December 17, 2004

Cultivated Perception:

Lots of psychology isn't rocket science - it's not exactly stuff you couldn't have figured out yourself if you'd have thought about it for long enough. Often the conclusions from some area of investigation are explained to you and you think 'Well, hey, that's obvious'. And of course there's an argument that true answers often should be obvious, once you've been told them.

One of the the things I hoped we could do with Mind Hacks was give people framworks for looking at how our minds work, and how we interact with the environment, so that it becomes easier to spot the obvious in advance. After all, we all have minds, so we all have access to the raw data to draw the conclusions - it's just that there are many things you don't notice until you've learnt to see them. (Until someone stops me i'm going to call this 'cultivated perception').

So, I should be working on designed a questionnaire (a sign that I committed grevious sins in a past life?) and I noticed how I could improve it with a little lesson from Chapter 8 of the book.

Essentially, Chapter 8 is about 'togetherness' - how our brain constantly works to organise what we perceive into groups. A simple example is by proximity.

On the left you see three rows, on the right - which is the same but with less vertical spacing - you see four columns. Your brain did this for you automatically, you don't get a choice about whether you see it as rows or columns, and you certainly don't get the choice of seeing them as just an unorganised collection of little boxes.

If you don't believe me, notice as well that you understood automatically that 'on the left' means the 12 left-most boxes, and 'on the right' means the 12 right-most. Why two lots of 12 rather than, say four lots of six, or 24 lots of one? Grouping by proximity again.

Anyway, since this kind of perceptual organisation is automatic, it's worth looking out for and/or using when you notice an opportunity. And this is where my point about cultivated perception comes in. While designing the questionnaire I wasn't quiet happy with the lay-out of some of the response boxes. I'm trying to keep it well spaced, avoiding clutter, but something was bugging me. Then I noticed that, perceptually, I wasn't automatically grouping the answers with their appropriate tick boxes. Just a small change made, and I think it looks a whole lot better. Have a look, the first question is the original, the second my adjusted version.

There's lots lots more about grouping in the book, and a couple of good links to get you started are here and here

—tom.

December 15, 2004

The Social Yawn:

All animals yawn (see animalyawns.com) and in humans yawning seems to be contagious. Seeing another person yawn, or even just reading about yawning can make you yawn. (We talk about unconscious immitation in chapter 10 of the book). James Anderson from the University of Stirling gave a lecture in Sheffield last week about yawning - in the introduction he told us that when he lectures on yawning lots of people in the audience, well, yawn. But his talk was only yawn-inducing in the social-contaigon sense.

Yawning, it seems to me, may provide us with paradigm case of an automatic behaviour that, moving along the phylogenetic scale, has become co-opted into a quasi-voluntary social signal.

What am i trying to say and why does it matter? Well, speech - that most human of abilities - is another kind of action that may have begun as an automatic behaviour (mere vocal noises) before being subsequently tranformed into a social signal (alarm calls), and then again changed into being a mostly voluntary behaviour (like giving speeches to the UN, but not like my automatic, expletive, reaction when i fell down some stairs).

By looking at yawning we may get clues about how automatic animal behaviours change over evolutionary time into voluntary ones. By looking at yawning contaigon we might get clues about how our social nature affects our individual behaviours - and our individual control over those behaviours. In short, if this is the arena where human volition was born and is still mediated we need every 'in' we can get, and yawning may be one.

You can pretty precisely define what a yawn is. The characteristics are instantly recognisable: the screwed-up eyes, the head thrown back and of course - the gaping maw.

In humans a yawn typically lasts around six to eight seconds. At least twenty candidate functions have been suggested for yawning - and we still don't know which ones could be true. It certainly isn't just to do with the levels of oxygen in our lungs - some very thorough scientists have done experiments involving raising the ambient levels of carbon dioxide and found that it didn't increase people's frequency of yawning. We do know that it is found in all vetebrates and that it develops early - even 10 week old human foetuses yawn.

Like a lot of behaviours held in common by many species (it has even been suggested that fish yawn!), and which develop early in the lifespan, yawning seems to be controlled in the central, ancient, part of the brain - the brainstem. (And lets note here, that in monkeys vocalisations also seem to be brainstem controlled).

