Well, okay, not really a serenade but the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, which kicks off in San Diego next week, on 6 March. I (Matt) will be there, speaking about my new project, playsh, the Playful Shell. And since the conference organisers also published Mind Hacks, I figure a few readers of this blog may be going along too. If you are, please do hunt me down and say hello! It's always fun to meet new folks.
Zac at ortholog.com writes about an experimental test of buying irrationality using Ebay. Quoting:
Test auctions on eBay showed that most people prefer to pay a low price for an item and also pay postage (American: "shipping") than pay a higher price and get free postage, even when the former added up to more than the latter. A CD for $5+$6 postage is preferred to a CD for $10+freepost. It wasn't presented as that stark a choice: multiple auctions with different price-postage ratios revealed a net preference for low item price and a poor correlation between auction success and stated postage costs. Interesting but hardly surprising: the salience of the price is greater than the cost of shipping (the anchoring cognitive fallacy), and people in general are not as rational or systematic as they/we believe.
(Zac's links. read the full post here)
In Influence, Cialdini highlights scarcity as one of the six principle factors of persuasion. In an auction they combine particularly strongly: scarcity of time (the item is only on sale for a limited period), scarity of product (items are sold individually, not just as one-of-many 'off the shelf') and competition (from other buyers). Add to this heady mix the price/postage sleight of hand and it is no wonder you get choice irrationalities.
Wikipedia now has both a mind and brain portal and a psychology portal which promise not only to keep you up-to-date with the latest encyclopaedic happenings, but also to broadcast news and messages for the psychology and neuroscience community.
The mind and brain portal seems to have been kicked-off by Italian philosopher Francesco Franco (username Lacatosias) while the psychology portal was the brain-child of Zeligf.
Both have been launched in the last few weeks and like everything on Wikipedia, the quality improves as more people pitch in.
So if you've never thought of contributing to the world's best and most dynamic online encyclopaedia, now's your chance.
Link to Wikipedia Mind and Brain Portal.
Link to Wikipedia Psychology Portal.
Link to what you get when you mix a choreographer, six cognitive scientists, ten dancers and an anthropologist. Via The Quarter, where art, science and politics meet.
Philosopher and neo-Darwinian Daniel Dennett has a new book out that attempts to explain the human penchant for religiosity in terms of memes. Guardian review here.
Quick on the heels of research showing how sex the old-fashioned way (but not other forms of sexual gratification) can protect against upcoming stressful events, a new study in the same journal shows sex with a partner is 400 per cent more satisfying than a self-loving session, as measured by levels of prolactin - a hormone associated with satiety. Both studies by Stuart Brody.
Update: Daniel Dennett will be in conversation with psychologist Dr. Susan Blackmore, philosopher and theologian Richard Swinborne and sociologist Tariq Modood at the Imax theatre in Bristol, March 15. Click here and scroll down.
Influence by Robert Cialdini is an excellent, excellent, book. Not only does it present voluminous evidence on the social psychology of persuasion and compliance, but it does succinctly and engagingly, mixing academic references with historical vignettes and personal anecdotes. The book discuss how techniques of persuasion work, grouping them under six major headings, and for each heading the book provides a 'defence against' section detailing how to stop yourself being unduly influenced. The final, glorious, touch is that in order to write the book Cialdini - who is a professor of social psychology - engaged in a three-year project of going undercover to explore first-hand how techniques of persuasion are used in the real world: applying for a waiter's job to study how to increase customers' tipping, attending tupperware parties, going on training programmes with door-to-door salesmen...it makes the book a wonderful blend of thorough research and astutely observed practice.
The book has been extensively and excellently summarised here, at happening-here.blogspot.com, so I'm just going to pull out some particularly fun examples of persuasion techniques, particularly as the relate to advertising and marketing.
A key idea is that we all use various cognitive 'shortcuts' (heuristics) we use to decide on what to buy. Advertisers can take advantage of these short-cuts to skew our behaviour. For example, there is a price-as-an-indicator-of-quality heurstic which means, if we're not thinking carefully about a purchase decision, we might just use the assumption that “better things are more expensive”, so if we want a 'better' thing we will just look at the prices to work out which product is better.
[Chivas Regal Scotch Whiskey] "had been a struggling brand until its managers decided to raise its price to a level far above its competitors. Sales skyrocketed, even though nothing was changed in the product itself (Aaker, 1991)" [1]
Or the coupons-give-you-a-bargain heuristic:
"A tire company found that mailed-out coupons which, because of a printing error, offered no savings top recipients produced just as much customers response as did error-free coupons that offered substantial savings" [2]
It's easy enough to think of other common examples - supermarkets which use three for the price of two offers, or put up signs saying things like "Two for £1". Next time you see one of these check the price for how much just one costs - it might stem your enthusiasm for the seeming bargain you thought you were being offered
Here's another trick, which takes advantage of another natural inclination - that of sticking by our word. Cialdini accuses toy producers of undersupplying stores with 'craze' toys just before Christmas - after a barrage of advertising parents promise their kids the toy but then can't get hold of one. They buy them a substitute at Christmas and then also have to buy the craze toy in January. He cites the example of the Cabbage Patch Kids, dolls which were heavily advertised one year in the mid-1980s, and undersupplied during the holiday season. $25 toys were selling at auction for $700. (A charge was later brought against company for advertising something that was unavailable). In 1988, a spokesperson for Hasbo, which made the Furby toy (which also sold out at Christmas), advised parents to say I'll try, but if I can't get it for you now, I'll get it for you later [3]
The same consistency principle lies behind the advice an encyclopaedia company gives during its sales-program: make the customs fill out the sales agreements themselves. Once they've 'owned' the action by doing it themselves they are far more likely to stick by it. ("There is something magical about writing things down" says Amway Corporation literature). Cialdini explains the popularity (with companies) of testimonial contests – those where you think of 50 words why the product is good and stand a chance of winning something. The contest is not for the company to get a single winning entry, but for them to induce all the entrants of the competition to enhance their commitment to the product by writing a testimonial. Influence has an extended discussion of this, and how the power of small, initial, public voluntary actions can be used to produce later compliance to much larger requests for action
"Commitment decisions, even erroneous ones, have a tendency to be self-perpetuating because they can 'grow their own legs'"
(page 97)
"You can use small commitments to manipulate a person's self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into "public servants", prospects into "customers", prisoners into "collaborators." And once you've got a man's self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself".
(page 74)
"...compliance professionals love commitments that produce inner change. First, that change is not just specific to the situation where it first occurred; it covers a whole range of related situations, too. Second, the effects of the change are lasting. So, once a man has been induced to take action that shifts his self-image to that of, let's say, a public spirited citizen [or a guru's disciple], he is likely to be public-spirited in a variety of other circumstances where his compliance may also be desired, and he is likely to continue his public-spirited behavior for as long as his new self-image holds."
(page 84)
Social proof (social influence) is another extremely strong heuristic: “if everyone else is doing it, I should do it to”
This too can be used unfairly - for example Evangelist Billy Graham has been known to 'seed' visits to towns in advance so that his arrival is met an outpouring of thousands of the faithful - apparently spontaneous, but actually highly organised. (p 101)
Positive association is also a powerful, and potentially automatic (see also) decision -shortcut
In one study, men who saw a new-car ad that included a seductive young woman model rated the car as faster, more appealing, more expensive-looking, and better designed than did men who viewed the same ad without the model. Yet when asked later, the men refused to believe that the presence of the young woman had influenced their judgments. [4]
The same kind of, automatic associations, lie behind findings that people leave larger tips if paying by credit card (credit cards associated with big spending, not always with paying back) and that "that when asked to contribute to charity (the United Way), college students were markedly more likely to give money if the room they were in contained MasterCard insignias than if it did not (87 percent verses 33 percent)." (p164). Funnily enough this didn't hold for people with troubled credit histories!
Cialdini is quite clear that we can't avoid using these short-cuts - after all they work most of the time - but we must come down hard on those who exploit them
“The pace of modern life demands that we frequently use shortcuts” (p. 234)"We are likely to use these lone cues when we don't have the inclination, time, energy, or cognitive resources to undertake a complete analysis of the situation. When we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indifferent, distracted or fatigue, we tend to focus less on the information available to us. When making decisions under these circumstances, we often revert to the rather primitive but necessary single-piece-of-good-evidence approach." (p235)
“The real treachery, and what we cannot tolerate, is any attempt to make a profit in a way that threatens the reliability of our shortcuts” (p. 239)
I don't know how realistic this kind of individual/consumer vigilance is as a strategy, but Cialdini seems to believe that the only alternative is to change the whole pace of modern life
The evidence suggests that the ever-accelerating pace and informational crush of modern life will make this particular form of unthinking compliance [shortcuts] more and more prevalent in the future (introduction, p. x.)
