The mis-use of Science: PseudoNeuroscience sways judges' sentencing.

One sees frequent discussions in neuroscience journals (like this one in Trends in Cognitive Sciences) over whether, and to what extent, neuroscience should influence public policy. Does the willingness on of some behavioral scientists to translate the legal and policy implications of their work really help, or does this represent growing misuse of neuroscience to attach scientific authority to policy, plus a clutch of neuroscientists trying to overstate their findings for a taste of power? Such debate makes studies like this one of of Aspinwall et al. very relvant:

We tested whether expert testimony concerning a biomechanism of psychopathy increases or decreases punishment. In a nationwide experiment, U.S. state trial judges (N = 181) read a hypothetical case (based on an actual case) where the convict was diagnosed with psychopathy. Evidence presented at sentencing in support of a biomechanical cause of the convict's psychopathy significantly reduced the extent to which psychopathy was rated as aggravating and significantly reduced sentencing (from 13.93 years to 12.83 years). Content analysis of judges' reasoning indicated that even though the majority of judges listed aggravating factors (86.7%), the biomechanical evidence increased the proportion of judges listing mitigating factors (from 29.7 to 47.8%). Our results contribute to the literature on how biological explanations of behavior figure into theories of culpability and punishment.

Reconstructing intolerance.

Luguri et al. in the Yale psychology department relate the tolerance of conservatives to whether their construal level is more abstract versus concrete. They either measured the existing construal level of study participants and tested tolerance, or after measuring construal level, manipulated it to see the consequences. Construal level was manipulated by asking people why (abstract) versus how (concrete) they would think about certain issues such as maintaining good health or moral fairness. Here is their abstract:

Gunnar Myrdal described the “American dilemma” as the conflict between abstract national values (“liberty and justice for all”) and more concrete, everyday prejudices. We leveraged construal-level theory to empirically test Myrdal’s proposition that construal level (abstract vs. concrete) can influence prejudice. We measured individual differences in construal level (Study 1) and manipulated construal level (Studies 2 and 3); across these three studies, we found that adopting an abstract mind-set heightened conservatives’ tolerance for groups that are perceived as deviating from Judeo-Christian values (gay men, lesbians, Muslims, and atheists). Among participants who adopted a concrete mind-set, conservatives were less tolerant of these nonnormative groups than liberals were, but political orientation did not have a reliable effect on tolerance among participants who adopted an abstract mind-set. Attitudes toward racial out-groups and dominant groups (e.g., Whites, Christians) were unaffected by construal level. In Study 3, we found that the effect of abstract thinking on prejudice was mediated by an increase in concerns about fairness.

A musical offering - Debussy L'Isle Joyeuse

I have finally done a recording of the Debussy L'Isle Joyeuse that I did at a house concert several months ago, deciding to post this run through on my Steinway B even with awkward page turn paste together. In a recording session with all my equipment setup, I always seem more likely to have the occasional minor glitch than when I play by myself or in performance before an audience. (Most of these are much more noticeable to me than to the average listener.)

Nocebo effect - the harm expectations can do.

A piece by Enck and Häuser in the NYTimes summarizes (and links to) their paper in Deutsche Ärzteblatt Internationa reviewing 31 studies on how fearful expectations can become self-fulfilling prophesies. (A nocebo effect is the induction of a symptom perceived as negative by sham treatment and/or by the suggestion of negative expectations. A nocebo response is a negative symptom induced by the patient’s own negative expectations and/or by negative suggestions from clinical staff in the absence of any treatment.) A few of the cases cited:

-a team of Italian gastroenterologists asked people with and without diagnosed lactose intolerance to take lactose for an experiment on its effects on bowel symptoms. But in reality the participants received glucose, which does not harm the gut. Nonetheless, 44 percent of people with known lactose intolerance and 26 percent of those without lactose intolerance complained of gastrointestinal symptoms.

-In one trial, the drug finasteride was administered to men to relieve symptoms of prostate enlargement. Half of the patients were told that the drug could cause erectile dysfunction, while the other half were not informed of this possible side effect. In the informed group, 44 percent of the participants reported that they experienced erectile dysfunction; in the uninformed group, that figure was only 15 percent.

-a group of German psychologists took patients with chronic lower back pain and divided them into two groups for a leg flexion test. One group was told that the test could lead to a slight increase in pain, while the other group was told that the test had no effect on pain level. The first group reported stronger pain and performed fewer leg flexions than the second group did.

-A doctor’s choice of words matters. A team of American anesthesiologists studied women about to give birth who were given an injection of local anesthetic before being administered an epidural. For some women, the injection was prefaced by the statement, “We are going to give you a local anesthetic that will numb the area so that you will be comfortable during the procedure.” For others, the statement was, “You are going to feel a big bee sting; this is the worst part of the procedure.” The perceived pain was significantly greater after the latter statement, which emphasized the downside of the injection.

Simple mechanisms can generate wealth inequality.

The Chaos Seminar lunch group at the University of Wisconsin, organized by physicist Clint Sprott and poet Robin Chapman, has been doing a discussion of power laws. The unequal distribution of monetary wealth within a population, the subject of last Thursday's post, provides an example. Here I pass on some of the background material circulated for the seminar. In particular I encourage you to do Sprott's short tutorial on why monetary wealth tends to follow a power law relationship (sometimes referred to as a Pareto distribution or the "80/20" law):

A non-mathematical discussion of power laws (no equations).

For more mathematics, Wikipedia is pretty good.

A contrary view is provided by Charles Franklin.

Sprott's web tutorial showing why monetary wealth tends to follow a power law:

From the tutorial:

In the simulations, we take a model society with one million individuals and give them all $100,000 which they are free to invest or spend in such a way that their wealth changes by an amount in the range of -10% to +10% each year. We then look at the distribution of wealth within the society after twenty years. The code was written in PowerBASIC and is available for download. (horizontal x-axis is log of wealth - from 10,0000 to 1,000,000 dollars) vertical y-axis is log of probability).

In the first simulation, the rate is chosen uniform random over the allowed range with no memory of the past. Thus each individual executes a random walk, some years gaining money and other years losing it. The distribution of wealth after twenty years is shown on a double logarithmic scale of two decades in the graph at the right. The result is approximately Gaussian as expected.

In the second simulation, the rate is chosen uniform random over the allowed range but with the same rate for each person throughout the twenty year period. As one would expect, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer so that after twenty years the distribution of wealth is as shown in the graph at the right. The result is quite accurately a power law with a slope close to -1.

In the third simulation, the rate each year is half determined by the past and half chosen randomly, with a result as shown in the graph at the right. Interestingly, over a good portion of the range, the distribution of wealth is still quite accurately a power law with the same slope close to -1.

 

The Anxious Idiot

Following in the vein of last Friday's self-helpy post I thought I would note Daniel Smith's quirky Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes about his chronic anxiety, his frequent states of agitation, self-hatred and incipient despair. I cook down and edit his remedy:

I should define "idiot" for our purposes… a person who tends to forget all the important lessons, essentially a fool, one who willfully ignores all that he has learned about how to come to his own aid. A person who is so fixated on the fact that he is in a hole that he fails to climb out of the hole. An idiot, in short, is someone who is self-defeatingly lazy…the anxious are rarely slothful in any typical sense. It's more that they tend to be undisciplined, or somehow otherwise unwilling to see our anxiety for what it is - a habit of mind.

The promising thing about a habit is that it is not the same thing as a fate… an anxious person has to build new patterns of thought, so that his mind doesn't fall into the old set of grooves. He has to dig new tracks and keep digging…Two reliable methods to keep anxiety at bay can be Zen meditation and cognitive-behavior therapy. Both teach that one's thoughts are not to be taken as the gospel truth; both foster mindfulness and mental discipline (as can yoga, exercise, therapeutic breathing, or prayer). It matters less what a person chooses than that he chooses, keeps choosing, and remains dogged. Anything else is idiocy.

A friday homily - "Symptoms of Inner Peace"

During a random walk of the web, which I do rather infrequently, I came across this piece by Saskia Davis, which, at the risk of being maudlin, I pass on. It softened my normal curmudgeonly self at least for a few moments....

