Psychology Research

Philosopher A.C. Grayling has a just-released opinion piece on the New Scientist site arguing that we should regulate armed military robots before they are responsible for, presumably, what would otherwise be classified as war crimes. As we reported in 2007, a military robot has already malfunctioned and ended up killing nine people with gunfire. Grayling notes that military robots are already deployed on ‘active duty’ and that we need to regulate the consequences of an increasingly mechanised military that relies on artificial intelligence technology to engage its firepower. Robot sentries patrol the borders of South Korea and Israel. Remote-controlled aircraft mount missile attacks on enemy positions. Other military robots are already in service, and not just for defusing bombs or detecting landmines: a coming generation of autonomous combat robots capable of deep penetration into enemy territory raises questions about whether they will be able to discriminate between soldiers and innocent civilians… In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner? Most thinking about the implications of robotics tends to take sci-fi forms: robots enslave humankind, or beautifully sculpted humanoid machines have sex with their owners and then post-coitally tidy the room and make coffee. But the real concern lies in the areas to which the money already flows: the military and the police. Link to NewSci piece by A.C. Grayling (via David Dobbs ).

There’s a brief but interesting case study in the General Hospital Psychiatry journal of a patient who is described as having ‘extremely grotesque somatic delusions’. The case was a 54-year-old man. He had no past history or family history of psychiatric disorders. His social and occupational histories were quite normal. In August of 2005, he felt that “something has stuck between under front teeth.” From September, he felt that “there is another lower jaw with teeth between the real upper jaw and real lower jaw, and there is another tongue between the false lower jaw and the real lower jaw”; “the teeth on the false lower jaw are growing steadily”; “I try to cut the false teeth off with the real teeth, but the false teeth do not stop growing”; “the false teeth melt into holes in the false lower jaw, but later grow again from those holes”; “something like spaghetti is coming into and going out from the holes” and “the false lower jaw rolls up and is coming into the throat.” Because of these annoying sensations, he had mild depressive symptoms such as depressed mood, decrease in appetite, restlessness and fatigue. Despite these symptoms, he was able to continue working. The patient was treated with the antipsychotic drug risperidone and reportedly recovered well. As part of his assessment he was also given a SPECT brain scan, that found reduced blood flow in the temporal and parietal lobes. Although still not well studied, various other single case studies have found that delusions concerning body size, shape or transformation correlate with changes in parietal lobe function. Owing to the role of the parietal lobe in maintaining our ‘body image’, it is thought that problems in this area could lead to unusual experiences of body distortion which could, in part, spark delusional beliefs. Link to case study. Link to PubMed entry for same.

