MindBlog on medical leave.

I'm heading into knee surgery early tomorrow morning, and may not be feeling in shape to continue doing posts for awhile.

The biology of sacred values.

Frank Rose does a nice piece in the NYTimes, pointing to the work of Gregory Berns and others, on brain correlates of why financial incentives are irrelevant when “sacred values” are at stake. (As in the failure of financial incentives offered by the West in getting Iran to give up its “right” to enrich uranium for “peaceful” uses.) Attempts to offer money to get people to alter strongly held beliefs - with issues like gun control, abortion, Israeli or Palestinian rights to the West Bank of the Jordan - result in moral outrage, feelings of contamination, and a need for moral cleansing. Work by Berns and others suggests we have radically different ways of processing ordinary and sacred beliefs. Berns…

...took M.R.I. images of participants’ brains as he asked them to consider changing their personal beliefs in exchange for money. Would they trade their preference for dogs over cats? What about their belief in God? Would they be willing to kill an innocent person?

When participants were questioned about issues of the dog-or-cat variety, their brain scans showed activity in the parietal cortex — a region that’s thought to be involved in making cost-benefit calculations. But when asked about issues on which they declined to make a trade, entirely different parts of the brain were activated — systems that are associated with telling right from wrong and with storing and retrieving rules. The result, Professor Berns observes, could be a new way to gauge sacred values “that is not solely dependent on self-report.”

Are we going to start running international negotiators through an M.R.I. machine to see where they’re processing the issues? [and determine whether or not someone is faking it when they claim sacred values] Highly unlikely. But results like Professor Berns’s might at least disprove the idea, still held by many, that every belief has its price. Given the intensely negative emotions that financial incentives can trigger, this might be a good lesson to learn.

Here is the abstract from the Berns et al work "The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values" to which the above is referring. It gives a bit more detail on the brain correlates of sacred values:

Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian theory suggests that they are processed based on costs and benefits of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an individual naturally uses is unknown. The study of decisions over sacred values is difficult because outcomes cannot typically be realized in a laboratory, and hence little is known about the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We used an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred values affect behaviour through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.

Your fitness age - a simple online calculator

Several popular articles have directed attention to recent work by Nes et al., which suggests that answers to seven simple questions can predict fitness age as well as more exhaustive determinations using peak oxygen intake (VO2) measured on a treadmill, HDL and total cholesterol measurents, accurate determination of body mass index, a lengthy life style questionnaire. Several large scale studies have shown that VO2 max correlates with significantly augmented life spans, and indicates 'fitness age.' They found the simple list of questions predicted VO2 max as well as actual treadmill determinations. I tried their online fitness calculator and discounted its determination that my 71 year old body had the fitness age of a 22-year old. Then I noticed the small detail that the calculator asked for waistline measurement in cm., not inches! Entering the waistline correctly gave me a VO2 max of 40 and fitness age of 59, which is a bit more reasonable. Here is their abstract:

PURPOSE: Cardiorespiratory fitness is suggested to be an important marker of cardiovascular risk but is rarely evaluated in health care settings. In the present study, directly measured peak oxygen uptake (V·O 2peak) from a diverse population of 4637 healthy participants were used to develop and cross-validate a new nonexercise regression model of cardiorespiratory fitness for men and women.

METHODS AND RESULTS: Multivariable regression analysis was used to develop a nonexercise model of cardiorespiratory fitness for men and women separately with V·O 2peak as the outcome. In the final models, 2067 men (mean age = 48.8 yr) and 2193 women (mean age = 47.9 yr) were included, respectively. Cross-validation of the models was done by standard data splitting procedures with evaluation of constant error and total error of a model developed on one sample and cross-validated on another sample. Age, waist circumference, leisure time physical activity, and resting HR, successively, were the most potent predictors of V·O 2peak for both men and women. Together, 61% and 56% of variance in V·O 2peak, for men and women, respectively, were explained by the full models. SEE was 5.70 and 5.14 for the models including men and women, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS: The nonexercise regression model developed in the present study was fairly accurate in predicting V·O 2peak in this healthy population of men and women. The model might be generalized to other healthy populations and might be a valid tool for a rough assessment of cardiorespiratory fitness in an outpatient setting.

Making muscle

Several scientific journals are having a robust and quirky sense of humor these days. I have to pass on this take-off on the Charles Atlas comic advertisements used to describe work by Xu et al. in which a factor obtained from culture of zebrafish embryos is used to induce skeletal muscle differentiation in human induced pluripotent stem cells.

Cell description: The cover catroon tells the story, reported in Xu et al., of an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC, shown here in a red t-shirt) that cannot make muscle. When a “bully” researcher tries to steal the postdoctoral fellow working with the iPSC, it's back to the lab, where the fellow uses a zebrafish model to discover chemicals that can turn the iPSC into muscle. Facing down the bully, the postdoctoral fellow rides high on his success. This concept was adapted from Charles Atlas comic advertisements related to bodybuilding. Cover artwork by Athens Qin.

More on long-term benefits of early musical training.

White-Schwoch et al. show that older adults who took music lessons at an early age - the type of instrument doesn't matter - can process the sounds of speech faster than those who did not:

Aging results in pervasive declines in nervous system function. In the auditory system, these declines include neural timing delays in response to fast-changing speech elements; this causes older adults to experience difficulty understanding speech, especially in challenging listening environments. These age-related declines are not inevitable, however: older adults with a lifetime of music training do not exhibit neural timing delays. Yet many people play an instrument for a few years without making a lifelong commitment. Here, we examined neural timing in a group of human older adults who had nominal amounts of music training early in life, but who had not played an instrument for decades. We found that a moderate amount (4–14 years) of music training early in life is associated with faster neural timing in response to speech later in life, long after training stopped (>40 years). We suggest that early music training sets the stage for subsequent interactions with sound. These experiences may interact over time to sustain sharpened neural processing in central auditory nuclei well into older age.

Where musical melodies are represented in our brains.

Here is a fascinating piece by Schindler et al. (open access) showing that musical melodies, or ‘gestalts’ are encoded at very early stages of our auditory processing and are constant through changes of key signature and type of instrument playing.

The perception of a melody is invariant to the absolute properties of its constituting notes, but depends on the relation between them—the melody's relative pitch profile. In fact, a melody's “Gestalt” is recognized regardless of the instrument or key used to play it. Pitch processing in general is assumed to occur at the level of the auditory cortex. However, it is unknown whether early auditory regions are able to encode pitch sequences integrated over time (i.e., melodies) and whether the resulting representations are invariant to specific keys. Here, we presented participants different melodies composed of the same 4 harmonic pitches during functional magnetic resonance imaging recordings. Additionally, we played the same melodies transposed in different keys and on different instruments. We found that melodies were invariantly represented by their blood oxygen level–dependent activation patterns in primary and secondary auditory cortices across instruments, and also across keys. Our findings extend common hierarchical models of auditory processing by showing that melodies are encoded independent of absolute pitch and based on their relative pitch profile as early as the primary auditory cortex.

Why some of us can, or can't, disengage from pain.

