How does language shape the way we think?

A more hypothesis-free question might be "Does language shape the way we think?"

This question, in fact, goes back a long way. It can be traced to the European romantic period of the early 19th century, with antecedents that are much earlier.

But a more modern form of the question is well-known to many as the Whorfian Hypothesis or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In even more modern terminology, this is the question of linguistic relativity. (That Wikipedia article gives a fairly detailed summary.)

There's a recent essay at Edge by neuroscientist Lera Boroditsky that outlines a number of the issues and gives an entertaining account of simple experiments that have been performed to test various linguistic relativity hypotheses.

How does language shape the way we think?

Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.

Let's first review the history of linguistic relativity. In romantic thought during the early 19th century in Germany language was seen as expressing the "spirit" of a nation. Implicitly, then, there was a close connection between language and the social and political attitudes of a place. However, the direction of a causal link, if any, was not clearly articulated. If anything, one could infer that society and culture affect language more than the reverse.

This might have been true before the invention of writing, but since then, language generally changes much more slowly than social attitudes. Instead of following culture, one might expect language to be one of the ways that attitudes are transmitted from generation to generation. So the natural expectation now is for language to causally affect society.

Some of the assertions in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) tend to support the notion that language strongly affects thought. TLP was published in 1921 and belongs to the "early period" of Wittgenstein's thought. In his later period, represented in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), he reversed course on a number of issues. Yet many people still regard much of TLP as powerfully insightful.

The basic thrust is that one's language places limits on what can usefully be thought, especially: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." (TLP, 5.6) And the concluding assertion of the book: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (TLP, 7) One interpretation is that although one might have certain thoughts one can't express in language, such thoughts would be largely futile, since they could not be communicated to others (at least not verbally) or even to oneself at a later time – perhaps only hours or even minutes later. At all events, limitations on the expressive power of a particular language place constraints on useful thinking. (To a large extent, this should be an empirical question about how much the brain uses a natural language to help with long-term storage of abstract thoughts. It seems very plausible – we need only recall a short aphorism like Wittgenstein's to access the more complex ideas. In fact, there's now a common term for this: "sound bites".)

A century after the German romantics, Edward Sapir (1884-1939), an American anthropologist and linguist, began to put the study of the relationship between language and thought on a more systematic and scientific basis. Sapir's linguistic studies adopted an anthropological approach (under the influence of Franz Boas), including field work exploring native American languages.

Although Sapir's connection with the question of a relationship between language and thought becomes more explicit in the work and writings of his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Sapir himself did much to encourage examination of the relationship. His introductory book on linguistics, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech is still in print. In Chapter X of it he wrote "Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense causally related." But nevertheless, "Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interrelated, are, in a sense, one and the same."

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) was much more closely identified with the question, so much so that the idea of an influence of language on thought is often called simply the Whorfian Hypothesis. His collection of writings, still in print, Language, Thought, and Reality, is the work for which he is best known. Representative quote:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds.

For some time more recently, especially in the 1980s, the Whorfian Hypothesis (which wasn't actually stated explicitly by Whorf) and the idea of linguistic relativity in general was not well regarded by cognitive scientists, because it lacked precision, testable hypotheses, and (consequently) experimental evidence. It was, after all, largely speculations based on anthropological observations. Lack of experimental evidence made a skeptical view of linguistic relativity easier to hold. But since the 1990s many attempts have been made to study the question scientifically and experimentally.

Although Boroditsky's essay could be construed as implying that most of the research has been done in her laboratory, in fact it has been undertaken rather more widely. However, we won't attempt to survey the other work right now. Let's just recap some of the research findings she discusses.

One interesting group of studies is anthropological in origin, like the original investigations of Sapir and Whorf. It involves how the languages of certain Australian aborigines, including but not limited to a group known as the Kuuk Thaayorre, describe 2-dimensional space. In English, and indeed in most languages of which English speakers have ever heard, positions in 2-dimensional space, in which the observer is situated, are usually described relative to the observer: left vs. right, in front of vs. behind. But for the aborigines, 2-dimensional space in which they are located is described in terms of absolute directions: north, south, east, west. Such a system has obvious advantages for navigation in possibly unfamiliar territory, by forcing the observer to remain oriented to fixed directions. It's also natural for people who spend a lot of time outdoors. This anthropological fact has been known for some time.

Many languages can apply spatial concepts to non-spatial information as well, particularly in the special-case of 1-dimensional data of many types. Examples include size, weight, age, time ("earlier" vs. "later"), moral values ("better" vs. "worse"), kinship ("near" vs. "far"), musical pitch ("high" vs. "low"). (It's now understood, of course, that pitch can be quantified as vibrational frequency, but this is a modern development.)

Each of these examples either involves things that can be quantified using numbers (size, weight, age), or if that's not possible there are terms specialized for the particular concept. Quantifiable concepts generally also have their own special terms too, which indicate magnitude in a vaguer way, when numeric values aren't convenient ("big" or "small", "heavy" or "light", "old" or "young").

In the case of quantifiable concepts it's not unusual to think of attribute values spatially laid out on a line from smaller to bigger (though the actual direction in space may vary – left to right or right to left, for example). Some concepts that aren't obviously quantifiable also customarily involve spatial metaphors (kinship, pitch).

Other concepts more often are described with non-spatial terms, but sometimes admit spatial metaphors. For instance, a particular time may be "near" or "distant", like kinship. Moral values may be "higher" or "lower", like pitch.

Obviously, languages other than English may customarily use different terms and metaphors to describe the same concepts. Every language seems to have its own way of conceptualizing and describing certain things, even with quantifiable concepts. Consider time, for example. Sometimes it's represented in non-spatial terms ("earlier" vs. "later"), but spatial metaphors are also common ("before" vs. "after"). When thinking spatially of time, English speakers tend to think of it in a horizontal line, perpendicular to the observer's line of sight, from earlier to later (and usually left to right). Occasionally time is described, like kinship, in a line that runs outward from the observer. However, Mandarin arranges time in a vertical direction – the way English arranges musical pitch.

(There are obviously even more complexities in all this if similar concepts customarily used in differing languages aren't quite congruent or coextensive to begin with. For instance, the concept "moral values" is one thing if such values are customarily believed in one culture to be supernaturally ordained, but something rather different if they are thought to be products of a rational ethics.)

In mathematics there is a uniform way of dealing with such 1-dimensional concepts. This is especially true when the concepts are quantifiable, but it also true even when there is only a greater-than-less-than relationship between specific attributes of different individuals. This kind of relationship of attribute values is called a linear ordering. However, most people, and most languages, don't express things in abstract mathematical terms. And so the actual language used for different types of linearly orderable attribute values can vary dramatically from one language to another.

With all these ways of using metaphors and terminology, which vary from language to language, for describing concepts, one can't help but wonder whether the choice of terminology or metaphor in a particular language affects how a speaker of the language thinks about a concept. For instance, does use of a spatial metaphor for moral values ("higher" or "lower") predispose a speaker to think differently about the concept than a different metaphor ("conservative" or "liberal", say)? If we are comparing different languages, do the different customary metaphors employed lead to observable differences between cultures where one or the other language predominates?

So the interesting general scientific question that arises from this situation is whether the peculiarities of how a particular language describes certain types of attributes have an effect on how the speakers of the language think about the attributes. More specifically, is it possible to set up experiments that demonstrate consistently different behaviors by speakers of different languages, where the behaviors make sense in terms of how each language typically represents the attributes?

When, as is quite common, a single language offers choices of metaphors or terminology for describing a given concept, it should be easy to set up experiments to detect different ways people think about a concept (as determined by observable behavior) according to selections of metaphor or terminology presented to an experimental subject. Or better yet, can we measure how much or how likely use of a specific metaphor affects specific behavior with respect to a given concept under given conditions?

