Live younger longer

New Yorker Magazine writer and polymath Adam Gopnik does an excellent article describing studies on our increased longevity that aim to enhance its quality, not its duration. He also describes anti-aging research directed at increasing longevity.  I suggest you read the article. Here are a few clips, mainly from the first part of the article describing the experience of aging:

Over the past century, we’ve created the greatest gift in the history of humanity—thirty extra years of life—and we don’t know what to do with it! Now that we’re living longer, how do we plan for what we’re going to do?

To get a sense of what it would be like to have the slow process of aging become a fast process, you can go to the AgeLab, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, and put on agnes (for Age Gain Now Empathy System). agnes, or the “sudden aging” suit, as Joseph Coughlin, the founder and director of the AgeLab describes it, includes yellow glasses, which convey a sense of the yellowing of the ocular lens that comes with age; a boxer’s neck harness, which mimics the diminished mobility of the cervical spine; bands around the elbows, wrists, and knees to simulate stiffness; boots with foam padding to produce a loss of tactile feedback; and special gloves to “reduce tactile acuity while adding resistance to finger movements.”

Slowly pulling on the aging suit and then standing up—it looks a bit like one of the spacesuits that the Russian cosmonauts wore—you’re at first conscious merely of a little extra weight, a little loss of feeling, a small encumbrance or two at the extremities. Soon, though, it’s actively infuriating. The suit bends you. It slows you. You come to realize what makes it a powerful instrument of emotional empathy: every small task becomes effortful. “Reach up to the top shelf and pick up that mug,” ...requires more attention than you expected. You reach for the mug instead of just getting it. Your emotional cast, as focussed task piles on focussed task, becomes one of annoyance; you acquire the same set-mouthed, unhappy, watchful look you see on certain elderly people on the subway. The concentration that each act requires disrupts the flow of life, which you suddenly become aware is the happiness of life, the ceaseless flow of simple action and responses, choices all made simultaneously and mostly without effort. Happiness is absorption, and absorption is the opposite of willful attention.

The AgeLab is designed to alleviate this progression. It exists to encourage and incubate new technologies and products and services for an ever-larger market of aging people....the AgeLab swiftly discovered that engineering and promoting new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged is a good way of going out of business. Old people will not buy anything that reminds them that they are old. They are a market that cannot be marketed to. In effect, to accept help in getting out of the suit is to accept that we’re in the suit for life. We would rather suffer because we’re old than accept that we’re old and suffer less.

The AgeLab has rediscovered the eternal truth that identity matters to us far more than utility. The most effective way of comforting the aged, the researchers there find, is through a kind of comical convergence of products designed by and supposedly for impatient millennials, which secretly better suit the needs of irascible boomers. The best hearing aids look the most like earbuds. The most effective PERS (personal-emergency-response system) device is an iPhone or an Apple Watch app.

It’s the failure of industry and engineering to address the actual problems of aging—the problems summed up by the aggravations of the agnes suit—that makes Coughlin impatient with scientific speculations about extending life. “We’ve already extended life! What we need is not to put off death a little longer but to write a new narrative of aging as it could be.”

The second section of the article describes several approaches that contest the classic explanation of why we age:

Once we have passed reproductive age, the genes can get sloppy about copying, allowing mutations to accumulate, because natural selection no longer cares. And so things fall apart. The second law of thermodynamics gets us all in the end. The car or the Cuisinart works for a decade, breaks down, and can’t be fixed; rust never sleeps, and we do.

Contra this view:

...in certain genetic labs at Harvard, the chairs and seals and exaptated services of the AgeLab are regarded as mere Band-Aids on the problem to be solved. Here, there are whispers of undying yeast, tales of eternally young mice, rumors of rejuvenated dogs, and scientists who stubbornly insist that age is an illness to be treated like any other...Perhaps aging is not a condition to be managed but a mistake to be fixed.

However,

To pass from the Harvard rejuvenators to the laboratory of Patrick Hof, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in Manhattan, is to sober up a little. Here, there is talk not of imminent innovation but of discouragingly minute work proceeding on many slow-moving fronts over decades. Where the Harvard crowd see quick fixes in the near future, Hof, an expert on the neuronal underpinnings of aging and Alzheimer’s, sees the exposure of ever more confounding complexity.

In conclusion...

As you take off the agnes suit—piece by piece; the boots and then the wrist weights and the impeding gloves—the feeling is disconcerting. It’s the return of flow, the feeling of choice and possibility as you begin to move again through the world, that makes you recall that what it is to be young is not to be in a state of ecstasy but merely to be unimpeded, to be in the world without having undue consciousness of your own muscle and bone within it. It’s the same thing we experience when we remove a splinter from our foot; what we get is not happiness in a positive sense but a return to not having to think about the prison and the fact of our flesh. We forget our insides, and fold ourselves back out.

The true condition of youth is the physical ability to forget ourselves. A friend who is still creative in his eighties points out what he calls the geriatric possessive: people past eighty, he says, are expected to say, “I’m going to take my bath,” “I’m going to take my walk.” We can counterpoise that to the pediatric possessive: “You’re going to take your bath,” “It’s time for your nap.” Only in midlife do we feel secure enough to enumerate actions as existing individually outside our possession of them: “I’m going to take a bath,” “I’m going to take a nap.” A bath and a nap exist, briefly, outside our possession of them—they’re just around for the taking, we suppose, and always will be.

We may indeed already be converging as a population — irascible millennials who feel dated at twenty-five and determinedly upbeat boomers who insist on feeling young at seventy — on a single American age, a kind of shared perpetual middleness, where we will dye our hair and take our pills and suddenly collapse in the midst of the dance. Right now, we live well, and then we don’t live well, and then we die. The most that science seems to offer us is this: We’ll live well, and then we’ll die.

With the rise of Trump, the fall of racial prejudice?

Stanley-Becker points to a fascinating study by Hopkins and Washington. Their abstract:

In his campaign and first few years in office, Donald Trump consistently defied contemporary norms by using explicit, negative rhetoric targeting ethnic/racial minorities. Did this rhetoric lead white Americans to express more prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through the normalization of prejudice or other mechanisms? We assess that question using a 13-wave panel conducted with a population-based sample of Americans between 2008 and 2018. We find that via most measures, white Americans' expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after the 2016 campaign and election, and we can rule out even small increases in the expression of prejudice. These results suggest the limits of racially charged rhetoric's capacity to heighten prejudice among white Americans overall. They also indicate that prejudice can behave like an issue attitude: rather than being a fixed predisposition, prejudice can respond thermostatically to changing presidential rhetoric and policy positions.

Stanley-Becker quotes Hopkins:

...it’s quite conceivable that Trump has simultaneously galvanized a small number of highly prejudiced white Americans while also pushing millions more to affirm that they are not as prejudiced.

Hopkins said his discovery is not out of step with other assessments. In fact, his conclusions are in line with recent scholarship suggesting that bias, both implicit and explicit, has declined when it comes to race and sexual orientation, though prejudice has remained steady regarding people with disabilities and actually increased regarding obesity.

The recent scholarship Hopkins references is work from Banaji's group:

Using 4.4 million tests of implicit and explicit attitudes measured continuously from an Internet population of U.S. respondents over 13 years, we conducted the first comparative analysis using time-series models to examine patterns of long-term change in six social-group attitudes: sexual orientation, race, skin tone, age, disability, and body weight. Even within just a decade, all explicit responses showed change toward attitude neutrality. Parallel implicit responses also showed change toward neutrality for sexual orientation, race, and skin-tone attitudes but revealed stability over time for age and disability attitudes and change away from neutrality for body-weight attitudes. These data provide previously unavailable evidence for long-term implicit attitude change and stability across multiple social groups; the data can be used to generate and test theoretical predictions as well as construct forecasts of future attitudes.

Blame the liberals for unlivable cities!

An excellent article by Farhad Manjoo, focusing on San Francisco's affordable housing crisis. Some clips:

Just look at San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s city. One of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire, and the annual household income necessary to buy a median-priced home now tops $320,000. Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard.

