Brain Wired by Culture

Some parts of a woman's brain change up to 25% through the course of a month. "When I started taking a woman's hormonal state into account as I evaluated her psychiatrically, I discovered the massive neurological effects her hormones have during different stages of life in shaping her desires, her values, and the very way she perceives reality," writes Dr. Louann Brizendine in The Female Brain.

I mention this because I want to make a bold claim. One that I think will be proven in the next decade or two but is not - to the best of my knowledge - yet proven or even claimed by any serious professionals.

It is not just that people in different cultures and points of developmental history have different opinions and beliefs: their brains are wired differently.

To take a simple example, in schools were children don't feel as safe and violence and bullying is common, test scores are lower to reflect, I believe, more time spent in the fight or flight portion of their brain and less time in the frontal lobes.

The brain of a villager living in a rural area of Afghanistan who suffers from hunger, is regularly coerced by threats of violence, and feels as though he has little control over his life will be bathed in a very different set of hormones and chemicals than the brain of a Greenwich villager living in New York who worries about overeating, is regularly persuaded by advertising, and feels like he has no purpose in his life. It is not just that these two people have different beliefs about the world. I would argue that these two have very different brains.

My personal opinion is that a sense of control is the biggest determinant of how the brain is wired and world view formed.

And this matters for policy. Imagine going into Mississippi to "help" the locals to give up on their curious religious beliefs and odd superstitions in order to become more developed and prosperous. It probably would not be long before they had taken up arms to chase you and your BMW-driving friends out of town. It is not as though you can simply offer some new information to change how they think. You would likely have to change the way their brain is wired, the way they make sense of the world. You cannot simply bring new policies into old brains, put new wine into old bottles.

It might just be that the answer is to change conditions for the next generation as much as possible. Alleviating hunger. Adding control and order to the point that people feel less intimidated in their daily lives. Offering choices to the young. These actions might plant the seeds for then introducing policies that will be welcomed rather than repulsed.

I love the idea of psychology, cognitive science, and therapy. I think that happiness and peace of mind is more important than we allow. But as I get older, I am more inclined to believe that social systems do as much to define psychology and cognition as anything we could do with an individual in a particular social milieu. To change the individual, you have to change the social system. Change the world he lives in and you change the individual. I predict that we'll even find that if you change the world he lives in, you change the very composition of his brain.

Dan Ariely on Predictably Irrational Humans

You may need to click through on this link as folks (sorry Sandi and Allen) seem to be having trouble with the video as it is embedded.

Embodied Cognition and Leadership

For once, we weren't meeting for a meal. Bernard wanted to walk on this gorgeous day and I was more than game. It was chamber of commerce weather and we were walking amidst the crowds at Balboa Park, engaged in a form of peri-philosophy (Bernard's word for walking around discussing ideas) as old as speech, I imagine.

"The latest ideas from cognitive science are subversive," Bernard said.

"Which ideas," I inquired.

"Embodied cognition," he said. "The idea that cognition is inseparable from the body or even the environment. It's a rejection of the claim that the mind sits separate from the body."

"How is this so subversive?"

"Well, it suggests that the mind is emergent from the body, not separate, and this undermines all kinds of authority."

"What?" Leave it to Bernard to leap from cognitive science to social power. "How did you make this leap?"

"Well, think about it. In the model of mind as separate from body, body is obviously subject to mind - or should be in the person with any will power at all. Mind is more pure than body and mind directs body; telling it where to go and what to do. The mind tells the hand to pick up a glass, or the foot to step towards the counter. This is the old model."

"Yeah. How does that contradict what you said before?"

"Well, if the dichotomy of mind and body is false, then it is not true that the mind directs the foot as if it is sending an order from central command to remote troops. It could easily be that the desire to move comes from the foot - as an extremity it might be the first to notice a need for water, say - and the knowledge about HOW to move is embodied in the foot - at least in part - and not just the brain. It's not true that the brain is the authority and the foot is the, er, willing foot soldier."

"Oh." I walked a few steps absorbing this. "That is different. So you are saying that even the notion that the impulses and choices and signals that we normally associate with the mind and think of as residing in the brain are, in fact, distributed more broadly through the body? Even in places like the foot?"

