Psychology Research

The October issue of The Psychologist has just hit the wires and two of articles, freely available online, have a fascinating take on the Victorian mind. The first looks at the 19th century understanding of insomnia, and the second on what master detective Sherlock Holmes can teach modern cognitive psychology. The game is afoot! The article on the Victorian’s view on insomnia is fascinating as it illustrates how far our thinking has come in terms of the relationship between body and mind. Despite the fact that we now think of sleep as primarily to do with the mind and brain, early Victorian theories rarely considered these as important and instead suggested seemingly odd ‘treatments’ focused on the blood, for example. Over time people started becoming more brain centric, seemingly due to the discovery of effective sleep-inducing medications, and more aware of the effects of stress, anxiety and thought on sleep. The article on Holmes and cognitive psychology is by two authors who research the psychology of expertise. Case studies of experts are often used to illustrate the theories but in this case, however, they argue that Sherlock Holmes could serve equally as well. To this day, research on expertise has devoted little attention to expert reasoning, and the few available studies on this theme mostly deal with inductive reasoning. However, experts use abductive reasoning in many situations. Abductive reasoning consists of starting from observed data and deriving from these data the most likely explanation or hypothesis. From this explanation, the data can be deduced by implication (e.g. Hanson, 1958). Holmes clearly explains the method of reasoning to Watson in A Study in Scarlet (1887): ‘In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.’ ‘I confess’, said I, ‘that I do not quite follow you.’ ‘I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically.’ In this example, Holmes describes in his words, but also with precision, the nature of abductive reasoning. The only drawback is that the article finishes just as it gets going, but a great idea none-the-less. Link to ‘Insomnia – Victorian style’. Link to ‘Can Sherlock Holmes help cognitive psychology?’. Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist.

When Jimmy and Nora were toddlers, we bought them great little plastic scooters to ride around the house. They were the perfect size for a small child. Yet Jimmy preferred to ride around on a plastic garbage truck instead, despite the fact that there was no steering wheel and the “seat” wasn’t nearly as comfortable, at least to our adult eyes: We figured this behavior was just one of Jimmy’s unique quirks. It didn’t really bother us, except for the knowledge that we could have saved 20 bucks on the “real” scooter if we’d only known he would end up preferring the garbage truck. In 2003, Judy DeLoache and some of her colleagues noticed similar behavior in their own kids, and the children of their friends, and, unlike Greta and I, they decided to see if this type of behavior was part of normal toddler development. The pattern they had casually observed was similar to what we had seen: a small child will attempt to use an impossibly small object as if it was the real thing. Maybe they’ll try to put on their Barbie doll’s clothes, or ride in a matchbox car, or sit on a miniature chair. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

A few months before Katrina, I caught one of the early Mardi Gras parades in a rural town outside New Orleans. Race relations there seemed different from those here in Northern California. Blacks were more outgoing and friendly to whites, and yet there also seemed to be more racial segregation. At the parade, the floats and teams were strictly segregated. The only integration I saw was a few clusters of black and white teens. I watched a policeman go out of his way to harass a black youth who was hanging out with some white girls. As I was heading back to my car I saw one group by a 7-11 and thought to ask them directly about the state of race relations. A white girl spoke for them all, "Oh, it’s getting better. The police still give you a hard time but it’s not bad." I thanked her and walked toward my car feeling pleased and hopeful; it was good to hear from a like-minded youth who was transcending past bigotries. The girl called me back. "You say you’re from San Francisco?" she asked. "Are they still letting gays marry there? ‘Cause I think that’s so disgusting." OK, not entirely like-minded. She had learned a lesson about bigotry, but she hadn’t generalized it. Me, I’ve seen enough instances of destructive bigotry to extrapolate to a universal pattern. Bigotry against blacks, Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, gays–I get it–no bigotry is acceptable. What you don’t do to blacks you don’t do to gays either. In this election I’m hoping a disenchanted nation will do some careful generalizing. Too much focus on Bush and Cheney’s bad character distracts us from questions about what makes them bad. If we conclude that they’re just bad apples, then what’s to stop equally counterproductive people with different names and faces from taking their places? Everyone says, "People who don’t learn the lessons of history are forced to repeat it," but if that statement doesn’t miss the point completely, it just barely grazes it. Sure, we should try to learn lessons–but the real question is which lessons, what generalizations? From Stalin and Hitler should we generalize to no more leaders with mustaches? No more short