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Day to Day Behaviour
Programmed by Evolution |
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How much free choice
do we in fact have? |
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Brain mechanisms of social conformity
New research reveals the brain activity that underlies our
tendency to "follow the crowd."
January 14, 2009
Psychology & Sociology
The study, published by Cell Press in the January 15th issue of the journal
Neuron, provides intriguing insight into how human behavior can be guided by
the perceived behavior of other individuals. Many studies have demonstrated
the profound effect of group opinion on individual judgments, and there is
no doubt that we look to the behavior and judgment of others for information
about what will be considered expected and acceptable behavior.
"We often change our decisions and judgments to conform with normative group
behavior," says lead study author Dr. Vasily Klucharev from the F.C. Donders
Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging in The Netherlands. "However, the neural
mechanisms of social conformity remain unclear."
Dr. Klucharev and colleagues hypothesized that social conformity might be
based on reinforcement learning and that a conflict with group opinion could
trigger a "prediction error" signal. A prediction error, first identified in
reinforcement learning models, is a difference between expected and obtained
outcomes that is thought to signal the need for a behavioral adjustment.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain
activity in subjects whose initial judgments of facial attractiveness were
open to influence by group opinion. Specifically, they examined the rostral
cingulate zone (RCZ) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc). The RCZ is thought to
play a role in monitoring behavioral outcomes, and the NAc has been
implicated in the anticipation and processing of rewards as well as social
learning.
The study authors found that a conflict with the group opinion triggered a
long-term conforming adjustment of an individual's own rating and that
conflict with the group elicited a neuronal response in the RCZ and NAc
similar to a prediction error signal. Further, the magnitude of the
individual conflict-related signal in the NAc correlated with differences in
conforming behavior across subjects.
"The present study explains why we often automatically adjust our opinion in
line with the majority opinion," says Dr. Klucharev. "Our results also show
that social conformity is based on mechanisms that comply with reinforcement
learning and is reinforced by the neural error-monitoring activity which
signals what is probably the most fundamental social mistake—that of being
too different from others."
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Research discovers 'generosity hormone'
The reason why some people are more generous than others is
down to levels of a single hormone in the brain.
Daily Telegraph
07/11/2007
A new study suggests that those who give more to charity, open their wallets
and act kindly to strangers have higher than normal levels of oxytocin
hormone in the brain, while mean-spirited people have relatively lower
levels.
The brain chemical could explain one of the most important traits of human,
as opposed to animal society: we are altruistic towards people we do not
know, are proud of being Good Samaritans, and are generous and charitable
when we do not have to be.
advertisementThe new study of the hormone is published by Prof Paul Zak of
Claremont Graduate University in PLoS ONE, and colleagues, extending work
linking the same hormone to levels of trust, revealing what he said is a
"huge increase" in generosity linked to higher levels of oxytocin.
His team gave doses of oxytocin and a placebo to participants, who were then
offered a decision on how to split a sum of money with a stranger who could
accept or reject the split. The results were overwhelming: Those given
oxytocin offered 80 per cent more money than those given a placebo.
There is even evidence that brain oxytocin levels in society are increasing,
as annual levels of charity in American have gone up 187% since 1954. But
this is not because genes responsible for high oxytocin are spreading, or
because people are inhaling the chemical, but it is because the hormone is
made at greater levels as a result of touching, receiving signals of trust
from other people, or when presented by advertisers with an image that
touches the heart strings, such as a photograph of a poverty-stricken child.
"Oxytocin specifically and powerfully affected generosity using real money
when participants had to think about another's feelings," Prof Zak explains.
"This result confirms our earlier work showing that oxytocin affects trust,
but with a dramatically larger effect for generosity."
As for data on average oxytocin levels in Scots, who have a reputation for
meanness, he said he had "no data."
Oxytocin's effect on generosity is more than three times larger than
observed in the work he published in Nature in 2005 with colleagues in
Zurich, showing that people who inhaled an oxytocin nasal spray are more
likely to trust a stranger with their cash. "Trust with oxytocin goes up
17%," said Prof Zak, "but in the present paper we show generosity increases
80% with oxytocin."
The paper was co-written by Angela Stanton of Claremont Graduate University
and Sheila Ahmadi of UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine.
As for fears about the abuse of oxytocin by snake oil salesmen, Prof Zak
said: "we have to put a lot up people's noses to get an effect (about two
teaspoons worth) - not a lot of oxytocin gets into the brain, so lots needs
to be used, so spritzing it around won't have an effect."
Good causes who want to boost their takings this way should beware of other
side effects: 20 percent of the men who take it get erections, and pregnant
women would want to avoid it because it could trigger contractions.
Besides, Prof Zak said that oxytocin sprays are unnecessary: con men, sales
people and advertisers already know how to use powerful images to boost
oxytocin levels in the brain.
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Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing
brain
Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions, liberals and
conservatives literally think differently, researchers show.
By Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2007
Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals
tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how
their brains work.
In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience,
scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation
is related to differences in how the brain processes information.
Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more
structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open
to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to
political situations but also influence everyday decisions.
The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a
conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not
connected to the latest research.
Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal"
to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M
appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a
W.
M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to
press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.
Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded
activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that
detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more
appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain
activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W,
researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in
recognizing M.
Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in
reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.
Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality
and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results
"provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a
conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."
Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as
conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with
conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the
distribution for accuracy.
Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a
single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen.
John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the
2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the
conflict.
Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily
accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.
"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and
political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science,"
said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied
behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.
Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York
University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human
behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political
orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting
information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.
