Yet another ESP controversy.

Great outrage (described in the NYTimes article by Benedict Carey) is accompanying the forthcoming publication by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology of a paper (link to PDF of paper is in Carey article) by Daryl J. Bem, who describes experiments over 10 years with ~10,000 students testing their ability to accurately sense random events. The critics maintain that extraordinary claims (conflicting with known science) require extraordinary validation (better than the usual 'less than 1/100 chance of being due to random correlation). Several critiques are being published alongside the Bem article, some presumably taking note  of the issues raised in Jonah Lehrer article that I described in a recent post,"The Truth Wears Off."  The last 50 years has seen multiple instances of seemingly (statistically significant) results on ESP,  drug effects, psychological mechanisms,  disappear over time as the experiments are repeated. (added note: in yesterday's NY Times Carey gives an excellent discussion of the statistics involved, in very simple language.)

Our digital afterlives - Deric's version

The NYTimes Sunday magazine has an interesting article by Rob Walker, raising issues that had been in my penumbra of awareness but that I've now felt forced to address directly. What happens to all the stuff you have put on the internet (photos, blogs, etc.) when you die? You should read the article.

I'll give you my own version of the issues it raises: Like many of us, I entered the web world via an early micro-computer (Apple II in my case, which appeared before the early IBM PC) with a slow phone modem. I got into chat rooms on AOL (using a pseudonym, then used that pseudonym for my first website on geocities.com, which was purchased by Yahoo, and the no-longer-relevant pseudonym was the account name used when I purchased the dericbownds.net domain name that now contain mindblog.dericbownds.net, which is simply a pointer used by google.com (i.e., blogspot.com), which actually hosts MindBlog. The images for the blog are stored, however, not by google, but on my own yahoo-hosted website at dericbownds.net/uploaded_images. Beyond this, I have data on several photo sites, five email addresses, logins and memberships and data on 10-20 social web sites, 61 piano performances on YouTube (with more to come), contact and calendar data on google...... What a mess!

So, what happens when I get run over by a truck tomorrow? I've recently (securely..not by email) passed on to my son and daughter a document titled Hit_By_Bus that hopefully contains enough information for them to sort through this mess and delete most of the material out there (hopefully condensing to a posthumus residue that covers family, university career, dericbownds.net, mindblog, and the piano performances). I don't envy their job, but I'm too lazy to do it myself.

So..what have you done? (Only about a third of Americans even have a will.)

Gay or Straight - same brain regions activated by love partner.

Here is an interesting bit from Semir Zeki, a well know vision scientist who has also studies brain correlates of artistic appreciation and brain systems and networks that are critical for the sentiment of romantic love. The article contains useful references. The abstract:

We pursued our functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of the neural correlates of romantic love in 24 subjects, half of whom were female (6 heterosexual and 6 homosexual) and half male (6 heterosexual and 6 homosexual). We compared the pattern of activity produced in their brains when they viewed the faces of their loved partners with that produced when they viewed the faces of friends of the same sex to whom they were romantically indifferent. The pattern of activation and de-activation was very similar in the brains of males and females, and heterosexuals and homosexuals. We could therefore detect no difference in activation patterns between these groups.

"Not tonight, dear" chemical signal in women's tears.

Anytime I see an article on article on evidence for a new human pheromone (a chemical signal that we secrete and sense - from arm pits, sweat, crotch, whatever) I pass it it on. Below is the abstract from  Gelstein et al, and here is a brief account from the NYTimes.

Emotional tearing is a poorly understood behavior that is considered uniquely human. In mice, tears serve as a chemosignal. We therefore hypothesized that human tears may similarly serve a chemosignaling function. We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears obtained from women donors, induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women's tears selectively reduced activity in brain-substrates of sexual arousal in men.