This kind of experiment, that uses only speakers of a single language, can separate out effects due to language (as expressed in metaphor or terminology) from effects due to underlying culture, as long as experimental subjects are drawn from the same culture or classified by culture (or specific demographic or ethnic groups, for example). This is a way to deal with the questions that always arise about whether it's the language or the culture in which the language is spoken that accounts for observed differences. A similar option, which Boroditsky mentions, is to deliberately train experimental subjects to use unfamiliar metaphors or terminology drawn from languages other than the subject's native language.

Boroditsky cites a few examples of experiments that have been performed to study such questions. In addition to considering languages that use different spatial metaphors (either 1- or 2-dimentsional), she mentions experiments involving other types of language differences. One example is whether and how "gender" is encoded in the grammar of a language. English is a little unusual in not having much grammatical role for gender (except for pronouns). In Russian, however, most nouns have one of three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). In a Russian sentence, adjectives, pronouns, and even verbs that refer to a noun must agree in gender.

As Boroditsky notes, "some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny." Although English and other Indo-european languages seem to rely on sex (i. e. genitals – same linguistic root as "gender") as the metaphor for gender, in other languages gender is simply about whatever the language, or the underlying culture, considers to be the most important categories for partitioning the world of discourse. Obviously, this can lead to huge differences in how people who use different languages think about the world.

Or consider the way languages differ in how they divide up a space of perceptual qualia – color in particular. Russian, for instance, recognizes two different types of blue (varying in the brightness dimension), using different words. This can lead to observable differences in behavior between Russian and English speakers. (Of course, English also recognizes multiple types of blue, such as azure and blue-green. It may simply use hyphenated and compound words to denote many of the different types. There may be thousands of English terms. What's distinctive about Russian is that it doesn't have a single word that is applicable to something that's normally just "blue" in English.)

It would be very interesting to study linguistic effects with respect to other types of qualia, such as taste. Taste is especially interesting, since there are physiological reasons that, cross-culturally, five different "flavors" are commonly recognized: "sweet", "salty", "sour", "bitter", and "umami". The result is a 5-dimensional perceptual space, instead of the 1-dimensional space of loudness or hue. For that matter, color space is actually 3-dimensional (hue, saturation, brightness), and sound has various dimensions too (loudness, pitch, timbre, etc.)

All this raises many interesting questions. How much do languages vary in the way they conceptualize perceptual spaces? Even if spatial dimensions are the same between two languages, are the spatial axes oriented differently? And what effects do such differences have on how people think about the perceptual spaces?

Interestingly, even in the case of color, the strength of a linguistic effect on perception of hue (e. g. 1 vs. 2 types of blue) seems to depend on how much the experiment calls for cognitive processing in the left vs. the right brain hemisphere, presumably because of the special role of the left hemisphere in language processing.

And then, supposing some correlation exists between how languages represent certain attributes and how people behave in thinking about the attributes, how can it be decided whether the language has affected the thinking, as opposed to both language and thought being affected by cultural history and circumstances (such as a lifestyle that places high importance in being oriented to directions of the compass). Boroditsky suggests experiments that can be done, such as deliberately teaching people different ways of describing things, to find out whether and how this affects thought and behavior.

But let's begin to wrap this up by returning briefly to Boroditsky's observations of the Kuuk Thaayorre. There was a specific reason she wanted to study these people. As noted, it was known that they tended to think of (2-dimensional) spatial information using coordinates independent of the observer. That's also true in thinking about 1-dimensional data, which speakers of English (and most other language) think of as left vs. right, relative to the observer.

Boroditsky wanted to know how the Kuuk Thaayorre conceptualized and described other 1-dimensional linear orderings, such as time, where spatial metaphors are less likely to be used in other languages. The answer is that the Kuuk Thaayorre continued to use the same absolute coordinate system for such things. For example, given pictures illustrating temporal progressions, they would tend to arrange them in a line in the east-west direction. So not only did they stick to absolute coordinates, but they chose a direction that just happens to be the same as the Sun's motion through the sky – as opposed to north-south, say. Of course, that might be due to dealing with temporal information.

One wonders whether they would do the same with other linearly ordered data, such as taste of food (from "unpleasant" to "delicious"). One also wonders what the outcome of such experiments would be if they were done with Kuuk Thaayorre people indoors, under conditions where they would be unaware of actual compass directions.

Interestingly, speakers of English and other languages that are written in a left-right direction, tend to arrange pictures illustrating temporal progression in the same left-right direction, while speakers of languages written from right to left tend to use this right-left ordering for 1-dimensional data. Right there you have an apparent effect of language on thought patterns and behavior.

Concluding thoughts

This is a vast subject. It's not at all easy to summarize even the discussion presented here. So I won't try. I'll just add some general remarks.

It has generally been assumed that if there is any causal relationship between language and thought it should be in the direction of language affecting thought instead of vice versa. This is probably because language is assumed to have arisen without conscious design, and because it's difficult to imagine what relatively complex thought would be like if it came before language. We assume that non-human animals, which lack language, can't have complex thoughts. But we know almost nothing about the origins of human language, at least tens of thousands of years ago, or what human thinking might have been like at the time. Our assumptions could be wrong. Language and complex thought probably co-evolved to some extent that we can now only guess about.

For another thing, it should be obvious that the effect of language doesn't have to be all or nothing. The Whorfian Hypothesis isn't necessarily generally true or generally false. Instead, what needs to be investigated are tendencies and correlations under many different special conditions, such as the kind of cognitive activity one suspects might be affected. One should look for the strength (i. e. probability) of an effect, and its pervasiveness (i. e. range of circumstances in which it can be observed).

Another important consideration is that language has a variety of parts, with vocabulary and grammar being the major divisions. The vocabulary and grammar of a language probably differ a lot in whatever way they affect thinking.

As far as vocabulary is concerned, if a language lacks a word for a specific concept, it's considerably more difficult to think about the concept, though generally not impossible. Without a word for a concept, it's harder to keep it in mind in order to examine it logically in order to understand it, or to use it for classifying or organizing things. For example, a study of an Amazonian tribe, the Piraha, who don't have words for numbers, suggests that these people have difficulty with numerical concepts in tasks where memory is involved, even though they presumably can recognize differences in size of small collections of things. (See below for more about this study.)

Likewise, suppose we didn't have words for many types of mammals, how easily could we distinguish between a fox and a coyote, say? Whether we regard two things as the "same" or "different" depends a lot on whether we have separate, common words for the two things. (For example: different shades of the same color.) Even if we could visually perceive differences between the species, would we remember the differences long enough to keep track of other ways the species differed?

So languages with sparse vocabularies make many kinds of thinking difficult. In language without words for abstract concepts like "liberty", "freedom", "justice", etc. it would be difficult to develop much of a political philosophy. Indeed, the introduction of such terms is often the starting point for new directions in philosophy. All this argues for a significant effect of language on thought, mediated by the language's vocabulary.

But vocabulary is a rather different aspect of language from grammar, and it is the grammar of a language that is often the focus of questions about how language affects thought. For instance, there are all the questions about the role of grammatical gender. Other important grammatical issues have to do with verbs – the way in which they involve time ("tense"), attitude towards the action ("mood"), whether action is ongoing or completed ("aspect"), issues of effect of an action ("transitivity") and so forth. A language can potentially pack quite a variety of disparate kinds of information in its verbs. Each of these aspects of grammar may affect thinking in different ways and different degrees. Research should be looking for whether certain aspects tend to be more influential than others.

Another interesting difference between vocabulary and grammar is that the former probably changes more quickly than the latter. Indeed, a language's grammar tends to change pretty slowly, and in small increments, if at all, over hundreds of years. But vocabulary can change in a matter of decades, or less. Think of the difference in English vocabulary between Shakespeare's time and ours. (With Shakespeare himself responsible for quite a few innovations.) Yet the grammar of Shakespearean English is hardly different from that of contemporary English.

What this may mean is that the grammar of a language has a more profound effect than vocabulary on thinking because of its relative constancy. Consequently, perhaps, speakers of the language can hardly imagine that distinctions imposed by grammar might admit any possible alternative kinds of distinctions. Just as speakers of English have a difficult time imagining any relevance of gender to non-living things.

