Facing major changes that are a predictable and integral part of life.

I pass on clips from another of Arthur Brooks' biweekly articles on "How to Build a Life." Its discussion of major life changes begins with the obvious  major life transition that is being forced upon most of us by the COVID -19 pandemic.

We have been awakening to the reality that the coronavirus pandemic is not a temporary affliction, but an involuntary transition from one way of life to another. Our jobs and personal lives are shifting and, in many cases, will never fully return to “normal.” ...You may never go back to work like before. Dating may never be the same. Your alma mater might go broke and disappear. Will you hug your friends or even shake hands as much as you used to? Perhaps not.

...Even when a transition is completely voluntary, it can be the source of intense suffering, because it involves adapting to new surroundings and changing your self-conception.

If we understand transitions properly, however, we can curb our natural tendency to fight against them—a futile battle, given their inevitability. Indeed, with a shift in mindset, we can make transitions into a source of meaning and transcendence.

Psychologists call the state of being in transition “liminality - you are neither in the state you left nor completely in your new state, at least not mentally. This provokes something of an identity crisis - it raises the question “Who am I?” - which can be emotionally destabilizing.

After interviewing hundreds of people about their life transitions, author Bruce Feiler found that a major change in life occurs, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Huge ones happen three to five times in each person’s life. Some are voluntary and joyful, such as getting married or having a child. Others are involuntary and unwelcome, such as unemployment or life-threatening illness.

...here’s the good news: Even difficult, unwanted transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than in real time... research  shows that we tend to see past events—even unwanted ones—as net positives over time. Though our brains have a tendency to focus on negative emotions in the present, over the years unpleasant feelings fade more than pleasant feelings do, a phenomenon known as “fading affect bias.”

One of the things we learn by not resisting challenging transitions is how to cope with subsequent life changes - a sense of meaning gained through change makes the rest of life seem more stable.

Difficult periods can also stimulate innovation and ingenuity. A large amount of literature  talks about “post-traumatic growth,” in which people derive long-term benefits from painful experiences, including more appreciation for life, richer relationships, greater resilience, and deeper spirituality. Another manifestation of this growth, according to some newer scholarship, is heightened creativity.

Life changes are painful, but inevitable. And as hard as they may be, we only make things harder—and risk squandering the benefits and lessons they can bring—when we work against them instead of with them...those who benefit the most from painful periods are those who spend time experiencing and processing them. The right strategy is to accept transitions as an integral part of life, and lean into them.

Tipsy microglia binge on synapses - another reason to cut down on the booze

Socodato et al. find that binge-level alcohol intake (about five drinks for an average person) over 10 consecutive days enhances Src-to–tumor necrosis factor (TNF) signaling in prefrontal cortex microglia, which boosts their engulfment capacity and leads to aberrant synaptic pruning, culminating in synapse loss and anxiety-like behavior. Overall, their data suggest that aberrant synaptic pruning by microglia might play an important role in the synaptic transmission deficits elicited by alcohol abuse. Their abstract:

Alcohol abuse adversely affects the lives of millions of people worldwide. Deficits in synaptic transmission and in microglial function are commonly found in human alcohol abusers and in animal models of alcohol intoxication. Here, we found that a protocol simulating chronic binge drinking in male mice resulted in aberrant synaptic pruning and substantial loss of excitatory synapses in the prefrontal cortex, which resulted in increased anxiety-like behavior. Mechanistically, alcohol intake increased the engulfment capacity of microglia in a manner dependent on the kinase Src, the subsequent activation of the transcription factor NF-κB, and the consequent production of the proinflammatory cytokine TNF. Pharmacological blockade of Src activation or of TNF production in microglia, genetic ablation of Tnf, or conditional ablation of microglia attenuated aberrant synaptic pruning, thereby preventing the neuronal and behavioral effects of the alcohol. Our data suggest that aberrant pruning of excitatory synapses by microglia may disrupt synaptic transmission in response to alcohol abuse.

Acetaminophen increases risk taking

From Keaveney et al.:

Acetaminophen (Tylenol), an analgesic and antipyretic available over-the-counter and used in over 600 medicines, is one of the most consumed drugs in the USA. Recent research has suggested that acetaminophen’s effects extend to the blunting of negative as well as positive affect. Because affect is a determinant of risk perception and risk taking, we tested the hypothesis that acute acetaminophen consumption (1000 mg) could influence these important judgments and decisions. In three double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, healthy young adults completed a laboratory measure of risk taking (Balloon Analog Risk Task) and in Studies 1 and 2 completed self-report measures of risk perception. Across all studies (total n = 545), acetaminophen increased risk-taking behavior. On the more affectively stimulating risk perception measure used in Study 2, acetaminophen reduced self-reported perceived risk and this reduction statistically mediated increased risk-taking behavior. These results indicate that acetaminophen can increase risk taking, which may be due to reductions in risk perceptions, particularly those that are highly affect laden.

All of us are racists in our early infancy.

Listening to a Sam Harris 'Making Sense' podcast interview of prolific black author John McWhorter - who describes 'The New Religion of Anti-Racism' - puts me in awe of how advanced and detailed arguments over race have become, with many brilliant people writing. This gives me pause with respect to adding any comments of my own to the cacophony. 

But...in much of the writing - on critical race theory for example - there seems to be almost exclusive emphasis on social constructionist approaches. Culture, history, politics are the main determinants. To point out that our social brains are genetically predisposed during their development to make us infant racists, performing us versus them distinctions even before one year of age, is to risk being labeled as racist, or some other flavor of politically incorrect. 

So... just to make the point again... humans are born, and their brains are wired, with a predisposition to form 'us and them' distinctions, particularly with regard to facial characteristics or skin color, that on average distinguish different ethnic or racial groups. If you enter 'faces', 'race', or 'infants' in the search box in the left column on this page, you will find hundreds of relevant posts noting research from 2006 onward. As a small sample: 

-An 'other race effect' emerges by 6 months of age, fully present at 9 months, in which infants discriminate faces within their own racial group better than within three other-race groups (African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese). 

- Orphan human infants raised with exposure to only same-race faces (European or Asian) have heightened amygdala fear responses to out-group faces than those raised with exposure to same- and other-race faces. Later age of adoption is associated with greater biases to race. 

-In group favoritism and expectations are observed in 17 month old infants. 

-The facial recognition area of our brains 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.

-Deindividuation of outgroup faces occurs at the earliest stages of visual perception.

-Pervasive stereotypes linking Black men with violence and criminality lead to implicit cognitive biases, including the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons.

-Studies on people of varying race, religion, and age and find, that after ranking their own race, religion, or age most favorably, people rank remaining categories in the same hierarchy, suggesting that rules of social evaluation are pervasively embedded in culture and mind.

We need to be clear that the nudging to be little racists by our genes and culture during infancy does not imply that this is what we should be (the naturalistic fallacy). It does give us a more clear understanding of how the biological deck is stacked against us as we try to modify our adult behaviors, which can never be as hard-wired as those learned much earlier. 

What to Do When the Future Feels Hopeless

In one of his biweekly 'How to bluild a life' essays Arthur Brooks offers advice on antidotes to feeling of helplessness in the face of the current pandemic. Some clips:

While there’s little we can do to change the harsh realities of the pandemic, we can change the mindset we use to face them. By doing two things, we can improve our ability to cope with this situation, as well as with negativity and feelings of powerlessness in the future.

1. Channel your inner lawyer.

Pessimism generally distorts reality. Seligman and others recommend that pessimists combat their tendency to expect the worst by employing what they call a disputing technique—verbalizing the negative assumptions we are making about the future, and disputing them with realistic facts.

The other day I found myself darkly musing that I would likely never go back in person; that this would be my new normal, forever. This pessimism, fueled by news stories I’ve read with titles like “Will the Coronavirus Forever Alter the College Experience?,” is completely unwarranted in my school’s case. So I disputed it with the facts. We are, in fact, creating hybrid classes, and planning for an in-person future. There’s a good chance I’ll be back in the classroom within the next year. My odd work situation is tedious, but temporary...Most likely, your future is also brighter than what you may think at your darkest moments, so dispute your pessimism not with mindless optimism, but with facts. Build a solid case for something other than the worst-case scenario, and argue it to yourself like a lawyer.