People believe they have more free will than others

Interesting observations from Pronin and Kuglera:

Four experiments identify a tendency for people to believe that their own lives are more guided by the tenets of free will than are the lives of their peers. These tenets involve the a priori unpredictability of personal action, the presence of multiple possible paths in a person's future, and the causal power of one's personal desires and intentions in guiding one's actions. In experiment 1, participants viewed their own pasts and futures as less predictable a priori than those of their peers. In experiments 2 and 3, participants thought there were more possible paths (whether good or bad) in their own futures than their peers’ futures. In experiment 4, participants viewed their own future behavior, compared with that of their peers, as uniquely driven by intentions and desires (rather than personality, random features of the situation, or history)

...Philosophers have long speculated that the introspective feeling of free will provides the force behind people's belief in it. By placing heavy weight on our own introspections (but not those of others), we may find ourselves uniquely convinced of our own free will. In some ways, this conviction is likely to be liberating—endowing us with a greater feeling of power in our lives.

Is the face alive? - the eyes tell us.

Looser and Wheatley do a nice study, reported in Psychological Science, on how we determine whether a face is dead or alive. A review of the work in Science Now has some nice videos of morphing faces along a gradient of animacy. The authors paired doll faces with a similar-looking human faces and used morphing software to blend the two, ending up with a spectrum of pictures that ranged from fully human to part human-part doll to purely doll. Volunteers consistently looked mainly at the eyes, and selected as the dividing point those faces that were about two-thirds along the continuum, closer to the human end. They also attributed the capability of thought to those faces.

The social sense - Theory of mind in 7-month old human infants.

A core component of our social cognition is the capacity to formulate a representation of what someone else believes to be true, even if that belief is false, and it has generally been accepted that this ability (theory of mind, or ToM) does not appear until children are 3-4 years old. Kovács et al. have found a behavioral paradigm, that when applied to both adults and infants, suggests that they form representations of others' beliefs in the same way. They developed a method for investigating ToM mechanisms that, in contrast to variants of the standard false belief task, is implicit, makes no reference to others’ beliefs, and requires no behavioral predictions of what agents will do on the basis of their beliefs. They used an object detection task to investigate two questions. First, are belief computations automatically triggered by the mere presence of an agent in adults and in infants as young as 7 months, even when the beliefs are entirely irrelevant to the task participants have to perform? Second, are beliefs about others’ beliefs stored in a format sufficiently similar to our own representations about the environment that both types of representations can affect our behavior?

Human social interactions crucially depend on the ability to represent other agents’ beliefs even when these contradict our own beliefs, leading to the potentially complex problem of simultaneously holding two conflicting representations in mind. Here, we show that adults and 7-month-olds automatically encode others’ beliefs, and that, surprisingly, others’ beliefs have similar effects as the participants’ own beliefs. In a visual object detection task, participants’ beliefs and the beliefs of an agent (whose beliefs were irrelevant to performing the task) both modulated adults’ reaction times and infants’ looking times. Moreover, the agent’s beliefs influenced participants’ behavior even after the agent had left the scene, suggesting that participants computed the agent’s beliefs online and sustained them, possibly for future predictions about the agent’s behavior. Hence, the mere presence of an agent automatically triggers powerful processes of belief computation that may be part of a “social sense” crucial to human societies.

Brain correlates of choice-induced preference change.

In an interesting article, Izuma et al. call classical cognitive dissonance theory into question. Their observations suggest that our preference for our choice between two equally desirable items is established by the act of choosing, not by a subsequent reduction of our preference for one of them. In other words, the mere act of rejecting favorite goods actually reduces preferences for them. Their abstract gives a clear summary of their observations:

According to many modern economic theories, actions simply reflect an individual's preferences, whereas a psychological phenomenon called “cognitive dissonance” claims that actions can also create preference. Cognitive dissonance theory states that after making a difficult choice between two equally preferred items, the act of rejecting a favorite item induces an uncomfortable feeling (cognitive dissonance), which in turn motivates individuals to change their preferences to match their prior decision (i.e., reducing preference for rejected items). Recently, however, Chen and Risen [Chen K, Risen J (2010) J Pers Soc Psychol 99:573–594] pointed out a serious methodological problem, which casts a doubt on the very existence of this choice-induced preference change as studied over the past 50 y. Here, using a proper control condition and two measures of preferences (self-report and brain activity), we found that the mere act of making a choice can change self-report preference as well as its neural representation (i.e., striatum activity), thus providing strong evidence for choice-induced preference change. Furthermore, our data indicate that the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex tracked the degree of cognitive dissonance on a trial-by-trial basis. Our findings provide important insights into the neural basis of how actions can alter an individual's preferences.