Studies have shown that in old-world monkeys yawning is more common amoung males, and amoung those monkeys higher up the dominance heirarchy. It could well be that in these creatures, like this baboon:

yawning has become a social signal of a different kind than in humans - a display of the canines and hence a warning to anyone thinking of causing trouble. The reports by some researchers that baboons are likely to yawn before fights, and possibly also likely to turn their heads in profile to the animal they are yawning at - better showing off those viscious teeth - would support this idea.

Another possible function for yawning amoung primates - including ourselves - is that it forfils a social coordination role. A way for a group to signal to itself something like "time for bed" or "we're bored, let's do something else now". It's not clear, however, why yawning would take on this role, nor, indeed, is it certain that a group of monkeys should all sleep at the same time.

Even in monkeys, yawning was making the transition into being a semi-voluntary behaviour. Dr Anderson reported evidence that yawning can be training into macque monkeys (using rewards for yawning behaviour). So, for primates at least, yawning is less than a reflex - perhaps a vital step on the path for a behaviour to become multi-purpose or a social signal. Although I wonder whether control-over-yawning was itself adaptive, or whether some more general increase in voluntary (cortical?) control allowed control-over-yawning as a by product.

Chimpanzees, closer relatives of ours than monkeys, shown videos by Dr Anderson of other chimps yawning, themselves yawned - showing that the yawning contaigon effect found in humans evolved before whatever happened that made us human.

In humans, Dr Anderson had done experiments showing that, unlike adult chimpanzees, pre-school children don't catch yawning off others. This would fit with research in child psychology which suggests that, until around the age of three or four children, aren't able to think about other people's states of mind. They don't have what many people would call empathy (and what psychologists call 'Theory of Mind'). One aspect of this lack may be that they don't socially mimic others like adults do, and hence don't catch yawns.

You can bet that the next time i'm around a three year old I'll be yawning at them to see if they copy me.

Supporting the connection between automatic contaigon of yawning is research published earlier this year by
Steven Platek, which showed that people who are higher in empathy are more likely to catch yawns off other people.

Dr Anderson made the prediction that primates without self-awareness (another aspect of theory of mind - if you can't think about other people's minds, how can you properly contextualise your own?) would, like human children but unlike adult chimps, not be subject to contaigous yawning.

But the purpose of yawning, and contaigous yawning in humans, is still an open question. During his talk Dr Anderson suggested that contaigous yawning "may just be a by-product of our capacity for low-level empathy". So there is no one function to yawning - it became contaigous because it was a semi-automatic, partly-social signal and as our capacity to represent the thoughts of others developed yawning became infectious on the back of that capacity - a capacity which we can see the origins of in our nearest primate relatives. In this way yawning is like sleep, it isn't fully understood and may in fact have many different functions. After arising in the common ancestor of all vetebrates it has had different roles put on it in different species - teeth display in baboons, and maybe some sort of social coordination function in chimpanzees. In humans yawning can reflect our profound capacity to unconsciously and automatically be influenced by the behaviour of others. Catching other's yawns is fundamental to the social imitation that is so advanced in humans. And it doesn't even have to be rude- some research, reported Dr Anderson, has suggested that yawning in synchrony is more common amoung potential lovers - not as a sign of bordom, but as an expression of their mutual empathy and attraction!

—tom.

Hallucinations in macular degeneration:

The Fortean Times has an online article about the unusual experiences that can occur in a condition called macular degeneration, where light sensing cells in the part of the eye called the macular cease to work. As well as blindness in the central part of vision, hallucinations can occur.

"Hallucinations? What do you mean?" I asked, totally nonplussed. He outlined several forms of hallucination that were plaguing him. The first one to manifest was what Don described as looking like "a ball of string or basketwork, a globular shape with an aperture on one side". He would see this image as if projected onto walls or other surfaces. He could sometimes make out a small face inside the aperture, and on the occasions when this became particularly evident the basket-like effect would adjust around it like a bizarre headdress.

This hallucinatory state is known as Charles Bonnet syndrome, after the 18th century philosopher who noticed the condition in his father.

Link to full article on www.forteantimes.com

—Vaughan.