2. Turn constraints into decisions.

...start an examination of every problem by listing the apparent limitations on your freedom, and instead of taking them as given, consider how you can change them...For example, in the case of the coronavirus lockdowns, the complaint about work I most often hear is that with the inability to work in a normal way, productivity is ruined...The answer is to change the definition of productivity...you might use this period to reset your definition of productivity. True, many aspects of many jobs have been made more difficult by the pandemic. But other parts of a truly productive life are begging for your attention. You can set goals for exercise, work on acquiring new skills, spend quality time with loved ones, or learn to tame your monkey mind in meditation. This is the sort of productivity that will reward you in the long run and can help you establish a healthier, happier equilibrium when the pandemic is over...the healthiest way to look at the pandemic—or any difficult period in our lives—is as an opportunity for improvement and personal growth, without pushing away the negative emotions that are a natural by-product of hard times. As we confront pessimism in the context of COVID-19, we will start to see and manage it more generally in our lives.

Kitty see, kitty do: cat imitates human

I am immediately going to start trying this with my abyssinians! Cats have been notoriously hard to study, and this study reinforces, for example, that cats 0 unlike dogs - are likely to show their true abilities only if their owner is present.   See the description by David Grimm. 

Perceptions of family social status correlate with health and life chances

A fascinating British twin study from Rivenbark et al:

Children from lower-income households are at increased risk for poor health, educational failure, and behavioral problems. This social gradient is one of the most reproduced findings in health and social science. How people view their position in social hierarchies also signals poor health. However, when adolescents’ views of their social position begin to independently relate to well-being is currently unknown. A cotwin design was leveraged to test whether adolescents with identical family backgrounds, but who viewed their family’s social status as higher than their same-aged and sex sibling, experienced better well-being in early and late adolescence. Participants were members of the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, a representative cohort of British twins (n = 2,232) followed across the first 2 decades of life. By late adolescence, perceptions of subjective family social status (SFSS) robustly correlated with multiple indicators of health and well-being, including depression; anxiety; conduct problems; marijuana use; optimism; not in education, employment, or training (NEET) status; and crime. Findings held controlling for objective socioeconomic status both statistically and by cotwin design after accounting for measures of childhood intelligence (IQ), negative affect, and prior mental health risk and when self-report, informant report, and administrative data were used. Little support was found for the biological embedding of adolescents’ perceptions of familial social status as indexed by inflammatory biomarkers or cognitive tests in late adolescence or for SFSS in early adolescence as a robust correlate of well-being or predictor of future problems. Future experimental studies are required to test whether altering adolescents’ subjective social status will lead to improved well-being and social mobility.

Genes and environments, development and time

 A special section of the Sept. 22 issue of PNAS offers a series of free online artices on biological embedding across timescales.  Here is the abstract of the introductory article by Boyce et al.:

A now substantial body of science implicates a dynamic interplay between genetic and environmental variation in the development of individual differences in behavior and health. Such outcomes are affected by molecular, often epigenetic, processes involving gene–environment (G–E) interplay that can influence gene expression. Early environments with exposures to poverty, chronic adversities, and acutely stressful events have been linked to maladaptive development and compromised health and behavior. Genetic differences can impart either enhanced or blunted susceptibility to the effects of such pathogenic environments. However, largely missing from present discourse regarding G–E interplay is the role of time, a “third factor” guiding the emergence of complex developmental endpoints across different scales of time. Trajectories of development increasingly appear best accounted for by a complex, dynamic interchange among the highly linked elements of genes, contexts, and time at multiple scales, including neurobiological (minutes to milliseconds), genomic (hours to minutes), developmental (years and months), and evolutionary (centuries and millennia) time. This special issue of PNAS thus explores time and timing among G–E transactions: The importance of timing and timescales in plasticity and critical periods of brain development; epigenetics and the molecular underpinnings of biologically embedded experience; the encoding of experience across time and biological levels of organization; and gene-regulatory networks in behavior and development and their linkages to neuronal networks. Taken together, the collection of papers offers perspectives on how G–E interplay operates contingently within and against a backdrop of time and timescales.

Inflammaging - Another reason seniors don't want to catch COVID-19

I imagine myself to have a very robust immune system because I very seldom catch a flu or cold, take Vitamins C and D, exercise, am not overweight, ran around barefoot when I was 3-4 years old, eating dirt and pill bugs outside the family house I have now moved back into 75 years later. This optimistic view is tempered quite a bit by information in Greenwoods's recent article describing how the aging immune system begins to shift into a heightened state of alert, dialing up inflammation and running out of certain immune cells. This is because the body's first line of defense against virus infiltration, that normally also cleans up damaged cells, misfolded proteins and other detritus in the body - even in the absence of an infection - begins to be overwhelmed by increasing amount of waste, and slides into a constant state of alert and inflammation. And...

At the same time, elderly cells in tissues throughout the body are thought to change with age, releasing inflammatory substances of their own...even perfectly healthy 65-year-olds usually have higher levels of immune proteins, like cytokines, involved in inflammation than younger people do. This heightened state of chronic inflammation, sometimes called “inflammaging,” is linked to frailty — older adults with higher levels of it may be more fragile and less mobile...fighting off pathogens becomes more complicated: All of this baseline inflammatory chaos in an aging body makes it harder for the messages sent out by the innate immune system to reach their targets...there’s the added danger that the innate immune system may overreact...the aging immune system might be linked to reports of severe Covid-19 culminating in a cytokine storm, a reaction that causes high numbers of immune messengers to flood the body and can lead to organ failure...This inflammation may also be part of why vaccines, whose effectiveness relies on a robust reaction from the immune system, don’t work as well in older people — an effect that’s likely to extend to Covid-19 vaccines.

Several days after the innate immune response begins, the body begins a second wave of attacks against the viral invader. This adaptive immune system response is more targeted than the first, methodically destroying cells infected by this specific virus...in older bodies, the adaptive response not only takes longer to get into gear, it arrives to find a scene of inflammatory pandemonium...These delays mean that the pathogen has already made many copies of itself by the time the adaptive immune system gets to work and gains a foothold that might not have been available in a younger person. Additionally, older people have fewer fresh T cells, important players in the adaptive response that are trained to hunt down cells infected with a specific pathogen.

Since it became clear that the virus sometimes provokes an out-of-control immune response, researchers have been testing whether reducing inflammation might help. Drugs that tamp down the levels of cytokines, like those used for treating rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases, have not shown success in fighting the virus. What’s more, chloroquine, which can help inhibit the aging of cells, caused increased mortality in Covid-19 clinical trials.

But the steroid dexamethasone, a potent anti-inflammatory, has been shown to reduce deaths from the virus. It resulted in one-third fewer deaths in people on ventilators and one-fifth fewer deaths in those on oxygen, according to a study published in June. (The drug may be ineffective, or even harmful, for patients in the early stages of the disease, however.)

The 2020 Ig Nobel Prizes - research on knives made of feces.

A piece in Science Magazine gives the highlights of this year's Ig Noble prize s published in the Annals of Improbable Research. If the award for research showing that knives can not be made from feces (despite a previous account of an Inuit man doing so) turns you on, you might also enjoy this Poop Mystery Story in the New Yorker Magazine.

Brain circuits signaling the absence of emotion in body language

Sokolov et al. show that modulation of the reciprocal effective connectivity between the amygdala and insula during processing of neutral and emotional body language predicts people’s ability to recognize neutral body language, suggesting that their interplay may be important not only for the processing of emotions but also, for inferring the absence of emotional content in body language. Their abstract:

Adaptive social behavior and mental well-being depend on not only recognizing emotional expressions but also, inferring the absence of emotion. While the neurobiology underwriting the perception of emotions is well studied, the mechanisms for detecting a lack of emotional content in social signals remain largely unknown. Here, using cutting-edge analyses of effective brain connectivity, we uncover the brain networks differentiating neutral and emotional body language. The data indicate greater activation of the right amygdala and midline cerebellar vermis to nonemotional as opposed to emotional body language. Most important, the effective connectivity between the amygdala and insula predicts people’s ability to recognize the absence of emotion. These conclusions extend substantially current concepts of emotion perception by suggesting engagement of limbic effective connectivity in recognizing the lack of emotion in body language reading. Furthermore, the outcome may advance the understanding of overly emotional interpretation of social signals in depression or schizophrenia by providing the missing link between body language reading and limbic pathways. The study thus opens an avenue for multidisciplinary research on social cognition and the underlying cerebrocerebellar networks, ranging from animal models to patients with neuropsychiatric conditions.