Influence of language on perception

Landau et al. show that hearing recorded sentences describing faces (versus places) enhances a subsequent electrophysiological marker of brain responses to pictures of faces, while seeing pictures of faces diminishes the subsequent responses. This shows that language influences early stages of visual processing.

We examined the effect of linguistic comprehension on early perceptual encoding in a series of electrophysiological and behavioral studies on humans. Using the fact that pictures of faces elicit a robust and reliable evoked response that peaks at ~170 ms after stimulus onset (N170), we measured the N170 to faces that were preceded by primes that referred to either faces or scenes. When the primes were auditory sentences, the magnitude of the N170 was larger when the face stimuli were preceded by sentences describing faces compared to sentences describing scenes. In contrast, when the primes were visual, the N170 was smaller after visual primes of faces compared to visual primes of scenes. Similar opposing effects of linguistic and visual primes were also observed in a reaction time experiment in which participants judged the gender of faces. These results provide novel evidence of the influence of language on early perceptual processes and suggest a surprising mechanistic description of this interaction: linguistic primes produce content-specific interference on subsequent visual processing. This interference may be a consequence of the natural statistics of language and vision given that linguistic content is generally uncorrelated with the contents of perception.

The wolfpack effect.

An interesting piece of work from Gao et al. showing how the perception of animacy influences our interactive behavior.

Imagine a pack of predators stalking their prey. The predators may not always move directly toward their target (e.g., when circling around it), but they may be consistently facing toward it. The human visual system appears to be extremely sensitive to such situations, even in displays involving simple shapes. We demonstrate this by introducing the wolfpack effect, which is found when several randomly moving, oriented shapes (darts, or discs with “eyes”) consistently point toward a moving disc. Despite the randomness of the shapes’ movement, they seem to interact with the disc—as if they are collectively pursuing it. This impairs performance in interactive tasks (including detection of actual pursuit), and observers selectively avoid such shapes when moving a disc through the display themselves. These and other results reveal that the wolfpack effect is a novel “social” cue to perceived animacy. And, whereas previous work has focused on the causes of perceived animacy, these results demonstrate its effects, showing how it irresistibly and implicitly shapes visual performance and interactive behavior.

Sample display (a) and manipulations (b–e) from the first experiment. The task was to detect whether one shape (the wolf) was chasing another (the sheep). Arrows indicate motion and were not present in the displays. In the wolfpack condition (a, b), all darts stayed oriented toward the task-irrelevant green square, regardless of their motion directions. This condition generated the wolfpack effect. In the perpendicular condition (c), each dart was always oriented orthogonally to the square. In the match condition (d), each dart was always oriented in the direction in which it was moving at that moment. And in the disc condition (e), the objects had no visible orientation.

A contrarian view of energy prospects.

John Tierney describes a wager he made in 2005 with Matthew Simmons, who bet $5,000 that the price of oil, then about $65 a barrel, would more than triple in the next five years, so that the average price of oil over the course of 2010 would be at least $200 a barrel in 2005 dollars....The average for 2010 has been just under $80, which is the equivalent of about $71 in 2005 dollars — a little higher than the $65 at the time of the bet, but far below the $200 threshold set by Mr. Simmons. (Tierney's mentor was the economist Julian L. Simon, a leader of the Cornucopians, optimists who believed there would always be abundant supplies of energy and other resources. Simon won a bet in the 1980s with Paul Ehrlich and two natural resources experts over the prices of five metals.) What happened to the grim predictions of declining oil reserves and rising prices? Perhaps there has been a temporary respite (which unfortunately will not help alternative energy efforts):