Lastly (for now), I should point out the relevance of this discussion to the even more general topic of "social construction of reality", as briefly touched on here.

In that regard, Edward Sapir wrote: "No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality."

A few recent relevant research reports

Language Without Numbers: Amazonian Tribe Has No Word To Express 'One,' Other Numbers (7/15/08)

An Amazonian tribe, the Piraha, with only 300 speakers of its language, apparently has no words for any natural number, even "one", though it has terms for comparing quantities ("some", "more"). Consequently the size of a very small collection (1 to 4 things) would be described with a word meaning "few", while larger collections would be "many".

Aboriginal Kids Can Count Without Numbers (8/18/08)

In contrast to the preceding report, a study of children in two Australian aboriginal communities, whose language does not contain words for numbers, showed that the children were able to copy and perform number-related tasks.

Pre-verbal Number Sense Common To Monkeys, Babies, College Kids (2/15/09)

As in a number of other studies, this research shows that human infants, as well as macaque monkeys, show an awareness of the different size of very small sets (2 or 3 objects), even though they do not have language. In fact, even dogs have a similar awareness, using similar testing protocols. (See here.) So certainly the Piraha also have such awareness. But as is pointed out in the Piraha study, lack of words for numbers seems to significantly affect the ability to perform tasks where memory is involved.

Scientists show that language shapes perception (2/26/09)

Modern Greek, like Russian, has different words for light and dark blue, unlike English. Greek speakers automatically use different words to describe the color of the sky or the color of the ink of a (dark) blue pen. Using a measuring technique called "event related brain potentials", differences in brain activity caused by seeing different shades of blue can be detected before the appropriate color word enters consciousness. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the brains of Greek speakers and English speakers (say) are genetically different – only, perhaps, that the cultural habit of sharply distinguishing two kinds of blue has been learned in non-verbal, as well as verbal, parts of the brain.

Expressing comparisons is possible even without language, researchers find (6/30/09)

Deaf children who had not learned a spoken language were compared with hearing children who had learned some language. Deaf children are able to use gestures to indicate a recognition that (for example) a house cat is different from a tiger. However, "as the children grew older, the comparisons diverged — deaf children's comparisons remained broader in nature, while hearing children's comparisons became more complex and focused, such as saying that the hair was brown like a brown crayon, after hearing children started using the word 'like'."

Update, 8/24/09: Here's a relevant new article I haven't had a chance to evaluate yet: Does Language Shape What We Think?

Update, 9/4/09: And here's an interesting quote from Steven Pinker (via Amira):

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group … We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

Tags: linguistic relativity, Whorfian hypothesis, social construction of reality

Want to be more creative? Get more REM sleep

REM sleep, a distinctive phase of normal sleep characterized by rapid eye movements, has traditionally been associated with vivid dreaming. New research suggests it is important for creativity in general.

Creative problem solving enhanced by REM sleep (6/8/09)

Research led by a leading expert on the positive benefits of napping at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine suggests that Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep enhances creative problem-solving. The findings may have important implications for how sleep, specifically REM sleep, fosters the formation of associative networks in the brain.

The study by Sara Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, and first author Denise Cai, graduate student in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology, shows that REM directly enhances creative processing more than any other sleep or wake state. ...

"We found that - for creative problems that you've already been working on - the passage of time is enough to find solutions," said Mednick. "However, for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity."

Mednick added that it appears REM sleep helps achieve such solutions by stimulating associative networks, allowing the brain to make new and useful associations between unrelated ideas. Importantly, the study showed that these improvements are not due to selective memory enhancements.

It might be supposed that sleep in general can aid problem solving by several mechanisms. For instance, sleep might be helpful simply by enabling avoidance of distractions that occur during wakeful periods. It is also known that memory consolidation occurs during sleep, and memories that are better established may also assist in problem solving. But there could be other benefits of sleep as well, especially specific phases of sleep.

A critical issue in sleep and cognition is whether improvements in behavioral performance are the result of sleep-specific enhancement or simply reduction of interference - since experiences while awake have been shown to interfere with memory consolidation. The researchers controlled for such interference effects by comparing sleep periods to quiet rest periods without any verbal input. ...

"Participants grouped by REM sleep, non-REM sleep and quiet rest were indistinguishable on measures of memory," said Cai. "Although the quiet rest and non-REM sleep groups received the same prior exposure to the task, they displayed no improvement on the RAT test. Strikingly, however, the REM sleep group improved by almost 40 percent over their morning performances."

The authors hypothesize that the formation of associative networks from previously unassociated information in the brain, leading to creative problem-solving, is facilitated by changes to neurotransmitter systems during REM sleep.

Here's the research abstract:

REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks

The hypothesized role of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is rich in dreams, in the formation of new associations, has remained anecdotal. We examined the role of REM on creative problem solving, with the Remote Associates Test (RAT). Using a nap paradigm, we manipulated various conditions of prior exposure to elements of a creative problem. Compared with quiet rest and non-REM sleep, REM enhanced the formation of associative networks and the integration of unassociated information. Furthermore, these REM sleep benefits were not the result of an improved memory for the primed items. This study shows that compared with quiet rest and non-REM sleep, REM enhances the integration of unassociated information for creative problem solving, a process, we hypothesize, that is facilitated by cholinergic and noradrenergic neuromodulation during REM sleep.

Further reading:

Problems are solved by sleeping (6/9/09) – BBC news article

Stages of sleep have distinct influence on process of learning and memory (2/25/09) – press release concerning prior reseach on REM sleep

Tags: creativity, problem solving

Propagandists and marketers agree: emotions may be more reliable when making choices

Here's yet another "study" that purports to show "gut reactions" are "better" than logical analysis in decision making. (Recent discussions of this are here, here, here.)

It's about how sales and marketing people and propagandists have learned to take advantage of your emotions for their own benefit.

Of course, that's not how it's presented....

Note the bait-and-switch technique going on in the research report: "reliability" is what the study seems to promise, but the fine print says that what you actually get is consistency.

Admittedly, "reliability" and "consistency" are nearly synonymous in terms of outcomes that marketing people want. But they may not be synonymous at all in terms of what decision-makers (i. e. you) want.

Trust Your Heart: Emotions May Be More Reliable When Making Choices (2/23/09)

"We investigated the following question: To what extent does relying on one's feelings versus deliberative thinking affect the consistency of one's preferences?" write the authors. To get at the question, the authors designed experiments where participants studied and chose among 8-10 products, sometimes relying upon their emotional reactions and sometimes calling upon cognitive skills. Their conclusion: "Emotional processing leads to greater preference consistency than cognitive processing."

Beware of marketing people who presume to advise you about, well, almost anything. But especially about either research conclusions or products they want to sell you.

Note the basic – and rather flagrantly expressed – dishonesty.

On one hand, the objective summary that the researchers offer of their study is: "Emotional processing leads to greater preference consistency than cognitive processing." In other words, the benefit attributed to reliance on emotion for decision making is consistency.

This isn't all that surprising: when people just go with their "gut feelings", the result is more likely to be the same each time the same decision is presented than if the actual specifics of the situation, which may vary from case to case, are analyzed.

This is also the outcome that marketers naturally prefer: predictable, consistent responses to marketing pitches.

But on the other hand, and this is the dishonest part, the authors also write "Indeed, our results suggest that the heart can very well serve as a more reliable compass to greater long-term happiness than pure reason."

This is a specious claim: where in their study did the researchers actually measure the happiness that experimental subjects experience as a result of their choices, as opposed to the consistency of the choices?

In other words, the unspoken idea they're pushing is actually this: you will enjoy more happiness if you allow your decisions to be determined according to how marketing has manipulated your emotions. (E. g.: Just go ask your doc for that Viagra prescription and have more fun in bed! And don't worry about whether your real problem in bed is something Viagra doesn't fix.)

If you think there may be some logic to that, just ask yourself whether letting yourself be manipulated by the greed of others is a good path to your happiness.

The sad truth of human behavior, despite illusions that humans are "rational" creatures, is that emotions are quite often much stronger motivators than reason. And they are generally a lot easier to control and manipulate than rational thinking about facts and logic.

