Month: May 2004

There’s a difference between scientific explanations and explanations involving science.

Something for the fMRI crowd to look out for, me thinks. I’d like to know a little more than function X activates region Y of the brain please.

Via futurepundit

A time-lapse 3-D movie that compresses 15 years of human brain maturation, ages 5 to 20, into seconds shows gray matter – the working tissue of the brain’s cortex – diminishing in a back-to-front wave, likely reflecting the pruning of unused neuronal connections during the teen years. Cortex areas can be seen maturing at ages in which relevant cognitive and functional developmental milestones occur. The sequence of maturation also roughly parallels the evolution of the mammalian brain, suggest Drs. Nitin Gogtay, Judith Rapoport, NIMH, and Paul Thompson, Arthur Toga, UCLA, and colleagues, whose study is published online during the week of May 17, 2004 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Yummy, mpeg here

A book review in the New Yorker by Christopher Caldwell of Barry Schwartz’s ‘The Paradox of Choice’

Schwartz looks at the particular patterns of our irrationality, relying on the sort of research pioneered by two Israeli-American psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky. It turns out, for instance, that people will often consciously choose against their own happiness. Tversky and a colleague once asked subjects whether they?d prefer to be making thirty-five thousand dollars a year while those around them were making thirty-eight thousand or thirty-three thousand while those around them were making thirty thousand. They answered, in effect, that it depends on what the meaning of the word ?prefer? is. Sixty-two per cent said they?d be happier in the latter case, but eighty-four per cent said they?d choose the former.

[and]

Research in the wake of Kahneman and Tversky has unearthed a number of conundrums around choice. For one thing, choice can be ?de-motivating.? In a study conducted several years ago, shoppers who were offered free samples of six different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were offered free samples of twenty-four. This result seems irrational?surely you?re more apt to find something you like from a range four times as large?but it can be replicated in a variety of contexts. Students who are offered six topics they can write about for extra credit, for instance, are more likely to write a paper than students who are offered thirty.

[and!]

Nor is the ?paradox of choice? limited to the shopping aisle. It helps explain why so many people at age thirty are still flailing about, trying to choose a career?and why so many marriageable singles wind up alone. You await a spouse who combines the kindness of your mom, the wit of the smartest person you met in grad school, and the looks of someone you dated in 1983 (as she was in 1983) . . . and you wind up spending middle age by yourself, watching the Sports Channel at 2 a.m. in a studio apartment strewn with pizza boxes.

[and, after discussing one, solution, that of limiting choice, Caldwell discusses the extent to which consumers are already using their freedom of choice to choose, in effect, a limiting of their choices]

Robert Reich, in his recent book ?The Future of Success,? notes that modern consumers, like corporations, respond to the marketplace by ?outsourcing? choice. They hire experts?critics, in the old way of looking at things. While many experts, such as interior decorators, offer personalized service and charge a mint, the masses have access to choosing services that are essentially free. That, in effect, is what a ?brand? is.

One function of certain New Economy innovations is to make choosing easier by automating it. TiVo, in theory, allows television addicts to lose themselves in ever more programming choices, but it can also be used as a filter, a means of allowing viewers to dispense with choosing altogether. Internet grocery services, such as Peapod, allow shoppers to fill out a template that protects them from having to rechoose every week. In practical terms, the Peapod shopper is confronted with far fewer new brands and choices than was a suburban housewife pushing her cart down a grocery aisle during the Kennedy Administration.

[although this does look like one kind of solution i’m yet to be convinced that this is the way forward – the consumption of a tailored set of limited choices customised to my desires seems very limiting for the potential of human growth, certainly bad in terms of social capital (lots of bonding, no bridging in the terminology) and pretty sinister in implications for social control as well

but Caldwell is off to other terrain for the end of the review…]

…the phenomenon?sometimes called the ?hedonic treadmill? can also explain why disaster, whether bankruptcy or incapacitation, seldom burdens our spirits for very long.

Strangely, we lose sight of our human resilience when we make big choices. People are consistently puzzled that so many things they had dreaded?from getting fired to being ditched by a spouse??turned out for the best.? Gilbert and Wilson even speculate (in a diplomatic way) that our inability to forecast this adaptive capacity spurs some people to a belief in God. ?Because people are largely unaware that their internal dynamics promote such positive change,? they write, ?they look outward for an explanation.? A tendency to overestimate the joy we?ll get from buying baubles and winning honors is only half of a complex predisposition. The other half is our enormous capacity for happiness, even in the absence of such things. The surprise isn?t how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.