Kucyi et al.,  note a beneficial effect of mind wandering and increased default mode network activity on pain suppression. Here is the author's state of the significance of their work:

The mind easily wanders away from mundane tasks, but pain is presumed to automatically capture attention. We demonstrate that individuals differ in how often their minds spontaneously wander away from pain and that these differences are associated with the disruptive effect of pain on cognitive performance. Brain–behavior relationships underscore these individual differences. When people’s minds wander away from pain, there are increased activations of the default mode network (DMN) and strong interactions between the DMN and periaqueductal gray (PAG), an opiate-rich region mediating pain suppression. Individuals with greater tendencies to mind wander from pain have stronger anatomical links and dynamic functional communication between PAG and DMN. These findings provide clinically important clues about why some individuals cannot disengage from pain.

The promises of 'priming'

I've done numerous posts noting psychological experiments on the phenomenon of priming, whose practical application is a major component of behavioral economics. Gary Gutting argues that the significance of priming in our real lives, more complex than the controlled parameters of a psychological experiment, may be overblown in claims that priming experiments provide powerful new tools for influencing human behavior. He starts by noting:

The classic priming experiment was one in which college students had been asked to form various sentences from a given set of words. Those in one group were given words that included several associated with older people (like bingo, gray and Florida). Those in a second group were given words with no such associations. After the linguistic exercise, each participant was instructed to leave the building by walking down a hallway. Without letting the participants know what was going on, the experimenters timed their walks down the hall. They found that those in the group given words associated with old people walked significantly slower than those in the other group. The first group had been primed to walk more slowly.

And, after reviewing claims made for the power of priming techniques to alter our behavior, Gutting notes:

...that priming experiments seldom tell us how important priming is in realistic situations. We know that it has striking effects under highly simplified and controlled laboratory conditions, where the subjects are exposed only to the stimuli that the experimenters provide. But it is very difficult to know how significant priming stimuli (thinking about money, large numbers, abstract questions) would be in a real-life, uncontrolled environment, where all sorts of stimuli might be conflicting with one another. Also, there is seldom any reason to think that even a strong priming effect will last very long. As Jonathan Ellis has noted, even Kahneman ignores these points when, after summarizing the walking-like-the-elderly experiment, he says: “Although you surely were not aware of it, reading this paragraph [which contained many words relating to the elderly] primed you as well. If you had needed to stand up to get a glass of water, you would have been slightly slower than usual to rise from your chair . . . ”

These limits are well illustrated by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s best-selling book, Nudge. The authors begin with excellent discussions of priming and similar experimental results and then put forward numerous public policy proposals, most of them quite sensible, allegedly inspired by these results. But hardly any of their proposals depend on the results of behavioral economics. Their ideas are mostly a matter of common sense or of strategies long practiced in the business world: in giving people options (regarding decisions like retirement plans or organ donations), make the choice you prefer the default option; provide more or less information on a credit card bill depending on whether you want people to pay just the minimum each month; arrange food in a cafeteria or supermarket so the items you want chosen are most accessible. As Benjamin Friedman pointed out in his review of the book, “we don’t need behavioral economics . . . to think such proposals might be helpful.”

Priming experiments remain important sources of information about the details of how our minds work. It’s possible that they might someday yield valuable techniques for modifying real-world behavior. (Here is one promising if very preliminary example.) But for now claims that they have deep philosophical significance or major practical consequences have scant support.

The serious business of play

Gillian Brown reviews what looks like a very interesting book from Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin "Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation." The look critically evaluates the literature on animal and human play. A few clips from the review:

Some children gain pleasure from climbing trees, some spend hours with building bricks, and others enjoy pretending to be doctors or musicians. In Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation, Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin argue that all of these play activities have in common the generation of novel combinations of actions or thoughts and that early play experiences promote creativity in later life.

...this highly engaging book provides a novel perspective on the role of play activities that apparently lack seriousness. The clarity of prose and diversity of material covered in Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation persuade the reader to reconsider the importance of play in childhood and beyond. For instance, Bateson and Martin point out that childhood play can introduce complexity to the behavioral repertoire and lead to selection for traits that underpin the adoption of novel behavior, thereby altering the evolutionary trajectory of our species. Playful play may be particularly important in generating creativity, and the authors entreat that adults still “have much to gain from deliberately adopting a more playful approach to life.”

To use their quote from George Bernard Shaw, “We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”

Motor exploration of 5-month old predicts academic achievement at 14 years.

A fascinating part of these observations is the lack of correlation noted in the last sentence of the abstract:. From Bornstein et al.:

A developmental cascade defines a longitudinal relation in which one psychological characteristic uniquely affects another psychological characteristic later in time, separately from other intrapersonal and extrapersonal factors. Here, we report results of a large-scale (N = 374), normative, prospective, 14-year longitudinal, multivariate, multisource, controlled study of a developmental cascade from infant motor-exploratory competence at 5 months to adolescent academic achievement at 14 years, through conceptually related and age-appropriate measures of psychometric intelligence at 4 and 10 years and academic achievement at 10 years. This developmental cascade applied equally to girls and boys and was independent of children’s behavioral adjustment and social competence; mothers’ supportive caregiving, verbal intelligence, education, and parenting knowledge; and the material home environment. Infants who were more motorically mature and who explored more actively at 5 months of age achieved higher academic levels as 14-year-olds.

The quest for personal enhancement - adding self brain stimulation to the toolkit?

I done a series of posts on computer games that can enhance attention, intelligence, memory, navigation and at least partially reverse the effects of aging. (See for example the post on Posit Science's Brain HQ). Interest in brain enhancement by tDCS (trans-cranial direct current stimulation) also has been building exponentially. In previous posts I've noted work showing how his gentle non-invasive technique can alter our sense of fairness, alter belief formation, enhance general intelligence,and mathematical abilities ( with these effects persisting for months), be performed with a do it yourself kit costing around $200, raising both safety and ethical issues. (Even the tDCS units used in research are often little more than a nine-volt battery with two electrodes and a controller for setting the current and the duration of the session. Several YouTube videos show how to make a rough facsimile, but fail to note that applying too much current, for too long, or to the wrong spot on the skull, can be extremely dangerous.) Another post notes a caution that stimulation enhancing one cognitive activity can compromises others.

The New York Times has published two recent article on the technique and the do it yourself approach. One, largely positive, is by Dan Hurley, basically an advertisement for his forthcoming book ‘Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power,’ and the second, by Kate Murphy, notes more cautions.

There is little data on the long-term use of tDCS, and some experts worry is that in addition to serious external burns, people who self-administer could permanently damage their brains, impairing cognitive and motor function in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

“What makes me very nervous about the Foc.us ($249,made by a British firm) and homemade tDCS devices is the intensity and duration of current people are getting,” said Dr. Michael Weisend, a cognitive neuroscientist at Wright State Research Institute in Beaver Creek, Ohio, who conducts tDCS research for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force. “We have zero data on long-term use on anybody’s brain, and I have scars to prove that you can burn yourself pretty badly with tDCS.”

I've actually done most of the BrainHQ computer exercises, and note they have clear effects on my attention, perception, and speed....but I get bored after a bit and don't stay with it. Insufficient motivation, I suppose. I'm not about to start dinking around with commercial or home-made tDCS kits, especially given the evidence that boosting one cognitive capacity can compromise others. I think we ought to bloody leave ourselves alone, unless we have notable cognitive impairments than can and should be addressed. I think the self improvement craze that seems to strive for some kind of uber-human is becoming a social pathology...and don't get me started on the marketing of life-extension fantasies.

Generating music during exercise lessens sense of physical effort.

