by ScienceBlog
February 18, 2009 in Blogs, Developing Intelligence by ScienceBlog
tags: lichens , symbiosis , nature , image of the day Lichens. Image: Biosparite, 2009 [ larger view ]. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
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Symbiosis [Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)]
February 15, 2009 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today
Human beings carry with them a cognitive toolset that allows them to plan, compare, and contrast. It is both useful and horrifying. We need to use it – but we also need to learn to rein it in. Unless we learn to rein it in, peace of mind, wholeness, and happiness are elusive. On this day following Valentine’s Day we should add that unless we learn to rein it in, we cannot love, except by accident (as we say, by "falling" in love). Let me ask a weird question. If George is smaller than Fred, but Sam is bigger than Fred, who is biggest? George or Sam? Any school child can arrive at the right answer. Two relations were combined to get there – between George and Fred, and Fred and Sam. Each is literally untrue, of course. The word "George" is not smaller than the word "Fred," for example. But we let the words "stand for" things and then we work out the little network of relations in the abstract world of our own minds. Relating symbols is part of how we imagine futures that have never been. We might imagine "it would be better to plant the seeds in this way … so we will have more food in the winter" even though we’ve never actually planted them that way. That is useful. But with the same skills we can imagine "despite all my successes I am a failure." If George can be smaller than Sam for no particular reason, then the same applies to acheivment and failure. No matter how successful, how handsome or beautiful, or how much loved, it is possible for us to be a total and absolute failure inside our own minds if we buy into the thinking that takes us there. That is horrifying. These cognitive tools we use to solve problems can create an imaginary universe in which we are the problem. Our histories contain pain, rejection, and betrayal. All of us. That can so easily now become a "problem" and yet our histories will never leave us. The "problem" is not solvable inside the mode of mind that created it. We can compare ourselves to an ideal and discover that we are wanting. That too is now a problem. Yet we will never be ideal. And right after Valentine’s Day it is worth noting how these same skills can be applied to the people we love, who (surprise, surprise) are not reacting precisely as we would want. They are also now a problem. These sweet, loving, amazing creatures who walk through life with us will never be the perfection our problem solving mode of mind can demand. In our work in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) we help people learn to be more flexible – to use a problem-solving mode of mind when we need it but without allowing it mindlessly to drain us of the vitality we contain. The acceptance, defusion, and mindfulness methods needed to be flexible in that way are powerful – we know that as a scientific fact. You can learn them now from many ACT books including my own, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life . But it is helpful to get an even more immediate sense of what is possible. Imagine a sunset that you look on with profound appreciation. It is unique. There is not another such sunset on the planet. Wow. When looking at a sunset we can experience simple appreciation. All of us could go back into a problem-solving mode of mind of course, as if it was important that there should be a little more pink here or a little more blue there. But we do not, or at least not normally. It would violate the beauty of the moment and we sense that. Instead we appreciate. A sunset mode of mind is transformational. It is every bit as powerful as a problem solving mode of mind. And just as a problem-solving mode of mind is available every conscious moment, so too is a sunset mode of mind. What would your marriage look like if you looked at your spouse as you would a sunset? What would your friends look like? What would your own history look like? What would that scared or sad little kid inside look like? Several days ago I was at a party celebrating a successful doctoral defense. There was speech after speech about the much-loved new doctor. Finally his mother stood up and explained that she had never in her whole life spoke in front of a group. Never. Not once. It was far too frightening. But in honor of her son she proceeded to give one of the most loving and moving speeches anyone had ever heard. When she finished every one of the 200 eyes in the room was wet. The love in the moment was tangible. It was like whipped cream you could gobble down in gulps without feeling full. It was wonderful. I would bet a thousand dollars not a single person sat back and focused on a thought like "what is wrong with her that she has been so afraid?" Such judgmental thoughts, if they occurred, were allowed to drift by because they were so irrelevant in the face of the beautiful sunset of a mother’s profound love for her child. Fear did not matter. Such is the power of a sunset mode of mind. On this day after Valentine’s Day is worth taking just a moment to appreciate those we love. I do not mean to evaluate them as being wonderful. I mean simply to appreciate their wholeness and humanity, beyond any judgment. Full of pinks and blues, each of our loved ones is a sunset, if we but see them for who they really are. Take a moment and look with wonder. You problem solving mode of mind may object but your sunset mode of mind can see what else is true. Wow. Happy Valentine’s Day. – S Steven C. Hayes University of Nevada (and thanks to my colleague Kelly Wilson for the sunset metaphor) © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.
