The Thinking Meat Project

Based on my previous experience with the term psychogeography, I gathered that it had to do with people’s emotional and mental response to various landscapes, urban and otherwise. However, the term psychogeography is also used in quite a different way in this article from the Boston Globe. Here psychogeography has to do with the mapping of personality traits, particularly in the US. Researchers are evidently looking at the Big Five personality traits and discovering geographic patterns to such things as neuroticism, openness to experience, and conscientiousness. The article describes the psychological landscape of the US and speculates about how it got to be that way: birds of a feather flock together? People who flock together, for whatever reason, come to resemble one another? However it works, it’s fascinating to look at the US in terms of the personality types prevalent in different regions. I hope there’s more of this research to come. I’d like to see an analysis of places like Bloomington (and Madison and Ann Arbor) that constitute islands of social and political openness in a sea of conservatism. It would also be interesting to know if there are links between the physical and psychological landscapes.

This article from Technology Review presents an interesting twist on the question of whether we’re alone in the universe. The author hopes that we are alone, mainly because, as he explains, if the road to the emergence life is easy, then the fact that we’re unable to find any other intelligent life to talk to is likely to result from stumbling blocks on the road to space-faring life. In other words, there’s likely some kind of bottleneck that lowers the likelihood of space-faring civilizations. If the bottleneck lies in the long process that results in the emergence and evolution of living things, then that bottleneck is in the past for our species; we somehow dodged all the hazards and here we are, alive and intelligent. There may be other hazards in our future, but at least we’ve evidently surmounted obstacles that have prevented life from even getting this far on other worlds. On the other hand, if simpler life forms are common, then we can assume that life arises with relative ease, and the reason that we find the universe devoid of other intelligent life is that living things generally do not negotiate some existential crisis on the road to advanced technology and space colonization. It’s an interesting argument, and it may make you think twice about whether you dream of or dread the day we learn of fossil bacteria on Mars or the spectral signature of life in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet.

This story from last week describes some research into what Paranthropus boisei, an early pre-human ancestor, actually ate. The species’ teeth are large and heavy, with thick enamel, earning it the nickname “Nutcracker Man”. But analysis of the wear patterns on the teeth of some members of the species indicates that they did not actually put all that hardware to use on tough or hard foods, but instead preferred softer fruits. So was their mastication apparatus adaptive because it was useful in hard times, when they had to rely on their ability to eat things they normally wouldn’t choose to? (Or was it adaptive at all, I suppose is also a good question.) At any rate, it seems to me that this finding should give evolutionary psychologists pause. Just because something is present in an organism and appears useful for a certain purpose, perhaps that doesn’t say much about the daily life of the average specimen of that organism.

Fluid intelligence is the facet of intelligence that enables you to solve new problems based on putting the pieces of an unfamiliar situation together. (It differs from crystallized intelligence, which has to do with drawing on the knowledge you already possess to solve problems.) Some new research indicates that with regard to fluid intelligence, you’re not stuck with whatever endowment you were born with, but can increase your capabilities.

The method for doing this involves training in working memory (the sort that lets you hold onto relevant pieces of information that you need at the moment), which is related to fluid intelligence and apparently uses the same parts of the brain. People who did half an hour of training every day (on a carefully designed, souped-up version of the old matching game, Concentration) showed increases in their fluid intelligence. Each period of training lasted for a certain number of days, after which fluid intelligence was retested. A control group was given the repeated intelligence tests without the training, and their test scores also went up over time (presumably due to familiarity with the test), but not nearly as much as those of the trained subjects.

This experiment did not examine how long the effect lasted. Also, the longest training period was 19 days, so it’s impossible to say whether further training might have led to further increases (although this study did show that the more training there was within each period, the greater the increase in fluid intelligence). But it’s still an intriguing result. I think I’ve said this before in connection with a long-ago post, but if a fairy godmother showed up I would not ask her for a ball gown and a carriage, or for riches, or for the love of a handsome prince, but for more smarts. Maybe I won’t have to wait for such unlikely intervention. This New York Times article has more information, and the Wikipedia has an entry on fluid and crystallized intelligence.

Well, I’m back from a wonderful trip to the Southwest, and the first thing I saw when I went to EurekAlert was this press release about dictionaries and brains. An analysis of the way language is structured (how many words at different levels of complexity, for example) shows that dictionaries have apparently arrived at a state of optimal organization. Specifically, dictionaries are arranged in the most economical manner so as to minimize their size, mirroring the way the human brain organizes its internal lexicon in such a way as to minimize the mental machinery it requires to retrieve word meanings. In this respect dictionaries are similar to other technologies—e.g., writing—that are tailored toward reducing the mental effort required to use them.