And there is no end in sight to such crushing success. At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive to the challenges at hand. Witness last week’s embarrassment, when California lawmakers used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase the supply of housing.

It was another chapter in a dismal saga of Nimbyist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities. Not-in-my-backyardism is a bipartisan sentiment, but because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats — many in states under complete Democratic control — this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.

Democrats on the 2020 presidential trail rarely mention their ideas for housing affordability, an issue eating American cities alive.

What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.

Educating liberals about white privilege doesn't make them more empathetic.

Cooley et al. find that people with socially liberal views on the major political issues are actually less likely to empathize with a poor white person’s plight after being given a reading on white privilege (see also the article by Jilani that points to this work):

White privilege lessons are sometimes used to increase awareness of racism. However, little research has investigated the consequences of these lessons. Across 2 studies (N = 1,189), we hypothesized that White privilege lessons may both highlight structural privilege based on race, and simultaneously decrease sympathy for other challenges some White people endure (e.g., poverty)—especially among social liberals who may be particularly receptive to structural explanations of inequality. Indeed, both studies revealed that while social liberals were overall more sympathetic to poor people than social conservatives, reading about White privilege decreased their sympathy for a poor White (vs. Black) person. Moreover, these shifts in sympathy were associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor White person’s plight. We conclude that, among social liberals, White privilege lessons may increase beliefs that poor White people have failed to take advantage of their racial privilege—leading to negative social evaluations.

Benefits of a period of exercise persist after 10 years.

Gretchen Reynolds points to a study by Johnson et al. showing long term effects of an experiment conducted from 1998 to 2003, in which overweight volunteers between 40 and 60 were divided into control (inactive), moderate walking), and vigorous (jogging) exercise groups that completed three sessions of their assigned workout each week for eight months. Health markers (aerobic fitness, blood pressure, insulin sensitivity and waist circumference) improved in the exercise but not the control groups. Experimenters were able to get in touch with many subjects 10 years later and found:

Most of the men and women from the control group, who had not exercised 10 years before, had larger waistlines now, while the exercisers displayed little if any middle-aged spread compared to their decade-earlier selves.

Those from the control group also were less fit now. Most had lost about 10 percent of their aerobic capacity, which is typical of the declines seen after about age 40, when most of us will lose about 1 percent of our fitness annually.

But those men and women who had exercised vigorously for eight months during the original experiment retained substantially more fitness. On average, their aerobic capacity had fallen by only about 5 percent, compared to when they had joined the Strride study, and those few who reported still exercising at least four times a week were more fit now than they had been a decade before.

Interestingly, those earlier experimental volunteers who had walked — meaning their exercise had been moderate, not intense — did not seem to have enjoyed the same lasting fitness benefits as those who had exercised more vigorously. Most of them had shed about 10 percent of their aerobic capacity during the past decade, much like the controls.

On the other hand, they showed surprisingly persistent improvements in their metabolic health, more so than among the intense exercisers. The walkers from 10 years ago still had healthier blood pressures and insulin sensitivity than they had had before joining the earlier experiment, even if they rarely exercised now. They had also had relatively healthier metabolisms than the men and women who had exercised intensely all those years before.

A Sunday Afternoon Musicale - Bridges and Mendelssohn

This post falls in the 'random curious stuff' of the MindBlog title above. I want to share some of my current musical efforts with MindBlog readers. When MindBlog began in 2016 I started to share with readers some of the videos made at Sunday afternoon musical/social events at my 1860 schoolhouse/residence in Madison Wisconsin. I'm now living full time in Austin Texas, and have been fortunate to be able form a piano trio with two accomplished musicians, violinist Andrea Gore and Cellist Karen Foster Cason. Andrea hosted a Musicale this past Sunday at her beautiful home built on the banks of a creek running into Lake Travis. The pictures show our trio, and the natural grotto photographed from the deck of the house. I embed a rehearsal video of the Mendelssohn Allegro and give links to rehearsal videos of the rest of the program (I wish I had recorded the coherence and precision of the event itself). The Mendelssohn Allegro and Finale are the most pyrotechnical of the offerings.

Program for the Sunday, May 19, 1:00 Musicale at Awalt

Frank Bridge (1879-1941)
Miniatures for Violin, Violoncello, & Piano
4. Romance
5. Intermezzo
6. Saltarello

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) Piano Trio No. 2 in D minor, Op. 66
1. Allegro energico e con fuoco
2. Andante espressivo
3. Scherzo: Molto allegro quasi presto
4. Finale: Allegro appassionato

Andrea Gore, Violin
Karen Foster Cason, Cello
Deric Bownds, Piano

Are rich people really less generous than poor people?

Here is a ‘fact’ (that rich people are less generous than poor people) that I had locked into mind that turns out to be wrong. They are not less generous, contra the findings of an often cited 2015 landmark study. From Schmukle et al.:

Significance

Are the rich less generous than the poor? Results of studies on this topic have been inconsistent. Recent research that has received widespread academic and media attention has provided evidence that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. However, in large representative datasets from the United States (study 1), Germany (study 2), and 30 countries (study 3), we did not find any evidence for such an effect. Instead, our results suggest that the rich are not less generous than the poor, even when economic inequality is large. This result has implications for contemporary debates on what increasing inequality in resource distributions means for modern societies.

Abstract

A landmark study published in PNAS [Côté S, House J, Willer R (2015) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112:15838–15843] showed that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. This finding might serve to reconcile inconsistent findings on the effect of social class on generosity by highlighting the moderating role of economic inequality. On the basis of the importance of replicating a major finding before readily accepting it as evidence, we analyzed the effect of the interaction between income and inequality on generosity in three large representative datasets. We analyzed the donating behavior of 27,714 US households (study 1), the generosity of 1,334 German individuals in an economic game (study 2), and volunteering to participate in charitable activities in 30,985 participants from 30 countries (study 3). We found no evidence for the postulated moderation effect in any study. This result is especially remarkable because (i) our samples were very large, leading to high power to detect effects that exist, and (ii) the cross-country analysis employed in study 3 led to much greater variability in economic inequality. These findings indicate that the moderation effect might be rather specific and cannot be easily generalized. Consequently, economic inequality might not be a plausible explanation for the heterogeneous results on the effect of social class on prosociality.

Like the emperor’s new clothes, DNA kits are a tailored illusion

I recommend reading this article by George Estreich. Here are a few clips:

Most people remember the emperor: a vain ruler, swindled into paying for a nonexistent magical garment, parades in public, only to be embarrassed by a little boy. To me, the story is really about the swindling tailors. Audacious, imaginative, their true product is a persuasive illusion, one keyed to the vulnerabilities of their target audience. In contemporary terms, the story is about marketing; and as such, the tale is tailor-made for an examination of genetic ancestry tests, because these too are sold with expert persuasion, with promises woven from our hopes, our fears, and the golden thread of DNA.

With these new tests, as in Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th-century tale, a gap yawns between the promise and the reality – and now and then, as in the story, someone says so in the public square. For example, when Phil Rogers, a reporter in Chicago, tried out home DNA test kits from competing companies last year, he discovered contradictory results. So did the Canadian reporter Charlsie Agro and her twin sister Carly, who mailed spit samples to 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, AncestryDNA, MyHeritage and LivingDNA. As with Rogers, the companies gave different histories – Balkan ancestry, for example, ranged from 14 to 61 per cent – but 23andMe actually reported different scores for each twin. (According to the company, Charlsie has French and German ancestors, while Carly does not.)

The tests are sold with variations on a single pitch: find your story. The companies don’t mention that the story might shade into fiction, or that stories can conflict. The evolutionary geneticist Mark Thomas at University College London has dismissed ancestry testing as ‘genetic astrology’, but it could be as useful to think of it as genetic gossip: a rumoured past that, like most rumours, is at least partly true.