Scientific American 'Mind' launches:

Scientific American has launched a quarterly magazine on psychology and neuroscience called Scientific American Mind. I have the first issue in front of me which I just bought from the newsagent. It seems to be well put together and mercifully short on adverts, although isn't cheap at 3.75ukp.

There's some sample articles in full on the website and various bits and pieces that are worth checking out.

Link to SciAm Mind website.

—Vaughan.

December 14, 2004

Finding Geschwind's territory:

A new connection has been found between two of most important language areas in the brain. Broca's area and Wernicke's area have been linked to speech production and language comprehension respectively. They were some of the first discoveries that linked particular brain areas to specific mental abilities and are known to be joined by a bundle of neural fibres called the arcuate fasciculus.

Reseachers from London have now discovered that another parallel pathway connects the two areas, although it does not develop until about 5-7 years of age, suggesting that even quite major connections in the brain do not develop until well into childhood.

The pathway runs through an area they have named Geschwind's territory after Norman Geshwind, the famous American neurologist who theorised that such a connection might exist.

Understanding the connectivity of the language areas is the brain is essential to the understanding and treatment of language problems after brain damage. These sorts of impairments are a common result of serious stroke or traumatic brain injury.

Link to story on newscientist.com.
Link to abstract from the Annals of Neurology.

—Vaughan.

December 13, 2004

The face, the brain and Marilyn Monroe:

Researchers from London and Italy have just published a study on the brain areas involved in perceiving and understanding faces. They created an elegant experiment where they used morphing to compare how brain activity changes as a photograph is gradually blended from one person to another, for example, from Marilyn Monroe to Margaret Thatcher.

They found that the brain did not respond in the same gradual manner, and that activation shifted to specific areas at certain points in the blending process. When the blending was in its early stages, participants perceived the picture as the same person with physical changes to their face, an experience which caused activation in the inferior occipital gyrus. When the level of blending affected recognition of the pictured person, the right fusiform gyrus was activated, an area thought to be involved with judgements of familiarity for faces. When a participant was already familiar with the people in the pictures, the temporal lobes became active when the final face became clear. These areas have been linked to semantic memory and naming.

This study is important as it shows specialised areas of activation for different stages in the face perception process in a single experiment.

These stages have been hypothesised to exist for quite some time in a model developed by psychologists Vicki Bruce and Andy Young, largely from studies on people with prosopagnosia, a condition where face recognition can be impaired, usually after brain damage.

Link to BBC News story.
Link to story in The Guardian.
Link to abstract from Nature Neuroscience.

—Vaughan.

December 10, 2004

Hack #102 : Alter Input With Expectations:

This is a hack which never made it into the book, but we thought it worth sharing. At this point, to get the most out of this hack, look at this figure (in a pop-up window) quickly before reading on. It's not important to try and work out what it is, but have a good look. Seen it? Now, without further ado...

Hack #102: Alter Input With Expectation

The balance between feed-forward and feed-back connections in the brain gives a clue to the balance between raw sensation and expectations in constructing experience.

Feedback is ubiquitous in the brain. The brain is not just massively parallel [Hack #52], it is also massively interconnected- an awesomely complex cybernetic system.

Individual neurons only transmit information one way, but all regions of the central nervous system both send and receive signals. About 45% of connections in the brain are feedback connections. Although we talk about hierarchies in processing (for example in hack#13), this is because of the sophistication of the information that is represented there, not because there is a flow of information to the top without signals being sent back down the hierarchy.

The sensory systems are part of a feedback loop with the motor systems. As we move, we adjust our movements according to the new sensations we receive. But as fundamental as this, there is also feedback within each system. Sensation itself is adjusted by feedback from the cortex.

For example, pathways ascend from the eye to the visual cortex (via the lateral geniculate nucleus [Hack #13]), but they also descent from the visual cortex to the eye (again via the lateral geniculate nucleus). Eyes are not just dumb sensors. From the very beginning our senses are fully integrated into the whole system that is the brain.

The functional corollary of feedback connections is top-down processing on perception. Top-down is internal information - what you know and what you expect. Bottom-up is external - the information that's actually coming in and which your brain has to make sense of. The existence of so many feedback connections suggests that information coming into our brains is altered by top-down processing from the very beginning. Those wires must exist for a reason. It looks like we are wired up to have what we perceive influenced by what we already know and what we expect to happen next.