My default assumption used to be that the careless use of decision heuristics probably only applies to unimportant decisions. This took quite a severe knock from Cialdini's discussion on the social-contagion of suicide [5]. If people can be influenced by publicity about a suicide to kill themselves (and all the evidence is that they are - and social proof is one of Cialdini's six discussed shortcuts), then all of the decisions we make in life are open to be exploited by irrational factors under the control of others.
Refs below the fold
[1] p6, in Influence. Ref: Aaker, D.A. (1991). Managing Brand Equity. New York: Free Press
[2] p7, in Influence. Ref: Zimmator, J.J. (1983) Consumer Mindlessness: I believe it, but I don't see it. Proceedings of the Division of Consumer Psychology, APA Convention, Aanheim, CA.
[3] p58 in Influence
[4] p164 in Influence. Ref: Smith GH and Engel R, 1968, Influence of a Female Model on Perceived Characteristics of an Automobile, Proceedings from the 76th APA Annual Convention, 681-682.
[5] See also in Gladwell's The Tipping Point
BrainTutor is a free-to-download neuroanatomy package from the same people that make the brain scan analysis software BrainVoyager.
It allows you to rotate and 'slice through' a brain scan in 2D and 3D, and click on specific areas to get their names. It's straightforward to use, and is available for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.
Some of the most important buttons are in the bottom right hand corner of the main window but are poorly labelled. They determine whether you are selecting the lobes, sulci (the 'trenches') or gyri (the 'ridges') when asking for on-screen labels.
If the surface of the brain looks slightly odd in the BrainTutor software, it's because BrainVoyager tends to accentuate the sulci during visualisation. This is presumably to enable a better view of the brain activation when it occurs on the surface.
Link to Brain Tutor software (via Developing Intelligence).
The current issue of American Scientist has an excellent feature article on 'The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural'.
It argues that our ability to reason about other people's intentions underlies many common supernatural beliefs. In other words, we have a tendency to see intentions and consciousness even in mechanical aspects of the world.
The author is psychologist Dr Jesse Bering who has been using cognitive psychology to try and understand areas that are traditionally tackled by philosophy, such as belief in souls, causation and existential meaning.
In one experiment, Bering used puppets to describe a story in which a mouse is eaten by an alligator. Children of different ages were then asked to describe the mouse's ability to feel or know things after its death.
Younger children were more likely than older children to attribute thoughts, desires and even biological states to the mouse, suggesting that the idea of an afterlife is more likely to be intuitive and not one that is learned through ongoing cultural experience.
Jesse is interested in how some of the beliefs surrounding these issues might be influenced or related to common aspects of the mind that have evolved to solve other, more practical problems of life and survival.
The article is only available in the print edition, or online to subscribers, but Jesse has kindly offered to provide a copy of the article to anyone who contacts him by email.
Link to summary of article from American Scientist.
Link to homepage of Dr Jesse Bering.
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon
Excerpt from 'Howl' by poet Allen Ginsberg. The poem was dedicated to Ginsberg's friend, Carl Solomon, whom he met while they were both patients at Rockland Psychiatric Hospital in New York.
Link to full text of 'Howl'.
Controversial artificial intelligence researcher and maverick cognitive science visionary Chris McKinstry took his own life last month.
Chris founded Mindpixel, a collaborative AI project which aimed to collate a mass of machine-usable human knowledge online. He also ran the now offline Mindpixel blog, where he posted AI news and opinions.
His ideas were often highly speculative, but always demonstrated a keen passion for understanding the mind and brain. A recent story for kuro5hin.org was an example of this, where he discussed his entry for the AI chatbot competition the Loebner Prize in terms of a seven dimensional hyper-surface.
Chris posted his intentions to end his life online, and, cognitive scientist to the end, finished it thus:
Oh and BTW, the mind is a maximum hypersurface and thought a trajectory on it and the amygdala and hippocampus are Hopf maps of it. No one knew this before me, and it seems no one cares. So be it. My time will come in a hundred or a thousand years when the idea again returns.
Link to Wikipedia entry for Chris McKinstry.
Link to obituary from KBand.
British secret intelligence service MI6 has agreed to compensate soldiers who were dosed with LSD without their consent during the 1950s, according to an article in The Guardian.
Similar experiments were carried out by a number of governments during the 1950s and 60s, in an attempt to create 'mind control programmes' and 'truth drugs'.
One of the most notorius projects was a CIA run project known as MKULTRA that unethically tested a number of dangerous techniques on unwitting members of the public in an attempt to understand 'mind control'.
In one particularly bizarre project, known as Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA created a brothel, spiked the drinks of punters with LSD, and secretly filmed the effects.
These experiments were largely initiated in reaction to concerns over 'brain washing', which American prisoners of war had been subjected to after being captured in Korea.
One LSD test on British Troops was recorded and is the subject of a well-known video, now widely circulated on the internet.
The compensation recently paid to ex-British troops echoes a similar payout to ex-patients of the Canadian psychiatric care who had similar unethical experiments conducted upon them, largely under the direction of the one-time head of the World Psychiatric Association Dr Ewan Cameron.
Link to 'MI6 pays out over secret LSD mind control tests' from The Guardian.
Link to 'MI6 payouts over secret LSD tests' from BBC News.
Link to Wikipedia page on MKULTRA.
Link to video of LSD testing on British troops.
The Implicit Association Test [1] is a sorting task which reveals something about our automatic, non-deliberate, associations [2].
The part of the test which betrays our automtic associations is a combination of two simpler sorting tasks. Both simple tasks involve sorting words and pictures into categories which are assigned to the left and right (by pressing the E and I keys, which are on the left and right of your keyboard). One task is to sort words (like 'love', or 'failure') into the categories 'good' and 'bad'. The other task varies depending on what you want to detect automatic associations about. In the 'race IAT' the task is to sort pictures of the faces of white americans and the faces of black americans. The race IAT isn't the only version, but it is the most (in)famous (you can also do the IAT on fat vs thin, arab-muslim vs non-arab-muslims, for different US presidents and in many other variations). The compound task involves sorting both words and pictures to the left and right where each side has two categories assigned to it - so 'good' and 'black american' on the left, and 'bad' and 'white american' on the right, for example.
What the IAT test does is compare your times for sorting good words when the 'good' side is also the 'white' side to when the 'good' side is also the 'black' side (and vice versa for sorting bad words, and for sorting white and black faces to the good and bad sides). By doing these comparisons the test can detect any evaluation of 'white' or 'black' as positive or negative that is affecting your time to classify the words or faces to the correct side. So, for example, if you take significantly longer to sort good words to the 'black' side than you do to the 'white' side then the result is an automatic preference for 'white americans' over 'black americans' [3]
What the Racial IAT indicates is that most Americans have an automatic preference for whites over blacks. Two things are important about this. First it isn't really clear what mechanisms lie behind the effects found in the test ('Voodoo' is one suggestion!), nor is it clear what they mean [4]. Second, the automatic preference shows up for most people, even in those who consciously express no race preferences and even in many black americans.
Now where did this automatic preference come from? It certainly can't be deliberate attitudes, since the bias shows up in people (including many black americans) who have explicitly anti-racist attitudes. Some suggestions have been made, like they are the residual of previously held explicit attitudes, or the result of a 'cultural bias' (whatever that means) [5], but I think a strong, and more likely causal [6], possibility is that that these preferences are the result of systematic exposure to particular associations (i.e that white = good and black = bad). Associations can become established in memory merely by the repeated co-presentation of two things (conditioning), there doesn't need to be any logical connection between the two. So if on television the adverts for flash cars and happy domestic scenes always feature white folks and the the crime shows more often have black folks as the bad guys you're going to absorb those associations.
The researchers running the project imply as much in an answer in their FAQ
...it is very possible to possess an automatic preference that you would rather not have (and the researchers who developed this test are convinced that they, too, fall into this category). One solution is to seek experiences that could undo or reverse the patterns of experience that could have created the unwanted preference. But this is not always easy to do. A more practical alternative may be to remain alert to the existence of the undesired preference, recognizing that it may intrude in unwanted fashion into your judgments and actions. Additionally, you may decide to embark on consciously planned actions that can compensate for known unconscious preferences and beliefs."
(My emphasis).
The interesting thing for me about the hypothesis that these automatic preferences develope from repeated exposure to particular associations is that you do not need to believe the associations on any deliberate level, nor do you need particularly to pay attention to them, all you need to do is to have them as part of your environment. In that way our Implicit Associations reflect a part of our minds which belongs as much to the environment of our experience as to ourselves - and, additionally, is as much common to everyone who has shared our environment as it is unique to our individual minds.
