2007 May » The Thinking Meat Project

Anxiety comes in two flavors

Brain and mind, Psychology Comments Off

May 312007

A novelist could describe varying shades of anxiety with a great deal of nuance. And the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition) identifies 11 different anxiety disorders. A more fundamental type of distinction, though, is the difference between anxious apprehension (the kind of anxiety where you fret and stew over things) and anxious arousal (the kind where your heart pounds and you feel fearful about what will happen next).

Researchers at the University of Illinois have demonstrated that different brain areas are activated in each of these two conditions. They used fMRI to scan the brains of students in three groups: those exhibiting a high degree of anxious apprehension, those with high anxious arousal, and those who fell into neither category. The press release from UIUC doesn’t describe precisely the conditions under which the subjects were scanned (it just says the researchers used “a variety of psychological probes”) but the upshot was that the apprehensive subjects showed more activity in the left half of the brain, specifically in an area related to speech, and the other anxious subjects in the right half, in a part of the brain that may be important in monitoring and reacting to signs of danger. Noting the difference might improve treatments for anxiety disorders, and it’s interesting to see some underlying brain differences supporting the idea that these are two distinct types of human misery.

The two types of anxiety can occur separately or together. I often feel a certain amount of generalized anxiety of the stewing-and-fretting variety, but the dread I feel when I fly is far beyond such everyday unease. Maybe I find flying so uncomfortable because I’m feeling both the types of anxiety that this research studied: I worry and fret a lot and I also feel a visceral fear of what might happen to me. (Yes, I know all the arguments about being safer in the air than in the car on the way to the airport, etc.–my neocortex gets it, my amygdala is not comforted.)

Animal personalities

Animal behavior 1 Response »

May 302007

My younger son Patrick keeps pet snakes. When he was younger I had some contact with the snakes and was struck by the degree to which they seem to have distinct personalities: calm, friendly, bad-tempered, curious, etc. Given what I knew about the mental equipment of snakes, it seemed a bit dubious to me that they would really have different personalities, so I wondered if maybe we were just misinterpreting their behavior or reading too much into it.

Recently I’ve been observing bird personalities. The wonderful nest cam run by the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group shows a–well, I was going to say a bird’s eye view–anyway it gives fantastic close-up coverage of three peregrine falcon chicks (eyases). The birds hatched just over a month ago in a nest box on top of San Jose City Hall and are being fed and cared for by their parents, a pair of falcons named Jose and Clara. I’ve been fascinated by seeing the babies grow and change over the past couple of weeks, and it seems to me like maybe I can observe the ways that they’re growing into distinct individuals, although it’s hard saying because I can’t always tell them apart. This is not my first exposure to bird personalities. My brother Vinny cares for a varying group of parrots, and from his stories I can see that the birds are definitely distinct individuals. Also Mark Bittner (The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill) described the parrots he befriended as having different personalities. And certainly other types of animals (horses, dogs, cats) have particular temperaments.

But still I was surprised to see that, according to this article from Science Daily, personalities have been observed in more than 60 different species, including some insects. Maybe I was not off the mark in seeing personalities in those snakes after all. Even more interesting, an international group of researchers has come up with the beginnings of an explanation for why different personalities develop within a species. The group modeled animal behavior as it relates to a fundamental decision: stick your neck out and risk death, but reproduce earlier, or hunker down safely and wait for more favorable conditions (which trades the risk of early death for the risk of never reproducing).

Animals face this kind of tough choice in a variety of contexts, and have to respond to it somehow. The researchers’ model looks at several behavioral traits related to being risk averse or risk prone, and it shows that over time a population will evolve to contain individuals with distinct personalities based on these characteristics. There’s a little bit more info in this article from New Scientist. I don’t suppose this is the whole story, but it looks like an interesting start.

More about resistance to science

Books, Thought and consciousness Comments Off

May 292007

The authors of the Science paper I mentioned a few days ago about why people resist science have published an adapted version of the paper on The Edge. They talk about why resistance to evolution is particularly strong in the US these days, among other things (in a nutshell, alternate explanations that are more in line with a child’s intuitive beliefs are circulated and supported by adults and institutions that children trust, thus reinforcing the intuitive beliefs and making it harder for the correct information to take hold).