What’s fascinating about this is that no one, as far as I know, ever sat down to study how to make a dictionary maximally efficient; I’m assuming it just happened over generations of dictionary creation and tinkering. Anyone who has had to help design or present, or for that matter use, online information or services, can vouch for the fact that there are many ways to go wrong. Perhaps there is an evolutionary process at work that weeds out the bad approaches, and eventually we’ll have a maximally useful web page/web application design, but in the meanwhile we have to sit in meetings and argue over how to organize information so people can find it. Do you suppose the early dictionary makers worried about usability studies?

I’m going to be away from the blog for a few days, so I’ll leave you a few big things to chew over this weekend.

First, from Edge.org, this article from complexity guru Stuart Kauffman, suggests a way to mend the rift between science and reason by giving up our reliance on reductionism and grasping the creativity of the emergent properties of the universe. I need to chew it over a bit more myself before I know what I think about everything he says, but some of it really rings true for me, and is beautifully expressed to boot, for example:

“Is it, then, more amazing to think that an Abrahamic transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient God created everything around us, all that we participate in, in six days, or that it all arose with no transcendent Creator God, all on its own? I believe the latter is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe. It is this view that I hope can be shared across all our religious traditions, embracing those like myself, who do not believe in a Creator God, as well as those who do. This view of God can be a shared religious and spiritual space for us all.”

I really like that he uses the word “gratitude”. I have felt the gratitude that he’s speaking of, but I’ve had people tell me that it makes no sense to call that feeling gratitude, because for gratitude to make sense, there needs to be a personal recipient at the other end. I’ve had a hard time coming up with counter-arguments, but it still feels like gratitude to me, even without a personal entity that I feel grateful to.

OK, the other brain fodder for the weekend is this piece from NPR about the book Mistakes were made (but not by me), by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris. The book covers the ways that we rationalize the choices we’ve made or actions we’ve taken even if they don’t turn out all that great, in an effort to avoid the cognitive dissonance that arises when our view of our own beliefs, competency, and abilities is thrown into doubt. In other words, it’s about the ways our brains put a positive spin on our actions. You can read an excerpt from the book online, or listen to a half-hour interview with Aronson from the show Talk of the Nation. Thanks to Jay for passing this one along.

If you read much about depression, you hear right away about serotonin, and maybe dopamine, neurotransmitters that are believed to be crucial to feelings of well-being. I hadn’t realized that stress hormones, in particular corticotropin releasing factor (CRF), are also implicated in depression. Overactivity in a particular area of the hypothalamus that produces CRF often occurs in depressed people. In a recent study, researchers used a technique called micro-laser-dissection to examine postmortem human brain tissue in fine detail. They looked at the appropriate region of the hypothalamus in seven depressed people and seven non-depressed control subjects, and found significant differences between the two that apparently reflect increased CRF activity in the depressed brain. Further studies of stress hormones and depression could lead to a new class of antidepressants. We can only hope.

A staple experiment of psychologists is a scenario where someone is given a certain sum of money and must decide how much to share with someone else. If the recipient accepts the offer, both parties get to keep their share of the money. If the recipient rejects the offer, both parties walk away with nothing. At first glance, you’d think that even getting, say, $2 or $5 out of $20 is better than getting nothing, but people often reject offers that strike them as unfairly low, even though it costs them money. The usual interpretation of this is that we’re wired to reward fair behavior and punish unfairness, even at a cost to ourselves.

Now researchers have scanned the brains of a dozen UCLA students while they were faced with this scenario, and found that the regions that were active when the students received a fair offer corresponded to “reward centers” that are also active when people taste a food they crave or win money. Among these brain regions are the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, bad offers activated the insula, a brain area linked with feelings of disgust; when a bad offer was accepted, activity in the prefrontal cortex ramped up and the insula quieted down (which the researchers suggest illustrates the overriding of the initial emotional reaction).

This press release from UCLA has more information.

It seems intuitive that the opening statement or request you make in a bargaining session can have a big effect on the resulting discussion. (Asking for more than you expect to get, for example, can drag the negotiations to the more positive end of the spectrum, from your point of view.) Some recent research has demonstrated a specific version of this with regard to bargaining over prices. People who are presented with a price in round numbers (e.g., $30 for a flash drive, or $200,000 for a house) are more likely to make a counter-offer that differs from the asking price in round numbers—in other words, that differs more significantly from the asking price. On the other hand, more precise prices ($29.95 or $197,500) get people thinking about more subtle differences, and they’re likely to come back with a counter-offer closer to the asking price. This effect was seen in a lab experiment over multiple runs, and in real-world data regarding home sales in Florida. The more I think about this, the stranger it seems; it’s like we agree with the seller to narrow in on a particular part of the number line depending on the asking price, without really considering whether we need to step out and consider a wider range of numbers. Very peculiar, but possibly useful if I ever have to sell a house. This article from Scientific American Mind gives the details.