In Action

This Figure (pop-up window) shows a classic example of how our perception is affected by what we know [1].

If you haven't seen this before you might not spot at first that it is a dog in the snow. Once you've seen it, you can't un-see it. It's not a conscious decision on your part; rather, your perception is now dominated by the top-down information about how this stimulus is organized. If you were just using bottom-up information, the picture would remain a picture-without-any-interpretation-a collection of light and dark splodges. But because you now know that there's a dog in the picture, you brain imposes that knowledge on our perception and you can't help but read the picture that way.

How it Works

So we're always trying to fit what we're sensing to what we know. If we just used bottom-up information only - trying to deduce what we are seeing without any expectations and assumptions - it'd be too ambiguous and too slow. But if we just used top-down information we'd only see what we already know-there'd be no surprises and we'd get caught out whenever things differed from our expectations.

You can see your top-down processes at work best in situations where the bottom-up processes are weak. With vision this might be in the dark, or where you only glimpse something or someone for a fraction of a second. In hearing this might be where background noise is loud. Poor resolution, brief or noisy information tips the balance in favor of top-down information. What we see comes to reflect more of what we already know and what we expect. Hence we see things in the dark: our brains fill in what is most likely there, what might be there, or what we fear could be there, based on small clues from what actually is perceivable there.

There's a balance between experiencing the world just as it is without any interpretation and experiencing the world just using expectations. Neither extreme is possible; it always has to be a compromise. Looking at the extent of physical feedback looks in the brain, it turns out the balance between working out the universe from first principles every time (bottom up) and imposing our expectations on what we perceive (top down) is ever so slightly in favor of bottom up. In terms of connections, it's 55% vs 45%.

See Also

These ideas are expanded upon and explored with far more profundity and depth than here in these two papers by Karl Friston of the Functional Imaging Laboratory at UCL, London (www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk).

Friston, K. (2002). Functional integration and inference in the brain. Progress in Neurobiology, 68(2), 113-43.

Friston, K. (2002). Beyond Phrenology: What can neuroimaging tell us about distributed circuitry? Annual Review of Neuroscience, 25, 221-50.

End Note

1. Gregory, R., L. (1970). The Intelligent Eye. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (This figure is also found on many psychology sites on the Web.)

—tom.

First week shouts:

Our heroic contributor Alex Fradera has a nice way with some kind words about the book here

Suffice to say that if you want to know about the brain, and the mind, and you want a bunch of mavericks to illuminate it using cognitive and visual illusions, pop culture and web-references, wrapped up in a very chic, sleek simple design, you couldn’t go far wrong

Need To Know give us a mention too (cheers guys) and we got our first review at amazon.com which was four stars and said, amongst other things that the book is 'unconventional in several ways' - which i like!

—tom.

Ghosts in the machine:

Controversy has erupted over Michael Persinger's findings that applying weak complex magnetic fields over the temporal lobes can induce unusual experiences, particularly the experience 'sensing a presence' in the room, which Persinger has linked to religious belief and spiritual experience.

This work was part of a larger project in which Persinger and his colleagues have reported strong links between temporal lobe disturbance and anomalous beliefs and experiences throughout the population.

However, a group of Swedish neuroscientists led by Pehr Granqvist have reported that they've failed to replicate Persinger's results with magnetic stimulation when they used a double blind approach to running their experiments (where neither the experimentor nor the participant knows whether they are getting magnetic stimulation).

Persinger has replied by stating that the Swedish study was not an accurate replication.

Link to story on nature.com

—Vaughan.

December 09, 2004

Online neuroscience tutorial:

The second part of a three part neuroscience tutorial has just been published on kuro5hin.org. While the first part covered the basic physiology of the neuron and how signals are generated and propogate within them, the second part deals with how signals are passed between neurons, over the synapse.

The synapse is the principal part of the neuron where neurotransmitters are released. Because of this, it is where most psychoactive drugs have their effect, which often work by mimicking or altering the normal function of neurotransmitters as they communicate signals throughout the brain and other parts of the nervous system.

