Jay Z’s Geopolitical Brain

Matt Yglesias had a post yesterday quoting Mark Lynch’s amusing discussion of the feud between Jay-Z and The Game framed in international relations terms.  At the end, Yglesias offers his thoughts:

One thing worth noting is that even when restraint can be identified as the best strategy, it’s often emotionally difficult to choose this path. When someone comes after you, you get angry. You want to respond in an intelligent and effective manner, yes, but there’s also a desire to do something that will make you feel better. And lashing out as per the Ledeen Doctrine (”Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business”) often can achieve that goal. And of course there’s a risk that members of Jay-Z’s camp who urge a policy of restraint will be accused of actively harboring pro-Game sympathies or otherwise failing to manifest a sufficient degree of loyalty.

Rap, international strategy, surely there must be a neuroscience angle somewhere in here.  The key point is Yglesias’ observation that “it’s often emotionally difficult to choose this path.”  It’s worth thinking about why we have those emotions in the first place, and that’s where neuroscience and psychology come in.

Emotions are a quick and dirty way to get an animal to act reliably in a particular manner under certain circumstances.  We don’t, of course, know exactly what emotions are like in non-human animals, but it’s safe the assume that they play some role in those animal possessing the same neurological structures implicated in our own passions.  Whether or not they’re widely experienced in the animal kingdom, however, they certainly played a central role in our development as a social species.

Emotions are somewhat more complex than habitual or instinctual reactions, but they’re far less sophisticated than what you might call our intellect.  To be sure, there is advantage in this simplicity.  Unlike cognitive control and deductive reasoning, emotions don’t burn through cognitive resources.  They prompt swift action unfettered by the niggling uncertainty that accompanies any serious attempt at analysis.  As for whether emotions or reason are objectively better?  It’s probably a pointless question.  They’re different animals, and each is better in the proper circumstances.

Increasingly, however, we find ourselves in circumstances that favor reason.  Lynch has highlighted two such instances.  I don’t really know much about rap, so I’ll stay away from that one.  But in the IR case, it’s clear.  When you actually sit down and think about it, it becomes unarguable that the emotional response is the wrong one.  If you want to get really technical and fully employ the powers of our neocortex, you can think about it in game theory terms.

International relations are not a zero-sum game.  We got angry after 9/11, and we tried to pick Iraq up and throw it against the wall.  Unsurprisingly, this did not go as well as planned.  Even if the post-Saddam occupation hadn’t been such a mess, the war weakened our alliances with the rest of the western world and severely alienated those in the Muslim world that might have otherwise been sympathetic.  We eliminated a country that was in no serious way a threat.  And on the Iraqi side, although Saddam Hussein was for sure a blameworthy dictator, it would be difficult to argue that life has been better these past 6 years for the majority of the Iraqi population, to say nothing of the thousands who lost their lives as collateral damage.

A more principled approach would surely not have lead to the Iraq war.   But the problem with intellect and emotion is that, even when they are opposite, they are not inverse.  Becoming persuaded that your emotions are wrong often does little or nothing to make them go away.  We can learn to control our emotions–it seems that this is a central role of the dlPFC–but the fact remains that it’s hard.  It requires constant effort.  And, perhaps most troublingly, there’s no real correlation between how wrong the emotion is and how easy it is to overrule.

On Neuroscience, Journalism, and Truth

I mentioned this article last week on my new Twitter feed, but I feel it is good enough that it deserves a full post.  It’s a piece from NPR online that delves fairly deeply into the various issues that complicate and potentially cloud the interpretation of neuroscience research that uses fMRI.  To anyone engaged in that research on a daily basis, there will be little new to discover by reading it, but I suspect that non-scientists will learn much about just how much we can, and often do, get wrong with neuroimaging.  In fact, the breadth of the gap between those two experiences is sort of the point itself, as even intelligent and engaged lay consumers of popular neuroscience writing are rarely exposed to the many caveats that should accompany most findings.

Of course, the problem of sensationalism and technical illiteracy is endemic to science writing (and I would strongly recommend this Bloggingheads diavlog from the past weekend that discusses the depressing state of scientific understanding and science journalism).  But neuroscience research undeniably draws a special degree of attention–we’re of course fascinated with understanding ourselves, and the technological glitz of fMRI seemingly promises the ultimate means of accomplishing that–and so it likewise carries a greater responsibility to communicate the facts fully and accurately.

