Thought and consciousness » The Thinking Meat Project

How daydreams can affect your thinking

Feb 222010

When I was an undergraduate, there was a cartoon posted on the wall of a student computing cluster in Swain East at Indiana University that I really liked. (The room was full of VT100 terminals that we used to connect to the university’s VAXes, just to give you an idea how long ago this was.) In the first panel of the cartoon, a man was sitting at a desk working away with paper and pencil, and a thought balloon over his head was filled with equations. Second panel, same thing. The third panel showed his thought balloon filled with the image of a voluptuous reclining woman, and he was smiling. In the fourth, it was back to the equations. I thought this was hilarious; the value of little mental vacations in the middle of a physics problem set, for example, was obvious.

Some recent research suggests that the type of daydreaming you do could affect your capacity for creative or analytical thought. Groups of subjects were asked to think about either spending quality time with their partner or having casual sex with someone they didn’t love; other groups were subliminally primed to think about either love or sex. Then all the groups were given both creative tasks to complete and questions to answer that tested their analytical thinking skills. Those whose thoughts had turned to romance did better at the tasks requiring creativity, and those who thought about sex were better at the tasks requiring analytical thinking.

This supports the hypothesis that thinking of love broadens the mind’s focus and is associated with seeing the big picture and connecting diverse ideas, whereas thinking of sex appears to be a more concrete, in-the-minute kind of thing that is linked to a focus on details. I’m kind of curious about what happens when you think about sex with someone you love, and I’m not sure I entirely grasp the reasoning behind this hypothesis, but it’s interesting at any rate.

The research is reported briefly in Scientific American. The paper that this article refers to (citation below) is based on construal level theory, which I knew nothing about, so I looked up some information about that. In a nutshell, this theory suggests a link between how distant in space or time a person, thing, or event is from us and how concretely or abstractly we think about it, and predicts the different effects of thinking concretely or abstractly (e.g., the difference in cognitive performance reported here). This Psychlopedia page on construal level theory has a “love versus sex” section that briefly describes the paper; the page also gives some other examples of how the theory is used.

Citation:
Why Love Has Wings and Sex Has Not: How Reminders of Love and Sex Influence Creative and Analytic Thinking, by Jens Förster, Kai Epstude, and Amina Özelsel. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 11, 1479-1491 (2009). (abstract)

Neanderthal jewelry

Human origins and evolution, Thought and consciousness Comments Off

Jan 122010

Seashells were painted and used as adornment by early humans, and this is commonly taken to indicate an ability to think symbolically. There has been very little evidence that Neanderthals shared this ability. In fact, the belief that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to humans has been given as a reason for why they died out.

However, a recent find challenges the idea that Neanderthals were incapable of symbolic thought. Scallop and cockle shells showing traces of applied pigment were found in two caves in southeastern Spain. The shells are estimated to be about 50,000 years old; fossil evidence of modern humans in the area goes back only 40,000 years.

Several past discoveries have suggested that Neanderthals might have created what could be considered jewelry or art. The evidence was scanty, and these earlier discoveries were generally not interpreted as true instances of symbolic thinking. This new evidence, however, combined with the earlier finds, seems to indicate that we’ve been underestimating the mental capacities of this fascinating species. In fact, this article from Scientific American even suggests that rather than developing jewelry independently, Neanderthals might have taught humans how to make art, or vice versa.

The findings will appear in the January 11 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and are available online now:

Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals
João Zilhão, Diego E. Angelucci, Ernestina Badal-García, Francesco d’Errico, Floréal Daniel, Laure Dayet, Katerina Douka, Thomas F. G. Higham, María José Martínez-Sánchez, Ricardo Montes-Bernárdez, Sonia Murcia-Mascarós, Carmen Pérez-Sirvent, Clodoaldo Roldán-García, Marian Vanhaeren, Valentín Villaverde, Rachel Wood, and Josefina Zapata.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0914088107

Religion in the brain

Brain and mind, Thought and consciousness Comments Off

Oct 062009

A couple of recent articles have examined how religious beliefs and feelings are related to the activity and anatomy of the brain. Together they provide an interesting look at the neuropsychology of religion.

Belief in religious statements and everyday facts

Sam Harris, who has written several books on atheism and is currently working on a doctorate in neuroscience, is one of the authors of a paper that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity in Christians and nonbelievers when they evaluated the truth of religious and nonreligious statements. Standard caveats about fMRI and small sample sizes (30 subjects, 15 each believers and non-believers) apply, but still, the results are intriguing.

In a nutshell: the brain areas associated with believing or disbelieving a statement are essentially the same whether the statement is about religion or not. It’s hard to know how this translates into felt experience—whether accepting the truth of the Virgin Birth yields the same feeling of certainty as accepting that the Golden Gate Bridge opened to traffic in 1937— but evidently the brain is doing pretty much the same thing, regardless of the content of the belief. Religious belief, in other words, is not some special brain process different from belief in more empirically verifiable things. However, there are some differences in the brain areas involved in accepting or rejecting religious statements and ordinary facts: the former appears to involve areas of the brain crucial to emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while the latter has more to do with networks involved in memory retrieval.

