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Folks, I’ve started a new blog on the new True/Slant network. It’s called Neuroworld. I like to think of it as a newswire of human stupidity. Basically, it follows advances in neuroscience and humanity’s ever-expanding understanding of its own irrationality.
Recent posts include:
* New iTunes Pricing: A Neuro Perspective
* Anti-Marriage Ads: Scared Straight
Give it a look. Hope you like it. The bulk of my blogging will be over there for the foreseeable future.
On Oscar night, it’s only appropriate to note the similarities between humans and monkeys. Not just because any awards for Benjamin Button will make me want to throw my own feces at the TV screen (I haven’t seen the movie, but it seems like mediocrity in movie form). But because it’s a night when our monkey-like tendencies are on particularly proud display.
Humans like to watch and hear about celebrities. Much like monkeys… which a famous experiment found were willing to give up delicious fruit juice for the opportunity to look at pictures of higher-status monkeys (think watching Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt on the red carpet). Conversely, monkeys must be paid in delicious juice to look at pictures of lower-status monkeys (think watching documentaries about the countries from which Angelina snatches up babies).
So, get your juice boxes, park yourselves in front of a TV, and jump up and down screeching for your favorite actors and actresses. Me? I’ve had to switch to CNN to avoid seeing Hugh Jackman’s painful opening number. You’d need to pay me a lot of juice to get me to change the channel back. Does that mean I consider Hugh Jackman a lower-status money? Or do I just value my ears and dignity?
Instead of annoying everyone around you on your cell phone, now just strap on a neck band and communicate from brain to vocal chords to phone to software to phone:
OK, so it’s pretty unwieldy right now. It looks even stupider than a Bluetooth headset. It’s first application will likely be patients with ALS. But in not too many years we’ll probably see a commercial version.
The New Scientist writes it up here.
My friend Owen sends on this video:
It’s of an amputee using a robotic arm being developed by the inventor of the Segway, Dean Kamen. (We saw a monkey working a similar device, in a more controlled setting, here.)
It’s pretty hard to wrap one’s head around, but it seems virtually inevitable at this point that humans will have Luke Skywalker quality prosthetics in most of our lifetimes. I mean, we may not be able to fight like a Jedi with them, but in a couple decades they could be indistinguishable from real limbs in everyday life — able to manipulate small objects, send sensory information to the brain, etc.
With the concept at this point proven — we can decode what the motor cortex is trying to tell the limb — it’s all a process of endless refinement. Those refinements, of course, will all represent major breakthroughs. But the direction things are heading is clear.
And, of course, we’re likely to reach the day when prosthetics will have advantages over normal limbs. Just ask this guy.
…while we try to figure out if Hillary’s staged crying won her back the woman vote in New Hampshire, scientists are figuring out how to play music with their brains:
I won’t speculate as to which one is more important to the future of humanity.
Forget brain scans on voters — it’s time to throw the candidates themselves into the MRI: The LA Times has a piece arguing for “Getting Inside Their Heads … Really Inside.”
The political bias of the piece might be revealed here:
One could argue that our current president’s struggles with language and emotional rigidity are symptoms of temporal lobe pathology. The temporal lobes, underneath your temples and behind your eyes, are involved with language, mood stability, reading social cues and emotional flexibility.
Though, to be fair, it also makes the case that Bill Clinton has some serious brain dysfunction.
The piece, however, points up an obvious problem with a lot of the hype around brain scanning. Aside from well-established medical diagnostic tests — we can detect Alzheimer’s very early these days — there’s very little a brain scan can tell us that observation of the candidates, in the normal course of politics, cannot. Bush can’t talk. Bush can’t admit when he’s wrong. We knew at least the first one in 2000. We knew the second one in 2004. We elected him twice (or, one and a half times) nonetheless.
There’s plenty we can tell about the candidates for 2008 already; there’s almost nothing, outside of, say, an undiagnosed brain tumor, we could tell by scanning them.
Personally, I’m in favor of euthanizing all of them and dissecting them in the interest of science. But others would just take their place.
Have I mentioned I just got back from the 2007 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in sunny San Diego, California? Yes, in my last two posts? Okay, well, I still haven’t given my roundup of just went on there and what conclusions one might take away from it.
So, let me do that now…
First off, since I’ve gotten the question from friends, a note as to why I’m suddenly paying so much attention to neuroscience. In short, it’s caught my interest. The longer answer: Of all the fields of human endeavor, neuroscience strikes me as the most likely to have the biggest impact on how we understand and experience the world in my lifetime. After centuries of speculation and philosophy, we have just in the last few decades begun to solve the problems of how to look inside the living human brain, how to understand what we’re seeing, and how to use that understanding to alter the brain and allow the brain to alter the world. The brain has a language, we’ve just begun to translate it, and what we learn (and what we learn to do) is going to turn major parts of the world upside down.