Chasing his dreams of status and power, the emperor misses the swindle: the ‘weavers’ make off with tangible wealth, while the emperor receives nothing. The entire performance is a masterful misdirection, a distraction from the truth of the exchange. In the same way, the promises of discovering identity and the genealogical past are a misdirection: the real exchange takes place offstage, with drug companies and others paying for access to the data that customers actually pay to give. Once it’s given, customers are vulnerable to future data breaches (and you can’t, at this date at least, change your genome), and they aren’t guaranteed compensation for any profits the data might lead to.

Father's physical activity directly enhances offspring's brain physiology and cognition.

Experiments on mice suggest that human kids of athletic fathers might have more smarts than kids of couch potatoes. From McGreevy et al.:

Significance

Physical exercise is well known for its positive effects on general health (specifically, on brain function and health), and some mediating mechanisms are also known. A few reports have addressed intergenerational inheritance of some of these positive effects from exercised mothers or fathers to the progeny, but with scarce results in cognition. We report here the inheritance of moderate exercise-induced paternal traits in offspring’s cognition, neurogenesis, and enhanced mitochondrial activity. These changes were accompanied by specific gene expression changes, including gene sets regulated by microRNAs, as potential mediating mechanisms. We have also demonstrated a direct transmission of the exercise-induced effects through the fathers’ sperm, thus showing that paternal physical activity is a direct factor driving offspring’s brain physiology and cognitive behavior.

Abstract

Physical exercise has positive effects on cognition, but very little is known about the inheritance of these effects to sedentary offspring and the mechanisms involved. Here, we use a patrilineal design in mice to test the transmission of effects from the same father (before or after training) and from different fathers to compare sedentary- and runner-father progenies. Behavioral, stereological, and whole-genome sequence analyses reveal that paternal cognition improvement is inherited by the offspring, along with increased adult neurogenesis, greater mitochondrial citrate synthase activity, and modulation of the adult hippocampal gene expression profile. These results demonstrate the inheritance of exercise-induced cognition enhancement through the germline, pointing to paternal physical activity as a direct factor driving offspring’s brain physiology and cognitive behavior.

Ready to pounce - Cat smarts get some attention

I live in a symbiotic relationship with my two Abyssinian cats, and so was gratified, given that canine social cognition is the subject of dozens of scientific papers, to see that feline cognition is beginning to get more attention. One simple reason for the difference is that dogs want to please humans and cooperate with experimenters, while cats could generally care less, and after a few trials will walk away from earnest efforts to engage their responses. When a human points at something, a chimp will not react, but a dog, like a human toddler, knows to look at the same thing. Turns out that cats do the same thing, they will trot over to a bowl that a human points to. It is turning out that cats match dogs in many tests of social smarts. Alas, I'm going to show you a cat video... not of some adorable feline faux pas, but of behavioral work being done with cats:



And, since I'm showing cat pictures, I can't resist introducing you to Abyssinians Marvin and Melvin, shown napping while I'm driving between Madison WI and Austin TX.

Want to escape your liberal bubble? Try this.....

I have a recommendation for MindBlog readers like myself who are concerned about their immersion in the liberal bubble of the New York Times, Washington Post and the numerous sarcastic evening show commentators (Colbert, Maher, Maddow, Noah, etc.). The media (alas, like scientific reality in general!) does indeed have a liberal bias. I'm now finding a crystallized antithesis to my bubble in the American Greatness website, whose daily email screeds I have subscribed to after reading an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times by its publisher and editor Chris Buskirk. To note only three of the twelve pieces in last Thursday's email: Democrats’ Collapse Could Happen Quickly , Yes,Christians Can Support Trump Without Risk to Their Witness , and  Why the Left Mocks the Bible . A clip from the last of these, a telling piece:

...on virtually every important value in life, the left and the Bible are diametrically opposed...

The biblical view is that people are not basically good. Evil, therefore, comes from within human nature. For the left, human nature is not the source of evil. Capitalism, patriarchy, poverty, religion, nationalism or some other external cause is the source of evil.

The biblical view is that nature was created for man. The left-wing view is that man is just another part of nature.

The biblical view is that man is created in the image of God and, therefore, formed with a transcendent, immaterial soul. The left-wing view—indeed, the view of all secular ideologies—is that man is purely material, another assemblage of stellar dust.

Relevant to humans being 'born in sin' I hope to do a post soon on a book I just finished, Nicholas Christakis' Magnum Opus “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society”. This book, like Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" , the subject of previous MindBlog posts, paints a more benign picture of desirable human traits that have evolved to make society possible.

MindBlog Changes

I want to explain to readers who check MindBlog daily why the drumbeat of a post each weekday (4,700 posts over the past 13 years) has stopped. My 78th year starts next week, and performative professor Deric has decided to spend more time doing other things, to try a few new tricks. I will continue to occasionally post on interesting material I encounter.

The Case for Doing Nothing

An article by Olga Mecking fits so well with my increasing allergic reaction to making myself busy all the time that I have to pass on a few edited and rearranged clips:

Perhaps it’s time to stop all this busyness. Being busy...is rarely the status indicator we’ve come to believe it is...There’s a way out...and it’s not more mindfulness, exercise or a healthy diet... What we’re talking about is … doing nothing. Or, as the Dutch call it, niksen...being like a car whose engine is running but isn’t going anywhere...coming to a moment with no plan other than just to be.

...the idea of niksen is to take conscious, considered time and energy to do activities like gazing out of a window or sitting motionless...permission granted to spend the afternoon just hanging out...daydreaming and idleness let the mind search for its own stimulation...counterintuitively, idleness can be a great productivity tool..it takes you out of your mind, and then you see things clearly after a while...it makes us more creative, better at problem-solving, better at coming up with creative ideas......For that to happen, though, total idleness is required.

...don’t get discouraged if you don’t catch on immediately to the benefits of idleness...like beginning a new workout routine: At first, you might get sore, but after a while, you’ll find yourself in this moment of "Oh, this feels fantastic.” Keep your devices out of reach so that they’ll be more difficult to access, and turn your home into a niksen-friendly area. Add a soft couch, a comfy armchair, a few cushions or just a blanket. Orient furniture around a window or fireplace rather than a TV.

Same-sex marriage legalization reduced implicit and explicit antigay bias

Interesting work from Ofosu et al. shows how government legislation can inform individuals’ attitudes, even when these attitudes may be deeply entrenched and socially and politically volatile.:

The current research tested whether the passing of government legislation, signaling the prevailing attitudes of the local majority, was associated with changes in citizens’ attitudes. Specifically, with ∼1 million responses over a 12-y window, we tested whether state-by-state same-sex marriage legislation was associated with decreases in antigay implicit and explicit bias. Results across five operationalizations consistently provide support for this possibility. Both implicit and explicit bias were decreasing before same-sex marriage legalization, but decreased at a sharper rate following legalization. Moderating this effect was whether states passed legislation locally. Although states passing legislation experienced a greater decrease in bias following legislation, states that never passed legislation demonstrated increased antigay bias following federal legalization. Our work highlights how government legislation can inform individuals’ attitudes, even when these attitudes may be deeply entrenched and socially and politically volatile.

Why are some people more anxious than others? Brain correlates of trait anxiety.

Why does trait anxiety (the stable tendency to attend to, experience, and report negative emotions such as fears, worries, and anxiety across many situations) vary between individuals? Berry et al. have measured self-reported trait anxiety in healthy adults, examining its relationships with brain dopamine function (Most anxiolytic drugs target serotonergic and GABAergic neurotransmitter systems) and also examining functional connectivity within circuits implicated in anxiety regulation. This enabled them to probe the neural substrates of individual differences.

  Significance Statement

It is common wisdom that individuals vary in their baseline levels of anxiety. We all have a friend or colleague we know to be more “tightly wound” than others, or, perhaps, we are the ones marveling at others' ability to “just go with the flow.” Although such observations about individual differences within nonclinical populations are commonplace, the neural mechanisms underlying normal variation in trait anxiety have not been established. Using multimodal brain imaging in humans, this study takes initial steps in linking intrinsic measures of neuromodulator release and functional connectivity within regions implicated in anxiety disorders. Our findings suggest that in healthy adults, higher levels of trait anxiety may arise, at least in part, from reduced dopamine neurotransmission.