Political orientation, he noted, occurs along a spectrum, and positions on
specific issues, such as taxes, are influenced by many factors, including
education and wealth. Some liberals oppose higher taxes and some
conservatives favor abortion rights.
Still, he acknowledged that a meeting of the minds between conservatives and
liberals looked difficult given the study results.
"Does this mean liberals and conservatives are never going to agree?" Amodio
asked. "Maybe it suggests one reason why they tend not to get along."
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Scientists discover brain trigger for
selfish behaviour
Scientists have found that they can make people selfish and
egotistical by turning off a brain region at the flick of a switch,
providing new insight into social behaviour
Telegraph.co.uk
6/10/2006
They set out to show that activation of the area of the brain known as the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) triggers self-control.
The scientists used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation on
subjects, in which a weak magnetic field was used to temporarily disable the
DLPFC.
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Then they took part in a bargaining game in which two individuals had to
agree on the division of a given amount of money.
One person proposed an offer and the other could either accept or reject it
but rejection meant that neither got any money.
The researchers found that suppressing the right side of the DLPFC made the
volunteers more likely to accept unfair offers instead of rejecting them in
order to punish the "proposer" for not sharing more equally.
Subjects who had the right DLPFC turned off were far less able to keep their
selfish impulses under control, though they still knew what was fair and
what was not.
"Our study suggests that right, but not left, DLPFC is involved in
overriding selfish impulses while it does not affect subjects' fairness
judgements," said Prof Ernst Fehr, an economist.
The insight into the brain circuits that regulate selfish impulses is
published today by Prof Fehr and the neuroscientist Prof Daria Knoch, of
Zurich University, with Prof Alvaro Pascual-Leone, of Harvard.
Prof Knoch dismissed fears about the unethical use of the method, saying
that the effect was of only short duration and required the permission of
the person undergoing the stimulation.
Earlier studies using a brain scanner method had suggested that self-control
depended on the DLPFC, which is among the last brain areas to mature.
The new research, published in the journal Science, points out that the same
part of the brain is not fully developed in young people, which could
account for their notoriously selfish behaviour.
Human society depends on fairness, co-operation, politeness, punctuality,
and honesty and on punishing those who violate these norms.
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Different view for East and West
Western and Eastern people look at the world in different
ways, University of Michigan scientists have claimed.
BBC online
22 Aug 2005
Researchers compared the way 26 Chinese and 25 US students viewed
photographs of animals or inanimate objects set against complex backgrounds.
Westerners' eyes tended to focus on the main subject while the eyes of their
Eastern counterparts kept flicking to background details, they said.
The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Its findings appear consistent with previous research which has suggested
Eastern people think in a more holistic way than Westerners, instinctively
paying greater heed to context.
In contrast, Westerners were thought to be more focused and analytical.
The latest study found that to start with, both American and Chinese
students fixed mainly on the background.
But after 420 milliseconds the Americans began to concentrate their
attention more on the foreground objects.
This was not true for the Chinese, who kept throwing glances at the
background.
Memory differences
The researchers also tested the ability of volunteers to remember previously
seen foreground objects when they were superimposed against new backgrounds.
The Chinese students were more likely to forget they had been shown an
object before.
In their memory, the foreground object and its original background appeared
to be bound together.
The researchers, led by Dr Richard Nisbett, wrote: "The Americans'
propensity to fixate sooner and longer on the foregrounded objects suggests
that they encoded more visual details of the objects than did the Chinese.
"If so, this could explain the Americans' more accurate recognition of the
objects even against a new background."
The researchers suggested social practices may play a role in the differing
approaches.
"East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role
relations.
"Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning.
"In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress
independence and allow them to pay less attention to context.
"The present results provide a useful warning in a world were opportunities
to meet people from other cultural backgrounds continue to increase.
"People from different cultures may allocate attention differently, even
within a shared environment.
"The result is that we see different aspects of the world, in different
ways."
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In defence of cynicism
By Steve Tomkins
I am a cynic. I have a lock on my front door, because I don't
trust people not to steal my stuff given the chance. I shop around, because
I don't expect shops to sell me CDs at the most reasonable price they can
afford. I check up on my children because I know they won't do what they're
told if I don't.
A friend of mine tells me that people are fundamentally good and honest -
but she still keeps a list of everyone she lends a book to, and never fails
to check her change.
The idea that people are basically motivated by self-interest is not a
pleasant one - that advantage goes to my friend's philosophy. But it is
true, I think.
In years gone by, this was generally accepted, because the church told us
that since "the Fall of Man" humans were selfish to the root and needed
redemption. Today evolutionary biology repeats the same message, without the
remedy. Natural selection favours those who are best at looking after their
own interests and those of their offspring. Society has evolved because
cooperation and mutual kindness (within limits) benefit the individual
better than throwing rocks at everyone.
Those who are honest we trust, those who are kindly we like, those who
steal lose our respect and their jobs
How much of what we call being a good person is actually smart
self-interest? I give selflessly to all my friends on their birthdays - and
expect them to do exactly the same when mine comes round. Those who are
honest we trust, those who are kindly we like, those who steal lose our
respect and their jobs.
Of course this "the sun shines on the righteous" system has as many
loopholes as a fishing net, and that's why most of us get our fair share of
sunlight without being shining examples of righteousness.
Self interest
All the evidence is that we are only as good as it suits us to be. How else
can you explain why in 2003 humans beat our previous record high for carbon
emissions by 13%, despite the fact that the World Health Organisation says
global warming already kills a conservative 150,000 people a year? Why else
would a mere 2.4% of UK food and drink spending go on organic produce, and a
fraction of even that figure on fair trade goods?