"Symptoms of Inner Peace"

* A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on fears based on past experiences.
* An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.
* A loss of interest in judging other people.
* A loss of interest in judging self.
* A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.
* A loss of interest in conflict.
* A loss of the ability to worry. (This is a very serious symptom.)
* Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation.
* Contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature.
* Frequent attacks of smiling.
* An increasing tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.
* An increased susceptibility to the love extended by others as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it.

A choice mind-set perpetuates acceptance of wealth inequality.

The practice of choice and the discourse of choice are widely prevalent in the United States. They derive from sentiments of the founding fathers (Thomas Jefferson: “Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice”). Savani1 and Rattan design a set of six experiments to examine several consequences of this:

Wealth inequality has significant psychological, physiological, societal, and economic costs. In six experiments, we investigated how seemingly innocuous, culturally pervasive ideas can help maintain and further wealth inequality. Specifically, we tested whether the concept of choice, which is deeply valued in American society, leads Americans to act in ways that perpetuate wealth inequality. Thinking in terms of choice, we argue, activates the belief that life outcomes stem from personal agency, not societal factors, and thereby leads people to justify wealth inequality. The results showed that highlighting the concept of choice makes people less disturbed by facts about existing wealth inequality in the United States, more likely to underestimate the role of societal factors in individuals’ successes, less likely to support the redistribution of educational resources, and less likely to support raising taxes on the rich—even if doing so would help resolve a budget deficit crisis. These findings indicate that the culturally valued concept of choice contributes to the maintenance of wealth inequality.

We are meant to become cyborg.

I pass on some clips from a brief essay by Sherry Turkle:

Winnicott believes that during all stages of life we continue to search for objects we experience as both within and outside the self. We give up the baby blanket, but we continue to search for the feeling of oneness it provided. We find them in moments of feeling "at one" with the world, what Freud called the "oceanic feeling." We find these moments when we are at one with a piece of art, a vista in nature, a sexual experience.

As a scientific proposition, the theory of the transitional object has its limitations. But as a way of thinking about connection, it provides a powerful tool for thought...it offered me a way to begin to understand the new relationships that people were beginning to form with computers...I could see that computers were not "just tools." They were intimate machines. People experienced them as part of the self, separate but connected to the self.

A novelist using a word processing program referred to "my ESP with the machine. The words float out. I share the screen with my words." An architect who used the computer to design goes went even further: "I don't see the building in my mind until I start to play with shapes and forms on the machine. It comes to life in the space between my eyes and the screen."...After studying programming, a thirteen year old girl said, that when working with the computer, "there's a little piece of your mind and now it's a little piece of the computer's mind and you come to see yourself differently." A programmer talked about his "Vulcan mind meld" with the computer.

This way of thinking about the computer as an evocative objects puts us on the inside of a new inside joke. For when psychoanalysts talked about object relations, they had always been talking about people. From the beginning, people saw computers as "almost-alive" or "sort of alive." With the computer, object relations psychoanalysis can be applied to, well, objects. People feel at one with video games, with lines of computer code, with the avatars they play in virtual worlds, with their smartphones. Classical transitional objects are meant to be abandoned, their power recovered in moments of heightened experience. When our current digital devices—our smartphones and cellphones—take on the power of transitional objects, a new psychology comes into play. These digital objects are never meant to be abandoned. We are meant to become cyborg.

If you are not in the group, you will not be in consciousness.

Here is a fascinating piece of work from Yar Pinto and collaborators at the University of Amsterdam, reported at the recent annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness:

What is the influence of social cognitions on consciousness? There is ample data that our response to visual stimuli depends on our social biases. However, perhaps visual perception per se is not altered, but only our responses to these percepts. In the current research we directly assessed the impact of social cognitions on consciousness. Specifically, we tested Dutch participants, and compared the perception of either black (experiment 1) or Moroccan (experiment 2) faces to the perception of Dutch faces.We employed a binocular rivalry task. One eye viewed a low contrast face, while the other eye viewed constantly changing Mondrian patterns. Initially the changing patterns dominate, so the picture of the face is invisible. By gradually increasing the contrast of the face, and decreasing the contrast of the Mondrian patterns, the face breaks through to conscious perception.Both experiments showed that Dutch faces enter consciousness quicker than non-dutch faces. Moreover, this effect is reduced/eliminated when the faces are inverted, and this effect correlates with how biased the participant is (measured with an implicit association task).We concludes that social cognition can directly change conscious perception. Specifically, stereotypes seem to slow down the entry of unwanted information into consciousness. Our findings suggest that entry into consciousness is not purely a matter of low-level factors, but may come about in the interplay between high-level pre-settings, and low-level input. Importantly, although previous research suggests that faces of outgroup members draw attention, this increased attention does not speed entry into awareness.

Culture of Empathy

I have finally taken time to look more thoroughly at a site noted in a comment to my July 25 post on compassion research. The "Culture of Empathy" site is an aggregator of resources and information about the values of empathy and compassion. It makes interesting, if a bit overwhelming, browsing. I feel like a complete trogdolyte as only now do I notice sites like CAUSES that hosts seven different empathy related causes that one can sign on to, listing the very same gentleman who commented on my post (Edwin Rutsch) as leader; or Scoop.it!, that hosts four different empathy related web based magazine hosted by, guess who?, Mr. Rutsch. Mr. Rutsch would also like you to join the Empathy Center Page on Facebook, and join him on Facebook Causes. This guy really gets around! The Culture of Empathy website lists summaries of a large number of interviews, book reviews, and conferences involving Mr. Rutsch, noting the neuroscience of empathy (things like mirror neurons, etc.), different cultural aspects of empathy, linguistics.... I guess its gotta be a good thing, but while fully thinking that my own behavior could certainly be leavened by a more empathetic bias, I'm overwhelmed by this web input to the point of inaction regarding social venues to support.

More on Haidt and Moral Psychology

I have finally finished a complete reading of Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind" that I have mentioned in several previous posts (enter 'Haidt' in the search box in the left column). This complete reading is unusual for me; my normal behavior is to just read a review of a new book, or skip, hop, and skim through the Kindle version. Here I pass on some clips from Jost's recent review.

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt attempts to explain the psychological foundations of morality and how they lead to political conflicts. The book's three parts are not as compatible or settled as Haidt's ingenious prose makes them seem. The first revisits the intriguing arguments of an earlier, influential paper in which he argued that moral reasoning is nothing but post hoc rationalizing of gut-level intuitions. The second introduces an evolutionarily inspired framework that specifies five or six “moral foundations” and applies this framework to an analysis of liberal-conservative differences in moral judgments. In the third part, Haidt speculates that patriotism, religiosity, and “hive psychology” in humans evolved rapidly through group-level selection.

After arguing that “moral reasoning” is nothing more than a post hoc rationalization of intuitive, emotional reactions, Haidt risks contradiction when claiming that liberals should embrace conservative moral intuitions about the importance of obeying authority, being loyal to the ingroup, and enforcing purity standards. If one were to accept Haidt's post hoc rationalization premise and his findings about differences in the moral judgments of liberals and conservatives, a more parsimonious (and empirically supportable) conjunction would be: For a variety of psychological reasons, conservatives do more rationalizing of gut-level reactions, and this makes them more moralistic (i.e., judgmental) than liberals. It does not, however, make them more moral in any meaningful sense of the word, nor does it provide a legitimate basis for criticizing liberal moral judgment the way Haidt does.

Haidt argues that the liberal moral code is deficient, because it is not based on all of his “moral foundations.” The liberal, he maintains, is like the idiot restaurateur who thought he could make a complete cuisine out of just one taste, however sweet. This illustrates the biggest flaw in Haidt's book: he swings back and forth between an allegedly value-neutral sense of “moral” (anything that an individual or a group believes is moral and serves to suppress selfishness) and a more prescriptive sense that he uses mainly to jab liberals. Ultimately, Haidt's own rhetorical choices render his claim to being unbiased unconvincing. If descriptive morality is based on whatever people believe, then both liberals and conservatives would seem to have equal claim to it. Does it really make sense, philosophically or psychologically or politically, to try to keep score, let alone to assert that “more is better” when it comes to moral judgment?

