Mixing Memory

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The New York Review of Books

The New York Review of Books: Home

03/28/03 - Review of How Do You Cure Injelitance?

03/28/03 - Review of How Do You Cure Injelitance?

ScienceDaily Magazine: Your Source for the Latest Research News in Science, Health & Medicine, the Environment, Space, Technology, and Computers

ScienceDaily Magazine: Your Source for the Latest Research News in Science, Health & Medicine, the Environment, Space, Technology, and Computers

The passions of prarie voles

The reward mechanism involved in addiction appears to regulate lifelong social or pair bonds between monogamous mating animals, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study of prairie voles published in the January 19 edition of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The finding could have implications for understanding the basis of romantic love and disorders of the ability to form social attachments, such as autism and schizophrenia.

Addiction and Cue-triggered decision processes

Beyond Money: towards an economy of well being

Desirable outcomes, even economic ones, are often caused by
well-being rather than the other way around. People high in well-being
later earn higher incomes and perform better at work than
people who report low well-being.

Found footnotes

this idea comes from the blog Notional slurry, who finds that some sets of footnotes, "as long as they’re not the minimalist Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. style (which wears so thin so quickly), make fine poems".

Sissela Bok stalks the notion of happiness

Bok, a senior visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, presented what she called "field notes from my travels" through the interdisciplinary field known, without a hint of irony, as happiness studies. We are, in general, a happier lot than we've ever been, she reported, and the secret of happiness lies not in one magic bullet but rather in a mix of predictable factors like good mental health and social relations and a baseline of physical health and wealth.

The Wealth of Virtual Nations

Available as a pdf download, an academic study of the economy of a virtual world.

Parrot does Maths

During one experiment Alex the parrot was presented with blocks in differently colored sets of two, three, and six. When researchers asked Alex which color group had five blocks, he answered, "None." This prompted Pepperberg to set up a series of tests in which the parrot consistently identified zero quantities of objects with the label "none."
Alex had been taught the term "none" to indicate when neither of two identically sized objects was larger than the other. He had also used it to indicate when there was no difference in other qualities, such as color or shape, among a set of objects.

The Hedonistic Bias: affective forcasting and the Big Wombassa

People tend to overestimate the impact of future events. That is, they predict that future events will have a more intense and more enduring hedonic impact than they actually do...

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Lessons from Medieval Trade

On March 28, 1210, Rubeus de Campo of Genoa agreed to pay a debt of 100 marks
sterling in London on behalf of Vivianus Jordanus from Lucca . There is nothing unusual
about this agreement—in fact, there is evidence of thousands of such agreements in
Europe at the time. But this agreement implicitly reveals why Rubeus lived in a period of
remarkable economic growth measured by such proxies as urbanization, population
growth, capital investment, and changing patterns of t

The poet's father

Here’s the thing: my father uses my poems to sell timeshare. He sits across those cheap metal folding tables that seem to be a staple in every timeshare office and says, “Let me show you a poem my daughter wrote.”

Philosophers out of 10

Simulated society may generate virtual culture

Every character in the simulated world will need to eat to survive, and will be able to learn from their environment through trial and error - learning, for example, how to cultivate edible plants with water and sunlight. In addition, characters will be able to reproduce by mating with members the opposite sex and their offspring will inherited a random collection of their parents "genetic" traits.

Gameboy boots

for the Japanese teen, from syberpunk.com

World's largest digging machine

via growabrain.

The social fabric

Social Fabric features a display of avatars on a mobile device's screen, representing individuals in a group of friends or acquaintances. The avatars use body language to show how recently you've contacted each person: Regularly contacted friends appear alert and look directly at you. Less frequent contacts might slouch and turn to the side, and infrequent contacts could have their backs turned.

Kleinzahler's ideal reader

The nature of this pleasure involves a degree of difficulty and resistance. This pleasure is not to be confused with diversion, even the cultivated diversion provided by authors like Elmore Leonard. My ideal reader has read widely enough, actively read, and with a certain degree of attention, that upon encountering a patch of dead syntax, tortured diction, bluff gesture, rote strategy, the ingratiating stylistic doffing of the hat or mechanical development and resolution the lights come on and the show is over. After all, it is 2005 and my reader doesn’t have a great deal of time

hamletworks.org

A decade ago, a student of the Shakespeare play would read the play, probably all the way through, and then search out separate commentaries and analyses.

Enter hamletworks.org.

When completed, the site will help visitors comb through several editions of the play, along with 300 years of commentaries by a slew of scholars. Readers can click to commentaries linked to each line of text in the nearly 3,500-line play. The idea is that some day, anyone wanting to study "Hamlet" will find nearly all the known scholarship brought together in a cohesive way that printed books cannot.