How many adverts say "Buy this. It may not be as cool or as efficient as the
competition, but you know it's morally right"? Advertisers appeal to our
self-interest, because they find that's what gets our wallets out.
In 1971, Prof. Philip Zimbardo of Stamford University ran a psychological
experiment, which involved groups of "peacenik" student volunteers being put
a Big-Brother-house-type prison. They were divided into guards and
prisoners, dressed in uniforms and masks and given numbers instead of names.
They were left unsupervised and supposedly unobserved. The experiment had to
be called off after six days, because the "guards" were physically and
mentally assaulting their wards, with midnight strip-searches and toilet
cleaning by hand (literally).
The moral being, that we aren't moral beings. Take away the advantage in
being decent humans, and we aren't. The importance of cynicism is not just
that it's true. It's that recognising human selfishness gives us a chance to
do something about it.
Take away the advantage in being decent humans, and we aren't
It is those who do not trust global corporations to protect the interests of
their Third-World employees and neighbours who campaign for a fairer world.
It is those who do not expect businesses and individuals to be
environmentally friendly when left to their own devices who work out
incentives and restrictions to cut our reckless pollution.
If our society is becoming ever more cynical, then we are less easy prey for
the manipulations of advertisers and filmmakers, politicians and media. We
listen with sharper ears and read with smarter eyes, which helps us to
divide the truth from the propaganda - just so long as we haven't become
incapable of believing anything.
The First World War was fought with the utter trust and unquestioning
support of the British people, and eight and a half million soldiers died in
the four years of futile, indefensible butchery. The 2003 Iraq War was
fought with less public trust than any other modern war, and about 6,000
combatants have died. Even if there are no winners in war, that arithmetic
must in part suggest a small victory for cynicism.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/magazine/3499307.stm
Published: 2004/02/18 11:24:24 GMT
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NEW YORK POST SHERMER INTERVIEW ON GOOD AND EVIL
"BAD TO THE BONE"
New York Post, Sunday January 12, 2004
By LOGAN HILL
Kobe Bryant cheated on his wife, Vanessa - who followed her more civilized
impulses and publicly forgave him.
January 11, 2004 -- Britney's quickie Vegas marriage was all anybody was
talking about last week. People just couldn't help themselves. As it
turns out, that excuse may be exactly right.
In his new book, "The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip,
Care, Share and Follow the Golden Rule" (Times Books, $26),
Scientific American columnist and Skeptic Magazine
editor Michael Shermer argues that our moral
impulses are more a matter of biological hard-wiring than
conscious choice. What's more, he says that
human beings have stopped evolving morally - and
our baser impulses to lie, cheat, gossip and steal are behaviors we'll just
have to learn to live with.
The author, a self-proclaimed "non-theistic agnostic," uses everything from
anthropology to neuroscience and philosophy - but emphatically not
religion -
to chronicle the evolution of human morality. "Our basic moral principles
evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, before religion came along and
encoded them," says Shermer. "People
wonder, 'Why should I be moral?' " he says. "In a sense, [they] might as
well ask, 'Why should I be in love? Or be hungry?'
"It's just basic to human nature." Like the desire for sex or food, "guilt
and shame and pride and the sense of justice and injustice" evolved to help
the human race survive. But even when we're generous, he says, we're really
only interested in what's in it for ourselves.
Moral acts of altruism, sympathy or cooperation have historically enabled
groups - and the species itself - to prosper. "If everybody in a group did
the wrong thing most of the time, these groups
would not survive," Shermer explains. "For a social primate species to
survive in a fairly harsh world, there must be a level of cooperation." But
Shermer holds little hope that human beings will continue to refine their
sense of right and wrong - in fact, he thinks that this is as good as
society gets.
As evidence, he says that several of the same moral qualities found in early
human history are still with us today - and they influence everything
from how
we gossip to why we go to war. So we asked Shermer to explain some specific
behavior. For example: Why do we generously tip a
waiter we'll never see again?
"Fairness is a deep evolutionary feeling that evolved because it's good for
the group," Shermer says. Shermer says we have an innate sense of what's
fair and what's not, and cites studies done involving both primates and
small children. "Young children know whether they're getting a fair [share]
or not down to the microscopic difference in the size of slices of birthday
cake," Shermer says. "They'll shout, 'I was
cheated!' The sense of what's fair and what isn't is deeply ingrained."
If we're so inclined to be fair, why would, say, a wealthy man like Sam
Waksal break the law just to avoid losing money in the stock market?
Shermer says we have an inherent ability to excuse our own immoral
desires - to, perhaps, convince ourselves that we
"deserve" to break the rules. "We can rationalize
all kinds of selfish behaviors," he says, even though we
are programmed by culture, history and evolution to resist pursuing
our own happiness at the expense of another's.
On a grander scale, Shermer says he is not a believer in moral absolutes
like good and evil; he believes anything and
anyone can be explained, including a terrorist
like Osama bin Laden - who Shermer maintains is not pure evil, but a
man who, like the rest of us, had potential for both good and evil.
The author maintains that environmental conditions informed his
decision to choose to commit acts of atrocity.
People like bin Laden, says Shermer, somehow "override our evolutionary
propensity toward moral behavior and the repulsion most of us would,
or at least
should, feel." But such extreme acts, he says, are aberrations. Easier to
explain, he says, are far more commonplace
behaviors like gossip - even about people we don't
know, like Ms. Spears and her lamentable ex-husband.
We're compelled, he says, to talk about "who's sleeping with who, who's a
bully, who's a cooperator, who's not," says Shermer. "It's really
important to gossip so you know who's going to
[take care of you]," he says. "[Nowadays] we spread a lot of information
that's not true, but originally gossip had a good, positive and useful
impulse. That's the normal human thing to do - to
talk about other people."