people? What we want, of course, is to generalize lessons from history that end up paying off in the future. Unfortunately, although that’s a great goal, it’s useless as a rule of thumb. The future isn’t here yet, so you can’t use it directly to guide your generalizations. "Son, my advice to you is buy low, sell high, and always learn today what worked tomorrow." Still, our society’s accelerated progress over the past few centuries is largely a product of culture realizing that right generalization is the name of the game. Science and engineering are largely attempts to systematize the process of effective generalization. In the hope of promoting that process, however slightly, here are a few generalizations about generalization applied to the coming election. Undergeneralizing: Sometimes we fail to learn because we fail to generalize at all. Bush voters who now criticize the president tend to defend their votes. Yes, Bush turned out to be a lemon, an exception to the otherwise fine products of the conservative movement. Gore, Kerry, and the whole liberal agenda would have been much worse. McCain will fix things. Abu Ghraib? A few bad low-level soldiers. There’s nothing to learn, no generalization to be drawn. When McCain said the economic problem was caused by greedy people on Wall street and that the answer was to fire the head of the SEC, he sounded like unsophisticated leftists I knew in the ’70s. The problem is a few greedy people leading big corporations. Replace them with un-greedy people like me and it will all be groovy. Overgeneralizing: Litmus-test partisans think they’ve found the one or two factors from which you can generalize to everything you need to know about a candidate. A Christian? Anti-abortion? For gay marriage? Divorced? A loyal spouse? For change? A traditionalist? The Sufis say, "He who’s burnt by hot milk blows on ice cream." Not all dairy products will burn you. And not all Christians are great leaders. To litmus-test partisans on the left or the right, expert status isn’t earned through careful analysis but through passionate self-certainty. They ignore last chances to fix things because they’ve lost peripheral vision. They’ve found the one cause that matters. It’s a priority not because they’ve compared it to other issues but because they can make an impassioned argument for its intrinsic and isolated merit. "But don’t you see, it’s a fundamental right!" Motivated generalization: An alcoholic ponders what’s causing those daily hangovers. Monday: gin and tonic; Tuesday: vodka and tonic; Wednesday: whiskey and tonic; Thursday: rum and tonic. Clearly it’s the tonic. Generalization serves two masters. One is, of course, our future selves. We hope to learn history’s real lessons so we don’t have to repeat them. The other is our present gut instinct, which definitely prefers some lessons to others. The alcoholic’s future self wants to avoid future hangovers, but the alcoholic’s gut doesn’t want to discover that those hangovers are caused by alcohol rather than tonic. Most Republicans don’t seem to want to consider the possibility that they’ve had a substantial chance to try their ideas out in the real world and that in general those ideas don’t work as well as they had hoped. Just this week, days after the $700 billion bailout was announced, I was probing a right-wing friend about the core values and principles that drive his beliefs. He’s for the bailout as the lesser of two evils. On core values, though, he proudly told me one thing he knows for sure. Liberal efforts to regulate the free market have failed over and over and should never be tried again. No mention of the possibility that conservatives have anything to learn here. This same friend tells me that he relishes arguing with liberals like me because our arguments are so weak and implausible. He’s the second conservative to tell me that this month. In other words, we generalize poorly. We’re either slow learners or we’re driven to our generalizations by our gut instincts, not our rational minds as they are. Psychological research* indicates that we all generalize through two parallel systems, the rational mind and the gut, and that the gut predominates. The gut is faster acting than the rational mind. It’s often right or we wouldn’t survive. But there’s plenty of evidence that the gut gets it wrong consistently on crucial matters. Ideally, therefore, we’d be rational about when to use our gut instincts and when to be rational. Among the more troubling findings therefore is strong evidence that most of us assume we’re more rational than we in fact are. We interpret gut instincts as rational instincts. Guts have the upper hand. Our guts tell us our rational minds are telling us that our rational minds are generalizing from the evidence and not our guts. We generalize incorrectly about our generalizing performance and skill. Me and all my Obama-supporting friends included. We assume we’re the rational ones. Given the psychological evidence regarding everyone’s ability to interpret their interpretive prowess, we’re disqualified as authorities on the subject of our own rationality. So are our equally gut-motivated Republican detractors. Indeed, posterity gets the final word on whose generalizing skills were best. It alone knows how skillful we were at generalizing to the right lessons of history to learn and not the wrong ones. Unfortunately it was unavailable for comment at the time of this writing. * For a great new survey of the findings, check out Nudge: Improving decisions about health wealth and happiness.