A fascinating bit of work from Fritz et al. makes one wonder whether our human love of music is based in part on its ability to ease physical effort.  They looked not at the effects not of simple passive listening to music during exercise, which is a feature of many gym environments, but of creating music generated by an electronic kit integrated into the internal workings of weight-training machines (such as stair steppers or weight machines with bars pulled up or down).   Subjects in effect became their own disk jockeys, creating sounds that mirrored their physical efforts.  From Reynolds review, the fascinating observation was:

...that most of the volunteers had generated significantly greater muscular force while working at the musically equipped machines than the unmodified ones. They also had used less oxygen to generate that force and reported that their exertions had felt less strenuous. Their movements were also more smooth in general, resulting in a steadier flow of music.

This suggests that:

A similar dynamic may have motivated early humans to whistle or hum while they hunted or tilled and later to raise their voices in song during barn raisings and other intense physical labor.

The abstract of the work:

Here we present a data set demonstrating that musical agency greatly decreases the perceived exertion during strenuous activity. We believe these findings are a major contribution to how we consider the role of music in the emergence of human societies. Furthermore, these findings are timely because they crucially help to understand the therapeutic power of music, a scientific field about to unfold. Although one would expect this workout with musical feedback (jymmin') to be a rather unconventional and dimensionally constrained (each instrument one-dimensionally regulates a musical signal) way to experience musical agency, the experience of the performers suggests an intimate entwinement of ecstatic pleasure and exertion during the performance.

Slaves of the Internet, Unite!

To continue the rant started in last Tuesday's post, let's move on to emphasizing how, in addition to our digital connections compromising our direct human ones, the rewards for writing and thinking have been vastly diminished. Content in real books, magazines, and newspapers that used to generate an income, for creative individuals now is expected for free, as noted by Tim Kreider ("They really do admire your work, just not enough to pay one cent for it") in his very humorous piece "Slaves of the Internet, Unite!"

People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing.

He notes:

...a side effect of our information economy, in which “paying for things” is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them. The first time I ever heard the word “content” used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I — henceforth, “content providers” — were essentially extinct. This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it’s the delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called “art” — writing, music, film, photography, illustration — to the status of filler, stuff to stick between banner ads.

Practicalities aside, money is also how our culture defines value, and being told that what you do is of no ($0.00) value to the society you live in is, frankly, demoralizing. Even sort of insulting. And of course when you live in a culture that treats your work as frivolous you can’t help but internalize some of that devaluation and think of yourself as something less than a bona fide grown-up.

My field of expertise is complaining, not answers. I know there’s no point in demanding that businesspeople pay artists for their work, any more than there is in politely asking stink bugs or rhinoviruses to quit it already. It’s their job to be rapacious and shameless. But they can get away with paying nothing only for the same reason so many sleazy guys keep trying to pick up women by insulting them: because it keeps working on someone. There is a bottomless supply of ambitious young artists in all media who believe the line about exposure, or who are simply so thrilled at the prospect of publication that they’re happy to do it free of charge.

Kreider does make a suggestion:

Here, for public use, is my very own template for a response to people who offer to let me write something for them for nothing:

Thanks very much for your compliments on my [writing/illustration/whatever thing you do]. I’m flattered by your invitation to [do whatever it is they want you to do for nothing]. But [thing you do] is work, it takes time, it’s how I make my living, and in this economy I can’t afford to do it for free. I’m sorry to decline, but thanks again, sincerely, for your kind words about my work.

I am impressed Mr. Kreider's old-fashioned courtesy in making such a response. The several requests I get each month to be a 'content provider' for free go straight to the email trash bucket.

Sleep cleans our brains, renews our synapses, consolidates our memories

This bit of work got a flurry of attention recently, but I think is important enough to warrant repeating here.  Xie et al.  have used an elegant two-photon imaging technique to compare awake and sleeping mouse brains. They find that metabolic waste products of neural activity are cleared out of the sleeping brain at a faster rate than during the awake state:

...convective fluxes of interstitial fluid increased the rate of β-amyloid clearance during sleep. Thus, the restorative function of sleep may be a consequence of the enhanced removal of potentially neurotoxic waste products that accumulate in the awake central nervous system.

The review of this work by Underwood has a nice graphic of the fluid-filled channels (pale blue) that expand to flush out waste:

The role of sleep in memory consolidation is well known, and further work of Tononi's group has suggested that in rats, sleep maintains an overall synaptic balance, by uniformly dialing down synapses that have expanded their activity during the day. (I have also previously pointed to work on fruit flies by Tononi's group coming to a similar conclusion.)

Work of this sort suggests that the 50-70 million Americans who have insufficient sleep or some kind of sleep disorder (like sleep apnea) are carrying around extra garbage in their brains during the day and have brain synaptic connection that haven't recovered from previous days' activities, both factors that would seem likely to compromise our mental function!

Scary music for Halloween - Dance Macabre

You should have a look at the 13 scariest pieces of classical music for Halloween, assembled by Limelight Magazine. It is hard for me to select a favorite, but I will point to this classic Disney cartoon of Saint-Saens Dance Macabre:

Saint-Saëns’s creepy 1874 tone poem is a Halloween classic, depicting the revelry of the Grim Reaper at midnight every year at this time. With his cursed fiddle, Death summons the dead from their graves to kick up their heals until dawn. In this vintage Disney animation, listen out for the xylophone sound of rattling bones.

Finding a protein linking exercise to brain health

Yet another candidate for a life enhancing drug? ...perhaps a protein that mimics the effect of the protein FNDC5, which is produced by muscular exertion and in turn boosts the level of a brain-health protein, BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic protein) in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. Here is the summary and abstract from Wrann et al. with some technical details:

Highlights

Exercise induces FNDC5 in the hippocampus.

PGC-1α regulates neuronal Fndc5 gene expression in vitro and in vivo.

FNDC5 positively regulates the expression of the important neurotrophin BDNF.

Peripheral delivery of FNDC5 via adenoviral vectors induces Bdnf in the hippocampus.

Summary

Exercise can improve cognitive function and has been linked to the increased expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). However, the underlying molecular mechanisms driving the elevation of this neurotrophin remain unknown. Here we show that FNDC5, a previously identified muscle protein that is induced in exercise and is cleaved and secreted as irisin, is also elevated by endurance exercise in the hippocampus of mice. Neuronal Fndc5 gene expression is regulated by PGC-1α, and Pgc1a−/− mice show reduced Fndc5 expression in the brain. Forced expression of FNDC5 in primary cortical neurons increases Bdnf expression, whereas RNAi-mediated knockdown of FNDC5 reduces Bdnf. Importantly, peripheral delivery of FNDC5 to the liver via adenoviral vectors, resulting in elevated blood irisin, induces expression of Bdnf and other neuroprotective genes in the hippocampus. Taken together, our findings link endurance exercise and the important metabolic mediators, PGC-1α and FNDC5, with BDNF expression in the brain.

"Only Disconnect" - The pathology of digital of connectivity

Alas, it seems increasingly clear that to follow E.M. Forster’s dictum “Only Connect” (i.e. with humans in person, what our emotional brain evolved to do.) it is also necessary to follow Evgeny Morozov’s more recent dictum (and title of his review of several several books) “Only Disconnect.” (with the pseudo-connectivity of our tweets,followers, facebook friends, blog hits, google+ plus counts, Klout numbers, Thumbs up or downs, Shout outs, Likes, etc.). I will pass on some clips from Morozov's article. After noting descriptions by the Weimar Republic's literary luminary Siegfried Kracauer of the public over stimulation of his day, and his remedy of 'radical boredom' as an antidote, Morozov continues:

These days, "the state of permanent receptivity" has become the birthright of anyone with a smartphone. We are under constant assault by "interestingness"...the anti-boredom lobby has all but established its headquarters in Silicon Valley...