As a result of that, people who stand to profit or otherwise benefit from the actions or beliefs they are able to persuade others to embrace have made a concerted effort, first of all, to persuade people that decisions are best made on an emotional basis.

What's their alternative, if facts and logic do not support whatever such people are advocating? They can always simply lie or engage in misdirection, and that's often done too, of course. But lies can occasionally be exposed, and in extreme cases can even be subject to prosecution (for fraud).

Think I'm making all this up? I suggest reading about one of the masters of propaganda techniques in the 20th century: Edward Bernays. He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and literally wrote the book: Propaganda.

Here's how that book begins:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized…

I'll try to summarize some of the history and thinking of Bernays when time permits, but here are some things to read for now, if you're interested:

Stunt Man – book review of a biography on Bernays

Karl Rove & the Spectre of Freud’s Nephew – an essay on Bernays by Stephen Bender

Tags: marketing, propaganda

Gut feelings may actually reflect reliable memories

We've had a bit of discussion of "gut feelings" recently. See here, here.

I've thought for a long time that one explanation of "intuition" and "gut feelings" when applied to dealing with a particular issue or problem is that we have dealt with a similar issue or problem before, but we do not have a clear memory of having done so. Or else we have read or otherwise learned some information related to the issue or problem. But when confronted with the issue or problem again, we "intuitively" sense how to deal with it, even though we aren't conscious of remembering the previous experience or information.

Actually, this happens a lot with experts in many areas, such as law, medicine, or business. For example, a young physician examining a patient with a certain set of symptoms may recall having learned in school that the symptoms might indicate any of several different problems. And that to distinguish among the possible causes of the symptoms it is necessary to carefully examine the particulars of the situation.

An older, more experienced physician, on the other hand, may quickly settle on one specific diagnosis without consciously going over the detailed checklist of distinguishing indicators. In this latter case, the "intuition" may simply be unconscious recollection of past experience where some specific feature in the symptoms correctly tipped the balance between one diagnosis or another.

This is not an original observation (though I can't quite recall where I first saw it), but there is new research that does support it:

Gut Feelings May Actually Reflect Reliable Memories (2/8/09)

You know the feeling. You make a decision you're certain is merely a "lucky guess."

A new study from Northwestern University offers precise electrophysiological evidence that such decisions may sometimes not be guesswork after all.

The research utilizes the latest brain-reading technology to point to the surprising accuracy of memories that can't be consciously accessed.

During a special recognition test, guesses turned out to be as accurate or more accurate than when study participants thought they consciously remembered.

"We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too," said Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern.

Actually, this is so well known that psychologists have names for it: "implicit memory" or "recognition memory". It's closely related to another effect called "priming".

So when we are, sometimes, urged to go with our intuition or "gut feelings" in making a decision, it's not necessarily bad advice. We may in fact be making well-informed decisions even when we think we are using our "intuition". But the problem is that our memory, whether explicit or implicity, can be unreliable or downright wrong. So "intuition" can just as easily get us into trouble.

In particular, we may be remembering "information" that is simply untrue. As Satchel Paige is reported to have said, "It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just ain't so."

When faced with important decisions, and enough time to consider them, perhaps it's not a bad idea to go consult reliable sources of information, just to be sure...

The blog Neurophilosophy has a good discussion of this research and implicit memory:

The neurological basis of intuition (2/9/09)

Most of us have experienced the vague feeling of knowing something without having any memory of learning it. This phenomenon is commonly known as a "gut feeling" or "intuition"; more accurately though, it is described as implicit or unconscious recognition memory, to reflect the fact that it arises from information that was not attended to, but which is processed, and can subsequently be retrieved, without ever entering into conscious awareness.

Further reading:

Study Suggests Why Gut Instincts Work (2/8/09) – Livescience.com

Hidden memories guide choices (2/9/09) – Nature.com

Subliminal messages really do affect your decisions (2/14/09) – NewScientist.com

Tags: intuition, implicit memory

Emotions and the insula

I've been meaning for some time to write more about a brain region known as the insula. Looks like now is as good a time as any.

This is a big topic. We had one previous, tentative discussion here. It dealt with involvement of the insula in the "feeling" of fairness and how moral/ethical decisions are made.

Let's start with a review of what the insula actually is, anatomically. It is a part of the brain's cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, which in humans ranges from 2 to 4 mm in thickness. Although part of the cortex, the insula is located fairly deep within the brain, in an especially deep fold (or "sulcus") of the cortex, between the temporal lobe and the inferior parietal cortex.

Since the insula is adjacent to the temporal lobe on each side of the brain, it is made up of two separate parts, on the right and left sides of the brain. It is found that one side or the other, often the part on the right side, may be more important than the other in particular circumstances. Sometimes the critical area is even smaller, such as the anterior or posterior region of the insula on one side.

A good reason for considering the insula is that it seems to be deeply involved in mediating various emotions in humans. However, the evidence is somewhat indirect.

One important clue is that when a part of the brain including the insula is damaged due to disease or trauma, significant changes in emotions of the affected individual are observed. For example, smokers who experience damage to the insula suddenly cease to feel pleasure from smoking, and they are able to quickly give up the habit. (See here.)

Another clue is that fMRI brain scans show significantly increased activity in the insula when experimental subjects feel strong emotions. There are many example of this. In fact, the relationship seems so predictable that activity in the insula as revealed in fMRI scans is taken to be a marker for emotional experience.

However, there's a lot more we would like to know about exactly how the insula is involved with emotion. For instance, is there anything special about neurons found in the insula, some genes expressed in those neurons more than in neurons elsewhere? Or is the insula's role simply a matter of how it is connected to other parts of the brain? Are there particular hormones or neurotransmitters that are important for processing of emotions in the insula?

In order to even think about such questions, we need to look more closely at what is known about emotions themselves, from classical psychological studies.

To begin with, psychologists distinguish between different "levels" of emotion, not in the sense of intensity, but in the degree to which a particular emotion is more or less "fundamental" and related to basic instinctual needs or aversions. Fundametal emotions are such things as hunger, lust, craving, and fear. It is easily imagined that most animals with a developed central nervous system have such emotions.

Other emotions are a little more abstract, such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, anxiety, joy, surprise, delight, pleasure, and amusement. One supposes that substantially fewer animal species experience such "higher" emotions.

And then there are emotions which are pretty much limited to complex social animals that have a rich social life – for example, group loyalty, a sense of fairness or unfairness, altruism, trust, pride, shame, envy, jealousy, greed, grief, etc.

A whole lot more could be (and has been) said about such a categorization of emotions or alternative categorizations, but this will serve to provide an idea of what is meant by "emotion".

There are very good reasons for studying emotions per se. Here are some of them:

• Emotions play a large role in making moral and ethical judgments. The sense of "fairness" and empathy, as well as various other emotions (especially social ones), come in here. This was discussed here.
  
• Another special case of emotional involvement with decision making is found in politics. For instance, our attitudes towards particular candidates have a lot to do with our emotional reactions to the candidates as people – e. g., whether or not they give us a feeling of trust or security or empathy. (Some discussion here.)
  
• Emotions play a significant role in economics. For instance, choices made about investments depend a lot on whether one has emotions of fear (in troubled times) or greed (when the economy seems to be doing well).
  
• Emotions play a large role in decision making in general. Everyone understands the importance of "gut feelings" here. The emotions a person typically has in certain situations have a large effect on the decisions the person makes in such situations.
  
• Critiques of artificial intelligence and certain forms of cognitive psychology assert that intelligent behavior is not simply a matter of algorithmically applying rules and heuristics to known facts. The idea is that computers in their present form are not capable of fully human intelligent behavior because they are not embodied in the way humans are, and in particular they lack emotions. Such critiques have been posed by many philosophers and cognitive scientists, such as Hubert Dreyfus, and George Lakoff. The latter is a representative of the viewpoint known as "embodied philosophy".
  

We're not going to address all those issues right away. They just serve to remind us of things where more knowledge of the insula and emotions might help our understanding.