Before drawing sweeping, profound conclusions about the politics of morality, Haidt needs to address a more basic question: What are the specific, empirically falsifiable criteria for designating something as an evolutionarily grounded moral foundation? Haidt sets the bar pretty low—anything that suppresses individual selfishness in favor of group interests. By this definition, the decision to plunder (and perhaps even murder) members of another tribe would count as a moral adaptation. Recent research suggests that Machiavellianism, authoritarianism, social dominance, and prejudice are positively associated with the moral valuation of ingroup, authority, and purity themes. If these are to be ushered into the ever-broadening tent of group morality, one wonders what it would take to be refused admission.

Men with wider faces are more generous.

Here is an interesting piece from Stirrat and Perrett:

Male facial width-to-height ratio appears to correlate with antisocial tendencies, such as aggression, exploitation, cheating, and deception. We present evidence that male facial width-to-height ratio is also associated with a stereotypically male prosocial tendency: to increase cooperation with other in-group members during intergroup competition. We found that men who had wider faces, compared with men who had narrower faces, showed more self-sacrificing cooperation to help their group members when there was competition with another group. We propose that this finding makes sense given the evolutionary functions of social helpfulness and aggression.

Here are some rambling clips from their discussion:

Human cooperation and altruism have very likely evolved within a long history of conflict between group. Therefore, one would expect people to have evolved either innate responses or innate learning abilities regarding aggression between groups. There are good evolutionary reasons for men to be especially intergroup oriented, because membership in groups (like social status within those groups) correlates positively with the number of mating opportunities for men. As men with wider faces are rated as physically less attractive and display more antisocial behavior that is likely to be unattractive as well, males with wider faces may adopt this stereotypically male strategy of intergroup orientation and within-group helping behavior (including aggressive defense) as a compensatory strategy for affirming their group membership and gaining prestige with both men and women in their group.

Understanding this contingent inter- and intragroup male behavior is crucial to interpreting the relation between appearance and behavior. For example, in a fascinating recent article, Wong, Ormiston, and Haselhuhn indicated that the facial width-to-height ratio of chief executive officers (CEOs) predicted their firms’ financial performance. For Wong et al., the possible salient personal characteristics of the CEO that improve a firm’s performance are power and aggressive and exploitative behavior. Clearly, given the data in our study, it is possible that the correlation between CEOs’ facial width-to-height ratio and their firms’ financial performance is due not to CEOs’ aggressive tendencies, but to their tendencies toward self-sacrifice on behalf of their firms.

A MindBlog Retrospective

Random musings...While doing some abstracting for a personal history, I’ve been looking back over writing and lectures I’ve done since my “Biology of Mind” book was published in 1999. (~15,000-20,000 copies apparently have been sold. I am amazed that several hundred copies of the book are still purchased every year.) The beginning of this MindBlog in Feburary 2006 effectively terminated work on draft versions of a next book, as well as some more popular and creative writing I was playing with. In particular, looking back at MindStuff: Bon-bons for the curious user, I like the lyricism and flow of the prose.... quite different from the chunky style of the writing I do on this MindBlog. Here is a sample:

BEGINNINGS

We are forever barred from recalling the buzzing cacophony that greeted our entry into this world. Our remembering brains had not formed, they had not begun to construct a world for themselves outside the womb. And yet, they had a very ancient kind of knowledge formed over millions of years. They knew to look for a face, they knew to direct muscles of the mouth to draw milk from a mother's breast. From a very rudimentary beginning repertoire they began fashioning a network of sensing and acting to finally generate the extraordinary machines that can read a page like this one.

In both the womb and with the growing baby, the story is a record of sensuality, of kinesthetic, visual, auditory, tasting and smelling histories that form themselves into a predictable order. A sense of past and of anticipation of the predictable future form a base non verbal imaged story line on which the layers of human language begin to build themselves. A smooth continuity informs the transformation of communication from gestures and simple sounds to strings of words with subjects, objects and verbs that form into stories about why, what, how, where. This transformation does not occur in feral children raised by surrogate animal parents, they appear to remain locked in the more present centered mental space of animals - a space that gives no flicker of reflectivity. The requirement is for not only our distinctively human genes but also a cultural context of human communication through gesture and language kept alive, altered, and transmitted by successive generations. We are tools of our our tools.

The programming of our brain regions central to social interactions is just as biological as the workings of a liver or kidney. It involves involuntary linkages of our primitive mammalian or limbic brain and its neuroendocrinology to status, sex, affiliation, power - mechanisms whose fundamental aspects we share with prairie voles and cichlid fish. Unique to humans is the self conscious confabulator or self-constructor that provides a new level of nudging, specification, control over these processes. It is this confabulator that generates what we take to be the world, what we take to be social sources of validation. All are in fact internal self creations that are assayed by their utility.

The MindBlog queue: moral responsibility; evolution of music; booze and hypnosis

During this period of relative inactivity for MindBlog, while I am pursuing other projects, I still accumulate references to work that looks interesting. Rather than letting them disappear into the list of potential posts that has accumulated by now to 50 pages of links, I’m going to post some of the links, with minimal descriptions, to make it possible for readers who find a favorite topic to click their way to the source.

Did your brain make you do it? Neuroscience and moral responsibility.

“Naïve dualism” is the belief that acts are brought about either by intentions or by the physical laws that govern our brains and that those two types of causes — psychological and biological — are categorically distinct. People are responsible for actions resulting from one but not the other. (In citing neuroscience, the Supreme Court may have been guilty of naïve dualism: did it really need brain evidence to conclude that adolescents are immature?)...Naïve dualism is misguided. “Was the cause psychological or biological?” is the wrong question when assigning responsibility for an action. All psychological states are also biological ones.

A better question is “how strong was the relation between the cause (whatever it happened to be) and the effect?” If, hypothetically, only 1 percent of people with a brain malfunction (or a history of being abused) commit violence, ordinary considerations about blame would still seem relevant. But if 99 percent of them do, you might start to wonder how responsible they really are.

Evolution of music by public choice

Music evolves as composers, performers, and consumers favor some musical variants over others. To investigate the role of consumer selection, we constructed a Darwinian music engine consisting of a population of short audio loops that sexually reproduce and mutate. This population evolved for 2,513 generations under the selective influence of 6,931 consumers who rated the loops’ aesthetic qualities. We found that the loops quickly evolved into music attributable, in part, to the evolution of aesthetically pleasing chords and rhythms. Later, however, evolution slowed. Applying the Price equation, a general description of evolutionary processes, we found that this stasis was mostly attributable to a decrease in the fidelity of transmission. Our experiment shows how cultural dynamics can be explained in terms of competing evolutionary forces.

Also check out:

Adaptive walks on the fitness landscape of music

and

Darwin Tunes on SoundCloud

Finally, this unrelated quirky fragment:

Booze enhances hypnotic susceptability

How the mighty have fallen...

I am slack-jawed with amazement on reading that Jonah Lehrer, who I have had great respect for, a brilliant popularizer of psychology and brain neuroscience (“Proust was a Neuroscientist”and "How we Decide") resigned as a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine on Monday after a report that he had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan in the book “Imagine,” published in March. This reminds me of Harvard animal psychologist Marc Hauser’s fall from grace after the discovery that he had falsified data. How could such intelligent and original people, who write with such clarity and lucidity, be so stupid? I guess ambition trumps all.

Added note: Today's New York Times has an interesting piece on the Lehrer/Dylan affair.

Brain correlates of out of body and depersonalization experiences

The NewScientist points to a workshop by Nick Medford at the recent ASSC meeting in Brighton that dealt with a focus on the anterior cingulate and right anterior insular cortex as central in producing subjective feelings about bodies, their continuity and individuality. Abnormal activity is observed in these areas during depersonalization (feelings of detachment or disconnection from one's own mental processes, emotions and/or body) and derealization (feeling like being outside of your own body observing it). Medford's ideas are summarized in his review article with Critchley.

There is now a wealth of evidence that anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortices have a close functional relationship, such that they may be considered together as input and output regions of a functional system. This system is typically engaged across cognitive, affective, and behavioural contexts, suggesting that it is of fundamental importance for mental life. Here, we review the literature and reinforce the case that these brain regions are crucial, firstly, for the production of subjective feelings and, secondly, for co-ordinating appropriate responses to internal and external events. This model seeks to integrate higher-order cortical functions with sensory representation and autonomic control: it is argued that feeling states emerge from the raw data of sensory (including interoceptive) inputs and are integrated through representations in conscious awareness. Correspondingly, autonomic nervous system reactivity is particularly important amongst the responses that accompany conscious experiences. Potential clinical implications are also discussed.