Abstract

Trait anxiety has been associated with altered activity within corticolimbic pathways connecting the amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), which receive rich dopaminergic input. Though the popular culture uses the term “chemical imbalance” to describe the pathophysiology of psychiatric conditions such as anxiety disorders, we know little about how individual differences in human dopamine neurochemistry are related to variation in anxiety and activity within corticolimbic circuits. We addressed this issue by examining interindividual variability in dopamine release at rest using [¹¹C]raclopride positron emission tomography (PET), functional connectivity between amygdala and rACC using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and trait anxiety measures in healthy adult male and female humans. To measure endogenous dopamine release, we collected two [¹¹C]raclopride PET scans per participant. We contrasted baseline [¹¹C]raclopride D2/3 receptor binding and D2/3 receptor binding following oral methylphenidate administration. Methylphenidate blocks the dopamine transporter, which increases extracellular dopamine and leads to reduced [¹¹C]raclopride D2/3 receptor binding via competitive displacement. We found that individuals with higher dopamine release in the amygdala and rACC self-reported lower trait anxiety. Lower trait anxiety was also associated with reduced rACC–amygdala functional connectivity at baseline. Further, functional connectivity showed a modest negative relationship with dopamine release such that reduced rACC–amygdala functional connectivity was accompanied by higher levels of dopamine release in these regions. Together, these findings contribute to hypodopaminergic models of anxiety and support the utility of combining fMRI and PET measures of neurochemical function to advance our understanding of basic affective processes in humans.

[11C]

Is Superintelligence Impossible?

Andy Clarke does an interesting and concise commentary on a discussion between Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers. I pass on the final two paragraphs of Clark's comments and suggest you read the whole piece.

I think we can divide the space of possible AI minds into two reasonably distinct categories. One category comprises the “passive AI minds” that seemed to be the main focus of the Chalmers-Dennett exchange. These are driven by large data sets and optimize their performance relative to some externally imposed choice of “objective function” that specifies what we want them to do—win at GO, or improve paperclip manufacture. And Dennett and Chalmers are right—we do indeed need to be very careful about what we ask them to do, and about how much power they have to implement their own solutions to these pre-set puzzles.

The other category comprises active AIs with broad brush-strokes imperatives. These include Karl Friston’s Active Inference machines. AI’s like these spawn their own goals and sub-goals by environmental immersion and selective action. Such artificial agents will pursue epistemic agendas and have an Umwelt of their own. These are the only kind of AIs that may, I believe, end up being conscious of themselves and their worlds—at least in any way remotely recognizable as such to us humans. They are the AIs who could be our friends, or who could (if that blunt general imperative was played out within certain kinds of environment) become genuine enemies. It is these radicalized embodied AIs I would worry about most. At the same time (and for the same reasons) I’d greatly like to see powerful AIs from that second category emerge. For they would be real explorations within the vast space of possible minds.

Digital addiction and the attention economy.

Jia Tolentino's "What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away" is a broad essay on our digital addictions that focuses on two recent books: Cal Newport's “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” and Jenny Odell's “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy." I strongly recommend that you read it. I am going to resist the impulse to pass on many choice clips of text, limiting myself to two:

Odell elegantly aligns the crisis in our natural world and the crisis in our minds: what has happened to the natural world is happening to us, she contends, and it’s happening on the same soon-to-be-irreparable scale. She sees “little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thought”; both are endangered by “the logic of capitalist productivity.” She believes that, by constantly disclosing our needs and desires to tech companies that sift through our selfhood in search of profit opportunities, we are neglecting, even losing, our mysterious, murky depths—the parts of us that don’t serve an ulterior purpose but exist merely to exist. The “best, most alive parts” of ourselves are being “paved over by a ruthless logic of use.”

On the monetization of attention:

Legislators might succeed in granting citizens more control over the data that they generate by using the Internet, but social-media companies will, presumably, continue to treat their users like little countries that can be strip-mined to make other people rich...We remain attached to these technologies in a way that is clearly affecting the health of the body politic. Newport insists that our Internet-fuelled lack of mental peace and quiet is a better explanation for the current wave of American anxiety than “the latest crisis—be it the recession of 2009 or the contentious election of 2016.”

A bit of digital detox - rehearsing a Mendelssohn Piano Trio

I have been fortunate to find in Austin TX two accomplished string players, violinist Andrea Gore and cellist Karen Foster Cason, who join me in sight reading interesting piano trios. We have decided to work up a few of the pieces we like to do for a house concert in late May, - a musical/social occasion of the sort I used to do in the 1860 stone schoolhouse that was the living room of my Twin Valley Road residence in Madison Wisconsin. I thought I would pass on to MindBlog readers a bit of our rehearsal this past Thursday, working on a Mendelssohn piano trio.

The "digital detox" phrase in this post's title is a clip from Jia Tolentino's recent New Yorker Article "What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away." I'm very much in the mood these days to get away from the "invasion of your cognitive landscape" that it describes and that I have permitted by being open to so many digital input streams as I spend a large fraction of my days hovering over screen and keyboard.

I find that the exercise of playing music is an antidote to this malaise, and I want to spend more time doing it. Don't be surprised if MindBlog posts become less frequent. Anyway, here is the 1st movement of the Mendelssohn Piano Trio No. 2 in C Minor, in a video recording done with my iPhone XS Max with a Shure condenser microphone plugged into its USB port:

Bringing dead brains back to life.

Work by Vrselja et al. on restoring brain function in pigs four hours after death has been extensively covered by the popular press. I want to pass on the abstract to their paper, and then one clip that shows how far away the recovery observed is from actually restoring brain function.

The brains of humans and other mammals are highly vulnerable to interruptions in blood flow and decreases in oxygen levels. Here we describe the restoration and maintenance of microcirculation and molecular and cellular functions of the intact pig brain under ex vivo normothermic conditions up to four hours post-mortem. We have developed an extracorporeal pulsatile-perfusion system and a haemoglobin-based, acellular, non-coagulative, echogenic, and cytoprotective perfusate that promotes recovery from anoxia, reduces reperfusion injury, prevents oedema, and metabolically supports the energy requirements of the brain. With this system, we observed preservation of cytoarchitecture; attenuation of cell death; and restoration of vascular dilatory and glial inflammatory responses, spontaneous synaptic activity, and active cerebral metabolism in the absence of global electrocorticographic activity. These findings demonstrate that under appropriate conditions the isolated, intact large mammalian brain possesses an underappreciated capacity for restoration of microcirculation and molecular and cellular activity after a prolonged post-mortem interval.

This beautiful work shows that the brain has a much greater capacity for restoration that had been realized. The authors were able to obtain intracellular recordings from hippocampus pyramidal cells. However:

Monitoring of electrical activity from the dorsal surface of the brain using clinical-grade surface grid electrodes and electrocorticography (ECoG; also known as intracranial electroencephalography, EEG) revealed that spontaneous global activity did not reemerge and that ECoG activity was isoelectric throughout BEx perfusion. This indicates that the organization and/or summation of synaptic activity of individual neurons was inadequate to elicit detectable network activity as assessed by ECoG.

Factfulness - Rosling's instinctual mental errors - Destiny, Single Perspective, Blame, Urgency

This is the final installment of several posts for my own benefit - making brief clips from the Rosling "Factfullness" book to encapsulate what he calls our 10 'basic instincts' - instinctual mental errors that we make - hoping this exercise will imprint them in my feeble memory and make me less likely to perform some of the mental errors he describes.

The Destiny Instinct (Chapter 7) - Many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly. Remember that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes. To control the destiny instinct, remember slow change is still change. Keep track of gradual improvements. A small change every year can translate to a huge change over decades. Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing. Talk to Grandpa. If you want to be reminded of how values have changed, think about your grandparents’ values and how they differ from yours. Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.