And this relates to advertising. Adverts are ubiquitious. Advertising shapes the statistical content of the stimuli we are exposed too, however much we decide to give ourselves certain experiences. Does the IAT give us a glimpse of the consequences we reap from an unclean mental environment? [7]
References below the fold
[1] You can get all the research papers here. How wonderful
[2] I nearly used the word 'unconscious' here but couldn't quite bring myself to. I'm afraid that if i say it three times the ghost of Freud will appear!
[4] Here's one example of an intepretation
[5] The residual of childhood preferences? discussion at cognitive daily. Review Article Sources of Implicit Attitudes (2004)
[6] That's the problem with much psychology research. You can find factors associated with some phenomenon, but it's far hard to find what is truly causing it
[7] Guardian article about the clean mental environment movement
Woah! While searching for more random brain clips, I've just found this video on the brain from BBC comedy programme 'Look Around You'.
The programme is designed to be a satire of BBC schools programming that any UK school child in the early 80s will recognise.
The style is impeccably reproduced, so if you never had the pleasure of being educated via the medium of 1980's school TV, this clip captures the magic (if the magic was being captured by some slightly stoned neuroscientists with too much time on their hands).
Link to page with embedded video.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
A new study from Duke University Medical Center suggests that half of US Presidents were mentally ill at some stage.
Food from the sea shore fuelled human brain evolution, claims researcher.
New study reports that boys and girls show different rates of cognitive development after being placed in care from orphanages.
Teachers who wave their hands more, teach mathematics better (via BB).
Early humans were food for predators, and the need to avoid being lunch was a factor in human evolution, claims new research.
Neuroethicist Judy Iles answers five questions (with video) on crucial questions facing brain science.
Study of 'crispy-crunchiness' shows how our brains analyze the sound of food to determine crispness.
Men in their 50s have more satisfying sex lives than men in their 30s finds new survey.
Does mental exercise help keep the wits sharp? The Washington Post investigates.
Musicians use beta-blocker propanolol to prevent on-stage jitters, reports the New York Times.
Dr. William Hapworth on methamphetamine (and he gives a lecture too!).
I've just found an article from defunct Canadian digital art and culture magazine HorizonZero that traces the history of electronic music generated from human EEG recordings.
In the late 1960s, Richard Teitelbaum was a member of the innovative Rome-based live electronic music group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV). In performances of Spacecraft (1967) he used various biological signals including brain (EEG) and cardiac (EKG) signals as control sources for electronic synthesizers. Over the next few years, Teitelbaum continued to use EEG and other biological signals in his compositions and experiments as triggers for nascent Moog electronic synthesizers.
Link to 'A Young Person's Guide to Brainwave Music'.
BrainBlog discovered a video clip from the cartoon show Pinky and the Brain online, where the mousey duo sing about neuroanatomy.
They do a surprisingly good job of it. If it wasn't for the fact that Pinky is bouncing around on a piece of elastic shouting "Brainstem! Brainstem!" it would be fine academic material.
And it's probably the only lecture you're ever likely to see that includes an impromptu tamborine solo.
Link to page with embedded video clip.
Sunday’s Observer featured an in-depth profile by Rachel Donadio of Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink.
“With a writerly verve and strong narrative powers, he leavens serious social science research with zany characters and pithy, easily digestible anecdotes.”
Gladwell’s publishing success – Tipping Point has sold 1.7 million copies in N. America and Blink has sold 1.3 million – has led to a lucrative career as a public speaker for which he is apparently now paid about $40,000 per lecture. On top of that he’s also a columnist at the New Yorker.
“Gladwell’s dazzling arguments ultimately offer reassurance. Indeed he seems a contemporary incarnation of a recurring figure in the American experience, one who comes with encouraging news: you can make a difference, you have the capacity to change.”
Update: Malcolm Gladwell has a blog; via Marginal Revolution.
Link to book tickets to see Malcolm Gladwell in conversation with Robert McCrum, The Observer’s literary editor, on Weds 15 March at the South Bank Centre in London.
Link to profile as it appeared in the NY Times before the Observer.
Link to first audio clip from the interview.
Link to 2nd audio clip.
Link to 3rd audio.
The story in Prospect magazine about Nia - "...too beautiful to be in a psychiatric ward" [see post here] caused quite a furore in the blogosphere. Now the authors have given their response here.
Perception is a fundamentally underconstrained problem. You get information in through your senses, but not enough information to be absolutely sure of what is causing those sensations. A good example is perception of depth in vision. You get a pattern of light falling on your retinas (retinae?), in two dimensions, and from that you infer a three dimensional world, using various clever calculations of the visual system and some assumptions about what is likely. But because the process remains fundamentally underconstrained, there is always the possibility that you will see something that isn't really there - that is, your visual system will take in a pattern of information and decide that it is more likely to be produced by a scenario different from the real one.
Which is a all a long winded way of saying: "Look, cool! Illusions rooms!" (thanks Yalda)
They're painted so that from one particular angle the shapes line up and your visual system flips into thinking that it can see a flat, 2D, pattern when the reality is a disjoint 3D one. Awesome.
There's plenty more here
If you like this kind of stuff, also check out Christian's recent post on dangerous illusionary adverts
Eating disorders, such as anorexia, are traditionally thought to be driven by a distorted body image, so affected people see themselves as excessively overweight (and therefore unattractive) despite being very thin.
A recent study by psychologist Anita Jansen and colleagues has challenged this theory, by showing that women with eating disorders are actually more accurate at judging how attractive they are to others, whereas unaffected women typically over-estimate their attractiveness.
Jansen's team asked women with and without eating disorder symptoms to have their picture taken, from the neck down, in their underwear. They were then asked to rate their own body for general attractiveness, and say which was the most attractive and unattractive part of their body.
These anonymised photos were then shown to two panels, consisting of both males and females, who were asked to make the same ratings.
The women with symptoms were generally in agreement with the panels, whereas those without rated themselves as more attractive and typically did not agree on which were their most and least attractive body parts.
This shows a lack of a 'self serving attribution bias' which is a normal tendency to over-attribute positive things to ourselves and negative things to other people or situations.
A recent review of the research suggested that this bias is usually strongly present in most people. It has been suggested that this may be useful, as it might emotionally cushion us from some of life's hardships.
People with certain forms of mental illness, particularly depression, tend not to have this bias, however, meaning they actually view the world more accurately - an effect coined 'depressive realism'.
Jansen's study suggests a similar 'painful realism' effect may be present in people with eating disorders, although it's not clear whether this is specific to body perception, or whether it is primarily associated with emotional difficulties that often accompany conditions like anorexia.
UPDATE: World of Psychology has interesting commentary on this research (and post).
Link to abstract of study.
Link to eating disorder information from mental health charity Mind.
If you were designing an advert to encourage university students to drink less alcohol, which wording do you think would work better?
"Most university students drink too much, with dire consequences for their future health".
OR
"University students are healthier than you think, most have fewer than four drinks when they go out".
A growing body of research on the misperception of norms suggests the second type of statement may work better. University students consistently overestimate how much their peers drink, and importantly, it's this misperception that correlates with how much they choose to drink themselves.
"In point of fact, the norm among college students is to drink moderately if at all. And promoting this good news is an essential element of the health promotion strategy known as the social norms approach".
From an article in The Scientist magazine on the science of encouraging healthy behaviour. (Note, to celebrate their relaunch, all 20 years of content is currently accessible for free at The Scientist website).
I'm currently enjoying reading the Brain Ethics Blog that aims to discuss the consequences of brain science amd the ethical issues that arise from it.
It is run by two Danish neuropsychologists, Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy and Martin Skov, who give their own take on the current hot topics of mind and brain science.
The most recent post, analysing a recent study that claims to have made inferences about cognitive evolution from a brain scanning experiment, particularly caught my eye as an insightful look into a recent controversial finding.
Link to Brain Ethics Blog.
Science and Consciousness Review have an interview with neuroscientist Sara Lazar, who conducted the first fMRI study of meditation in 2000, and recently hit the news for reporting that meditation may increase the thickness of the grey matter in the cortex.
The interview explores Sara's motivation for studying meditation, and discusses the science and implications of her work.
When we first posted about the meditation study, one of the criticisms was that the study simply compared meditators to non-meditators without following them up to actually see if the cortex did change over time.
It could be argued that people with more grey matter are simply more likely to meditate, rather than the act of meditation having any direct effect on grey matter.
Like the London cab driver study (which reported that cab drivers have larger hippocampi) Lazar's meditation study reported a correlation between number of years spent meditating and the amount of grey matter, making it much less likely that the effect was incidental.
Lazar discusses such results in detail and, particularly, focuses on the brain areas found to show the most change, and relates them to the possible effects meditation may be having on the brain's function.