So, with that, let me try to find some decent way to take you through things. First off, this is a BIG conference. Some 30,000+ folks come out for it — scientists, students, exhibitors, a small gaggle of press. A team of reporters couldn’t keep up with one-tenth of the presentations, posters, symposia, minisymposia, workshops, meetings, socials, and satellite events; so I can only give you the snapshot of what I saw.
#1 — Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Treo and founder of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute and Numenta
The first big talk I made it out to on Saturday, one of the featured lectures, was Jeff Hawkins on the topic, “Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like a Brain?” Good question. Despite all outward appearances, it turns out computers are very, very stupid. The example Hawkins used was this: Give a computer a bunch of sets of pictures of cats and dogs, then ask it which pictures are of which animals; no computer in existence can pass this test. (My old Apple IIc would just crawl under a table and hide; my MacBook Pro would, too; as would Big Blue.) The point here is that even the simplest task, something that can be accomplished by a two-year-old human, is virtually impossible to accomplish with a computer at this time.
Why?
Well, we, as humans, have a tremendous amount of very complex information in our brains about cats and dogs. Computers don’t. Unless, of course, we teach it to them. The question, though, is how to design a computer that can learn. Hawkins looks at the question as one of how the human brain distributes information. His model is Hierarchical Temporal Memory (explained somewhat on the Numenta Web site). The idea, essentially, is that the brain stores information hierarchically, with many pictures of dogs and cats stored together under the headings “dogs” and “cats.” Each category is a subset of some larger category (animals, say, or furry animals), and each category has various subsets (labs, beagles, puppies, pugs). Each node on the hierarchy represents an algorithm that allows the brain to process what it’s looking at.
Using this concept, Hawkins and his lab have created a platform that can be taught to look at rudimentary drawings (of things like mugs, helicopters, dogs, etc.) and classify them. After a significant amount of “training” with test images, they’ve had decent success in getting a computer to recognize what it’s looking at. The drawings are very crude, but after training the computer is correctly classifying unique images it’s never been trained on (it’s seen a lot of drawings of mugs, for instance, but it hasn’t seen this one) — so that seems pretty promising.
A computer that can learn is sort of the holy grail (Hawkins quoted Bill Gates, who said a computer that can learn would be worth 10 Microsofts). And, of course, once we have such a thing working, it doesn’t have to be limited by the human senses. The concept could be applied to things like weather or seismology — imagine a computer brain whose “senses” were every weather station in the world or every seismometer.
Of course, this talk wasn’t purely, or even mostly, neuroscience. But without the insights we’re gaining into the brain, this progress wouldn’t be being made.
[Another talk by Hawkins on the same subject is here on Google Video. Examples of the drawings the computers are looking at appear around 30 minutes in.]
#2 — Press panel on the normal aging brain
On Sunday, there was a panel for the press on the normal aging brain — that is, a look at what happens to the brain as we age in the absence of disease. It’s truly depressing to look at exactly how one’s brain will decline, even if one dodges various bullets in terms of disease. Nonetheless, a couple bullet points from the presentation:
* Old people really do have a worse sense of direction — Scott Moffat, PhD, at Wayne State University in Detroit, presented a study in which old people and young people navigated a virtual environment. Both old people and young people did a pretty decent job at remembering a series of landmarks in the virtual world. But old people did much worse at remembering which way to go at those landmarks. Also, old people did a worse job of filtering out useless information, remembering meaningless landmarks (not associated with a choice point) that younger people correctly ignored.
* Risk factors for stroke, like high cholesterol and a physically inactive lifestyle, may be linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s.
* Physical fitness is closely related to maintaining cognitive ability — We’ve known this about cardiovascular health for a while. But research presented by Claudia Völcker-Rehage of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, indicates that balance training (such as Tai Chi) may also be important.
# 3 —Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel
Also on Sunday, Andy Grove gave a talk about, “Translating Neuroscience: Can Systems Engineering and Lessons from High-Tech Take Us Beyond the R01 Culture?” Grove, who had prostate cancer and now has Parkinson’s, has come to take an interest in what he calls “bio-enterprise.” He looks at progress in the semiconductor industry in 30 years (gigantic) versus progress in treatment of Parkinson’s in 50 years (minimal) and — well, he’s pissed off.
He broke down the problems with biomedical research into three headings: speed, failure, and success.
Speed — In semiconductors, Grove said, they could test new patterns on little corners of existing, commercially sold wafers, creating a constant stream of “FedEx Trucks” sending tests out and results in to the company. Biomedical research gets packed onto trains, and they leave the station once a decade (that is, large-scale clinical trials that have to play out in humans over years). We need to find ways to speed up testing.
Failure — In short, biomedical research doesn’t spend enough time looking at its failures and trying to glean useful lessons. In semiconductors, a mistake can lead to a whole new type of memory system. In medicine, things get swept under the rug or subsumed in averages of multiple data points. Why did that one patient get better on the treatment? It might be coincidence; or it might be a breakthrough.