Another Big History - why the West is WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic)

Alas, I usually end up reading reviews of books rather than the books themselves. Here I want to pass on clips from Shulevitz's review in The Atlantic: of Joseph Henrich's theory-of-everything type book: "The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous." Henrich directs Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

Consider this the latest addition to the Big History category, popularized by best sellers such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The outstanding feature of the genre is that it wrangles all of human existence into a volume or two, starting with the first hominids to rise up on their hind legs and concluding with us, cyborg-ish occupants of a networked globe. Big History asks Big Questions and offers quasi-monocausal answers. Why and how did humans conquer the world? Harari asks. Cooperation. What explains differences and inequalities among civilizations? Diamond asks. Environment, which is to say, geography, climate, flora and fauna. Henrich also wants to explain variation among societies, in particular to account for the Western, prosperous kind.

One culture... is different from the others, and that’s modern WEIRD (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”) culture. Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance. He rests his grand theory of cultural difference on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamental institutions.”...Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions...The Catholic Church changed all that. As of late antiquity, Europeans still lived in tribes, like most of the rest of the world. But the Church dismantled these kin-based societies with what Henrich calls its “Marriage and Family Program,..it meant quashing pagan practices such as polygamy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula “I do”), and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was redefining as incest.. ..Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself...Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy...The Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe...Loosened from their roots, people gathered in cities. There they developed “impersonal prosociality”—that is, they bonded with other city folk. They wrote city charters and formed professional guilds. Sometimes they elected leaders, the first inklings of representative democracy.

Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.

Henrich’s most consequential—and startling—claim is that WEIRD and non-WEIRD people possess opposing cognitive styles. They think differently. Standing apart from the community, primed to break wholes into parts and classify them, Westerners are more analytical. People from kinship-intensive cultures, by comparison, tend to think more holistically.

Henrich is more persuasive when applying his theory of cumulative culture to the evolution of ideas. Democracy, the rule of law, and human rights “didn’t start with fancy intellectuals, philosophers, or theologians,” Henrich writes. “Instead, the ideas formed slowly, piece by piece, as regular Joes with more individualistic psychologies—be they monks, merchants, or artisans—began to form competing voluntary associations” and learned how to govern them. Toppling the accomplishments of Western civilization off their great-man platforms, he erases their claim to be monuments to rationality: Everything we think of as a cause of culture is really an effect of culture, including us.

Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy

Bartels does a survey (open source) that provides numbers and graphs on what is obvious from current news sources - the frailty of public commitment to democratic norms in the contemporary United States illustrated by the survey responses of 1,151 Republican identifiers and Republican-leaning Independents* interviewed in January 2020:  

Significance

Growing partisan polarization and democratic “backsliding” in various parts of the world have raised concerns about the attachment of ordinary Americans to democratic institutions and procedures. I find that substantial numbers of Republicans endorse statements contemplating violations of key democratic norms, including respect for the law and for the outcomes of elections and eschewing the use of force in pursuit of political ends. The strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism—especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The strong tendency of ethnocentric Republicans to countenance violence and lawlessness, even prospectively and hypothetically, underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics.

Abstract

Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” (In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.) I use 127 survey items to measure six potential bases of these and other antidemocratic sentiments: partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, and ethnic antagonism. The strongest predictor by far, for the Republican rank-and-file as a whole and for a variety of subgroups defined by education, locale, sex, and political attitudes, is ethnic antagonism—especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics.

Disagreeable people are not more likely than agreeable people to obtain power in an organization.

An interesting study from Anderson et al.:

Does being disagreeable—that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways—help people attain power? This question has long captivated philosophers, scholars, and laypeople alike, and yet prior empirical findings have been inconclusive. In the current research, we conducted two preregistered prospective longitudinal studies in which we measured participants’ disagreeableness prior to entering the labor market and then assessed the power they attained in the context of their work organization ∼14 y later when their professional careers had unfolded. Both studies found disagreeable individuals did not attain higher power as opposed to extraverted individuals who did gain higher power in their organizations. Furthermore, the null relationship between disagreeableness and power was not moderated by individual differences, such as gender or ethnicity, or by contextual variables, such as organizational culture. What can account for this null relationship? A close examination of behavior patterns in the workplace found that disagreeable individuals engaged in two distinct patterns of behavior that offset each other’s effects on power attainment: They engaged in more dominant-aggressive behavior, which positively predicted attaining higher power, but also engaged in less communal and generous behavior, which predicted attaining less power. These two effects, when combined, appeared to cancel each other out and led to a null correlation between disagreeableness and power.

"Us" versus "Them" in 17 month old infants.

Jin and Baillargeon make observations that suggest an early origin of the 'us and them' perspective being taken to extremes in our current polarized political climate:

Significance

We examined whether one mechanism contributing to ingroup favoritism might be an abstract and early-emerging sociomoral expectation of ingroup support. In violation-of-expectation experiments, 17-mo-old infants first watched third-party interactions among unfamiliar adults identified (using novel labels) as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one adult needed help, and another adult either did or did not provide it. Infants expected help to be provided when the two adults belonged to the same group, but held no expectation when the adults belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups. Infants thus already possess an abstract expectation of ingroup support, and this finding sheds light on one of the mechanisms underlying ingroup favoritism in human interactions.

Abstract

One pervasive facet of human interactions is the tendency to favor ingroups over outgroups. Remarkably, this tendency has been observed even when individuals are assigned to minimal groups based on arbitrary markers. Why is mere categorization into a minimal group sufficient to elicit some degree of ingroup favoritism? We consider several accounts that have been proposed in answer to this question and then test one particular account, which holds that ingroup favoritism reflects in part an abstract and early-emerging sociomoral expectation of ingroup support. In violation-of-expectation experiments with 17-mo-old infants, unfamiliar women were first identified (using novel labels) as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one woman needed instrumental assistance to achieve her goal, and another woman either provided the necessary assistance (help event) or chose not to do so (ignore event). When the two women belonged to the same group, infants looked significantly longer if shown the ignore as opposed to the help event; when the two women belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups, however, infants looked equally at the two events. Together, these results indicate that infants view helping as expected among individuals from the same group, but as optional otherwise. As such, the results demonstrate that from an early age, an abstract expectation of ingroup support contributes to ingroup favoritism in human interactions.

Cognitive control increases honesty in cheaters but cheating in those who are honest

Abe discusses work of Speer et al. that probes:

..a long-standing paradox concerning the cognitive nature of honesty: Is it a matter of “will” or “grace”? The will hypothesis assumes that honesty requires cognitive control to suppress temptation to cheat, while dishonest behavior to serve self-interest is people’s automatic response. In contrast, the grace hypothesis assumes that honesty flows automatically without active resistance to temptation, while dishonest behavior is realized by cognitive control to override honest impulses.

Here is the Speer et al. abstract:

Every day, we are faced with the conflict between the temptation to cheat for financial gains and maintaining a positive image of ourselves as being a “good person.” While it has been proposed that cognitive control is needed to mediate this conflict between reward and our moral self-image, the exact role of cognitive control in (dis)honesty remains elusive. Here we identify this role, by investigating the neural mechanism underlying cheating. We developed a task which allows for inconspicuously measuring spontaneous cheating on a trial-by-trial basis in the MRI scanner. We found that activity in the nucleus accumbens promotes cheating, particularly for individuals who cheat a lot, while a network consisting of posterior cingulate cortex, temporoparietal junction, and medial prefrontal cortex promotes honesty, particularly in individuals who are generally honest. Finally, activity in areas associated with cognitive control (anterior cingulate cortex and inferior frontal gyrus) helped dishonest participants to be honest, whereas it enabled cheating for honest participants. Thus, our results suggest that cognitive control is not needed to be honest or dishonest per se but that it depends on an individual’s moral default.