"Yep." Bernard loved it when I eventually understood. "At least that's what I got."

"Okay." I'm slow but persistent. "So, this is subversive how?"

"Well, the traditional model of leadership of organizations is all based on the notion of mind body divide. We call the leader 'the head' of the organization in reference to this. The authority comes from some outside inspiration or revelation that is not embodied in the organization but comes into it through the head, the leader."

"So if the mind is embodied then perhaps leadership is too? Leadership is actually distributed more broadly than we thought?"

Bernard had a little grin. "Yep."

I laughed. "So, you think that you can trigger social change by sharing the lesson of embodied cognition, a relatively obscure branch of cognitive science, itself a fairly obscure area of study?"

He looked hurt and shook his head. "Now why did you have to say that?"

I had no answer to his question. "You know, Bernard, a shift like that has more potential than most notions."

"It does, doesn't it," he grinned again, his new idea still safe. And I knew he was right, really. As our models of the world gradually change, so does our world. By adapting to the reality we perceive, we create it. And besides, I liked this idea: embodied leadership.

Cog Sigh

Jordan has been posting some fascinating stuff on cognitive science - easy to digest and intriguing. Her recent posts include explanation about why dogs in Russia say "gruff gruff," how even bonobos communicate with just eye contact, and a definition of deixis.

In particular, the video at this post

What YouTube Means About You

is fascinating (I know - I know! It's an hour long! But fascinating to anyone who cares about what is actually going on in the on-line community and, by extension, the global community.)

Jordan's Cog Sigh Blog

(Oh yeah. Jordan is my daughter. That doesn't make her blog any less interesting, though.)

The Internet is Re-Wiring Your Brain

In the latest Atlantic, Nicholas Carr provocatively asks, "Is Google Making us Stupid?" The point he makes is that our new style of search, hypertext, and scanning rather than "deep reading" is actually changing how our minds are wired. He speaks to it as a problem of diffusing attention, and I agree that there is an element of that. But, as I tend to be, I'm an optimist on this score. I think that the Internet is changing how we attend to issues in a positive way.

The Internet has created a new kind of communication that facilitates understanding, coordinating, managing, and participating in systems. Such facility with systems - from ecosystems to economic systems to technical systems to social systems - is emerging none too soon.

The last century or so has been characterized by the emergence of specialists. We have experts who can improve the design and performance of products like combustion engines, bombs, and financial derivatives. They are heads down focused on parts of larger systems but their actions have implications that spill outside of their products. Getting here has been a journey characterized by "deep" reading, drilling down to greater nuance and detail and understanding. The problems created by their success has created a need for a different kind of thinking and communication, a communication that looks shallow at first glance.

Going further down the rabbit hole on these specialties won’t necessarily improve our world. The issues that matter are those that spill across domains, that don’t neatly fit into Cartesian boxes of categories that say more about what we project onto reality than reality itself. “Deep” reading and thinking promises less in the way of progress than “shallow” reading and thinking that make connections and perceives system dynamics.

The Internet is changing how we think. By raising our awareness of connections, it raises the probability that we will properly understand and manage the systems that define our world. This, it seems to me, is a good thing.

---
On a related note, Milena pointed me to Hyperwords - a program that allows you to make any word on a page searchable, as if it were all hypertext. Talk about connections! Economist article here.

Massive Connectivity Now - Social Simulations Next

Aristotle said that there were three ways to report truth: history, science, and fiction. History reported facts. Science made those facts into laws that could apply to past or future. Fiction was the highest form, though, because it included what could be. (I'm almost positive Aristotle wrote this. If not, it was someone else. And if no one wrote this previously, I'll just take credit for it. I often confuse my memory and imagination, usually to my detriment, but I digress.)

Our brains spend lots of energy running models of what ought to be. We simulate a lot. It helps for the various regions of our brains to have models that run in parallel - in situations as varied as interpersonal behavior and navigating our way around a garden.

But this capability to simulate so much would be mind boggling if not for values that guide the activity. All that massive potential is guided by wants and needs - we simulate in ways that guide us towards desired states rather than send us adrift into the sea of infinite possibilities.

