing author styles. Their dataset was a subset of 537 authors in the Project Gutenberg database composed of those who wrote after the year 1550, had at least five works in English in the Project Gutenberg collection, and for whom birth and death date information was available. The primary results of the analysis are that time provides the most coherent means of clustering work and that a trend of diminishing stylistic influence is observed as one moves forward in time. Such a finding is consistent with a simple evolutionary model for stylistic influence, which assumes that imitation attends preferentially to contemporary authors. The authors uncover quantitative support of the previously purely anecdotal notion of a literary “style of a time.” They note that their findings suggest the utility and perhaps the creation of a new field of stylometric analysis in culturomics. Here is their abstract:

Literature is a form of expression whose temporal structure, both in content and style, provides a historical record of the evolution of culture. In this work we take on a quantitative analysis of literary style and conduct the first large-scale temporal stylometric study of literature by using the vast holdings in the Project Gutenberg Digital Library corpus. We find temporal stylistic localization among authors through the analysis of the similarity structure in feature vectors derived from content-free word usage, nonhomogeneous decay rates of stylistic influence, and an accelerating rate of decay of influence among modern authors. Within a given time period we also find evidence for stylistic coherence with a given literary topic, such that writers in different fields adopt different literary styles. This study gives quantitative support to the notion of a literary “style of a time” with a strong trend toward increasingly contemporaneous stylistic influence.

It seems a bit amazing that their analysis of the use of 307 content-free words that included prepositions, articles, conjunctions, “to be” verbs, and some common nouns and pronouns allowed them to cluster authors in time and by narrative theme, and that content-free word frequencies were found to be fairly faithfully transmitted among authors of a similar period, even when imitation at this level of textual resolution seems to be out of the question. Moving into the present, this imitation becomes increasingly localized to our contemporaries. Further edited clips:

We propose that for the earliest periods in our dataset, and through the early modern period, the number of published works remained relatively low. This allowed authors to have sufficient time to sample (read) very broadly from the full range of historically published works. Common phrasing, and norms of syntax and grammar, remain relatively unchanged for long periods of time. This generates decay rates in similarity as a function of temporal distance that are not significantly different from the average, because authors are influenced by models distributed uniformly in time. However, for more recent authors, the number of possible choices of books to read has increased dramatically, and with a finite amount of time, a subset of these works must be chosen, leading to rather heterogeneous reading patterns and a greater overall diversity of authored works. The pattern accelerates in the later modern period, with even more authors to choose from and selection dominated by contemporaneous authors. This suggests a simple evolutionary model for patterns of influence.

The negative influence of authors from a preceding generation in the period 1907–1952 could be explained by the Modernist movement. Modernist authors, who are contained within this time period, display a radical shift in style as they reject their immediate stylistic predecessors yet remain a part of a dominant movement that included many of their contemporaries. The contemporary influence of writing programs and their often close readings of contemporary works and feedback (sometimes called “reflexive modernism”) has also been suggested to contribute to this effect. The overall pattern that we find is that the stylistic influence of the past is diminishing at an increasing rate, which suggests that style itself is evolving at an accelerating pace.

The patterns of influence are a first discovery from the corpus. Implicit in this is a temporal clustering of similarity and quantitative support for the qualitative suggestions of a notion of a “style of a time.” It is also worth noting that the implicit temporal clustering of similarity is not an exclusively temporal phenomenon. A network representation of the authors reveals evidence of thematic clustering as well. Examples include interesting groupings of English poets and playwrights, military leaders, and a collection of important naturalists, social thinkers, and historians. This is suggestive and supportive of the hypothesis that word frequencies are not only typical of a given time but also of a field of inquiry. Historians and naturalists do not only write about different topics, they write about them differently. Taken together with the patterns of decay in influence this suggests that whereas authors of the 18th and 19th centuries continued to be influenced by previous centuries, authors of the late 20th century are strongly influenced by authors from their own decade. The so-called “anxiety of influence”, whereby authors are understood in terms of their response to canonical precursors, is becoming an “anxiety of impotence,” in which the past exerts a diminishing stylistic influence on the present. These results are consistent with many complex, scaling phenomena such as those found in urban and technological systems, where there has been an accelerating rate of change into the present. This is a rather intriguing pattern of short-term cultural evolution that is different from the constant rates of change reported for names and pottery or the reduced rates of lexical substitution of frequently used words over thousands of years. Further analysis will elucidate not only the transmission mechanisms generating temporally localized styles but additional stylistic factors that help differentiate the style of one author from that of another.