And when it comes to adultery, the evolutionary benefits are obvious, says
Shermer. "For the male, depositing one's genes in more places
increases the probability of . . . genetic
immortality. For the female, it's a chance to trade
up for better genes and higher social status.
Still, Shermer holds out a bit of hope that human beings could actually
develop even better behavior. "Those guys made a good start of it,"
he says, referring to the authors of the Bible,
Koran and Talmud. "But we live in a completely
different world. "It's time," he says, "that we came up with something
better."
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More Than Good Intentions: Holding Fast to
Faith in Free Will
New York Times
December 31, 2002
JOHN HORGAN
When I woke this morning, I stared at the ceiling above my bed and wondered:
to what extent will my rising really be an exercise of my free will?
Let's say I got up right . . . now. Would my
subjective decision be the cause? Or would
computations unfolding in a subconscious neural netherworld actually
set off the muscular twitches that slide me out of the bed, quietly,
so as not to wake my wife, and propel me toward
the door?
One of the risks of science journalism is that occasionally you encounter
research that threatens something you cherish.
Free will is something I cherish. I can live with the idea of science
killing off God. But free will? That's going too far. And yet a
couple of books I've been reading lately have left
me brooding over the possibility that free will is
as much a myth as divine justice.
The chief offender is "The Illusion of Conscious Will," by Dr. Daniel M.
Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard. What makes Dr. Wegner's critique
more effective than others I've read over the
years is that it is less philosophical than
empirical, drawing heavily upon recent research in
cognitive science and neurology.
Dr. Wegner also carries out his vivisection of free will with a disturbing
cheerfulness, like a neurosurgeon joking as he cuts a patient's
brain.
We think of will as a force, but actually, Dr. Wegner says, it is a feeling
"merely a feeling," as he puts it of control over our actions. I
think, "I'm going to get up now," and when I do a
moment later, I credit that feeling with having
been the instigating cause. But as we all know,
correlation does not equal causation.
When neurologists make patients' limbs jerk by electrically zapping certain
regions of their brains, the patients often insist they meant to move
that arm, and they even invent reasons why.
Neurologists call these erroneous, post hoc
explanations confabulations, but Dr. Wegner prefers the catchier
"intention inventions." He suggests that whenever we explain our acts
as the outcome of our conscious choice, we are
engaging in intention invention, because our
actions actually stem from countless causes of which we are
completely unaware.
He cites experiments in which subjects pushed a button whenever they chose
while noting the time of their decision as displayed on a clock. The
subjects took 0.2 seconds on average to push the button after they
decided to do so. But an electroencephalograph
monitoring their brain waves revealed that the
subjects' brains generated a spike of brain activity 0.3 seconds
before they decided to push the button.
The meaning of these widely debated findings, Dr. Wegner says, is that our
conscious willing is an afterthought, which "kicks in at some point
after the brain has already started preparing for
the action."
Other research has indicated that the neural circuits underlying our
conscious sensations of intention are distinct from the circuits that
actually make our muscles move. This
disconnect may explain why we so often fail to
carry out our most adamant decisions. This morning, I may resolve to
drink only one cup of coffee instead of two, or to take a long run
through the woods. But I may do neither of these
things (and chances are I won't).
Sometimes our intentions seem to be self-thwarting. The more I tell myself
to go back to sleep instead of obsessing over free will, the wider
awake I feel. Dr. Wegner attributes these
situations to "ironic processes of mental
control." Edgar Allan Poe's phrase "the imp of the perverse" even more
vividly evokes that mischievous other we sense lurking within us.
Brain disorders can exacerbate experiences of this kind. Schizophrenics
perceive their very thoughts as coming from malevolent external
sources. Those who have lasting damage to the
corpus callosum, a neural cable that transmits
signals between the brain's hemispheres, may be afflicted with
alien-hand syndrome.
They may end up, Dr. Wegner says, like Dr. Strangelove, whose left hand
frantically tried to keep his right from jutting out in Nazi salutes.
Perfectly healthy people may lose their sense of control over actions their
brains have clearly initiated. When we are hypnotized, playing with
Ouija boards, or speaking in tongues, we may feel
as though someone or something else is acting
through us, whether a muse, ghost, devil, or deity. What all
these examples imply is that the concept of
a unified self, which is a necessary precondition
for free will, is itself an illusion.
Dr. Wegner quotes Arthur C. Clarke's remark that "any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic." Because we cannot
possibly understand how the fantastically complex
machines in our skulls really work, Dr. Wegner
says, we explain our behavior in terms of such silly, occult
concepts as "the self" and "free will." Our belief in our personal
identity and self-control does have its uses, Dr.
Wegner grants; without it, "we might soon be
wearing each other's underclothing."
Maybe I should lighten up and embrace my lack of free will and a self.
That's what Dr. Susan Blackmore, a British psychologist and a
practitioner of Zen, advises. In her book "The
Meme Machine," she contends that our minds are
really just bundles of memes, the beliefs and habits and predilections
that we catch from one another like viruses. Take all of the memes
out of a mind, and there is no self left to be
free.
Once you realize you have no control over your destiny, says Dr. Blackmore,
you will expend less energy regretting past decisions and fretting
over future ones, and you will be more
appreciative of the vital present. Be here now,
and so on. In other words, true freedom comes from accepting there is
no freedom.
Dr. Blackmore's reasoning strikes me as less spiritual than Orwellian. To
me, choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful. Moreover,
our faith in free will has social value. It
provides us with the metaphysical justification
for ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility
for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God.