Neuroanthropology has alerted me to these wonderful ‘ brain maps ‘ from a 1912 book on phrenology that attempted to map how the bumps on the head related to the ‘higher faculties’. Phrenology as a science was doomed owing to the simple fact that bumps on the head can’t be reliably linked to any ‘faculties’, but it did prompt scientists of the mind to start thinking that brain areas might be related to specific functions. The opposing school of thought was that the brain was homogeneous, and that there was no specialisation of function for particular areas. This theory was most fully formed by Karl Lashley’s idea of mass action which was published in 1950. Now we know that certain brain areas are specialised for certain functions, but the debate focuses on to what extent areas are specialised, how many specialisations there are, and as part of what network. Unfortunately, many media stories love the “x is the brain area for y” angle, which is a vast oversimplification and ignores the wonderful complexity of our most mysterious of organs. UPDATE: Thanks to Neuroanthropology and Neurophilosophy who mailed to say I’d got my knickers in a twist. The link is to a Neuroanthropology post (now fixed), although apparently Neurophilosophy wrote about the same thing last year . Normal service will be resumed shortly – presumably after my brain kicks back into gear. Link to images from phrenology book. Link to Neuroantrhpology commentary.

  IQ Test Examiner : All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there? Soviet Union Peasant : I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen. IQ Test Examiner : But what do my words imply? Soviet Union Peasant : If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed. — This peasant, hailing from a remote area of the Soviet Union in the early part of the 20th century, was interviewed by the psychologist Alexander Luria. It turns out that this peasant’s way of thinking was quite common back then. This type of thinking involves reasoning based on personal experience and reference to the concrete, functional use of objects. For some IQ subtests, this type of thinking won’t get you a very good score. Indeed, this is built into the very scoring instructions of some of the most widely administered IQ tests. Take the scoring instructions for the WISC-R  Similarities  IQ subtest (italics are mine): 2 points  are given for "pertinent  general categorizations " 1 point  is given for "the naming of one or more common properties or functions  of a member of a pair (a more  concrete  problem-solving approach)" 0 points  are given to answers that may be functional but are phrased in a more concrete way To make this idea concrete (which would probably score me low on an IQ test!), I will use a real example. This item was previously found on an actual WISC-R: What do liberty and justice have in common? According to the scoring instructions,  2 points  are given to those who answer that both are ideals or that both are moral rights,  1 point  is given to those who say that both are "freedoms", but  0 points  are given to the person who says "free things", because it’s the more concrete response. As James R. Flynn notes in his most recent book , "You are just not supposed to be preoccupied with how we use something or how much good it does you to possess it." Let’s put this in context for a moment. In my  previous  post, I discuss the "Flynn Effect"-the finding that IQ rose quite a bit during the 20th century. The type of IQ-test content that requires abstract generalizations showed some of the largest increases. This poses a major paradox. If one were to work backwards, this would mean Aristotle’s IQ can be estimated to have been -1000 (that’s right, negative 1000). How can this be? Aristotle clearly came up with some pretty darn good ideas. There are various ways to respond to this paradox. Some are more satisfying than others. One way is to say that there really is no paradox: O n average, the people of our grandparents generation really were that less intelligent than we are today!  This one isn’t satisfying to me. If we took their IQ estimation at face value, we would expect that the average person from 1900 wouldn’t understand a word coming out of their grandchildren’s mouths. Personal experience (again this wouldn’t score me a point on an IQ test) reveals that this isn’t the case.  Another way to respond is to say:  See, this proves that IQ tests aren’t measuring anything meaningful!  Again, this doesn’t satisfy me. Research shows that  within  each generation, IQ tests predict an awful lot of things that any reasonable person would consider meaningful. They even predict some practical outcomes, such as job performance. So it’s probably not fair to argue that IQ tests have  no  practical significance in  today’s  world. We could also argue that we aren’t actually smarter, we are just more sophisticated test takers:  We have simply become better at taking tests, thanks to better schooling.  This would be all fine and dandy, if it weren’t for the fact that the IQ subtests that displayed the  smallest  gains (such as vocabulary and general knowledge) are the ones that are most capable of being educated! Now let’s explore  James R. Flynn’s  way out of the paradox. According to Flynn, our ancestors thought very differently about the world. The industrial revolution brought to prominence a particular type of thought–scientific operational thought.  Peasant spectacles were probably the least scientific (e.g., most tied to experience) than others living at the same time, but on average, people back then did not all receive the same scientific instruction we do today. Once the industrial revolution brought with it a different set of demands, scientific thought flooded the classroom curriculum, and the average person became much more comfortable at hypothetical thinking and making abstract generalizations.  None of this negates the IQ test or the value of scientific thought. Today, in an era where all children are handed post-scientific spectacles, the smarter one will probably be the one who uses such spectacles. Indeed, if one views the definition of intelligence as "adaptation to the environment", people back then were adapting to the demands of their environment. The demands today are different. To be sure, such change is a good thing. The IQ increases witnessed in the 20th century certainly "represent nothing less than a liberation of the human mind" from the concrete and have "paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable." Flynn’s resolution of the paradox only offers an explanation as to how it can be that the  average  performance on subtests requiring abstract generalizations was so much lower than it is today. Today, with more opportunities for educating the scientific mind, more people hold a ticket that gives them the chance to properly display their true IQ. According to Flynn, many people may have been smart back in the day, and may have been  capable  of answering the IQ items requiring abstract generalizations, but