Social jetlag and obesity.

Roenneberg et al. do an epidemiological study, showing that, beyond sleep duration, the difference between natural circadian sleep rhythm and the actual times of sleep people observe (social jetlag) is associated with increased body mass index. They suggest that living “against the clock” may be a factor contributing to the modern epidemic of obesity. (But... it seems to me people were doing this before the obesity epidemic was noted. Most experts attribute the epidemic to increased physical inactivity and abundance of cheap highly caloric foods.) Here is their summary and abstract:

-In 70% of the population, biological and social clocks differ by >1 hr (social jetlag) -Social jetlag is a predictor of BMI, especially for overweight individuals -The decrease of sleep duration over the past decade concerns only workdays -Individuals are progressively exposed to decreasing light, and their chronotypes delay

Abstract

Obesity has reached crisis proportions in industrialized societies. Many factors converge to yield increased body mass index (BMI). Among these is sleep duration. The circadian clock controls sleep timing through the process of entrainment. Chronotype describes individual differences in sleep timing, and it is determined by genetic background, age, sex, and environment (e.g., light exposure). Social jetlag quantifies the discrepancy that often arises between circadian and social clocks, which results in chronic sleep loss. The circadian clock also regulates energy homeostasis, and its disruption—as with social jetlag—may contribute to weight-related pathologies. Here, we report the results from a large-scale epidemiological study, showing that, beyond sleep duration, social jetlag is associated with increased BMI. Our results demonstrate that living “against the clock” may be a factor contributing to the epidemic of obesity. This is of key importance in pending discussions on the implementation of Daylight Saving Time and on work or school times, which all contribute to the amount of social jetlag accrued by an individual. Our data suggest that improving the correspondence between biological and social clocks will contribute to the management of obesity.

Social interactions prime us for motor empathy or resonance.

Hogeveen and Obhi1 find that recent experience tunes our mirroring systems to particular agent types. A bit from their introduction, followed by the abstract:

Detecting and responding to biological stimuli such as predators or potential mates is a fundamental and adaptive capability, supported by rain areas such as the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) which is biased for processing biological motion. The pSTS and the parietofrontal mirror system form part of a wider action observation network (AON), which is thought to underlie many social abilities. Motor resonance (MR) is the activation of matching motor representations during observation of action(s) made by others, and could index mirror activity within the wider AON.

Understanding the neural basis of social behavior has become an important goal for cognitive neuroscience and a key aim is to link neural processes observed in the laboratory to more naturalistic social behaviors in real-world contexts. Although it is accepted that mirror mechanisms contribute to the occurrence of motor resonance (MR) and are common to action execution, observation, and imitation, questions remain about mirror (and MR) involvement in real social behavior and in processing nonhuman actions. To determine whether social interaction primes the MR system, groups of participants engaged or did not engage in a social interaction before observing human or robotic actions. During observation, MR was assessed via motor-evoked potentials elicited with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Compared with participants who did not engage in a prior social interaction, participants who engaged in the social interaction showed a significant increase in MR for human actions. In contrast, social interaction did not increase MR for robot actions. Thus, naturalistic social interaction and laboratory action observation tasks appear to involve common MR mechanisms, and recent experience tunes the system to particular agent types.

Serotonin modulates reward value in our decision making.

Seymour et al. find further behavioral and neural evidence that serotonin modulates (is necessary for) distinct behavioral and anatomical components of decision-making. Most surprising is their observation of a strongly positive dependence of reward outcome value on serotonin signaling, with corresponding cue-value-related activity in vmPFC and prediction-error-related activity in dorsolateral putamen (for errors). This value-dependent effect was behaviorally and anatomically distinct from an effect of serotonin on behavioral flexibility, as indicated by choice perseveration. Here is their abstract:

Establishing a function for the neuromodulator serotonin in human decision-making has proved remarkably difficult because if its complex role in reward and punishment processing. In a novel choice task where actions led concurrently and independently to the stochastic delivery of both money and pain, we studied the impact of decreased brain serotonin induced by acute dietary tryptophan depletion. Depletion selectively impaired both behavioral and neural representations of reward outcome value, and hence the effective exchange rate by which rewards and punishments were compared. This effect was computationally and anatomically distinct from a separate effect on increasing outcome-independent choice perseveration. Our results provide evidence for a surprising role for serotonin in reward processing, while illustrating its complex and multifarious effects.