Origins of human music - two perspectives

Because I wrote an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (coauthored with Vadim Arshavsky), that was published in 2010, I receive the journal's calls for commentaries on forthcoming articles. Here I pass on the abstracts of two articles proposing evolutionary rationales for the origins of our human musical abilities.  Because I am a recital pianist I have always been interested in the origins and neuroscience of our musical faculties. In 2015 I agreed to give a lecture on 'Music and the Mind', generated thirty pages of fairly lucid text, became overwhelmed by the complexity of the subject, and backed out of doing the talk.  I'm curious to see whether a careful reading of these articles confirms that decision or inspires me to try again. 

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archaeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution due to their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding (MSB) hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.

Origins of music in credible signaling

Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (e.g., rhythmic entrainment) and the effects of adaptations for non-musical functions (e.g., auditory scene analysis). How did music evolve? Here, we show that prevailing views on the evolution of music — that music is a byproduct of other evolved faculties, evolved for social bonding, or evolved to signal mate quality — are incomplete or wrong. We argue instead that music evolved as a credible signal in at least two contexts: coalitional interactions and infant care. Specifically, we propose that (1) the production and reception of coordinated, entrained rhythmic displays is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling coalition strength, size, and coordination ability; and (2) the production and reception of infant-directed song is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling parental attention to secondarily altricial infants. These proposals, supported by interdisciplinary evidence, suggest that basic features of music, such as melody and rhythm, result from adaptations in the proper domain of human music. The adaptations provide a foundation for the cultural evolution of music in its actual domain, yielding the diversity of musical forms and musical behaviors found worldwide.

The science of inequality.

Economic inequality is a continuing focus of political debate, and I think a re-post of a brief MindBlog item from 6/2/2014 is relevant:

The May 23 issue of Science Magazine has a large section devoted the origins and analysis of economic inequality. And, the general gist of virtually all the articles is that inequality is here to stay, predicted by social and also simple physical models of exchange. A weekly chaos and complexity discussion group that I attend just this past Tuesday discussed the economic Yard-Sale Model of wealth redistribution, in which power-law-like distributions result even when all individuals are identical and playing by the same rules. In a previous post, I have passed on a simple model illustrated by Clint Sprott, organizer of the seminars.

Predicting results of our presidential election.

I want to pass on an email from retired historian Lou Wangberg, a friend from my Fort Lauderdale period who leads a history discussion group there. He gives links to analyses by The Economist magazine and Mind Matters A.I.

Between now and the election on November 3rd you will see literally countless polls and forecasts. You see, as humans we hate to live with uncertainty. We want to know in advance what is ahead for us. And it is a legitimate question to ask, "Which poll(s) should I pay attention to? "Which poll(s) will be most on target?" the answer is NONE OF THEM. In the end virtually all of them will be wrong for one reason or another. That is why we hold elections. But I have found one that is more sophisticated than the rest and uses 20,000 factors. It also goes day by day so it is interesting to watch. So give this one a try and you will at least have something you can quote in your discussions (arguments) with friends. I'm going to share an additional link that will explain why most predictions are bogus. Enjoy! Here are the links:

The Economist - Forecasting the US elections

Mind Matters - Election Models: Predicting the past is easy - and useless

Democracy in the Balance - Special Issue of Science Magazine

The Sept.4 issue of Science Magazine has a special section of open source perspectives and reviews. A few of the titles:

Racial authoritarianism in U.S. democracy

Campaigns influence election outcomes less than you think

Diversity and prosocial behavior

False equivalencies: Online activism from left to right

The illusion of objectivity enhances political polarization.

From Schwalbe et al. (open source):  

Significance

Political polarization increasingly threatens democratic institutions. The belief that “my side” sees the world objectively while the “other side” sees it through the lens of its biases contributes to this political polarization and accompanying animus and distrust. This conviction, known as the “objectivity illusion,” was strong and persistent among Trump and Clinton supporters in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election. We show that the objectivity illusion predicts subsequent bias and polarization, including heightened partisanship over the presidential debates. A follow-up study showed that both groups impugned the objectivity of a putative blog author supporting the opposition candidate and saw supporters of that opposing candidate as evil.

Abstract

Two studies conducted during the 2016 presidential campaign examined the dynamics of the objectivity illusion, the belief that the views of “my side” are objective while the views of the opposing side are the product of bias. In the first, a three-stage longitudinal study spanning the presidential debates, supporters of the two candidates exhibited a large and generally symmetrical tendency to rate supporters of the candidate they personally favored as more influenced by appropriate (i.e., “normative”) considerations, and less influenced by various sources of bias than supporters of the opposing candidate. This study broke new ground by demonstrating that the degree to which partisans displayed the objectivity illusion predicted subsequent bias in their perception of debate performance and polarization in their political attitudes over time, as well as closed-mindedness and antipathy toward political adversaries. These associations, furthermore, remained significant even after controlling for baseline levels of partisanship. A second study conducted 2 d before the election showed similar perceptions of objectivity versus bias in ratings of blog authors favoring the candidate participants personally supported or opposed. These ratings were again associated with polarization and, additionally, with the willingness to characterize supporters of the opposing candidate as evil and likely to commit acts of terrorism. At a time of particular political division and distrust in America, these findings point to the exacerbating role played by the illusion of objectivity.

Mechanisms of our current political polarization.

I want to point to three sources that provide complimentary perspectives on the origins and maintenance of the extreme Red versus Blue divide in the U.S.:

The first is a freakonomics podcast, with a text version also offered,  describing how Republicans and Democrats form a duopoly analogous to Coke and Pepsi, Intel and AMD, Boeing and Airbus, etc.

"America's Hidden Duopoly - We all know our political system is “broken” — but what if that’s not true? Some say the Republicans and Democrats constitute a wildly successful industry that has colluded to kill off competition, stifle reform, and drive the country apart.  So, what can we do about it?

A second perspective is offered by Yang et al., who provide a "Satisficing" Dynamical Model of why U.S. political parties are so polarized. Here is a summary by Clint Sprott of the Univ. of Wisc. Chaos and Complex Systems Discussion Group:

Basically, it contends that when the parties are too centrist and too inclusive, voters with extreme views find little reason to choose one over the other and either abstain from voting or vote randomly. Thus it is advantageous for the parties to move off center to pick up more of these voters. In the coming election, most people long ago decided which side they are on. Thus all the parties can hope to do at this point is to induce those who lean in their direction to get out and vote. Would mandatory voting reduce polarization? Why is the popular vote usually so close to 50/50?

And finally, a book by Achen and Bartels, "Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government." From the book description:

Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens.

Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters―even those who are well informed and politically engaged―mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly.

The active grandparent hypothesis - an evolutionary explanation of why and how exercise delays senescence and death.

I recommend that you read an interesting article by Daniel Lieberman in the current issue of Harvard Magazine. Here are a few clips:

The evidence that hunter-gatherers stay physically active for several decades after they stop having children is fundamental for understanding the nature of human aging. Most especially, our uniquely cooperative system of intergenerational cooperation and food-sharing postpones Medawar’s grim shadow. Instead of becoming obsolete, middle-aged and elderly hunter-gatherers bolster their reproductive success by provisioning children and grandchildren, doing childcare, processing food, passing on expertise, and otherwise helping younger generations. Once this novel cooperative strategy—the essence of the hunting and gathering way of life—started to emerge during the Stone Age, natural selection had the chance to select for longevity. According to this theory, hard-working and helpful grandparents who looked out for others and who were blessed with genes that favored a long life had more children and grandchildren, thus passing on those genes. Over time, humans were evidently selected to live longer to be generous, useful grandparents. One version of this idea is known as the Grandmother Hypothesis in recognition of the evidence that grandmothers play especially important roles.

In order to elucidate the links between exercise and aging, I propose a corollary to the Grandmother Hypothesis, which I call the Active Grandparent Hypothesis. According to this idea, human longevity was not only selected for but was also made possible by having to work hard during old age to help as many children, grandchildren, and other younger relatives as possible survive and thrive. That is, while there may have been selection for genes (as yet unidentified) that help humans live past the age of 50, there was also selection for genes that repair and maintain our bodies when we are physically active. As a result, many of the mechanisms that slow aging and extend life are turned on by physical activity, especially as we get older. Human health and longevity are thus extended both by and for physical activity.

