Perpetual revelations

Ross Douthat reviews a book, "The Case for God" by Karen Armstrong, that tries to land somewhere between the militant atheists and the religious fundamentalists. Armstrong makes a case for an approach to religion:

...which emphasizes the pursuit of an unknowable Deity, rather than the quest for theological correctness ... compatible with a liberal, scientific, technologically advanced society. She argues that it’s actually truer to the ancient traditions of Judaism, Islam and (especially) Christianity than is much of what currently passes for “conservative” religion. And the neglect of these traditions, she suggests, is “one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so troublesome today.”

Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas.

These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine. And their religion was a set of skills, rather than a list of unalterable teachings — a “knack,” as the Taoists have it, for navigating the mysteries of human existence.

Taking it lying down...

Many cognitive neuroscience measurements are made on subjects who are supine, as for example in an MRI scanner. Given that body postures can affect behaviors (as when slumped postures lead to more 'helpless' behaviors, or erect posture with chest protruding enhances confident behavior) Harmon-Jones and Peterson compared the brain responses of subjects to anger-inducing insults while in either an upright or reclined position . It is know that left prefrontal cortex is more activated than the right prefrontal cortex during the experience of anger, particularly anger associated with approach motivational inclinations. They found, consistent with an embodied motivation prediction, that a insult delivered to subjects in an upright condition produced greater relative left lateral frontal activity than insults in a reclined condition - which produced about the same relative left lateral frontal activity as the neutral-upright condition.

Rational Irrationality

John Cassidy, in an interesting article in The New Yorker, discusses the inner logic of an economy like ours, in which behavior that is perfectly reasonable on the individual level produces calamity when aggregated in the marketplace. During both rises and falls in the markets, very small perturbations can be magnified by interlocking feedback loops that cause the economy to balloon into either a bubble or a crash.

Calvin Trillin, in a humorous but dead-on piece, has a much more simple model for the meltdown. Wall Street used to be run by the bottom third of the college class, the people who took gut general education courses (such as the Geology course referred to as "Rocks for Jocks"), and they weren't smart enough to invent all these fancy derivative investment vehicles. Then the upper third of the class that used to become teachers, doctors, or lawyers decided they needed to make more money. Mathematicians and physicists poured in to investment houses and invented all the complicated and sophisticated schemes that brought down the system.

Temperature and social proximity

An interesting bit from IJzerman and Semin, who examine the effect of warmth on social proximity:

"Holding warm feelings toward someone" and "giving someone the cold shoulder" indicate different levels of social proximity. In this article, we show effects of temperature that go beyond these metaphors people live by. In three experiments, warmer conditions, compared with colder conditions, induced (a) greater social proximity, (b) use of more concrete language, and (c) a more relational focus. Different temperature conditions were created by either handing participants warm or cold beverages (Experiment 1) or placing them in comfortable warm or cold ambient conditions (Experiments 2 and 3). These studies corroborate recent findings in the field of grounded cognition revealing that concrete experiences ground abstract concepts with which they are coexperienced. Our studies show a systemic interdependence among language, perception, and social proximity: Environmentally induced conditions shape not only language use, but also the perception and construal of social relationships.

Texting, surfing, studying...

I've done a number of posts on the evils of multitasking (for example here and here, or enter multitasking in the search box in the left column of this blog), and thus was struck by a number of salient points in an article by Perri Klass. Here are some clips:

...A recent and much-discussed study showed decreased productivity in adults who were multitasking...you don’t really multitask, you just think you do; the brain can’t process two high-level cognitive things. What you are actually doing...is oscillating between the two...So are teenagers any better at oscillating?...It may be that multitasking is more of a problem for us old brains...parents are digital immigrants...children are digital natives...they really have come of age with these technologies.

The literature looking at media and its impact on attentional skills is just in its infancy...We don’t really know what they pay attention to, what they don’t. We don’t know how it impacts their school performance, whether it impacts their school performance.

One possibility is that performing a task while allowing distractions lengthens the amount of time that can be spent on the task, more than compensating for a decrease in efficiency.