The Single Perspective Instinct (Chapter 8) - Recognize that a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remember that it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions. To control the single perspective instinct, get a toolbox, not a hammer. Test your ideas. Don’t only collect examples that show how excellent your favorite ideas are. Have people who disagree with you test your ideas and find their weaknesses. Don’t claim expertise beyond your field: be humble about what you don’t know. Be aware too of the limits of the expertise of others. If you are good with a tool, you may want to use it too often. If your favorite idea is a hammer, look for colleagues with screwdrivers, wrenches, and tape measures. Be open to ideas from other fields. The world cannot be understood without numbers, and it cannot be understood with numbers alone. Love numbers for what they tell you about real lives. Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions. History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions. Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise. Solve problems on a case-by-case basis.

The Blame Instinct (Chapter 9) - Recognize when a scapegoat is being used and remember that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future. To control the blame instinct, resist finding a scapegoat. Look for causes, not villains. When something goes wrong don’t look for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to. Instead spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation. Look for systems, not heroes. When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing. Give the system some credit.

The Urgency Instanct (Chapter 10) - Recognize when a situation feels urgent and remember that it rarely is. To control the urgency instinct, take small steps. Take a breath. When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down. Ask for more time and more information. It’s rarely now or never and it’s rarely either/or. Insist on the data. If something is urgent and important, it should be measured. Beware of data that is relevant but inaccurate, or accurate but irrelevant. Only relevant and accurate data is useful. Beware of fortune-tellers. Any prediction about the future is uncertain. Be wary of predictions that fail to acknowledge that. Insist on a full range of scenarios, never just the best or worst case. Ask how often such predictions have been right before. Be wary of drastic action. Ask what the side effects will be. Ask how the idea has been tested. Step-by-step practical improvements, and evaluation of their impact, are less dramatic but usually more effective.

Factfulness - Rosling's instinctual mental errors - Fear, Size, Generalization

I'm continuing posts for my own benefit - making brief clips from the Rosling "Factfullness" book to encapsulate what he calls our 10 'basic instincts' - instinctual mental errors that we make - hoping this exercise will imprint them in my feeble memory and make me less likely to perform some of the mental errors he describes. The next post in this series is here.

The Fear Instinct (Chapter 4) - Frightening things get our attention, but remember that these are not necessarily the most risky. Our natural fears of violence, captivity, and contamination make us systematically overestimate these risks. To control the fear instinct, calculate the risks. The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected—by your own attention filter or by the media—precisely because it is scary. The risk something poses to you depends not on how scared it makes you feel, but on a combination of two things. How dangerous is it? And how much are you exposed to it? Get calm before you carry on. When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.

The Size Instinct (Chapter 5) - When a lonely number seems impressive (small or large), remember that you could get the opposite impression if it were compared with or divided by some other relevant number. To control the size instinct, get things in proportion. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make you suspicious. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divide by something. The 80/20 rule. Have you been given a long list? Look for the few largest items and deal with those first. They are quite likely more important than all the others put together. Divide: Amounts and rates can tell very different stories. Rates are more meaningful, especially when comparing between different-sized groups. In particular, look for rates per person when comparing between countries or regions.

Remember that categories can be misleading. We can’t stop generalization and we shouldn’t even try. What we should try to do is to avoid generalizing incorrectly. To control the generalization instinct, question your categories. Look for differences within groups. Especially when the groups are large, look for ways to split them into smaller, more precise categories. And, look for similarities across groups. If you find striking similarities between different groups, consider whether your categories are relevant. But also, look for differences across groups. Do not assume that what applies for one group (e.g., you and other people living on income Level 4 or unconscious soldiers) applies for another (e.g., people not living on income Level 4 or sleeping babies). Beware of “the majority.” The majority just means more than half. Ask whether it means 51 percent, 99 percent, or something in between. Beware of vivid examples. Vivid images are easier to recall but they might be the exception rather than the rule. Assume people are not idiots. When something looks strange, be curious and humble, and think, In what way is this a smart solution?

Factfulness - Rosling's instinctual mental errors - Gap, Negativity, Straight Line

I'm doing this and a few subsequent posts for my own benefit - making brief clips from the Rosling "Factfullness" book described in the previous post to encapsulate what he calls our 10 'basic instincts' - instinctual mental errors that we make - hoping this exercise will imprint them in my feeble memory and make me less likely to perform some of the errors he describes. The next post in this series is here.

The Gap Instinct (Chapter 1) - the irresistible temptation we have to divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap—a huge chasm of injustice—in between (as in rich vs. poor, us vs. them). The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be. To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.

The Negativity Instinct (Chapter 2) - ...information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them, gradual improvement is not news. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful. To control the negativity instinct, expect bad news. More bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world. Beware of rosy pasts. People often glorify their early experiences, and nations often glorify their histories.

The Straight Line Instinct (Chapter 3) - ..straight lines are rare in reality, remember that curves come in different shapes, many trends do not follow straight lines but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines. Not child ever kept up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents would expect it to. World population will be stabilizing in the next 50-100 years as birth and death rates become equal. 

Factfulness - Hans Rosling - Introduction

I have just had a read through the book “Factfulness” written by Hans Rosling together with his son and daughter, published in early 2018, very much in the vein of Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” published at roughly the same time. Both books provided detailed data showing that things in this world are not as bad as we commonly suppose. I abstracted portions of Pinker's book in a series of MindBlog posts beginning on 3/1/18,  and in a series of subsequent posts  I want  to pass on my thumbnail sketches, taken from the text, of the main points of the "Factfulness" book. They are descriptions of 10 human "instincts", evolved psychological short cuts that blind us to obvious facts that are revealed by just paying attention to the numbers. The next post in this series is here.

To begin, however, this post points to a marvellous video that serves as an introduction  - Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - from BBC 4:

Return of the oppressed.

An article written by Peter Turchin in 2013 notes that inequality moves in cycles, from the Roman Empire to our own Gilded Age, and he gives a chilling prediction about 2020: that inequality will have reached levels sufficient to cause violent social unrest (cf. threats of violence by Trump supporters if he does not win re-election in 2020.) I suggest you read the article, and include below his interesting graphic on American History

Inverse relationship between well-being and inequality in American history. The peaks and valleys of inequality (in purple) represent the ratio of the largest fortunes to the median wealth of households (the Phillips curve). The blue-shaded curve combines four measures of well-being: economic (the fraction of economic growth that is paid to workers as wages), health (life expectancy and the average height of native-born population), and social optimism (the average age of first marriage, with early marriages indicating social optimism and delayed marriages indicating social pessimism).

New microscopy technique sees thousands of cells and their activity deep in the brain

Weisenberger et al. manage the amazing feat of imaging and recording activity of ~12,000 neurons in the mouse cortex. Here is their abstract and a clip from their Figure 7.

Highlights

•In vivo Ca 2+ imaging of ∼12,000 neurons in mouse cortex at single-cell resolution

•Simultaneous 2p and 3p Ca 2+ imaging within 1,000 × 1,000 × 1,220 μm at up to 17 Hz

•Volumetric 3p Ca 2+ imaging of hippocampus through intact cortex 

•A new integrated, systems-wide optimized microscopy design paradigm

Summary

Calcium imaging using two-photon scanning microscopy has become an essential tool in neuroscience. However, in its typical implementation, the tradeoffs between fields of view, acquisition speeds, and depth restrictions in scattering brain tissue pose severe limitations. Here, using an integrated systems-wide optimization approach combined with multiple technical innovations, we introduce a new design paradigm for optical microscopy based on maximizing biological information while maintaining the fidelity of obtained neuron signals. Our modular design utilizes hybrid multi-photon acquisition and allows volumetric recording of neuroactivity at single-cell resolution within up to 1 × 1 × 1.22 mm volumes at up to 17 Hz in awake behaving mice. We establish the capabilities and potential of the different configurations of our imaging system at depth and across brain regions by applying it to in vivo recording of up to 12,000 neurons in mouse auditory cortex, posterior parietal cortex, and hippocampus.