While exercise restores most structures (what biologists term homeostasis), in some cases it may create stability by making things even better than before (allostasis). For example, demanding physical activities can increase the strength of bones and muscles, increase cells’ abilities to uptake glucose from the blood, and both augment and replace mitochondria in muscles. In addition, repair mechanisms sometimes overshoot the damage induced by exercise, leading to a net benefit. It’s like scrubbing the kitchen floor so well after a spill that the whole floor ends up being cleaner. All in all, the modest physiological stresses caused by exercise trigger a reparative response yielding a general benefit, a phenomenon sometimes known as hormesis.

Changes as MindBlog's autonomic nervous system ages 11 years

Actually, the original title of this MindBlog post on June 11, 2013 was "Changes as an autonomic nervous system ages 11 years - The "Wild Divine" is a bit less wild." - I'm reviewing old MindBlog posts (very slowly, as it turns out) and in most cases resisting the temptation to re-post even ones I thinks are quite interesting. This personal one really hit me, owever, so I pass it on, wondering how much further the noted decrease in my ability to regulate autonomic nervous system parameters has progressed by age 78:

Just after I retired from being a Univ. of Wisconsin department chair in 2001 I bought a set of finger sensors that fit on one's three middle fingers to report skin conductance and heartbeat to a PC or MAC via an A/D converter. These were part of a package with several CDs that installed a new age game on the computer that lead you through a rich environment of classical greek temples and waterfalls, attended by soothing music, that presented tasks in which you dinked with your own heart rate variability and sympathetic (arousing)/parasympathetic (calming) balance, going alternatively through periods of calm and arousal. I thought it was a hoot, and took the time to go through the "Journey to Wild Divine: passage" and "Journey to Wild Divine: Wisdom Quest."

Some of the current incarnations of these programs have moved to web browsers. Over the years a number of heavy weight new age gurus have signed on with their wares - Deepak Chopra, Dean Ornish, and Andrew Weil (Weil was in my Harvard graduating class...I'm tempted, but I won't burden you with my jaded opinion of this class of entrepreneurs, particularly Mr. Chopra.)

The main point of this post is note my experience on pulling out the finger sensors after 11 years trying the same exercises in their new presentation. What's the difference when this 71 year old tries the same manipulations of calm and arousal that the 60 year old played with with 11 years earlier? In a nutshell, I have less command over heart rate variability, which is lower, as the swings between calm and arousal have less amplitude.

And indeed, this fits with the literature on changes in the autonomic nervous system that occur on aging. If you simply do a google search for "autonomic nervous system and aging" numerous references appear that document how healthy aging is associated with lowered heart rate variability, elevated basal sympathetic nervous activity, and reduction of overall autonomic reactivity of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Here is a very recent review, from which I pass on one figure:

Schematic of proposed features associated with the imbalance in the autonomic nervous system during aging. During aging there is a shift in the balance of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) towards the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). This may be influenced by circulating or local brain levels of angiotensin (Ang) II and leptin. The lower activity of the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is proposed to result at least in part from an age-related decline in Angiotensin-(1–7). Lower Angiotensin-(1–7) and higher Ang II or leptin in the brain medulla would predispose to a decline in baroreceptor reflex sensitivity (BRS) for control of heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), both of which are associated with aging. Moreover, impairments in BRS and HRV can contribute to target organ damage, including metabolic dysfunction, with or without an increase in blood pressure. 

If you're inclined, like Mr. Dylan Thomas, to not "go gently into that good night" you can find numerous sources (example here) on slowing these aging changes, usually by some sort of physical movement or stimulation.

Reconsidering the value of believing in free will.

Nadelhoffer et al. fail to replicate 2008 experiments suggesting that a belief in determinism increases cheating:

A key source of support for the view that challenging people's beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests.

A brief history of risk

Li, Hills, and Hertwig do an open access review with the title of this post. From their introductory paragraph:

...First, we examined how the frequency of the word risk has changed over historical time. Is the construct of risk playing an ever-increasing role in the public discourse, as the sociological notion of a ‘risk society’ suggests? Second, we investigated how the sentiments for the words co-occurring with risk have changed. Are the connotations of risk becoming increasingly ominous? Third, how has the meaning of risk changed relative to close associates such as danger and hazard? Is risk more subject to semantic change? Finally, we decompose the construct of risk into the specific topics with which it has been associated and track those topics over historical time. This brief history of the semantics of risk reveals new and surprising insights—a fourfold increase in frequency, increasingly negative sentiment, a semantic drift toward forecasting and prevention, and a shift away from war toward chronic disease—reflecting the conceptual evolution of risk in the archeological records of public discourse.

Getting the rhythm to suppress Alzheimer's

An interesting brief open source review by Lynne Peeples in PNAS describes experiments on mice and humans showing that visual and sound stimulation in the e.e.g gamma frequency range (30-80 Hertz, or cycles/sec, peaking at 40 Hz) elicits gamma frequency brain oscillation, enhance cognition, and diminishes levels of the amyloid plaques and tau protein tangles associated with Alzheismer's. The article is worth a read, and I pass on just a bit of a background paragraph:

Brain rhythms are known to participate in all forms of cognition. And changes of brain rhythms appear to be implicated in all forms of neurological disease...Growing evidence indicates that neurons in many animals, including humans, can strongly synchronize in the gamma range of frequencies—between 30 and 80 hertz, and peaking around 40 hertz. As far back as a 1955 study of meditating yogis, researchers have associated gamma waves with peak concentration and high levels of cognitive functioning. Studies in the last decade that manipulated brain rhythms in lab animals and humans have confirmed the impact of those rhythms on cognition and disease. Researchers have also found that fewer neurons fire together at this rate in patients with Alzheimer’s disease or other neurological conditions, suggesting that gamma rhythms may play a role in the cognitive impairments associated with such disorders.

Rice-farming predicts tigher social norms, less innovative thinking, worldwide

From Talhelm and English (open source):

Data recently published in PNAS mapped out regional differences in the tightness of social norms across China [R. Y. J. Chua, K. G. Huang, M. Jin, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 6720–6725 (2019)]. Norms were tighter in developed, urbanized areas and weaker in rural areas. We tested whether historical paddy rice farming has left a legacy on social norms in modern China. Premodern rice farming could plausibly create strong social norms because paddy rice relied on irrigation networks. Rice farmers coordinated their water use and kept track of each person’s labor contributions. Rice villages also established strong norms of reciprocity to cope with labor demands that were twice as high as dryland crops like wheat. In line with this theory, China’s historically rice-farming areas had tighter social norms than wheat-farming areas, even beyond differences in development and urbanization. Rice–wheat differences were just as large among people in 10 neighboring provinces (n = 3,835) along the rice–wheat border. These neighboring provinces differ sharply in rice and wheat, but little in latitude, temperature, and other potential confounding variables. Outside of China, rice farming predicted norm tightness in 32 countries around the world. Finally, people in rice-farming areas scored lower on innovative thinking, which tends to be lower in societies with tight norms. This natural test case within China might explain why East Asia—historically reliant on rice farming—has tighter social norms than the wheat-farming West.

Stable isotopes in hair reveal dietary divergence related to socioeconomic status and health

From Ehleringer et al.:

Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in hair sampled from 65 communities across the central and intermountain regions of the United States and more intensively throughout 29 ZIP codes in the Salt Lake Valley, Utah, revealed a dietary divergence related to socioeconomic status as measured by cost of living, household income, and adjusted gross income. Corn-fed, animal-derived proteins were more common in the diets of lower socioeconomic status populations than were plant-derived proteins, with individual estimates of animal-derived protein diets as high as 75%; United States towns and cities averaged 57%. Similar patterns were seen across the socioeconomic status spectrum in the Salt Lake Valley. It is likely that corn-fed animal proteins were associated with concentrated animal-feeding operations, a common practice for industrial animal production in the United States today. Given recent studies highlighting the negative impacts of animal-derived proteins in our diets, hair carbon isotope ratios could provide an approach for scaling assessments of animal-sourced foods and health risks in communities across the United States.

