On Solitude.

Reading a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece by Susan Cain ("The Rise of the New Groupthink") transported me back over 20 years to what I then experienced as a transformative reading of British Psychotherapist Anthony Storr's book "Solitude, a return to the self." It's reading provided me with a my needed validation of my own solitary and introspective nature (preferring to do my work and thinking my myself, even while serving and respecting social groups, such as the laboratory I ran). Storr's book was a reaction against the popular psychotherapies of the 1980s which emphasized intimate interpersonal relationships as the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. He made a strong case that the life of an average person, not just a familiar list of brilliant scholars and artists such as Beethoven, Kant, Newton, etc., could be greatly enriched more time spent alone.

In a similar vein Cain writes against the current assumption that creativity, particularly in business, requires the collaboration of group of people addressing the problem at hand. Her central illustration describes the origins of the Apple computer, It's creation required the support of a creative group of engineers and Steve Jobs' business sense, but the creative kernel of work and insight that put together the core of the actual hardware and code that ran it was done by Wozniak's solitary effort. Cain notes:

...brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity...People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure... fear of rejection actives the brain's amygdala.

The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.

...most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy....To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved partly because HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every day at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and people could socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions was how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the ability to share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly dressed colleagues — who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.

Chill-out architecture - The use of tree metaphors

I gravitate towards forests and trees (typing right now at a desk that looks out at a large tree canopy on the opposite riverbank) because the vision of green trees under a blue sky is vastly more calming that having to look at the more brown and red tints of modern city structures. (My current Fort Lauderdale location is an extended strip mall only occasionally small bits of nature to intrude). Old pine forests give me the same sheltered feeling as the great cathedrals of Europe.

Thus I am very sympathetic to efforts to argue for a evolutionary or biological basis for these feelings, which appear to be common to most human cultures. E.O. Wilson, the father of "Sociobiology" and evolutionary psychology, has written a book "Biophilia" that essentially argues that our preference for natural scenes is innate, the product of a psychology that evolved in paleolithic times. I would like this to be a correct view, but alas, it is, like most of evolutionary psychology, more like Rudyard Kipling's "Just so Stories" than hard science.

It is one thing to simply note trees as a metaphor for shelter, and thus to find it natural that architectural designs (such as the Metropol Parasol in Seville shown in the picture) that incorporate the tree metaphor would be pleasing to us. It is quite another hang this all on the supposed cognitive neuroscience of embodied cognition, as Sarah Williams Goldhagen, the architecture critic for The New Republic, has done in a rather confused piece. A recent post by Voytek, and the discussion following, point out a number of reservations and relevant points.

Living large - how the powerful overestimate.

From Duguid and Goncalo, their abstract, slightly edited:

In three experiments, we tested the prediction that individuals’ experience of power influences their perceptions of their own height. In the first experiment high power, relative to low power, was associated with smaller estimates of a pole’s height relative to the self, in a second experiment with larger estimates of one’s own height, and in a third experiment with choice of a taller avatar to represent the self in a second-life game . These results emerged regardless of whether power was experientially primed (In the first and third experiments) or manipulated through assigned roles (in the second experiment). Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are. The discussion considers the implications for existing and future research on the physical experience of power.

My pushing back against our diffusion into “the cloud”

My son visits over the new year's holiday every year, which gives me the chance to have a "techie" conference with him to see what I've been missing. One of the web applications he mentioned lead me to Ghostery, a web app that installs on your web browser with a cute little pac-man like ghost that shows you who is tracking your web movements and what cookies have been put on your browser (I was rather taken aback to see that I'm tracked by 759 'bugs' and have 412 cookies). The Ghostery App allows you to inactivate them individually or as a group. Even though most of the monitoring of our movements on the web is supposedly for benign marketing purposes, I'm more than happy to turn it all off.

A storm of controversy has risen over Google recent effort to conflate supposedly neutral web searches with its Google Plus social network, so that a search for information on some idea or item might now yield results that include posts, photos, profiles and conversations from Google Plus that are public or were shared privately with the person searching. I go to google for Google for links to expert information, and don't want my search results to be cluttered with friends’ postings. Since I use google for practically everything I do on the web (this blog, mail, calendar, contacts, google+, google voice, etc.), this cross linking of my search results and my google+ account is in fact happening. Fortunately, you can turn off this google+ feature by going to the gear-shaped options icon at the top right of google search results, selecting "Search settings," scrolling down till you see "Personal results" and tick the box next to "Do not use personal results."