One ubiquitous fault in the popular discussion of neuroscience, which even the NPR piece stands guilty of, is the use of the phrase “lights up” to describe what putatively involved brain regions are doing during some activity.  I hate this phrase, and I wish it could be forever expunged from the vocabulary of science writers.  I’d be extremely interested to hear where this idiom was invented, but it’s not hard to see why it’s so common: the pretty “spot on brain” pictures appear to capture neural tissue flashing like a beacon.  In reality, though, those figures are just a way of communicating the result of a statistical test comparing activity between two conditions.

If we’re right about fMRI, of course, a well-designed experiment will lead to one or several brain regions doing something interesting, and they might even experience more activity, as the “lights up” trope implies.  The problem with the image, though, is that there is electrical activity going on all over your brain at all times.  And fMRI does not even measure this activity, it measures blood flow.  From increased neural firing to a rush of oxygenated blood, out through the magnet to a computer, transformed by a half-dozen measures of pre-processing and than statistical analysis, the steps between brain activity and finalized neuroimaging data are many and large.  Talking about brain activity as “lighting up” and implying that the pretty pictures accompanying your article show this happening only serves to reinforce a misleading perception of how the science works. 

Lobsters, Lasers, and Pain

As a means of preparing for the Infinite Summer, I spent a bit of last month reading some of David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction essays.  Perhaps my favorite of these is Consider the Lobster, well known for lending its title to a DFW compilation that I would recommend to all.  I find Infinite Summer’s brief on the piece to be both accurate and amusing:

It’s hard to know what Gourmet Magazine had in mind when they dispatched Wallace to the Maine Lobster Festival, but Consider the Lobster–an 8,000 words treatise (complete with footnotes) that grapples with the ethical quandary of boiling sentient creatures alive for the sake of culinary enjoyment–was probably not it.

As David Foster Wallace was a rather omnivorous thinker, the essay actually contains a serious discussion of the prevailing neuroscientific consensus on the question of whether lobsters are capable of experiencing pain:

Several irreproducible segues down the road from the PETA anecdotes, Dick—whose son-in-law happens to be a professional lobsterman and one of the Main Eating Tent’s regular suppliers—articulates what he and his family feel is the crucial mitigating factor in the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive issue: “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part.”

Besides the fact that it’s incorrect in about 11 different ways, the main reason Dick’s statement is interesting is that its thesis is more or less echoed by the Festival’s own pronouncement on lobsters and pain, which is part of a Test Your Lobster IQ quiz that appears in the 2003 MLF program courtesy of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council: “The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain.”

Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is still either false or fuzzy. The human cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc. Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus. On the other hand, it is true that the cerebral cortex is involved in what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional experience of pain—i.e., experiencing painful stimuli as unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on.

I’m reasonably certain that constitutes the only time the word “nociceptor” has or will appear in the pages of Gourmet Magazine.  Of course, Consider the Lobster first appeared in 2004, and with the rapid pace of modern cognitive neuroscience, we’re starting to learn quite a bit more about exactly this question.  In fact, I was happy to see a highly relevant study arrive last month in The Journal of Neuroscience.

dlPFC Now On Twitter

A brief announcement:

I’ve decided to inaugurate a twitter feed for the blog, available here:    http://twitter.com/dlpfcblog

At the moment, I imagine its primary use will be for shameless self-promotion, but I’m hoping I’ll get in the habit of passing on interesting articles or studies I come across that don’t earn a full blog post.

While I’m add it, I’ll just point out that you can subscribe to my RSS feed here, and please email me here with any good links, comments, questions, criticisms, or ideas for posts.

Looking for the Mathematical Brain

An interesting and largely unanswered question concern the acquisition of our ability to understand and perform mathematics.  We appear to innately possess an concrete grasp of only a handful of small values, and yet we frequently engage in transactions for quantities that reach into the hundreds or thousands.

Our ability to perform these computations no doubt speaks to the substantial development in our capacity for abstract reason, but there is plenty of evidence that the mechanism is far from perfectly rational.  For example, our approximated mental addition and subtraction are marked by a curious pattern of errors: we tend to overestimate the answer when adding and underestimate when subtracting.  And of course, the fact that computers long ago outclassed us in the domain of basic calculation and yet still struggle to do something as simple (for us) as identify the subject of a picture suggests that our minds are not ideally suited for arithmetic.

In an alternate theory, our mathematical reasoning co-opted the neural architecture that serves similar cognitive processing.  Evolution tends to take the easiest route, and building on top of a module that already exists is much more efficient than producing a novel one.  A paper in last week’s Science supports this theory, as it shows that a brain region responsible for eye movement is directly involved in mental arithmetic.