Free will works better than any other single
criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a
society.
Theologians have proposed that science still allows faith in a "God of the
gaps," who dwells within those shadowy realms into which science has
not fully penetrated, such as the imaginary time
before the Big Bang banged. In the same way, maybe
we can have a free will of the gaps. No science is more
riddled with gaps, after all, than the science of human
consciousness.
As I lay in bed this morning, however, my faith in free will wavered.
Scanning my mind for something resembling will, I found a welter of
roiling thoughts and antithoughts, a few of which
transcended virtuality long enough for closer
inspection. One thought was that, no matter what my intellect
decides, I'm compelled to believe in free
will.
Abruptly my body, no doubt bored with all this pointless cogitation, slipped
out of bed, padded to the door, and closed it behind me.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
Originally from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/science/31ESSA.html
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Hijacking the
Brain Circuits With a Nickel Slot Machine
New York Times
February 19, 2002
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Compulsive gambling, attendance at sporting events, vulnerability to
telephone scams and exuberant investing in the stock market may not seem to
have much in common. But neuroscientists have uncovered a common
thread.
Such behaviors, they say, rely on brain circuits that evolved to help
animals assess rewards important to their survival, like food and
sex. Researchers have found that those same
circuits are used by the human brain to assess
social rewards as diverse as investment income and surprise home
runs at the bottom of the ninth.
And, in a finding that astonishes many people, they found that the brain
systems that detect and evaluate such rewards generally operate
outside of conscious awareness. In navigating the
world and deciding what is rewarding, humans are
closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the time.
The findings, which are gaining wide adherence among neuroscientists,
challenge the notion that people always make conscious choices about
what they want and how to obtain it. In fact, the
neuroscientists say, much of what happens in the
brain goes on outside of conscious awareness.
The idea has been around since Freud, said Dr. Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist
at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. Psychologists have
studied unconscious processing of information in terms of subliminal
effects, memory and learning, he said, and they have started to map
out what parts of the brain are involved in such
processing. But only now are they learning how
these different circuits interact, he said.
"My hunch is that most decisions are made subconsciously with many
gradations of awareness," Dr. Berns said. "For example, I'm vaguely
aware of how I got to work this morning. But
consciousness seems reserved for more important
things."
Dr. P. Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in
Houston, says the idea that people can get themselves to work on
automatic pilot raises two questions: how does the
brain know what it must pay conscious attention
to? And how did evolution create a brain that could make
such distinctions?
The answer emerging from experiments on animals and people is that the brain
has evolved to shape itself, starting in infancy, according to what
it encounters in the external world.
As Dr. Montague explained it, much of the world is predictable: buildings
usually stay in one place, gravity makes objects fall, light falling
at an oblique angle makes long shadows and so
forth. As children grow, their brains build
internal models of everything they encounter, gradually
learning to identify objects and to predict how they move through
space and time.
As new information flows into it from the outside world, the brain
automatically compares it to what it already knows. If things match
up as when people drive to work every day along
the same route events, objects and the passage
of time may not reach conscious awareness.
But if there is a surprise a car suddenly runs a red light the mismatch
between what is expected and what is happening instantly shifts the
brain into a new state. A brain circuit involved
in decision making is activated, again out of
conscious awareness. Drawing on past experience held in memory
banks, a decision is made: hit the brake, swerve the wheel or keep
going. Only a second or so later, after hands and
feet have initiated the chosen action, does the
sense of having made a conscious decision arise.
Dr. Montague estimates that 90 percent of what people do every day is
carried out by this kind of automatic, unconscious system that
evolved to help creatures survive.
Animals use these circuits to know what to attend to, what to ignore and
what is worth learning about. People use them for the same purposes
which, as a result of their bigger brains and
culture, include listening to music, eating
chocolate, assessing beauty, gambling, investing in stocks and
experimenting with drugs all topics that have been studied this
past year with brain imaging machines that
directly measure the activity of human brain
circuits.
The two circuits that have been studied most extensively involve how animals
and people assess rewards. Both involve a chemical called dopamine.
The first circuit, which is in a middle region of
the brain, helps animals and people instantly
assess rewards or lack of rewards.
The circuit was described in greater detail several years ago by Dr. Wolfram
Schultz, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University in England, who
tracked dopamine production in a monkey's midbrain
and experimented with various types of rewards,
usually squirts of apple juice that the animal liked.
Dr. Schultz found that when the monkey got more juice than it expected,
dopamine neurons fired vigorously. When the monkey got an amount of
juice that it expected to get, based on previous
squirts, dopamine neurons did nothing. And when
the monkey expected to get juice but got none, the
dopamine neurons decreased their firing rate, as
if to signal a lack of reward.
Scientists believe that this midbrain dopamine system is constantly making
predictions about what to expect in terms of rewards. Learning takes
place only when something unexpected happens and
dopamine firing rates increase or decrease. When
nothing unexpected happens, as when the same amount of
delicious apple juice keeps coming, the dopamine system is quiet.
In animals, Dr. Montague said, these midbrain dopamine signals are sent
directly to brain areas that initiate movements and behavior. These
brain areas figure out how to get more apple juice
or sit back and do nothing. In humans, though, the
dopamine signal is also sent to a higher brain region
called the frontal cortex for more
elaborate processing.
Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a neuroscientist at Princeton, studies a part of the
frontal cortex called the anterior cingulate, located in back of the
forehead. This part of the brain has several functions, Dr. Cohen
said, including the task of detecting errors and
conflict in the flow of information being
processed automatically.