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A Sunset Mode of Mind
February 11, 2009 in Blogs, Cognitive Daily by Cognitive Daily
How do you decide how dangerous a sex-offender is? Certainly all cases of sexual assault are appalling, but clearly some incidents are worse than others. In some places, teenagers who photograph themselves naked and send the pictures to their friends can be prosecuted as purveyors of child-pornography. While we may want to intervene in these cases, surely the action shouldn’t be as drastic as when we’re dealing with an adult who’s a serial child rapist. There are miles of gray area between these two extremes, and psychologists are often called on to make the tough judgment of how dangerous a individual might be. One common test is to attach a monitor to the offender’s penis and then show them images of children and adults. In principle, true pedophiles will be more aroused by the children’s pictures. But a convict applying for parole has a good reason to try to fake his response, and some people are inevitably misclassified, with potentially disastrous results. Other methods, such as the Implicit Association Test, have also been tried, but these are also potentially subject to manipulation. So a team led by Anthony Beech decided to see if a different test could be used: The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation test, or RSVP. As we discussed on Monday, in an RSVP test, a distracting word or image is presented in a series of similar displays. If the viewer’s attention is attracted by the distractor, he or she is more likely to miss a later image. As an example I’ve modified Monday’s task. Can you spot the words naming a color (like blue, red, or green)? Ignore all the other words. Click here to view the movie (QuickTime required) Instead of words, Beech’s team used photographs. They recruited convicted child molesters and other non-sex-related felons (from British prisons) to volunteer for their test. The volunteers were looking for four types of pictures: children or animals (the distractors), and chairs or trains (the targets). The rest of the pictures were neutral scenes or objects. The photos flashed by at a rate of ten per second, in sets of 11. At a random point one of the distractors would appear, just like in the example above. Two to three images later, the target appeared. Then respondents had to say what the distractor was, what the target was, and which direction the target was facing (left or right). Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
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Child molesters and attentional blink
February 9, 2009 in Blogs, Cognitive Daily by Cognitive Daily
One of stand-up comic George Carlin’s most famous routines was the seven words you can’t say on TV (obviously, not safe for work). He repeated the words over and over, and it was hilarious — especially back in the days before most people had cable. These days we’ve become desensitized to those words, and it’s hardly surprising any more to see them laced into casual conversation. Or is it? One test of our ability to ignore words is rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP. In RSVP, you’re shown a rapid sequence of words or images — one about every tenth of a second. Your job is to pick out a particular type of word from the sequence — colors, for example. I’ve made a quick movie to illustrate how it works. Watch carefully as the words flash by. This movie has three separate sequences, each preceded by the text “Ready.” Your job is to pick out the names of colors (brown, purple, yellow, and so on) from the sequence. One color will flash somewhere in the middle of each sequence, for a total of three colors named. Ignore all the other words. Click here to view the movie (QuickTime required) Did you spot all three colors? Make a note of the colors you spotted (even if it’s less than three); I’ll give the correct answer later in this post. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
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The words you can’t ignore, even if you only see them for 1/10 of a second
February 5, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour
When Sir Francis Galton first described the “peculiar habit of mind” we now call synaesthesia , he noted that it often runs in families. Modern techniques have confirmed that the condition does indeed have a strong genetic component – more than 40% of synaesthetes have a first-degree relative – a parent, sibling or offspring – who also has synaesthesia, and families often contain multiple synaesthetes. Synaesthesia is known to affect females more than males, and although the female predominance of the condition is now known to have been exaggerated, the condition is presumed to be linked to the X chromosome. A number of genetic studies also support the theory that a single gene is responsible for synaesthesia, and that it is inherited in a dominant manner (in other words, just one copy of the gene, inherited from either parent, is sufficient to cause it). Researchers from the University of Oxford have now conducted the first genome-wide search for genes linked to the condition. In the American Journal of Human Genetics , they report the identification of a number of genes that are likely to be involved in auditory-visual synaesthesia, in which sounds are perceived as colours. The study reveals also that synaesthesia is not X-linked, and that the genetics of this form of synaesthesia – and probably that of other forms – is far more complex than previously thought. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
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The genetics of synaesthesia [Neurophilosophy]
February 3, 2009 in Blogs, Cognitive Daily by Cognitive Daily