Success — Here, Grove talked about something a number of speakers were talking about: “We are about to experience an explosion of Alzheimer’s disease cases. Population statistics, incident rates and demographic changes indicate that the incidence of AD is doubling every five years. North America alone is going to have multiple millions of cases in a few more years, and when you look at the economic aspect of this, by 2030, the spending on Alzheimer’s disease will be as much as the total Medicare spending on everything in this country today. This is not a stochastic process. This is not a maybe. This is going to happen plus or minus a little bit.” His point was that even if we had a sure-thing treatment for AD, if it cost, say, $1 billion, it would be almost impossible to put together the funding to develop the treatment.
Summing up the difference between semiconductors and bio-enterprise, Grove offered this: “The semiconductor industry says ‘what matters is time to money’ … In the bio-enterprise, my impression is the corresponding statement is ‘good science takes time.’ Is that true? Yes. Does it help? No.”
His suggestions for improving the situation:
* More focus on biomarkers (reliable ways to measure the progress of diseases and the effectiveness of drugs)
* More open data
* A risk-multiplier for patent extensions, rewarding truly innovative drugs over “me-too” drugs
[The full speech transcript is available here.]
#4 — Press panel on emerging technologies in neuroscience
The highlight here was Mark Ellisman discussing plans for a “Whole Brain Catalog” (think “Whole Earth Catalog“) that would be something like Google Maps (crossed with Wikipedia) for the brain.
#5 — Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania
On Monday, Martha Farah gave a talk on neuroethics. At least, that’s how the talk was billed. To my mind, it was mostly a listing of really cool things people are doing with neuroscience, with a coda at the end that said: “And there are ethical implications to all this.” Maybe she ran out of time.
I don’t mean in any way to insult the talk, though, as it was one of my favorites.
A few tidbits I picked up:
* The fall 2007 Jack Daniels ad campaign made use of neuromarketing data. (I’ve learned, in my short time following this stuff, to be more than skeptical regarding the limitations of what neuromarketing can tell us right now … but I’m still excited to see corporate America getting interested.)
* A 2001 case in Iowa has set out the groundwork for so-called “brain-fingerprinting” (a form of lie detection) to be admitted into evidence.
* I posted the YouTube to this before, but I’ll mention it again: A company called Emotiv is getting ready to introduce a game where you move objects using EEG (i.e., your mind).
* Brain scanning could be used to measure personality traits (extroversion, etc.) and to measure things in an educational setting, such as reading ability.
Ethical issues include: distributive justice (rich folks will have access; others, not-so-much at first), privacy, safety, and freedom (is there a Fifth Amendment right not to have your brain scanned during a police interrogation?).
#6 — Newt Gingrich
I can’t get away from Newt. This wasn’t CPAC, but for some reason the former Republican Speaker of the House was there. Actually, he gave a great speech and was surprisingly well received by a bunch of presumably liberal scientists.
His first message was simple: Lobby Congress. You won’t get what you need if you don’t tell anyone. You can’t, as citizens, not engage the political world and then complain when Congress does something stupid that hinders you. My sense is the neuroscience community has been doing a good job of getting organized in this regard, so the message fit with the direction things are already going.
Other suggestions from Newt:
* A pool of federal grant money should be set aside for scientists under 40 — people too young to know that certain things can’t be done.
* A government-awarded-prize system should figure more prominently in encouraging the development of drugs.
* Help government come up with an overarching strategy as regards Alzheimer’s. (He’s starting a group to look at the issue — which, to anyone who follows Newt, could not be less surprising.)
#7 — Press panel on brain-machine interface
Last but certainly not least, on Tuesday, was the amazing presentation on brain-machine interface — which I already wrote up here. The basic point: We can record the firing of neurons in the motor cortex, figure out what movements they correspond to, and then use the translation to direct robotic limbs. From here, it’s all a problem of refinement.
OVERARCHING THEMES:
I’ll spare you. But I’ll just say the speed of developments is fast and only likely to get faster. Things that sound like science fiction now are likely to be cutting edge and then old news in most of our lifetimes — assuming you’re, say, under 50. Anything we can kind-of, sort-of, just-barely do right now, we’ll eventually perfect. I can’t wait for tomorrow.
The Society for Neuroscience is wrapping up its annual conference. This year it was held in San Diego, and I’m currently in transit on my way back from it.
Before giving some more coherent thoughts (probably when I get back to my desk in Brooklyn), I wanted to share a small taste of the most remarkable thing I saw: the science-fiction-like progress being made in brain-machine interface. That’s using signals recorded from the brain to affect the outside world, such as creating robotic limbs for amputees or allowing the movement of a computer cursor with one’s mind.
Perhaps most astounding to me was a video along the lines of this, where a monkey feeds itself by means of a robotic arm (the monkey is not an amputee, for those concerned, its arms are just immobilized) attached to an array reading neuron firings in its motor cortex:
And this is an old video. Andrew Schwartz, of the University of Pittsburgh’s Motorlab, showed a much more impressive video in a press conference on Tuesday (not yet available for distribution), in which the monkey appeared to have much better control of the arm — including a wider range of motion and finer motor control.