may have found the items so foreign and absurd to even take the test seriously. Or they may have answered the test questions with a certain habit of mind that wouldn’t have earned them a high score. Flynn goes further by proposing a mechanism; Piaget’s distinction between concrete operational and formal operational thinking. Flynn cogently shows in his book how being on the concrete level in Piaget terms can hinder your performance on an IQ test but not necessarily make you mentally handicapped. Indeed, a large amount of teenagers today haven’t attained Piaget’s formal level of thinking, but would we want to say that they are all mentally handicapped? Probably not. Indeed, for most of these teenagers and for our ancestors, "they were quite capable of on-the-spot problem solving in the concrete situations that dominated their lives." Flynn also argues that most of our pre-scientific spectacle wearing ancestors in 1900 were indeed on the concrete level and that "people lacking a scientific perspective are much more likely to have their intelligence grounded on the concrete level." Flynn presents evidence in his book that item difficulty on the test that has displayed the largest gains — The Ravens Progressive Matrices — correlates quite well with Piagetian competence. Performance on this test requires one to look at a matrix of (presumably) never seen before pictures and determine the common pattern. Research shows that twenty items on this test in particular require the participant to be "either on the threshold of the formal level or operating on that level." So according to Flynn, no, our grandparents weren’t stupid. And no, we all aren’t smarter than Aristotle (although you personally may be). In fact, Aristotle’s once said that, "we are what we frequently do." Which, interestingly, is Flynn’s entire point. Keep in mind that IQ test scores are calculated relative to others taking a test. In Aristotle’s day, he was the cat’s pajamas. And if he took a modern day IQ test, he’d probably still do quite well. But if they had IQ tests back in Ancient Greece, the average score of the population would probably have been much lower than it is today (at least for tests involving operational scientific thought). According to Flynn’s resolution, we have to face a different set of problems today that were unheard of to our ancestors. Today, we take such thought for granted. Are you satisfied with Flynn’s resolution to the paradox? Please weigh in. Personally, I am most satisfied with Flynn’s resolution in comparison to the alternatives, but I have a few qualms. Sure, it’s easy to see how providing an answer on the verbal  Similarities  sub-test of the WISC-R IQ test in terms of the function or value of the two entities (such as in the liberty and justice example) can get you a lower score on that subtest. The scoring instructions do indeed damn "the concrete in favor of the abstract." It’s harder for me to imagine though how this would operate on the nonverbal Ravens Progressive Matrices test which is not open ended and clearly requires one to make abstract generalizations. Indeed when it comes to performance on the Ravens test, one  can’t  be penalized for providing a functional response, because it’s impossible to give a functional response on this test (this test is multiple choice only)! Of course, Flynn may still be right that the cause of lower performance on Ravens may be due to the general lack of education and familiarity with the form of thinking that is required to do well on the test. But "the scoring instructions are biased against that habit of mind" argument can’t be applied in the case of Ravens (which is the particular test that has displayed the largest increases– gains much larger than seen on the verbal  Similarities test). My second qualm is that people  were  capable of formal operational thought back then. Piaget started his research back in 1929 and found that after about age 11, people really could handle formal operational thinking. So to propose that the mechanism behind the Flynn effect is a shift from concrete operational to formal operational thought is to say that the average person back then used the same form of thinking as the average 10 year old today. I feel as though, if true, the implications of this would be interesting in its own right and may raise just as many issues as the Aristotle paradox raised! Therefore, let’s not be too quick to accept Flynn’s explanation in its entirety as fact. In nearly every  popular media  discussion of the Flynn effect, the writer summarizes Flynn’s argument and treats it as the truth. Not even Flynn is that dogmatic! In my opinion, Flynn’s major contribution is not solving the paradox definitely, but specifying the parameters of the paradox. This limits the number of reasonable alternatives. This is why I admire Flynn so much: he possesses a unique combination of philosophical and scientific thinking. In Flynn’s words, here are the parameters: "Our ancestors were not mentally retarded; yet they could not cope with a huge number of Raven’s items; nor could they, as recently as those born in the 1930s, cope with a large number of Similarities items – and that we must seek an explanation in new habits of mind, rather than talk about test sophistication." We’re not done though. So far, I’ve only discussed one paradox raised by the Flynn Effect. But there are more. Chew on this one for a little while: The rise in IQ from generation to generation suggests that the average IQ score of a particular population  can  change through the influence of environmental factors. And quite a bit. If this is so, how can IQ tests be meaningfully capturing anything of importance, if those things that are captured are so dependent on environmental influence? Indeed, twin studies demonstrate the strong influence of genes in determining IQ score. And IQ tests do show pretty good stability and predict various practical outcomes within a generation. What’s going on here?  In my next few posts, I’ll try to work ourselves out of this mess. © 2008  Scott Barry Kaufman , All Rights Reserved — Notes : The dialogue at the beginning of this post as well as all quotes from James Flynn are taken from Flynn’s recent book,  What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect . I thank James Flynn and the syndicates of Cambridge University Press for allowing me permission to reproduce the dialogue. Also thanks to Elliot Paul for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this post. I have been quite impressed by some of the responses to the first paradox. A few readers of my blog hit the nail right on the head. In fact, one individual personally emailed me because they were too shy to post their solution on my blog, and this person was in near perfect agreement with Flynn’s hypothesis! I look forward to reading potential solutions to this next paradox. There is usually more than one interpretation of data, and some of you may hit upon something none of us intelligence researchers have ever thought of. So stay involved!