Brain imaging experiments are beginning to show that when a person gets an
unexpected reward the equivalent of a huge shot of delicious apple
juice more dopamine reaches the anterior
cingulate. When a person expects a reward and does
not get it, less dopamine reaches the region. And when a person
expects a reward and gets it, the anterior cingulate is silent.
When people expect a reward and do not receive it, their brains need a way
to register the fact that something is amiss so it can recalibrate
expectations for future events, Dr. Cohen said. As in monkeys, human
dopamine neurons project to areas that plan and control movements, he
said. Fluctuating levels of dopamine make people
get up and do things, outside their conscious
awareness. The number of things people do to increase their
dopamine firing rates is unlimited, neuroscientists are discovering.
Several studies were published last year looking
at monetary rewards and dopamine. Money is
abstract but to the brain it looks like cocaine, food, sex or
anything a person expects is rewarding, said Dr. Hans Breiter, a
neuroscientist at Harvard. People crave it.
Some people seem to be born with vulnerable dopamine systems that get
hijacked by social rewards. The same neural circuitry involved in the
highs and lows of abusing drugs is activated by
winning or losing money, anticipating a good meal
or seeking beautiful faces to look at, Dr. Breiter
said.
For example, dopamine circuits are activated by cocaine; people become
addicted when their reward circuits have been hijacked by the drug,
Dr. Montague said.
Winning in gambling can also hijack the dopamine system, Dr. Berns said.
Many people visit a casino, lose money and are not tempted to go
back. But compulsive gamblers seem to have
vulnerable dopamine systems, he said. The first
time they win, they get a huge dopamine rush that gets embedded in
their memory. They keep gambling and the occasional dopamine rush of winning
overrides their conscious knowledge that they will lose in the long
run.
Other experiments show that reward circuits are activated when young men
look at photos of beautiful women and that these circuits are
defective in women with eating disorders like
bulimia. Bulimics say they are addicted to
vomiting because it gives them a warm, positive feeling.
Music activates neural systems of reward and emotion. Older people with
age-related impairments to the frontal cortex do poorly on gambling
tasks and, experiments show, are prone to believe
misleading advertising.
Neuroscientists say that part of the appeal of live sporting events is their
inherent unpredictability. When a baseball player with two outs at
the bottom of the ninth inning hits a home run to
win the game, thousands of spectators
simultaneously experience a huge surge of dopamine. People keep
coming back, as if addicted to the euphoria of experiencing
unexpected rewards.
One of the most promising areas for looking at unconscious reward circuits
in human behavior concerns the stock market, Dr. Montague said.
Economists
do not study people, they study collective neural systems in people who form
mass expectations. For example, when the Federal Reserve unexpectedly
lowered interest rates twice last year, the market went up, he said.
When it lowered interest rates on other occasions
and investors knew the move was
coming, markets did not respond.
Economists and neuroscientists use the same mathematical equations for
modeling market behavior and dopamine behavior, Dr. Montague said.
Neuroscience may provide an entirely new set of constructs for
understanding economic decision making.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
Originally from:
www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/health/19REWA.html?rd=hcmcp?p=042OHR042OId4ANTa012000mq3$vq3yg
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How your friends' friends can affect your
mood
Source: New Scientist
Dec 2008
IF YOU live in the northern hemisphere, this is probably not your
favourite month. January tends to dispirit people more than any other.
We all know why: foul weather, post-Christmas debt, the long wait before
your next holiday, quarterly bills, dark evenings and dark mornings. At
least, that is the way it seems. For while all these things might
contribute to the way you feel, there is one crucial factor you probably
have not accounted for: the state of mind of your friends and relatives.
Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by
those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also
beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends
of friends - people three degrees of separation away from us who we have
never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network
like a virus.
Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are
transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely
understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking
habits, ill-health
<http://arjournals. annualreviews. org/doi/abs/ 10.1146/annurev.
soc.34.040507. 134601?cookieSet =1&journalCode= soc>,
the inclination to turn out and vote in elections
<http://journals. cambridge. org/download. php?file= %2FPSR%2FPSR102_
01%2FS0003055408 080039a.pdf& code=d1aecff1fa0 7baec0e528452fc6 608c7>,
a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy
<http://www3. interscience. wiley.com/ cgi-bin/fulltext /121527993/
HTMLSTART? CRETRY=1& SRETRY=0>,
even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide
<http://www.newscien tist.com/ article/mg194260 35.400-can- media-coverage-
of-suicides- inspire-copycats .html>.
They ripple through networks "like pebbles thrown into a pond", says
Nicholas Christakis
<http://christakis. med.harvard. edu/pages/ research/ social_networks.
html>,
a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has
pioneered much of the new work.
At first sight, the idea that we can catch the moods, habits and state
of health not only of those around us, but also those we do not even
know seems alarming. It implies that rather than being in charge of
where we are going in life, we are little more than back-seat drivers,
since most social influence operates at a subconscious level.
But we need not be alarmed, says Duncan Watts
<http://research. yahoo.com/ bouncer_user/ 106>, a sociologist at Columbia
University, New York. "Social influence is mostly a good thing. We
should embrace the fact that we're inherently social creatures and that
much of who we are and what we do is determined by forces that are
outside the little circle we draw around ourselves." What's more, by
being aware of the effects of social contagion we may be able to find
ways to counter it, or use it to our own benefit. "There's no doubt
people can have some control over their networks and that this in turn
can affect their lives," says Christakis.