McMindfulness - how capitalism captured the mindfulness industry

A great piece in The Guardian by David Forbes, an extract from his forthcoming book "Mindfulness and its Discontents" from which I further extract a few chunks:

On the internet is an image of Ronald McDonald, the McDonald’s hamburger icon, seated in a lotus position. Some Thai Buddhists see this in literal terms as disrespectful to the Buddha...The technical, neutral definition of mindfulness and its relativist lack of a moral foundation has opened up secular mindfulness to a host of dubious uses, now called out by its critics as McMindfulness...Instead of letting go of the ego, McMindfulness promotes self-aggrandizement; its therapeutic function is to comfort, numb, adjust and accommodate the self within a neoliberal, corporatized, militarized, individualistic society based on private gain...McMindfulness aims to reduce the stress of the private individual and does not admit to any interest in the social causes of stress...it does not grasp that an individualistic therapized and commodified society is itself a major generator of social suffering and distress. Instead, the best it can then do, ironically, is to offer to sell us back an individualistic, commodified “cure” – mindfulness – to reduce that distress...Meditation apps monetize mindfulness; Headspace’s revenue is estimated at $50m a year and the company is valued at $250m.

The New York Times Privacy Project

Many MindBlog readers are probably aware of the NYTimes series of articles on privacy, but I point to it for those who may not be. A recent piece by Ross Douthat describes how our emerging post-privacy isn't quite totalitarian, but it's getting there. I was particularly chilled by Valentino-DeVries' description of Google's Sensorvault database - a trove of detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. Law enforcement officers are using it to identify possible suspects near crimes, and can obtain names and email addresses of device owners who appear relevant to the crime. The article has links to Google web pages that let you download all of your location history and any other data Google has on you. Other pages give instructions on deleting location, web, and App activity, as well as turning off such data collection.

Changes in well-being measured by massive online choice experiments.

Brynjolfsson et al. (open source) suggest moving beyond using gross domestic product (GDP) and productivity as a proxy for well-being to include the welfare gains from digital goods having zero price that are currently not captured in GDP.:

Significance

Gross domestic product (GDP) measures production and is not meant to measure well-being. While many people nonetheless use GDP as a proxy for well-being, consumer surplus is a better measure of consumer well-being. This is increasingly true in the digital economy where many digital goods have zero price and as a result the welfare gains from these goods are not reflected in GDP or productivity statistics. We propose a way of directly measuring consumer well-being using massive online choice experiments. We find that digital goods generate a large amount of consumer welfare that is currently not captured in GDP. For example, the median Facebook user needed a compensation of around $48 to give it up for a month.

Abstract

Gross domestic product (GDP) and derived metrics such as productivity have been central to our understanding of economic progress and well-being. In principle, changes in consumer surplus provide a superior, and more direct, measure of changes in well-being, especially for digital goods. In practice, these alternatives have been difficult to quantify. We explore the potential of massive online choice experiments to measure consumer surplus. We illustrate this technique via several empirical examples which quantify the valuations of popular digital goods and categories. Our examples include incentive-compatible discrete-choice experiments where online and laboratory participants receive monetary compensation if and only if they forgo goods for predefined periods. For example, the median user needed a compensation of about $48 to forgo Facebook for 1 mo. Our overall analyses reveal that digital goods have created large gains in well-being that are not reflected in conventional measures of GDP and productivity. By periodically querying a large, representative sample of goods and services, including those which are not priced in existing markets, changes in consumer surplus and other new measures of well-being derived from these online choice experiments have the potential for providing cost-effective supplements to the existing national income and product accounts.

Tracking emotions of unseen persons by their context.

Martinez does a commentary on work by Chen and Whitney (open source) in the same issue of PNAS.  Here is a clip from that commentary:

Face perception is a fundamental component of our cognitive system and, arguably, a core ability that allowed humans to create the large, advanced societies of today. When we look at someone else’s face, we recognize who they are, whether they are female or male, attractive or unattractive, and happy or sad; that is, their affective state. Correctly interpreting these signals is essential for a functional, cooperative society. For example, when looking at the faces in Fig. 1, most people identify a female expressing sadness on the left and an angry male on the right. But while identity and other attributes are recognized quite accurately, affect is not. To see this, look at the images in Fig. 2A and B. What expressions would you now say these two individuals express? Most of us classify them as expressing excitement or euphoria; that is, positive emotions. What is behind this radical change in our interpretation of these images? Context. Our interpretation of a facial configuration is dependent on the context in which the facial expression is situated. In an ambitious new study in PNAS, Chen and Whitney show that people make reasonably good predictions of people’s affect when only the contextual information is known; that is, when the face is not observable (Fig. 2C). This inference is shown to be accurate, even when the whole body of the person is masked (Fig. 2D), thus preventing an inference based on body pose. Context, therefore, is not only necessary for a correct interpretation of how others feel but, in some instances, it is sufficient. This surprising result will provide renewed interest in the value that context plays in our interpretation of how others feel.

Fig. 1. When asked to identify the emotions shown in these images, most people agree that the left image expresses sadness, while the right image is a clear display of anger. If asked whether these expressions communicate positive or negative valence, most people agree that both correspond to a negative expression. The problem with these assessments is that context is not observable, which may lead to incorrect interpretations. Images courtesy of (Left) Imgflip and (Right) Getty Images/Michael Steele.

Fig. 2. Adding context to the facial expressions previously seen in Fig. 1 radically changes our interpretation of the emotion being experienced by a person. (A and B) In these two images, most observers agree that the people shown are experiencing a joyful event (i.e., positive valence). (C and D) When the face and body are blurred out, inference of valence and arousal is still possible. Images courtesy of (Upper Left, Lower Left, and Lower Right) Imgflip and (Upper Right) Getty Images/Michael Steele.

Here is the Chen and Whitney abstract:

Emotion recognition is an essential human ability critical for social functioning. It is widely assumed that identifying facial expression is the key to this, and models of emotion recognition have mainly focused on facial and bodily features in static, unnatural conditions. We developed a method called affective tracking to reveal and quantify the enormous contribution of visual context to affect (valence and arousal) perception. When characters’ faces and bodies were masked in silent videos, viewers inferred the affect of the invisible characters successfully and in high agreement based solely on visual context. We further show that the context is not only sufficient but also necessary to accurately perceive human affect over time, as it provides a substantial and unique contribution beyond the information available from face and body. Our method (which we have made publicly available) reveals that emotion recognition is, at its heart, an issue of context as much as it is about faces.

Studies on brain renewal and enhancement

I want to point to two recent examples of studies on brain renewal in aging humans and other animals. First, a Stanford group finds that the normal decay in the effectiveness of the microglial brain cells that clean up brain garbage (protein deposits and cellular debris) correlates with the increased appearance of a single gene product, the B cell receptor protein CD22. They find that "Long-term central nervous system delivery of an antibody that blocks CD22 function reprograms microglia towards a homeostatic transcriptional state and improves cognitive function in aged mice."

Second, Zimmer does a nice review of work on the brain protein Klotho. Mice bred to make extra Klotho live 30 percent longer, and protects those with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease from cognitive decline. Klotho not only protects, but enhanced brain function, even in young mice. A recent study suggests that Klotho may also provide some protection from Alzheimer’s disease to people as well.

Synchronizing rhythmic brain circuits improves working memory in older adults.

Our short term memory depends on theta rhythms (~6-10 Hz) and gamma rhythms (~25-100 Hz) in different parts of our brain being coupled and in synchrony with each other. They become increasingly uncoordinated as we age, resulting in observable cognitive decline by the time we reach 60 or 70 years of age. Reinhart and Nguyen compare the working memory of subjects in their 20s with 60-70 year olds, and find that 25 min of noninvasive stimulation, frequency-tuned to individual brain network dynamics, dramatically improves the working memory of the older group, making it similar to the younger group.