Amazing things are possible with these arrays hooked directly into brains. One thing being tested in humans right now is this BrainGate device, allowing a paraplegic to move a cursor around a computer screen. This local news broadcast gives a peek (ignore the hokey “Twilight Zone” music):
Of course, there’s also a demand for less intrusive devices. To that end, Eric Sellers showed off the Wadsworth Center’s BCI Home System, which uses EEG (electroencephalography, which is non-invasive) to allow ALS patients to “type” using only their brains. It’s far from perfect, but it seems to offer an improvement over eye-tracking devices, which perform a similar function.
Another EEG application is far more commercial: video games. A company called Emotiv is shortly to release a game where players control the action with their minds. It’s pretty rudimentary stuff, but first of its kind. And there’s a video demo:
Now, EEG is far less powerful than direct implantation of arrays into the brain — obviously because it’s reading a much weaker signal. Schwartz told me EEG is just doing now what direct implantation could do 12 years ago. But it’s also the only way most people would ever be willing to experience brain-machine interface (there aren’t too many people clamoring to have things implanted in their brains … yet), so I hope some serious effort is put into that end of things.
All in all, it’s hard for someone of my generation to avoid thinking of Luke’s prosthetic hand in “Star Wars.” A “long, long time ago” might just end up being in my lifetime.
… of a “buy button” in the brain, there may also be a “don’t buy” button.
This whole conservatism-as-mental-disorder idea has really sparked a cottage industry, hasn’t it:
People who are sensitive to interpersonal disgust – for example, they dislike sitting on a bus seat left warm by a stranger – are more likely to hold right-wing attitudes and to be racist.
That’s according to Gordon Hodson and Kimberly Costello, who say that in the same way that core disgust guards the bodily boundary, interpersonal disgust may serve to guard cultural boundaries, by averting us from people who are not members of our group, and drawing us to those who are.
But don’t worry. The researchers are closing in on a cure for racism:
Hodson told the Digest his lab are testing desensitisation procedures in the hope of reducing prejudice: “If disgust sensitive people are more prejudiced then efforts to reduce disgust sensitivity through systematic desensitisation and related procedures (i.e. presenting participants with basic disgusting stimuli and intergroup disgust stimuli under controlled settings paired with relaxation) should help to reduce prejudice.”
Now, if they could only cure conservatism.
… magic.
Women can make men spend money. To know this, one need only be a man (or, I suppose, a woman with said ability). But does this have a direct application to business? Neuromarketing blog argues that it does.
A recent study showed that both conspicuous spending and altruistic behavior can be boosted in men by priming them to think about mating (in this particular experiment, they were asked to describe their perfect date). This same concept seems obviously applicable to sales. If a purchaser is male, an even moderately attractive female is going to push a button in his brain making him want to display his tail feathers, so to speak.
Neuromarketing brings up the somewhat cliche example of hot female pharmaceutical sales reps pushing pills on mostly male doctors. The point, of course, isn’t that there aren’t exceptions to the rules — female doctors, male reps, unattractive female reps — but that our brains build certain biases into the system. Doctors can be as scrupulous as they want, and the reps can be doing nothing to “prime” their clients to think about sex, but the brain wants what the brain wants. And the brain wants to scream to the world: “I am virile! I can make babies! Behold!”
And it’s not just women who can make such appeals:
Female salespeople aren’t the only ones who try to appeal to male customers for a “power display.” I’ve periodically received calls from boiler-room security salesmen (universally male, in my experience) trying to pitch a stock or at least get an agreement that I’ll listen to future pitches. I’m usually courteous when I disengage a telemarketer, but the only way to get these guys off the line is to hang up. Any attempt to disengage will produce more questions. One approach I’ve had them use is a line like, “Are you telling me you can’t make a $5,000 investment?” Said dismissively, it’s clearly intended to question the authority, the financial wherewithal, and ultimately the masculinity of the client.
As is often the case with many of these neuro-based insights, these biases and the techniques they suggest are already ingrained in our culture — after all, they emanate from our brains.
We’re swimming in this stuff. It’s just now, however, that we’re becoming aware of the water.
John B. Judis, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, has what might initially seem to be an intriguing article in the current issue of The New Republic. In it, he argues that something called “terror management theory” has a good deal to tell us about why George W. Bush won reelection in 2004. I say the article “initially seems” intriguing because it falls apart upon inspection. While I believe political psychology and neuropolitics are fruitful fields of endeavor — explaining, for instance, how different personality traits affect political orientation — this Judis article seems to me to be a case of a lot of fancy words and interesting experiments telling us next to nothing we didn’t already know.
The basic thesis Judis advances is that September 11 (and the Bush administration’s subsequent use and abuse of the memory of 9/11) led to Republican victories in 2002 and 2004 because “mere thought of one’s mortality can trigger a range of emotions–from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores.” Racism, bigotry, nationalism, daddy-fixation, Bible-thumping… every liberal stereotype of conservatives is heightened by what a group of psychologists has dubbed “mortality salience.”