Let me first introduce myself and this blog, which is titled Total Brain Workout. I am a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto, and one of my main areas of cultural research is puzzles. I have also been teaching an undergraduate course on puzzles (their history and cultural meaning) at the University for many years. It is one of the most satisfying courses I have ever taught because, by the end of it, the students not only develop puzzle-solving skills (which they may have thought they didn’t have at the start), but also come out of it with a better perspective about the role of puzzles in human life. This blog is modeled on puzzles that I put together for my recent book, The Total Brain Workout: 450 Puzzles to Sharpen Your Mind, Improve Your Memory & Keep Your Brain Fit, published by Harlequin Books. It will contain one or two puzzles, and (if relevant) the history behind them, to tease your brain and thus keep it fit. As I indicate in the preface to that book, it would seem that such apparently “trivial amusements” foster brain growth, by stimulating logical and creative thinking regions of the brain. Research has come forward to suggest (although not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt) that puzzles sharpen the mind, improve memory, and keep the brain fit throughout life, and especially later life. As a boomer myself, and a puzzle addict since my childhood, I welcome this news. If puzzles are to the brain what physical exercise is to the body, then let’s do puzzles-not just for fun, but more importantly for brain fitness. And even if the research is not exactly what it is claimed to be, so what! Doing puzzles cannot hurt. Puzzles are as old as human history. They are found in all cultures throughout time. One of the first documented puzzle-and still one of the most famous-is the Riddle of the Sphinx. According to myth and legend, when Oedipus approached the city of Thebes he encountered a gigantic sphinx guarding entrance to the city. The menacing beast confronted Oedipus, posing the following riddle to him, and warning him that if he failed to answer it correctly he would die instantly at the Sphinx’s hands: What has four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three at night? The fearless Oedipus answered (paraphrasing his statement somewhat): “Humans, who crawl on all fours as babies, then walk on two legs as grown-ups, and finally need a cane in old age to get around.” Upon hearing the answer, the astonished sphinx killed itself, and Oedipus entered Thebes as a hero for having gotten rid of the terrible monster that had kept the city in captivity for so long. Ironically, by solving the riddle the devastating prophecy, which Oedipus tried to elude-that he would kill his father (which he did unwittingly on the way to Thebes) and marry his mother, the widowed queen of Thebes-came true. Why are we so intrigued by stories such as this one which revolve around puzzles? The answer might lie in the origin of the English word puzzle itself, which comes from the Middle English word poselen “to bewilder, confuse.” And indeed, puzzles generate bewilderment and confusion, because they cannot be solved by applying any formula or method mindlessly. They always require a dose of creative, unconventional thinking, which psychologists call “insight thinking.” This is essentially an intuitive grasp of a pattern or twist concealed by the puzzle. Given their appeal, some puzzles have given origin to commonly-held ideas, such as the one that life is comparable to the three main parts of a day (the Riddle of the Sphinx). Others are the source of everyday expressions. Here is a brainteaser that gave origin to the expression “thinking outside the box.” Many readers undoubtedly know it: Without letting your pencil leave the paper, can you draw four straight lines through the following nine dots? Those who may not have come across this puzzle before might tend to approach it by joining up the dots as if they were located on the perimeter (boundary) of an imaginary square or flattened box. But this reading of the puzzle does not yield a solution, no matter how many times one tries to draw four straight lines without lifting the pencil. A dot is always left over. It is at this point where creative thinking comes into play: “What would happen if I extend one or more of the four lines beyond the box?” That hunch turns out, in fact, to be the relevant insight. One possible solution is as follows: Can you find the others? It should now be obvious why this puzzle gave rise to the expression “thinking outside the box,” which entered the English language around the middle part of the twentieth century when people in business and education started referring to it as a prototypical example of what creative or “lateral” thinking is all about. It continues to be cited by psychologists as an example of how the mind tends to impose unnecessary limitations upon methods of attacking problems. Who invented the puzzle? I have looked into several sources and have been able to trace it as far back as 1914, in the first edition of puzzlist Sam Loyd’s (1841-1911) Cyclopedia of Puzzles. But the principle it embodies is probably older, as Martin Gardner indicates in his 1960 edition of Loyd’s work (titled The Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Loyd). The Nine-Dot puzzle is a 3 × 3 version of what can be called generally a Dot-Joining puzzle. Can you solve the Sixteen-Dot (4 × 4) and Twenty-Five Dot (5 × 5) versions? Again, you just connect the dots without lifting your pencil. How many lines are required in each of these two cases? Do you detect a correlation between number of dots and number of connecting lines? Sixteen-Dot Version Twenty-Five-Dot Version As a final word on Dot-Joining puzzles, I should mention that, as with any puzzle genre, once the general principle involved in solving them is deciphered, the genre starts losing its appeal. However, like any good joke, Dot-Joining puzzles can be played on others over and over to great effect. I await your answers, solutions, discussions, anecdotes, etc. for this particular puzzle, including any general formula for solving any general version (n × n) of the puzzle (if there is one). I also welcome suggestions for future puzzles on this blog. This is going to be fun!  (Scroll down for the answers)                           Answers Each of the following constitutes only one possible solution. Sixteen-Dot Version Six lines are needed for this version of the puzzle. As mentioned other solutions are possible. All involve six lines. Twenty-Five-Dot Version Eight lines are needed for this version of the puzzle. Other solutions are possible. Can we generalize? By making the Nine-Dot puzzle as complex as we desire (increasing the number of dots to 16, 25, 36, 49, etc.), a pattern seems to emerge through inspection. This pattern can be charted as follows: Dots    Lines Required 3 × 3    (3 + 1) = 4 4 × 4    (4 + 2) = 6 5 × 5    (5 + 3) = 8 6 × 6    (6 + 4) = 10 …    … n × n    n + (n – 2) = 2n – 2 I should point out that I have not tested this pattern beyond a 6 × 6 version of the puzzle. As with all inductively-derived formulas, there is no way to be sure that the formula works all the time. It thus can be called, simply, a working formula.  