Understanding normal brain aging and developing methods to maintain or improve cognition in older adults are major goals of fundamental and translational neuroscience. Here we show a core feature of cognitive decline—working-memory deficits—emerges from disconnected local and long-range circuits instantiated by theta–gamma phase–amplitude coupling in temporal cortex and theta phase synchronization across frontotemporal cortex. We developed a noninvasive stimulation procedure for modulating long-range theta interactions in adults aged 60–76 years. After 25 min of stimulation, frequency-tuned to individual brain network dynamics, we observed a preferential increase in neural synchronization patterns and the return of sender–receiver relationships of information flow within and between frontotemporal regions. The end result was rapid improvement in working-memory performance that outlasted a 50 min post-stimulation period. The results provide insight into the physiological foundations of age-related cognitive impairment and contribute to groundwork for future non-pharmacological interventions targeting aspects of cognitive decline.

Affective forecasting and partisanship

Rai summaries work by Dorison et al.:

Increasing political polarization is driven in part by voters selectively seeking views that support their preexisting beliefs and avoiding opposing views. Across several experiments, Dorison et al. found that people overestimate how upset they will be from being exposed to views from the opposing political party. For example, Clinton voters overestimated how upset they would be from watching Donald Trump's inaugural address or reading statements by Trump voters. This bias in affective forecasting occurs because voters underestimate their level of agreement with people from the opposite party. Correcting voters' affective forecasts increased their engagement with opposing views. These results have implications for fostering dialogue and reducing political polarization.

The Dorison et al. abstract:

People preferentially consume information that aligns with their prior beliefs, contributing to polarization and undermining democracy. Five studies (collective N = 2455) demonstrate that such “selective exposure” partly stems from faulty affective forecasts. Specifically, political partisans systematically overestimate the strength of negative affect that results from exposure to opposing views. In turn, these incorrect forecasts drive information consumption choices. Clinton voters overestimated the negative affect they would experience from watching President Trump's Inaugural Address (Study 1) and from reading statements written by Trump voters (Study 2). Democrats and Republicans overestimated the negative affect they would experience from listening to speeches by opposing-party senators (Study 3). People's tendency to underestimate the extent to which they agree with opponents’ views drove the affective forecasting error. Finally, correcting biased affective forecasts reduced selective exposure by 24–34% (Studies 4 and 5).

"Learned Helplessness" from constant attention to your input stream (email, etc.)?

I'm trying out a 'new rule' for myself (cf. the Real Time with Bill Maher show on HBO). I frequently wake with some new ideas that I want to develop and write about, then let that good intention to do productive generative work be blown away by glancing at and being hooked by emails and text messages that are continually running in background on the MacBook Air that I use for all my writing. The morning becomes submerged in attending to an never ending list of piddly details. I start feeling increasingly helpless and defined by reactivity to unpredictable input streams - like the experimental dogs in Seligman's classic "Learned Helplessness" experiments. My new rule - which I already violated this morning, but only once - is to carry the good ideas I wake up directly into further thinking and writing about them, completely ignoring the emails and text messages that have accumulated over the night. Going offline makes me feel powerful rather than helpless. Only after a significant period of being generative rather than reactive do I go back to glance at the input stream online. What I find is a pleasant simplification: many of the items I would have reacted to now get deleted without reading!

These sentiments are echoed by Goldfarb's recent NYTimes piece on how making yourself inaccessible from time to time is essential to boosting one's focus and effectiveness. I want to pass on clips of that essay, which contains links to the work referenced.

A 2017 survey from the American Psychological Association found that being constantly and permanently reachable on an electronic device — checking work emails on your day off; continuously cycling through social media feeds; responding to text messages at all hours — is associated with higher stress levels.

This phenomenon of always being reachable is what Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive, calls continuous partial attention. Unlike multitasking — juggling activities of similar importance that don’t require too much cognitive processing — C.P.A. is a state of alertness during which you’re motivated by the desire not to miss out on anything.

Ms. Stone, who gives lectures and consults on issues relating to technology and attention, describes C.P.A. as an “always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis.” Being distractible — allowing incessant beeps, flashes and trills to shatter any semblance of concentration — contributes to a strained lifestyle, she said. Half-paying attention to everything means you’re not able to fully pay attention to anything.

This kind of task switching comes with a cost. It’s called attention residue, a term established by Sophie Leroy, a professor at the Bothell School of Business at the University of Washington. In a 2009 study, Dr. Leroy found that if people transition their attention away from an unfinished task, their subsequent task performance will suffer. For example, if you interrupt writing an email to reply to a text message, it will take time to refocus when you turn your attention back to finishing your email. That little bit of time of adjusting your focus — the residue — compounds throughout the day. As we fragment our attention, fatigue and stress increases, which negatively affects performance.

The life prospects of female co-twins are diminished by prenatal testosterone from their male twins.

From Bütikofe et al.:

During sensitive periods in utero, gonadal steroids help organize biological sex differences in humans and other mammals. In litter-bearing species, chromosomal females passively exposed to prenatal testosterone from male littermates exhibit altered physical and behavioral traits as adults. The consequences of such effects are less well understood in humans, but recent near-doubling of twinning rates in many countries since 1980, secondary to advanced maternal age and increased reliance on in vitro fertilization, means that an increasing subset of females in many populations may be exposed to prenatal testosterone from their male co-twin. Here we use data on all births in Norway (n = 728,842, including 13,800 twins) between 1967 and 1978 to show that females exposed in utero to a male co-twin have a decreased probability of graduating from high school (15.2%), completing college (3.9%), and being married (11.7%), and have lower fertility (5.8%) and life-cycle earnings (8.6%). These relationships remain unchanged among the subsets of 583 and 239 females whose male co-twin died during the first postnatal year and first 28 days of life, respectively, supporting the interpretation that they are due primarily to prenatal exposure rather than to postnatal socialization effects of being raised with a male sibling. Our findings provide empirical evidence, using objectively measured nation-level data, that human females exposed prenatally to a male co-twin experience long-term changes in marriage, fertility, and human capital. These findings support the hypothesis of in utero testosterone transfer between twins, which is likely affecting a small but growing subset of females worldwide.

One mechanism of a basic life choice - to ‘go for it’ or to ‘scram’

Miller et al. use a variety of methods to find subpopulations of dopamine sensitive neurons in the amygdala of mice, projecting to different brain areas, that become active either either during explorative approach or threat-avoiding behaviors:

Avoidance of innate threats is often in conflict with motivations to engage in exploratory approach behavior. The neural pathways that mediate this approach–avoidance conflict are not well resolved. Here we isolated a population of dopamine D1 receptor (D1R)-expressing neurons within the posteroventral region of the medial amygdala (MeApv) in mice that are activated either during approach or during avoidance of an innate threat stimulus. Distinct subpopulations of MeApv-D1R neurons differentially innervate the ventromedial hypothalamus and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and these projections have opposing effects on investigation or avoidance of threatening stimuli. These projections are potently modulated through opposite actions of D1R signaling that bias approach behavior. These data demonstrate divergent pathways in the MeApv that can be differentially weighted toward exploration or evasion of threats.

Students of color are healthier in schools that emphasize the value of diversity

From Levine et al.:

Significance

The United States is increasingly diverse, especially among youth. At the same time, racial and ethnic gaps persist in many domains, including risk for cardiovascular disease. Here, we use a diverse sample of adolescents in a mostly urban setting to show that when schools emphasize the value of diversity, students of color are healthier. Thus, schools’ climates around diversity may have a role to play in reducing health disparities.