Beyond the blink - the art of delay

I pass on two interesting and related pieces on the limits of rapid spontaneous intuition judgements and actions, contra Malcolm Gladwell. Partnoy describes the spectacle of the initial reporting rush that incorrectly described the recent Supreme Court decision on health care, a case of focused "present bias" that would have been avoided by waiting and reading a bit further into the court decision. Brain pickings points to Partnoy's more scholarly and extended treatment of this issue in its piece on his new book.

Thinking about the role of delay is a profound and fundamental part of being human. Questions about delay are existential: the amount of time we take to reflect on decisions will define who we are. Is our mission simply to be another animal, responding to whatever stimulations we encounter? Or are we here for something more? ...Our ability to think about delay is a central part of the human condition. It is a gift, a tool we can use to examine our lives. Life might be a race against time, but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires pause. The converse of Socrates’s famous admonition is that the examined life just might be worth living.

Aphorisms and the Commodification of Wisdom

I pass on this nice bit from Brain Pickings on some Susan Sontag writing. One chunk:

Aphorisms are rogue ideas.

Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details. Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast, and move on. An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that.

To write aphorisms is to assume a mask — a mask of scorn, of superiority. Which, in one great tradition, conceals (shapes) the aphorist’s secret pursuit of spiritual salvation. The paradoxes of salvation. We know at the end, when the aphorist’s amoral, light point-of-view self-destructs.

Compassion towards one person generalizes to others.

DeSteno does a NYTimes OpEd piece to point to his papers in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychyology (PDF here) and the journal Emotion (PDF here). Clips:

Whether it’s the parable of the good Samaritan in Christianity, Judaism’s “13 attributes of compassion” or the Buddha’s statement that “loving kindness and compassion is all of our practice,” empathy with the suffering of others is seen as a special virtue that has the power to change the world. This idea is often articulated by the Dalai Lama, who argues that individual experiences of compassion radiate outward and increase harmony for all.

...does the experience of compassion toward one person measurably affect our actions and attitudes toward other people? If so, are there practical steps we can take to further cultivate this feeling? Recently, my colleagues and I conducted experiments that answered yes to both questions.

The links provided give the details of the experiments, here are the abstracts, first on the generalization of compassion:

The ability of compassion felt toward one person to reduce punishment directed at another was examined. The use of a staged interaction in which one individual cheats to earn higher compensation than others resulted in heightened third-party punishment being directed at the cheater. However, among participants who were induced to feel compassion toward a separate individual, punishment of the cheater disappeared even though the cheater clearly intended to cheat and showed no remorse for doing so. Moreover, additional analyses revealed that the reduction in punishment was directly mediated by the amount of compassion participants experienced toward the separate individual.

And second, on a technique to foster compassion:

Although evidence has suggested that synchronized movement can foster cooperation, the ability of synchrony to increase costly altruism and to operate as a function of emotional mechanisms remains unexplored. We predicted that synchrony, due to an ability to elicit low-level appraisals of similarity, would enhance a basic compassionate response toward victims of moral transgressions and thereby increase subsequent costly helping behavior on their behalf. Using a manipulation of rhythmic synchrony, we show that synchronous others are not only perceived to be more similar to oneself but also evoke more compassion and altruistic behavior than asynchronous others experiencing the same plight. These findings both support the view that a primary function of synchrony is to mark others as similar to the self and provide the first empirical demonstration that synchrony-induced affiliation modulates emotional responding and altruism.

Half a heartbeat can chill out our response to threat.

Whether we are breathing in or breathing out can have a pronounced effect on our threat detection threshold. Meditation regimes and stress performance training (as for Navy Seals) emphasize prolongation of exhalation as a calming technique. During exhalation, measurements have shown a relative increase in parasympathetic and vagal activity, a relative decrease in amygdala reactivity, and lower reactivity to possible threats. Now work of Garfinkel and colleagues, reported at the recent meeting on the Assoc. for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Brighton, U.K. (meeting abstracts here, 4.7 MB download) shows that the cardiac cycle can influence our emotional response to scary stimuli. Here is a clip from the writeup in The New Scientist:

In one experiment...people were asked to look at a stream of flashing images and highlight when they spotted a face. Some of the faces looked fearful, others looked neutral...Unbeknown to the volunteers, images were time-locked to appear in sync with their heart-beat. Sometimes the images were synced with the systole phase - the part of the cardiac cycle where the heart muscle contracts to squeeze blood out of the heart, at other times they were linked to the diastole phase - the stage where the heart relaxes and fills after contracting...people were better at spotting fearful faces compared with neutral faces, but only when the pictures were timed to appear at the systole phase.

In another study, people saw the same pictures while having their brain scanned using MRI. People had a stronger response in the hippocampus and amygdala - areas of the brain associated with fear - when they were shown fearful faces at systole than when they saw them at diastole. In other words, half a heartbeat was all it took for a person to experience a significantly different response to the same scary stimulus...The finding seems to be mediated by barorecepors - stretch and pressure sensitive receptors in the heart and surrounding arteries which help initiate systole. "When barroreceptors are activated at systole, a flurry of activity is transferred to the brain at that moment," Garfinkel says, which could explain the difference in the brain scans.

It is not at all clear whether this is a functional adaptation, but other studies show heartbeat can mediate other emotional functions, such as empathy and overt fear responses.

Why are conservatives happier?

The New York Times has had a nice chunk of commentary on explanations for why many studies show people of conservative political persuasion report themselves to be happier than liberals. The article by Arthur Brooks who (red flag for Deric) is president of the American Enterprise Institute notes several common explanations based on lifestyle (marriage, faith)

Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.

Some further clips from Brooks:

An explanation for the happiness gap more congenial to liberals is that conservatives are simply inattentive to the misery of others...conservatives do indeed see the free enterprise system in a sunnier light than liberals do, believing in each American’s ability to get ahead on the basis of achievement. Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help.

...one other noteworthy political happiness gap that has gotten less scholarly attention than conservatives versus liberals: moderates versus extremists...People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either “extremely conservative” (48 percent very happy) or “extremely liberal” (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center “moderate” (26 percent)...What explains this odd pattern? One possibility is that extremists have the whole world figured out, and sorted into good guys and bad guys. They have the security of knowing what’s wrong, and whom to fight. They are the happy warriors.

A followup in a "Letters to the Editor" piece contains a number of comments:

"Much research implies that happiness depends on brain chemistry (the pharmaceutical industry thinks so) and might, to some extent, be hard-wired. So maybe happiness makes us conservative, not vice versa...It’s logical that happy Americans would be suspicious of change: that they’d be conservative. And that unhappy Americans, wanting to feel happier, would prefer change: that they’d be liberal...Or maybe some unhappy Americans are unhappy because America is relatively conservative: that conservatism by some breeds unhappiness in others. The happiest countries (according to the World Happiness Report, Denmark, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands) are more liberal than America...Presumably, many people manage to be both happy and liberal, at least by our standards."

"I agree with Arthur C. Brooks that conservatives may be happier than liberals. A parallel may be found in the French society of the 18th century...Versailles and its gardens may testify to the splendor of life for the French aristocrats; similarly, the palaces in St. Petersburg may testify to the sense of well-being among the Russian nobility. This contentment could not have existed without some of the clergy encouraging the aristocrats to enjoy their status and not be concerned with the misery of the lower classes...We know how huge upheavals put an end to this obliviousness, but history is replete with lessons not learned."

"Arthur C. Brooks argues that conservatives are happier than liberals in part because of their emphasis on faith... But the emphasis on faith-based “knowledge” among some conservatives has led to an unwillingness to accept reality. Some deny evolution, or that global warming exists, or that bank misbehavior was a major cause of the Great Recession, and so on...The denial or ignorance of these depressing facts might well explain some of the conservative bliss."