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me fulminate about the mad proliferation of choices we face when shopping. Do we really need a dozen flavors of Cheez-Its (although even one may be too many), or half a dozen kinds of macaroni and cheese, or multiple varieties of each brand of toothpaste? Awhile back I found that the house brand of ice cream at Marsh supermarkets comes in three different flavors of vanilla. That’s too many. And I think it was Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, who told a story of going to buy blue jeans and being baffled by the sudden explosion of styles and colors, and asking the clerk for the kind you used to get when there was only one kind. I understand entirely what he was up against.

Well, perhaps my complaints about having too many options have some rational basis. A recent study looked at behavior in a variety of venues and found that decision-making seems to sap people’s ability to focus on a task and stay undistracted. Some of the work was done in the lab, where people either had to make a choice about something or simply evaluate information on the same topic; the former task was more likely to make it harder for people to complete a goal-oriented task. Another part of the study involved querying shoppers in a mall about the decisions they had made and checking their ability to solve simple math problems; the more decisions they’d made (and these were self-motivated decisions), the worse their performance (after correcting for other factors like gender, age, and time spent shopping). The study also looked at the performance of students preparing for a math test, and found that performance was degraded in those who had had to make choices about their courses, with more time frittered away in distractions rather than studying.

All three lines of inquiry seem to indicate that some reservoir of mental energy is drained by the process of choosing between alternatives. This story from Science Daily has the details. So maybe I’m not the only one worn down by the process of shopping, evaluating health care options, etc. It’s not that I want to go back to the days when you could get any color of Ford you wanted as long as it was black, but I certainly wouldn’t mind having the kind of vanilla ice cream you got when there was only one kind.

The New York Times has a good article on frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and creativity. FTD is a rare disorder, or perhaps more accurately a cluster of related disorders, that affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. As the frontal lobes begin to lose function, other areas of the brain, particularly those related to creative activity, can become stronger. There’s no treatment and no cure, but the odd thing about the disease is that it can result in a wonderful outpouring of creative work. The article talks about Anne Adams, a woman with FTD who was strongly driven to begin painting in the early stages of the illness, after leaving a career in science due to a family emergency. The article describes her work (including a painting she did that renders the structure of Ravel’s Bolero visually; Ravel also suffered from FTD) and talks about what can be learned about brain function from studying patients with FTD. Check out the links at the end to look at samples of Adams’s work. Thanks to Patrick for telling me about this one.

The New York Times has an interesting essay comparing human memory and computer memory. We humans (and other living creatures) use cue-based memory recall, and as you know, the cues sometimes don’t trigger the memory you need, or trigger an incorrect memory. (It was also interesting to learn how irrelevant some of the cues are; for example, people are often able to recall a word better if they are in the same posture—slouched, standing up straight, etc.—in which they learned it.) Computers, on the other hand, use location-based recall, which is much more reliable. But first you have to know where everything is, which is easy for a computer and impossible for us to do with our brains.

The author of this essay speculates that someday we may have neural implants that can work with our memories the way Google does with the web, helping us to search the data stores between our ears. I’m not sure how it would work, but it sounds useful, if a little spooky. It’s worth noting that on my laptop, nearly three years old, a few of the letters on the keyboard look a little worn. The “N” is completely worn away, leaving a blank key, and I think this is because the single most common task I do on my computer is to open a new window in my browser, more often than not to search Google. So I can see the value of having the memories in my brain indexed and easily accessible. I suppose the ability to Google our brains is far off, but it makes for interesting imagining.

You all know by now that flavonoid-rich foods like many fresh fruits and vegetables have a number of benefits, including anti-oxidant properties that can help protect your body from age-related damage. In a recent study, researchers found that adding blueberries to the diet can also improve spatial memory, reversing age-related decline. The researchers identified the specific mechanism in the hippocampus by which the flavonoids had their memory-enhancing effect. This story from Science Daily has more details, although it doesn’t mention how many blueberries the people in the study ate. I’m really intrigued by the idea of a nutritional approach to not only enhancing memory but reversing decline. The next step in the research will be to study how flavonoid-rich diets affect people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of cognitive impairment.

Even subliminal exposure to a logo appears to be able to influence behavior–not purchasing behavior, though. A recent study looked at whether people are subconsciously affected by the connotations connected with different brand logos. Logos was shown to volunteers so briefly that they couldn’t consciously register it (they thought they were doing a visual acuity task). People who had been shown the Apple logo, associated with nonconformity and innovative thinking, were able to come up with more, and more creative, ideas for how to use a brick than people who had been shown the IBM logo (which has a very different set of associations) instead. A similar experiment involved the Disney and E! Channel brands; those who had seen the former “behaved much more honestly” afterward (according to this Science Daily story). As always, it’s fascinating and a little disconcerting to see what our brains are evidently up to without our awareness.