Giant new oil fields have been discovered off the coasts of Africa and Brazil. The new oil sands projects in Canada now supply more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia does. Oil production in the United States increased last year, and the Department of Energy projects further increases over the next two decades...The really good news is the discovery of vast quantities of natural gas. It’s now selling for less than half of what it was five years ago. There’s so much available that the Energy Department is predicting low prices for gas and electricity for the next quarter-century. Lobbyists for wind farms, once again, have been telling Washington that the “sustainable energy” industry can’t sustain itself without further subsidies...As gas replaces dirtier fossil fuels, the rise in greenhouse gas emissions will be tempered, according to the Department of Energy. It projects that no new coal power plants will be built, and that the level of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States will remain below the rate of 2005 for the next 15 years even if no new restrictions are imposed.

Maybe something unexpected will change these happy trends, but for now I’d say that Julian Simon’s advice remains as good as ever. You can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can usually make money betting against them.

New brain circuits form online during rapid learning

Shtyrov et. al. show that after just 14 minutes of learning exposure to a new word, presentations of this word cause increased responses in the language cortex, reflecting rapid mapping of new word forms onto neural representations.

Humans are unique in developing large lexicons as their communication tool. To achieve this, they are able to learn new words rapidly. However, neural bases of this rapid learning, which may be an expression of a more general cognitive mechanism, are not yet understood. To address this, we exposed our subjects to familiar words and novel spoken stimuli in a short passive perceptual learning session and compared automatic brain responses to these items throughout the learning exposure. Initially, we found enhanced activity for known words, indexing the ignition of their underlying memory traces. However, just after 14 min of learning exposure, the novel items exhibited a significant increase in response magnitude matching in size with that to real words. This activation increase, as we would like to propose, reflects rapid mapping of new word forms onto neural representations. Similar to familiar words, the neural activity subserving rapid learning of new word forms was generated in the left-perisylvian language cortex, especially anterior superior-temporal areas. This first report of a neural correlate of rapid learning suggests that our brain may effectively form new neuronal circuits online as it gets exposed to novel patterns in the sensory input. Understanding such fast learning is key to the neurobiological explanation of the human language faculty and learning mechanisms in general.

Paying the price for a longer life.

A brief article by Bakalar notes a study by Crimmins et al.

...people live longer not because they are less likely to get sick, but because they survive longer with disease....As a result, a 20-year-old man today can expect to live about a year longer than a 20-year-old in 1998, but will spend 1.2 years more with a disease, and 2 more years unable to function normally.

Placebo pills work without deception

Kaptchuk et al. show that placebos administered without deception may be an effective treatment for irritable bowel syndrome. From Bakalar's summary:

They explained to all that a placebo was an inert substance, like a sugar pill, that had been found to “produce significant improvement in I.B.S. symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes.” The patients, all treated with the same attention, warmth and empathy by the researchers, were then randomly assigned to get the pill or not...At the end of three weeks, they tested all the patients with questionnaires assessing the level of their pain and other symptoms. The patients given the sugar pill — in a bottle clearly marked “placebo” — reported significantly better pain relief and greater reduction in the severity of other symptoms than those who got no pill.

A weakness of the study is that because the outcome measure is so subjective, placebo patients may have exaggerated their improvement to please the researchers.

English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently.

I pass on this abstract from Boroditsky et al., and a few clips from the article:

Time is a fundamental domain of experience. In this paper we ask whether aspects of language and culture affect how people think about this domain. Specifically, we consider whether English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently. We review all of the available evidence both for and against this hypothesis, and report new data that further support and refine it. The results demonstrate that English and Mandarin speakers do think about time differently. As predicted by patterns in language, Mandarin speakers are more likely than English speakers to think about time vertically (with earlier time-points above and later time-points below).