I’m interesting in creating a list of people on Twitter that Mind Hacks readers might be interested in: psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, AI hackers, anthropologists, sociologists, science writers, philosophers – you know the sort. However, it seems quite hard to track down people by their interests. So if you follow, or are, someone who posts lots of interesting mind and brain stuff on Twitter, leave a comment on this post, or email me using this web form with Twitter in the title. My only caveat is I’m not particularly interested in, for example, a psychologist who mostly twitters about their cat, the news, sport or whatever. They need to be a good source of mind and brain insights. I’ll filter the list and post it up here.

Here are links to some old posts about psychology and advertising. About three years ago I was writing a lot about this, and I just thought I’d collect them here: Longer posts: Is there a science of advertising? Decoding adverisements Cognitive psychology & advertising Music wine and will advertising influences familiarity induces preference neuroscience and advertising where do implicit associations come from? Book review: Influence (by Robert Cialdini) Does advertising erode free will? ‘Briefly noted’ and links the price is right regardless of the cost When choice is demotivating Experimental psychology of advertising resources Why can’t we choose what makes us happy The Endowment effect and marketing A quick and miscellaneous list of advertising links

Today’s issue of Science has a letter from neuroscientist Martha Farah and theologian Nancey Murphy warning against ‘non-materialist neuroscience’ becoming the new front-line in the religion wars. Most religions endorse the idea of a soul (or spirit) that is distinct from the physical body. Yet as neuroscience advances, it increasingly seems that all aspects of a person can be explained by the functioning of a material system. This first became clear in the realms of motor control and perception. Yet, models of perceptual and motor capacities such as color vision and gait do not directly threaten the idea of the soul. You can still believe in what Gilbert Ryle called “the ghost in the machine” and simply conclude that color vision and gait are features of the machine rather than the ghost. However, as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms underlying personality, love, morality, and spirituality, the idea of a ghost in the machine becomes strained. Brain imaging indicates that all of these traits have physical correlates in brain function. Furthermore, pharmacologic influences on these traits, as well as the effects of localized stimulation or damage, demonstrate that the brain processes in question are not mere correlates but are the physical bases of these central aspects of our personhood. If these aspects of the person are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all? By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge than evolutionary biology to many religions. Predictably, then, some theologians and even neuroscientists are resisting the implications of modern cognitive and affective neuroscience. “Nonmaterialist neuroscience” has joined “intelligent design” as an alternative interpretation of scientific data. This work is counterproductive, however, in that it ignores what most scholars of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures now understand about biblical views of human nature. These views were physicalist, and body-soul dualism entered Christian thought around a century after Jesus’ day. As I’ve noted before , I remain sceptical that this will pose much of a threat, largely due to the fact that non-materialist neuroscience is not particularly new – many famous neuroscientists (including the Nobel prize-winning John Eccles) have been explicitly non-materialist with few contemporary ripples. Unlike evolution, which bluntly contradicts what many religious texts claim, very few holy books describe any concepts of the soul that can be directly contradicted by neuroscience. However, there is certainly some interest in the neuroscience bashing among Christian fundamentalists, who recently held their first conference on the issue. We shall have to see how successfully they manage to enthuse their flock. Link to letter ‘Neuroscience and the Soul’. Link to DOI entry for same.