We've evolved massively impressive internal systems that allow for all this to take place within the confines of our head, dense brains so tightly packed with connections that "a cubic millimeter of brain tissue contains about a mile of axons and a couple of miles of dendrites. (1)" The brain is a mass of connections and those connections are often busy with simulations. It was not until this massive redundancy emerged that the capacity for simulation emerged with it. There are parallels in the social world: we're beginning to see a massive growth in parallel connectivity between people.

Social evolution lags species evolution. In 1866, a transatlantic cable was operating between North America and Great Britain. When it was first laid, a New Yorker wrote in his diaries, “Yesterday’s [New York] Herald said that the cable is undoubtedly the Angel in the Book of Revelation with one foot in the sea and one foot on land, proclaiming that time is no longer. Moderate people merely say that this is the greatest achievement in history. (2)”

It has taken about 150 years for this simple cable to transform into massive redundancy. In today's world, there are millions and millions of connections between individuals. The Internet has become the simplest, catch-all for this phenomenon of massive interconnectivity.

When the transatlantic cable was first laid, it was used by bankers like J.P. Morgan to execute bond trades between Britain and the US. It was a cable used for action. Now that there is massive redundancy in the connections, it is increasingly used to generate what-if scenarios, to define what could be. The difference between news and blogs is often as simple as that: it is the difference between reporting on what happened and reporting on what could be.

Blogs might be a kind of social fiction - reporting on what could be. What if the capacity for generating social simulations just becomes more enhanced? What if it becomes a tool that that both expedites the articulation of desired states and makes it easier to navigate towards those?

I suffer from wild bouts of optimism, a condition I've never been able to properly explain. I think that we'll learn more about how to join brains together into social simulations that move us towards the better community. The Internet, blogs, even Democracy, will be looked back on as the equivalent of the telegraph. The connections are proliferating. The simulations have begun. Now, we watch it ratchet up. The fiction that makes reality is, after all, the strongest form of truth. Eat your vitamins. It is going to get really fascinating and you want to be alive when this happens.

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For those of you keeping track at home, this appears to be my 700th post, about 100 more than I would have written had I been posting once a day. Still no cure for my idearhea.

(1) Read Montague, Your Brain is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions (New York: Plume, 2006) 35.
(2)William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created (San Francisco: McGraw-Hill, 2004) 186.

Which Half of Your Brain is Dominant?

Which way is the dancer twirling? Clockwise or counter clockwise?



If she's moving counter clockwise, you are left brain dominant. If she's moving clockwise, you are right brain dominant.

Click through here is a list of the differences in the cognitive styles. Also, here's a small list of right vs. left characteristics.

Left Brain

Linear
Sequential
Symbolic
Logical
Verbal
Reality-based

Right Brain

Holistic
Random
Concrete
Intuitive
Nonverbal
Fantasy-oriented

For the record, I cannot get the dancer to twirl counter clockwise, suggesting that I'm right brained. I'm big on patterns, have disregard for authority or ranking, am free with feelings, and am spontaneous. But I am no good at manipulating objects (the only people worse at parallel parking then me don't bother, which makes me, officially, the least capable person to actually still try), something I'd supposedly be good at if I were right brained. And I do prefer talking and writing, which should make me left brain. But in spite of all that, the dancer only moves clockwise for me.

You?
[And thanks, Jordan, for another intriguing bit of cognitive science trivia.]

The Effect of Brain States on Learning, Memory & Identity

Here's a fascinating post over at Cog Sigh about how a brain state can reinforce itself and how similar brain states can create similar memories and associations.

Here's a quote from the posting:

In practice this means that, for example, when I am depressed I most easily remember episodes and information that I encountered during past periods of depression (by depression I mean a mood, not clinical depression). We've all experienced how our moods seem to feed themselves, but just think about it in terms of identity. Identity is essentially composed from a series of key memories about the experiences that we have had and what we have made them mean about the world. If I am building a definition of myself (to a certain degree) from my own memories, then my understanding of who I am when I am depressed is significantly different from who I think I am when I am happy or calm simply because I am constructing my identity from a different set of memories.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, this is my daughter Jordan's most recent posting.)