Also, the authors mention that sometimes the bias in favor of incorrect but intuitive understandings is strong enough that science education is ineffective, but then they go on to say that real-world experience can sometimes overcome these ingrained biases. But if you put these two statements together, they suggest how science education might be improved so that it is effective: by giving kids real-world experience that demonstrates how things work, and by explaining at least some of the evidence that supports a particular scientific assertion, so that kids can see the chain of evidence from things that are more easily understood to things that are harder to see. That might help prevent the perception that science and religion are simply presenting competing claims of more or less equal weight. (And it also might teach something about how arguments are constructed and how to evaluate arguments critically, vital skills that I suspect are often not addressed adequately either at home or in school.) Thanks to Mark for bringing up this aspect of the article in a discussion this evening.

And while we’re on the subject of science literacy, here’s a book review by Steven Pinker that appeared recently in the New York Times. Pinker reviews the latest from science writer Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Angier provides an overview of the essential scientific knowledge that she thinks every educated person should possess. Pinker makes some interesting comments on the way science journalism and science education are typically done and the use (or misuse) of analogies in science writing.

Link between genes and language

Thought and consciousness 4 Responses »

May 282007

Variants in two genes that are associated with brain development, ASPM and Microcephalin, appear to affect how easy it is to learn a tonal language like Chinese. In a tonal language, the pitch with which a word is spoken affects its meaning, so that the same combinations of letters spoken with different pitches can mean different things. Few European languages are tonal, but many of the languages of sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia are. A recent study shows that people who live where non-tonal languages, such as English and most other European languages, are spoken are more likely to have more recently evolved variants on the ASPM and Microcephalin genes. One of the implications is that the earliest languages might have been tonal, with non-tonal languages arising later in our evolutionary history. It sounds like we still have a lot to learn about how the later gene variants associated with non-tonal languages emerged.

Tonal languages can be difficult to learn for those who are used to a non-tonal language. Some English speakers find it easier to learn tonal languages than others, and previous work has demonstrated differences in brain anatomy between the two groups; future work may investigate whether the anatomical differences also appear between people with the more recent ASPM and Microcephalin variants and those without.

This article from New Scientist gives the details, and here’s a story from the Times Online (UK).

The life and death of science

Being human Comments Off

May 272007

To follow up on yesterday’s post on why people resist accepting the findings of science, you might be interested in Will Science Die Again?, an article that James Williamson wrote in 2002. It gives a brief history of Ionian science and its eventual eclipse, and there’s a bit of discussion at the end about whether or not science could undergo a similar eclipse today.

Why people resist science

Psychology, Thought and consciousness 6 Responses »

May 262007

I’ve been thinking a lot about science literacy these days–what it is and why it’s important. As someone who favors natural (not supernatural) explanations for how the world works, and who believes in evolution, the scientific study of human nature, etc., etc., I find it hard sometimes not to feel like science in this country is under siege. This is especially distressing given that we have some major challenges facing us that rely on a scientifically literate public.

So I found this article from USA Today of particular interest. It covers some of the factors, going back to childhood experiences, that make adults resistant to science. The article mentions a paper that two Yale psychologists recently published in Science, which identifies two important elements. The first is that scientific explanations sometimes contradict the intuitive insights that children are good at forming about the way the world works. Some of these intuitive misperceptions are easier to give up than others. E.g., eventually you agree that the world is indeed round and this doesn’t mean that people in the other hemisphere will fall off, but it can be much harder to accept some of the facts of subatomic physics. Another instinctive concept is dualism, the belief that the physical body and the soul/mind are separate; some argue that this belief is innate to humans. (For example, Paul Bloom argues that this is the case in Descartes’ Baby.) The second element is that children tend to trust authority figures. This is a valuable thing when parents are telling their children not to run out in the street, etc., but it also means that parents have a responsibility to their children to tell them the truth about how the world works and not mislead them. (I think this is the basis for Richard Dawkins’s complaints about how a religious education is a disservice to children; many forms of religious education are a betrayal of this responsibility.) If you’re interested in the paper in Science, you can read the abstract or this press release from Yale.

So the idea is that these mental habits, formed in childhood, tend to carry over into adulthood and make science to some degree difficult to understand or believe, and so we have things like the frustrating persistence of the evolution/creation debate long after evolution has become the basis for modern biology. What the article doesn’t really get into is the obvious question of why the US should be so different from the rest of the world. Maybe I’m misjudging the degree to which science is ignored or denied in this country compared to the rest of the world; what comes to mind first is this graph showing the percentage of the population that accepts evolution in 34 western nations, in which the US comes in almost at the very bottom. Is there something about religious institutions in this country or about the way we raise children that encourages the persistence of juvenile mental habits? And if so, what is it and how do we change it?