[all book reviews should be like this!]

Via steveberlinjohnson.com (in this edited excerpt Steve Johnson is quoting Antonio Damasio)

On the face of it, idea that the speed of modern life will lead to cognitive overload is a familiar complaint: cultural critics like David Shenk and the late Neil Postman have warned of the dangers of accelerated society. But Damasio has a twist: he’s not saying that the brain can’t keep up with the society — he’s saying that part of the brain can’t keep up with the society, while another part, thus far, has been game to go along for the ride.

“We really have two systems that are totally integrated and work perfectly well with each other, but that are very different in their time constants. One is the emotional system, which is the basic regulatory system that works very slowly, with time scales of a second or more. Than you have the cognitive system, which is much faster, because of the way it’s wired, and because a lot of the fiber systems are totally mylenated — which means it works much faster. So you can do a lot of reasoning, a lot of recognition of objects, remembering names, in just a few hundredths of a second. And in fact it has been suggested that we’re optimizing those times — that we’re working faster and faster…

[however] there is no evidence whatsoever that the emotional system is going to speed up…In fact, I think that it’s pretty clear that the emotional system, because it is a body regulatory system, is going to stay at those same slow time constants. There’s this constant limit, which is that the fibers are unmylenated. So the conduction is very slow.” In a sense, this is an engineering problem: The system that builds somatic markers — the system that encodes the stream of consciousness with value — works more slowly than the system that feeds it data to encode. The result is not a short-circuit of our cognitive machinery. (We can in fact process all that data, and perhaps more.) The danger comes from the emotional system shorting out.

Young children (eg age 8) say they prefer savannah landscapes over other types of natural landscape (Balling & Falk, 1982). Older children and adults don’t exhibit this preference. The evolutionary psychology interpretation of this is that there is an innate preference for the environment within which modern humans evolved, but that this preference is over-ridden by lifetime development of aesthetic preferences which are influenced by your personality and environment.

Or, put another way, you’re born with a feel for the plains of east Africa, but as you get older you can grow to love the flats of Peckham.

In lots of ways this seems like a typical piece of evolutionary psychology. It could be true – and if it was true it might be interesting – but there’s no reason why it has to be true. Has the experiment been replicated? Has it been replicated cross-culturally? Has it been replicated when controlling for scene complexity and for the adaptive value of the landscape (ie the prospect-refuge affordances). The answers to these questions seem to be either ‘no’ or ‘not alot’ (ie not very well). Obviously i could be wrong and some more delving into the literature might turn up some more references [1].

It also seems to be crying out for a replication with pre-linguistic infants using a preferential-looking paradigm…

[1] I think my further reading would begin here:

Appleton, J. 1996. The Experience of Landscape. Revised edition. New York, Wiley.

Orians, G.H. & Heerwagen, J.H. 1992. Evolved responses to landscapes. In Barkow, J.H., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (eds) The Adapted Mind. Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 555-579.

http://www.ub.rug.nl/eldoc/dis/ppsw/a.e.van.den.berg/c2.pdf

Steve Johnson‘s Mind Wide Open gets a bad review. Although the review is great fun to read, it’s because it contains more about the review than the book. It concludes:

The idea that brain science is somehow going to do something which will “exceed the wildest dreams of poets and philosophers” is very light and very ignorant. It is, however, a characteristic idea of our time.

Which is true, as far as it goes, but he also says:

Equally, our minds work on the basis of myriad assumptions. If these are exposed as the deterministic workings of mere chemistry, then we might not even be able to get through the day, never mind the next million years.

which Paul Myers characterises well as

Well. I guess we’d better stop studying the brain then, shouldn’t we? Who knows, we might actually learn things about how it works that don’t involve angels or ghosts, and then people will get depressed.

The great thing about consciousness is it’s sheer obstinacy in the face of contradictory evidence. We don’t need to worry too much about the existential dangers of too much scientific information (the damage has already beeen done in that respect). We do need to worry about the social use, misuse and abuse of scientific information…But that’s another story.