As a long-time observer of relationships, I can tell you that, like children, marriages go through different developmental stages and predictable crises. But because people are unfamiliar with the normal hills and valleys of marriage, these predictable transitional periods are often misunderstood, causing over-reactions. Those who manage to weather these universal stormy periods usually come out the other side with greater love and commitment to their spouses. That’s why I want to offer you a Marriage Map. Stage One- Passion prevails Head over heels in love, you can’t believe how lucky you are to have met your lover. Much to your amazement, you have so much in common: you enjoy the same hobbies, music, restaurants and movies. You can finish each other’s sentences. When you pick up the phone to call your partner, he or she is already on the line calling you. When little, annoying things pop up, they’re dismissed and overlooked. At no other time in your relationship is your feeling of well being and physical desire for each other as intense as it is during this romantic period. The newness and excitement of the relationship stimulates the production of chemicals in your bodies that increase energy, positive attitudes and heighten sexuality and sensuality. While in this naturally produced state of euphoria, you decide to commit to spending the rest of their lives together. And marry, you do. But soon, your joy gives way to an inevitable earth-shattering awakening; marriage isn’t at all what you expected it to be. Stage Two- What was I thinking? In some ways, stage two is the most difficult because it is here that you experience the biggest fall. After all, how many miles is it from bliss to disillusionment? Millions. For starters, reality sets in. The little things start to bother you. You realize that your spouse has stinky breath in the morning, spends way too long on the toilet, leaves magazines and letters strewn on the kitchen counter, and never wraps food properly before it’s put in the refrigerator. Although you once thought you and your spouse were kindred spirits, you now realize that there are many, many differences between you. You’re confused. You argue about everything. When you remind yourself you made a life-long commitment, you start to understand the real meaning of eternity. Ironically, it is in the midst of feeling at odds with your once kindred spirit that you are faced with making all sorts of life-altering decisions, such as whether and when to have children, where to live, who will support the family, who will handle the bills, how your free time will be spent, how in-laws fit in to your lives, and who will do the cooking. Just at the time when a team spirit would have come in mighty handy, spouses often start to feel like opponents. So they spend the next decade or so trying to get their partners to change, which triggers stage three. Stage Three- Everything would be great if you changed In this stage of marriage, most people believe that there are two ways of looking at things, your spouse’s way and your way, also known as the Right Way. And rather than brainstorm creative solutions, couples often battle tenaciously to get their partners to admit they are wrong. That’s because every point of disagreement is an opportunity to define the marriage. Over time, both partners dig in their heels deeper and deeper. Now is the time when many people face a fork in the marital road. Three choices become apparent. Convinced they’ve tried everything, some people give up. They tell themselves they’ve fallen out of love or married the wrong person and they divorce. Other people resign themselves to the status quo and decide to lead separate lives. But there are still others who decide that it’s time to begin to investigate healthier and more satisfying ways of interacting. Although the latter option requires a major leap of faith, those who take this leap are the fortunate ones because the best of marriage is yet to come. Stage Four- That’s just the way s/he is In stage four, we finally come to terms with the fact that we are never going to see eye-to-eye with our partners about everything and we have to figure out what we must do to live more peaceably. We look to others for suggestions; we seek religious counsel, talk to close friends and family, attend marital therapy, read self-help books, or take a relationship seminar. Those of us who are more private look inward and seek solutions there. We more readily forgive our spouses for their hardheadedness, and recognize that we aren’t exactly easy to live with either. When disagreements occur, we make more of an effort to put ourselves in our partner’s shoes. We recognize that, as with everything in life, we have to accept the good with the bad. Fights happen less frequently and when they occur, they’re not as intense or as emotional as in the earlier years of marriage. And because we’re smart enough to have reached this stage, we reap the benefits of the fifth, and final stage. Stage Five- Together, at last It is really a tragedy that half of all couples who wed never get to stage five, when all the pain and hard work of the earlier stages really begins to pay off. Since you are no longer in a struggle to define who you are and what the marriage should be, there is more peace and harmony. You start "liking" your spouse again. By the time you reach stage five, you have a shared history. And although you’d both agree that marriage hasn’t been easy, you feel proud that you’ve weathered the storms. You appreciate your partner’s sense of commitment to making your marriage last. You feel more secure about yourself as a person and you begin to appreciate the differences between you and your spouse. And what you don’t appreciate, you find greater acceptance for. If you have children, they’re older and more independent, allowing you to focus on your marriage again, like in the old days. And you start having "old day feelings" again. You have come full circle. I’m certain that if more couples realized that there really is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they’d be more willing to tough it out through the downpour. The problem is, most people fool themselves into thinking that whatever stage they are in at the moment, is where they will be forever. But it’s important to remember that nothing lasts forever. There are seasons to everything in life, including marriage. The wiser and more mature you become, the more you realize this. The more you realize this, the more time you and your spouse spend hanging out in stage five. Together again, at last. Copyright 2009 Michele Weiner-Davis. All rights reserved. My Books My Website Telephone Consultations Personal Two-Day Intensives   © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

An interesting if dubious Twitter phenomenon: a $200 an hour online therapist website is spamming people who express distress in their twitter bulletins with a reply advertising their service. The service is called AskAnAlly and the Twitter spam has really pissed a number people off. Like many of the other people, I can’t help reading the name as AskAnally, which I shall be charitable and assume is a reference to Freudian psychotherapy. It seems life imitates Web Therapy . Thanks for Mind Hacks reader Rachel for letting me know.