Congratulations to Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren, Cognition’s CTO and Founder, Dr. Elizabeth Goldsmith, Dr. Saurabh Mendiratta, and Dr. Radha Akella of the University of Texas, Medical Center at Dallas, for having their paper entitled “Natural Language Query in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Domains Based on Cognition Search” accepted for presentation at the workshop on Intelligent Data Analysis in bioMedicine and Pharmacology (IDAMAP) 2008. Dr. Dahlgren and the others will be presenting their paper at the IDAMAP conference on November 7, 2008. For more information on IDAMAP, click here .

You might think the zoo is an odd place for psychology bloggers to meet up. But on Saturday not only did Greta and I get a chance to connect with some of our readers and fellow bloggers, we also received some fascinating insight into the psychology of zookeeping. Our group toured the North Carolina Zoo, led by Jayne Owen Parker, Ph.D., the Director of Conservation Education of the Zoo Society. As we strolled from exhibit to exhibit and listened to Jayne’s comments, we were struck by how frequently psychology enters into the daily routine of managing a zoo. Through operant conditioning , the animals are trained to assist the zookeepers in practically every zoo function, from feeding, to grooming, to medication and contraception. Operant conditioning is simply the use of rewards and punishment to modify behavior, and examples of this process abound at the zoo. When Jim and Nora were younger, we visited the zoo quite regularly, and one of our favorite animals was the elephant (or “Dumbo” as our kids called them). But the NC Zoo provides the elephants with a generous enclosure, and it seemed that every time we visited, they were at the far end of their space, to the consternation of children who wanted to get a close look. Don’t elephants like toddlers? On Saturday, we were excited to see an elephant right up near the viewing area: Jayne told us that this wasn’t a coincidence. In the last decade, zookeepers realized that their feeding schedule was affecting the elephants’ behavior. Every day at closing time, they let the elephants into the barn for feeding. For several hours, as feeding time approached, the hungry pachyderms gradually sidled towards the gate, so they’d get their food as soon as the gate opened. So the zoo placed a new gate near the front of the enclosure, and now at the end of the day the elephants go through that gate and then back through a chute to the barn to get fed. So now the elephants sidle towards the excited zoo visitors in anticipation of dinner, and everyone is happy! (By the way, there’s a great article on elephants in this month’s National Geographic.) Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

      Mal de Media – Part 3, Solutions     It was April 30, 1992. Los Angeles was ground zero. The acquittal of the police who were video-taped beating Rodney King was more than 30 hours old and the answer from angered citizens was spreading throughout the city. Fire, gun shots, looting, and "burn down the city" threats were popping from the mouths and graphics of the news rooms. In the Hollywood Hills I was in my living room, sitting for hours, glued with pupil-dilated attention to the television as it brought a gunfire-riddled street scene into my home. I saw my city on fire. Sitting in front of the screen or pacing around the floor in front of it, I felt vulnerable and threatened. The more I watched, the more upset I became. Neighbors called, sharing their alarm. Media-repeated words and images ricocheted off walls of consciousness. My blood pressure rose. My temples pounded. Warnings were issued by city authorities. The dangers of leaving home were itemized like a way-to-die cheat sheet. And as the hours smashed ahead, it just kept getting worse. Rumors of rioters driving into the canyon where I lived were already rampant and warnings, even alleged sightings of arsonists seen driving into the dry canyon woods, were virally spread with grim-voiced certainty. As the rampage grew in its sprawl and eye-witness reports piled up in my brain, I found myself circling a Defcon 4 anxiety attack. My mind moved to the nearby closet where my Colt 45 and my 22 caliber rifle were stored. It was only a matter of time. My fatalistic thoughts jolted my head back. I froze and just stared into the TV screen. It seemed like hours but it was only seconds. Suddenly I saw the screen as foe, not friend. I lurched forward and tore myself away from the television, hurtled past the closet, into the outside… and journeyed through the looking glass. I stopped on the deck and scanned the environment of sound and sights. The noisy, panicked voices in my head suddenly stopped. There were no sounds of gunfire, no fires, no looting — nothing but the sounds of quiet. As