To get an idea of what is going on, take Christakis's findings on the
spread of happiness, which were published last month. His team looked at
a network of several thousand friends, relatives, neighbours and work
colleagues who form part of the Framingham Heart Study
<http://www.framingh amheartstudy. org>, an ongoing multi-generational
epidemiological survey that has tracked risk factors in cardiovascular
disease among residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948. They
found that happy people tend to be clustered together, not because they
naturally orientate towards each other, but because of the way happiness
spreads through social contact over time, regardless of people's
conscious choice of friends (/BMJ/, DOI: 10.1136/bmj. a2338
<http://dx.doi. org/10.1136/ bmj.a2338>).
Christakis also found that a person's happiness is dependent not only on
the happiness of an immediate friend but - to a lesser degree - on the
happiness of their friend's friend, and their friend's friend's friend.
Furthermore, someone's chances of being happy increase the better
connected they are to happy people, and for that matter the better
connected their friends and family. "Most people will not be surprised
that people with more friends are happier, but what really matters is
whether those friends are happy," says Christakis.
Happiness is near
They also discovered that the effect is not the same with everyone you
know. How susceptible you are to someone else's happiness depends on the
nature of your relationship with them. For example, if a good friend who
lives within a couple of kilometres of you suddenly becomes happy, that
increases the chances of you becoming happy by more than 60 per cent. In
contrast, for a next-door neighbour the figure drops to about half that,
and for a nearby sibling about half again. Surprisingly, a cohabiting
partner makes a difference of less than 10 per cent, which coincides
with another peculiar observation about some social epidemics: that they
spread far more effectively via friends of the same gender.
All this poses a key question: how can something like happiness be
contagious? Some researchers think one of the most likely mechanisms is
empathetic mimicry. Psychologists have shown that people unconsciously
copy the facial expressions, manner of speech, posture, body language
and other behaviours of those around them, often with remarkable speed
and accuracy. This then causes them, through a kind of neural feedback,
to actually experience the emotions associated with the particular
behaviour they are mimicking.
Actions and feelings can be as contagious as a virus
Barbara Wild and her colleagues at the University of Tübingen, Germany,
have found that the stronger the facial expression, the stronger the
emotion experienced by the person observing it (/Psychiatry Research/,
vol 102, p 109 <http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/ S0165-1781% 2801%2900225- 6>).
She believes this process is hard-wired, since it acts so rapidly and
automatically.
Others have suggested it works through the action of mirror neurons, a
type of brain cell thought to fire both when we perform an action and
when we watch someone else doing it, though it is not clear whether the
mimicking would cause the neurons to fire or whether their firing would
trigger the mimicry. What is clear is that unconscious imitation allows
people to "feel a pale reflection of their companions' actual emotions"
and even "feel themselves into the emotional lives of others", says
Elaine Hatfield <http://www2. hawaii.edu/ %7Eelaineh/> at the University
of Hawaii, Honolulu, whose review of the latest research will appear
next April in /The Social Neuroscience of Empathy/.
There is plenty of evidence for emotional contagion outside the lab. In
2000, Peter Totterdell
<http://www.shef. ac.uk/psychology /staff/academic/ peter-totterdell .html>
at the University of Sheffield, UK, found a significant association
between the happiness of professional cricketers during a match and the
average happiness of their teammates, regardless of other factors such
as whether the match was going in the team's favour (/Journal of Applied
Psychology/, vol 85, p 848). He found a similar effect among nurses and
office workers. It has also been shown that if a college student suffers
from mild depression their roommate will become progressively more
depressed the longer they live with them, and that emotional displays by
bank employees have a direct impact on the moods of their customers.
We can see, then, how a phenomenon such as happiness might pass quickly
through a social network and infect clusters of friends and relatives.
What none of these studies explains, however, is why the strength of the
infection varies according to who is passing it to whom. Why are we so
much more strongly affected by the happiness of a nearby friend than a
nearby sibling? Why does a next-door neighbour have a significant
impact, yet someone living a few tens of metres away on the same block
have none?
The power of strangers
Two factors appear crucial: the frequency of social contact, and the
strength of the relationship. This is not too surprising: we know that
emotional contagion requires physical proximity. It is also likely that
the closer we feel to someone, the more empathetic we are towards them,
and the more likely we are to catch their emotional state. However, how
these two factors play out in day-to-day interactions is uncertain. What
is also unclear - because it has never been properly tested - is the
extent to which emotions can propagate through virtual networks, where
the opportunity for physiological mimicry is much reduced.
So much for emotions - what about other phenomena that we unwittingly
pick up, and pass on, through our social networks? In 2007, Christakis's
team, again tracking members of the Framingham Heart Study, found that
obesity is transmitted in a similar way to happiness. Your risk of
gaining weight increases significantly when your friends gain weight,
and it is also affected by the weight of people beyond your social
horizon. "Obesity appears to spread through social ties," Christakis
says. Again, how likely you are to catch it depends on who you are
interacting with: after controlling for factors such as difference in
socioeconomic status, the researchers found that an individual's chances
of becoming obese increased by 57 per cent if one of their friends
became obese, 40 per cent if a sibling did and 37 per cent if their
spouse did, irrespective of age (/The New England Journal of Medicine/,
vol 357, p 370 <http://content. nejm.org/ cgi/content/ full/357/ 4/370>).
However, neighbours have no influence, and how far away you live from a
friend counts for little, which implies that obesity spreads via a
different mechanism to happiness. Rather than behavioural mimicry, the
key appears to be the adoption of social norms. In other words, as I see
my friends gain weight, this changes my idea of what an acceptable
weight is. One similarity with happiness is that friends and relatives
have a far greater influence if they are of the same gender. While it is
not evident why that should matter for emotional contagion, norms of
body size are clearly gender-specific: "Women look at other women, men
look at other men," says Christakis. This could also help explain the
epidemics of eating disorders reported among groups of schoolgirls in
recent decades.