The effect certainly seems to exist. As recounted in the article, experiments have shown that subjects primed to contemplate their own mortality have shown a greater propensity to fear other races and religions, wish to impose harsher penalties for crimes, and seek a strong leader than subject who have not been so primed.
Nonetheless, what does any of this really tell us about Bush, 9/11, 2002, and 2004? According to Judis:
[The results of numerous experiments] strongly suggested that Bush’s popularity was sustained by mortality reminders. The psychologists concluded in a paper published after the election that the government terror warnings, the release of Osama bin Laden’s video on October 29, and the Bush campaign’s reiteration of the terrorist threat (Cheney on election eve: “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again”) were integral to Bush’s victory over Kerry. “From a terror management perspective,” they wrote, “the United States’ electorate was exposed to a wide-ranging multidimensional mortality salience induction.”
OK… But what has any of this told us that any political commentator in November of 2004 couldn’t have told us without aid of time-consuming studies and analysis conducted over several decades?
Yes, terrorism makes people scared, and this makes them seek out a strong leader. But why was President Bush so effective in presenting himself as that strong leader? Why couldn’t John Kerry effectively portray himself as a strong leader? While there are plenty of answers to such questions (Bush spent time at his ranch in Crawford, Kerry went windsurfing), none are enhanced by the psychological angle — they’re just common sense.
The one potentially interesting aspect of the psychological angle is that perhaps the entire Republican basket of issues was suddenly more attractive to voters — anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, anti-immigrant, etc. — after 9/11 because of mortality salience, but the Judis article does little to make such a case. Sure, Karl Rove tried to pump up the gay-marriage issue in a way never seen before in American politics. But A) the Massachusetts court decision started the ball rolling, and B) there’s no evidence the gay-marriage initiatives actually helped the GOP on balance. On immigration, Bush has long been at odds with his party’s base, favoring greater Hispanic immigration; he also refused to demonize Muslims after 9/11, even going out of his way to portray Islam as a “religion of peace,” much to the chagrin of his conservative supporters. Overall, I see little evidence that 9/11 shifted the culture in a conservative direction in a way that particularly benefited Bush.
The major problem with Judis’s article, however, would seem to be that it just doesn’t do much to account for 2006. Saying that the memory of 9/11 had faded and Katrina had tarnished Bush’s image as “protector” seems pretty thin. Once again, there’s not much here that goes beyond a conventional political analysis.
If the “9/11 led to cultural conservatism led to more votes for Bush” angle could be established more firmly, there’d be something here. As it stands, I don’t think the case is made.
Meanwhile, the end of the article gives away which candidate the author fears might repeat Bush’s political success coming into 2008:
Of course, there are still voters within the Republican electorate whose hearts beat to the rhythms of September 11 and who are still engaged in a passionate defense of their worldview. They continue to identify the war in Iraq with the war on terror; they worry about illegal aliens and terrorists crossing the border; some even judge the growing public opposition to Bush as further confirmation of his role as protector. These voters appear particularly attracted to Rudy Giuliani, whose entire campaign is based upon reminding voters of September 11. And, if Giuliani is the Republican nominee in 2008, the election may pivot on his ability to use reminders of September 11 to provoke the public into another massive bout of worldview defense.
Given the outcome of 2006, following the same-old Republican script probably wouldn’t be a good idea for any GOP candidate. Neuroscience or no.
Don’t miss the Wall Street Journal’s fantastic article “Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?“
Basic story:
Did I miss any major parts? Well, you’d have to read the whole profile — which I encourage you to do — to find out.
To answer the headline question — in contravention of the Great Law of Headline Question Marks — it seems safe to say: yes. While we’re not talking about a physical affair (if real-life man is to be believed, he’s never even talked to avatar hottie’s real-life counterpart on the phone), it’s certainly an emotional one. And even if he doesn’t feel like he’s cheating, he’s checked out of his real-life marriage in favor of his Second Life one.
This sort of thing is only going to become more common. As online worlds become more realistic, more immersive, and more rewarding (financially and otherwise), people who feel constrained in their real lives are going to turn to cyberlife. I don’t think this is an unmitigated evil — in fact, it may be quite a positive thing (value in life is where people find it, who’s to judge). But, at the same time, it is important for society to get its head around just how “real” these worlds can become to people — just so folks can go in with their eyes open.
The Neuromarketing blog looks at the Wall Street Journal piece and picks out some important points:
In other words: “From a neurological standpoint, virtual reality IS reality.”
Which circle is brighter? The one on the left or the one on the right?
It turns out, they’re both the same shade of white. But the halo surrounding the one on the left causes most people to experience it as being much brighter. Students looking at this illusion in a lab setting complained of it burning their retinas.
(via Cognitive Daily)
Is addiction a “brain disease” or a “psychological problem”? This post over at Mind Hacks takes a look at the question, jumping off of this ABC Radio special.
The question, of course, is not an entirely scientific one. It is also a political one. “Brain disease” indicates a condition for which the patient cannot be blamed. “Psychological problem” implies more personal responsibility.