Bright-sided

Patricia Cohen offers a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” which takes on the happiness movement, in particular its more extreme proponents. The book, despite its title, it is not a curmudgeonly rant. Ehrenreich found in 2000 that she had breast cancer. The book chronicles:

...her stay in a world that she became intimately familiar with: the smiley-faced, pink-ribboned, positive-thinking culture that surrounds breast cancer patients...The unrelenting message was “that you had to be cheerful and accepting and that you would not recover unless you were...It’s a clever blame-the-victim sort of thing.”

Then the financial crisis hit. “Wham,” she said. “It was so clear to me that it was connected.” The relentlessly optimistic forecasts about subprime mortgages and endless increases in real estate values were the product of the positive-thinking culture. One of the fundamental tenets of the literature, Ms. Ehrenreich said, is to surround yourself with other positive thinkers and “get rid of negative people...
We’ve been weeding out anybody capable of rational thinking, of realism.”

In “Bright-sided,” she traces the roots of the nation’s blithe sunniness to a reaction against Calvinist gloom and the limits of medical science in the first half of the 19th century. Starting with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, perhaps one of the first American New Age faith healers, she draws a line to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; the psychologist William James; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Norman Vincent Peale, who published “The Power of Positive Thinking” in 1952; and the toothy television minister Joel Osteen, who preaches the gospel of prosperity...To Ms. Ehrenreich, the reliance on one’s personal disposition shifts attention from the larger social, political and economic forces behind poverty, unemployment and poor health care. “It can’t all be fixed by assertiveness training...All that shiny optimism, she said, was “like sitting in a warm bubble bath for too long.”

The illusion of sex

Here is a figure from a neat article (PDF here) by Richard Russell illustrating how facial contrast and cosmetics can alter the perceived sex of an androgynous face.


The Illusion of Sex. The face on the left appears male, while the face on the right appears female. Both images were produced by making slight alterations to the same original image. The eyes and lips were unaltered, and hence equally dark in both images. The remainder of the image was darkened to produce the left image, and lightened to produce the right image. The eyes and lips may appear darker in the right image than in the left image, but are notöit is an example of simultaneous contrast.

The neuropsychology of religion - neural correlates of belief

Sam Harris (the guy who wrote "The End of Faith" and "Letters to a Christian Nation"), along with a group of collaborators, has made fMRI measurements on fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. Religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.

Facial width-to-height ratio predicts aggression

Carré et al. find that observers can make accurate judgments of propensity for aggression in men from faces displaying neutral expressions, even when exposure to the faces is limited to 39 ms. Individual participants reliably judged men with larger facial width to height ratios as more aggressive. Here is their abstract and a figure from the paper showing the width and height determination:

Facial width-to-height ratio is a sexually dimorphic metric that is independent of body size and may have been shaped by sexual selection. We recently showed that this metric is correlated with behavioral aggression in men. In Study 1, observers estimated the propensity for aggression of men photographed displaying neutral facial expressions and for whom a behavioral measure of aggression was obtained. The estimates were correlated strongly with the facial width-to-height ratio of the stimulus faces and with the actual aggression of the men. These results were replicated in Study 2, in which the exposure to each stimulus face was shortened to 39 ms. Participants' estimates of aggression for each stimulus face were highly correlated between Study 2 (39-ms exposure) and Study 1 (2,000-ms exposure). These findings suggest that the facial width-to-height ratio may be a cue used to predict propensity for aggression in others.

Predicting our choice between risky and safe options..

This recent work from Schultz, Dolan and collaborators suggests brain imaging might be able to predict risky versus safe behaviors in a given choice context:

Decision making under risk is central to human behavior. Economic decision theory suggests that value, risk, and risk aversion influence choice behavior. Although previous studies identified neural correlates of decision parameters, the contribution of these correlates to actual choices is unknown. In two different experiments, participants chose between risky and safe options. We identified discrete blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) correlates of value and risk in the ventral striatum and anterior cingulate, respectively. Notably, increasing inferior frontal gyrus activity to low risk and safe options correlated with higher risk aversion. Importantly, the combination of these BOLD responses effectively decoded the behavioral choice. Striatal value and cingulate risk responses increased the probability of a risky choice, whereas inferior frontal gyrus responses showed the inverse relationship. These findings suggest that the BOLD correlates of decision factors are appropriate for an ideal observer to detect behavioral choices. More generally, these biological data contribute to the validity of the theoretical decision parameters for actual decisions under risk.