The spread of a social norm appears to account for another of
Christakis's findings: that when people stop smoking, they usually do so
along with whole clusters of friends, relatives and social contacts. As
more people quit, it becomes the socially acceptable thing to do, and
those who choose to continue smoking are pushed to the periphery of the
network. In this case, people are most strongly influenced by those
closest to them - if your spouse quits, it is 67 per cent more likely
that you will too. Your work colleagues can also have an effect,
particularly if you are in a small, close-knit workplace; and more
highly educated friends influence one another more than less educated
(/The New England Journal of Medicine/, vol 358, p 2249
<http://content. nejm.org/ cgi/content/ short/358/ 21/2249>).
Happiness, obesity, smoking habits - activities that we traditionally
think of as shaped by individual circumstances, turn out to be ruled to
a large degree by social forces. Many other day-to-day phenomena fit a
similar pattern, often counter-intuitively . Take autism: Peter Bearman
at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia
University who in 2004 uncovered a link between suicidal behaviour and
certain friendship patterns (/American Journal of Public Health/, vol
94, p 89), is looking at whether the recent rise in the diagnosis of
autism is in any way socially determined. His study is ongoing
<http://www.iserp. columbia. edu/centers/ autism.html>, but he says his
findings could be "explosive". "It is likely that if you have an
autistic child in your community the probability of your child being
diagnosed with autism is significantly higher."
Happiness, obesity, smoking habits - all turn out to be ruled to a large
degree by social forces
Why three degrees?
While the mechanism of social contagion varies depending on the
phenomenon being spread, in many cases the dynamics are very similar.
For example, Christakis has found that with happiness, obesity and
smoking habits, the effect of other people's behaviour carries to three
degrees of separation and no further. He speculates that this could be
the case with most or perhaps all transmissible traits. Why three
degrees? One theory is that friendship networks are inherently unstable
because peripheral friends tend to drop away. "While your friends are
likely to be the same a year from now, your friends of friends of
friends of friends are likely to be entirely different people," says
Christakis.
This poses the question: what shapes the architecture of our social
networks and our position in them? Clearly, many factors contribute:
where we live, where we work, family size, education, religion, income,
our interests, and our tendency to gravitate towards people similar to
us. New research by Christakis's team, due to be published in the next
few weeks, suggests there is also a strong genetic component. The study
compared the social networks of identical and fraternal twins, and found
that identical twins had significantly more similar social networks than
fraternal twins, suggesting the structure of your social network is
influenced by your genes. That may not sound remarkable, since
personality traits such as gregariousness and shyness clearly play a
role in determining how connected we are. But there is much more to it,
says Christakis. "It's not just about having a genetic predilection to
be friends with a lot of people, it's about having a genetic
predilection to be friends with a lot of popular people. That's
mysterious: how could our genes determine our actual location in this
socio-topological space?"
Answering that should help us understand more about the "collective
intelligence" of social networks, which some researchers liken to the
flocking of birds - the decision to quit smoking, for example, is no
more an isolated move than the decision by a bird in a flock to fly to
the left.
Sociologists and others are using mathematical models to test these
dynamics to try to understand better what triggers the spread of
behaviours. Duncan Watts <http://cdg.columbia .edu/cdg/ papers> at
Columbia University has shown that seeding localised social groups with
certain ideas or behaviours can lead to the ideas cascading across
entire global networks. This contradicts the notion - promoted by the
author Malcolm Gladwell in /The Tipping Point/
<http://www.gladwell .com/tippingpoin t/index.html> and others - that
social epidemics depend on a few key influential individuals from whom
everyone else takes their cue. It doesn't ring true, argues Watts,
because such "influentials" typically interact with only a few people.
The key for the spread of anything, he says, from happiness to the
preference for a particular song, is a critical mass of interconnected
individuals who influence one another.
Is there any way to mitigate the effects of such powerful and pervasive
social forces? It is unlikely we can ever escape social influence
entirely, even if we wanted to. "Even when you're aware of it, you're
probably susceptible, " says Watts. Still, being aware can help,
especially when we are seeking to avoid undesirable behaviours or adopt
positive habits. We can be choosy about new friends, seeking out people
whose lifestyles we aspire to: if you want to lose weight, for example,
join a running club and - most importantly - socialise with its members.
Actually cutting ties with old friends might be a bit drastic, though
perhaps spending less time with those whose traits we do not wish to
share would be a good idea - lazy people, perhaps, or those inclined to
negative thinking. And beware those who hang out with such people even
if they do not display their views or behaviours - remember the three
degrees of contagion rule. Finally, if you really cannot avoid spending
time with certain people whose behaviours or emotional state you would
rather not take on board (certain relatives at family gatherings,
perhaps), you could always try repressing your natural inclination to
mimic their body language and facial expressions, and so limit the
contagion effect - though be prepared for them to instinctively cool
towards you as a result.
What this game plan amounts to is a kind of subtle social reorientation.
We will always be vulnerable to what those around us are doing, so as
far as possible make sure you are with the right people. Remember the
new adage: we are who we hang out with.
Five tips for a healthier social network
1. Choose your friends carefully.
2. Choose which of your existing friends you spend the most time with.
For example, hang out with people who are upbeat, or avoid couch potatoes.
3. Join a club whose members you would like to emulate (running, healthy
cooking), and socialise with them.
4. If you are with people whose emotional state or behaviours you could
do without, try to avoid the natural inclination to mimic their facial
expressions and postures.
5. Be aware at all times of your susceptibility to social influence -
and remember that being a social animal is mostly a good thing.
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