Gaze deflection reveals how gaze cueing is tuned to extract the mind behind the eyes

Here is a fascinating bit from Colombatto et al.:  

Significance

We report an empirical study of gaze deflection—a common experience in which you turn to look in a different direction when someone “catches” you staring at them. We show that gaze cueing (the automatic orienting of attention to locations at which others are looking) is far weaker for such displays, even when the actual eye and head movements are identical to more typical intentional gazes. This demonstrates how gaze cueing is driven by the perception of minds, not eyes, and it serves as a case study of both how social dynamics can shape visual attention in a sophisticated manner and how vision science can contribute to our understanding of common social phenomena.

Abstract

Suppose you are surreptitiously looking at someone, and then when they catch you staring at them, you immediately turn away. This is a social phenomenon that almost everyone experiences occasionally. In such experiences—which we will call gaze deflection—the “deflected” gaze is not directed at anything in particular but simply away from the other person. As such, this is a rare instance where we may turn to look in a direction without intending to look there specifically. Here we show that gaze cues are markedly less effective at orienting an observer’s attention when they are seen as deflected in this way—even controlling for low-level visual properties. We conclude that gaze cueing is a sophisticated mental phenomenon: It is not merely driven by perceived eye or head motions but is rather well tuned to extract the “mind” behind the eyes.

Effects of lockdown on human sleep and chronotype during the COVID-19 pandemic

An open source article in Current Biology from Leone et al., the summary:

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many countries imposing a lockdown, which in turn reduces sunlight exposure and alters daily social schedules. Since these are the main entrainment factors for biological rhythms, we hypothesized that the lockdown may have affected sleep and circadian rhythms. We indeed show that participants slept longer and later during lockdown weekdays, and exhibited lower levels of social jetlag. While this may seem to be an overall improvement of sleep conditions, chronotype was also delayed under the lockdown. This signature of a weaker light–dark cycle should be monitored attentively since it may progressively cause disruptive effects on sleep and circadian rhythms, affecting human performance and health.

A model shows herd immunity to COVID can be achieved at a population-wide infection rate of ~40%

I pass on the editor's summary and the abstract for a open source article by Britton et al.:  

Heterogeneity and herd immunity

In response to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), some politicians have been keen to exploit the idea of achieving herd immunity. Countering this possibility are estimates derived from work on historical vaccination studies, which suggest that herd immunity may only be achieved at an unacceptable cost of lives. Because human populations are far from homogeneous, Britton et al. show that by introducing age and activity heterogeneities into population models for SARS-CoV-2, herd immunity can be achieved at a population-wide infection rate of ∼40%, considerably lower than previous estimates. This shift is because transmission and immunity are concentrated among the most active members of a population, who are often younger and less vulnerable. If nonpharmaceutical interventions are very strict, no herd immunity is achieved, and infections will then resurge if they are eased too quickly.

Abstract

Despite various levels of preventive measures, in 2020, many countries have suffered severely from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus. Using a model, we show that population heterogeneity can affect disease-induced immunity considerably because the proportion of infected individuals in groups with the highest contact rates is greater than that in groups with low contact rates. We estimate that if R0 = 2.5 in an age-structured community with mixing rates fitted to social activity, then the disease-induced herd immunity level can be ~43%, which is substantially less than the classical herd immunity level of 60% obtained through homogeneous immunization of the population. Our estimates should be interpreted as an illustration of how population heterogeneity affects herd immunity rather than as an exact value or even a best estimate.

Philanthropy—or tax-exempt lobbying?

I pass on this piece by Brad Wible from the Editors' Choice section of the current issue of Science Magazine:

Major corporations appear to fund their charitable foundations in part to cater to politicians who are important to the firm's profitability. Integrating corporate tax returns, lobbying data, and data on U.S. congressional committee assignments, Bertrand et al. show that donations from a given corporate-funded foundation to charities in a particular congressional representative's district, or for which a congressional representative is a board member, ebb and flow according to whether the representative sits on a committee that is of interest to the corporation. The patterns parallel spending by political action committees (PACs). Around 7% of charitable giving (∼$1.2 billion annually) appears to be politically motivated, amounting to about 2.5 times the annual PAC spending and one-third of the total federal lobbying spending—and it is tax exempt and thus subsidized by taxpayers.

Am. Econ. Rev. 110, 2065 (2020).

Our default-mode network contains nine subnetworks serving different cognitive tasks.

Our brains are organized into large networks that can be identified during brain scanning. The default mode network, which has been the subject of many MindBlog posts (try the Blog's search function in the left column), engages a large number of inwardly directed cognitive functions such as mind-wandering, autobiographical and social thinking, memory, and reward. Gordon et al. now do resting-state functional connectivity studies distinguishing nine subnetworks with different specializations:

Significance

The human brain is organized into large networks. One important brain network is the Default network, which enables cognitive functions such as social thinking, memory, and reward. In group-averaged data, this network emerges as a unitary whole, despite its involvement in multiple cognitive functions. Here, we tested whether Default networks found in individual humans, rather than group-average networks, contain organized substructure. In individuals, we consistently found nine subnetworks within the Default network. These subnetworks matched brain activity patterns during cognitive tasks. Some subnetworks resembled brain circuits involved in specific Default functions. Others linked Default network to other large networks. In summary, this study describes a set of brain circuits within the Default networks of individual humans.

Abstract

The human brain is organized into large-scale networks identifiable using resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC). These functional networks correspond with broad cognitive domains; for example, the Default-mode network (DMN) is engaged during internally oriented cognition. However, functional networks may contain hierarchical substructures corresponding with more specific cognitive functions. Here, we used individual-specific precision RSFC to test whether network substructures could be identified in 10 healthy human brains. Across all subjects and networks, individualized network subdivisions were more valid—more internally homogeneous and better matching spatial patterns of task activation—than canonical networks. These measures of validity were maximized at a hierarchical scale that contained ∼83 subnetworks across the brain. At this scale, nine DMN subnetworks exhibited topographical similarity across subjects, suggesting that this approach identifies homologous neurobiological circuits across individuals. Some DMN subnetworks matched known features of brain organization corresponding with cognitive functions. Other subnetworks represented separate streams by which DMN couples with other canonical large-scale networks, including language and control networks. Together, this work provides a detailed organizational framework for studying the DMN in individual humans.

The Neurobiology of Social Distance

Bzdok and Dunbar (open source) do a definitive review of evidence that psychosocial embedding in interpersonal relationship is crucial for survival. Dunbar is well known for his demonstration of the correlation between the size of social groups and the brain size of their members, which places the natural size of groups of humans at ~150 (roughly the size of human hunter gatherer groups whose isolation has permitted them to survive into the modern era. The number of friends and family relationships we can manage at any given time is limited by our cognitive constraints to ~150). Their summary:

From babies to the elderly, psychosocial embedding in interpersonal relationships is crucial for survival.

Insufficient social stimulation affects reasoning and memory performance, hormone homeostasis, brain grey/white matter connectivity and function, as well as resilience to physical and mental disease.

Feelings of loneliness can spread through a social network, causing negatively skewed social perception, escalating morbidity and mortality, and, in older people, precipitating the onset of dementia (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease).

Placebos without deception reduce self-report and neural measures of emotional distress

Interesting work from Guevarra et al. (open source):

Several recent studies suggest that placebos administered without deception (i.e., non-deceptive placebos) can help people manage a variety of highly distressing clinical disorders and nonclinical impairments. However, whether non-deceptive placebos represent genuine psychobiological effects is unknown. Here we address this issue by demonstrating across two experiments that during a highly arousing negative picture viewing task, non-deceptive placebos reduce both a self-report and neural measure of emotional distress, the late positive potential. These results show that non-deceptive placebo effects are not merely a product of response bias. Additionally, they provide insight into the neural time course of non-deceptive placebo effects on emotional distress and the psychological mechanisms that explain how they function.

Here is a description from their text of the EEG signals measured:

The LPP is an electroencephalogram (EEG) derived event-related brain potential (ERP) response that measures millisecond changes in the neural activity involved in emotional processing. The early-time window of the LPP (400–1000 ms) indexes attention allocation34; the sustained time window (1000–6000 ms) indexes conscious appraisals and meaning-making mechanisms involved in emotion processing34,35 and is consistently downregulated by cognitive emotion regulation strategies. Consistent with its role in immediate attentional orienting responses to emotional stimuli and later appraisal processes, neural sources of the LPP include both the amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex41. Thus, the LPP is ideally suited to help examine the neural mechanisms and time course of non-deceptive placebo effects on emotional distress.