Commission for Africa Report

A must read.

What Other People Say May Change What You See

A new study uses advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on a topic that psychologists have puzzled over for more than half a century: social conformity.


The study was based on 1950's work by the psychologist Solomon Asch, above.
The study was based on a famous series of laboratory experiments from the 1950's by a social psychologist, Dr. Solomon Asch.
In those early studies, the subjects were shown two cards. On the first was a vertical line. On the second were three lines, one of them the same length as that on the first card.
Then the subjects were asked to say which two lines were alike, something that most 5-year-olds could answer correctly.
But Dr. Asch added a twist. Seven other people, in cahoots with the researchers, also examined the lines and gave their answers before the subjects did. And sometimes these confederates intentionally gave the wrong answer.
Dr. Asch was astonished at what happened next. After thinking hard, three out of four subjects agreed with the incorrect answers given by the confederates at least once. And one in four conformed 50 percent of the time.
Dr. Asch, who died in 1996, always wondered about the findings. Did the people who gave in to group do so knowing that their answers was wrong? Or did the social pressure actually change their perceptions?
The new study tried to find an answer by using functional M.R.I. scanners that can peer into the working brain, a technology not available to Dr. Asch.
The researchers found that social conformity showed up in the brain as activity in regions that are entirely devoted to perception. But independence of judgment - standing up for one's beliefs - showed up as activity in brain areas involved in emotion, the study found, suggesting that there is a cost for going against the group.
"We like to think that seeing is believing," said Dr. Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta who led the study.
But the study's findings, he said, show that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe.
The research was published June 22 in the online edition of Biological Psychiatry.
"It's a very important piece of work," said Dr. Dan Ariely, a professor of management and decision making at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. "It suggests that information from other people may color our perception at a very deep level."
Dr. Brian Knutson, a neuroscientist at Stanford and an expert on perception, called the study "extremely clever."
"It had all the right controls and is a new contribution, the first to look at social conformity inside a brain magnet," he said.
Functional M.R.I. scanners detect which brain regions are active when people carry out various mental tasks.
The new study involved 32 volunteers who agreed to participate in a study on perception. "We told them others will be doing the same task, but you're the only one who will be in the scanner," Dr. Berns said.
The subjects were asked to mentally rotate images of three-dimensional objects to determine if the objects were the same or different.
In the waiting room, the subjects met four people who they thought were other volunteers, but who in fact were actors, ready to fake their responses.
To encourage cohesiveness in the group, the participant and the four actors played practice rounds on laptop computers, took pictures of one another and chatted.
Then the participant went into the M.R.I. machine. The participant was told that the others would look at the objects first as a group and then decide if they were same or different.
As planned, the actors gave unanimously wrong answers in some instances and unanimously correct answers in others.
Mixed answers were sometimes thrown in to make the test more believable but they were not included in the analysis.
Next, the participant was shown the answer given by the others and asked to judge the objects.
Were they the same or different?
The brain scanner captured a picture of the judgment process.
In some trials, instead of being told that the other volunteers had given an answer, they were told that a computer had made the decision. Dr. Berns said this was done to make sure it was social pressure that was having an effect.
As in Dr. Asch's experiments, many of the subjects caved in to group pressure. On average, Dr. Berns said, they went along with the group on wrong answers 41 percent of the time.
The researchers had two hypotheses about what was happening. If social conformity was a result of conscious decision making, they reasoned, they should see changes in areas of the forebrain that deal with monitoring conflicts, planning and other higher-order mental activities.
But if the subjects' social conformity stemmed from changes in perception, there should be changes in posterior brain areas dedicated to vision and spatial perception.
In fact, the researchers found that when people went along with the group on wrong answers, activity increased in the right intraparietal sulcus, an area devoted to spatial awareness, Dr. Berns said.
There was no activity in brain areas that make conscious decisions, the researchers found. But the people who made independent judgments that went against the group showed activation in the right amygdala and right caudate nucleus - regions associated with emotional salience.
The implications of the study's findings are huge, Dr. Berns said.
In many areas of society - elections, for example, or jury trials - the accepted way to resolve conflicts between an individual and a group is to invoke the "rule of the majority." There is a sound reason for this: A majority represents the collective wisdom of many people, rather than the judgment of a single person.
But the superiority of the group can disappear when the group exerts pressure on individuals, Dr. Berns said.
The unpleasantness of standing alone can make a majority opinion seem more appealing than sticking to one's own beliefs.
If other people's views can actually affect how someone perceives the external world, then truth itself is called into question.
There is no way out of this problem, Dr. Ariely said.
But if people are made aware of their vulnerability, they may be able to avoid conforming to social pressure when it is not in their self-interest.