Information overload can bore us as easily as information underload. But this form of boredom, mediated boredom, doesn't provide time to think; it just produces a craving for more information in order to suppress it.

Morozov quotes from French philosopher Henri Lefebvre from the early 1960's

Today everything comes to an end virtually as soon as it begins, and vanishes almost as soon as it appears..As interest in it gets progressively weaker, so news becomes more rapid and concentrated, until finally, at the end of a shorter and shorter period, it wears itself..We have the phoney "new" faked novelty..The confusion between triviality which no longer appears trivial and sensationalism which is made to appear ordinary is cleverly organized. New shrinks to the size of the socially instantaneous, and the immediate instant tends to disappear in an instant which has already passed.

And then, Morozov notes:

I should admit that I'm something of a "contemplative computing" devotee, which is also to say, a distraction addict. Last year, I bought a safe with a built-in timer that I use to lock away my smartphone and Internet cable for days on end. (Tools like Freedom didn't work for me - they are too easy to circumvent.

What's needed is a modern-day counterpart to the anti-noise campaigners of a century ago.. Information deserve its own environmentalism....what is modernity if not a collection of pickets of silence and distraction? Consider the Amtrak train: yes, we get Wi-Fi, but we also get the Quiet Car..Both radical boredom and radical distraction can get us closer to "authentic rapture within the inauthentic domain." The trick is not to settle for their tepid, mediocre versions.

Likewise, the possibility of controlled disconnection - embedded in software like Freedom and harware like my safe - reassures us that our task lists and deadlines are manageable, if we approach them with distraction. Like travel and dance, both are illusions concocted by modernity... Life in the New Digital Age might be disorienting, but at least it isn't nasty, brutish, and short. Not in the Quiet Car, anyway.

Perspective taking can turn competitors unethical

An interesting bit from Pierce et al.:

Perspective taking is often the glue that binds people together. However, we propose that in competitive contexts, perspective taking is akin to adding gasoline to a fire: It inflames already-aroused competitive impulses and leads people to protect themselves from the potentially insidious actions of their competitors. Overall, we suggest that perspective taking functions as a relational amplifier. In cooperative contexts, it creates the foundation for prosocial impulses, but in competitive contexts, it triggers hypercompetition, leading people to prophylactically engage in unethical behavior to prevent themselves from being exploited. The experiments reported here establish that perspective taking interacts with the relational context—cooperative or competitive—to predict unethical behavior, from using insidious negotiation tactics to materially deceiving one’s partner to cheating on an anagram task. In the context of competition, perspective taking can pervert the age-old axiom “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” into “do unto others as you think they will try to do unto you.”

Oxytocin, gentle human touch, and social impression.

Another bit of information from Leknes and collaborators, expanding on their work mentioned in a recent post:

Interpersonal touch is frequently used for communicating emotions, strengthen social bonds and to give others pleasure. The neuropeptide oxytocin increases social interest, improves recognition of others’ emotions, and it is released during touch. Here, we investigated how oxytocin and gentle human touch affect social impressions of others, and vice versa, how others’ facial expressions and oxytocin affect touch experience. In a placebo-controlled crossover study using intranasal oxytocin, 40 healthy volunteers viewed faces with different facial expressions along with concomitant gentle human touch or control machine touch, while pupil diameter was monitored. After each stimulus pair, participants rated the perceived friendliness and attractiveness of the faces, perceived facial expression, or pleasantness and intensity of the touch. After intranasal oxytocin treatment, gentle human touch had a sharpening effect on social evaluations of others relative to machine touch, such that frowning faces were rated as less friendly and attractive, whereas smiling faces were rated as more friendly and attractive. Conversely, smiling faces increased, whereas frowning faces reduced, pleasantness of concomitant touch – the latter effect being stronger for human touch. Oxytocin did not alter touch pleasantness. Pupillary responses, a measure of attentional allocation, were larger to human touch than to equally intense machine touch, especially when paired with a smiling face. Overall, our results point to mechanisms important for human affiliation and social bond formation.

A genetic predisposition to note the negative.

Another interesting example of viewing the world through gene-colored glasses...Todd et al. note an interesting behavioral correlation involving a gene variant, carried by ~50% of Caucasians, of subtype B of the α2-adrenergic receptor: people with the variant are more likely to take note of negative events. They use the "attentional blink" paradigm to reach this conclusion:

The attentional blink...is a phenomenon in which participants are typically unable to identify a target stimulus when it is presented less than approximately 500 ms after a previous target in a rapid stream of stimuli. One interpretation of this blink is that it reflects a failure of attentional filters to consolidate the second target into working memory when it appears too quickly after the first, which results in impaired perceptual awareness. When the second target has emotional significance, there is a reduced attentional blink, or an emotional sparing. This emotional sparing, or reduction of the attentional blink for emotional stimuli relative to neutral stimuli, can be seen as the relative tuning of selective attention to affective stimuli.

Here is their abstract (which contains the fairly common error of using "are responsible for" instead of the more correct "correlate with"):

Emotionally enhanced memory and susceptibility to intrusive memories after trauma have been linked to a deletion variant (i.e., a form of a gene in which certain amino acids are missing) of ADRA2B, the gene encoding subtype B of the α2-adrenergic receptor, which influences norepinephrine activity. We examined in 207 participants whether variations in this gene are responsible for individual differences in affective influences on initial encoding that alter perceptual awareness. We examined the attentional blink, an attentional impairment during rapid serial visual presentation, for negatively arousing, positively arousing, and neutral target words. Overall, the attentional blink was reduced for emotional targets for ADRA2B-deletion carriers and noncarriers alike, which reveals emotional sparing (i.e., reduction of the attentional impairment for words that are emotionally significant). However, deletion carriers demonstrated a further, more pronounced emotional sparing for negative targets. This finding demonstrates a contribution of genetics to individual differences in the emotional subjectivity of perception, which in turn may be linked to biases in later memory.

Silver Lining of a mind in the clouds

This post continues a MindBlog thread on the consequences of our minds being task-focused versus wandering. A seminal paper was Killingsworth and Gilbert's 2010 work "A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.", and I recently posted a more positive view. Franklin et al. now collect data of the sort Killingsworth and Gilbert used, but analyze with a bit more nuance:

The negative effects of mind-wandering on performance and mood have been widely documented. In a recent well-cited study, Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) conducted a large experience sampling study revealing that all off-task episodes, regardless of content, have equal to or lower happiness ratings, than on-task episodes. We present data from a similarly implemented experience sampling study with additional mind-wandering content categories. Our results largely conform to those of the Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) study, with mind-wandering generally being associated with a more negative mood. However, subsequent analyses reveal situations in which a more positive mood is reported after being off-task. Specifically when off-task episodes are rated for interest, the high interest episodes are associated with an increase in positive mood compared to all on-task episodes. These findings both identify a situation in which mind-wandering may have positive effects on mood, and suggest the possible benefits of encouraging individuals to shift their off-task musings to the topics they find most engaging.