And, conditions presented to participants:

In both experiments, we randomly assigned participants to either a non-deceptive placebo group or a control group. Participants in the non-deceptive placebo group read about placebo effects and were then asked to inhale a nasal spray consisting of saline solution. They were told that the nasal spray was a placebo that contained no active ingredients, but would help reduce their negative emotional reactions to viewing distressing images if they believed it would. Participants in the control group read about the neural processes underlying the experience of pain and were also asked to inhale the same saline solution spray; however, they were told that the purpose of the nasal spray was to improve the clarity of the physiological readings we were recording in the study. The articles were matched for narrative structure, emotional content, and length

Personality dimensions are predicted by cell phone usage data

From Stachi et al.:  

Significance

Smartphones are sensor-rich computers that can easily be used to collect extensive records of behaviors, posing serious threats to individuals’ privacy. This study examines the extent to which individuals’ personality dimensions (assessed at broad domain and narrow facet levels) can be predicted from six classes of behavior: 1) communication and social behavior, 2) music consumption, 3) app usage, 4) mobility, 5) overall phone activity, and 6) day- and night-time activity, in a large sample. The cross-validated results show which Big Five personality dimensions are predictable and which specific patterns of behavior are indicative of which dimensions, revealing communication and social behavior as most predictive overall. Our results highlight the benefits and dangers posed by the widespread collection of smartphone data.

Abstract

Smartphones enjoy high adoption rates around the globe. Rarely more than an arm’s length away, these sensor-rich devices can easily be repurposed to collect rich and extensive records of their users’ behaviors (e.g., location, communication, media consumption), posing serious threats to individual privacy. Here we examine the extent to which individuals’ Big Five personality dimensions can be predicted on the basis of six different classes of behavioral information collected via sensor and log data harvested from smartphones. Taking a machine-learning approach, we predict personality at broad domain and narrow facet levels based on behavioral data collected from 624 volunteers over 30 consecutive days (25,347,089 logging events). Our cross-validated results reveal that specific patterns in behaviors in the domains of 1) communication and social behavior, 2) music consumption, 3) app usage, 4) mobility, 5) overall phone activity, and 6) day- and night-time activity are distinctively predictive of the Big Five personality traits. The accuracy of these predictions is similar to that found for predictions based on digital footprints from social media platforms and demonstrates the possibility of obtaining information about individuals’ private traits from behavioral patterns passively collected from their smartphones. Overall, our results point to both the benefits (e.g., in research settings) and dangers (e.g., privacy implications, psychological targeting) presented by the widespread collection and modeling of behavioral data obtained from smartphones.

Conversational primes influence choices - a magic trick example

From Pailhès and Kuhn:

Abstract

Past research demonstrates that unconscious primes can affect people’s decisions. However, these free choice priming paradigms present participants with very few alternatives. Magicians’ forcing techniques provide a powerful tool to investigate how natural implicit primes can unconsciously influence decisions with multiple alternatives. We used video and live performances of the mental priming force. This technique uses subtle nonverbal and verbal conversational primes to influence spectators to choose the three of diamonds. Our results show that a large number of participants chose the target card while reporting feeling free and in control of their choice. Even when they were influenced by the primes, participants typically failed to give the reason for their choice. These results show that naturally embedding primes within a person’s speech and gestures effectively influenced people’s decision making. This raises the possibility that this form of mind control could be used to effectively manipulate other mental processes.

From the text of the article:

Magic tricks provide a valuable tool to investigate psychological processes within a highly natural environment. Most magic principles rely on tightly structured action and language scripts, which allow researchers to investigate psychological processes (e.g., priming, attention, and perception) under controlled, yet realistic conditions. Forcing refers to conjuring techniques that allow magicians to covertly influence a spectator’s choice, and they provide unique tools to investigate how primes unconsciously influence people’s decisions when there is a broad range of alternatives (i.e., 52 playing cards). Many of these forces are commonly used within a magic performance context, but only a few have been empirically investigated. In this paper, we examine a forcing technique that relies on subtle conversational nonverbal and verbal primes: the mental priming force. This force was created by British illusionist Derren Brown, and uses subtle verbal and nonverbal primes to influence the spectator to think about the three of diamonds (see figure).

We recruited 90 participants (62 women) who were randomly allocated to the video or live performance groups. After watching the performance, participants were asked to write down the card they chose ...Overall, 17.8% of the participants chose the three of diamonds, 38.9% chose a three (all suits combined) and 33.3% chose a diamond (all numbers combined). The three of diamonds was the most commonly chosen card, closely followed by the three of hearts. To carry out statistical analyses, we compared these results to a condition in which participants were asked to choose a card after watching a video of the same performer and script without using any specific prime (0 out of 23 named the three of diamonds.)

Our results illustrate that the mental priming force significantly influenced participants’ choice among a large number of alternatives, and it works just as effectively when presented on video compared to when it is performed by a real person. Eighteen percent of our participants chose the target card, and most were oblivious to the force itself. Indeed, even though the force resulted in a ninefold increase chance of participants choosing the three of diamonds, participants reported that their choice was free and that they were in control of it. Investigating the way implicit cues unconsciously influence people’s thoughts provides important insights into the nature of human cognition.

The Paradoxical Role of Social Capital in the Coronavirus Pandemic

I suggest you read an insightful article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker with the title of this post. He begins with an interesting comparison of the King James Version of the Bible having the angels proclaiming "On earth peace, goodwill toward men" versus more militant Bibles that render the Greek phrase as "Peace on earth to men of goodwill" and asks "Is the happy news that of Heaven's dispensation of ever-increasing trust toward all people? Or is it a special favor restricted to those already possessed of good will toward us?" He goes on to examine:

...the relationship between the perniciousness of the plague and the presence or the absence of social capital in the places that suffer it. Are places that have high levels of social trust and strong institutions of civil society doing any better than those that don’t? Does good will toward men help fight the virus, or does it make no difference what the angels sing?

...the empirical results so far seem at least to suggest an intriguing paradox: that places with a great deal of social capital got hit worst by the virus, and then recovered fastest. This is reportedly the case with the secular, social-democratic countries of the European Union, none of them particularly religious, but many of them rich in shared networks of trust.

It’s a paradox of place: people who were not socially distanced at the start of the plague had an easier time learning to social-distance by its end. A striking study in Italy, for instance, found that places with high existing “civic capital” tended to “display greater mobility”—that is, people travelled around more—than places without it. But, “as soon as the threat of the virus became real, communities with high civic capital started to self-restrain and to internalize the risk of propagating the infection through social contacts.” Translated from the academese, people who are used to going out a lot stopped when people they trusted told them that doing so was a good way to get sick. That’s a process familiar to New Yorkers... We had, through nearly all of April, above a twenty-per-cent positive-testing rate; now, by living behind our masks and (mostly) staying out of bars, we have driven the number below one per cent.

In America, we have been undergoing a kind of four-year experiment in what happens to a country when social trust and social capital are not merely badly maintained but actively corroded. In Donald Trump’s government, favor flows from the head of state only to men of good will, i.e., those whom he considers to be on his side. We have been living a four-year exercise in destroying social trust and replacing it with gangster values: loyalty to the capo at all costs, and vengeance on his competitors and enemies taken at his direction.

The results are already clear. The rush to reopen in the so-called red states was motivated partly by commercial impatience but also largely by a kind of irrational rage at the “élitist” social networks that depend on the diffusion of scientific expertise. If instructed that scientific medicine is one more opinion on the spectrum of political grievance, then social distancing and mask-wearing become, like gun control, an imposition on liberty.

The disasters that have left America with far more COVID-19 deaths and a far higher per-capita infection rate than other rich countries have many causes and many lessons, acting, as they do, as an X-ray of our social inequality. But the seemingly unstoppable spread of the illness shows the cost, too, of actively looting our already diminished supply of social capital. Destroy our commonplace civilization, and the larger civilization around it will collapse, too. Where we struggle to create good will toward our fellow-citizens, illness rises and then abates. Where we encourage it only toward our kind, illness increases. It is a simple formula, though, by now, so much a matter of life and death that it would leave the angels, all of them, weeping to watch it.