Remembering a rosy future.

Here is a fascinating tidbit from Dan Schacter's laboratory. When we imagine events in the future, our subsequent recall of negative simulations fades more rapidly than our recall of positive ones.:

Mental simulations of future experiences are often concerned with emotionally arousing events. Although it is widely believed that mental simulations enhance future behavior, virtually nothing is known about how memory for these simulations changes over time or whether simulations of emotional experiences are especially well remembered. We used a novel paradigm that combined recently developed methods for generating simulations of future events and well-established procedures for testing memory to examine the retention of positive, negative, and neutral simulations over delays of 10 min and 1 day. We found that at the longer delay, details associated with negative simulations were more difficult to remember than details associated with positive or neutral simulations. We suggest that these effects reflect the influence of the fading-affect bias, whereby negative reactions fade more quickly than positive reactions, and that this influence results in a tendency to remember a rosy simulated future. We discuss implications of our findings for individuals with affective disorders, such as depression and anxiety.

(Schacter, in the Harvard Psychology department, is a prolific memory researcher, and is author of such popular books as "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers." as well as coauthor, along with Gilbert and Wegner, of a really excellent introductory college Psychology text.)

Our bias against creativity

In principle we are all for creativity, but, when faced with the prospect of actually altering our behavior or opinions we falter. Mueller et al suggest that this is a covert, largely unconscious process regulated by how uncertain we feel. Their results show that regardless of the degree to which people are open minded, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty (either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty or they feel uncertain generally), they may experience more negative associations with creativity, which results in lower evaluations of a creative idea. Their findings imply an irony. Other research has shown that uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas, yet these findings reveal that uncertainty also makes people less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when they need it most. Here is the abstract.:

People often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. To explain this paradox, we propose that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt and that is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty. In two experiments, we manipulated uncertainty using different methods, including an uncertainty-reduction prime. The results of both experiments demonstrated the existence of a negative bias against creativity (relative to practicality) when participants experienced uncertainty. Furthermore, this bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea. These results reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face as they attempt to gain acceptance for their novel ideas.

IQ scores are malleable.

Brinch and Galloway do a rather clean demonstration that contests the common notion that education has little effect on IQ. Here is the abstract and one figure from the paper.:

Although some scholars maintain that education has little effect on intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, others claim that IQ scores are indeed malleable, primarily through intervention in early childhood. The causal effect of education on IQ at later ages is often difficult to uncover because analyses based on observational data are plagued by problems of reverse causation and self-selection into further education. We exploit a reform that increased compulsory schooling from 7 to 9 y in Norway in the 1960s to estimate the effect of education on IQ. We find that this schooling reform, which primarily affected education in the middle teenage years, had a substantial effect on IQ scores measured at the age of 19 y.

Average IQ and education by time to reform.

BioDigitalHuman - You've got to check out this site!

I've just spent the last two hours marveling at the incredibly elegant 3-D human anatomy website developed by BioDigital Systems (pointed to by Natashe Singer's article). (I'm finding the 3-D graphics work on either Firefox or Chrome, but not both, depending of which of my MacBook Pro laptops I'm using.  Go figure.  I use Apple computers, so can't comment on Microsoft Explorer.) You can view gross to detailed levels of skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, digestive, etc., systems. A click on a structure brings up a detailed description along with relevant clinical issues. I focused first on the brain (finding it helps if you first toggle off viewing the skeleton system skull that covers it. Duh!) You can zoom in and out, performing 3-D rotations to see precisely where structures are. Asking for smaller internal structure like the pituitary, or left or right amygdala, takes you to their internal location, and you can zoom in and out to appreciate how to get there. The transitions from external to internal brain structures are crude and jerky at this point, and I hope the developers will be adding more fine structure and smoother transitions during zooming. (It will take a massive amount of work to do this.)

I moved next to the muscular system, particularly around the knee joints (whose malfunctions in my case over the past year have convinced me I may no longer a teenager, in fact might be "old"). I found a more clear view of the muscles and their insertions that might underlie the pain than I've been able to get from several doctor's appointments.

Happy hunting!

Classic versus modern violins: beauty in the eye of the beholder?