—Vaughan.

Imaginary friends:

Psychologists from the University of Oregon have been studying children's imaginary friends. Their study found that 65% of children had imaginary friends at the age of 7, a much higher rate than expected, and that the presence of an imaginary friend is linked to better emotional understanding and 'theory of mind' skills (the suggested ability that allows us to figure out and represent others' beliefs and intentions).

Other studies on imaginary friends in children have also shown that they seem to be quite normal and generally linked to positive psychological development.

Interestingly though, some of the children report that their imaginary playmates don't always do what they're told and sometimes won't go away when expected to, or bother them inconveniently. It seems that even from quite a young age, we are not always master of our own imaginations.

Link to story in Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

—Vaughan.

Left-handers survive best in violent societies:

A study investigating the number of left-handed people in tribal societies has found that the more violent the society, the higher the number of left-handers in the population. The researchers speculate that this is due to left-handers having an advantage in hand-to-hand combat, as shown by the higher number of left-handed champions in sports like boxing and fencing.

Some researchers have linked left-handedness to neurobiological stress during the early stages of brain development, so it has been a puzzle why left-handedness remains a common trait in the population, when this sort of biological stress has been linked to other, less advantageous traits, such as higher rates of nervous system and immune system disorders.

The advantage in combat may be one way (among, potentially, many others, including better non-verbal intelligence) in which left-handers have an edge on their right-handed peers.

Link to story on nature.com

—Vaughan.

Vaughan:

I'm one of the contributors to the book and have been kindly asked to write for mindhacks.com. I'm a clinical and research psychologist and there's more about my work at my staff page.

You can find me on Twitter here (@vaughanbell) where I also post various mind and brain snippets.

License:
I write because I enjoy it. I don't get paid so my best return is that people are kind enough to read my work. I release all my writing on this site under the Creative Commons Attribution License v 2.0. This means you can copy and re-publish my work anywhere, without my permission, as long as you don't pass it off as your own.

To be fair though, I'm hardly going to get lawyers involved if you do rip off my stuff, so if you don't have the courtesy to acknowledge where the article came from, fine, you're rude. I'll just take it as a rather ill-conceived complement.

Full disclosure:
The words are all my own, they're not paid for, and are written because I enjoy it. We don't take paid adverts. Any product I mention is because it's caught my eye. When there might be a conflict of interest I will endeavour to recognise this and mention it in the post. Most pertinently, I am an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor for The Psychologist, and am an unpaid member of the editorial board for the excellent open-access science journal PLoS One.

Occasionally, publishers will offer to send us a free book, or will send us one out of the blue. If I mention a book on the blog, I will state if it was sent for free. I will not necessarily mention a book just because you send us a copy. We do not always accept the offers. Actually, this rarely happens and so far, most books that I've mentioned are my own or from the library.

I've occasionally noticed posts about your own papers...
Aren't you just promoting your own work?
Well spotted. If you're a researcher you should too. Write your research up as a short, accessible, jargon free summary and post it on the net. Science should be accessible to everyone and the net is the perfect place to set it free. If it's about the mind, brain or human behaviour, let us know and we'll feature it.

—Vaughan.

December 08, 2004

UK-a-Go-Go:

It's taken a couple of weeks to cross the Atlantic, clear customs, and get through the warehouses... Mind Hacks is now in stock at Amazon UK, with a dispatch time listed of 3-4 days. And if you order now, you get 30% off.

Buy Mind Hacks at Amazon UK, and get it in time for Christmas.

(Also available to purchase from Amazon.com, currently at 34% off. You'll need to order soon if you want to get it as a gift.)

Read on for the sales bit.

Have I mentioned the fine gift qualities possessed by this book? Short easy-to-digest sections of only a few pages each, perfect for post-indulgent-lunch quiet time. Experiments to try on family over dinner. Amaze your friends and confound your enemies!

Okay, the hard sell doesn't suit me.

Have a look at the 8 free sample hacks instead. You'll get 100 of these. Each starts with an experiment you can perform either immediately or online, or something to observe. We then go a little deeper, and explain what's happened in terms of more general brain behaviour. Using this, you can make up your own experiments, or ensure that whatever you're designing or building next works the way our brains work--or read just out of interest. Along the way we've included facts you may find interesting, and places to go for further reading. It shouldn't stop at the book, in other words.