Norman Cousins pioneered the idea of using humor as part of the treatment for medical illnesses, in conjunction with other therapies. Nearly 45 years ago he wrote a book, The anatomy of an illness, detailing his experience in using humor as part of his plan for overcoming a serious disease. At the time I don’t know that it was taken all that seriously by the medical establishment. However, the mood/health connection has been explored since then, including a recent study that found that not just laughter, but the anticipation of laughter, increased blood levels of two beneficial hormones (beta-endorphins, good against depression, and human growth hormone, good for the immune system). A follow-up study has found that the anticipation of laughter also decreases the levels of stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline. It looks like laughter is not just good medicine, but maybe also good preventive maintenance for the body.

Dame Gillian Beer, a professor of English literature at Cambridge, is delivering two Patten Lectures in Bloomington this week (Tuesday, April 8 and Thursday, April 10; 7:30 pm in Rawles Hall, room 100, on the Indiana University campus). Tuesday she will speak on Darwin and the consciousness of others and on Thursday about Darwin’s “filthy heraldries”: Why did Darwin’s theories cause scandal?.

On Tuesday (April Fools Day) I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about whether playing practical jokes had some adaptive value in the past history of our species. Then I spotted this article in the New York Times that examines the psychology of pranks. In particular, it describes some recent research into how being tricked may spur greater self-awareness and the chance to learn from our mistakes. Ah, yes, learning experiences–often useful, not always pleasant.

Items found at two sites in France where Neanderthals once lived indicate that the Neanderthals there used black manganese pigments as body paint. That finding, in turn, suggests that they had were able to communicate using some form of language.

Researchers found blocks of pigment that had been shaped into drawing tools, and believe that Neanderthals used them to mark both animal skins and their own skin (although this New Scientist article doesn’t mention the evidence supporting the idea that the pigments were used as body paint). Thirty-nine other Neanderthal sites have also yielded evidence of pigment use.

Neanderthals are also believed to have used other forms of bodily adornment, like seashell-bead necklaces. One of the researchers who found the pigment at the French sites describes this sort of body ornamentation as a proxy for symbolic communication; in the case of the body painting, he believes that the meaning of the symbols could have been conveyed only through language of some sort (although their language capacities were likely not as advanced as humans’).

This is all part of the larger debate about the cognitive endowment of Neanderthals. For more details about Neanderthals and pigment use, see this January 2008 post from A Very Remote Period Indeed.

Evolutionary psychologists speculate that it may have been adaptive for our hominid ancestors to play practical jokes on each other. Providing misinformation that is at least briefly plausible to the recipient but a source of mirth to others in the know may have served dual purposes. First, it could have cemented the group loyalty of those who perpetrated the pranks (unfortunately, as with so many of these bonding mechanisms, the process could be rough on outsiders) and granted practitioners preferential access to resources. Second, it may have provided useful information about the quick-wittedness of other humans; this social data might have been highly valuable as a means of identifying intelligent and resourceful mates and worthwhile partners in other enterprises. (Think about it: Would you want to go hunting with someone who believed what he read in The Onion?)

To play tricks on others and to speedily see through tricks others are attempting to play on you, you must be able to understand that the contents of other minds may differ from the contents of your own, i.e., you must posses a theory of mind (ToM). Recent research into the so-called ToM-fool module revealed that when plotting the playful bamboozlement of their peers or detecting such efforts directed against themselves, modern-day hominid brains showed unusual activity in the Interstices of Fatuity, perhaps lending credence to the idea that this area evolved to support the processing of pranks and practical jokes. Are your Interstices of Fatuity busy today?

This story from New Scientist describes the latest news about the intelligence of birds in the crow family, in this case rooks. Pairs of birds were able to figure out the cooperative behavior needed to get food. The setup involved a tray of food that was visible but inaccessible to the birds; a string ran behind the tray with a loose end extending on either side of the tray. If a bird pulled on one loose end, he simply pulled the string out from behind the tray; if he got a buddy to simultaneously pull on the other end, however, they could jointly pull the tray out and get the food. They figured it out without too much training when another bird was around, but they didn’t seem to get the hang of waiting for a partner to help. When another bird was on the way but delayed, a lone bird would generally pull on the string by itself and lose the chance to get the food. This differs from chimp behavior; chimpanzees can both solve problems like this and also understand that they need to wait for a partner to help them. It’s still too early to say why chimps get that aspect of it and the rooks don’t seem to. It may be linked to the fact that interactions between mature crows are fairly limited, so their social instincts are not as finely honed as those of animals that interact more. At any rate, it’s cool, as always, to see smart birds learning the ropes. The New Scientist article includes a video.