This article from Newsweek offers an interesting summary and interpretation of the work. The paper itself was published in PLoS, so you can easily access the whole thing yourself: The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief, by Sam Harris, Jonas T. Kaplan, Ashley Curiel, Susan Y. Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni, and Mark S. Cohen. PLoS ONE, October 1, 2009. There’s a lot of interesting background in the article.

Differences in neuroanatomy between believers and nonbelievers

The second study looked at the neuroanatomy of religiosity, a cluster of traits associated with religious beliefs, feelings, and behavior. In this study, structural magnetic resonance imaging was used to determine the volume of various brain areas in 40 adults who showed different degrees of religiosity based on their responses to a survey.

Analysis of the resulting data revealed four components of religiosity: a feeling of closeness to God, religious behavior, fear of God, and a group of traits linked to pragmatism and skepticism about God’s existence. Each component was associated with increased volume of a particular brain area (the first two traits were both associated with the same area). Religious upbringing did not affect the volume of any of the areas identified.

In a nutshell: the areas of the brain associated with religious behavior and both intimacy with and fear of God have been linked in previous studies with social cognition, including the ability to understand the emotions of others, the ability to regulate one’s own emotions, particularly in response to negative stimuli, and the use of symbolic language.

The study raises a whole bunch of interesting questions, like the chicken-and-egg question of whether people’s brains change in response to their religious feelings and practices or whether an existing brain difference predisposes people to religious feelings and practices (I would guess it might be some of both).

This article from Wired discusses the results (hat tip to Chuck for passing this along), and this article from Ars Technica also covers this research. And again, thanks to PLoS, you can read the whole paper yourself: Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity, by Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman. PLoS ONE, September 28, 2009. Again, lots of cool background and some interesting conjecture in the article.

Consciousness as arbiter

Thought and consciousness Comments Off

Sep 302009

Time supposedly is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. Consciousness may be the body’s way of keeping two contrary actions from being attempted at once. A recent study found that people reported higher levels of awareness when they felt the urge to carry out two contradictory actions simultaneously, compared with when they were planning an action about which no conflict existed or when the conflict did not involve the motions of muscles under conscious control. The implication is that consciousness tunes in when something happens that requires a decision about what muscles to move and how to move them. This press release from EurekAlert has more information.

I am the eggman

Thought and consciousness 2 Responses »

Sep 192009

Fans of the surreal, take heart. Recent research suggests that reading stories involving bizarre events that don’t necessarily make sense can temporarily enhance your ability to identify patterns that help you learn new material. Researchers did two studies to investigate the effects of exposure to a “meaning threat,” something that didn’t make sense or that upset typical notions.

In the first study, subjects read either a Kafka short story (The Country Doctor) pretty much as he wrote it, with its strange and inexplicable series of events, or a tidied-up version that was edited into a more conventional story line. In the second study, people were asked to think about aspects of their own past behavior that are contradictory—in other words, to consider the ways that identity is not as unified as we typically assume it is. After this, participants in both studies were shown strings of letters arranged in a strict but subtle pattern. Then they were given new letter strings and asked to identify the ones that conformed to the pattern.

In both cases, the people who were exposed to the meaning threat (the original Kafka story, the idea of a somewhat fragmented identity) not only selected more strings as adhering to the pattern, but were also correct more often than the respective control group. The researchers explain this by suggesting that it’s uncomfortable to have our common-sense expectations violated, and to compensate when that happens, people are more motivated to make sense of what’s going on around them.

It would be interesting to know if this extends to other media such as music or visual art. It’s also kind of interesting to me that one of the problems with the human cognitive apparatus is that we often make connections too easily, through various cognitive biases such as confirmation bias. Finding associations between seemingly unrelated things or events is a source of creativity, and uniting disparate phenomena under a single comprehensive explanation is often a goal of science. On the other hand, finding patterns where none exist (the supposed face on Mars is a classic example) is a less agreeable manifestation of our hunger for meaning. Like so many things about human thought, perhaps pattern-seeking deserves a “Handle with care” label. Goo goo g’joob.

This article from ScienceDaily describes the research in more detail. The paper appears in Psychological Science:
Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar, Travis Proulx and Steven J. Heine. Psychological Science, 20 (9), 1125–1131.

Words shaping thoughts

Psychology, Thought and consciousness 3 Responses »

Jun 162009

The question of whether the language we use shapes the way we think is an old one that has been answered emphatically in both the positive and the negative down through the years. Over at Edge.org, Lera Boroditsky has written this essay describing some of the research done in her labs that shows interesting links between the language a person is using and the way he or she thinks. I was particularly intrigued by the parts about how the gender of a noun influences the way speakers of a language describe the object named by the noun. People more often come up with typically feminine attributes to describe bridges or keys, for example, if their language assigns a feminine gender to the noun, and are more likely to use typically masculine attributes if the language assigns a masculine gender. Although the essay describes the assignment of gender in the first place as being essentially a quirk (one with far-reaching cognitive consequences), I wonder if, in some cases where no obvious gender assignment exists, some nouns are masculine or feminine as a result of long-lost, very early metaphors.