You may have heard of the Stroop effect, and you may have even seen it demonstrated. But can the Stroop effect itself be manipulated? This short demo may show that it can. In case you’re not familiar with the effect, it occurs when you try to say the color a word is printed in, while the word itself names a color (so if you see “RED” you should say “green.”) Try it with these short lists. Remember, say the color the word is PRINTED in, not the color named by the word. Which column was most difficult? Let’s make this a poll: Which column was the most difficult? ( surveys ) The basic Stroop effect predicts that Columns 2 and 3 will be much harder than Column 1, since reading the name of a different color makes it more difficult for us to say the color of the letters. But if we’ve replicated a nuance of the effect here, Column 3 should be more difficult than Column 2. Why? It’s a process called “negative priming.” In Column 3, the color of the letters in a word is named in the word above it (“Black” is printed in purple, “Red”is printed in black, and so on). Normally when we’re “primed” with a word or an image, it’s easier to produce that word or related words later on (so “detective” might help us remember “police” in a list like “cat, airplane, telephone, police, museum”). But in our example above, priming actually acts the opposite way, and makes the task more difficult. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
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A special case of the Stroop Effect: Kids may not be as different as we thought
January 24, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour
I’ve got a short column in the Wall Street Journal today where I recommend five books on human irrationality. I wanted to work in a novel too, but I soon realized that every novel is about irrational people. 1. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds By Charles Mackay 1841 There is nothing modern about financial bubbles. In this classic work, Charles Mackay compiled an exhaustive list of the “schemes, projects and phantasies” that are a recurring theme of economic history. From the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland, in which 12 acres of valuable land were offered for a single bulb, to the South Sea Bubble of 18th-century England, in which a cheerleading press spurred a dramatic spike in the value of a debt-ridden slave-trading company, Mackay demonstrates that “every age has its peculiar folly.” He notes that even the most intelligent investors are vulnerable to these frenzies of irrational exuberance: Isaac Newton is reported to have lost a small fortune after the South Sea Co. went bust. 2. Judgment Under Uncertainty By Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky Cambridge, 1982 It’s hard to overstate the influence of this academic volume, which revealed many of the hard-wired flaws that shape human behavior. For one thing, authors Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky — all of them psychologists — almost single-handedly dismantled the assumption of “rational man,” which had been the standard view of human nature since Plato. In experiment after experiment, the psychologists demonstrated that, unlike the hypothetical consumers in economics textbooks, real people don’t treat losses and gains equivalently, or properly perceive risks, or even understand the basic laws of statistics — with sometimes severe consequences. For example, the failure of many investors to properly weigh losses — people are irrationally loss averse — makes these investors much more likely to sell stocks that have gone up in value. This leads, over time, to a portfolio composed entirely of shares that are declining in value, which is why the stocks that these investors sell tend to significantly outperform the stocks that they keep. 3. How We Know What Isn’t So By Thomas Gilovich Free Press, 1991 Thomas Gilovich is an eminent psychologist at Cornell University, but he is also a lucid writer with a knack for teaching the public about its own mental mistakes. Consider the hot-hand phenomenon in basketball: Most fans are convinced that a player who has made several shots in a row is more likely to make his next shot — he’s in the zone, so to speak. But Gilovich, employing an exhaustive analysis of the 1980-81 Philadelphia 76ers, shows that this belief is an illusion, akin to trying to discern a pattern in a series of random coin flips and then predicting what the next flip will bring. The same logic also applies to “hot” mutual-fund managers, who are wrongly convinced, along with their customers, that they can consistently beat the market. 4. The Winner’s Curse By Richard H. Thaler Princeton, 1992 In 2000, the Texas Rangers signed Alex Rodriguez to the richest contract in baseball history after participating in a blind auction. If the team had consulted Richard H. Thaler’s “The Winner’s Curse,” it would have known that such auctions invariably lead to irrational offers — and, indeed, the Rangers’ bid (a 10-year contract for $252 million) overshot the next highest offer by about $100 million. In addition to documenting how bidders at auctions operate, Thaler — a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago — examines other anomalies, such as the stock market’s seasonal fluctuations (nearly one-third of annual returns occur in January) and the surprising unselfishness of people playing economic games. When given $10 and told to share the money with someone else, most people don’t keep it all, or even most of it. Instead, they tend to split the cash equally, which is neither selfish nor rational. As Thaler notes, people have a powerful instinct for generosity, which can lead them to do things that flagrantly violate the model of Homo Economicus. 5. Predictably Irrational By Dan Ariely HarperCollins, 2008 Dan Ariely is a mischievous scientist: He delights in duping business students, getting them to make decisions that, in retrospect, seem utterly ridiculous. In “Predictably Irrational,” an engaging summary of his research, Ariely explains why brand-name aspirin is more effective than generic aspirin even when people are given the same pill under different labels (paying more produces the expectation of better results, and the headache complies), and why the promise of getting something without paying for it — such as free shipping, or a free T-shirt if we buy two other shirts — prompts shoppers to spend more money than they would have in the absence of the offer. (In other words, we go broke trying to save a buck.) In one of his most famous experiments, Ariely showed how exposing people to a few random digits can later dramatically influence how much they bid for wine: Higher numbers lead to higher bids. The lesson, Ariely says, is that the rational brain is a feeble piece of machinery. Read the comments on this post…
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The Wall Street Journal [The Frontal Cortex]
January 22, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour
I know, I know, you’re probably sick of me prattling on about metacognition . If so, then feel free to skip this post. I’ve got a new article in the latest Seed (it’s a particularly good issue, I think, although it’s not yet online) on the virtues and vices of thinking about thinking: The game only has one rule, and it’s a simple one: Don’t think about white bears. You can think about anything else, but you can’t think about that. Ready? Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and banish the animals from your head. You just lost the game. Everyone loses the game. As Dostoevsky first observed, in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: “Try to avoid thinking of a white bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” In fact, whenever we try to not think about something, be it white bears or a broken heart, that something gets trapped in the mind, stuck in the recursive loop of self-consciousness. The brain backfires; our attempt at repression turns into an odd fixation. This human frailty has profound consequences. Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, refers to the failure as an “ironic” mental process. Whenever we establish a mental goal⎯such as trying to not think about white bears⎯the goal is accompanied by an inevitable follow-up thought, as the brain checks to see if we’re making progress. The end result, of course, is that we obsess over the one thing we’re trying to avoid. Wegner argues that this ironic twitch is responsible for all sorts of afflictions, from anxiety disorder (we get anxious whenever we think about not getting anxious) to insomnia, which can occur when the drowsy brain checks to see if we’ve fallen asleep (and so we wake up). The mind is a disobedient machine. Although these perverse thoughts can be irritating⎯⎯wouldn’t it be nice to be able to fall asleep at will, like a cat?⎯they also reveal an essential feature of the human mind, which is that it doesn’t just think: it constantly thinks about how it thinks. We’re insufferably self-aware, like some post-modern novel, so that the brain can’t go for more than a few seconds before it starts calling attention to itself, reflecting on its own contents, thoughts and feelings. This even applies to thoughts we’re trying to avoid, which is why those white bears are so inescapable. The technical term for this is metacognition, and it’s a rather surreal skill. Imagine that M.C. Escher drawing of a hand drawing a hand, or a video camera making a movie of itself: The cortex is the same way, as it constantly transforms the subject at the center of consciousness⎯you⎯into yet another object contemplated by consciousness. Of course, like all things meta, the process can quickly spiral out of control. When a mind thinks about metacognition, it’s thinking about how it thinks about how it thinks. And so on. I then go on to discuss the benefits of metacognition… Read the comments on this post…
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Ironic Thoughts [The Frontal Cortex]
January 21, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour
Market forces affect patterns of polygyny in Uganda : Polygynous marriage is generally more beneficial for men than it is for women, although women may choose to marry an already-married man if he is the best alternative available. We use the theory of biological markets to predict that the likelihood of a man marrying polygynously will be a function of the level of resources that he has, the local sex ratio, and the resources that other men in the local population have. Using records of more than 1 million men in 56 districts from the 2002 Ugandan census, we show that polygynously married men are more likely to own land than monogamously married men, that polygynous marriages become more common as the district sex ratio becomes more female biased, that owning land is particularly important when men are abundant in the district, and that a man’s owning land most increases the odds of polygyny in districts where few other men own land. Results are discussed with reference to models of the evolution of polygyny. My piece for The Guardian , Monogamy: bucking the trend? , was fundamentally an argument against natural short term market forces. Read the comments on this post…
December 24, 2008 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour
My second article for the Scientific American Mind Matters website is online now. This one is about the recent study which demonstrated that distorting the body image alters pain perception – specifically, it was found that using inverted binoculars to make the hand look smaller than it actually was led to a reduction in the pain and swelling induced by movement in patients with chronic pain. It is not clear why this happens, but the findings obviously have major implications for pain management. One explanation put forward by the authors is that this simple manipulation caused the subjects to “disown” their hands; the hand feels less like a part of their own body, because it appears to be further away than normal, and so painful stimuli originating from it are reduced. This, and several other studies which investigate the phenomenon of body ownership, are in my opinion among the most interesting research findings to be published this year. Both of the others were conducted by Henrik Ehrsson ‘s group at the Karolinska Institute. One showed that amputees can be made to experience a rubber hand as their own , so that they can sense the tactile stimuli applied to it. This could eventually lead to the development of prosthetic limbs which provide accurate sensory feedback to the user and therefore feel realistic. The second study from Ehrsson’s group is about the body swap illusion . Here, participants could be made to experience someone else’s body, or that of a mannequin, as their own, simply by seeing it from a first-person perspective, while at the same time seeing their own body from the third-person perspective and having identical stimuli applied simultaneously to both. All of three studies point to the hitherto unrecognized – and somewhat surprising – notion that visual information can easily override the other types of sensory information entering the brain to modulate tactile sensations. In other words, altering the visual perception of one’s own body can have significant effects on how one’s body feels. Read the comments on this post…