Time magazine reports on an intriguing new study finding that groups select natural leaders on the basis of how much each person contributes to group discussions, even when their contributions have no relation to their actual competence. Psychologists Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff , asked several groups to complete tasks for a $400 dollar prize. They found that those who spoke more were rated as more competent and influential. Wondering whether this genuinely reflected their actual competence, they decided to test this out with a similar task where the group had to solve math problems. But this time, they had the participants’ mathematics exam results and could see exactly how many problems each person had solved. When the work was finished, the people who spoke up more were again likelier to be described by peers as leaders and likelier to be rated as math whizzes. What’s more, any speaking up at all seemed to do. Participants earned recognition for being the first to call out an answer, but also for being the second or third — even if all they did was agree with what someone else had said. Merely providing some scrap of information relevant to solving the problem counted too, as long as they did so often enough and confidently enough. When Anderson and Kilduff checked the participants’ work, however, a lot of pretenders were exposed. Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they’d even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers — period. The researchers conclude that one way dominant people attain influence is simple through acting in ways that make them appear competent, even when this isn’t the case. Link to Time article ‘Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It?’. Link to PubMed entry for study.

"I almost die for food, and let me have it!" As You Like It by William Shakespeare How do we lose weight and keep it off? This is a big, big topic, and one that I’ll be covering piece by piece in this blog. So let me first tell you who I am and why this topic is mine. In my professional life I’m a professor of nutrition and a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University and have spent the last 17 years doing research on weight loss and how to make it work for real people in the real world. On a personal level, I was an overweight kid, had a mother who loved us with food, and was 55 pounds overweight in my 30’s after a difficult pregnancy. Researching weight has been my way to bring all the pieces of my life together. Like many people who struggle with control over what they eat, I’ve gained and lost, and gained and lost again, so I know the struggle up close. But I also know how to win on a personal level – I’ve been weight stable for the last 15 years, and with the help of things I’ve learned in my research program have achieved this without giving up the wonderful pleasures of food, comfort food and all the rest. I also love food – I was a chef in a French bistro and worked as a private chef as well, before becoming a researcher – and think that good food, comfort food and all the rest are legitimate, normal pleasures which should not be made hostage to weight control – indeed I believe that we can’t win our personal battle with weight unless we enjoy what we eat and stay satisfied. I’m also the author of the just-published The Instinct Diet, which has been endorsed by more leading obesity scientists than any diet book ever-including researchers who’ve never before been able to agree on the same recommendations. People who struggle with their weight report that the main reasons they give up on a diet are because they miss eating foods they love, they are hungry all or most of the time, and then hit a plateau and can’t get any further. So the central challenge in weight control is this: how do we cut calories while staying satisfied and eating things we enjoy? If we can do this, there is no reason we can’t gain permanent control over our weight! So let’s start with hunger control. I know that most everyone thinks that they have other problems as well, but in my experience really good hunger control 24/7 makes it much easier to deal with just about every other issue (such as emotional eating and craving, which I will cover in a future blog). In psychiatric terms of peeling the onion, hunger control is the outside layer – you can’t uncover other stuff until you get rid of it. And the good news here is that the diet wars of past years really are over. Really! Research studies are showing quite conclusively that there isn’t just one way to deal with hunger, there are at least 4 ways to put together a meal or snack to get satisfied on fewer calories. Eating the right foods isn’t the only way to control hunger (more on this later), but all of the following items are great for hunger control, and if you include 2 or more of these in each meal and each snack you will probably notice a rapid improvement in how satisfied you feel: • High fiber foods (such as high fiber cereals, legumes, green vegetables); • High protein foods (such as lean proteins like chicken breast, white fish, tofu); • High volume foods (such as green salads and vegetable or bean soups); • Low glycemic index carbs (such as legumes, again, and also wheat berries, barley, low carb breads, and non-starchy fruits). What if you don’t like these things? Practice (especially when you are hungry) and some good recipes are the key to growing enjoyment. Here is my favorite after-dinner cure for both hunger and late-night munchies. Think of it as the best diet medicine rather than an indulgent dessert, and enjoy! Chocolate Cereal Dessert ½ cup very high fiber cereal such as Original Fiber One, All Bran Extra Fiber or Trader Joe’s High Fiber Cereal 1 square (10 grams) chocolate of your choice 1% milk to serve, about 1/3 cup Optional: 2 drops mint essence, or a handful of frozen raspberries Place the chocolate on top of the cereal and microwave until the chocolate just melts, about 30 seconds. Mix the cereal and chocolate together really well. Add the milk and serve (preferably while you put your feet up and relax). Dr. Susan Roberts is professor of nutrition and professor of psychiatry at Tufts University and author of The Instinct Diet . © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.