Personalized genetics and medicine

An article by Pauline C. Ng, Sarah S. Murray, Samuel Levy and J. Craig Venter finds differences in results from two direct to consumer genetics testing companies. Their summary:

* For seven diseases, 50% or less of the predictions of two companies agreed across five individuals
* Companies should communicate high risks better and test for drug response markers
* Community should study markers in all ethnicities and look at behaviour after tests

Also Lahn and Ebenstein argue that the discovery of genetic diversity among groups of people as well as among individuals should be embraced, not feared. Their summary:

* Promoting biological sameness in humans is illogical, even dangerous
* To ignore the possibility of group diversity is to do poor science and poor medicine
* A robust moral position is one that embraces this diversity as among humanity's great assets

Gene therapy restores vision to color-blind monkeys

An Editor's summary in the Oct. 8 Nature describes a remarkable finding, and Shapley discusses the work described in the paper by Mancuso et al. :

It is often assumed that critical periods exist for the development of vision and other neural capabilities and that they end prior to adolescence. For example, it might be expected that gene therapy in adults with congenital vision disorders would be impossible. But experiments in adult spider monkeys who are normally red–green colour blind show that it is possible to add a third photopigment (human opsin) into some of their retinal cells by gene therapy. The monkeys acquire a new dimension of colour vision as a result. Not only does this suggest a possible therapy for a common congenital visual defect in humans (clinical trials are now under way), but also it demonstrates the extreme neuroplasticity of visual processing and points to possible routes by which trichromatic vision evolved.

How nonsense sharpens our intellect

Benedict Carey points to an article in Psychological Science that I scanned past without realizing its interest. Proulx and Heine show that a threat to our sense of coherence or meaning in one area (such as reading an absurd short story by Kafka) enhances our ability to unconsciously detect patterns within letter strings (an artificial grammar task). Encountering incoherence apparently primes our brains to detect patterns they might otherwise miss. The idea is that the brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns. The process is enhanced by a threat to meaning. (It is also important to evaluate the possibility that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance.)

Mummy Recipe Hard to Follow

Another gem from the Random Samples section of the Oct. 2 Science Magazine:

Frank Rühli wants to know just how the Egyptians did it. So he is trying to mummify human legs.

Rühli, a physician and head of the Swiss Mummy Project at the University of Zurich, and his collaborators severed the legs from a female donor body. One, the "control leg," was kept in an oven at 40°C and low humidity to replicate "natural mummification" in the Egyptian desert. The other leg, as described in ancient Egyptian records, was put on a pine board and covered with natron, a blend of four sodium compounds that pulls moisture out of the tissue. The researchers left it at 23°C to see what natron would do in the Swiss environment.

Other researchers have tried mummifying human remains. But the Swiss group is using advanced imaging technology, biopsies, and tests of DNA degradation for moment-by-moment analysis of the mummification process.

So far, the researchers have found that mummification in Zurich takes longer than expected: After 3 months, scans showed that the natron leg still had pockets of humidity, Rühli says. They have also discovered that storing an untreated leg in the heat doesn't work well. The control leg failed to dry out and started to decompose after a week. Rühli plans to repeat the experiment, this time encasing the control leg in hot sand.

Where our brain computes value.

From Chib et al.:

To make economic choices between goods, the brain needs to compute representations of their values. A great deal of research has been performed to determine the neural correlates of value representations in the human brain. However, it is still unknown whether there exists a region of the brain that commonly encodes decision values for different types of goods, or if, in contrast, the values of different types of goods are represented in distinct brain regions. We addressed this question by scanning subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they made real purchasing decisions among different categories of goods (food, nonfood consumables, and monetary gambles). We found activity in a key brain region previously implicated in encoding goal-values: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was correlated with the subjects' value for each category of good. Moreover, we found a single area in vmPFC to be correlated with the subjects' valuations for all categories of goods. Our results provide evidence that the brain encodes a "common currency" that allows for a shared valuation for different categories of goods.