"... “Don’t Indulge. Be Happy,” by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton (Sunday Review, July 8), tells us that once you have reached $75,000 a year, earning more doesn’t really make you happier...It may be that “conservatives are happier than liberals” because they are more likely to have reached that $75,000 income level."

MindBlog summer vacation schedule

I've decided to chill for a bit, relax from the daily postings, take a summer break. (Maybe this is influenced by the amazing heat wave and drought we are experiencing in the midwest. It saps energy and motivation.) So, if the spirit moves me to putter with a posting, I'll do it. If not, that's also OK...

Monday music offering. Faure Barcarolle No. 4

Here is the second of the two Faure Baracolles I did at a May 27 recital and recorded on July 5.

Religion replenishes self-control.

In four experiments Rounding et al. activate god-related concepts in participants without their conscious awareness, using an implicit-priming procedure that required participants to unscramble each of 10 five-word sentences by dropping an irrelevant word. Half of the sentences contained neutral words only ,and the remaining sentences contained one religious-prime word. A procedure like this evokes very little conscious awareness of the primed material, and participants who were suspicious of the primed material or who guessed the hypotheses of the study were excluded from the analyses. Next, participants engaged tasks that tested enduring discomfort, delayed gratification, or persistence with or without ego depletion. A forth condition used primes that were not religious, but suggested morality (such as righteous, virtue, or moral) or death (such as extinct, grave, or deadly). The researcher found religious priming most effective in increasing, or regenerating, self control. Here is their abstract:

Researchers have proposed that the emergence of religion was a cultural adaptation necessary for promoting self-control. Self-control, in turn, may serve as a psychological pillar supporting a myriad of adaptive psychological and behavioral tendencies. If this proposal is true, then subtle reminders of religious concepts should result in higher levels of self-control. In a series of four experiments, we consistently found that when religious themes were made implicitly salient, people exercised greater self-control, which, in turn, augmented their ability to make decisions in a number of behavioral domains that are theoretically relevant to both major religions and humans’ evolutionary success. Furthermore, when self-control resources were minimized, making it difficult for people to exercise restraint on future unrelated self-control tasks, we found that implicit reminders of religious concepts refueled people’s ability to exercise self-control. Moreover, compared with morality- or death-related concepts, religion had a unique influence on self-control.

Scary?..Google X making a digital human brain?

I have a major love/hate affair with google. This MindBlog uses google's blogger service, and so utterly depends on it, all my email addresses forward to my gmail account, I use it to synchronize all my calendar, documents, spreadsheets, and contacts, across multiple devices. I use google voice for phoning, google+ hangouts for video chats, etc. etc. Google's services have become such a prosthesis for me that I am quite helpless away from its Cloud. At the same time, I resist as many of the 'connectivity' efforts as much as I can. I emphatically do not want to know whether a friend is nearby, and don't want people following me. I think we are constantly flirting with the 'uncanny valley' effect, where what might be useful suddenly becomes very spooky.

In this vein, a recent article noting google's efforts to model the human brain made me both excited, interested, and terrified at the same time. Google's brain used an array of 16,000 processors to create a neural network with more than one billion connections, and presented it with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos. Without any instructions or labels, it learned to detect faces, human bodies, and cats! This suggests that the human brain, which has at least a million times more connections than this model, could learn significant classes of stimuli with minimum genetic nudging other than instructions for making nerves cells whose connections can be shaped by the sensory input received. 

Here is the abstract from Le et al.(PDF here):

We consider the problem of building high-level, class-specific feature detectors from only unlabeled data. For example, s it possible to learn a face detector using only unlabeled images? To answer this, we train a 9- layered locally connected sparse autoencoder with pooling and local contrast normalization on a large dataset of images (the model has 1 billion connections, the dataset has 10 million 200x200 pixel images downloaded from the Internet). We train this network using model parallelism and asynchronous SGD on a cluster with 1,000 machines (16,000 cores) for three days. Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not. Control experiments show that this feature detector is robust not only to translation but also to scaling and out-of-plane rotation. We also found that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies. Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8% accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories from ImageNet, a leap of 70% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.

Thinking in a foreign language reduces decision biases.

From Keyser et al.:

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

'Crazy busy' and internet distractions...

I wanted to pass on two recent NYTimes pieces: Tim Kreider makes the point that the 'busy' trap that many people drive themselves into the ground with is entirely a matter of their own choice:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day...More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done...Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

Jenna Wortham notes her experience that taking breaks to aimlessly wander around the Web during focused assignments seemed to make her more efficient. She then notes research asking whether the plasticity of our brains might be allow us to adapt to multi-tasking:

...consensus among scientists and researchers is that trying to juggle many tasks fractures our thinking and degrades the quality of each action. But understanding the plasticity of the brain, or its ability to adapt and reorganize its pathways, is still in its early stages...It may be that the brain — or some brains — can handle certain levels of multitasking and not others, he said. Surfing the Web and talking on the phone may not place the same demand on available cognitive resources as, say, cruising down the highway and sending a text message. It’s an area of research that scientists and psychologists are just starting to explore...if abilities can actually improve, the question is, by how much?

A Faure Barcarolle

I pass on this recording I made a few days ago of the Faure Barcarolle (Gondolier's song) No. 2. It is a piece I did at a May 27 musical at my home that I have mentioned earlier.

Metarepresentations explain human uniqueness.

I pass along this essay by Hugo Mercier:

Humans alone fluently understand the mental states of others. Humans alone rely on an open-ended system of communication. Humans alone ponder the reasons for their beliefs. For each of these feats, and for others too, humans rely on their most special gift: the ability to represent representations—the ability to form metarepresentations. Hidden behind such mundane thoughts as "Mary believes that Paul believes that it's going to rain" is the explanation of human uniqueness.

There are two ways to represent representations: one immensely powerful, the other rather clumsy. The clumsy way is to create a new representation for every representation that needs to be represented. Using such a device, Mary would have to form a representation "Paul believes that it's going to rain" completely independent of her representation "it's going to rain." She would then have to learn anew all of the inferences that can be drawn from "Paul believe it's going to rain," such as the negative impact on the willingness to go for a jog or the increased probability to fetch an umbrella. This cumbersome process would have to be repeated for each new representation that Mary wishes to attribute, from "Peter things the weather looks lovely" to "Ruth is afraid that the Dow Jones is going to crash tomorrow." Such a process could not possibly account for humans' amazing abilities to attribute just about any thought to other people. How can we account for these skills then?

The explanation is that we use our own representations to attribute thoughts to others. When Mary wants to attribute to Paul the belief "it's going to rain," she 'simply' uses her representation "it's going to rain" and embeds it in a metarepresentation: "Paul thinks "it's going to rain."" Because the same representation is used, Mary can take advantage of the inferences that she could draw from "it's going to rain" to draw inferences from "Paul believes that "it's going to rain."" This trick opened for humans the doors to an unparalleled understanding of their social environment.

Most of the beliefs we form about others are derived from communication: people keep telling us what they believe, want, desire, fear, love… Here again, metarepresentations play a crucial role, since understanding language requires going from utterances—"It's going to rain"—to metarepresentations—"Paul means that "it will soon rain here.""

Mentalizing (attributing thoughts to others) and communicating are the most well known uses of metarepresentations, but they are not the only ones. Metarepresentations are also essential for people to be able to think about reasons. Specific metarepresentations are relied on when people produce and evaluate arguments, as in: "Mary thinks "it's going to rain" is a good argument for "we should not go out."" Again, Mary uses her representation "it's going to rain" but, instead of attributing it to someone else, she represents its strength as a reason to accept a given conclusion.

Several other properties of representations can be represented, from their esthetic value to their normative status. The representational richness made possible by recycling our own representations to represent other people's representations, or to represent other attributes of representations, is our most distinctive trait, one of these amazingly brilliant solutions that natural selection stumbles upon. However, if it is indeed much simpler to rely on this type of metarepresentations than on the cumbersome solution of creating new representations from scratch every time, we still face a complex computational task.