Link to interview with Dr. Sara W. Lazar.
The band of reality skeptics over at The Huge Entity have finished their series of Reasons Why You Don't Exist.
As we mentioned previously, there's a contribution from our very own Christian Jarret, and a number of other authors pushing their own brand of mind altering concepts.
Gerry Canavan questions the concept of 'you' as a unitary conscious experience and Thomas Herold takes aim at free will.
Jaime Morrison argues with himself on the reliability of information provided by perception and comes to the conclusion that neither of him exists, and Daniel Rourke questions whether the world as we experience it is just another reality-bending trick the brain has evolved to use.
...and there's more where those came from.
Link to 'Reasons Why You Don't Exist'.
ABC Radio's All in the Mind discusses the curious condition of prosopagnosia, sometimes called 'face-blindness', where affected individuals can't recognise faces despite having intact vision and being able to recognise objects.
The programme discusses how face recognition can be affected after brain injury, and talks to both a person with the condition, and neuropsychologists trying to better understand how it occurs.
On a related note, last year we interviewed Thomas Grüter, a prosopagnosia researcher and someone who has an inherited version of the disorder.
As the cold winter evenings drew near
Aunt Marge used to put extra blankets
over the furniture, to keep it warm and cosy
Mussolini was her lover, and life
was an outoffocus rosy-tinted spectaclebut neurological experts
with kind blueeyes
and gentle voices
small white hands
and large Rolls Royces
said that electric shock treatment
should do the trick
it did...today after 15 years of therapeutic tears
and an awful lot of ratepayers' shillings
down the hospital meter
sad Aunt Marge
no longer tucks up the furniture
before kissing it goodnight
and admits
that her affair with Mussolini
clearly was not right
particularly in the light
of her recently announced engagement
to the late pope.
'Sad Aunt Marge' by poet Roger McGough, from his book Blazing Fruit: Selected Poems 1967-1987 (ISBN 0140586520).
I notice that the award winning BBC documentary series Century of the Self is available on certain bittorrent trackers (for example, here).
The series, made by producer Adam Curtis, follows the development of the concept of the self from the ideas of Freud, to the massively influential but largely unknown role of his nephew Edward Bernays.
Bernays is considered the 'father of public relations' as he virtually invented the practice in its current form by applying his uncle's theories.
Crucially, instead of selling products on the basis that they were better products, he revolutionised advertising by marketing them to appeal to the sense of self - i.e. the product would make you a better person (more attractive, more independent or whatever).
He was later involved in applying the same techniques to excert political influence on behalf of the US government and later wrote Propaganda, one of the most influential books on the subject.
The documentary tracks how the psychology of the 'self' evolved and was used by marketeers and politicians throughout the 20th century.
It gets a little political towards the end, but otherwise strikes me as a groundbreaking analysis of a neglected topic. Highly recommended.
Link to torrent for 'Century of the Self'.
Link to Wikipedia entry on Edward Bernays.
Link to Wikipedia entry on 'Century of the Self'.
Link to BBC information on 'Century of the Self'.
An interesting update on Peter Lawrence's PLoS Biology article that discussed the role of social and biological differences between males and females, and the under-representation of women in science (see previously on Mind Hacks)...
According to an article in The Telegraph, Lawrence's article was accepted for publication in the journal Science but they bottled it and pulled out at the eleventh hour, presumably fearing the controversy that has surrounded the debate so far.
Link to Telegraph article 'Scientists are split on the different ways men and women think'.
This week's Science News has a cover article on the neural basis of the sense of self, which they've kindly published online in full.
The article also discusses how the concept of self can breakdown after brain injury or during mental illness. For example, some people diagnosed with schizophrenia have the experience that they are being controlled by outside forces.
In addition to the article, there was a recent edition WNYC's Radio Lab that covered similar ground, as noted in a previous post on Mind Hacks.
Link to article 'Self-Serve Brains' from Science News.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Research suggests that complex decisions should be 'slept-on' whereas simple decisions such as "selecting a brand of oven glove" (huh?) can be left to the conscious mind.
Cinematical reviews new movie "Unknown white male" - a documentary about someone with retrograde amnesia.
Japan sees a surge of death from people who make 'internet suicide pacts', reports the BBC.
Wired discusses research on the biases in interpreting emotional tone from other people's emails.
An article in The Manitoban discusses the science and validity of parapsychology [Ghostbusters fans: make your own jokes about Manitoban's Spirit Guide here].
Nature report on research that suggests that the more familiar you are with a route, the longer it seems.
Stanford neuroscientist Bill Newsome wants to implant an electrode in his brain to better understand human consciousness. Cool!
Circadiana discusses the disrupting effect of puberty and menstruation onset on sleep patterns.
Have you seen the new breed of lorry adverts? Surely they're dangerously offputting? ;-]
Thanks to J Mallory Wober for sending me the pic.
It reminded me of these.
Seed Magazine have an online article looking at the role of mirror neurons in appreciating spectator sport, particularly in light of the ongoing Winter Olympics.
The article itself is quite speculative, taking some of the conclusions with regard to possible emotional identification with the competitors a little further than the evidence can strongly support, but deftly uses the example of sports as an interesting introduction to the function of the 'mirror system'.
Link to article 'Built to be fans'.
The cover article in this week's New Scientist is about the new generation of wakefulness-promoting and cognitive enhancement drugs being marketed and developed by pharmaceutical companies.
Available drugs, such as modafinil, and those still in development, such as CX717, are being widely discussed as having the potential to alter society as sleep becomes a less necessary comidity.
Although marketed as a treatment for narcolepsy, modafinil is being frequently used by people wanting more work or play time without the cognitive impairement associated with tiredness. This has become so prevalent that it featured in a major article in the Washington Post as far back as 2002.
The New Scientist article is also enthusiastic in its coverage of the new compounds:
If that sounds unlikely, think about what is already here. Modafinil has made it possible to have 48 hours of continuous wakefulness with few, if any, ill effects. New classes of sleeping pills are on the horizon that promise to deliver sleep that is deeper and more refreshing than the real thing. Further down the line are even more radical interventions - wakefulness promoters that can safely abolish sleep for several days at a stretch, and sleeping pills that deliver what feels like 8 hours of sleep in half the time. Nor is it all about drugs: one research team even talks about developing a wearable electrical device that can wake your brain up at the flick of a switch.
Although perhaps we can be a bit suspicious of the claim that they have "few, if any, ill effects", as the history of new drugs shows that major effects are often not discovered until several years after the marketing claims them to be virtually side-effect free (e.g. benzodiazepines, SSRIs).
Unfortunately, the New Scientist article is not available online to non-subscribers, so you'll have to visit your local library or newsagent to get a copy, but there's plenty of information on modafinil and CX717 on the net.
Link to table of contents for current New Scientist.
Link to Washington Post article 'The Great Awakening'.
Professor Richard Wiseman talks about an upcoming study on speed dating in a BBC news story and is quoted as saying "This is the first time that speed dating has been used to assess the psychology of compatibility".
It seems Professor Wiseman has a short memory, as several studies have been published on speed dating, including a paper published last year in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior that was quite widely discussed (funnily enough, just around the time of last year's Valentine's Day).
Wiseman's experiment is to be carried out at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in April and reflects a trend for using speed dating in science education events. It even featured (rather unsuccessfully) in the tepid BBC series Secrets of the Sexes and, in a slightly more informed format, as a segment on Radio 4's All in the Mind.
Link to 'Scientists to study speed dating' from BBC News.
Online badge retailer Lapel Pin Planet have designed a handcrafted pewter pin in the shape of the brain. It's stylish and sure to be a conversation piece.
Although, I suspect many of the conversations will start something like "Hey, nice badge, hang on, where's the middle temporal gyrus?".
Hopefully though, if anyone notices that the badge isn't anatomically correct in its finer details, you've got a good excuse to kick-back with some neuroscience chit-chat.
Link to handcrafted brain pin.
If you're not already tired of Valentine themed stories in the news, LiveScience have an interesting article discussing some of the recent developments in understanding the psychology and neuroscience of love and attraction.
It's not the most critical article in the world, taking most of the results from the studies as given, but does provide some useful pointers for the current state of work in this area.
Link to article 'The Rules of Attraction in the Game of Love'.
Interesting fact for Valentine's Day: The retina is the only part of the central nervous system that is visible from outside the body.
So when you're looking deep into the eyes of your true love, you can say...
"Darling, you have the most beautiful central nervous system I have ever seen."
And if that doesn't send shivers down their spine, Ode to Psyche by John Keats is possibly one of the most beautiful love poems to feature the mind and brain, as this excerpt shows:
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same;
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
Link to full text of Ode to Psyche by John Keats.