It is a truism among musicians that no modern violin can, or ever will, approach the perfection of the instruments crafted by Renaissance violin makers such as Stradivari or Guarneri del Gesù in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Nichlas Wade describes an interesting test published in PNAS that aims to determine if this is in fact the case. Violinists attending an international competition were asked to wear goggles (so they could not identify the instruments they were playing) and play three classic (a Guarneri and two Stradivari instruments) and three high quality modern violins. (It has been as pastime of physicists for years to analyze the sound qualities of old violins and devise construction techniques that could reproduce them in modern instruments.)

...participants in Dr. Fritz’s test could not reliably distinguish the old instruments from modern violins. Only 8 of the 21 subjects chose an old violin as the one they’d like to take home. In the old-to-new comparison, a Stradivarius came in last and a new violin as the most preferred.

The results are clear, even though there was grumbling from other players that the test was performed in a hotel room rather than a concert hall, so projection qualities of the instruments might not have been appreciated.

This reminds me of the numerous blind taste tests involving hundreds of people have shown no correlation between the price of wines costing from $1.50 to $150 and their reported taste. In fact, I've done a posting on the neural correlates of this effect (see also this related posting).

Are the Humanities becoming the “Animal Sciences”

A theme of my "Biology of Mind" course at the University of Wisconsin and the book of that title that I generated from my lecture notes was that our understanding of almost any aspect of our culture and literature could be enhanced by knowledge of its biological underpinnings. As more or and more of the cognitive faculties once assumed to be unique to humans are found in animals (aspects of math, language, tool use, the roots of morality) the citadel of the Humanities has increasingly taken note and an
article by James Gorman points to the consequences of this: a array of courses that bridge animal studies and human animal interactions.

This spring, freshmen at Harvard can take “Human, Animals and Cyborgs.” Last year Dartmouth offered “Animals and Women in Western Literature: Nags, Bitches and Shrews.” New York University offers “Animals, People and Those in Between.”

The existence of an emerging scholarly community is reflected by the recent formation of the Animals and Society Institute, which lists more than 100 college level courses that fit under the broad banner of animal studies. Previously ignored ethical issues in the treatment of animals are being scrutinized. The human-animal divide is being eroded as humans increasingly realize they too are animals, and subject to the same natural forces. Any cultural trend that injects just a bit more humility into us humans has to be a good thing.

Structural changes in adult brains caused by acquiring knowledge

A number of reports have appeared over the past 20 years suggesting that the hippocampus region of the brain involved in place memory is larger than normal in London Taxi drivers (who must pass a memory test of London streets to become licensed taxi drivers). Woollett and Maguire have now examined this more carefully. Their summaries:

-Trainee taxi drivers in London spend 3–4 years learning the city's layout
-We assessed the brain and memory of trainees before and after this long training
-Those who qualified experienced increased gray matter in posterior hippocampus
-Successful qualification was also associated with changes in memory profile

The last decade has seen a burgeoning of reports associating brain structure with specific skills and traits. Although these cross-sectional studies are informative, cause and effect are impossible to establish without longitudinal investigation of the same individuals before and after an intervention. Several longitudinal studies have been conducted; some involved children or young adults, potentially conflating brain development with learning, most were restricted to the motor domain, and all concerned relatively short timescales (weeks or months). Here, by contrast, we utilized a unique opportunity to study average-IQ adults operating in the real world as they learned, over four years, the complex layout of London's streets while training to become licensed taxi drivers. In those who qualified, acquisition of an internal spatial representation of London was associated with a selective increase in gray matter (GM) volume in their posterior hippocampi and concomitant changes to their memory profile. No structural brain changes were observed in trainees who failed to qualify or control participants. We conclude that specific, enduring, structural brain changes in adult humans can be induced by biologically relevant behaviors engaging higher cognitive functions such as spatial memory, with significance for the “nature versus nurture” debate.

Can ignorance promote democracy?