Using the example of mentalizing, it is apparent that even when we use our own representations to attribute representations to other people, a lot of work remains to be done. It cannot be metarepresentations all the way down: at some point, other inputs—linguistic or behavioral cues—have to be used to attribute representations. Moreover, when a representation is represented not all of the inferences that can be drawn from it are relevant. When Mary believes that John believes it's going to rain, some of the inferences that she would draw from "it's going to rain" may not be attributable to John—maybe he doesn't mind jogging in the rain for instance. Other inferences Mary may not spontaneously draw—maybe John will be worried because he has left his book outside. Still, without a baseline—Mary's own representation—the task would jump from merely difficult to utterly intractable.

Probably more than any other cognitive trait, the ability to use our own representations to represent representations is what explains humans' achievements. Without this skill, the complex forms of social cognition that characterize our species would have been all but impossible. It is also critical for us psychologists to understand these ideas if we want to continue our forays into human cognition.

I leave the last word to Dan Sperber who, more than any other cognitive scientists, has made of metarepresentations the most central explanation of humans' unique cognition: "Humans have the ability to represent representations. I would argue that this meta-representational ability is as distinctive of humans, and as important in understanding their behaviour, as is echolocation for bats."

Mechanisms of white matter changes induced by meditation.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a noninvasive MRI-based technique that can delineate white matter fibers in vivo, measure white matter’s structural plasticity to demonstrate that training or learning alters brain white matter. Fractional anisotropy (FA) is an important index for measuring the integrity of white matter fibers. In general, a higher FA value has been related to improved performance, and reduced FA has been found in normal aging and in neurological or psychiatric disorders. Posner and collaborators now show more details about changes that occur with only 4 weeks of meditation training (One suspects these changes might reverse after cessation of meditation practice?):

Using diffusion tensor imaging, several recent studies have shown that training results in changes in white matter efficiency as measured by fractional anisotropy (FA). In our work, we found that a form of mindfulness meditation, integrative body–mind training (IBMT), improved FA in areas surrounding the anterior cingulate cortex after 4-wk training more than controls given relaxation training. Reductions in radial diffusivity (RD) have been interpreted as improved myelin but reductions in axial diffusivity (AD) involve other mechanisms, such as axonal density. We now report that after 4-wk training with IBMT, both RD and AD decrease accompanied by increased FA, indicating improved efficiency of white matter involves increased myelin as well as other axonal changes. However, 2-wk IBMT reduced AD, but not RD or FA, and improved moods. Our results demonstrate the time-course of white matter neuroplasticity in short-term meditation. This dynamic pattern of white matter change involving the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain network related to self-regulation, could provide a means for intervention to improve or prevent mental disorders.

Here is their description of the integrative body-mind training (IBMT) used:

IBMT involves body relaxation, mental imagery, and mindfulness training, accompanied by selected music background. Cooperation between the body and the mind is emphasized in facilitating and achieving a meditative state. The trainees concentrated on achieving a balanced state of body and mind guided by an IBMT coach and the compact disk. The method stresses no effort to control thoughts, but instead a state of restful alertness that allows a high degree of awareness of body, mind, and external instructions (5, 16, 19). RT involves the relaxing of different muscle groups over the face, head, shoulders, arms, legs, chest, back, and abdomen, guided by a tutor and compact disk. With eyes closed and in a sequential pattern, one is forced to concentrate on the sensation of relaxation, such as the feelings of warmth and heaviness. This progressive training helps the participant achieve physical and mental relaxation and calmness.

Hierarchy increases group effectiveness.

From Ronay et al.:

Two experiments examined the psychological and biological antecedents of hierarchical differentiation and the resulting consequences for productivity and conflict within small groups. In Experiment 1, which used a priming manipulation, hierarchically differentiated groups (i.e., groups comprising 1 high-power-primed, 1 low-power-primed, and 1 baseline individual) performed better on a procedurally interdependent task than did groups comprising exclusively either all high-power-primed or all low-power-primed individuals. There were no effects of hierarchical differentiation on performance on a procedurally independent task. Experiment 2 used a biological marker of dominance motivation (prenatal testosterone exposure as measured by a digit-length ratio) to manipulate hierarchical differentiation. The pattern of results from Experiment 1 was replicated; mixed-testosterone groups achieved greater productivity than did groups comprising all high-testosterone or all low-testosterone individuals. Furthermore, intragroup conflict mediated the productivity decrements for the high-testosterone but not the low-testosterone groups. This research suggests possible directions for future research and the need to further delineate the conditions and types of hierarchy under which hierarchical differentiation enhances rather than undermines group effectiveness.

Connectivity of prefrontal cortex predicts cognitive control and intelligence

From Cole et al.:

Control of thought and behavior is fundamental to human intelligence. Evidence suggests a frontoparietal brain network implements such cognitive control across diverse contexts. We identify a mechanism—global connectivity—by which components of this network might coordinate control of other networks. A lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) region's activity was found to predict performance in a high control demand working memory task and also to exhibit high global connectivity. Critically, global connectivity in this LPFC region, involving connections both within and outside the frontoparietal network, showed a highly selective relationship with individual differences in fluid intelligence. These findings suggest LPFC is a global hub with a brainwide influence that facilitates the ability to implement control processes central to human intelligence.

Figure - Cognitive control regions, as defined by successful cognitive control. A, Regions of Interest (ROIs) were defined based on brain activity during successful N-back task performance. The following highly selective criteria were used: preferential activation for trials requiring flexible control (lures), correct > incorrect trials, positive correlation with accuracy across participants. All 3 of these regions were hubs (in top 10% connectivity in the brain).

Hygiene can hurt.

I pass on this summary from the Editor's choice section of Science, follwed by the abstract of the work mentioned. It describes further work on how failure to interact with natural environments during childhood can lead to later chronic inflammatory disorders. Also, relevant to this topic is a recent Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes called "Dirtying Up Our Diets.", and this further piece discusses our human microbiome.

As human societies urbanize, chronic inflammatory disorders become more apparent. The hygiene hypothesis suggests that individuals exposed to infection in childhood are less likely to develop inflammatory disease because exposure to microorganisms is important for stimulating responses that maintain epithelial cell integrity. Hence, in urban environments, reduced contact with the full diversity of the microbial world may be leading to the increased incidence of inflammatory disorders. Hanski et al. took a random sample of 118 adolescents from towns, villages, and isolated dwellings in eastern Finland, tested their immune function and allergic responses, surveyed their skin microflora, and investigated the biodiversity within their homes. They found several significant correlations, not least that low biodiversity was surprisingly strongly associated with atopy, and concluded that humans need to interact with natural environments for their physical health, not just for their peace of mind.

Here is the Hanski et al. abstract:

Rapidly declining biodiversity may be a contributing factor to another global megatrend—the rapidly increasing prevalence of allergies and other chronic inflammatory diseases among urban populations worldwide. According to the “biodiversity hypothesis,” reduced contact of people with natural environmental features and biodiversity may adversely affect the human commensal microbiota and its immunomodulatory capacity. Analyzing atopic sensitization (i.e., allergic disposition) in a random sample of adolescents living in a heterogeneous region of 100 × 150 km, we show that environmental biodiversity in the surroundings of the study subjects’ homes influenced the composition of the bacterial classes on their skin. Compared with healthy individuals, atopic individuals had lower environmental biodiversity in the surroundings of their homes and significantly lower generic diversity of gammaproteobacteria on their skin. The functional role of the Gram-negative gammaproteobacteria is supported by in vitro measurements of expression of IL-10, a key anti-inflammatory cytokine in immunologic tolerance, in peripheral blood mononuclear cells. In healthy, but not in atopic, individuals, IL-10 expression was positively correlated with the abundance of the gammaproteobacterial genus Acinetobacter on the skin. These results raise fundamental questions about the consequences of biodiversity loss for both allergic conditions and public health in general.

Life satisfaction and economic growth.

Richard Easterlin coauthored a seminal study in 1974 that attempted to explain why the happiness score in the United Sates and elsewhere had stayed constant while per capita income had gone up. His explanation was that economic growth has a positive effect on happiness with other things being equal; however, it also raises aspirations, and aspirations have a negative effect. Aspirations are determined by society, particularly reference group income. The combination of these two effects gives rise to a Hedonic Treadmill.

He now has coauthored a study on China, an excellent setting for investigating the relationship between economic growth and life satisfaction. Over the period of economic reform, starting in 1978, income per capita rose 10-fold, China’s Human Development Index score improved impressively in all three dimensions, and through its steady, evolutionary reforms, China avoided the hardship that would have accompanied an economic revolution. Surely the Chinese people became happier as a result?