From their text:

Both English and Mandarin use horizontal front/back spatial terms to talk about time. In English, we can look forward to the good times ahead, or think back to travails past and be glad they are behind us. In Mandarin, front/back spatial metaphors for time are also common. For example,  Mandarin speakers use the spatial morphemes qián (‘‘front”) and hòu (‘‘back”) to talk about time...Unlike English speakers, Mandarin speakers also systematically and frequently use vertical metaphors. The spatial morphemes shàng (‘‘up”) and xià (‘‘down”) are used to talk about the order of events, weeks, months, semesters, and more. Earlier events are said to be shàng or ‘‘up”, and later events are said to be xià or ‘‘down”.  For example, “shàng ge yuè” is last (or previous) month, and “xià ge yuè” is next (or following) month...This difference between the two languages offers the prediction that Mandarin speakers would be more likely to conceive of time vertically than would English speakers.

In the experimental paradigm, participants made temporal judgments following horizontal or vertical spatial primes. On each trial, participants first answered several questions about the spatial relationship between two objects (arranged either horizontally or vertically on a computer screen), and then answered a question about time (e.g., March comes earlier than April; TRUE or FALSE). Participants’ response times to the target question about time following either the horizontal or vertical primes were the measure of interest.

The basic finding was that both groups organize time on the left-to-right axis with earlier events on the left, a pattern consistent with writing direction. But, Mandarin speakers also show evidence of vertical representations of time, with earlier events represented further up. English speakers showed no evidence of such a representation.

You've got to have (150) friends...

The post title is the title of a brief essay by Robin Dunbar, who is best known for his work documenting, for a large number of animal species,  the relationship between brain size and social group size (they get larger together.)   His curve predicts that the optimal group size for humans is about 150.  That is what is observed over a large number of hunter-gatherer and aboriginal human species across the world,  and (his article contends) is an evolved biological/psychological limit that operates even in a world of facebook that permits thousands of "friends." Some clips:

The developers at Facebook overlooked one of the crucial components in the complicated business of how we create relationships: our minds...Put simply, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited...Indeed, no matter what Facebook allows us to do, I have found that most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships, online and off — what has become known as Dunbar’s number. Yes, you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life — a fact incorporated into the new social networking site Path, which limits the number of friends you can have to 50.

Until relatively recently, almost everyone on earth lived in small, rural, densely interconnected communities, where our 150 friends all knew one another...the social and economic mobility of the past century has worn away at that interconnectedness. As we move around the country and across continents, we collect disparate pockets of friends, so that our list of 150 consists of a half-dozen subsets of people who barely know of one another’s existence...as we move around, though, we can lose touch with even our closest friends. Emotional closeness declines by around 15 percent a year in the absence of face-to-face contact, so that in five years someone can go from being an intimate acquaintance to the most distant outer layer of your 150 friends.

Facebook and other social networking sites allow us to keep up with friendships that would otherwise rapidly wither away. And they do something else that’s probably more important, if much less obvious: they allow us to reintegrate our networks so that, rather than having several disconnected subsets of friends, we can rebuild, albeit virtually, the kind of old rural communities where everyone knew everyone else. Welcome to the electronic village.

The science of cities.

I've been meaning to point out an interesting article by Jonah Lehrer that focuses on the work of 70-year old physicist Geoffrey West, who decided to turn his attention to discerning whether the cities that containing an ever increasing fraction of the world's population (82% of the people in the U.S. live in cities) follow discernible patterns and laws. Some edited clips:

Knowing the population of a metropolitan area in a given country allows one to estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same...the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent...This straightforward observation has some surprising implications. It suggests, for instance, that modern cities are the real centers of sustainability. According to the data, people who live in densely populated places require less heat in the winter and need fewer miles of asphalt per capita.

People, however, do not go to cities because they are more efficient, they go because their are more social and commercial interactions. West and colleagues were able to quantify Jane Jacob's points in her famous book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”

...whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits, increases by approximately 15 percent per capita (It also experiences a 15 percent per capita increase in violent crimes, traffic and AIDS cases). It doesn’t matter how big the city is; the law remains the same...everything that’s related to the social network goes up by the same percentage.