It is easy to despair over the continuing decay in the intelligence and rationality of American voters, and worry about their susceptibility to manipulation by loud voices offering simplistic solutions. Past work has suggested that when many individuals (human voters, flocks of birds, schools of fish) must come together to make a single collective decision, a strongly opinionated minority (tea party anyone?), might be able to exert disproportional pressure on the decision-making process. Couzin et al. develop a theoretical model in which uninformed individuals inhibit the influence of a strongly opinionated minority, returning control to the numerical majority, and in experiments on the shiner, a schooling fish, show the utility of their model. In the presence of an intransigent (and not proselytizing) minority uninformed individuals tend to adopt the opinions of those around them, amplifying the majority opinion and preventing erosion by the intransigent minority. Thus, adding uninformed individuals to a group can facilitate fair representation during the process of information integration. Here is the abstract:

Conflicting interests among group members are common when making collective decisions, yet failure to achieve consensus can be costly. Under these circumstances individuals may be susceptible to manipulation by a strongly opinionated, or extremist, minority. It has previously been argued, for humans and animals, that social groups containing individuals who are uninformed, or exhibit weak preferences, are particularly vulnerable to such manipulative agents. Here, we use theory and experiment to demonstrate that, for a wide range of conditions, a strongly opinionated minority can dictate group choice, but the presence of uninformed individuals spontaneously inhibits this process, returning control to the numerical majority. Our results emphasize the role of uninformed individuals in achieving democratic consensus amid internal group conflict and informational constraints.

Dynamics of improvising together.

In a previous life (when I was a 30-something) I frequently participated in dance improvisation sessions sponsored by either the Univ. of Wisc. Dance Department or local dance groups. One of the basic exercises was 'mirroring', two dancers generating novel movements by attempting to spontaneously generate matching movements. This worked much better when participants were equal, rather than one being designated the leader. Here is an interesting bit of work by Noy et al. describing why that was the case:

Joint improvisation is the creative action of two or more people without a script or designated leader. Examples include improvisational theater and music, and day-to-day activities such as conversations. In joint improvisation, novel action is created, emerging from the interaction between people. Although central to creative processes and social interaction, joint improvisation remains largely unexplored due to the lack of experimental paradigms. Here we introduce a paradigm based on a theater practice called the mirror game. We measured the hand motions of two people mirroring each other at high temporal and spatial resolution. We focused on expert actors and musicians skilled in joint improvisation. We found that players can jointly create novel complex motion without a designated leader, synchronized to less than 40 ms. In contrast, we found that designating one player as leader deteriorated performance: The follower showed 2–3 Hz oscillation around the leader's smooth trajectory, decreasing synchrony and reducing the range of velocities reached. A mathematical model suggests a mechanism for these observations based on mutual agreement on future motion in mirrored reactive–predictive controllers. This is a step toward understanding the human ability to create novelty by improvising together.

Have a scary memory? Erase it with prozac plus psychotherapy.

Numerous clinical studies by now have shown that a combination of antidepressant medication and psychological treatment works better for mood disorders than either therapy on its own. Karpova et al. have now ferreted out the mechanisms that might underlie this fact by investigating the effect of fluoxetine (Prozac) on fear-conditioned memories in mice. Fluoxetine accelerated extinction of fear responses, and together with extinction training disrupted fear renewal and fear reinstatement, but neither treatment by itself produced long term fear extinction. Their results suggest that fluoxetine reactivates plasticity within the amygdala, which, in combination with extinction training, can lead to the erasure of conditioned fear responses. Here is their abstract:

Antidepressant drugs and psychotherapy combined are more effective in treating mood disorders than either treatment alone, but the neurobiological basis of this interaction is unknown. To investigate how antidepressants influence the response of mood-related systems to behavioral experience, we used a fear-conditioning and extinction paradigm in mice. Combining extinction training with chronic fluoxetine, but neither treatment alone, induced an enduring loss of conditioned fear memory in adult animals. Fluoxetine treatment increased synaptic plasticity, converted the fear memory circuitry to a more immature state, and acted through local brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Fluoxetine-induced plasticity may allow fear erasure by extinction-guided remodeling of the memory circuitry. Thus, the pharmacological effects of antidepressants need to be combined with psychological rehabilitation to reorganize networks rendered more plastic by the drug treatment.

Our genes and our behavior, a paradigm shift in our understanding

I thought it would be interesting to pass on two recent items I've come across. The first is the paper by Schultz et al. (also, see commentary by Wade.) that challenges some of the leading theories of social behavior (that stress environment, larger groups sizes forcing larger more intelligent brains, stepwise progression to complexity,etc.) to argue that genetic determinants force primate species, including ours, into whatever social structures they inherit.