if on signal, all the tension drained out of me. Yet, nothing had actually changed in the world. I was just looking at and listening to a different part of it. At that moment, I understood the power of the visual image, especially the repeated visual image, as I had never understood it before. Television had brought the riots and my mind started its own riot of fantasy and prophecy. This is an anecdote of a more general phenomenon of people’s reactions to crises, man-made or mind-made, natural or unnatural. Research into media effects speaks clearly on this subject: As anxiety elevates, as perceived consequences heighten, the more people turn to the media during a crisis, during a threat to their existence or to their world as taken for granted, the more they want to watch; the more they feel the need to watch, the higher the need to get more and more information about what threatens. TV watchers, radio listeners or Internet dwellers don’t realize they are getting more nervous as they consume ever more media information, information which is often repetitious rather than illuminating, regardless of graphics which promise "breaking news" or "updates." In reaction, media-users immerse further in order to calm themselves, anxiety elevates, and the cycle continues. Yet, it is not simply that stress triggers stress-related physiological reactions but also that stress engages cognitive flights of "what if…" self-stimulation which further exacerbates physiological reactions and pushes nightmare scenarios onto the mind’s center stage. Worry begets worry, scenarios beget scenarios. Katrina, 9/11, earthquakes, presidential campaigns with implications that may tilt a world on its axis; they are all anxiety machines, all the fodder for Crisis television! These are sustained crises, crisis jags that feed the lizard part of the brain with a smorgasbord of alarm messages triggering flight, fight, or stay-put-and-worry reactions. Historically, things are a hell of a lot worse on the matter of media effects since we were first privileged with 24-hour news networks (thanks, Ted). Yes, they often provide up-to-the-minute news and fill news holes (the spaces between the commercials) with visual arrays and talking and screaming pundits. But there is a grandly manifest down side to this abundance. They can fill hours, days, where minutes would have been sufficient to inform. But information is good, right? No. Not always. We are awash in media reporting on American politics. True, some of this leads people to action they might otherwise not have taken. But consuming too much dire news, political or crisis-based, as the opening anecdote illustrated, can lead to information indigestion and trigger twin symptoms of social anxiety and feelings of political impotence. For the political junkie, it seemed at first that a 24-hour news cable and, later, the Internet’s proliferation of online newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and political sites and blogs, offered an informational menu of valuable, near-infinite individual voices and images. In principle, this media gusher of push and pull political news platforms is simply extraordinary; a democratizing antidote to one-voice Murdochism. But principles are usually abstractions which tend to miss nuances and unanticipated consequences. They also miss the well documented tendency for webizens to take to the internet highway and then reduce it to 30 habitual off-ramps. Politically, we’re creatures of habit, ideological tropists, inclined toward validating our opinions rather than seek conflicting perspectives, easily seduced by a low hanging fruit model of ideological information seeking. I’m no different, of course. Even after my epiphany during the L.A. riots, daily I sample dozens of sites, all linking to dozens of other sites. Accessible sites expand exponentially, with teasers, fragments and links, designed to lure me further in with hints of unearthed nuggets portending and usually revealing more rottenness in the Denmark of American politics. I go willingly. There will be a price to pay, even though I may take a momentary and perverse pleasure in adding to my repository of all loathsome things Bush-Cheney, or the Palin-McCain administration (as she has recently described the order of merit at a Youngstown, Ohio rally). Republicans feelings similar angst would, of course, plug in other names. . Ingesting too much talk about how the self-anointed armies of God are on the verge of turning America into a theocratic police state may, in some ways, be as bad as ingesting too little. Do the words American Taliban trip too lightly from my lips? Yes. But, ingest I do. I am not alone either. I have my social network of ingesters. We feed each other tidbits; send each other racing across hyperspace to read new or variant McCain-Palin slips of the tongue revealing