Listening to your heart

Dunn et al. try to evaluate how sensing feedback from the body influences thought and feeling. Some edited clips of background, and their results:

Some metaphorical expressions that are used daily, such as “brokenhearted” or “gut feelings,” reflect the common belief that feelings and cognitions are partly grounded in bodily responses. This idea is reflected in early philosophical writings about embodiment (e.g., Descartes, 1649/1989) and was introduced to experimental psychology by William James (1884), who asserted that perception of changes in the body “as they occur is the emotion” (pp. 189–190). Since then, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which feelings and cognitions are in fact embodied. Much of this discussion has focused on emotion experience and decision making. Schachter and Singer modified Jamesian theory to argue that emotion experience is a product of the cognitive appraisal of bodily arousal. The somatic marker hypothesis of Damasio proposes that emotional biasing signals emerging from the body influence intuitive decision making. These models remain controversial, and critics argue that bodily responses occur relatively late in the information-processing chain and are therefore best viewed as a consequence, rather than the cause, of cognitive-affective activity.

...A central but untested prediction of many of these proposals is that how well individuals can perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) determines the strength of the relationship between bodily reactions and cognitive-affective processing. In a first study we demonstrated that the more accurately participants could track their heartbeat, the stronger the observed link between their heart rate reactions and their subjective arousal (but not valence) ratings of emotional images. (In other words, the more strongly these autonomic changes are felt, the more they are associated with arousal experience.) These results offer strong support for Jamesian bodily feedback theories.

In a second study, we found that increasing interoception ability either helped or hindered adaptive intuitive decision making, depending on whether the anticipatory bodily signals generated favored advantageous or disadvantageous choices. These findings identify both the generation and the perception of bodily responses as pivotal sources of variability in emotion experience and intuition, and offer strong supporting evidence for bodily feedback theories, suggesting that cognitive-affective processing does in significant part relate to “following the heart.” Our findings agree with those of other studies showing that an absence of emotion following frontal head injury can in some circumstances lead to superior decision making and with claims that elevated interoceptive awareness may maintain conditions such as anxiety.

Deric's MindBlog for smartphones

I use Google's Blogger to publish MindBlog, and they have just added a nice new tweak.

We realize that more and more users are accessing the web on smartphones, and we want to make sure that blogs still look nice when viewed on these smaller screens. We’ve put a lot of work into creating a mobile version of BlogSpot, which will automatically detect if a blog is accessed on a smartphone and then display a mobile-optimized version.

I have enabled this feature, so now if you go to mindblog.dericbownds.net using your iPhone or other smartphone,  you see this new format. 

The dark side of inflammation

Couzin-Frankel does an interesting piece in the News section of the Dec. 17 issue of Science, consonant with my opinion that inflammatory processes are one of the main issues in aging. The abstract:

Not long ago, inflammation had a clear role: It was a sidekick to the body's healers, briefly setting in as immune cells rebuilt tissue damaged by trauma or infection. Today, that's an afterthought. Inflammation has hit the big time. Over the past decade, it has become widely accepted that inflammation is a driving force behind chronic diseases that will kill nearly all of us. Cancer. Diabetes and obesity. Alzheimer's disease. Atherosclerosis. Here, inflammation wears a grim mask, shedding its redeeming features and making sick people sicker.

A growing body of evidence suggests that C-reactive protein (CRP), a molecular marker for inflammation, may be as crucial as cholesterol in assessing risk of heart attack. Macrophages, the white blood cells that are a hallmark of inflammation, appear around fatty plaques that build up in the arteries in atherosclerosis, infiltrate fat tissue in obesity, surround cancer cells to stimulate circulation and coax them along, help to kill neurons in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and promote two components of type 2 diabetes: insulin resistance and the death of pancreatic beta cells that produce insulin. Anti-inflammatory drugs (that suppresses action of proinflammatory cytokines released by immune cells)  have been shown in several cases to retard disease progression.