No previous neuroscience experience necessary, just a general curiousity. We use plain english--but at the same time we don't believe people are scared of new words (as some general science books seem to). We've used the jargon but explained it, and cross-referenced extensively so you can start reading anywhere.

The topics covered go from vision and other forms of perception, to the construction of language, to memory and learning, to the continual mimicry of other people's gestures and emotions. That last one is what's fun to try in meetings and over dinner, by the way, to see how long it takes for whoever you're speaking with to scratch their nose after you start doing it.

Just as important is what you won't find: There's nothing explicitly about complex conscious behaviour in the book. Although you'll find hacks that influence the information that consciousness receives, in general we've avoided topics that don't give you a greater understanding about what's going on in that grey lump. So no how-to-revise-for-exam hacks, no neurolinguistic programming, and no trepanation. These topics tend to have their own frameworks for understanding them, and their own rules of thumb.

These complex behaviours, however, all have something in common: They operate as part of the brain and they depend on these same basic, moment-by-moment features, and that's what we investigate. Hopefully we'll give you enough to start making some of your own conclusions.

Actually, we'll give you enough to start going a bit loopy and seeing quirks of your brain in every tiny thing that happens. "Ah, that's why I see streaks of light, being driven in the dark!," "Ah, those fenceposts are too close for my attentional resolution when I look at them just off-centre!"--that's what Tom and I started doing, over the summer. It's fun. Steven Johnson, in the Foreword [PDF] refers to this as "recreational neuroscience." I think that's spot on.

—Matt.

Sinister Research:

A couple of interesting bits of research on handedness in the news today.

Chimps brains are asymmetrical in similar ways to human brains, and this is reflected in whether they're left or right handed too. Why we have a preferred hand is still being debated, but this research shows handedness isn't a consequence of the same brain asymmetry which arose with language (the language centres are on the left side of the brain). Handedness must have arisen much earlier, and been present 5 million years ago.

In Mind Hacks, in "Test Your Handedness" [Hack #68], Karen Bunday points out one theory arguing that hand preferences come from our tree-dwelling past. One hand is mainly used for hanging on to branches, and the other hand used for finer, manipulative tasks like picking fruit. The difference in the hemispheres of the brain comes about when each optimises for slightly different behaviours. For example, spider monkeys tend to reach with their left hand. Use the keywords Postural Origins to search for more. (Personally, the idea that our brains were shaped by the literal shape of the forest canopy and the tree branching structure fascinates me. I'd love to know more about this, so recommended reads are much appreciated).

Which posturing brings us to the second piece of handedness research, related by BBC News Online: Left-handers 'better in fights', as found by looking at homicide rates in traditional societies and their left-handedness rate. Without reading the paper I couldn't be sure, but it can't be easy to get a causual relationship out of that, and the article does quote some sensible objections. But hey, it's a great headline.

—Matt.

December 07, 2004

Applying the hacks:

It's good to try some of the ideas in Mind Hacks on real-world problems. We have a piece up on the O'Reilly Network today, using visual attention concepts to comment on Flickr's Daily Zeitgeist toy. Photos continually fade in and shrink down on a grid of pictures--what does this mean, from the perspective of change blindness and the attention-grabbing nature of rapid movements?

Read the full article for more: Paying Attention (or Not) to the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist.

(To situate this in the book, we're making use of "Blind to Change" [Hack #40] for not noticing the photos fading in, "Grab Attention" [Hack #37] for noticing them shrink, and "Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision" [Hack #17] for not being able to see where the photo has shrunk to because your eyes are in motion as it does so. See the book's table of contents for which chapters these are in.)

—Matt.

Don't think, sleep!:

Sometimes it isn't how much sleep you got that's important, but how much sleep you think you got.

Our own perception of how much we slept during a night can be startlingly inaccurate. Dr Allison Harvey (now of UC Berkley) took insomniacs and measured how much they actually slept during the night. Despite the insomniacs reporting that they had only slept for two or three hours, they had in fact been asleep for an average of 7 hours - only 35 minutes less than a control group who didn't have any problems sleeping.

