End of history illusion

“People regard the present as a watershed moment that will last the rest of their lives .. this ‘end of history illusion’ has consequences, leading people to overpay for future opportunities in light of their current preferences.” Daniel Gilbert 

This study examines the ‘end of history’ illusion [ link ]. A cognitive bias toward projecting present values and personal preferences into the future .. even when it’s clear that values and preferences change so dramatically. Guess that means I imagine myself willing to pay the same for concert tickets to see Lissie ten years from now .. even though I’m no longer that  interested in seeing someone like Sarah Bettens who was one of my favorites ten years ago.

Peer-mediated buzz

James Fowler, professor of psychology at UCSD, found that messages from our peers are more likely to initiate action than messages from a political committee [ link ]. Last year, Obama’s reelection committee learned the same thing [ link ]. They developed a system that leverages database technology and social-media to deliver their messages. In an instant, this system allows them to:

1. mobilize grassroots support for White House concerns 
2. provide White House support for local concerns

Apparently they took an extra step, conducted surveys ..and learned that nothing energizes participation better than ‘reciprocity’. Brilliant use of technology combined with Obama’s experience as a community organizer. Politically I’m independent and pretty damn naïve ..but I can see why this may give Republicans cause for alarm.

Puzzle Box

A fun way to learn to relax

Puzzlebox Orbit relies on EEG hardware from NeuroSky to capture brainwaves that signal attention and meditation. The more relaxed the player ..the higher and more controlled the helicopter goes [ link ].

Decision making

Decisions are mostly intuitive, logical explanations
catch-up milliseconds later ~ Robert Sapolsky [ link ]

Eyewitness testimony

Since 1975, Elizabeth Loftus has conducted research into the integrity of human memory. Her studies show that memory is not a video recording of things past. It’s suggestible and subject to laws of perception ..especially when we rely on it for eyewitness testimony [ link ].  Courtroom proceedings  back her claims. Convictions have been overturned due to faulty eyewitness testimony. Crimes are generally chaotic and the experience .. traumatic. In addition, the process of identifying suspects from a lineup or photo spread can be biased. The state of Oregon is the first to establish standards, based on these findings, to determine what qualifies as admissible evidence from eyewitness testimony [ link ]. For one, the eyewitness needs to be in a position to objectively observe the perpetrator during the commission of a crime ..not wounded or staring down the barrel of a gun. Two, lineups need to be conducted by someone who doesn’t know the identity of the suspect. And three, photos need to be presented sequentially, one at a time, the way we ordinarily run into people on the street ..not all at once.

GABA

GABA is the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter of the central nervous system. It is responsible for lowering excessive activity in the brain. Sedatives and tranquilizers act by enhancing the effects of GABA. When the potency of GABA is elevated for reasons unknown ..it results in a condition called hypersomnia or around-the-clock sleep, which can be very disruptive. It renders people unable to work or maintain relationships. Dr. David Rye found that a drug called flumazenil counteracts both tranquilizers and GABA in patients suffering hypersomnia. Furthermore it targets only people with high sensitivity to GABA while leaving people with normal GABA response alone ..meaning it gets closer to the root of the problem [ link ].

Imagining things

People store and retrieve information based on self-interest, feelings and mirroring – or mentally simulating an activity. Kind of like watching a tennis match in preparation for a game. When presented with lists of character traits (adventurous, brave, compassionate) participants were asked one of five questions: 

1. what does it rhyme with (phonetic elaboration) 

2. what does it mean (semantic elaboration) 

3. can you identify with it (semantic self-referential processing) 

4. have you ever acted that way (episodic self-referential processing) 

5. can you imagine yourself acting that way now (self-imagining) 

Turns out question 5 (self-imagining) boosts recall more than any of the other questions [ link ].