Whether it’s worse in the US or not, the big question everywhere is how can people learn to think critically and put aside some of the mental habits of childhood as they grow into adulthood. The Science paper makes some suggestions for scientists who want to reach more of the public. It’s plain that teachers, parents, and religious leaders also have some responsibilities in this area, and it’s also up to each of us to do our best to understand the science that affects our lives in countless ways–even if it is counterintuitive sometimes. (Just because some scientific thinking is counterintuitive for children, does it really mean, as one author of the paper states, that it’s “unnatural” for adults?)

Another thing that struck me about this article is that recently I saw the episode of Cosmos where Carl Sagan talked about how Ionian science of roughly 2,500 years ago was overtaken by various forms of mysticism and the western world’s scientific understanding of the world was more or less stalled for centuries. It’s tempting to think of our progress as a culture as being analogous to our individual progress through childhood and into a more mature understanding of the universe in which we find ourselves. But in fact while humans proceed through childhood to adulthood and then stay there, humankind, or at least large portions of it, can lose its forward momentum or even backtrack. It’s crossed my mind lately to wonder whether we’re at the beginning of such a backtracking right now, losing sight of Enlightenment values and slipping into another dark age, where science and reason will be eclipsed by ignorance and religious fervor. Of course it’s impossible to say, but it’s a chilling thought to realize that there’s no guarantee against it happening.

The Belief-O-Matic

Being human 3 Responses »

May 252007

No, I’m not making that name up. There really is something called the Belief-O-Matic; it’s an online quiz that tells you what religion/belief system you are most suited for. Part of Beliefnet.com, the Belief-O-Matic presents you with 20 questions about your religious and spiritual beliefs and tells you what religion you’re practicing (or ought to practice). In the results, 27 different belief systems are listed, ranked from the best match to the worst match for you, with percentages to indicate the amount of overlap between your views and those of each religion. At the top of my list is Secular Humanism (100%), with Unitarian Universalism a reasonably close second (91%). In position number 26, almost the bottom of the list, is the religion in which I was raised, the Roman Catholic faith (9%–tied with Islam, the Eastern Orthodox church, and Orthodox Judaism), followed by Jehovah’s Witnesses at 6%. As with most quizzes of this type, it’s fairly obvious where it’s going, but it was mildly entertaining.

For some reason this reminds me of a time 28 years ago, when I was in my late teens and contemplating leaving the Catholic church. I had been raised in such a devout household that it didn’t even occur to me to just stop going to church, so I did a little research to find a new church. But as I recall, I didn’t look at anything but the mainstream Protestant denominations. I didn’t even know Secular Humanism was on the list. (When I finally did leave, four and a half years later, I did quit going to church altogether.)

The story of your life

Psychology 2 Responses »

May 242007

The stories you tell about your life influence how you see and respond to people and events, and in turn your personality shapes the stories you tell. I’m not sure if it’s a strange loop, but it’s definitely a loop. This article from the New York Times discusses some of the ways that the stories people tell affect their views of themselves, their happiness, and even their memories. I was particularly interested in the experiment where reliving a memory by describing it in the third person, as if it happened to someone else, aroused less negative emotion than recounting it in the first person. One of the things that I’ve found gets better as you go through life is the ability to take a longer view and realize that a lot of the things that seem really upsetting–bad times on the job, relationship troubles, bad plumbing, money worries, you name it–do pass by, and in the end you get through it and it’s just one part of a much bigger picture. (And you realize most of it really wasn’t worth all that mental anguish, so you try not to stress out so badly next time.) It seems a little weird to think about things that happen to me in the third person–to write a journal entry that way, for example–but I wonder if it speeds up that process of getting the big picture.

One interesting thing that the article doesn’t address is the role of stories in group identity: in families or groups of people who work together, for example. I’m sure they must play a similar role for groups in terms of shaping a shared identity and influencing how the group feels about and responds to events. (Not to mention the way shared stories can create or enhance an emotional bond, but that’s a slightly different topic.) There’s also the interesting question of how other people’s stories about you can influence how you feel about yourself and how you behave. Anne Tyler’s novel Patchwork Planet explored that one pretty well.

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