I’ve always taken the “psychological problem” view, basically reasoning that something isn’t a “disease” if the cure is to simply stop doing it. At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore that there are powerful genetic and physiological factors that push some people toward addiction and others away. What kind of moral culpability can we pin on someone who is the victim of bad biology?
What’s hopeful here, I think, is that as we discover more and more about the genetic and other triggers of addiction — making us more likely as a society to favor treatment over punishment — these same breakthroughs might actually help us treat addiction effectively, something we kind of suck at as a society as things stand right now.
If you live in New York City and take the subway, you may have noticed a series of cartoon ads for something called “Windorphins.” What are they? A Cartoon Network show (my guess)? A depression drug? A kite-flying club for orphans? Just plain scary (guest-blogger Jacob Gershman’s guess)?
Well, it turns out they are … a rather lame ad for eBay. (I suppose one has a rush of endorphins when one wins an eBay auction.)
The theory seems to be that mystery gets people’s attention. And, well, here I am talking about eBay — so, I suppose, mission accomplished. Still, this strikes me as similar to those “The Algorithm Killed Jeeves” ads. Didn’t care then. Don’t care now.
(via 3quarksdaily)
They can be used for more than detecting terorrists…
They can also probably be used to sell soft drinks!
According to this article, from McClatchy’s Washington Bureau, the Transportation Security Agency is now employing Behavior Detection Officers at airports to monitor passengers’ body language, behavior, and facial expressions. They’re currently deployed at “more than a dozen” airports; the TSA reportedly wants to have 500 of these agents trained and working by the end of 2008, though the article doesn’t say how many airports that would entail covering.
This is how the officers operate:
At the heart of the new screening system is a theory that when people try to conceal their emotions, they reveal their feelings in flashes that [University of California at San Francisco Professor Paul] Ekman, a pioneer in the field, calls “micro-expressions.” Fear and disgust are the key ones, he said, because they’re associated with deception.
Behavior detection officers work in pairs. Typically, one officer sizes up passengers openly while the other seems to be performing a routine security duty. A passenger who arouses suspicion, whether by micro-expressions, social interaction or body language gets subtle but more serious scrutiny.
A behavior specialist may decide to move in to help the suspicious passenger recover belongings that have passed through the baggage X-ray. Or he may ask where the traveler’s going. If more alarms go off, officers will “refer” the person to law enforcement officials for further questioning.
So, the next time the guy hands you back your shoes and asks you where you’re headed to today, he’s probably not just making conversation… as if you didn’t assume that already.
This is all sort of a domestic-beer version of Israel’s airport security, which has the drawback of being much more intrusive but the plus of actually having a shot at working.
I’ve had the pleasure of going through Israeli airport security a few times. The first time, heading to Israel on an El Al flight, the security folks grilled me about where I was going and where I was staying and why I was going, etc. etc. etc. My business was a bit odd (going to an academic conference on the topic of whether Israel needed a written constitution, with an emphasis on analyzing the U.S. Constitution), so I had a lot of explaining to do. The fact that I was on assignment for the most pro-Zionist paper in America didn’t seem to help. They even tried to trip me up by asking me if I spoke Hebrew. I said no (because, well, I don’t). But later I was asked, seemingly at random by another agent and a family in line with me, if I could translate. I, of course, said no. But it wasn’t until much later that it occurred to me that El Al has plenty of translators and didn’t need my services. On another occasion, on my way back from Israel, I could barely move for having sunburned myself on the beach in Tel Aviv. I thought Ben-Gurion security might take me down for walking so funny, but I made it through relatively unscathed.
The point is, while micro-expressions are real, I highly doubt a TSA officer with 16 hours of training can pick them up (typically, you hear about researchers studying such expressions in a lab setting, on slowed down videotape). Less intrusiveness than the Israeli system + far less training than the Israelis = far, far less effective.
The government seems to get this. They want to replace this still-being-implemented system with a computerized system that would, according to the article, use “videocams and computers to measure and analyze heart rate, respiration, body temperature and verbal responses as well as facial micro-expressions.” Sounds a lot better to me than the human version.
While the Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, argument might say that humans can read these sorts of cues well (I’m halfway through the book right now), I’d guess the ability varies quite a bit person-to-person, and I don’t trust our TSA staffing policies to put the right people in the right places. I’d greatly prefer to have a computer looking out for me.
And plenty of folks, I’m sure, won’t be happy with either solution. It is creepy being watched constantly in an airport — believe me, I know, I fly a lot for work. At the same time, you’re boarding a human-guided missile responsible not just for the lives of the passengers in the air but civilians on the ground. Our society asks for certain trade-offs between safety and security, and I’m not sure that this is an unreasonable one.
(via Sciam Observations)
UPDATE (12:50 a.m.): I just stumbled upon the fact that Professor Ekman has these CDs available that supposedly allow one to improve his or her ability to interpret facial expressions. I must say I’m intrigued.
Here’s another one of those academic studies on political differences meant to drive conservatives crazy: Study finds conservatives less creative than liberals.