Now here's an achievement that definitely deserves recognition, I'd say. Robert Jervis, the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Affairs at Columbia University, is set to be awarded $20,000 by the National Academy of Sciences in America for carrying out psychological research that has helped prevent nuclear war.
There must be a few people working towards such ends because apparently this award is made every three years! A press release says Jervis earned this year's prize "for showing, scientifically and in policy terms, how cognitive psychology, politically contextualized, can illuminate strategies for the avoidance of nuclear war". He'll receive the award at a ceremony in Washington on April 23rd.
Link to the National Academy of Sciences.
Link to interview with Jervis.
As well as semiotics and cognitive psychology there is another tool for understanding advertising - neuroscience! Enter neuromarketing [1]. Neuromarketing promises to tell you how your brain responds to branding, or which adverts during the superbowl are most effective (Vaughan did a great job on this one, here, and here), or how alert people are during normal television adverts ("there may well need to be more ads created." concludes the executive who commissioned the study!)
Neuromarketing leaves people saying things like
But the brain doesn't lie, and the ad industry is just waking up to the potential of neuroscience. The brain's seven defined regions - each affecting a different aspect of brain function - literally light up the screen if stimulated. Each one contributes to different cognitive activities; reasoning, analysis, long or short-term memory, high or low involvement processing, emotion, meaning etc.
(Tess Alps, in the Guardian)
The appeal of neuromarketing is the illusion of being able to access some more fundamental explanatory basis for our actions. People may lie to market researchers, or may even deceive themselves, but - we hope - 'the brain doesn't lie'. As psychologist and marketing guru Gerald Zaltman said existing methods don't go nearly far enough in helping [advertisers] move to a closer understanding of their customers [2]
Sadly for marketing science, a straight description of what the brain is doing is of limited use - the marketing implications crucially depend on how you interpret that activity. And the interpretation depends on your theories and assumptions about the mind. If your assumptions are dubious (see the superbowl study) or just wrong (see the Tess Alps quote above) then you're not going to get anything more than a pseudo-scientific smokescreen.
Perhaps the real appeal of neuromarketing to advertisers is betrayed by this quote from Jonathan Harries, the creative director at advertising agency FCB:
It is very hard for our clients to buy gut feel because every time they approach [a campaign], their jobs are on the line. Neuroscience promises to measure the gut feel, and that is exciting for us. It makes it easier for us to sell what we believe is right [2]
Ref:
[1] Enjoy the marketing of neuromarketing first hand at neurosense.co.uk/
[2] Inside the Consumer Mind : What neuroscience can tell us about marketing, Wendy Melillo, Adweek; Jan 16, 2006; 47, 3
A recent paper in the medical journal Psychopathology has analysed the links between websites of likely-delusional people who publish their experiences of 'mind control' on the internet, and has concluded that they challenge the psychiatric criteria for the diagnosis of delusions.
One of the defining features of a delusion is that it should not be a belief "ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture". Nevertheless, some researchers have noted that there is no clear measure of what is 'ordinarily accepted'.
It is also possible that cultures or subcultures could be based around beliefs that would otherwise be diagnosed as delusional. Until now, however, there have been no obvious examples of such subcultures identified.
In the Psychopathology paper, ten websites reporting psychosis-like 'mind control' experiences were identified. The reports were anonymised and independently blind-rated by three psychiatrists who confirmed that they reflect experiences stemming from psychosis.
The links between the websites were then analysed using a technique called social network analysis that allows the social network of the authors to be inferred.
This analysis suggested that the authors of the reports were part of a 'small world' social network, based around the content of likely-delusional beliefs (click here to see the network structure in a popup window).
This contradicts the current definition of a delusion, suggesting that it is becoming increasing redundant as technology shapes and re-shapes social networks.
It also suggests that, according to the current definition, anyone can 'cure' themselves of a delusion by using the internet to find or form a community of others who share the same belief!
Importantly, however, the researchers make clear that this research does not imply that all of the internet 'mind control' community are psychotic, as reports were chosen to specifically reflect psychosis-like experiences.
It is interesting, however, that the identified authors are also likely to be an active part of a wider, non-psychotic community, who may have similar, although differently motivated, concerns.
Link to abstract of study.
PDF of paper.
Disclaimer: This paper is from my own research group.
Every day from nine to five I sit at my desk facing the door of the office and type up other people's dreams. Not just dreams. That wouldn't be practical enough for my bosses. I type up also people's daytime complaints: trouble with mother, trouble with father, trouble with the bottle, the bed, the headache that bangs home and blacks out the sweet world for no known reason. Nobody comes to our office unless they have troubles. Troubles that can't be pinpointed by Wassermanns or Wechsler-Bellvues alone.
Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all-it's the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.
When people ask me where I work, I tell them I'm Assistant to the Secretary in one of the Out-Patient Departments of the Clinics' Building of the City Hospital. This sounds so be-all end-all they seldom get around to asking me more than what I do, and what I do is mainly type up records. On my own hook though, and completely under cover, I am pursuing a vocation that would set these doctors on their ears. In the privacy of my one-room apartment I call myself secretary to none other than Johnny Panic himself.
Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psycho-analytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream-stopper, a dream-explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves alone. A lover of dreams for Johnny Panic's sake, the Maker of them all.
There isn't a dream I've typed up in our record books that I don't know by heart. There isn't a dream I haven't copied out at home into Johnny Panic's Bible of Dreams.
This is my real calling.
Excerpt from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by poet and author Sylvia Plath. Plath suffered from severe depression throughout her life, and this piece was based upon her experiences of being in a psychiatric hospital.
ABC Radio's science show Ockham's Razor marks the 100th anniversary of the creation of the intelligence test by examining its history and impact on modern psychology.
The programme traces the development of the modern IQ test from the initial efforts of psychologist Alfred Binet and its roots in educational testing, to its controversial involvement in social and political debates.
mp3 or realaudio of programme audio.
Link to programme transcript.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
PLoS Medicine have a review article on the links between cannabis and psychosis.
Psychologist Petra Boyton casts a critical eye on media reports that 'sexual chemistry lasts just two years'.
The Royal College of Nursing debate 'harm minimisation' measures for people who self-harm.
Beta-blocker drug propranolol could reduce the impact of painful memories if taken after severe trauma.
Wired magazine discuss recent research into developing an eye test for Alzheimer's disease.
The touch of a loved one's hand can induce in measurable stress-reducing responses in the brain during tense times.
BBC Radio 4's health issues show 'Case Notes' has a half-hour special on the neuroscience and treatment of stroke.
The brain continues with significant development after the age of 18 (via /.).
New Scientist on research that shows that the brain only has to send a movement command to create the sensation of movement.
The New York Times has an insightful article on the media obsession with pretty brain images and what they actually tell us.
Article in Wired on an inventor of retinal implants (via BoingBoing).
Here's a way to make people buy more of your stuff - give them fewer options. Douglas Coupland called the bewilderment induced by there being too many choices 'option paralysis' ('Generation X', 1991). Now social psychologists have caught on ('When choice is demotivating', 2000, [1]). Offer shoppers a choice of 24 jams and they are less likely to buy a jar than if offered a choice of 6 jams. Offer students a choice of 6 essays, rather than 30 essays, for extra-credit and more will take up the opportunity if there is less choice of essay titles - and, what is more, they write better essays. Students given a similar choice of free chocolates (a restricted choice compared to an extensive choice) made quicker choices (not too suprising) and were happier with the choices they did make once they had made them.
ref
[1] Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. 2000. When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 995-1006.
A couple of news stories have discussed the 'Better Humans?' report featured earlier on Mind Hacks:
One article from The Guardian (actually an excerpt from the full report) on potential abuses of technology as 'mind control' by neuroscientist Steven Rose; and another on Radio 4's Today Programme that interviewed Steven Rose and philosopher Nick Bostrom (realaudio here) about using biotech to extend life and optimise the brain.
If you want to read the report in full, it has now been published and is available for free download at the Demos site.
I've not read it yet, but I'm hoping that it will provide a bit of balance to the somewhat wide-eyed and uncritical acceptance of neuroscience stories that tend to make the media.
Link to article 'We are moving ever closer to the era of mind control'.
Realaudio of interview with Rose and Bostrom on Radio 4.
Link to 'Better Humans?' report.
All this week over at the Huge Entity - Reasons YOU don't exist, including a brief contribution by moi based on fundamental attribution error.
A new edition of Scientific American Mind has been released and includes two web-published articles: one on recent research on grandmother cells (or 'Halle Berry neurons' as they're becoming known) and another on the use of neurofeedback as a therapy and cognitive enhancer.
'Halle Berry neurons' are brain cells that supposedly activate in response to a single face, and are so named because a photo of Ms Berry was used in a recent experiment experiment that seemed to support this "one neuron - one face idea", that was previously derided as being unrealistic.