As an example of very recently reported research on the insula and emotions, we have this:

Why An Exciting Book Is Just As Thrilling As A Hair-raising Movie (8/12/08)

We all know, however, that reading a book describing the same scene can be similarly gripping. This week, in a paper published in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, Mbemba Jabbi, Jojanneke Bastiaansen and Christian Keysers show us why.

At the NeuroImaging Center of the University Medical Center Groningen of the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), Jabbi and colleagues compared what happens in our brains when we view the facial expressions of other people with the brain activity as we read about emotional experiences. ...

"Our striking result," said Keysers, "is that in all three cases, the same location of the anterior insula lit up. The anterior insula is the part of the brain that is the heart of our feeling of disgust. Patients who have damage to the insula, because of a brain infection for instance, lose this capacity to feel disgusted. If you give them sour milk, they would drink it happily and say it tastes like soda."

Prof. Keysers continued, "What this means is that whether we see a movie or read a story, the same thing happens: we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted– and that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through."

To summarize: the question was about similarities (and differences) in brain response to the emotion of disgust, which may be stimulated in three different ways: actual experience (tasting something very unpleasant), observation of facial expressions of others experiencing disgust, and subjective imagination of disgust.

It was already known that fMRI scans showed activity in the insula and an adjacent region (the frontal operculum) – collectively termed the IFO – as a result of experiencing or observing the emotion of disgust. The research showed that very similar activity occurred as a result of imagining disgust.

Further reading:

Why real and imagined disgust have the same effect (8/13/08) – New Scientist article about the research

Emotional Thrills From A Movie (or a Book) – blog post on this research

A Common Anterior Insula Representation of Disgust Observation, Experience and Imagination Shows Divergent Functional Connectivity Pathways – August 2008 research article in PLoS ONE

Tags: insula, insular cortex, emotion

Whom Do We Fear Or Trust?

Whom Do We Fear Or Trust? (8/5/08)

A pair of Princeton psychology researchers has developed a computer program that allows scientists to analyze better than ever before what it is about certain human faces that makes them look either trustworthy or fearsome.

In doing so, they have also found that the program allows them to construct computer-generated faces that display the most trustworthy or dominant faces possible.

Such work could have implications for those who care what effect their faces may have upon a beholder, from salespeople to criminal defendants, the researchers said.

There's another category of people who have a similar concern – politicians. Hmmm... salespeople, criminal defendants, politicians... lots in common there, no? What's missing from this list... preachers, TV political pundits, military officers... pretty long list.

Unfortunately, we haven't figured out how to run any large society, much less a modern one, without government and government officials, so we're stuck with politicians for some time to come, I'd guess. Well, at least that provides political scientists and researchers into aberrant psychology something to keep busy with.

The research described in the press release above isn't directly about politicians, but it's a sequel to work of the principal investigator (Alexander Todorov) that is:

Who Will Win An Election? Snap Judgments Of Face To Gauge Competence Usually Enough (10/22/07)

A split-second glance at two candidates' faces is often enough to determine which one will win an election, according to a Princeton University study.

Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov has demonstrated that quick facial judgments can accurately predict real-world election returns. Todorov has taken some of his previous research that showed that people unconsciously judge the competence of an unfamiliar face within a tenth of a second, and he has moved it to the political arena.

His lab tests show that a rapid appraisal of the relative competence of two candidates' faces was sufficient to predict the winner in about 70 percent of the races for U.S. senator and state governor in the 2006 elections.

Other reports on this research: here, here.

Duh. At first glance all he's saying is that people tend to make snap judgments about a candidate's competence... and those candidates go on to win the election. That's not surprising, especially if one hypothesizes that voters tend not to go much beyond their snap judgment. And perhaps that is a valid conclusion, though hardly a welcome one.

In fact, Todorov had already published research showing that people make snap judgments about trustworthiness of people in general:

Snap Judgments Decide A Face's Character, Psychologist Finds (8/22/06)

We may be taught not to judge a book by its cover, but when we see a new face, our brains decide whether a person is attractive and trustworthy within a tenth of a second, according to recent Princeton research.

Princeton University psychologist Alex Todorov has found that people respond intuitively to faces so rapidly that our reasoning minds may not have time to influence the reaction -- and that our intuitions about attraction and trust are among those we form the fastest.

OK, if Todorov's research is sound, people make snap judgments about whom they will trust or fear. So it would be useful to know more precisely what factors those judgments are based on. His latest research has tried to do just that. Quoting again from the latest press release:

Based on this data, the scientists found that humans make split-second judgments on faces on two major measures -- whether the person should be approached or avoided and whether the person is weak or strong.

From there, using a commercial software program that generates composites of human faces (based on laser scans of real subjects), the scientists asked another group of test subjects to look at 300 faces and rate them for trustworthiness, dominance and threat. Common features of both trustworthiness and dominance emerged. A trustworthy face, at its most extreme, has a U-shaped mouth and eyes that form an almost surprised look.

An untrustworthy face, at its most extreme, is an angry one with the edges of the mouth curled down and eyebrows pointing down at the center. The least dominant face possible is one resembling a baby's with a larger distance between the eyes and the eyebrows than other faces. A threatening face can be obtained by averaging an untrustworthy and a dominant face.

This is all rather discouraging. What is not addressed (yet) is how accurate such snap judgments are, especially as regards trustworthiness and competence of political candidates.

It's hardly as though perspicacious people haven't been thinking about such issues for a very long time, of course. If I knew Plato better, I'm sure there'd be some choice observations in there somewhere to cite. Sort of goes along with what he said about the kind of judgments of reality made by people who can observe only shadows on the walls of a cave.

But another astute observer of human nature did have something to say about judging the intentions of people just from studying faces:

There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.

(Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 4. This is spoken by King Duncan, regarding the Thane of Cawdor, who has just been executed for treason. Macbeth enters right after this remark, and Duncan makes him the new Thane. Slow learner, that Duncan.)

Interestingly, one of Todorov's conclusions is that the kind of face people find most trustworthy is one that features, basically, a smile. Here's Shakespeare's take on that, in words he gives to Hamlet:

O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain
(Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)

I have addressed previous similar studies along the same lines (by other investigators) here and here.

Discouraging? Yes. Especially so if this research were to accurately describe most of the electorate. But perhaps it would be better to look at whether there are subsets of the electorate that behave quite differently. Perhaps it would work to divide the (potential) electorate into those who have at least some interest in and knowledge of politics and government, and those who don't and basically don't give a damn.

In particular, there is some evidence that "undecided" voters, those who can't make up their minds until just before voting (if they vote at all) don't simply have a difficult time making a careful judgment. Instead, many "undecideds" are actually "low-information" voters, who don't follow politics very closely, and don't especially enjoy the process. Here are some (obviously partisan) anecdotal observations on this from the 2004 election.

If this is correct, then we can write off maybe 40-50% of the potential electorate as a random factor which is basically uninformed about and uninterested in details of politics and government. If they vote at all, their votes will be based largely on impressionistic factors of appearance, charisma, or group identity – snap judgments from the physical appearance of candidates, perhaps. Although many of them won't vote, those that do might make up perhaps 10% of the total, and they are fully capable of swinging any election in one direction or another.

It is often said that a deciding factor in the 1960 presidential election was that in the first televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon, the latter was recovering from illness, looked weak, and had a decided 5 o'clock shadow. Nixon lost the popular vote by only 120,000 votes. Given how things turned out after Nixon came back to win the office in 1968, the judgments people made in 1960 may not have been so bad. But still such judgments seem like little more than a coin toss.

Further reading:

Poli Psy? – September 2000 online Scientific American article about the "shallowness" of criteria some voters use in voting decisions

The functional basis of face evaluation – June 2008 research article in PNAS about the research described in the first-mentioned press release

Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes – June 2005 research article in Science by Todorov et al on the relationship between neotenous appearance and perceived competence

Appearance DOES Matter – June 2005 commentary in Science on the preceding article

Tags: political science

Consciousness, free will, etc.