Face recognition area of the brain also notes race and sex.

Hundreds of papers have been written on the fusiform face area (FFA) of our brains, which Contreras et al. now show immediately collects information about race and sex as well, showing patterns of activation that are different for black and white faces, and for female and male faces. Meaning is attached to those identifications later in visual processing. This specialization might have appeared for evolutionary or developmental reasons, for it can be important to know the sex and race of other people, especially in contexts in which those differences should change the way in which you interact with them. Here is their abstract:

Although prior research suggests that fusiform gyrus represents the sex and race of faces, it remains unclear whether fusiform face area (FFA)–the portion of fusiform gyrus that is functionally-defined by its preferential response to faces–contains such representations. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate whether FFA represents faces by sex and race. Participants were scanned while they categorized the sex and race of unfamiliar Black men, Black women, White men, and White women. Multivariate pattern analysis revealed that multivoxel patterns in FFA–but not other face-selective brain regions, other category-selective brain regions, or early visual cortex–differentiated faces by sex and race. Specifically, patterns of voxel-based responses were more similar between individuals of the same sex than between men and women, and between individuals of the same race than between Black and White individuals. By showing that FFA represents the sex and race of faces, this research contributes to our emerging understanding of how the human brain perceives individuals from two fundamental social categories.

Out of the group, out of control?

From Otten and Jonas:

The effects of social exclusion are far-reaching, both on an emotional and behavioral level. The present study investigates whether social exclusion also directly influences basic cognitive functions, specifically the ability to exert cognitive control. Participants were either excluded or included while playing an online game. To test whether exclusion altered cognitive control, we measured the electrophysiological responses to a Go/No Go task. In this task participants had to withhold a response (No Go) on a small number of trials while the predominant tendency was to make an overt (Go) response. Compared to Go trials the event-related potential evoked by No Go trials elicited an increased N2, reflecting the detection of the response conflict, followed by an increased P3, reflecting the inhibition of the predominant response. The N2 effect was larger for participants who had experienced exclusion, while the P3 effect was smaller. This indicates that exclusion leads to an increased ability to detect response conflicts, while at the same time exclusion decreases the neural processes that underlie the inhibition of unwanted behavior.

Trashing Malcolm Gladwell

It is with some glee that I have been reading the many negative reviews of Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book (David and Goliath..), in particular Chad Orzel's "Malcolm Gladwell Is Deepak Chopra." He compares Gladwell's style to that of Deepak Chopra, who I immediately decided was a con-artist when I first encountered his work in the 1970s. After noting Gladwell's willful misleading of readers with cherry-picked science, Orzel notes the connection to Chopra:

So what does this have to do with everybody’s favorite bullshit artist stand-up Eastern philosopher? It occurred to me in reading some of the social media reactions that Gladwell stands in relation to good, responsible journalists in more or less the same position that Chopra stands in relation to actual quantum physicists. That is, he’s a glib and gifted writer who can talk just enough of the talk to buffalo people from outside the field. To a physicist, Chopra’s babble about “energy fields” and “congealing quantum soup” presents as utter gibberish, but he drops enough names and technical terms to sound superficially like somebody with real knowledge of physics, making it really hard for those of us who really know how the universe works to convince non-scientists that he doesn’t. If both sides throw around technical terms, but one twists them into a compelling narrative while the other is full of limits and caveats and, you know, math, well, the fact that the people with the complicated story are right doesn’t carry as much weight as it ought to.

A few further writeups are Poole's review relayed in The New Republic, and Chabris in Slate.

Constructive aspects of mind wandering

I've generally been noting research that documents some negative aspects of mind wandering, for example "A wandering mind is an unhappy mind" and "Better memory with less default mode activity." The other side of the coin, how day dreaming can be constructive, is developed by Kaufman here and here(PDF). He and his coauthors point out that the rewards of mind wandering:

...include self- awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion

Kaufman argues for an definition of intelligence moves beyond emphasis on cognitive control, deliberate planning, and decontextualized problem solving, and that includes:

...an individual’s personal goals, and considers both controlled forms of cognition (e.g., working memory, attentional focus, etc.) and spontaneous forms of cognition (e.g., intuition, affect, insight, implicit learning, latent inhibition, and the spontaneous triggering of episodic memories and declarative knowledge) are important potential contributors to that personal adaptation.

The changing psychology of culture from 1800 through 2000.

Greenfield makes use of the Google Books Ngram Viewer to observe a large shift from collectivist to individualist values during this period, as mass migration occurred from rural to urban areas. The corpus of books published in England and America was examined for the frequency of words like “obliged” and “choose”;“give” and “get”;“act” and “feel”, etc. Their abstract:

The Google Books Ngram Viewer allows researchers to quantify culture across centuries by searching millions of books. This tool was used to test theory-based predictions about implications of an urbanizing population for the psychology of culture. Adaptation to rural environments prioritizes social obligation and duty, giving to other people, social belonging, religion in everyday life, authority relations, and physical activity. Adaptation to urban environments requires more individualistic and materialistic values; such adaptation prioritizes choice, personal possessions, and child-centered socialization in order to foster the development of psychological mindedness and the unique self. The Google Ngram Viewer generated relative frequencies of words indexing these values from the years 1800 to 2000 in American English books. As urban populations increased and rural populations declined, word frequencies moved in the predicted directions. Books published in the United Kingdom replicated this pattern. The analysis established long-term relationships between ecological change and cultural change.

Distinctive brain correlates of brief compassion meditation.

This article by Hassenkamp provides a very useful integrative review of, and links to, several articles on brain correlates of mindfulness, empathy, and compassion meditation that I have noted separately in previous posts. It is becoming increasingly clear that even brief engagement with training or practice of compassion meditation enhances both perception of the emotional state of others and activity of the brain's networks related to love, affiliation, and positive emotion. Hassenkamp notes that the studies:

...highlight the important difference between merely having empathy, which can lead to negative emotions and even feelings of helplessness and burnout, versus compassion, which is rooted in loving, affiliative, positive feelings, and fosters a motivation to help. When faced with intense suffering, these findings could have major implications for strategies to overcome empathic distress and strengthen resilience, not to mention promoting helpful action.

Is music the key to success?

I'm passing this on immediately after reading it. While I have done numerous posts on how music training influences brain development, for example to enhance and speed brain processing of complex inputs into complex motor outputs, this article by Joanne Lipman points to other straightforward reasons that musical training and continued practice as a adult correlates with high achievement, with high achievers noting qualities that:

...music has sharpened: collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile conflicting ideas. All are qualities notably absent from public life. Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of view — and most important, to take pleasure in listening.

Oxytocin dilates our pupils and enhances emotion detection

Interesting work from Leknes et al.:

Sensing others’ emotions through subtle facial expressions is a highly important social skill. We investigated the effects of intranasal oxytocin treatment on the evaluation of explicit and ‘hidden’ emotional expressions and related the results to individual differences in sensitivity to others’ subtle expressions of anger and happiness. Forty healthy volunteers participated in this double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study, which shows that a single dose of intranasal oxytocin (40 IU) enhanced or ‘sharpened’ evaluative processing of others’ positive and negative facial expression for both explicit and hidden emotional information. Our results point to mechanisms that could underpin oxytocin’s prosocial effects in humans. Importantly, individual differences in baseline emotional sensitivity predicted oxytocin’s effects on the ability to sense differences between faces with hidden emotional information. Participants with low emotional sensitivity showed greater oxytocin-induced improvement. These participants also showed larger task-related pupil dilation, suggesting that they also allocated the most attentional resources to the task. Overall, oxytocin treatment enhanced stimulus-induced pupil dilation, consistent with oxytocin enhancement of attention towards socially relevant stimuli. Since pupil dilation can be associated with increased attractiveness and approach behaviour, this effect could also represent a mechanism by which oxytocin increases human affiliation.