The proof?:
Stephen Dollinger established the conservatism of 422 university students by asking them whether they favoured such things as legalised abortion, gay rights and the immigration of foreigners.
The students demonstrated their creativity by completing a half-finished drawing in any way they liked, and by taking 20 photos on the theme “who are you?” - their efforts were then rated by judges. The students also indicated how often they engaged in various creative activities, such as writing poetry.
The students with more conservative views tended to be judged less creative based on their performance on the drawing and photography task, and their record of creative activities. This remained true even when their scores on a vocab test and a personality measure of openness to experience were taken into account.
The content of the students’ photos gave some insight into their differing creativity. The 15 most conservative students depicted religious and family values, for example with photos of the bible. The 9 least conservative students, by contrast, tended to use unconventional ways to illustrate their lives. One student photographed a car parking over the line, to portray his disdain for rules.
The findings build on earlier work showing that people with conservative attitudes tend to favour simple representational paintings over more abstract art.
Though there have been other studies in this vein that have been less convincing — usually designed by liberal academics looking to belittle conservatives — this one strikes me as quite plausible. It seems relatively clear to me that political values for the average person have far less to do with a coherent philosophy arrived at from scratch than with one’s general disposition, mixed with cultural and family influences. For instance, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’m a misanthrope who doesn’t particularly like most people and a libertarian. It’s just too convenient.
That conservatism would be correlated with some sorts of personality traits and liberalism with others seems more than likely — it seems inevitable.
Don’t miss John Tierney’s column, raising the possibility that we’re all Sims in some future (or, I suppose, present) computer geek’s virtual world:
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.
You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
Of course, this all would answer one longstanding question:
It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.
Having played a lot of Sim City as a kid, I’d argue that we know this theory isn’t true for one simple reason: There’d be a LOT more earthquakes and tornadoes. Still, the Tierney column is worth reading to the end, just for the college-dorm-room-BS-session recursiveness of it all.
Software designers, among others, know that “default” is a very powerful tool for influencing the behavior of users/customers.
Architectures of Control looks at what happened when Adobe tried to steer business toward FedEx Kinko’s. Other printers got upset, and a default setting was removed from the product.
[Image from Architectures of Control]
As someone who lives only a few blocks from a Kinko’s, this strikes me as a case where competitors acted against the interests of consumers. We didn’t get a more flexible product, one which would allow us to choose to send our documents to FedEx Kinko’s or another print shop. We simply have no “send-to” button at all. It reminds me of all the cases against Microsoft, where competing software companies complained about Microsoft giving consumers free software. Now, I’m a Mac guy. But I also very rarely have a problem with companies trying to give me something for free.
While the FedEx Kinko’s button could be seen as piece of architecture trying to control consumers, I think consumers pretty desperately need these default functions. I don’t agree with everything I’ve read attributed to “The Paradox of Choice,” but it seems rather obvious that individuals don’t need any more extraneous choices to make. I’m happy to just send my printing wherever the heck Adobe wants me to. And if I have a strong preference for another provider, I’ll find a workaround. If enough people have another preference, Adobe will have a pretty good incentive to come up with another architecture.
They say that on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog. An article noted by Deception Blog puts that in some perspective.
An article under the title, “Deception in cyberspace: A comparison of text-only vs. avatar-supported medium,” in the September 2007 issue of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies relays the results of an experiment in online deception. Student participants were randomly assigned to either tell the truth or lie to online conversation partners. They then conducted conversations in either text-only or avatar-supported chat rooms.
There were three key findings:
* Participants who had been assigned to lie were more likely than truth-tellers to choose avatars that looked different from themselves.
* In text-only chat, liars had higher (self-reported) anxiety levels than truth-tellers; but the same effect did not show up in the avatar-supported chat.
* Avatar or no avatar, participants were not able to pick up on cues to deception.
In other words, an online avatar can make it easier (and less stressful) to lie, but it doesn’t make you any more or less trustworthy to those with whom you interact. You may be a dog, but to the world you have a poker face.
The neuroblog Mind Hacks recommends a BBC documentary called “Brain Story.” The series of six, one-hour episodes was apparently put out in 2000 — but never released on VHS or DVD. Now, however, it’s available (ilegally) on BitTorrent.
While I wouldn’t normally endorse illegal downloading, the BBC hasn’t created any legal way for consumers to obtain the series. (I personally just ordered a probably illegal bootleg off of eBay. I would have greatly preferred to simply order through the BBC or on Amazon. British citizens, perhaps, can feel less guilt, as they already paid for the series through their tax dollars. I’ll consider it reparations for the BBC having not made a third season of “Rome.”)
Anyway, it looks pretty cool, at least in this 9 minute clip on YouTube, which has subtitles in what I’m taking a shot in the dark by guessing is Chinese:
Just watching a couple of neurosurgeons poke a woman’s brain with cattle prods while she tries to count to 10 is worth the price of admission.
I mentioned yesterday that oenophiles are state whores — being told a wine was from California made them like it more than when they were told it was from North Dakota (nickname: “The Nothing State”).