For quite a long time, the subject of "consciousness" was not considered especially suitable for scientific investigation. A tremendous amount has been written about it, of course. But most of that has been written by philosophers rather than working scientists. Quite a few, if not a substantial majority, of philosophers seem to think that consciousness is a "mystery" that isn't likely to be understood scientifically anytime soon, if ever.

Well, on one hand, when a subject is not very amenable to scientific investigation, then it usually is philosophers, rather than scientists, who write and speak about it. Only when you see that situation change, and you have actual experimental scientists working on the problem and having the technology to actually conduct meaningful experiments, is it time to regard the subject as fair game for science.

At one time even physics was a subject discussed more by philosophers than by scientists. But that changed when people like Galileo and Newton came along, followed by many others. In regard to consciousness, perhaps the technology known as "functional MRI" may be the factor that tips the scales towards real science.

On the other hand, my general opinion of philosophers is well expressed by a quote attributed to one of the all time greatest scientists, C. F. Gauss: "When a philosopher says something that is true, then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial, then it is false."

However that may be, we are now in fact seeing real scientific work being done on the subject of consciousness. It's a vast field, I can only scratch the surface here, and I won't go into much detail about any of this. But perhaps a good example of relevant recent research on consciousness is this:

Brain scanner predicts your future moves

Long before you decided to read this story, your brain may have already said "click that link".

By scanning the brains of test subjects as they pressed one button or another – though not a computer mouse – researchers pinpointed a signal that divulged the decision about seven seconds before people ever realised their choice. The discovery has implications for mind-reading, and the nature of free will.

More reports on this research: here, here
Much more: here

Seven seconds. Think about that for a bit. Where, exactly, is "free will", if the brain has already made, or almost made, a decision seven seconds before one is even conscious of a decision having been made?

Sure, one can argue that "free will" comes into play near the final stage of the process, when a course of action is consciously considered before commitment is made to it. Perhaps. But consider something like drug addiction. Just how much "free will" does an addict actually have to resist his/her cravings? Rather little, no? There's quite a bit of research into addiction now, and it is supporting the idea that addictive behavior is largely driven by brain chemistry. I could cite dozens of recent reports in this area, but I need to move on to other stuff right now. Maybe more on addiction later.

Oh yes, and there are a number of other brain states that appear to significantly affect behavior much more strongly than does conscious deliberation. States such as pain, extreme hunger or thirst, the experience of being tortured by agents of the U. S. government, etc.

There's another area of research that comes to mind in connection with significant unconscious influences on people's thoughts and behavior. Psychologists have a term for it: "priming". What it means is that one can manipulate, at least on a statistical basis, the behavior of another person, such as an experimental subject, a voter, or a "consumer", by subtly exposing the subject to various kinds of cues before eliciting the behavior to be manipulated. The subject may be consciously aware of the cues, but not of how they affect subsequent behavior.

Again, I could probably come up with many examples of studies on this if I had more time. Maybe later. Just two examples now, this story that appeared last year: Who’s Minding the Mind?. I wrote about that here, along with another, somewhat older story (A New Study Suggests A Relationship Between Fear Of Death And Political Preferences). Something to think about in this election year.

Moving right along, this all sets the stage for the following very recent report:

Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face

The phenomenon that Dr. Wolfe’s Pop Art quiz exemplified is known as change blindness: the frequent inability of our visual system to detect alterations to something staring us straight in the face. The changes needn’t be as modest as a switching of paint chips. At the same meeting, held at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, the audience failed to notice entire stories disappearing from buildings, or the fact that one poor chicken in a field of dancing cartoon hens had suddenly exploded. In an interview, Dr. Wolfe also recalled a series of experiments in which pedestrians giving directions to a Cornell researcher posing as a lost tourist didn’t notice when, midway through the exchange, the sham tourist was replaced by another person altogether.

The article is a report by Natalie Angier on research into consciousness and attention by neuroscientist Jeremy Wolfe. I won't attempt to say much about it, except that it concerns the interplay of consciousness and attention. And how in some sense we are not really conscious of as much as we think we are. The sense data are streaming into our brains, and they do register at some level that appears to be conscious. But in fact, only a part of the information stream that is the focus of "attention" actually seems to matter." Attention" is the brain's mechanism for limiting actual processing to just a part of the data stream that, somehow, seems most important.

I won't attempt to summarize more than that. Angier is a pretty good writer. Read the article for yourself. Actually, speaking of Angier, I should remark that I have expressed reservations before about her writing style (here). There I described her style as "too flowery and gaudy for my taste". The article mentioned above is fairly tame in that regard. But sometimes what she writes seems, to me anyhow, to be best described as somewhat twee.

Now, "twee" is a word you may not be familiar with if you have been exposed mainly to U. S. English (and you don't do crossword puzzles). It's a British word. A rough American equivalent might be "affected". However, I used "twee" to make a point. Namely, that if you didn't know the meaning, but you looked it up, I'm pretty sure you won't have much trouble remembering it. Why? Because I brought it to your attention.

So you see, although you were probably conscious of the word when you read it, having had your attention focused on it will tend to be the catalyst that gets it added to your memory.

The brain has other mechanisms for directing consciousness in certain ways and for raising the probability that certain kinds of data get remembered. Emotion is one such psychological mechanism that has this effect. I've touched on this tangentially when I wrote about stress and memory here. Also think about "flashbulb memories".

The point is that sensory data that is accompanied by significant emotional valence tends to be preferentially stored in memory. Various hormones and growth factors (such as BDNF) seem to play a role in this process. Consciousness per se... not so much. You have been conscious of quite a lot that you have already forgotten the next day (such as, perhaps, what you had for breakfast a day or two ago).

Here's another report of recent research that tends in the same direction. It concerns the role of emotion in the sense of smell, and which olfactory experiences tend to be stored in memory:

One Bad Experience Linked To Sniffing Out The Danger

Each human nose encounters hundreds of thousands of scents in its daily travels perched front and center on our face. Some of these smells are nearly identical, so how do we learn to tell the critical ones apart?

Something bad has to happen. Then the nose becomes a very quick learner.

New research from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine shows a single negative experience linked to an odor rapidly teaches us to identify that odor and discriminate it from similar ones.

More reports on this research: here, here.

I don't think I need to comment further on that, with respect to how the emotional circuitry of the brain influences the memory storage circuitry.

Time to wrap up now. I'm going to indulge in a bit of anecdotal reporting on a few of my own observations on consciousness. This is just speculation on my part, not scientific data at all, of course. Think about your own experiences and see whether they aren't consistent with the possibility that consciousness is just another brain mechanism, which serves various purposes, and interacts in different ways with other brain mechanisms. If this is so, eventually we should be able to understand scientifically what the biology of consciousness is.

First off, I'll note that I recently had a colonoscopy. (Nothing bad found. Thanks for asking.) The most interesting part of the experience was how readily consciousness can be turned on and off. Before the procedure began, I was injected with two drugs: Demerol and Versed. The former blocks pain. The latter is a strong sedative that basically turns off consciousness for a brief, fairly predictable period of time.

For a couple of minutes after receiving the Versed, I didn't notice anything unusual, no drowsiness, no disorientation, nada. I just looked around and noticed various features of the immediate environment, such as the staff and the monitoring instruments. I can still picture that stuff fairly clearly. Of the next half hour or so while the procedure was going on, I can recall nothing at all. And then I was awake again, and everything seemed pretty normal. I can recall that period clearly too.

What I conclude from this is that consciousness and memory formation are both processes and/or mechanisms that can be turned off pretty mechanically with a simple chemical. Probably the memory formation is turned off first, so that the intermediate state of drowsiness (if it even occurred) was not remembered. And then as soon as the chemical has been metabolized away, consciousness and memory formation resume with little aftereffect. (Physicians maintain that a patient's judgment can be compromised for several hours afterwards. Perhaps so, but I could detect little evidence of that.) I was also told that patients under the effects of the drugs are still consciousness enough to follow verbal instructions. But of course, I have no memory of whether this is true.