This shows that insomniacs (and probably the rest of us) are very bad at judging the time it takes us to get to sleep, and the time we actually are asleep. It also suggests that worrying about sleep, and our beliefs about how we've slept, have a big role in the negative affects of what (we believe) is a sleepless night.

To test this Dr Harvey attached monitoring sensors to insomniacs which gave them a read-out in the morning of how much they had slept the night before. Except that the read-out was a lie and always told the participants in the experiments that they had slept 'okay' regardless of how badly they had slept. (In the seminar where I heard Dr Harvey discuss this research she told us that originally they tried giving false-feedback saying that the insomniacs had slept 'excellently' each night, but they just didn't believe it so the researchers settled for just 'okay').

And what happened? When asked about how they felt, about their mood and alertness, those people who were lied to and told (by a scientific measurement, no less) that they had got a normal night's sleep felt better for it!

So, it seems, one of the surprising disadvantages of trying to get enough sleep is that you can be hypersensitive to those times you don't get enough - and that the hypersensitivity alone can depress and distract you.

Another entirely separate study shows neatly the role of anxiety in insomnia. A placebo effect is where something works because we believe it will work, not because of any intrinsic quality the thing itself has (there's lots more on placebos in the book). Placebos are known to be potentially very strong - for example in one study of placebo painkillers a significant proportion of people found the placebo to have as strong an effect on their pain as morphine.

Anyway, what would we expect if we gave someone a pill and told them that it was a strong stimulant - something like eight cups of espresso - just before they went to bed? Well if they were normal we'd expect them to take longer to get to sleep, and that's what happens. But if they're an insomniac then they get to sleep quicker than they do normally. Why? Because, the theory goes, the insomniac is preventing from getting to sleep by their anxiety about getting to sleep (there's lots of other work on this, including research by Dr Harvey). When they are given the fake eight-shots-of-espresso pill they are still anxious, but now they can put it down to the pill - "I'm awake, but hey - of course I'm awake, I had that pill" - now, because they're not worrying about it, they fall off to sleep. Genius!

All this says, to me, that the best thing to do about not being able to sleep - or about not having had enough sleep - is to not worry about it, especially if the hours you have available to spend unconscious are out of your control. Often self-awareness is a good thing, but when it comes to sleep, both before and after, a little less self-awareness can do a lot of good.

(I should apologies for the lack of references in this post. I heard the material about inaccuracy of sleep perception in a seminar Dr Harvey gave at the University of Sheffield in 2003, and haven't been able to find my notes, or any published details of the study. My apologies for any errors that have crept in. People wishing to follow this up could start with this paper [1] which shows that students with insomnia improved after they were shown the discrepancy between their perception and a more objective measure of how much they sleep. The placebo study I read in a textbook and unfortunately can't remember where. You can buy one of the gadgets researchers use to measure sleep here and you can read The Onion's advice on fighting insomnia here).

refs

1. Tang, N.K.Y. & Harvey, A.G. (2004). Correcting distorted perception of sleep in insomnia: a novel behavioural experiment? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 42, 27-39.

—tom.

December 03, 2004

Choice Irrationalities:

There was a great Analysis programme on radio 4 last night: The Economy on the Couch which was about behavioural economics, neuroeconomics (whatever that is) and ways in which we fail to act like the rational agents that standard economic theory supposes us to be

One irrationality- a human frailty for fairness- is revealed by a thing called the Ultimatum Game. The Ultimatum Game works like this. I am offered some money, say £100, on the condition that I share it with you. I get to decide the split, and you get to say if you accept it or not. If you accept, we get the money in the proportions I determined, if you reject my split then neither of us gets anything. So what would you do if I offered £1 to you, leaving me with the other ninety-nine?

One view of economic 'rationality' is that you have a choice between nothing (if you reject) and £1 (if you accept) so the rational choice is to accept. Of course hardly anyone does do this. Most people won't accept offers lower than a £30-£40 limit. Our sense of fair play gets in the way of rational choice.