Our sense of fairness changes with weak electric stimulation of our prefrontal cortex.

Fascinating work from Ruff et al:

All known human societies have maintained social order by enforcing compliance with social norms. The biological mechanisms underlying norm compliance are, however, hardly understood. We show that the right lateral prefrontal cortex (rLPFC) is involved in both voluntary and sanction-induced norm compliance. Both types of compliance could be changed by varying neural excitability of this brain region with transcranial direct current stimulation, but they were affected in opposite ways, suggesting that the stimulated region plays a fundamentally different role in voluntary and sanction-based compliance. Brain stimulation had a particularly strong effect for compliance based on socially constituted sanctions, while it left beliefs about what the norm prescribes and about subjectively expected sanctions unaffected. Our findings suggest that rLPFC activity is a key biological prerequisite for an evolutionarily and socially important aspect of human behavior.

(Culotta does a brief review here.)

Psychedelic drugs cause cortical desynchronization

From Muthukumaraswamy et al., small wonder that it doesn't all hang together during the psychedelic experience:

Psychedelic drugs produce profound changes in consciousness, but the underlying neurobiological mechanisms for this remain unclear. Spontaneous and induced oscillatory activity was recorded in healthy human participants with magnetoencephalography after intravenous infusion of psilocybin—prodrug of the nonselective serotonin 2A receptor agonist and classic psychedelic psilocin. Psilocybin reduced spontaneous cortical oscillatory power from 1 to 50 Hz in posterior association cortices, and from 8 to 100 Hz in frontal association cortices. Large decreases in oscillatory power were seen in areas of the default-mode network. Independent component analysis was used to identify a number of resting-state networks, and activity in these was similarly decreased after psilocybin. Psilocybin had no effect on low-level visually induced and motor-induced gamma-band oscillations, suggesting that some basic elements of oscillatory brain activity are relatively preserved during the psychedelic experience. Dynamic causal modeling revealed that posterior cingulate cortex desynchronization can be explained by increased excitability of deep-layer pyramidal neurons, which are known to be rich in 5-HT2A receptors. These findings suggest that the subjective effects of psychedelics result from a desynchronization of ongoing oscillatory rhythms in the cortex, likely triggered by 5-HT2A receptor-mediated excitation of deep pyramidal cells.

Poulenc Improvisation No. 15

This piece is a homage to Edith Piaf.  The last of a series of Poulenc recordings I have done this year.

 

Better memory with less default mode activity

I've done a number of posts on our default mode versus attentional networks (a review is here, for example). Here is the summary and abstract for some interesting work in NeuroImage by Chai et al. on the relationship of these modes to memory:

Highlights:

-Children, adolescents and adults studied scenes during fMRI.
-Default-mode network (DMN) deactivation was examined during memory encoding.
-DMN deactivation was associated with successful memory encoding in adults.
-In children, deactivation of the DMN did not predict memory outcome. 

Abstract:

Task-induced deactivation of the default-mode network (DMN) has been associated in adults with successful episodic memory formation, possibly as a mechanism to focus allocation of mental resources for successful encoding of external stimuli. We investigated developmental changes of deactivation of the DMN (posterior cingulate, medial prefrontal, and bilateral lateral parietal cortices) during episodic memory formation in children, adolescents, and young adults (ages 8–24), who studied scenes during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Recognition memory improved with age. We defined DMN regions of interest from a different sample of participants with the same age range, using resting-state fMRI. In adults, there was greater deactivation of the DMN for scenes that were later remembered than scenes that were later forgotten. In children, deactivation of the default-network did not differ reliably between scenes that were later remembered or forgotten. Adolescents exhibited a pattern of activation intermediate to that of children and adults. The hippocampal region, often considered part of the DMN, showed a functional dissociation with the rest of the DMN by exhibiting increased activation for later remembered than later forgotten scene that was similar across age groups. These findings suggest that development of memory ability from childhood through adulthood may involve increased deactivation of the neocortical DMN during learning.

Evilicious humans, hard-wired for war?

"Evilicious" is the title of a new book self published by Marc Hauser, the Harvard Psychologist forced to resign his position after it was discovered that he had been falsifying behavioral data to fit his foregone conclusions. He asks "why seemingly normal people torture, mutilate, and kill others for the fun of it — or for no apparent benefit at all." He suggests that humans uniquely evolved this capacity because "evildoers emerge when unsatisfied desires combine with the denial of reality, enabling individuals to engage in gratuitous cruelty toward innocent victims. This simple recipe is part of human nature, and part of our brain’s uniquely evolved capacity to combine different thoughts and emotions." Hauser's 'trying for a second chance' book has drawn a number of favorable reviews. One summary from Atran's review cited by Dobbs:

....“addiction to evil” – the persistent subjection of innocents to gratuitous cruelty — emerged as a by-product of the human brain’s unique evolutionary design. The ability to creatively combine all manner of thought and emotion enabled our species to produce great works of art and science, as well as to freely choose to kill and torture with a level of maliciousness unprecedented in the history of life on earth. Here we find that the most dangerous and effective evildoers are not sadists or serial killers with disordered minds, but mostly normal people who could have chosen not to kill and torture. When driven by unsatisfied desires — especially if channeled into dreams of glory for a cause — and in denying the reality and the humanity of others, even nice guys can become massively bloodthirsty.

A related issue is whether we are "hard-wired for war". Evolutionary biologist David Barash argues there is no convincing evidence for this. Despite examples such as Yanomamo ferocity, a broad survey shows that peacemaking is, if anything, more pronounced and widely distributed, especially among groups of nomadic foragers who are probably closest in ecological circumstance to our hominin ancestors.

Information sharing as a measure of brain consciousness

King et al. make measurements they suggest are a signature of conscious state in awake but noncommunicating patients. I pass on the summary, abstract, and one of their figures (and, the first graphic, thanks to Jean-Rémi King, who offers the unedited PDF of the article here):

Highlights
 • Theories of consciousness link conscious access to global information integration
 • 181 EEG recordings were acquired, including 143 from VS and MCS patients
 • Information sharing across current sources was estimated with a new measure
 • The results suggest that unconscious patients have lower global information sharing

Summary

Neuronal theories of conscious access tentatively relate conscious perception to the integration and global broadcasting of information across distant cortical and thalamic areas. Experiments contrasting visible and invisible stimuli support this view and suggest that global neuronal communication may be detectable using scalp electroencephalography (EEG). However, whether global information sharing across brain areas also provides a specific signature of conscious state in awake but noncommunicating patients remains an active topic of research. We designed a novel measure termed “weighted symbolic mutual information” (wSMI) and applied it to 181 high-density EEG recordings of awake patients recovering from coma and diagnosed in various states of consciousness. The results demonstrate that this measure of information sharing systematically increases with consciousness state, particularly across distant sites. This effect sharply distinguishes patients in vegetative state (VS), minimally conscious state (MCS), and conscious state (CS) and is observed regardless of etiology and delay since insult. The present findings support distributed theories of conscious processing and open up the possibility of an automatic detection of conscious states, which may be particularly important for the diagnosis of awake but noncommunicating patients.