Resource-based attention

In an elegant ‘simulation’ of economic-class differences, researchers found that people with means (those in higher economic classes) don’t have to focus so much on their immediate needs and are more likely to consider the future cost of borrowing when making purchase decisions. On the other hand, people with limited means, who do have to focus on immediate needs, make better use of the resources they have but lose sight of the future cost of borrowing. As a result, they are more likely to become over-extended [ link ]. This means that no matter who you are, having limited resources alters the way you perceive and make borrowing decisions. They simulated economic differences by altering either the amount of time or the number of opportunities each group had available to make choices. The group with less time made better use of it when making purchase decisions than the group with more time. However, when they were allowed to ‘borrow time’ from future periods, at exorbitant cost .. these advantages diminish. This tells me that it’s not some innate ability to defer gratification that distinguishes rich from poor. When you have less to spend ..your attention is, by necessity, focused on the demands of the present situation.

Level of stress

Locus-of-control affects levels-of-stress. People in charge experience less stress than those whose livelihood is in the hands of others [ link ]. Confidence in keeping their position helps .. even when the organization they lead .. suffers. They test lower for the presence of cortisol among other things.

Neuro news

Neuroscientists have documented the functional neuro-anatomy of the hippocampus and amygdala. They’ve deciphered the role of the hippocampus ..showing how it works to transfer and consolidate information during long-term storage. They have also seen how the amygdala acts to adjust our threshold to threat and assign emotional-value to information transfer. “..what’s unclear however is the way the two regions connect ..and it’s the inter-connectivity that enables complex behavior that occurs so seamlessly.” 

Neuro feedback:  Real-time ‘visual feedback’ showing activity in the brain that’s linked to pain gives patients the ability to adjust and relieve instances of pain. Activity is displayed as a ‘flame’ ..which they can be taught to lower ..thereby reducing the activity and relieving the pain 

Depression :  Anti-depressants have been shown to work by lowering activity in a part of the prefrontal cortex called Broadmann's area 25 [ link ]. According to Neuroscientists “ ..area 25 is a key conduit of neural traffic between the “thinking” frontal cortex and the phylogenetically older limbic region that gives rise to emotion .. area 25 appears overactive in depressed people, like it opens the floodgates and allows negative emotions to overwhelm thinking and mood.” My question is - if they can treat depression in this area with anti-depressants and deep brain stimulation  ....couldn’t they also treat it with neurofeedback training ..?

Network content

“The meaning of a sentence is derived from the original words by an active, interpretive process. The original sentence which is perceived is rapidly forgotten and the memory is then for the information (meaning) contained in the sentence.” ~ Jacqueline Sachs, 1967 

Apparently the effect of messages from our peers is greater than the content of the messages themselves. James Fowler at UCSD conducted a study to observe the influence of messages read on Facebook [ link ]. He found that messages from peers are more persuasive than purely informational messages. Thirty nine percent more recipients went to the polls and voted after receiving messages from friends reminding them to vote than those who received messages from ‘the sponsor’. This tells me that the power of a message doesn’t reside in the information (meaning) alone.  Or perhaps the social-value is an even greater source of information.

Predictions in social perception

Research has shown that perception is an active process. The brain is constantly making predictions about the outcome of sensory events and revising predictions in response to feedback. Discrepancies naturally occur between expected and actual events resulting in ‘prediction errors’ that the brain actively works to resolve. Although prediction errors are transient in nature, they can be observed and measured during tests of sense-function. The longer they persist, the more disruptive they are to tasks involving high-speed sense-discrimination such as speech and reading comprehension. The principles of “predictive brain” are well established in the field of neuro-cognition. This study suggests they apply to the field of social-cognition as well ..and error analysis could be a useful measure of disruptions in social perception that characterize delusions of mental-illness [link].

Neural basis of stuttering

The neural basis of stuttering has to do with the integration of auditory information with speech-production commands. Previous studies show that stutterers’ produce a weaker-than-normal compensatory response while processing auditory feedback during speech. In this study they manipulated auditory feedback in order to see if weak compensatory responses are due to problems hearing feedback or using feedback. What they found is that stutterers’ have no difficulty hearing feedback, which narrows it down to functional areas responsible for using feedback ..or those areas responsible for translating performance-to-target feedback into corrective speech-action commands [link]

Take a Leap

A new interface to information ..using point and grasp gestures

 

Refreshing the mind

EEG recordings from the visual cortex show that conscious experience is ‘periodically refreshed’ rather than ‘continuously updated’. Sensory memory persists long enough to bridge the gap [ link ]

The feeling of discourse

An MRI study reveals that emotion, not fact-sharing, promotes social interaction and facilitates interpersonal understanding. What researchers discovered is that emotions ‘synchronize mental networks’ between individuals. Synchronized network activity focuses attention on shared experience and produces a common framework for understanding. Sharing other people’s emotional state during discourse enables us to perceive, experience and interpret what others say in a like manner ..without separation [ link ].