The jury is still out on whether they exist or not, but the article considers evidence for and against the hypothesis.
Neurofeedback is a technique where brain activity is measured and shown to the subject, who can then attempt to control it by altering their mental state.
The brain activity can be measured from areas that could be linked to problems a person has (such as poor attention or concentration) and so the technique can be supposedly used to 'train the brain' to work more efficiently.
The article considers the evidence that it can be effective, although it is still not a mainstream treatment, partly because there are no widely agreed standards for how it should be administered.
Link to artice 'One Person, One Neuron?'.
Link to article 'Train Your Brain'.
We probably like to think that we're too smart to be seduced by such "branding," but we aren't. If you ask test participants in a study to explain their preferences in music or art, they'll come up with some account based on the qualities of the pieces themselves. Yet several studies have demonstrated that "familiarity breeds liking." If you play snippets of music for people or show them slides of paintings and vary the number of times they hear or see the music and art, on the whole people will rate the familiar things more positively than the unfamiliar ones. The people doing the ratings don't know that they like one bit of music more than another because its more familiar. Nonetheless, when products are essentially equivalent, people go with what's familiar, even if it's only familiar because they know its name from advertising
Barry Schwartz. 'The Paradox of Choice' (2004)
I think the essential point is correct, but there is a sort of sneaking condescension here: All of you people (the 'test participants') only like the things you like because you're familiar with them, not because of any rational or emotional affection for them (that's just 'some account'). What's more - we (the psychologists) have done experiments which show (admittedly only in some circumstances) that familiarity leads to liking; and from this we're prepared to generalise to all other circumstances you're involved in. I parody, but I'm sure you see what I mean.
The fact that we tend to like the familiar isn't too surprising. There's even a good evolutionary reason for preferring what worked before - if it didn't kill you last time, why risk doing something else this time? The single most useful thing you can measure to predict what someone will do in the future is not what they want to do, nor is it what they say they'll probably do, nor what their friends and family will do, but simply what they did last time - such is the power of habit (For more on this see Hack #74 in Mind Hacks).
But the interesting thing about advertising and branding is the process of it making something familiar to us and us taking this as an indication of preference. In other words, we don't properly take into account that the brand is not familiar to us for any good reason.
Psychologically it's not too surprising that this should happen. The study [1] which revived the subliminal perception field involved this mere exposure effect. Participants were shown meaningless shapes for time-spans below the perceptual threshold and subsequently they preferred those shapes to other not previously displayed shapes - even though they had not consciously perceived either set of shapes before.
However, is there any evidence that this kind of familiarity effect can be shown to compete with, or even over-ride, actual good reasons for liking or disliking a brand? Perhaps people are happy to use a fairly arbitrary guideline (familiarity) for unimportant decisions, or decisions where the choices are all pretty good, but when more is at stake familiarity is relegated down the table of influencing factors?
Ref
[1] Kunst-Wilson WR, Zajonc RB (1980). Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognized. Science, 207(4430):557-8.
Time magazine talks to psychologist Steven Hayes in an article about the development of 'Acceptance and Commitment Therapy' - an increasingly popular treatment for mental disorder.
I'm not familiar with the name, but it seems to be a form of mindfulness-based therapy, originally developed by a team at Cambridge University, inspired by Buddhist meditation techniques, and known to be highly effective in treating depression.
The article contains a summary of both ACT and the current most popular and most evaluated form of psychological therapy: cognitive behaviour therapy or CBT.
The Time article is a little overzealous in its enthusiasm, suggesting that ACT outperformed CBT when applied to a wide range of mental disorders, when, in fact, Hayes himself wrote an encouraging but balanced review article in which he stated "there are not enough well-controlled studies to conclude that ACT is generally more effective than other active treatments".
Nevertheless, the article is an interesting insight into Hayes himself, and a good account of some of the core principles behind modern psychological treatments for mental illness.
Link to article 'Happiness isn't normal'.
Link to information on mindfulness-baded therapy from Oxford University.
The 'complete results' from the Super Bowl brain scans are online, and it does indeed seem as if the exercise has been mostly hype.
Cardinal sins:
1) Not giving the comparison conditions and experimental design. This makes the reported results essentially meaningless.
2) Interpreting brain activity in certain areas to mean a certain response from viewers, even when they actually report something else.
female subjects may give verbally very low 'grades' to ads using actresses in sexy roles, but their mirror neuron areas seem to fire up quite a bit, suggesting some form of identification and empathy.
Mirror neurons tend to fire when anyone else's actions are viewed, there is no evidence that approval or liking of the person doing the actions has any bearing on the response.
3) Assuming activation in the 'mirror system' equals empathy.
4) Assuming activation of the amygdala is a measure of fear.
There is a big jump in amygdala activity when the dinosaur crushes the caveman... The scene looks funny and has been described as funny by lots of people, but your amygdala still perceives it as threatening
The amygdala can be active when someone experiences happiness or joy. Equally, it could have been active because people found the scene funny.
5) Finishing on an advert for the neuromarketing company involved.
Link to 'Complete results'.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on same.
Just a quick note to say thanks very much to Mark Brown who got sick of mindhacks.com not having a favicon... and made us one. You can see it up there in the address bar, or - possibly - by the title for your RSS feed. Much appreciated, cheers!
This month's Prospect magazine features a touching story about Nia - "..too beautiful to be in a psychiatric ward". The true tale conveys elegantly the dilemma that often faces psychiatrists as they weigh up the benefits of antipsychotic medication against the side effects that can sometimes be worse than a patient's original symptoms. In this story Nia's beauty is ruined by the only drug that alleviates her psychosis - Olanzapine. What unnerves the psychiatrists is that she doesn't seem to care, whereas they do. "The treatment had reversed a Faustian pact in which Nia had been beautiful and mad, and replaced it with another—in which she was fat and sane. But was it really a blessing that Nia seemed to have no conception of what she had lost?"
Link to story by deputy editor of Prospect Alexander Linklater and psychiatrist Robert Drummond (access to this item is free).
To cut a long story short - don't believe the hype. At least as it's described in a story doing the rounds.
According to the report, neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni and his team brain-scanned people while they watched the Super Bowl adverts to see which "won".
This is part of an emerging science called neuromarketing, which uses the techniques of cognitive neuroscience to try and evaluate and design better product promotions.
Iacoboni claims that "a good indicator of a successful ad is activity in brain areas concerned with reward and empathy" (which seems controversial at best, but we'll move on).
The tricky bit comes when you try and measure brain activity from participants who are watching adverts.
The images generated from fMRI brain scanning are not pure 'maps' of brain activity. All of the brain is active all of the time, so to infer which areas are most involved, neuroscientists compare brain activity between different conditions.
These conditions are designed very carefully in scientific experiments, and in the most common form of comparison ('subtraction') they are identical, apart from the one thing that the researchers want to investigate.
It is, therefore, impossible to interpret the results of a brain scanning study without knowing how the experiment was designed and exactly what was being compared with what.
As this hasn't been made clear, the results could be due to any number of things not related to how good the advert was.
From a previous study done on political ads by the same marketing company, it looks as if they just average the activation of a certain brain area over the course of the ad. They then base their conclusions of the effect of the ads on the assumed functions of these brain areas.
The difficulty is that the functions of these areas are still controversial. For example, with the Super Bowl ads, Iacobini claims that activation in the 'mirror system' is a measure of empathy. This is still highly contentious and is presumably based on conclusions from an earlier study of his.
Because of this uncertainty, it is difficult to know that any difference is not due to one advert having more movement in it than the other. Or perhaps more people. Or happier people. Or even something unrelated like a faster tempo in the music... despite the advert being otherwise rubbish.
The previous study on political ads (that made the front page of The New York Times no less) was completed while America was winding up for the 2004 presidential elections, and the current one was completed during the 24 hours after the Super Bowl.
Sounds like the 'neuromarketing' company involved in these stories is doing some pretty effective marketing of their own. Apparently more details will be forthcoming. I look forward to reading more (but remain skeptical!).
Link to 'Who really won the Super Bowl? The Story of an Instant-Science Experiment'.
You go to the supermarket and stop by some shelves offering French and German wine. You buy a bottle of French wine. After going through the checkout you are asked what made you choose that bottle of wine. You say something like "It was the right price", or "I liked the label". Did you notice the French music playing as you took it off the shelf? You probably did. Did it affect your choice of wine? No, you say, it didn't.That's funny because on the days we play French music nearly 80% of people buying wine from those shelves choose French wine, and on the days we play German music the opposite happens
This study was done by Adrian North and colleagues from the University of Leicester [1]. They played traditional French (accordion music) or traditional German (a Bierkeller brass band - oompah music) music at customers and watched the sales of wine from their experimental wine shelves, which contained French and German wine matched for price and flavour. On French music days 77% of the wine sold was French, on German music days 73% was German - in other words, if you took some wine off their shelves you were 3 or 4 times more likely to choose a wine that matched the music than wine that didn't match the music.