Shrinking the Shrinks

From the Random Samples section of the Oct. 2 Science Magazine (I was not successful in spotting the report mentioned on the APS website):

Many training programs for clinical psychologists in the United States should be scrapped, an organization of psychologists says. In a report to be released this month, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) calls for more scientific rigor in psychotherapy. "Clinical psychology resembles medicine at a point in its history when practitioners were operating in a largely prescientific manner," it says. Therapists' "lack of adequate science training ... leads them to value personal clinical experience over research evidence." The report lambastes the American Psychological Association (APA)—which comprises mainly clinical psychologists—for lax accreditation standards and proposes a new mechanism for certifying Ph.D. training programs.

Psychologist Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University in Atlanta praises the report, saying, "Far too many practitioners are administering unsubstantiated or untested intervention." But he worries that its proposals would freeze out Psy.D. programs, nonresearch degrees begun in the 1970s, which now turn out about half of the nation's clinical psychologists.

Jeffrey Zeig, a clinical psychologist and director of the Milton H. Erikson Foundation in Phoenix, says psychotherapy is much too diverse to be constrained by APS definitions. "There are more than 1,000,000 therapists in the U.S., and only a fraction" have Ph.D.s, says Zeig, who predicts the report "will have as much effect as a breeze has on a leaf."

But report co-author Timothy Baker of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison predicts that it "will ultimately reshape clinical psychology just as the [1910] Flexner Report reshaped medicine," leading to the closure of almost half the nation's medical schools.

The high price of being a gay couple.

My partner and I live in Madison, Wisconsin. The state legislature recently passed a bill granting domestic partnerships a small fraction of the benefits that go with conventional marriage (like being able to visit your ill partner in the hospital, or by default have health care or legal power of attorney if one partner is incapacitated.) This bill is being challenged in court by the same right wing religious nuts who backed the successful drive to add a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I've become acutely aware of some of the financial downside of being a gay couple over the past 20 years of my current partnership, having been in a conventional marriage for 21 years before that. Now some hard numbers on just how unfair the situation is have been generated by Bernard and Lieber in the New York Times. The lifetime penalty for being in a same-sex couple can range between ~$30,000 and ~$200,000, depending on the circumstance.

How our brain's hard wiring is hooked by texting, twitter, email, googling...

As a companion to the previous post on distinguishing 'wanting' and 'liking' I would like to point you to an engaging article in Slate by Emily Yoffe (thanks to my son Jon for pointing it out to me). She discusses the work from researchers like Jaak Panksepp and Kent Berridge (the subjects of several mindblog posts over the past few years) that suggests the biological basis of our addiction to email, google, twitter, texting, etc.

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits "promote states of eagerness and directed purpose," Panksepp writes. It's a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.

Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting "enter" to get our next fix.

Wanting is Berridge's equivalent for Panksepp's seeking system. It is the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain's reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated. This is why the opiate drugs induce a kind of blissful stupor so different from the animating effect of cocaine and amphetamines. Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop. When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. "The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire," Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

"Wanting" what was never "liked"

Work from Berridge and collaborators shows in rat experiments that pathways in the ventral pallidum that fire when a cue to a previously liked stimulus (such as sucrose) is presented - but do not fire with a cue of the previously "disliked" taste of intense salt - can suddenly become activated if the salt cue is encountered in a never-before-experienced state of physiological salt depletion. This means that dynamic recomputation of cue-triggered "wanting" signals can occur in real time at the moment of cue re-encounter by combining a previously learned Pavlovian associations with novel physiological information about a current state of specific appetite.

Long live quest gets respect? The 120 Club.

Nicholas Wade notes a recent meeting on aging at Harvard Medical School (Some of the participants belong to the "120 Club," whose members propose to live until they are 120). His article focuses on work of David Sinclair and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals .

...In mice, sirtuin activators are effective against lung and colon cancer, melanoma, lymphoma, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease...SRT-501, the company’s special formulation of resveratrol, is being tested against two cancers, multiple myeloma and colon cancer that has spread to the liver. A chemical mimic of resveratrol, known as SRT-2104, is in a Phase 2 trial for Type 2 diabetes, and in a Phase 1 trial in elderly patients. (Phase 1 trials test for safety, Phase 2 for efficacy.)...unpublished tests in mice showed that another chemical mimic, SRT-1720, increased both health and lifespan; after two years, twice as many mice taking the drug were alive compared with the undosed animals. Resveratrol itself has not been shown to increase lifespan in normal mice, although it does so in obese mice, laboratory roundworms and flies.