Figure - wSMI Increases with Consciousness, Primarily over Centroposterior Regions(A) The median wSMI that each EEG channel shares with all other channels is depicted for each state of consciousness.(B) 120 pairs formed by 16 clusters of EEG channels are depicted as 3D arcs whose height is proportional to the Euclidian distance separating the two clusters. Line color and thickness are proportional to the mean wSMI shared by the corresponding cluster pair.

Early emergence of mature brain alarm circuits in maternally deprived children

Many studies have shown adverse effects of various kinds of childhood deprivation or abuse, with maternal deprivation being one of the most significant. Normally, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) connections with the amygdala are immature during childhood and become adult-like during adolescence. Gee et al. show that institutionalized youths who experienced early maternal deprivation show mature connectivity at a much earlier age:

Early adversity has profound and lasting effects on neurodevelopment and emotional behavior. Under typical environmental conditions, prefrontal cortex connections with the amygdala are immature during childhood and become adult-like during adolescence. Rodent models show that maternal deprivation accelerates this development as an ontogenetic adaptation to adversity. Here, we demonstrate that, as in the rodent, children who experienced early maternal deprivation exhibit early emergence of mature amygdala–prefrontal connectivity. Evidence suggests that the adult-like neural phenotype, which is mediated by cortisol levels, confers some degree of enhanced emotion regulation, as maternally deprived youths with adult-like phenotypes are less anxious than their counterparts with immature phenotypes. Accelerated amygdala–prefrontal development may serve as an ontogenetic adaptation in the human in response to early adversity. 

Francis Poulenc Sonata for piano 4 hands

Here is the last of the 4 hands pieces offered at a recent house concert/social at my Twin Valley Rd. home in Middleton,WI.

Threads of current debate: narcissism, ills of the world, scientism, brain science

I want to pass on some of the products of my TOC (tables of contents) scanning that I’m unlikely to develop into full posts, but that might be of interest to some readers.

Quenque does a piece focusing on San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, who has compared decades of personality test results to conclude that younger generations are increasingly entitled, self-obsessed and unprepared for the realities of adult life. Critics have questioned her data and her results. A subsequent New York Times invitation for debate on social media and narcissism elicits a number of interesting views.

Novelist Janathan Franzen's extended screed in the Guardian on how the world is drifting towards disaster as we Tweet, Text, and spend has some choice passages, and draws a retort from Clive Thompson, who points out that similar hysteria has accompanied all new technology.

Steven Pinker's article in the New Republic,  "Science Is Not Your Enemy"  has drawn an avalanche of comment.  I've already mentioned one retort by Ross Douthat. Douthat follows this up with a piece on Sam Harris' offer of $20,000 for the best rebuttal of his book on how science can determine human values.  Leon Wieseltier rails against science invading the liberal arts.

In pieces more focused on brain science  Gopnik goes after mindless brain scientists, while Eric Kandel offers a rosy view of the new science of mind.  . 

Aspects of our musical experience.

I want to pass on three recent articles I found interesting. The first is a piece by Kawakami in the New York Times on why we like sad music, sumarizing his article in Frontiers in Psychology. He and his collaborators found that when listening to sad music

...felt emotion did not correspond exactly to perceived emotion. Although the sad music was both perceived and felt as “tragic” (e.g., gloomy, meditative and miserable), the listeners did not actually feel the tragic emotion as much as they perceived it. Likewise, when listening to sad music, the listeners felt more “romantic” emotion (e.g., fascinated, dear and in love) and “blithe” emotion (e.g., merry, animated and feel like dancing) than they perceived. (Glinka's "La Séparation" is one of the pieces used).

They suggest this may have something to do with vicarious emotions:

...when we listen to sad music (or watch a sad movie, or read a sad novel), we are inoculated from any real threat or danger that the music (or movie or novel) represents...If this is true, what we experience when we listen to sad music might be thought of as “vicarious emotions.” Here, there is no object or situation that induces emotion directly, as in regular life. Instead, the vicarious emotions are free from the essential unpleasantness of their genuine counterparts, while still drawing force from the similarity between the two.

The second article, by Leman et al., examines how music can entrain the speed of beat synchronized walking. Subjects walked to the rhythm of different musical pieces all having a tempo of 130 beats per minute and a meter of 4 beats. Some music was "activating" in that it increased stride length and distance covered, while "relaxing music" had the opposite effect. They suggest that recurrent patterns of fluctuation affecting the binary meter strength of the music may entrain the vigor of the movement, a relationship between entrainment and expressiveness that might lead to applications in sports and physical rehabilitation. Finally, Koelsch et al. do an intersting examination of processing of hierarchical syntactic structure in music:

Hierarchical structure with nested nonlocal dependencies is a key feature of human language and can be identified theoretically in most pieces of tonal music. However, previous studies have argued against the perception of such structures in music. Here, we show processing of nonlocal dependencies in music. We presented chorales by J. S. Bach and modified versions in which the hierarchical structure was rendered irregular whereas the local structure was kept intact. Brain electric responses differed between regular and irregular hierarchical structures, in both musicians and nonmusicians. This finding indicates that, when listening to music, humans apply cognitive processes that are capable of dealing with long-distance dependencies resulting from hierarchically organized syntactic structures. Our results reveal that a brain mechanism fundamental for syntactic processing is engaged during the perception of music, indicating that processing of hierarchical structure with nested nonlocal dependencies is not just a key component of human language, but a multidomain capacity of human cognition.

Theory of Mind and the mind of the market

The financial community has been in a striking tizzy over the fact that the Federal Reserve didn't do what they were predicting, i.e. start to dial back on their economic stimulus. The financial community also has not been very good at predicting or knowing when a financial bubble is growing. Perhaps work like this piece by Martino et al. casts some mechanistic light on this. They demonstrate that the ability to infer the intentions and mental states of other individuals (“theory of mind”) biases evaluation when people interact not with individuals but with complex modern institutions like financial markets, contributing to the formation of economics bubbles. Here is their summary:

The ability to infer intentions of other agents, called theory of mind (ToM), confers strong advantages for individuals in social situations. Here, we show that ToM can also be maladaptive when people interact with complex modern institutions like financial markets. We tested participants who were investing in an experimental bubble market, a situation in which the price of an asset is much higher than its underlying fundamental value. We describe a mechanism by which social signals computed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex affect value computations in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, thereby increasing an individual’s propensity to ‘ride’ financial bubbles and lose money. These regions compute a financial metric that signals variations in order flow intensity, prompting inference about other traders’ intentions. Our results suggest that incorporating inferences about the intentions of others when making value judgments in a complex financial market could lead to the formation of market bubbles.

Franz Schubert Marches caractéristiques, No. 2

This is second of the three four hands pieces played at a recent house concert at my Twin Valley Rd. home in Middleton, WI.

The joystick years - computer games and grey matter volume

Sian Lewis summarizes work by Kühn and Gallinat:

A new study has used voxel-based morphometry of MRI scans of adult video-game players to investigate whether there is a correlation between grey matter volume and the number of years spent playing video games ('joystick years'). They found that grey matter volume in the entorhinal cortex was altered and that the direction of change was influenced by the type of game played; logic or puzzle games tended to increase entorhinal grey matter volume, whereas action-based games had the opposite effect. Moreover, hippocampal volume was found to be greater in players with more 'joystick years', suggesting positive long-term effects on visual attention and navigation.