Well, it turns out three-year-olds are brand whores. To the research mobile, Robin!:
A study, published in the Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine yesterday, found that children as young as three preferred to eat foods they believed to be from McDonald’s - even if those foods, such as a serve of vegetables, were not part of the fast-food giant’s menu.
Researchers tested 63 preschoolers from low-income families in California. The children were each given two identical samples of three foods from McDonald’s, one in branded wrappers and the other in identical packaging bearing no brand. They were also given milk and carrots.
About 77 per cent of children said they preferred the taste of the french fries in the McDonald’s bag, while only 13.3 per cent favoured the fries in the plain bag. Only 10 per cent said they thought the two offerings tasted the same.
What we learn here that’s interesting is that “serve” is apparently Australian for “serving.” (The news story is from the Sydney Morning Herald.)
We also learn that our preferences are shaped far less by direct sensory input than we might imagine. Obviously, a chicken nugget should taste like a chicken nugget should taste like a chicken nugget. But it turns out, according to this study, that even carrot sticks taste better to kids if they’re in a McDonald’s bag than if they’re in a plain bag!
This (and the wine story) reminds me of one of my favorite segments from Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit,” where unsuspecting diners are told they’re eating a fancy meal, but really they’re being served stale bread and canned tomatoes. Needless to say, they — quite literally — eat it up.
These cognitive mistakes seem silly in children. But people of all ages are susceptible to them.
(via Neuromarketing)
… of Debbie Downer.
Tell folks their wine comes from North Dakota and they have one experience.
Tell them it comes from California, and not only does the wine taste better to them — the food does, too.
Something called the James S. McDonnell Foundation has a Web site it calls the Neuro-Journalism Mill, dedicated to tracking good and bad (mostly bad) reporting on neuroscience. It separates press reports into two categories — wheat and chaff — based on these criteria:
To be considered Chaff, the article must demonstrate one (or more than one) of the following flaws:
- seriously misrepresents the original science
- covers research of dubious value
- wildly extrapolates the reported findings
- presents an overly simplistic interpretation of a complex finding
Recent chaff includes:
“Men’s Brains Have More Cells, Say Scientists Who Counted”
“Cockroaches Can Learn — Like Dogs and Humans”
“Learn More About the Cognitive Paparazzi!”
“Why Do Most 16-Year-Olds Drive Like They’re Missing a Part of Their Brain?”
“Cells That Read Minds”
Among the wheat… this July 2 New Yorker piece on whether brain scans can really detect lies (short answer: not yet, not by a long shot).
It’s a fun site — though the authors don’t lie when they call themselves “curmudgeonly.” I’ll certainly be checking in with it regularly as I begin to write on this blog more about developments in neuroscience.
Still, I wonder if these folks aren’t trying to suck too much of the fun out of the entire endeavor of reporting on the leaps and bounds being made in understanding the human mind and human behavior. Sure, some of the headlines above take a serious field and force its findings into the template of the Weekly World News. At the same time, is any journalism that takes complex research and makes it accessible to non-academic readers a crime against science? Is joyless skepticism, as opposed to guarded optimism (or even wonderment), the only acceptable tone for one to take?
It could be the case that such an approach is necessary. These are very tough topics for people to grapple with intellectually. A recent study (PDF) suggests that “people are much more willing to buy bad scientific explanations of phenomenon if they contain some sort of neuroscience reference - such as a comment that the phenomenon is associated with activity in a certain part of the brain - even if that reference is irrelevant to the logic of the argument being made.” It’s something to keep in mind as a reader, a reporter, or a writer.
Still, I think with a little more knowledge on the part of the reader — more education in basic neuroscience, as with economics, would be a good idea at the high school level — most of the sillier stories would stop being believed. Meanwhile, there’s plenty in the field to be excited about, even keeping it all in perspective.
Sort of a double recommendation here tonight…
First, cruise on over to www.dontclick.it. It’s an ingenious art project (mouse over where it says “copyright” to get some explanation), based on the idea that user interfaces on the Web would (or at least could, under some circumstances) be better without “clicking.” As in… well, it’s sort of difficult to put into words. But you’ll get it in 10-30 seconds if you play with the site. I’m not sure I buy the concept — though it’s not being helped by the fact that I’m using a laptop touchpad at the moment — but it’s intriguing and could be used for at least some types of sites.
And how did I stumble upon this odd, fascinating site? Did a blog recommend it? Did it come up in a search result? Did Microsoft pay to put it in front of me? Nope, nope, and nope. I found it using a little tool called StumbleUpon. You download a toolbar, give it a few topics you’re interested in, and then hit a button that says “Stumble!” It sends you to sites, which you can rate with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. It collects data on what kinds of sites you like and creates recommendations — a bit like Amazon’s recommendations, I suppose, but for the whole Web.
This is my first, oh, half an hour using StumbleUpon. But I like it so far. And it could be a great tool when bored of my usual virtual haunts.
I found it, via GeekPress.
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