true motives. So many sites. So little time. Polls rain down on us, telling us a dizzying array of often-depressing, occasionally spiriting, often contradictory information about a nation ideologically riven, comprised of people so not like us we can’t possibly understand, worse, live with them–in the same country. Or so it seems in the heat of crisis. Inexorably, at day’s end, gathering more evidence of the open wound called America Politics turns out to be as palliating as a gum abscess. But contemplating solutions to my media overload syndrome, leads to even more questions: Is there some reading diet, some mélange of news ingredients which arouses the tastes of vigilance but stops short of plunging me into an excess of fear of the kind that inspired America’s bomb shelter kibbutzniks of the 50s or the psychosis of survivalist camps in Idaho? How can you tell if your prudent alarmism is transitioning into incipient paranoia? Much of my media malaise on display in this series of blogs may just be media overload. Information is not emotionally neutral, especially hot-button information when accompanied by memorable visual images. Crises, natural or electoral, with their inevitable cauldron of television talking heads, ideological hacks and clueless "experts," fake "breaking news" and alarmist headlines have produced actual PTSD in some viewers, stress and transient depression in many others. Anecdotal reports and self-report surveys rather consistently conclude that watching terrible images of death and destruction over and over, can produce numerous stress-related clinical symptoms including agitation or depression. Repeated exposure of such horrifying or distressing events has been labeled "retraumatizing" ( Spicer-Brooks, 2001 ). In our age of terrorism, political polarization, and human-aggravated natural disasters, news cycles reek of rumors or fleeting facts until displaced by other rumors and fleeting facts. Many viewers stay electronically tethered, often in hopes of staving off an engulfing sense of impotent outrage over Mother Nature or man’s nature. That’s precisely why political appeals to fear upset viewers and lead them to embrace the fear-arouser who offers him- or herself as the überpatriot , the salvation, or "the soccer mom who spoke truth to power." Social support in this regard is a double-edged sword. Either sitting alone with one’s thoughts and fears, or reading kindred skeptics and outraged pessimists (selective attention), the end result can be the same-panic, fear and worst case scenarios! When one is going over the top with fears and frets, turning to others can often help in bringing the hysteria down and the reality testing up. But sitting in with a group of like-minded apocalyptics (selective congregation) or listening, day after day, to like-minded shock jocks, can make matters worse, can polarize attitudes and send anger, violent thoughts , exaggeration, and apprehension soaring. So, what can I remember to do when media-fixated? What can you do? In the end, we must use media, or actually anything we physically or mentally ingest, as we use medicine. We can use or we can abuse, we can sample or we can mainline. When in a natural or political crisis we need to monitor our bodies and minds sensitize ourselves to changes in diet, sleep, recurring thoughts, catastrophizing, hyperventilating, or radicalization of thoughts and actions. We must take breaks from the media to still the messages, and venture into places of comfort or serenity. We must test reality, check out rumors and not just accept them because we’d like them to be true. We have to push ourselves to confer with people whose opinions we respect people who are liable to either agree or disagree with our renditions of reality. In a word, we must avoid "supersizing" the media. Finally, research shows that taking some sort of constructive action to allay one’s upset is one of the best medicines for media indigestion. If that means working for a candidate, writing a check, marching at a rally, sending out emails to friends to encourage their voting, or canvassing the opposition to persuade them to your side, they are all valuable ways to keep reality in check and temper exaggerations and alarmism. Doing something constructive with one’s angst is always better than just taking in more distressing information which can lead to depression, emotional paralysis, or rash and regrettable action. There’s enough of that already. Why add to it? And for those who read the previous blog, well, the mysterious stranger lurking in the shadows was-my wife! You remember, the critic of my Jewish angst. She came with some chicken soup for angst-easing…No, I’m joking. She brought me fresh cup of coffee and told me it was very generous of me to share my anxieties with my blog readers. "Spread it around," she quipped. She quips.    