This experience was not like falling asleep normally, when there is usually a definite period of drowsiness that one can often remember the next day. Nevertheless, once asleep one is no longer conscious in the usual sense. Again this suggests that consciousness is just a mechanism that can be turned off (though not by means of volition, unfortunately) at appropriate times.

But we all realize that many mental processes do not cease when we are asleep. For instance, perceptual data is still coming in and processed by the brain to some extent. Noises, especially, that can and do wake us up. Then there is dreaming, which seems to engage large parts of the machinery of consciousness, including emotional subsubsystems (fear and pleasure), and perceptual processing systems of vision and hearing – only on internally generated rather than external sensory data. Sometimes external perceptual data becomes part of the dream consciousness, but usually not.

Another interesting aspect of dreaming is how it interacts with memory. We all know how quickly, after we wake up, we forget about what we may have been dreaming. This suggests that the short term memory system has been functioning, but loses its content more or less as usual. Intermediate and long term memory systems seem to be shut down. It's very unusual (in my experience) to remember any dreams several hours later, unless I happened to think of them immediately after waking up.

Only, this doesn't seem to be entirely true. I've not infrequently had the experience with dreams, when I can "remember" details of being in places and situations and in the company of people that I've encountered in other dreams, perhaps not at all recently. So it seems that there is some sort of long term memory mechanism and storage capability that is specifically dedicated for use while dreaming. Perhaps this is just an aspect of the déjà vu effect.

Another intesting question about the state of consciousness during sleep is whether, or to what extent, the brain continues to engage in creative problem solving. We all know about the advice, when one has a difficult problem, to "sleep on it". This does seem to help a little, but probably it's more a case of letting sleep restore the freshness and alertness of one's mind. Ceasing to think about problems for awhile (whether hours or days) often has similar benefits. I'd say that I experience creative insights into problems rather more often in some place like the shower or out on a walk than I do right after awakening. So it doesn't seem to me that a great deal of actual ratiocination is going on during sleep. At least in my experience.

One last sort of observation, concerning how attention facilitates memory. I think most people find it a little difficult to recall what they've had to eat for lunch even a day or two ago, certainly a month or even a week ago. Unless, that is, there was something unusual about the circumstances of the meal. Such as eating something one hasn't tried before, or at least not for a long time. Or having a meal in a restaurant or location one hasn't eaten in often (or ever). In such cases, one tends to recall many little details of the experience, not just the items in the meal itself. For instance, one tends to remember noticing specific ingredients in what's eaten, and what flavors seemed to be especially pleasant or unpleasant.

When I think about it, I can still recall where I was the first time I had a cola beverage, and how I enjoyed it. I was only six or so. Now, perhaps what I can remember was not actually the first time. And perhaps I'm only remembering past experiences of having that memory. But still... this is about an experience that was decades ago, and without particularly intense related emotions, just general pleasure. But the experience was marked by having my full attention at the time. Needless to say, I can't summon up the perceptual experience of (probably) any other consumption of a similar beverage... except the one I had today.

From that experience, I draw the conclusion that attention is a mechanism which is separate from consciousness, yet which regulates it in such a way that essentially permanent long term memories can be formed. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine that specific biological features will eventually be identified that implement the mechanisms of attention and consciousness in general.

A couple of things about memory

First:

Children's Memory May Be More Reliable Than Adults' In Court Cases

Researchers Valerie Reyna, human development professor, and Chuck Brainerd, human development and law school professor--both from Cornell University--argue that like the two-headed Roman god Janus, memory is of two minds--that is, memories are captured and recorded separately and differently in two distinct parts of the mind.

They say children depend more heavily on a part of the mind that records, "what actually happened," while adults depend more on another part of the mind that records, "the meaning of what happened." As a result, they say, adults are more susceptible to false memories, which can be extremely problematic in court cases.

The implications of these results for legal testimony is not what I find especially interesting here. In fact, there are reasons why the testimony of children has sometimes been found to be less reliable than that of adults. Namely, in some cases, the techniques used to interview the children (before trial) have been improperly coercive or suggestive of particular interpretations.

What does seem interesting is the hypothesis that in adults memories of the same event tend to be stored in two distinct forms: literal details of "what happened", and interpretive judgments about the "meaning" of an event. But that in children it is primarily the actual details that are stored.

Reyna and Brainerd's Fuzzy Trace Theory hypothesizes that people store two types of experience records or memories: verbatim traces and gist traces.

Verbatim traces are memories of what actually happened. Gist traces are based on a person's understanding of what happened, or what the event meant to him or her. Gist traces stimulate false memories because they store impressions of what an event meant, which can be inconsistent with what actually happened.

The researchers have experimental evidence to support their conclusions. Some of this is noted in earlier accounts, such as this:

Children Less Prone To False Memories, Implications For Eyewitness Testimony, Study Shows

In a study published in the May issue of Psychological Science, Brainerd and Reyna presented a list of words for groups of first, fifth and ninth graders. Many of the words from this "study list" were related to each other (by belonging to certain categories such as animals, furniture, men's names) while others were unrelated "filler" words.

After a short break, the students were presented with a new "test list" composed of study list words, new words belonging to the aforementioned categories (animals, furniture, etc.), and distracter words that were new and entirely unrelated to the categories or the study list. Their task was to identify whether they had previously heard a word or not.

As predicted, if the test list provided a new word with a closely related meaning (a "semantic relation") to a word from the study list, older children were more likely to assert that they had heard it before. Simply put, the older children had more false memories in this case than younger children.

One can speculate about what's going on here. As people mature through childhood, they are constantly learning about the interrelationship of isolated details and events. (For instance, "Dad acts more scary after he's been drinking beer.") In addition, the accumulation of details makes more literal forms of memory cumbersome (and liable to confusion), so people learn to make abstractions and interpretations that summarize details and make storage easier by associating similar details in more general categories. However, this kind of fuzzy storage (or "fuzzy traces" as Brainerd and Reyna call it) can misrepresent the facts. (For instance, "Dad was drunk when he hit me" – which might not actually be true.)

Second, and not directly related to this, there are two quite indepentdent studies that show something about the relationship between memory and experience of stress.

The first item concerns observation of squirrels:

Correct Levels Of Stress Hormones Boost Learning, Squirrel Study Suggests

Tests on the influence that a stress-related hormone has on learning in ground squirrels could have an impact on understanding how it influences human learning, according to a University of Chicago researcher.

Jill Mateo, Assistant Professor in Comparative Human Development, has found that when they perform normal survival tasks, ground squirrels learn more quickly if they have a modest amount of cortisol, a hormone produced in response to stress, than those with either high or low levels of cortisol.

In humans, cortisol production is also related to stress and is known to have an impact on learning, but that impact is not well understood, Mateo said.

This should sound familiar to anyone who's been through even a few moderately difficult college courses. Namely, if the work in a particular course isn't difficult enough to cause at least a little stress, retention of the details may not be very complete. Without some stress, the material just doesn't seem "important" enough, even if it's new to the student, to compel the student's attention to the details and the complexity. But of course, if the material is difficult enough to cause excessive stress, anxiety can get in the way of successfully organizing the material in the student's mind.

The second study looked at the actual neurobiology of learning under conditions of acute stress:

Short-term Stress Can Affect Learning And Memory

Short-term stress lasting as little as a few hours can impair brain-cell communication in areas associated with learning and memory, University of California, Irvine researchers have found.

It has been known that severe stress lasting weeks or months can impair cell communication in the brain's learning and memory region, but this study provides the first evidence that short-term stress has the same effect.

As it turns out, another stress-related hormone besides cortisol is involved, corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH), and the latter is more significant under conditions of acute stress:

In their study, Baram and her UC Irvine colleagues identified a novel process by which stress caused these effects. They found that rather than involving the widely known stress hormone cortisol, which circulates throughout the body, acute stress activated selective molecules called corticotropin releasing hormones, which disrupted the process by which the brain collects and stores memories.

Learning and memory take place at synapses, which are junctions through which brain cells communicate. These synapses reside on specialized branchlike protrusions on neurons called dendritic spines.