Abstract

As the United States becomes more diverse, the ways in which mainstream institutions recognize and address race and ethnicity will be increasingly important. Here, we show that one novel and salient characteristic of an institutional environment, that is, whether a school emphasizes the value of racial and ethnic diversity, predicts better cardiometabolic health among adolescents of color. Using a diverse sample of adolescents who attend more than 100 different schools in predominantly urban locations, we find that when schools emphasize the value of diversity (operationalized as mentioning diversity in their mission statements), students of color, but not white students, have lower values on a composite of five biomarkers of inflammation, have less insulin resistance and compensatory β-cell activity, and have fewer metabolic syndrome signs and score lower on a continuous metabolic syndrome composite. These results suggest that institutions that emphasize diversity may play an unacknowledged role in protecting the health of people of color and, thus, may be a site for future interventions to reduce health disparities.

American geography of opportunity reveals European origins

Interesting analysis from Berger and Engzell. They use microlevel Census data on self-reported ancestry to characterize the European origins of US places. They then examine whether variation in income inequality and intergenerational mobility across these places mirror differences between European countries. While parts of the Southeast contain places that are among the least mobile in the developed world, some areas in the Midwest show mobility rates similar to the Scandinavian countries. Evidence of stark regional divides that are seemingly stable over time suggests that some of this variation may be historical in origin. Their work confirms the inverse relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility.

Significance

The United States is an immigrant nation and consists of places that differ widely in social, cultural, and economic makeup. Recent research finds striking regional variation in economic opportunity—the prospects of poor children to escape poverty as adults. Here, we show that the dominant European ancestry of a place does much to explain such differences: Levels of income equality and mobility across US communities with different European heritage mirror those across corresponding European countries. This finding sheds light on the historical roots of the American geography of opportunity.

Abstract

A large literature documents how intergenerational mobility—the degree to which (dis)advantage is passed on from parents to children—varies across and within countries. Less is known about the origin or persistence of such differences. We show that US areas populated by descendants to European immigrants have similar levels of income equality and mobility as the countries their forebears came from: highest in areas dominated by descendants to Scandinavian and German immigrants, lower in places with French or Italian heritage, and lower still in areas with British roots. Similar variation in mobility is found for the black population and when analyzing causal place effects, suggesting that mobility differences arise at the community level and extend beyond descendants of European immigrant groups. Our findings indicate that the geography of US opportunity may have deeper historical roots than previously recognized.

Infants and toddlers expect different third party punishment behaviors from ingroup and outgroup members.

Yet another example of how our brains are wired to distinguish ingroup and outgroup at a very early age...Ting et al. find sophisticated social analysis performed by 1- and 2.5-year-olds, who show different expectations of the behavior of a third party who has viewed an ingroup-outgroup versus an ingroup-ingroup transgression:

Significance

Adults are more likely to punish transgressions that do not affect them when these transgressions victimize ingroup members. Such third-party punishment (TPP) often takes an indirect form, such as the withholding of help. Building on these results, we showed 2.5- and 1-year-olds scenarios involving a wrongdoer, a victim, and a bystander, and we manipulated the minimal-group memberships of the wrongdoer and the victim relative to that of the bystander. When the victim belonged to the bystander’s group, children expected TPP: They detected a violation when the bystander chose to help the wrongdoer. When the victim did not belong to the bystander’s group, however, children no longer expected TPP. Young children thus selectively expect indirect TPP for harm to ingroup members.

Abstract

Adults and older children are more likely to punish a wrongdoer for a moral transgression when the victim belongs to their group. Building on these results, in violation-of-expectation experiments (n = 198), we examined whether 2.5-year-old toddlers (Exps. 1 and 2) and 1-year-old infants (Exps. 3 and 4) would selectively expect an individual in a minimal group to engage in third-party punishment (TPP) for harm to an ingroup victim. We focused on an indirect form of TPP, the withholding of help. To start, children saw a wrongdoer steal a toy from a victim while a bystander watched. Next, the wrongdoer needed assistance with a task, and the bystander either helped or hindered her. The group memberships of the wrongdoer and the victim were varied relative to that of the bystander and were marked with either novel labels (Exps. 1 and 2) or novel outfits (Exps. 3 and 4). When the victim belonged to the same group as the bystander, children expected TPP: At both ages, they detected a violation when the bystander chose to help the wrongdoer. Across experiments, this effect held whether the wrongdoer belonged to the same group as the bystander and the victim or to a different group; it was eliminated when the victim belonged to a different group than the bystander, when groups were not marked, and when either no theft occurred or the wrongdoer was unaware of the theft. Toddlers and infants thus expect individuals to refrain from helping an ingroup victim’s aggressor, providing further evidence for an early-emerging expectation of ingroup support.

Yet another longevity predictor?

The NYTimes and WaPo must have a substantial number of readers in my 75-80 year old demographic, an age interval during which physical capabilities are rapidly diminishing. Strout offers yet another article pointing to research on physical tests that measure life expectancy:

The test requires you to lower yourself to the floor, crisscross style, without bracing yourself with your hands, knees, arms, or sides of your legs. If you can stand back up, again without the aid of those body parts, you’ve scored a perfect 10 (five points for sitting, five points for standing). You lose a point every time you support yourself with a forbidden joint or appendage...The researchers tested 2,002 adults 51 to 80 years old, and then followed them until a participant died or until the study concluded, which was a median of 6.3 years. In that time, 159 people died — only two of whom had scored a perfect 10. Those who had the lowest score of zero to three points had a risk of death that was five to six times higher than those who scored eight to 10 points.

...more variables apply to our health (and our longevity) than those this particular test focuses on. It’s important to remember that the study results are most relevant to those the same age as the subjects in the testing group, who were ages 51 and up — a point often lost in discussion. Most of the people who scored the lowest on the test were in the 76-to-80 age range, a group that generally experiences decreased mobility and coordination. The research also didn’t reveal the causes of the 159 deaths during the follow-up period. Should we assume they all died of complications from falling, instead of cardiovascular disease or cancer? We don’t know.

The article points to other work showing correlations between physical performance and health. Men who can complete 40 push-ups over a ten year period have a 96% lower risk of cardiovascular disease. People over 65 who walk one meter per second or faster live longer than those who can't.

Using artificial intelligence for medical billing scams.

As a 76 year old Medicare beneficiary, I am frequently annoyed by the blatant ploys that medical care providers use to game the 'fee for services' system: notably scheduling unnecessary appointments and procedures. Metz and Smith describe how this behavior could be enhanced by a dark side of the use of A.I. in health care, as A.I. image analysis technology spreads across medicine, and systems are developed that can detect diabetic retinopathy, as well as lung and brain diseases.

Similar forms of artificial intelligence are likely to move beyond hospitals into the computer systems used by health care regulators, billing companies and insurance providers. Just as A.I. will help doctors check your eyes, lungs and other organs, it will help insurance providers determine reimbursement payments and policy fees.

Ideally, such systems would improve the efficiency of the health care system. But they may carry unintended consequences, a group of researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. warns. In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers raise the prospect of “adversarial attacks” — manipulations that can change the behavior of A.I. systems using tiny pieces of digital data. By changing a few pixels on a lung scan, for instance, someone could fool an A.I. system into seeing an illness that is not really there, or not seeing one that is.

...doctors, hospitals and other organizations could manipulate the A.I. in billing or insurance software in an effort to maximize the money coming their way...If an insurance company uses A.I. to evaluate medical scans, for instance, a hospital could manipulate scans in an effort to boost payouts. If regulators build A.I. systems to evaluate new technology, device makers could alter images and other data in an effort to trick the system into granting regulatory approval.

In their paper, the researchers demonstrated that, by changing a small number of pixels in an image of a benign skin lesion, a diagnostic A.I system could be tricked into identifying the lesion as malignant. Simply rotating the image could also have the same effect, they found.

Small changes to written descriptions of a patient’s condition also could alter an A.I. diagnosis: “Alcohol abuse” could produce a different diagnosis than “alcohol dependence,” and “lumbago” could produce a different diagnosis than “back pain."

In turn, changing such diagnoses one way or another could readily benefit the insurers and health care agencies that ultimately profit from them. Once A.I. is deeply rooted in the health care system, the researchers argue, business will gradually adopt behavior that brings in the most money.