Did people notice the music? Probably in a vague sort of way. But only 1 out of 44 customers who agreed to answer some questions at the checkout spontaneously mentioned it as the reason they bought the wine. When asked specifically if they thought that the music affected their choice 86% said that it didn't. The behavioural influence of the music was massive, but the customers didn't notice or believe that it was affecting them. Similar experiments have shown that classical music can make people buy more expensive wine [2], or spend more in restaurants [3].
Is this manipulation? There's no coercion, all the customers are certainly wine buyers who are probably more or less in the mood to buy some wine. But they have been influenced in what kind of wine they buy and they don't know that they have.
What would be the effect, I wonder, of having someone stand by the shelves saying to the customers as they passed "Why don't you buy a French wine today"? My hunch is that you'd make people think about their decision a lot more - just by trying to persuade them you'd turn the decision from a low involvement one into a high involvement one. People would start to discount your suggestion. But the suggestion made by the music doesn't trigger any kind of monitoring. Instead, the authors of this study believe, it triggers memories associated with the music - preferences and frames of reference. Simply put, hearing the French music activates [4] ideas of 'Frenchness' - maybe making customers remember how much they like French wine, or how much they enjoyed their last trip to France. For a decision which people aren't very involved with, with low costs either way (both the French and German wines are pretty similar, remember, except for their nationality) this is enough to swing the choice.
This priming affect is, I believe, one of the major ways advertising works [5]. Simply by making it more likely for us to remember certain things, we are more likely to make decisions biased in a certain way. There's no compulsion, nobody has their free-will wrenched from their conscious grip. There's just an environment shaped a certain way to encourage certain ideas. And how could anything be wrong with that?
Refs & Footnotes below the fold:
[1] Adrian C. North, David J. Hargreaves, and Jennifer McKendrick? (1997). In-store music affects product choice. Nature, 390, 132.
Adrian C. North, David J. Hargreaves, and Jennifer McKendrick? (1999). The influence of in-store music on wine selections. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 271-276.
[2] Areni, C. S. and Kim, D. (1993). The influence of background music on shopping behavior: classical versus top-forty music in a wine store. Advances in Consumer Research, 20, 336-340.
[3] North, A. C., Shilcock, A., and Hargreaves, D. J. (2003). The effect of musical style on restaurant customers’ spending. Environment and Behavior, 35, 712-718.
[4] For 'activates', read 'primes'. See Hacks #38 and #81 in 'Mind Hacks' or look up priming in any cognitive psychology textbook
[5] This is my first-pass conclusion. I'd love to be convinced otherwise. Get in touch if you know of any evidence otherwise.
"Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, the brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre".(p.254)
Henry Perowne is the neurosurgeon at the centre of Ian McEwan's novel Saturday from which this quote is taken (ISBN 978-0-099-46968-1).
Link to previous post on the neural code.
Coulrophobia [fear of clowns] is most commonly triggered by a traumatic experience in childhood, said Steven Luel, a psychologist in New York specializing in anxiety and phobias.
Indeed, that was the case with Wallace. At the age of 6, she met her first clown at the circus, an encounter she still remembers clearly 25 years later.
"A clown got right up in my face, and I could see his beard stubble under his makeup. He smelled bad and his eyes were weird," she said. "I guess I never got over it."
Enough said.
Link to article (with fantastic title) 'Fear of Clowns: No Laughing Matter' from INS News.
Psychologist Tania Lombrozo has collected suggestions for the menu of the fictional (but delicious sounding) cognitive science café. It's both full of psychology in-jokes and gives a lighthearted crib-sheet for some of the most influential thinkers in the field.
Some of my favourites include:
The Turing Tester
Half Brie with apricot jam on a French roll, half vegan alternative — we bet you won't know which is which!The Wason Cheese Selector
Grilled Portobello mushroom with cheese. If cheddar, then sesame bun. (Please check your order carefully.)The Piagetian
A sandwich in four stages: sensational baguette, quantities of Swiss cheese that are anything but conservative, the concrete crunch of walnuts, and a dash of Cayenne pepper lead to this sandwich’s formal elegance.
PDF of 'Shepard's Tables: A Cognitive Science Café' (via Mixing Memory)
From Nancy Etcoff's book Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (ISBN 0385478542):
"People judge appearances as though somewhere in their minds an ideal beauty of the human form exists, a form they would recognise if they saw it, though they do not expect they ever will. It exists in the imagination." (p11)
"Attitudes surrounding beauty are entwined with our deepest conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit. We view the body as a temple, a prison, a dwelling for the immortal soul, a tormentor, a garden of earthly delights, a biological envelope, a machine, a home. We cannot talk about our response to our body's beauty without understanding all that we project onto our flesh." (p20)
Today's Times has two short but interesting articles in its 'body and soul' section, both of which are available online: one on the neuroscience of art and another on self-harm.
Mark Lythgoe is a neuroscientist at University College London who has been involved in art / science projects for over a decade. He discusses the possible neural basis for why Dan Flavin's minimalist light-based artwork has such appeal.
The article on self-harm is inspired by a new book by Carolyn Smith, based on her own experiences of self-harm and recovery. It discusses the phenomenon, its emotional impact, and includes advice if you find out someone you know has self-harmed.
Link to article 'The light fantastic'.
Link to article 'Unkindest cut of all'.
A few places where you can enjoy the intersection between experimental psychology and marketing research are at:
(labs)
The Food and Brand Lab (was 'The Illinois Food and Brand lab', but has now moved to Cornell) found at consumerpsychology.net
The Bangor University: The Experimental Consumer Psychology research group - see this article in New Scientist about Jane Raymond's research Is advertising flogging a dead horse? (New Scientist, 24 December 2005).
(associations)
The Association for Consumer Research
Society for Consumer Psychology
(journals)
Journal of Consumer Psychology
The Journal of Consumer Behaviour (defunct?)
(updated)
Here's another approach to understanding how adverts work - cognitive psychology, as discussed in this Wired article from 2002 (thanks Lauren!)
You'll probably not be surprised that I've lots of sympathy for experimenal psychology as a method for understanding adverts (as opposed to, say, semiotics). A conventional experimental cognitive psychology approach to understanding something about advertising would be:
1. Have an idea, e.g., I think Factor X makes people buy more stuff
2. Come up with an experiment which involves two situations which are identical except for the presence/absence of Factor X.
3. Include some measure which is a good enouch approximation for the behaviour 'buying' (it could be actual purchases, or it could be something like memory for the product, or extent of positive feelings for the product, which we just assume will convert into sales)
4. Do the experiment, write up the results, let the rest of the (psychology) world criticise your experiment
5. Do follow-up experiments to re-test your idea and counter criticisms.
Or something like that anyway. Here's an example from the Wired article:
One example: At the University of Texas at Austin, cognitive science professor Art Markman gave a group of hungry people a few bites of popcorn. Another group got no food. Then he showed his volunteers pictures of products – DVD players, shampoo, cars, French toast. The group whose appetite had been whetted with popcorn had a harder time concentrating on the nonfoods. One obvious implication, Markman says: Food samples may actually hurt nongrocery sales.
Now the strength here is that you both check if there is an effect at all, and you narrow down the possibiliies so that you have a rough idea what is causing it (again, cf a semiotic approach). The weakness is that even though you've shown an effect in the lab, you're not sure it will operate outside of the lab (the problem of generalisability), and you're not going to be sure that, even if it does operate, it isn't made irrelevant by some other factor that you weren't looking at with your experimental lens. So, for example, maybe wetting people's appetites does make it harder for them to concentrate on non-foods, but maybe in real life most people don't wet their appetites before shopping for non-foods, so the finding is irrelevant. Or maybe everyone wets their appetites, so the supermarket needn't worry about giving away samples - we're all peckish anyway. Or maybe we're more likely to buy non-foods when we're not concentrating (concentration being the thing actually measured in the experiment), so being peckish actually helps non-food sales.
Anyway, so lots of things could be true, and it takes more than a simple lab study to work out which factors are dominating, but the great virtue of the experimental method is that it gives strong hints as to what sorts of things can be operating and - just as important - what sort of things can't affect behaviour.
A new online service called 'PsychPop' has been launched by the Institute of Psychiatry in London. It allows members of the public to volunteer to help in research that aims to combat brain injury, neurological disease and mental illness.
Often, one of the difficulties in conducting research is not recruiting people affected by medical conditions, but members of the public.