In rat and mouse studies, Baram's group saw that the release of CRH in the hippocampus, the brain's primary learning and memory center, led to the rapid disintegration of these dendritic spines, which in turn limited the ability of synapses to collect and store memories.

The researchers discovered that blocking the CRH molecules' interaction with their receptor molecules eliminated stress damage to dendritic spines in the hippocampal cells involved with learning and memory.

The role of cortisol, in learning under conditions of moderate stress, remains somewhat less clear. In addition to the squirrel study, anecdotal experience with so-called "flashbulb memories" supports the idea that some degree of stress can assist the formation of memories. The Wikipedia article states, without references, "Some biologists believe that the hormone cortisol, which is released in response to stressful incidents, cooperate with epinephrine (adrenaline) to cause the formation of flashbulb memories by the brain, functioning to help remembering things to avoid in the future." The squirrel study suggests cortisol actually has some role in memory formation, rather than being just a coincidental byproduct of stress. (See also the article on Emotion and memory.

Tags: memory, stress, cortisol, corticotropin-releasing hormone

Valentine's Day news

Yeah, yeah, this is late. So?

Every year we read news stories like the following right around this time. Worth thinking about. (By the way, Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from "Tristan und Isolde" is playing on my computer right now. Synchronicity?)

And here's a little more advice you didn't ask for. First, go see the movie Juno, if you haven't yet. It's good. Really. Second, if you want to understand all this you need to get the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature is a good place to start, if you need one.

The Differences in Gender -- Sealed With a Kiss

A kiss, it turns out, is definitely not always just a kiss.

As Valentine's Day approaches, research has begun shedding light on that most basic of all human expressions of love -- the smooch -- which has received surprisingly little scientific scrutiny.

"You'd think there would be a lot of research on kissing behavior. It's so common," said Susan M. Hughes, an assistant professor of psychology at Albright College in Pennsylvania, whose recent study is one of the first to probe snogging in depth. "But there isn't. It's really been ignored."

In fact, much about love and attraction remains mysterious.

"This is a seminal paper," said Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University anthropologist who studies love. "It's remarkable that we don't know more about these things. But love has not really been well studied until recently."

In people, kissing to express affection is almost universal. About 90 percent of human cultures do it.

Carnal Knowledge: They give pleasure; science asks why

There are some natural phenomena whose wonder only deepens upon scientific investigation.

Take the orgasm. Scientists know it involves muscle contractions. They know it makes your pupils expand, and heart rate and blood pressure surge.

But why do orgasms feel good?

I was surprised to find that this is still something of a scientific mystery - though one that a few intrepid researchers are just starting to unravel.

"Really and truly, people don't know," says Julia Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research and coauthor of Becoming Orgasmic.

Right now, says Heiman, there's a big debate over how the female orgasm evolved. Researchers would also like to know just how different the female kind is from the male.

"Why is it easier for women to have multiple orgasms than it is for men?" Heiman asks. "How does it interact with attachment issues?"

There are lots of other questions, she says, but oddly, in our supposedly sex-obsessed society, it's nearly impossible to get funding for sex research.

Another complication: The orgasm question touches on some profound mysteries about how feelings and consciousness can emerge from the brain.

The Merry Band of Wrigglers

The old adage says that a wife can't change her husband, but the truth is that women for thousands of years have been shaping one crucial male attribute: sperm. Men tend to produce as many sperm as possible as quickly as possible, a manufacturing decision that sacrifices quality control: Their sperm are frequently mutated or deformed as a result. Why, then, do men make millions of sperm at once? Because they're adapting to ward off the effects of women's frequent cheating, according to a paper published in December in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Humans aren't especially good at monogamy. Evidence gathered from surveys and paternity tests suggests that 25 percent of women and 30 percent of men cheat on their spouses at least once during marriage. The evolutionary reason that men cheat is pretty simple: to father as many children as they can. It's more complicated for women, who can only give birth so many times. The quality of the child, then, wins over quantity. Because men with the best genes aren't always the most stable and resourceful partners (they don't have to be), women might marry the latter but cheat with the former. Then they can become pregnant with a genetically superior child who will, if her mother can pull it off, grow up with the help of her unwitting spouse.

Why Perfect Dates Make Lousy Partners

The best "catches" in dating land may be the worst choices in the long-run, new research shows.

Popular people who monitor themselves carefully in social situations and thereby appear to be the most socially appropriate are often highly sought after as romantic partners, a study finds, but these people show less satisfaction and commitment in relationships than socially-awkward people.

By self-monitoring, people assess how their actions affect others and adjust to fit the appropriateness of the situation. They screen their words and behavior to suit the people around them.

"High self-monitors are social chameleons," said Northwestern University professor of communication studies Michael E. Roloff."And, because they're quick to pick up on social cues, are socially adept and unlikely to say things upsetting to others, they are generally well-liked and sought after."

Self-monitoring is often a helpful attribute.

"Research finds [self-monitors] to be excellent negotiators and far more likely to be promoted at work than their low self-monitoring peers,” Roloff said.

But there’s a downside for high self-monitors when it comes to their romantic relationships.

"High self-monitors may appear to be the kind of people we want to have relationships with, but they themselves are less committed to and less happy in their relationships than low self-monitors," Roloff said.

More: Is Your Dating Partner Happy? With Some People It Is Hard To Know

The next item is about rats, but human folklore suggests it's very likely true for humans as well:

Females love the sweet smell of sexual success

It might be the sweet smell of success or the bitter whiff of despair, but there's something in the odour of a male rat that tells a female whether he's been copulating like crazy or starved of sex for days. And to make matters worse for frustrated males, the females much prefer the smell of road-tested studs.

The next is a fairly interesting article. Unfortunately, the link may turn into a pumpkin rather soon, since Nature isn't very generous with such things. Snarf it quickly if you want it.

Love: You have 4 minutes to choose your perfect mate

Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick have probably seen more first dates than most. The social scientists at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have watched hundreds of videos of single people as they participate in a curious, but not unpopular, trend known as speed dating. Two participants spill their souls to each other for a set time, say four minutes, and try to decide whether they might have a future together. When the time is up, they move on to a new partner, sometimes talking to a dozen or more people in a night. ...

From a purely biological standpoint, the success of a partnership hinges mainly on one thing, reproduction. But for humans, who give birth to exceptionally weak, awkward and totally dependent babies, strong pair bonding and the sharing of parental duties can play an important part in the success of their offspring. It is strange, then, that a goal as simple as forming a pair bond could lead to an emotion as complex as romantic love. ...

Since the 1940s, social scientists have brought the tools of their trade to bear on such lofty questions. Finkel and Eastwick are now using some of the newest and most controversial techniques. The fast-paced format of speed dating could be exhilarating, daunting or perhaps even dorky for participants and observers alike. Nevertheless, the researchers say that it could help to reveal some of the mysteries behind that uniquely human emotion — love. Indeed, their research, including a paper published today1, has already started to turn up some surprises.

In the 1940s, when scientists first started to pick at the basis of human attraction, psychologists interviewed single people and asked them what they would value in a partner. Many of the values were the same in both men and women, but two things stood out in survey after survey. Women valued the wealth of their partner much more than men did, and men valued attractiveness more than women did.

These differences can even make sense in evolutionary terms. A woman looking to have children would want the support of a good provider to help her children succeed in life. Men's seemingly superficial preference for beauty was seen as a proxy for health. Symmetry, skin tone and a favourable waist-to-hip ratio could reasonably point to a woman who would not only survive childbirth, but also pass on lots of healthy genes.

More: What Men And Women Say And Do In Choosing Romantic Partners Are Two Different Matters

Other studies on such themes:

Women More Perceptive Than Men In Describing Relationships

'Love Hormone' Promotes Bonding: Could It Treat Anxiety?

Beauty Bias: Can People Love The One They Are Compatible With?

A Sense Of Scarcity: Why It Seems Like All The Good Ones Are Taken

'Hotties' Not So Hot When You're In Love, Online Dating Researchers Find

Probing Women's Response To Male Odor