Or what is one kind of rational choice. Like a lot things in the human judgement literature, one person's irrationality can look like a rational choice from another point of view. Here, if I accept a measly £1 it seems like I'm setting myself up for a run of bum-deals. If I reject the offer, losing out on a pounds myself but also punishing the guy who cut the cake so unfairly, I'm laying the ground for him or her to make me a better offer next time. Not so irrational, eh?

Here's another choice irrationality which isn't so amenable to the 'different kind of rationality' analysis, but which is also clear as to why it happens at all. (This wasn't in the R4 programme, but it's my favourite example at the moment):

You are offered a choice between $2 for certain, and a gamble where you get a 7 out of 36 chance of winning $9. 29 chances out of 36 you get nothing. What would you choose the gamble? If you do the maths, the expected pay off of the gamble is $1.75 (7/36 x 9), so you probably shouldn't.

When Paul Slovic and colleagues [1] gave this choice to a sample of people just 33% went for the gamble.

Now consider this: as before you have a choice between $2 for certain and a gamble. The gamble still has a 7/36 chance of winning you $9, but there is 26/36 chance you will have to pay out $0.05. Now the expected pay-off of the gamble is slightly worse ($1.71) but, strangely, around 60% people offered this choice took the gamble.

How come? Slovic argues that this is an example of 'evaluability' making the second gamble feel more attractive. Offered a 7/36 chance of winning $9 we don't compute the exact expected value, but rather do rough and ready reckoning. Does 7/36 feel like good odds? Is $9 a lot of money? It feels like the gamble probably isn't worth it.

What the 5 cents does is make the $9 easy to emotionally evaluate. Is $9 a lot of money? Hell, yes, compared to 5 cents! So you probably take the gamble, even though it has a lower expected value than $2 for certain, and a lower expected value than the mostly-rejected $9 only gamble.

Moral from this? Well, for me, it says that we can't rely on any information presented without context to be persuasive. Would you pay $10 for a scientific dictionary with 10,000 entries? Maybe. Who knows? What if you knew that all the other scientific dictionaries are $10 but only have 5,000 entries? Suddenly it becomes obvious. More generally this relates to the importance of correctly framing arguments (about which more later, and there's some stuff in the book too).

Human reasoning is chock-a-block of 'irrationalities', domains in which our limited cognitive resources and our animal ancestry compel us into making irrational choices (even bearing in mind my earlier caveat about defining irrationality). Classic economic theory ignores these foibles entirely and assumes that each economic actor makes rational choices, maximising their expected value in every situation.

Behavioural economics puts the lie to this model, but doesn't give us any good replacements - a collection of qualifications and observations which can be applied case-by-case, but no systematic replacement for the grand theory of the rational actor. Proponents of the classical model always knew it was psychologically unrealistic, but it's simplicity bought a lot of progress despite that. All models are false, but some are useful, as they say.

Ref

1. Slovic, P., Finucane, M., Peters, E., & MacGregor, D. G. (2002). The Affect Heuristic. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgement (pp. 397-420). New York: Cambridge University Press.

—tom.

December 01, 2004

Caffeine rituals:

Ah, this is good to see. There's a hack in the book about the rituals around coffee and tea. It's on the O'Reilly catalog page for Mind Hacks as a free sample, Hack 92: Make the Caffeine Habit Taste Good. It's like Pavlov and his dogs. He conditioned them to associate a noise with food so that they started salivating when they heard the noise. As with that, the ritual of making coffee gets associated with the caffeine high, and so the ritual becomes part of the buzz.

Anyway, here's someone who has found the same thing.

My particular ritual seems to be boiling the kettle, putting the teabag and water in the mug to brew, and then forgetting about it for the next 20 minutes as I suddenly get back into work again.

—Matt.

Rrrrroar:

"So, I'm not really comfortable with the fact that my mind is actually something physical." -- at Daily Dinosaur Comics [via introvert.net]. Hey that freaks me out too, knowing that the thought "that freaks me out," is not just accompanied by but actually is some kind of arrangement of the actual physical stuff in my head, which represents (in this context) "that freaks me out."

There's a lot to say here, on the philosophical aspects, but I refuse to be drawn into discussion on the nature of representation, emergence, and where "self" is stored by a cartoon T. Rex stomping on a house. Forgive me.

—Matt.