Seed Magazine has an excellent article by Mo Costandi discussing how the study of neuroaesthetics – the neuroscience of art and beauty – is really starting to take off with a dedicated research centre recently launched in London. I love the idea of neuroaesthetics but remain a little skeptical, not least because some of the literature gives the impression that it’s revolutionising our understanding of art when psychologists have been researching it since the beginning of psychology. I’ve yet to see the ‘neuro’ aspect add anything particularly novel so far. I’ve got a fascinating but out of print book called Cognitive Processes in the Perception of Art that has a collection of papers from a five day conference on art and cognition from 1983. The chapters cover much of the same sort of thing that is discussed under the neuroaesthetics banner (just without the brain scans) – including methods, symbolism, visual perception, music, improvisation, aesthetics, beauty and synaesthesia. The introduction is interesting as an overview of the fragmented history of the field, most of which seems to have been undertaken in the expectation that this was something new and exciting: …since 1876, when Fechner initiated the empirical approach to art through his book ‘Vorschule der Aesthetik’ psychology has been characterized by different ’schools’; there has been continual dispute about the proper subject-matter of the discipline and about the theories and methods which should be applied to it. In many cases, the various approaches – such as Behaviourism, Gestalt Theory, Psychoanalysis, Humanistic Psychology, Information Theory, and Cognitive Psychology – have made distinctive contributions to the arts. One consequence has been that particular artistic phenomena have been selectively examined and then assimilated to preferred theories and methods of working, and hence these phenomena have escaped broad and systematic investigation as distinctive phenomena in their own right. Approaches to the arts have often been superficial and fragmentary, as Kose points out in his chapter, traditional approaches to the study of art often reveal more about the workings of psychological investigation than they do about art. I’ve still yet to see anything that advances on this position. Furthermore, theories that simply redescribe what you’re trying to explain are generally thought to be useless and the test of a good theory is that it can make accurate predictions. Where relevant it also suggests where interventions will have predictable effects. Consequently, I often wonder whether neuroaesthetics will ever lead to a new and innovative type of artwork or art practice. One of the most interesting things I’ve read recently was a discussion on the empyre mailing list (thanks Julian!) with various artists discussing their work in the cognitive and neurosciences. I warn you, it’s a pain in the arse to read because it’s only available as list archives. Nevertheless, it mentioned a piece called ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ which sounds fantastic: Ghosts in the Machine is a generative, closed system. Random noise from a CCD camera is analyzed for patterns. An algorithm looks for patterns that match the basic geometry and physiognomy of the human face. What it actually finds are pixels on a screen forming blobs and patches of colour that have no actual relation to a real world face. They have no indexical relation to an object. They are not images of people, but another kind of image loaded with meaning, which arises accidentally, but irresistibly, from the hybrid interaction between machine and body. To all intents and purposes when these patches of pixels look like faces, they are images of faces. That such obscure images resolve themselves into faces without conscious effort, and that remain even when attending closely to them, suggests that it is paradoxically their lack of objective meaning that generates their form. It is the very ambiguity and intedeterminacy of the images that allows the brain to reconfigure them as indexical. It’s part of the Einstein’s Brain Project which aims to explore “the notion of the brain as a real and metaphoric interface between bodies and worlds in flux, and that examines the idea of the world as a construct sustained through the neurological processes contained within the brain”. Link to Seed article ‘Beauty and the Brain’. Link to details of cognitive processes in art book. Link to Einstein’s Brain Project . Link to good neuroaesthics primer.

One of Jimmy’s favorite toys as a toddler was a simple little bucket of blocks. There were three shapes: a rectangular prism, a triangular prism, and a cylinder. The bucket’s lid had three holes: a square, a triangle, and a circle (The picture at right was the only one I could find online — this sort of toy has gotten much fancier in recent years). For an adult, it’s a simple matter to properly sort the shapes by placing them into the corresponding holes, but for a toddler, it’s a real challenge. It took months before Jim was able to put any of the blocks through the holes, despite countless demonstrations by his parents. Maybe parents have a special sort of magic that kids just can’t do. But eventually — perhaps by accident — Jimmy managed to get a cylinder through the round hole. Eureka! The puzzle was solved. He put another cylinder through the hole, and another. Aha! All you need to do is put the objects through the round hole. The others are decoys. Next he attempted to put a rectangular prism through the round hole. To his amazement, this didn’t work, even when he applied so much force that his little body shook from the effort. How about the triangular prism? This didn’t work either. He confirmed that indeed, the remainder of the cylinders fit through the hole. Apparently triangular and rectangular pieces required a different strategy. A smile of realization crossed his face. Confidently, Jimmy tried his new solution. He removed the lid to the bucket and placed all the triangular and rectangular blocks into the bucket, one by one. Then he replaced the lid and looked to his parents for approval. He had finally solved the puzzle, hadn’t he? It would be several weeks before Jimmy was able to properly sort all the blocks. Even after he had solved the puzzle once and for all, he still played with it for some time afterwards, as if to confirm that the rules of geometry he had carefully sorted out, hadn’t changed. Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t until 2007 that a systematic study of this simple problem was undertaken. Helena Örnkloo and Claes von Hofsten presented 69 infants aged 14 to 26 months with a similar problem while carefully monitoring their attempts to solve it. Instead of just three shapes, they used seven, each progressively more difficult: Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…