On the contrary, his latest results bear some erie similarities to the unequal effects of our current economic downturn on low versus higher income citizens:

Despite its unprecedented growth in output per capita in the last two decades, China has essentially followed the life satisfaction trajectory of the central and eastern European transition countries—a U-shaped swing and a nil or declining trend. There is no evidence of an increase in life satisfaction of the magnitude that might have been expected to result from the fourfold improvement in the level of per capita consumption that has occurred. As in the European countries, in China the trend and U-shaped pattern appear to be related to a pronounced rise in unemployment followed by a mild decline, and an accompanying dissolution of the social safety net along with growing income inequality. The burden of worsening life satisfaction in China has fallen chiefly on the lowest socioeconomic groups. An initially highly egalitarian distribution of life satisfaction has been replaced by an increasingly unequal one, with decreasing life satisfaction in persons in the bottom third of the income distribution and increasing life satisfaction in those in the top third.

Synchronized brain activity across individuals during emotional arousal.

From Nummenmaa et al.:

Sharing others’ emotional states may facilitate understanding their intentions and actions. Here we show that networks of brain areas “tick together” in participants who are viewing similar emotional events in a movie. Participants’ brain activity was measured with functional MRI while they watched movies depicting unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant emotions. After scanning, participants watched the movies again and continuously rated their experience of pleasantness–unpleasantness (i.e., valence) and of arousal–calmness. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to derive multisubject voxelwise similarity measures [intersubject correlations (ISCs)] of functional MRI data. Valence and arousal time series were used to predict the moment-to-moment ISCs computed using a 17-s moving average. During movie viewing, participants' brain activity was synchronized in lower- and higher-order sensory areas and in corticolimbic emotion circuits. Negative valence was associated with increased ISC in the emotion-processing network (thalamus, ventral striatum, insula) and in the default-mode network (precuneus, temporoparietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal sulcus). High arousal was associated with increased ISC in the somatosensory cortices and visual and dorsal attention networks comprising the visual cortex, bilateral intraparietal sulci, and frontal eye fields. Seed-voxel–based correlation analysis confirmed that these sets of regions constitute dissociable, functional networks. We propose that negative valence synchronizes individuals’ brain areas supporting emotional sensations and understanding of another’s actions, whereas high arousal directs individuals’ attention to similar features of the environment. By enhancing the synchrony of brain activity across individuals, emotions may promote social interaction and facilitate interpersonal understanding.

Cumulative life stress decreases working memory and prefrontal cortex size.

Two of my colleagues here at the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson and Seth Pollack, have collaborated with others in a sobering study that demonstrates brain changes caused by childhood stress:

A large corpus of research indicates that exposure to stress impairs cognitive abilities, specifically executive functioning dependent on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). We collected structural MRI scans (n = 61), well-validated assessments of executive functioning, and detailed interviews assessing stress exposure in humans to examine whether cumulative life stress affected brain morphometry and one type of executive functioning, spatial working memory, during adolescence—a critical time of brain development and reorganization. Analysis of variations in brain structure revealed that cumulative life stress and spatial working memory were related to smaller volumes in the PFC, specifically prefrontal gray and white matter between the anterior cingulate and the frontal poles. Mediation analyses revealed that individual differences in prefrontal volumes accounted for the association between cumulative life stress and spatial working memory. These results suggest that structural changes in the PFC may serve as a mediating mechanism through which greater cumulative life stress engenders decrements in cognitive functioning.

A study in the same vein on rhesus monkeys also notes late life heath effects of early adversity:

This paper exploits a unique ongoing experiment to analyze the effects of early rearing conditions on physical and mental health in a sample of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). We analyze the health records of 231 monkeys that were randomly allocated at birth across three rearing conditions: mother rearing, peer rearing, and surrogate peer rearing. We show that the lack of a secure attachment relationship in the early years engendered by adverse rearing conditions has detrimental long-term effects on health that are not compensated for by a normal social environment later in life.

Finding genes that affect brain integrity and intellectual performance

Chiang et al. have looked at brain images of 472 twins and their non-twin siblings to observe gene network effects on brain microstructure and intellectual performance:

A major challenge in neuroscience is finding which genes affect brain integrity, connectivity, and intellectual function. Discovering influential genes holds vast promise for neuroscience, but typical genome-wide searches assess approximately one million genetic variants one-by-one, leading to intractable false positive rates, even with vast samples of subjects. Even more intractable is the question of which genes interact and how they work together to affect brain connectivity. Here, we report a novel approach that discovers which genes contribute to brain wiring and fiber integrity at all pairs of points in a brain scan. We studied genetic correlations between thousands of points in human brain images from 472 twins and their nontwin siblings (mean age: 23.7 ± 2.1 SD years; 193 male/279 female). We combined clustering with genome-wide scanning to find brain systems with common genetic determination. We then filtered the image in a new way to boost power to find causal genes. Using network analysis, we found a network of genes that affect brain wiring in healthy young adults. Our new strategy makes it computationally more tractable to discover genes that affect brain integrity. The gene network showed small-world and scale-free topologies, suggesting efficiency in genetic interactions and resilience to network disruption. Genetic variants at hubs of the network influence intellectual performance by modulating associations between performance intelligence quotient and the integrity of major white matter tracts, such as the callosal genu and splenium, cingulum, optic radiations, and the superior longitudinal fasciculus.

Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking.

Being a bit curmudgeonly about the whole Happiness industry, and having once been a contrarian guest on a west coast happiness radio program (whose message was to laugh and be positive ALL the time), I thought I should mention a nice book “The Antidote”, by Oliver Burkeman, on embracing uncertainty and rediscovering the power of negative thinking. He offers this animated trailer:

How depressives surf the web.

A brief piece with the title of this post recently appeared in the NYTimes, and is an example of annoying phenomenon: advertising by advance announcement in popular media with reference made to a "forthcoming" article. The points raised are interesting enough that the reader deserves access to what might be more thorough analysis and discussion. I'm thinking the correlations indicated might be quite spurious. For what it is worth, in a study involving the usual gaggle of undergraduate volunteers, the authors claim to have:

...identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression. In other words, we found a trend: in general, the more a participant’s score on the survey indicated depression, the more his or her Internet usage included these (rather technical-sounding) features — for instance, “p2p packets,” which indicate high levels of sharing files (like movies and music).

Our second major discovery was that there were patterns of Internet usage that were statistically high among participants with depressive symptoms compared with those without symptoms. That is, we found indicators: styles of Internet behavior that were signs of depressive people. For example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high e-mail usage. This perhaps was to be expected: research by the psychologists Janet Morahan-Martin and Phyllis Schumacher has shown that frequent checking of e-mail may relate to high levels of anxiety, which itself correlates with depressive symptoms.

Another example: the Internet usage of depressive people tended to exhibit high “flow duration entropy” — which often occurs when there is frequent switching among Internet applications like e-mail, chat rooms and games. This may indicate difficulty concentrating. This finding, too, is consistent with the psychological literature: according to the National Institute of Mental Health, difficulty concentrating is also a sign of depressive symptoms among students... OTHER characteristic features of “depressive” Internet behavior included increased amounts of video watching, gaming and chatting.

Highjacked brain fallacy, and free will illusion going mainstream.

In a series of previous posts on MindBlog I have enjoyed following the continuing back and forth over free will and neuroscience,and my own sentiments are clearly revealed in my introductory web/lecture listed in the column to your left ("The I Illusion"). A raft of books on this subject has recently appeared, an example being Eagleman's "Incognito: Secret Lives of the Brain" as well as several mentioned in a recent Huffington Post essay by Victor Strenger. An interesting variation on the free will question is provided by O'Connor's discussion of a popular analogy that clouds our discussion of addiction, i.e. the portrayal of addition as a disease (not subject to our willful control, thus not the responsibility of the victim) rather than a choice.

In the “hijacked” view of addiction, the brain is the innocent victim of certain substances — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine or heroin, for example — as well as certain behaviors like eating, gambling or sexual activity...drugs like alcohol and cocaine and behaviors like gambling light up the brain’s pleasure circuitry, often bringing a burst of euphoria. Other studies indicate that people who are addicted have lower dopamine and serotonin levels in their brains, which means that it takes more of a particular substance or behavior for them to experience pleasure or to reach a certain threshold of pleasure.