Compare this with the proposed article from Behavioral and Brain Sciences "Behavior genetics and post genomics", by Charney (PDF download here), which points to the much more tortuous road from genotype to phenotype. Here is his abstract:

The science of genetics is undergoing a paradigm shift. Recent discoveries, including the activity of retrotransposons, the extent of copy number variations, somatic and chromosomal mosaicism, and the nature of the epigenome as a regulator of DNA expressivity, are challenging a series of dogmas concerning the nature of the genome and the relationship between genotype and phenotype. DNA, once held to be the unchanging template of heredity, now appears subject to a good deal of environmental change; considered to be identical in all cells and tissues of the body, there is growing evidence that somatic mosaicism is the normal human condition; and treated as the sole biological agent of heritability, we now know that the epigenome, which regulates gene expressivity, can be inherited via the germline. These developments are particularly significant for behavior genetics for at least three reasons: First, these phenomena appear to be particularly prevalent in the human brain, and likely are involved in much of human behavior; second, they have important implications for the validity of heritability and gene association studies, the methodologies that largely define the discipline of behavior genetics; and third, they appear to play a critical role in development during the perinatal period, and in enabling phenotypic plasticity in offspring in particular. I examine one of the central claims to emerge from the use of heritability studies in the behavioral sciences, the principle of "minimal shared maternal effects," in light of the growing awareness that the maternal perinatal environment is a critical venue for the exercise of adaptive phenotypic plasticity. This consideration has important implications for both developmental and evolutionary biology.

Friends with benefits - pet ownership and well-being

My two abyssinian cats and I agree with the (obvious) results of this study by Harmon-Jones et al.:

Social support is critical for psychological and physical well-being, reflecting the centrality of belongingness in our lives. Human interactions often provide people with considerable social support, but can pets also fulfill one's social needs? Although there is correlational evidence that pets may help individuals facing significant life stressors, little is known about the well-being benefits of pets for everyday people. Study 1 found in a community sample that pet owners fared better on several well-being (e.g., greater self-esteem, more exercise) and individual-difference (e.g., greater conscientiousness, less fearful attachment) measures. Study 2 assessed a different community sample and found that owners enjoyed better well-being when their pets fulfilled social needs better, and the support that pets provided complemented rather than competed with human sources. Finally, Study 3 brought pet owners into the laboratory and experimentally demonstrated the ability of pets to stave off negativity caused by social rejection. In summary, pets can serve as important sources of social support, providing many positive psychological and physical benefits for their owners.

Local Jekyll and global Hyde - duality of face perception

Miellet et al. make the curious observation that we can identify faces with either focused foveal global (peripheral) vision:

The main concern in face-processing research is to understand the processes underlying the identification of faces. In the study reported here, we addressed this issue by examining whether local or global information supports face identification. We developed a new methodology called “iHybrid.” This technique combines two famous identities in a gaze-contingent paradigm, which simultaneously provides local, foveated information from one face and global, complementary information from a second face. Behavioral face-identification performance and eye-tracking data showed that the visual system identified faces on the basis of either local or global information depending on the location of the observer’s first fixation. In some cases, a given observer even identified the same face using local information on one trial and global information on another trial. A validation in natural viewing conditions confirmed our findings. These results clearly demonstrate that face identification is not rooted in a single, or even preferred, information-gathering strategy.

Figure - Procedure used to create iHybrid faces. The spatial frequencies (SFs) of two original face images (illustrated here with Brad Pitt and William H. Macy) were decomposed separately into four nonoverlapping SF bands of 1 octave each (<3, 3–6, 6–12, >12 cycles per degree of visual angle). A Gaussian window (SD = 25 pixels, ~1° of visual angle) was then centered on every potential fixation location on each face; this procedure formed a lattice of 5- × 5-pixel cells covering the original 260 × 260 image. When an observer fixated on the stimulus, the local information across the four SF bands for one identity was extracted through the Gaussian window at that location, and the complementary global SF information was extracted from the other identity. The sum of the complementary, fixation-dependent identities formed the iHybrid stimulus. In the example illustrated here, the dashed red line indicates a fixation location at the left eye; local SF information was extracted from this location in the image of Brad Pitt, and the complementary SF information was taken from the image of William H. Macy. An observer who identifies the resulting face as Brad Pitt is using local information, and an observer who identifies this face as William H. Macy is using global information.