Mapping the Female Brain to Find the World's Most Effective Pick Up Line

This morning, my darling wife announces to me that she was in the midst of the most delicious dream when the phone rang. She reports this while still lying in bed, stretching her arms over her head rather sensuously as she yawns. The visual she provides me neatly ties into my own definition of delicious dream, and I’m convinced that we must be talking about exactly the same thing. When I get too bored by sleep, I dream. When I’m lucky, the dreams are delicious.

“What were you dreaming,” I curiously ask, trying not to look too eager to hear salacious details.

“I was in the most incredible shoe store,” she said. “It was like a shoe aquarium.” My little Canadian added, her eyes aglow, “and they even served tea!” As my expectations of erotica dissolved, she launched into details about the assortment of shoes on display, one pair in particular she was inquiring about when her friend Kate called.

I don’t understand women and shoes, but I’ve been given a theory that has to do with brain mapping. (If I could, I would avoid all shoes. My toes get claustrophobic and I will put on a jacket before I put on socks and shoes.)

My daughter, the cog sci major, shared a theory about why women so love shoes. As it turns out, the brain has regions that map to the body. The genitals map to a large region near the top, on the side of the brain, with the toes and feet immediately adjacent. (The brain map does not exactly accord with the layout of the body. Lips – vital for eating and loving – get disproportionately more of the brain’s real estate than, say, the leg.) One (fairly casual) theory is that the wiring for the genitals and feet sometimes overlap in ways that can, in the extreme, lead to foot fetishes or, more often, closets littered with shoes. Our very different "delicious" dreams might actually be exciting very similar regions of the brain.

Only now, happily married at 47, does it occur to me that some guy out there is on track to break Wilt Chamberlain's’s record for sexual conquests with the simplest of pick up lines: “I just love your shoes.”

Cognitive Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives

"the more liberal-minded volunteers were better able to avoid the knee-jerk reaction."

This one of the conclusions from a study by David Amodio of New York University (summarized here at Scientific American Mind).

In the test, liberals and conservatives were asked to hit a button every time they saw M but not W. Given that M appeared about 80% of the time, hitting the button became a reflex. Liberals were more able to suppress this reflex when faced with the wrong stimulus. (Past studies have indicated that liberals are more comfortable with ambiguity and conservatives need structure. I look around my office and suspect that I need to hire a conservative office assistant.)

There are certainly exceptions to this general tendency. George Will stands out as someone who seems to generally think before making pronouncements. Huckabee, Ron Paul, and John McCain seem comfortable defying some of the typical conservative stereotypes. But after watching Republicans shout "tax cut" in response to every situation they face - including massive deficits and the expenses of war - this indictment sounds pretty spot on to me: conservatives are more likely to give the right response in the wrong situation.

In fact, coming from a family of conservatives, I can say that they often don't even need a stimulus to provide their canned responses. Like a back seat driver continually shouting "Turn right!" whether or not there is even an intersection, conservatives will eventually wonder why it is the country has tuned them out.

[Thanks to my daughter Jordan, the cog sci major, for this odd and interesting tip.]

Is Consciousness Just a Trick of the Brain?

According to Tor Norretranders' fascinating book, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, your brain is tasked with an amazing responsibility. Your senses bombard it with about 11 million bits per second. Consciousness, however, can process only about 10 to 40 bits per second (estimates vary). So, the challenge of your brain is to process 11 million bits into 20 bits in way that accurately represents, or maps back to, the 11 million bits. The million+ bits flowing in from your eyes, for instance, have to be processed into familiar shapes ("Hey - that's my buddy Bill!") that shows up in consciousness as one bit rather than millions of disparate bits indicating colors, shapes, and spatial location. Cognitive processes below the surface of consciousness, processes that by definition we are unaware of, translate the millions into the few.

As it turns out, the brain takes about half a second to perform this feat - a remarkably rapid rate of calculation for processes so complex. But a half second is a really long time when it comes to awareness and sensations. This creates a challenge.

How is it that we don't seem to be going through reality with a time delay? Why aren't we aware of this half second delay? Well, for one thing, we' re only aware of what we're aware of and that is whatever is presented by consciousness . And consciousness performs an amazing feat: once it has processed the 11 million bits into the 20 bits to be comprehended by consciousness, it back dates this reality.

Let me repeat that. Tests indicate that although it takes a half second to process the sensations of reality into the perception of reality, consciousness basically tells us that it is instantaneous. It tricks us.