Working memory capacity predicts individual differences in social-distancing compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic

Xie et al. suggest that non-compliance is associated with limitations in people's mental capacity to simultaneously retain multiple pieces of information in working memory (WM) for rational decision making that leads to social-distancing compliance.:

Significance

Before vaccination and other intervention measures become available, successful containment of an unknown infectious disease critically relies on people’s voluntary compliance with the recommended social-distancing guidelines. This involves a decision process of prioritizing the merits of social distancing over its costs, which may depend on one’s ability to compare multiple pieces of potentially conflicting information regarding social distancing in working memory. Our data support this hypothesis, highlighting the critical role of one’s working memory capacity in social-distancing compliance during the early stage of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. This observation reveals a core cognitive limitation in one’s response to a public health crisis and suggests a possible cognitive venue for the development of strategies to mitigate this challenge.

Abstract

Noncompliance with social distancing during the early stage of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic poses a great challenge to the public health system. These noncompliance behaviors partly reflect people’s concerns for the inherent costs of social distancing while discounting its public health benefits. We propose that this oversight may be associated with the limitation in one’s mental capacity to simultaneously retain multiple pieces of information in working memory (WM) for rational decision making that leads to social-distancing compliance. We tested this hypothesis in 850 United States residents during the first 2 wk following the presidential declaration of national emergency because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that participants’ social-distancing compliance at this initial stage could be predicted by individual differences in WM capacity, partly due to increased awareness of benefits over costs of social distancing among higher WM capacity individuals. Critically, the unique contribution of WM capacity to the individual differences in social-distancing compliance could not be explained by other psychological and socioeconomic factors (e.g., moods, personality, education, and income levels). Furthermore, the critical role of WM capacity in social-distancing compliance can be generalized to the compliance with another set of rules for social interactions, namely the fairness norm, in Western cultures. Collectively, our data reveal contributions of a core cognitive process underlying social-distancing compliance during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting a potential cognitive venue for developing strategies to mitigate a public health crisis.

The coming de facto world government?

David J. Lynch does a fascinating description, which I strongly suggest that you read, of

How a little-known company kept Apple products on the market — and previewed a future less dependent on China...The little-known, Singapore-based company had to improvise when the coronavirus started spreading in China to make sure their operations didn't collapse. Its journey through the pandemic illuminates how globalization could evolve.

The main force for stability in the emerging world order may be the vast global network of buyers and suppliers that continually shifts its loci of operations as competing nation states flail about, imagining that they are running the show, while the distributed intelligence of smaller more local units of function, integrated by cloud-based systems analyzing supply and demand, is actually what matters. Lynch's article describes the remarkable ability of Singapore based Flex Ltd. (160,000 workers, 100 facilities in 30 different countries, annual revenue over $24 billion) to adapt to the sudden shut down of its China operations (50,000 workers) supplying Apple. (Flex has been making Mac Pros in an Austin TX plant since 2013 - the plant Trump claimed to have opened on a Nov. 2019 visit, proving he was bringing back high paying jobs to America.)

...as Flex’s evolution demonstrates, the pandemic did not — and likely will not — end globalization. Instead, it turbocharged trends that already were in motion when the virus first flared, including a diminishing reliance on China...Armed with data and facing a perilous world, more companies recalculated the balance between cost and resilience, between efficiency of production and certainty of delivery, and imagined a less-China-centric economy.

From a Flex command post in Milpitas, Calif., Lynn Torrel, the company’s chief procurement officer, monitors 16,000 suppliers and more than 1 million individual items using a data analytics tool called Pulse. Introduced in 2015, the cloud-based system gobbles data from 88 sources, providing a cohesive view of the multinational’s operation. Arrayed on a wall, 22 video screens provided near-real-time information on every .0005-cent screw and each integrated circuit costing hundreds of dollars...Each weekday on a 5:30 a.m. conference call, Torrel and the logistics team juggles priorities as the virus disrupts their tightly choreographed network.

The subsequent text describes the amazing flexibility and resilience of Flex's response to constantly shifting patterns of travel restrictions and country specific shutdowns and openings.

Conserved aspects of sex-biased brain development in humans and mice

It is a pity that in our current political environment any scientist adding to the abundant evidence of brain differences between the sexes runs the risk of being "cancelled" as an unredeemable sexist by the "woke" intelligentsia. Mostly, however, work of the sort described by Liu et al. remains under or outside of their radar, and is consumed only by fellow scientists and the scientifically literate. I pass on their summary statements, and here is a link to a neat movie showing their data, which is also downloadable as an mp3 file. The caption to the video: "Movie of continuous coronal slices shows overlapping significant sex differences in human GMV (gray matter volume) - with male larger than female shown as cyan, and female greater than male shown as yellow.)

Significance

Sex differences in brain organization are theoretically important for our understanding of sex differences in human cognition and behavior. However, neurobiological sex differences have been easier to characterize in mice than in humans. Recent murine work has revealed a highly reproducible spatial patterning of gray matter volume (GMV) sex differences that is centered on systems for socioreproductive behavior and correlated with regional expression of sex chromosome genes. We integrate neuroimaging and transcriptomic data to establish that these same characteristics also apply to GMV sex differences in humans. These findings establish conserved aspects of sex-biased brain development in humans and mice, and update our understanding of the consistency, candidate causes, and potential functional corollaries of sex-biased brain anatomy in humans.

Abstract

Humans display reproducible sex differences in cognition and behavior, which may partly reflect intrinsic sex differences in regional brain organization. However, the consistency, causes and consequences of sex differences in the human brain are poorly characterized and hotly debated. In contrast, recent studies in mice—a major model organism for studying neurobiological sex differences—have established: 1) highly consistent sex biases in regional gray matter volume (GMV) involving the cortex and classical subcortical foci, 2) a preponderance of regional GMV sex differences in brain circuits for social and reproductive behavior, and 3) a spatial coupling between regional GMV sex biases and brain expression of sex chromosome genes in adulthood. Here, we directly test translatability of rodent findings to humans. First, using two independent structural-neuroimaging datasets (n > 2,000), we find that the spatial map of sex-biased GMV in humans is highly reproducible (r > 0.8 within and across cohorts). Relative GMV is female biased in prefrontal and superior parietal cortices, and male biased in ventral occipitotemporal, and distributed subcortical regions. Second, through systematic comparison with functional neuroimaging meta-analyses, we establish a statistically significant concentration of human GMV sex differences within brain regions that subserve face processing. Finally, by imaging-transcriptomic analyses, we show that GMV sex differences in human adulthood are specifically and significantly coupled to regional expression of sex-chromosome (vs. autosomal) genes and enriched for distinct cell-type signatures. These findings establish conserved aspects of sex-biased brain development in humans and mice, and shed light on the consistency, candidate causes, and potential functional corollaries of sex-biased brain anatomy in humans.

Cats associated with early human farming long before their domestication

As the herd of Abyssinian cats in my has grown, now numbering two 12 year olds and two kittens, I've become more curious about the origins of this breed and of domestic cats in general. It turn out, as shown in recent work by Jrahcarz et al., that cats were predators feeding on rodents in grain stores in Neolithic farming settlements for at least a thousand years before their domestication as house cats.

Most of today’s domesticates began as farm animals, but cat domestication took a different path. Cats became commensal of humans somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, attracted to early farmers’ settlements by rodent pests. Cat remains from Poland dated to 4,200 to 2,300 y BCE are currently the earliest evidence for the migration of the Near Eastern wildcat to Central Europe. Tracking the possible synanthropic origin of that migration, we used stable isotopes to investigate the paleodiet. We found that the ecological balance was already changed due to the expansion of Neolithic farmlands. We conclude that among the Late Neolithic Near Eastern wildcats from Poland were free-living individuals, who preyed on rodent pests and shared ecological niches with native European wildcats.

As regards the origins of my Abyssianians, I have always passed on the story that all of the current registered purebreds derive from a male brought to England by a British solider in the late 19th century. A quick google look, however, shows their origins to be far from clear.