Leaning to the left makes an object seem smaller.

From Eerland et al., here is yet another neat example of embodied cognition, how a body state can influence "objective" estimations:

In two experiments, we investigated whether body posture influences people’s estimation of quantities. According to the mental-number-line theory, people mentally represent numbers along a line with smaller numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right. We hypothesized that surreptitiously making people lean to the right or to the left would affect their quantitative estimates. Participants answered estimation questions while standing on a Wii Balance Board. Posture was manipulated within subjects so that participants answered some questions while they leaned slightly to the left, some questions while they leaned slightly to the right, and some questions while they stood upright. Crucially, participants were not aware of this manipulation. Estimates were significantly smaller when participants leaned to the left than when they leaned to the right.

Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently.

A colleague pointed me to this interesting (to me, because I'm a pianist) work by Sohee Park's laboratory at Vanderbilt. Their central finding is that professionally trained musicians more effectively use divergent thinking (the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems, or thinking 'outside of the box'). Creative thinking was tested both with written word association test and by asking subjects to make up new functions for a variety of household objects. Brain activity was measured by near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), a noninvasive neuroimaging method that allows in-vivo measurement of changes in the concentrations of oxygenated hemoglobin and deoxygenated hemoglobin in the cortex. They suggest that musician's elevated use of both brain hemispheres may be related to having to use two hands independently, as well as follow multiple voices on musical scores. Folley, one of the authors, noted "“Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres...Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere.” Here is the PDF of their article, and here is the abstract:

Empirical studies of creativity have focused on the importance of divergent thinking, which supports generating novel solutions to loosely defined problems. The present study examined creativity and frontal cortical activity in an externally-validated group of creative individuals (trained musicians) and demographically matched control participants, using behavioral tasks and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Experiment 1 examined convergent and divergent thinking with respect to intelligence and personality. Experiment 2 investigated frontal oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin concentration changes during divergent thinking with NIRS. Results of Experiment 1 indicated enhanced creativity in musicians who also showed increased verbal ability and schizotypal personality but their enhanced divergent thinking remained robust after co-varying out these two factors. In Experiment 2, NIRS showed greater bilateral frontal activity in musicians during divergent thinking compared with nonmusicians. Overall, these results suggest that creative individuals are characterized by enhanced divergent thinking, which is supported by increased frontal cortical activity.

Good minus God - distrust of atheists

Gervais et al offer yet another study on us poor atheists. I follow their abstract with some comments on such studies:

Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion's effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a first study using a broad sample of American adults revealed that distrust characterized anti-atheist prejudice but not anti-gay prejudice. In subsequent studies, distrust of atheists generalized even to participants from more liberal, secular populations. In three further studies description of a criminally untrustworthy individual was seen as comparably representative of atheists and rapists but not representative of Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, or homosexuals. In addition, results were consistent with the hypothesis that the relationship between belief in God and atheist distrust was fully mediated by the belief that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them. In implicit measures, participants strongly associated atheists with distrust, and belief in God was more strongly associated with implicit distrust of atheists than with implicit dislike of atheists. Finally, atheists were systematically socially excluded only in high-trust domains; belief in God, but not authoritarianism, predicted this discriminatory decision-making against atheists in high trust domains. These 6 studies are the first to systematically explore the social psychological underpinnings of anti-atheist prejudice, and converge to indicate the centrality of distrust in this phenomenon.

In the New York Times online Opinionator, Louise Anthony makes some interesting points about such studies. A few brief clips:

I gather that many people believe that atheism implies nihilism — that rejecting God means rejecting morality. A person who denies God, they reason, must be, if not actively evil, at least indifferent to considerations of right and wrong. After all, doesn’t the dictionary list “wicked” as a synonym for “godless?” And isn’t it true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted”?

Well, actually — no, it’s not. (And for the record, Dostoevsky never said it was.) Atheism does not entail that anything goes.

We “moralistic atheists” do not see right and wrong as artifacts of a divine protection racket. Rather, we find moral value to be immanent in the natural world, arising from the vulnerabilities of sentient beings and from the capacities of rational beings to recognize and to respond to those vulnerabilities and capacities in others...many theists, like many atheists, believe that moral value is inherent in morally valuable things. Things don’t become morally valuable because God prefers them; God prefers them because they are morally valuable.