Let your mind wander

Brain and mind, Thought and consciousness 2 Responses »

May 212009

The very idea of a mind wandering suggests that the wandering mind is off course, aimless, or somehow gone astray. However, it might be more accurate to suppose that the mind is looking the other way while loosening the reins to allow more productive interaction between areas typically seen as having opposing actions. Recent research has shown that when the brain shifts its attention from a routine task and wanders, or daydreams, the so-called executive network, which is important for complex higher-level processing and problem solving, is activated. Earlier research had shown activity in the default network during daydreaming; the default mode seems to be what our brain slips into when it’s not attending to anything in particular.

The recent study suggests that when the mind wanders, these two networks, hitherto seen as opposed, are able to work together, perhaps allowing the solution of knotty problems. The study used fMRI to examine the brains of people who were carrying out a rote task; their level of attention was evaluated based on their performance on the task, their own reports of how attentive they were, and their brain activity. This press release on EurekAlert has more details.

This might explain some of the mysterious workings by which the mind can come up with an answer by going at a problem sideways, while ostensibly working on something else. For example, every Sunday morning I listen to the Sunday puzzle with Will Shortz on NPR. Shortz leaves listeners with a puzzle to solve during the week; the solution often comes to me later in the day when I’m in the shower or folding laundry. And one reason that I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, long walks, and cross-stitch is that these seemingly mindless activities can give me a break from considering some troublesome situation and, at least sometimes, allow me to come up with an answer or an approach to try. (Try as I might, though, I still can’t justify having a bad Freecell habit.)

The paper will be in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering, by Kalina Christoff, Alan M. Gordon, Jonathan Smallwood, Rachelle Smith, and Jonathan W. Schooler. Published online before print May 11, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0900234106.

Baby minds and unconscious minds

Brain and mind, Thought and consciousness 5 Responses »

May 032009

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately, in particular about how it works and what it feels like to create something. A couple of recent news articles, while not directly about creativity, do seem to shed some light.

This article from the Boston Globe discusses some of the capabilities of the infant mind and how they differ from those of the adult mind. The skills our brains are born with are useful in gaining mastery over the world; as we grow and use this initial tool kit, the result is a greater capacity for focused consciousness and time-saving familiarity with the world we live in. As in so many things, though, it’s not all gain. Some of those early-life attributes, such as greater flexibility and the capacity for noticing many more details of a situation or scene, would be kind of handy to regain from time to time. The article gives some interesting tidbits about how the brain develops from its early state into something more sophisticated but in some ways narrower and less rich.

Creativity comes into the story, it seems to me, because part of what it means to be creative is to be able to see things freshly, not only appreciating the familiar as if it were new but being able to present stories, colors, shapes, or sounds in new ways, as if seeing them from a new angle. I wonder if creativity is enhanced in any way by spending time with very young people and borrowing their sense of wonder and their capacity for absorbing situations (not knowing what they should pay attention to, the idea is that they try to pay attention to it all). One thing I’ve run across several times in advice about how to keep your brain fit and healthy as you age is to try new things: learn a new language or a new physical skill, read up on some subject or place that’s foreign to you. Maybe what’s going on there is that by immersing yourself in a world that you don’t know, you have to re-acquire some of that ability to notice everything and put it all together. It certainly seems like that might also be a boon to those who want to create; I’ve always had the feeling that doing new things, even if they weren’t related to the writing I wanted to do, was helpful somehow.

This article from The Economist, on the other hand, covers some new research into unconscious thought. A new study has used EEGs to examine brain activity while people were solving a particular type of problem; it turns out that brain activity can be used to predict, by up to 8 seconds, whether someone is going to get the answer to a puzzle. In other words, brain unconscious activity (specifically, an increase in high-frequency gamma waves in the right frontal cortex) reliably signals a forthcoming conscious moment of insight.

It’s always been fascinating to read about the many ways our subconscious minds seem to go on about their business without letting our conscious minds in on what’s going on until necessary. It’s like there’s some committee in the back room discussing the options unbeknownst to me (although “me” is a slippery pronoun in this context) until suddenly my conscious mind is announcing some decision to myself and to the world, just as confidently as if it had thought of it by itself. I’m sure this behind-the-scenes activity makes my cognitive processing much more efficient, but sometimes I’d really like to know what’s going on in there. The whole thing is even more peculiar when you’re coming up with ideas for some creative project or another, and you suddenly see a way to put together the pieces you’ve been mentally pushing around but you’re not sure where the insight came from, or you think you know what road you’re going to take in your writing that day but wind up finding yourself far from home with not much of an idea how you got there. Funny old things, brains.

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