60 things worth shortening life for

Gilbert lecture from TED

power manners

Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put
one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came
in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie?
The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open,
spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table.
It reminded the researchers of powerful people they had known in real life. One of them, for instance, had
attended meetings with a magazine mogul who ate raw onions and slugged vodka from the bottle, but failed to
share these amuse-bouches with his guests. Another had been through an oral exam for his doctorate at which
one faculty member not only picked his ear wax, but held it up to dandle lovingly in the light.

Inner life of Cells

group male competition

Evolutionary scientists argue that human cooperation is the product of a long history of competition among rival groups. There are various reasons to believe that this logic applies particularly to men. In three experiments, using a step-level public-goods task, we found that men contributed more to their group if their group was competing with other groups than if there was no intergroup competition. Female cooperation was relatively unaffected by intergroup competition. These findings suggest that men respond more strongly than women to intergroup threats. ..These findings fit nicely with an evolutionary hypothesis about specific male intergroup adaptations—the male-warrior hypothesis—and such evolved intergroup traits are likely to be reinforced through cultural processes, for example, during childhood socialization...Women's social psychology is likely to be shaped more strongly by different kinds of needs, such as defending their offspring and creating supportive social networks

The Paomnnehal Pweor Of The Hmuan Mnid

I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanighuh?

sitll tarainwg toughrw minblgo

Cooperation, Punishment, and the Evolution of Human Institutions

from Mindblog:

This is the title of a review by Henrich of studies on how human cooperations and sanctions might have evolved, which specifically cites a paper by Gurerk et al in Science. People are offered the choice of two institutions in which individuals make voluntary contributions with the total then being equally distributed among all. Participants know what was contributed by others. In the first, individuals who do not contribute still receive an equal share of the total collected but no sanctions are applied to poor contributors. In the second, participants can choose to penalize slackers at some cost to themselves. The authors show "that a sanctioning institution is the undisputed winner in a competition with a sanction-free institution. Despite initial aversion, the entire population migrates successively to the sanctioning institution and strongly cooperates, whereas the sanction-free society becomes fully depopulated. The findings demonstrate the competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions and exemplify the emergence and manifestation of social order driven by institutional selection."

The expert mind

from Mindblog

I've been meaning to mention an interesting article in the August issue of Scientific American, by Philip Ross, on how people become experts in different fields of accomplishment.

Some clips ard paraphrase from that article: Some of the most clear research on expertise has studied skill at chess, which can be clearly measured. What emerges is that the expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. Similar results have been demonstrated in bridge players (who can remember cards played in many games), computer programmers (who can reconstruct masses of computer code) and musicians (who can recall long snatches of music). Ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.


Figure from Amidzic et al. (2001) Brain activity in chess masters is different from the pattern observed in novices. Relationship between chess-playing skill (Elo rating scale) and the relative share of dipoles located in medial temporal lobe structures (black) and in the frontal and parietal cortices (red). In weaker players more activfity occurred in the brain's medial temporal lobe than in the frontal and parietal cortices, which suggests that the amateurs were analyzing unusual new moves. In gradmasters, however, the frontal and parietal cortices were more active, indicating that they were retrieving information from long term memory.

It takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Herbert Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others. K.A. Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence...Having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields...

The Insula

"... the insula “lights up” in brain scans when people crave drugs, feel pain, anticipate pain, empathize with others, listen to jokes, see disgust on someone’s face, are shunned in a social settings, listen to music, decide not to buy an item, see someone cheat and decide to punish them, and determine degrees of preference while eating chocolate. Damage to the insula can lead to apathy, loss of libido and an inability to tell fresh food from rotten."
The insula itself is a sort of receiving zone that reads the physiological state of the entire body and then generates subjective feelings that can bring about actions, like eating, that keep the body in a state of internal balance. Information from the insula is relayed to other brain structures that appear to be involved in decision making, especially the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices...The insula was long ignored for two reasons, researchers said. First, because it is folded and tucked deep within the brain, scientists could not probe it with shallow electrodes. It took the invention of brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to watch it in action."

" ...the insula receives information from receptors in the skin and internal organs. Such receptors are nerve cells that specialize in different senses. Thus there are receptors that detect heat, cold, itch, pain, taste, hunger, thirst, muscle ache, visceral sensations and so-called air hunger, the need to breathe. The sense of touch and the sense of the body’s position in space are routed to different brain regions."