Speech recognition

Theory has it that language development is an ‘innate biological process’. First we learn to segment a stream of sound into syllables and words, and then we begin extracting the rules of syntax needed to generate sentences. What’s amazing is that exposure to speech is all that’s required. No formal training is needed ..interaction in a verbal community is sufficient. Based on this theory, a humanoid named DeeChee was created to mimic the way infants learn to recognize syllables and words. It was also tuned to boost the prominence of words signalling encouragement. Starting from scratch, DeeChee was able to learn simple words in minutes by just having a conversation with someone [ link ]. One small conversation for a robot; a canticle of possibilities for mankind..

Sound mind

It’s well known that the brain receives information from the ears in an orderly fashion. Signals for different frequencies arrive in tonotopic order along the auditory cortex. This means high tones are processed at one end of the auditory cortex while low tones are processed toward the other end. The location where these signals arrive determines our perception of pitch [ link ]. What’s interesting is that this type of organization applies to other properties of sound as well. Synapses that quickly release transmitters provide us with information about the onset of sound, like the beat, while synapses that release neurotransmitters more slowly provide information on qualities like timbre that persist over the duration of a sound. What’s new? Researchers have found that the pathways carrying these different synapse types are not grouped randomly. Instead, like orchestra musicians sitting in their own sections, they are bundled together by the property of sound that they convey. Tonotopic organization is preserved here as well. This means that beat and timbre have their own locations in the brain contributing to the perception of sound and music  [ link ].

A cure for Siri

Consider the phrase, “Man on first.” It doesn’t make much sense unless you know baseball. Or imagine a sign outside a store that reads, “Baby sale - One week only!” You easily infer that the store isn’t selling babies. Computers can’t do that. They haven’t mastered the pragmatic component of language yet .. information that is only available by knowing what social context prevails. However, Stanford psychologists have created a mathematical model that helps predict pragmatic reasoning [ link ]. This could allow computers to recognize when to apply commonly held social rules. Who knows, they may have just discovered a cure for the speech impediment suffered by Siri – a natural language interface for the Apple iPhone [ link ].

Siri don't parse

Siri is a natural language interface for the Apple iPhone 4S. It stands for Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface and can answer your questions or make recommendations by delegating your requests to services on the web [ wiki link ]

Siri can’t parse pragmatics. The literal and rule-based contents of speech (semantics and syntax) are no problem. But the pragmatic content that’s supplied by context and culture is beyond Siri. However, roughly two-thirds of human communication requires intuiting one anothers meaning on a pragmatic basis [ thesis ]. We are pretty good at striking a balance between how specific and how general we need to be in order to keep the conversation rolling ..without either getting bogged down or sounding incomprehensible [ link ]. Computers on the other hand can’t do this. So, half the time I expect Siri to be either clueless ..or respond in gibberish.

Expectation-based perception

The journal Nature reports that expectation of a sensory event can increase the speed and accuracy we perceive it [ link ]. “Animals are not passive spectators of the sensory world in which they live. In natural conditions they often sense objects on the bases of expectations initiated by predictive cues. Expectation profoundly modulates neural activity by altering the background state of cortical networks and modulating sensory processing” [ link ].

Expectations alter perception ..I know this from my own practice. Expectations amplify and channel speech perception. Listeners have to take a moment to adjust when speakers say something that defies expectation. This study shows that the same holds true for taste. In one sense experiences arrive one by one, always fresh and new, but over time they become familiar re-enactments of prior experience. For instance I like yogurt for breakfast ..so I say it’s good and look forward to it when I get up in the morning. Good is a property I supply as something I experienced so long ago I don’t remember. It’s no longer fresh and new but an experience that my expectations enhance.