So, here's the real kicker. If consciousness lags reality and we don't, for instance, take a half second to decide to flex a finger or look up, what is the role of consciousness, or awareness? How is it that we interact with reality in real time even though our consciousness lags it by half a second?

It almost seems as though consciousness does less to make decisions than to trail after the cognitive processes that make such decisions - processes that are not even at the level of awareness - and explain, apologize, or rationalize what just happened. The role of consciousness may be less that of the driver of the car than that of the insurance agent who follows after the car, leaving behind claim forms in its wake.

If this is true, it raises another really important question. Who is writing my blog?

Blogging and Global Consciousness

"It is the ‘turning inward’ aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.”
UC San Diego professor V.S. Ramachandran on the "Neurology of Self-Awareness"

Some claim that through the Internet we have created a new kind of consciousness, a global self. They must be right. As I stroll through the blogosphere I find so many blogs about blogging. The catalyst may have once been to engage in a dialogue, to change the world, but the continual and seemingly inevitable distraction, towards which so many bloggers eventually flock like moths to a light, are rankings, stats, and market share. So busy looking for how to get readers they forget why they wanted them in the first place.

Blogging has become an act of chronicling blogging - a recursive act that seems certain to implode.

Happy Tangencies and Recovering From Iraq

Look at A on the left. At a low resolution, it looks like one fuzzy line. At a higher resolution, it looks like two lines that mostly overlap.

Now, look at B. In B, you can see that the two lines that sort of overlapped in fact were just tangents to one another. If you trace the line long enough, it eventually diverges from the circle for a simple enough reason: the line is straight and it can only overlap with the circle for a certain period of time.

I'd argue that all philosophies start as happy tangencies - a line that seems to overlap with the circle, a philosophy that seems to overlap with reality. But eventually such philosophies show their true nature - products of minds much smaller than the world they're trying to explain, philosophies, hypotheses, and beliefs are all eventually shown to be limited and eventually diverge from reality. This shows up in a variety of circumstances. For instance, the problems at WalMart are in part due to their institutionalizing the solution to a past situation - one that is becoming less relevant.

Reactionaries are worse. They don't just cling to a particular world view. They try to recreate the conditions that seemed to make that worldview correct - stop the world and take it back to the point at which the tangent was happily coincident.

Ultimately, this has to do with a sense of awareness about how much we can actually know the extent to which we need to be open to changes. William James put it this way:

“But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. We may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another.” [Louis Menand, Pragmatism: A Reader (New York: Vintage, 1997) 77.]

Some have asked whether there is any hope for Iraq. There is, in the meta-sense. If George would only understand that personal conviction has little to do with actual knowledge and were to express that ... If he were to express a mea culpa that included his denunciation of certitude in the face of complexity, arrogance as an approach, of failing to test the null hypothesis ... That could be one way that this debacle could actually translate into something positive for this country.

Not in His Right Mind

First, two quotes of note, both spoken in regards to the Iraq invasion and occupation.
"Anyone who is not conflicted in their judgment is not thinking seriously."
- Representative Jim Leach, Republican from Iowa.
"I don't know how you operate unless you continually challenge your own assumptions."
- Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to both Ford and George H.W. Bush

Brain research indicates that the right brain and left brain have different roles in the complex process of formulating and defending world views. The right brain is the revolutionary, continually challenging the current worldview as new data streams in. Obviously, a person cannot reformulate worldviews as rapidly as he receives new data - the process is too time-consuming and potentially too disruptive. Plus, a worldview that didn't last longer than it took data to stream in would be useless. By contrast, the left-brain defends the existing worldview from new data. At its most extreme, a stroke victim unable to move her arm may insist that she is, indeed, pointing with it. When the brain has been hijacked by the left brain, it is unable to change the worldview no matter how poorly matched that is to reality.

The simple truth is, our minds are much smaller than the world and inevitably our worldviews are limited. Given a lack of omniscience, worldviews need to be regularly tweaked and occasionally shifted. The only option to allowing on-going changes to one’s worldview is to ignore or distort reality.

So what is one to make of Bush's insistence on staying the course in Iraq, even as events have repeatedly unfolded as contrary to his original theories? It is quite simple and fairly intuitive. Bush is not in his right mind.