"All mammals have insulas that read their body condition... Information about the status of the body’s tissues and organs is carried from the receptors along distinct spinal pathways, into the brain stem and up to the posterior insula in the higher brain or cortex...Humans, and to a lesser degree the great apes, have evolved two innovations to their insulas that take this system of reading body states to a new level...One involves circuitry, the other a brand new type of brain cell...In humans, information about the body’s state takes a slightly different route inside the brain, picking up even more signals from the gut, the heart, the lungs and other internal organs. Then the human brain takes an extra step, Dr. Craig said. The information on bodily sensations is further routed to the front part of the insula, especially on the right side, which has undergone a huge expansion in humans and apes...The second major modification to the insula is a type of cell found in only humans, great apes, whales and possibly elephants... Humans have by far the greatest number of these cells, which are called VENs, short for Von Economo neurons, named for the scientist who first described them in 1925. VENs are large cigar-shaped cells tapered at each end, and they are found exclusively in the frontal insula and anterior cingulate cortex...Exactly what VENs are doing within this critical circuit is not yet known...but they are in the catbird seat for turning feelings and emotions into actions and intentions."

realzelig

Brain damage turns man into human chameleon
In his 1983 fake documentary 'Zelig', Woody Allen plays a character, Leonard Zelig, a kind of human chameleon who takes on the appearance and behaviour of whoever he is with. Now psychologists in Italy have reported the real-life case of AD, a 65-year-old whose identity appears dependent on the environment he is in. He started behaving this way after cardiac arrest caused damage to the fronto-temporal region of his brain.

When with doctors, AD assumes the role of a doctor; when with psychologists he says he is a psychologist; at the solicitors he claims to be a solicitor. AD doesn't just make these claims, he actually plays the roles and provides plausible stories for how he came to be in these roles.

To investigate further, Giovannina Conchiglia and colleagues used actors to contrive different scenarios. At a bar, an actor asked AD for a cocktail, prompting him to immediately fulfil the role of bar-tender, claiming that he was on a two-week trial hoping to gain a permanent position. Taken to the hospital kitchen for 40 minutes, AD quickly assumed the role of head chef, and claimed responsibility for preparing special menus for diabetic patients. He maintains these roles until the situation changes. However, he didn't adopt the role of laundry worker at the hospital laundry, perhaps because it was too far out of keeping with his real-life career as a politician.

AD's condition is a form of disinhibition, but it appears distinct from other well-known disinhibition syndromes such as utilisation behaviour, in which patients can't help themselves from using any objects or food in the vicinity. For example, AD didn't touch anything in the hospital kitchen.

His tendency to switch roles is exacerbated by anterograde amnesia (a loss of memory for events since his cardiac arrest) and anosognosia – a lack of insight into his strange behaviour.

“AD seems to have lost the capacity to keep his own identity constant, as he adapts himself excessively to variations in the social contexts, violating his own identity connotations in order to favour a role which the environment proposes”, the researchers said.
___________________________________

Hanson on Truth

Idea Futures
Even massive documentation, however, does not obviously make it much hard to lie and
self-deceive about abstract reasoning and conclusions. If you are biased in your reasons for
preferring a political candidate, or for believing in a scientific theory, it seems hard to catch
that bias just by looking at where you’ve been and what you’ve said.
For disputes that can eventually be resolved, it turns out that we have a social institution,
feasible today, that is capable of eliminating much of this bias, producing relatively accurate
unbiased estimates. That institution is idea futures, i.e., betting markets, also known as
prediction markets or information markets (Wolfers & Zitzewitz, 2004; Hanson, 1999, 1995).
The basic idea is that people who have to put their money where their mouth is form
beliefs in the equivalent of harsher weather, where they prefer more functional clothes. Those
who know that they don’t know tend to shut up, and those who don’t know that they don’t
know lose their money and then shut up. Those who remain know, and know that they
know.

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Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks

The moral may be that once you can guess what your answer will be - once you can assign a greater probability to your answering one way than another - you have, in all probability, already decided. And if you were honest with yourself, you would often be able to guess your final answer within seconds of hearing the question. We change our minds less often than we think. How fleeting is that brief unnoticed moment when we can't yet guess what our answer will be, the tiny fragile instant when there's a chance for intelligence to act. In questions of choice, as in questions of fact.
Thor Shenkel said: "It ain't a true crisis of faith unless things could just as easily go either way."

How Brain's 'Mirrors' Aid Our Social Understanding

This means that at least some aspects of language may be rooted in a very physical understanding of the world, the way we see and touch and feel things. It helps address a long-standing puzzle about language: How do we understand what words mean? If words are defined only by other words, what does the whole deck of cards rest on?

The new research suggests that language may depend at least in part on representations in the brain of the physical world, a much more concrete way to conceptualize language. When we hear words, we essentially act out their meanings in our own minds.