PTSD

Researchers in Europe have found that a gene, linked to improved memory performance ..also increases susceptibility to PTSD [ link ] “..in dramatic fashion, a gene variant responsible for differences in brain activity during memory encoding can also lead to increased risk of developing PTSD in response to catastrophe.” According to Neurobiologist James McGaugh at the University of California, Irvine “It’s well known that emotional arousal enhances memory consolidation, which can be a contributing factor to PTSD ..these findings provide genetic support for this hypothesis.”

Losing my religion

“This study applied a dual-processing model of [the mind] to show that analytic reasoning overrides flawed intuition and diminishes religious belief” -Gervais  [ link ].

I’m no mystic but I believe there’s a flaw in this logic. Claiming that analytic reasoning supercedes intuitive thinking is a false comparison. Analytic reasoning is not native; it is an acquired skill. It doesn’t have it’s own ‘processing system’ in the brain. The mind is a hybrid and analytic reasoning is just one of many ways of knowing. Discovery and invention come about just as often by integration and ‘insight’. Navigating unfamiliar territory is faster by seeing the relationship between vague and loosely-connected information than by using step-by-step analysis [ link ].

 

Analytic reasoning takes practice and devotion to it means neglecting other skills. When I consider all the technical writing I’ve done that required logical analysis; it’s a wonder I can suspend critical thinking long enough to accept things as they are. This may be dangerous. Invention takes a creative leap - a vision outside the confines of analytic thought. I do feel that technical writing has been stifling. For instance, after working on predicate-based software for so long (the kind that runs on legacy systems); it took me a while to grasp the more intuitive-based ‘object-software’ - which are the ‘apps’ that power devices running on the Internet today. After all, this was a sea-change brought about by the invention of Mitch Kapor and the vision of Steve Jobs. Neither of them knew for sure what the pay-off would be. It required a leap of faith.

Sensory integration

This garden universe vibrates complete. Some we get a sound so sweet. Vibrations reach on up to become light, and then thru gamma, out of sight. Between the eyes and ears there lay, the sounds of color and the light of a sigh.  ~   Moody Blues

   

A recent study shows that baboons can learn to tell the difference between word and non-word strings [ link ]. In an accompanying editorial, Dr Michael Platt says this evidence suggests dyslexia might be more of a visual problem than a problem matching sounds to letters. It’s a rare opportunity that I get to hear a neuroscientist jump to an either-or conclusion like that. Reading is an integrated process that coops many areas of the brain. A problem in the visual system can produce a reading deficit just as profound as a problem in the auditory system. These systems are integrated by higher centers of the brain during reading. What these investigators discovered with baboons is a better example of pattern recognition. It’s a process shared by any species that survives in the wild. Over time, the visual system is tuned to distinguish what’s meaningful from what isn’t by a process of ‘statistical regularity’. Statistical regularity simply means that certain signal combinations appear more frequently with meaningful objects than with non-meaningful objects. It’s no surprise that a baboon can perform this with a string of letters just as easily as it can a set of racing stripes. And I have no doubt that humans require a working visual system as well as a sound system to be able to read coherently. The written word hasn’t been around long enough to evolve an area of it’s own in the brain like it has for speech and vision.

 

The heart of interpretation

According to a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, people who receive a diagnosis of cancer are 5 to 6 times more likely to suffer a heart attack or other cardiovascular complication within seven days after receiving the news (compared to people with similar backgrounds who are cancer-free). This is well before the disease or treatment has a chance to compromise health. Just hearing and interpreting information has an immediate impact on the cardiovascular system. This is a dramatic illustration of the relationship that exists between the mind and body [ link ].

 

Warning of a life-threatening event elicits conditioned fear. Conditioned fear depends on prior experience with a signal (hearing the term for an illness) paired with an adverse consequence. Once established, conditioned fear always involves blood pressure changes. In fact, practitioners of behavioral medicine can track fluctuations in blood pressure to fleeting psychological states ..in real-time. Blood pressure reliably follows the steps of a conditioned fear response. Changes can be observed when a signal arrives, while memories are retrieved, as the response is felt, and either panic or post-fear calm sets in [ link ].