However,

"A hijacker comes from outside and takes control by violent means. A hijacker takes a vehicle that is not his; hijacking is always a form of stealing and kidnapping...The analogy of addiction and hijacking involves the same category mistake as the money switched from hand to hand...It might be tempting to claim that in an addiction scenario, the drugs or behaviors are the hijackers. However, those drugs and behaviors need to be done by the person herself...In the usual cases, an individual is the one putting chemicals into her body or engaging in certain behaviors in the hopes of getting high...There is a kind of intentionality to hijacking that clearly is absent in addiction...Addiction develops over time and requires repeated and worsening use...If we think, however, of addiction as involving both choice and disease, our outlook is likely to become more nuanced.

Linking choice and responsibility is right in many ways, so long as we acknowledge that choice can be constrained in ways other than by force or overt coercion. There is no doubt that the choices of people progressing to addiction are constrained; compulsion and impulsiveness constrain choices. Many addicts will say that they choose to take that first drink or drug and that once they start they cannot stop. A classic binge drinker is a prime example; his choices are constrained with the first drink. He both has and does not have a choice. (That moment before the first drink or drug is what the philosopher Owen Flanagan describes as a “zone of control.”) But he still bears some degree of responsibility to others and to himself...Addicts are neither hijackers nor victims. It is time to retire this analogy.

Exercise bad for you?

My almost religious devotion to exercise has been slightly nudged by this piece by Gina Kolata pointing to a study by Bouchard et al., who do a rather thorough exercise study involving 1,687 people to find that

...about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease: blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterol or triglycerides....But counterbalancing the 10 percent who got worse were about the same proportion who had an exaggeratedly good response on at least one measure. Others had responses ranging from little or no change up to big changes, seen in about 10 percent, where risk factor measurements improved anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent.

The burdens of being a biped

Given my current preoccupation with my failing 70 year old knee joints, I was drawn to a brief piece by Elizabeth Pennisi with the title of this post.  Here I give a summary graphic and a few clips of her discussion:

...a number of musculoskeletal issues are traceable to our past, in particular to the switch to walking upright more than 7 million years ago…Shifting from a four-legged support system to a two-legged one put extra stress on the legs and vertebrae. Adaptations in the feet, knees, hips, pelvis, and spine accommodate these forces, but at a cost…vertebrae that break more easily, weaker bones, and feet prone to heel spurs and sprained ankles…A brief tour of the body reveals a number of design flaws, the legacy of our past…

Spine. Back pain is the leading health complaint in the United States. In dogs, horses, and even chimpanzees, the backbone is a series of vertebrae neatly stacked and evenly spaced to form a relatively stiff, gently curving beam…the human spine… is highly flexible and can even bend backward..this flexibility creates wear and tear on joint surfaces and predisposes us to osteoarthritis…One type of break, called spondylolysis, affects about 6% of the U.S. population and is a leading cause of lower-back pain in teenage athletes. In this condition, the neural arch - a triangle of bone that surrounds the spinal cord - detaches from the rest of its vertebra, allowing the spine to slip forward relative to the back of the pelvis, pinching nerves and causing pain…the problem lies in inadequate spacing between the joints connecting the vertebrae.

Feet. To cope with the added load on just two feet, the foot evolved a shock-absorbing arch by bringing what was a grasping big toe into line with the other toes. When that arch fails to form fully, as in people with flat feet, fatigue fractures can result.

Fragile bones. The added load on two feet also caused knee and hip joints to expand, creating more surface area to absorb foot-fall forces. But the joints—and vertebrae as well—evolved to be bigger by enlarging the spongy, inner bone and thinning the hard, outer bone. As a result, human bones are less dense than those of other primates. Bone...loses mass during adulthood. With humans having ever longer life spans, bones, particularly vertebrae, may become fragile and break spontaneously.

Bipedality leaves its mark in other parts of our bodies, too, for example in the difficulty of childbirth and in our vulnerability to rotator cuff injuries of the shoulder. loses mass during adulthood. With humans having ever longer life spans, bones, particularly vertebrae, may become fragile and break spontaneously.

A musical offering.

As has been my custom, I post on this blog piano video-recordings that I have recently made, this being the Chopin Nocturne in C# Minor that I played at a house concert on May 27, and subsequently recorded on June 10.

Skin Pics

One frequently comes across amazing images in cell biology. This time I felt like passing some on to readers.

The science of gaydar

Yet another study suggesting that we have an ability (if not a proficiency) to correctly judge the sexual orientation of others about 60% of the time, significantly great than chance. This piece in the New York Times points to work by Tabak and Zayas:

Research has shown that people are able to judge sexual orientation from faces with above-chance accuracy, but little is known about how these judgments are formed. Here, we investigated the importance of well-established face processing mechanisms in such judgments: featural processing (e.g., an eye) and configural processing (e.g., spatial distance between eyes). Participants judged sexual orientation from faces presented for 50 milliseconds either upright, which recruits both configural and featural processing, or upside-down, when configural processing is strongly impaired and featural processing remains relatively intact. Although participants judged women’s and men’s sexual orientation with above-chance accuracy for upright faces and for upside-down faces, accuracy for upside-down faces was significantly reduced. The reduced judgment accuracy for upside-down faces indicates that configural face processing significantly contributes to accurate snap judgments of sexual orientation.

Brain correlates of resting, alert, and meditation states.

Posner and colleagues do a nice review of neural correlates of establishing, maintaining, and switching brain states.  I thought I would pass on a few chunks from their article describing the alert state and the meditation state:

The three brain states are compared in Table 1.

The meditation state differs from the alert state induced by a warning signal in several crucial ways. First, the alert state can be induced by the simple instruction to expect a target, without requiring any practice, whereas the meditation state requires specific instruction and practice. Second, the alert state requires an external target, whereas the meditation state may not involve a target event. Third, the alert state involves primarily the neuromodulator NE, whereas dopamine (DA) has often been shown to be important to the meditation state. Finally, the alert state involves a reduction in ACC activity, likely in order to keep the mind clear to perceive and respond quickly to the target. The meditation state, however, shows increased ACC activity that serves to regulate mind wandering. As mentioned previously, Five days of integrative mind-body training (IBMT) increases brain activity in the ACC, insula, and striatum. One month of IBMT improves white matter connectivity between the ACC, striatum, and other regions. Based on these results and related work, we propose the insula, ACC, and stiatum (IAS) as key neural correlates of changing brain states (Figure 2).

Because of its role in attention and self-regulation, we hypothesize that the ACC is involved in maintaining a state by reducing conflict with other states; the insula serves a primary role in switching between states, and the striatum is linked to the reward experience and formation of habits needed to make maintenance easier. The insula and ACC work together to support the role of the autonomic nervous system in maintaining the meditation state.

Your great grandparent's experience might have altered your stress response.

This fascinating nugget from Crews et a. (open access) adds to accumulating evidence on the importance of experience induced modification of our genomes that can be passed between generations. (The experiments are on mice, because obviously you don't do this kind of study directly on humans.)

Ancestral environmental exposures have previously been shown to promote epigenetic transgenerational inheritance and influence all aspects of an individual’s life history. In addition, proximate life events such as chronic stress have documented effects on the development of physiological, neural, and behavioral phenotypes in adulthood. We used a systems biology approach to investigate in male rats the interaction of the ancestral modifications carried transgenerationally in the germ line and the proximate modifications involving chronic restraint stress during adolescence. We find that a single exposure to a common-use fungicide (vinclozolin) three generations removed alters the physiology, behavior, metabolic activity, and transcriptome in discrete brain nuclei in descendant males, causing them to respond differently to chronic restraint stress. This alteration of baseline brain development promotes a change in neural genomic activity that correlates with changes in physiology and behavior, revealing the interaction of genetics, environment, and epigenetic transgenerational inheritance in the shaping of the adult phenotype. This is an important demonstration in an animal that ancestral exposure to an environmental compound modifies how descendants of these progenitor individuals perceive and respond to a stress challenge experienced during their own life history.