General public participants are essential allies in research, needed to determine which aspects of mind and brain functioning might be different when compared to people with a specific condition.
The service at the Institute of Psychiatry has been set up by neuropsychologist and wikipedian Paul Wicks, initially out of frustration when trying to recruit members of the public in his own research on motor neurone disease.
Taking part in research can also be a fascinating experience. If you don't live in London, most universities will conduct research into the mind and brain so it's worth getting in touch and asking how to volunteer.
Crucially, find out exactly what's involved, make sure the study has ethical approval (it has been judged by an ethics committee to be safe and well conducted) and ask any questions you have before starting.
Other than that, enjoy the experience! You usually get your travel expenses reimbursed and can often get a copy of the results - including a picture of your brain if you take part in a neuroimaging study.
Cognitive scientists: If your department has an online sign-up form for participants, why not add a link in the comments page of this entry?
Link to PsychPop.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
A new blog 'On The Spectrum' collects and discusses development in the science of the autism spectrum.
Mixing Memory discusses the psychology of intellectual of insight
ABC Radio's All in the Mind discusses the effect of petrol sniffing on the brain.
Scientific brain linked to autism - with the appropriate number of caveats and qualifications.
Brain Waves previews an upcoming book on the female brain.
Epilepsy Action launches Mothers in Mind campaign.
RadioLab's science programme discusses the psychology and neuroscience of stress.
A report on a person who experiences near permanent deja-vu.
An engaging article from Cognitive Daily tackles research on the how children understand the concept of death.
Wired chart the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation for the treatment of depression.
Judith Williamson's 'Decoding Advertisements' is a classic look at the semiotics of advertising - about how adverts construct and promolgate meaning, necessarily involving the customer in a system of signs and symbols, as a token in that system. It's a great book and, in some sense, a forerunner of Naomi Klein's book on Brands, No Logo
I'm going to talk about it because it is exactly not what I am interested in in terms of advertising and psychology.
The first advert discussed in the book (shown below, p18 in the book) is an advert for car tyres. The advert shows a car stopped just before the end of a jetty; the text reports how they drove the car 36,000 miles and then did an emergency stop to test the quality of the tyres. They stopped fine - in other words, 'these are good tyres'. But - aha! - says Judith Williamson - that is just the overt message of the advert. The covert message of the advert is captured in the image
The outside of the jetty resembles the outside of a tyre and the curve is suggestive of its shape: the whole jetty is one big tyre...The jetty is tough and strong, it withstands water and erosion and does not wear down: because of the visual resemblance we assume that this is true of the tyre as well. In the picture the jetty actually encloses the car, protectively surrounding it with solidity in the middle of dangerous water: similarly, the whole safety of the car and driver is wrapped up in the tyre, which stands up to the elements and supports the car. Thus what seemed to be merely a part of the apparatus for conveying a message about braking speed, turns out to be a message in itself, one that works not on the overt but almost on the unconscious level; and one which involves a connection being made, a correlation between two objects (tyre and jetty) not on a rational basis but by a leap made on the basis of appearance, juxtaposition and connotation.
Is this true? Do the qualities of the jetty occur to us and transfer to the tyres? Does this happen covertly, on an 'almost unconscious level'. Does this magic bypass the normal rational monitoring of our thoughts? Well, it could be true, maybe. But also, something like it could be true - maybe the image really plays the role of a phallic symbol and suggest to the viewer thoughts of masculine strength and durability. Or maybe something contradictory but similar in style is true - does the image suggest danger, when the tyres are meant to make you feel safe, so that really it is a bad advert. Or maybe people just like to look at a nice picture of a jetty in the sea. Or maybe they like the curves of the jetty, and this makes them feel positive about the thing they see at the same time (the logo of the tyre manufacturer). All of these things could be true - I don't believe Judith Williamson has any more idea than us which are true, and this is why I'm not interested in the semiotics of advertising at the moment.
The argument advanced in 'Decoding Advertisements' misses a critical step. Can it be shown that covert visual imagery affects consumer's buying behaviour? I don't doubt that covert visual imagery exists, nor even that in some circumstances has an effect, but does it have an effect in adverts? Till the whole class of influences talked about is demonstrated to be in operation, why should I believe these analyses of adverts are any more than psychoanalytic-spook stories?
So, while I'm alive to the use of decoding adverts using semiotics, the first stops on my investigation into adverts will be
the experimental evidence which shows that adverts do have an effect
the experimental evidence on what sorts of things affect behaviours
By 'sorts of things' I mean general categories like 'new information', 'social influence', 'status', 'sex appeal', 'positive emotions' - all things that at first glance seem more likely to be factors in adverts' success. I'll leave the fine, critical-theory, detail for later, and until I can be persuaded that, in an advert, a jetty is more than just a jetty.
Ref:
Williamson, Judith. (1978). Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Boyars. You can get a flavour for the book from this discussion, which includes examples. Judith Williamson is a flag on the fantastic semiotics black run.
Today's New Scientist is a special on robots, particularly focusing on robots that mimic or model certain aspects of human behaviour.
The issue also has an additional article on whether it is possible to regulate the brain's 'time keeper' to change the conscious perception of time - a skill which could be used to allow for more conscious control of difficult tasks.
The article does suffer from a few points of frank weirdness (e.g. "Schizophrenics have too much dopamine activity in the brain so their clock is so fast that it feels like the whole world is crazy" - wtf?) but is otherwise an interesting look at chronobiology - the science of biological time perception.
For those wanting to know more about the area, you could do far worse than go to the insightful and informative blog Circadiana, for which chronobiology is a focus of interest.
Otherwise, your local library should have a copy of New Scientist if your newsagent doesn't, as unfortunately, the main feature articles aren't available online.
Link to table of contents for this week's New Scientist.
Link to Circadiana.
I've just discovered mindhacks.org. I think it's a version of this site from a parallel universe.
It's a seemingly dormant blog that has a mixture of posts on everything from the science of spirituality to the plainly cosmic...
Dr. William A. Tiller's studies and experiments have proven that human consciousness "changes space." And he explains how this works in a way that's easy for us to follow and understand.
But further - and of importance to the subject matter of our current issue - he demonstrates not only that Zero Point Energy is, for all practical purposes, absolutely limitless, but that in it lies our future potential.
Zero Point Energy sounds suspiciously like a good dose of caffeine to me, but I suspect Dr. Tiller might have something slightly different in mind.
Link to mindhacks.org
Does advertising work? If it does work, how does it work? And given this, should we be worried about what advertisers do? These are, broadly, the questions I'm interested in and the topics I am going to be posting about for the next month. Aside from sheer curiousity, I'm chairing a discussion on the topic of advertising and psychology on March 6th at Cafe Scientifique, Sheffield.
Here's the blurb:
Do adverts work? How do they work? And is it a problem?Most of us don't think we're particularly affected by adverts, but it can't be for nothing that the advertising industry in the UK spent £13 billion last year trying to change our buying habits, and another couple of billion pounds researching in which are the most effective ways of doing this. Psychologists have spent years trying to predict what makes people behave in certain ways and we're not that close to an answer - perhaps the advertisers, with their massive budget, have cracked it? And if they have, should we be worried?
This talk will invite the audience to consider what kind of effect advertising has, and how most adverts work. Although 'subliminal advertising' is a myth, some recent research does suggests that there are ways our behaviour can be influenced without our full awarenessus of it. What these experiments mean for the freedom of the individual is an open question which hopefully we can consider together.
I genuinely haven't reached any conclusions on this yet, so I'm looking forward to the discussion, especially as it touches on such tangled issues as freewill and experimental evidence on how our behaviour can be unconsciously affected (Hacks #98, #99 and #100 for those of you with copies of Mind Hacks). And hopefully too, there'll be an opportunity for some blog-discussion as well. I'm going to cross-post things at both mindhacks.com and at idiolect, although I'll reserve the more speculative and/or sociological stuff for idiolect. If you've anything to say, please chip in, and if you've got anything you think I should know about, read or listen to please email me tom [at] mindhacks [dot] com
An article in The Guardian discusses the possibilities of using new developments in biotechnology to enhance the human mind and brain.
The article is somewhat breathless to say the least, but does contain an interesting overview of the current schools of thought on the possible impact of the technology on society.
The author also notes that there are a number of upcoming events which will discuss the implications of a world where cognitive enhancement technology is widely available.
One such event, entitled 'Better Humans?', is being run by the London-based think-tank Demos in Feburary and aims to mark the launch of a series of essays on the topic.
A further event, entitled 'Tomorrow's People', is being run by Oxford University in March and aims "to explore the promises of technology for life enhancement and extension in different parts of the world".
Link to 'There is no stop button in the race for human re-engineering'.