Clementi Sonata No. 2 in C for piano four hands

Here is the first of the four hands pieces performed at a concert at my home on Sept. 8.

Compassion - Bridging Practice and Science

Science magazine has an article by Kupferschmidt pointing to the work of Tania Singer, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, who has embarked on an ambitious study involving 160 participants to find out whether meditation can make people more compassionate. He notes that meditation research does not have a very rigorous reputation, and some scientists are skeptical about the work, but Singer — who has long practiced meditation herself—hopes her study will be methodologically rigorous enough to withstand criticism. In 2004 Singer published a landmark paper in Science that showed that bilateral anterior insula (AI), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem, and cerebellum were activated when subjects received pain and also by a signal that a loved one experienced pain. AI and ACC activation correlated with individual empathy scores. Singer has just release a free 900-page e-book, entitled "Compassion - Bridging Practice and Science", that is quite amazing. I'm going to spend some time paging through it. Here is one clip from Kupferschmidt's commentary:

Numerous studies have shown that people can be "primed" to think more socially in various ways—from reading simple instructions to holding a warm cup of coffee. In one test, participants who listened to Bob Sinclar's hit song "Love Generation" were more likely to come up with words like "help" than those who listened to Sinclar's less uplifting song "Rock This Party." But Singer isn't interested in words; she wants to train people to act more socially in everyday life. And from personal experience, she believes meditation may be the way to do it. At its most basic, the technique simply involves focusing on a feeling. In one meditation exercise in her study, participants are told to imagine a person they love and to concentrate on positive feelings toward them. "May you be happy. May you be safe and sheltered. May you be healthy. May you live with a light heart," the teacher intones. Like bodybuilders increasing the weights they lift, meditators can intensify their compassionate feelings over time. Expert meditators can go very far, Singer says; rape victims may meditate on feeling compassion for their rapist, for instance. To measure meditation's effects, researchers in the ReSource Project determine the level of the stress hormone cortisol in participants' saliva, test their reaction times, have them fill out questionnaires, and shepherd them through virtual reality worlds while monitoring their heart rate. Each participant's brain is scanned for several hours five times over the course of the study. Participants also play computer games designed to evaluate their compassion level. In one of them, developed with Swiss economist Ernst Fehr, they have to guide a smiley along a winding path that leads to a treasure chest; they have blue or red keys to open gates of the same color. But another smiley is also wandering the screen, on its own quest to another treasure, and players have to decide whether to open gates for it, too. In a preliminary study in 2011, Singer showed that just one day of compassion meditation made people more likely to help the other smiley, whereas 1 day of memory training did not. Singer is also trying to better understand what goes on in the brain when it is feeling compassion. The activation patterns seen in the scanner leave open two possibilities: The feeling could be linked to the neurotransmitter dopamine and the brain's reward circuits (which, among many other things, makes you crave chocolate) or it could be linked to what she calls the affiliation network, which is activated for example when you view a picture of your partner or your own child, and is mediated by the neurotransmitters oxytocin or opioids. Singer admits that pinning down the neurobiology of compassion is difficult because the mental state it corresponds to remains fuzzy. A French Buddhist monk may have a very different concept of compassion than an African doctor or a British businessman, and there's friction between the classic third-person perspective of science and subjective experiences. "But we need the first-person experience as well as the third-person science," she says.

Poulenc Novelette No. 3

Here is the third of the Poulenc Novelettes, based on a theme by Manuel de Falla, a return to a more sonorous style, but with nice dissonances. It is one of the pieces played at a house concert Sept. 8, 2013, using the Steinway B at my Twin Valley Road home in Middleton, WI

Virtues of coffee and coffee shops.

I've been meaning to pass on these two articles that help me justify my addiction to breakfast and noon (but not dinner) coffee. Reynolds reviews a number of studies reporting at coffee consumption correlates with a 10% decrease in mortality over a 13 year period, reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes and other diseases, and slower progression of dementia or Alzheimer's disease. O'Connor notes studies indicating that creative thinking is enhanced by ambient noise levels typical of a bustling coffee shop. The idea is that extreme quiet tends to sharpen focus, which can prevent thinking in the abstract. Moderate noise levels distract people enough so that they think more broadly. So, when you have been sitting at your keyboard for a long time and are beginning to feel a bit locked in, trying pulling up the coffitivity.com website, and see what it does for you.

Old farts perform more consistenly on cognitive tasks than younger adults.

Schmiedek et al. do a demonstration of something we more or less already knew...

People often attribute poor performance to having bad days. Given that cognitive aging leads to lower average levels of performance and more moment-to-moment variability, one might expect that older adults should show greater day-to-day variability and be more likely to experience bad days than younger adults. However, both researchers and ordinary people typically sample only one performance per day for a given activity. Hence, the empirical basis for concluding that cognitive performance does substantially vary from day to day is inadequate. On the basis of data from 101 younger and 103 older adults who completed nine cognitive tasks in 100 daily sessions, we show that the contributions of systematic day-to-day variability to overall observed variability are reliable but small. Thus, the impression of good versus bad days is largely due to performance fluctuations at faster timescales. Despite having lower average levels of performance, older adults showed more consistent levels of performance across days.

Poulenc Novelette No. 2 - a bit on the wild side

Poulenc's first two novelettes, the one in C major that I posted yesterday, and today's second novelette in B-flat minor, were composed in 1927 and 1928, and first performed by Poulenc at a Paris concert in June of 1928. The second novelette is in many ways similar to a scherzo, and very different from the sonorous and melodic first and third. All demonstrate multi-layered piano writing. Poulenc was mainly a self taught composer, and he was was one of the first openly gay composers, dedicating many of his pieces to his lovers. His most immediate influences were Chabrier, Debussy, Satie, and Stravinsky. Stravinsky helped get his early music published.

The cognitive benefits of movement reduction.

This piece by Warburton et al. shows another example of how musical, artistic, or athletic performance can be enhanced by subtle mimicking of the final full-out performance. I certainly use this technique in my piano playing. I notice many more possible refinements, errors, and nuances to tweak during either imagining play or playing very slowly and softly than in the normal more robust performance. Their abstract:

In a number of domains, humans adopt a strategy of systematically reducing and minimizing a codified system of movement. One particularly interesting case is “marking” in dance, wherein the dancer performs an attenuated version of the choreography during rehearsal. This is ostensibly to save the dancer’s physical energy, but a number of considerations suggest that it may serve a cognitive function as well. In this study, we tested this embodied-cognitive-load hypothesis by manipulating whether dancers rehearsed by marking or by dancing “full out” and found that performance was superior in the dancers who had marked. This finding indicates that marking confers cognitive benefits during the rehearsal process, and it raises questions regarding the cognitive functions of other movement-reduction systems, such as whispering, gesturing, and subvocalizing. In addition, it has implications for a variety of topics in cognitive science, including embodied cognition and the nascent fields of dance and music cognition.

Some mindblog music - Poulenc Novelette No. 1

Since the beginning of this blog, I've passed on classical piano recordings I make, and I'm going to do the same with some of the pieces performed at a house concert this past Sept 8 using the Steinway B at my Twin Valley Rd. home in Middleton, Wisconsin.