Apologies and David Foster Wallace

Alright, internet is now all hooked up and I’m settled in, so blogging should, no, will resume.  I’ve been quite lazy about the whole thing for a while now, which I feel bad about but have resolved to rectify.  In addition to this blog’s typical fare, I may or may not begin posting about Infinite Jest, which I’ve now dived headfirst into as part of Infinite Summer.  Either way, expect a post or two on non-Jest D.F.W. sometime later this week.  If you happen to have also found Infinite Summer on your own (apologies for not linking to it earlier) and you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll probably also be interested in Ezra Klein et al. blogging the novel over at A Supposedly Fun Blog.

Now, to work on a real post…

Reflections on Gaze, Attention, and Other Minds

There is a surprising amount of truth in the old adage that “the eyes are the window to the soul.”  We possess an innate ability to understand that the focus of someone else’s vision is the object of her attention.  This ability is an important part of autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen’s model for our specialized cognitive module devoted to social processing, and he has called the vast nonverbal sphere of social communication “the language of the eyes.”

Because of this ability, we’re also able to quickly trace others’ vision and lock onto whatever they are looking at.  The neural substrate of this behavior, known as gaze following, might have less immediately apparent implications for the broader project of understanding what makes us human, but it is nevertheless a computationally interesting question.  Now a study published in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (the article is open access) has unified a deeper understanding of the mechanics of gaze following with a fundamental attribute of social cognition: neural mirroring.

Stephen Shephard, Jeffrey Klein, Robert Deaner, and Michael Platt examined gaze following behaviors in rhesus monkeys using a simple task.  

Greene and Knobe on Bloggingheads

Apologies for the lack of posts recently.  I was preparing for (and then executing) a move to Cambridge, and I have not yet set up internet in my new apartment.  I’m currently reading a fascinating study for a new research blogging post, which I hope to get up soon (but probably tomorrow).  In the meantime, everyone should watch this episode of Bloggingheads with Joshua Greene (whose work I discussed recently) and Joshua Knobe on the psychology and neuroscience of morality.

(Update:  Well, for some reason I can’t seem to get the embed feature to work.  But you should still click through on the link about and watch the discussion.)

The Conservative Media Bias

E.J. Dionne offered what I think is a critically important observation about the dynamics of the American media in his column the other day (also worthwhile are Matt Yglesias’ and Ezra Klein’s responses).  Despite the constant conservative clamoring about the a pervasive liberal media bias, it’s really hard to look at the seriousness with which the media treats Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and not see a rightward tilt.  Of course, both Dionne and I are liberals, and if social psychology tells us anything it’s that everyone imposes their own filters and biases on the world.  Still, his point that nary a position to the left of the President makes it into the cable news debate is pretty much an objective fact, and this truly does have a distortionary effect on the way policy and politics are communicated to the broader public.

The difference between my claim that the media tilts to the right and the traditional claim about liberal media bias, though, is that I don’t think there’s some conscious effort by reporters and news directors to push the conservative position.  Instead, there’s a messy confluence of factors that each push coverage of the debate a little bit further to the right.  An important one is cultural.  Many far right social positions are tied closely to religion and nostalgic evocations of Americana that make them difficult to criticize.

That’s not to say that the far right positions are valid, or that conservative extremism is endemic to actual American values, but their proponents effectively hide behind the “real American” image.  In contrast, far-left policies are associated with cultural and academic elitism that tends to be much easier to dismiss or reject outright.  For all of the conservative whining about political correctness, they’re probably the largest beneficiaries of it.

Another factor is one I’ve written about quite a bit before: the intuitive appeal of conservatism. 

On Cognitive Limitations and Subprime Mortgages

Last week’s Newsweek had an article (which I found via the excellent Nudge blog) on the Venkatraman and Huettel study I wrote about Wednesday, which is an interesting read.  The piece focuses on the second result of the experiment, which detailed the strong relationship between ventral striatal response to reward and propensity to engage in simplification behavior.  It makes a strong and direct connection between this finding and the current mess we’re in, focusing on the suggestion that consumers who blundered into adjustable-rate mortgages they ended up not being able to afford did so because of a pattern of sensitivity to reward like that observed in the study.

I certainly think it’s possible, and even likely, that this connection exists, but I do wish the Newsweek article were a little bit more clear that selecting a mortgage is an experience far removed from the task used in the experiment, and nothing in the paper substantiates the claim that a similar effect might occur during such a long-range decision.  With that said, I don’t think you need to focus so strongly on what particular region of the brain might be involved in simplification behavior (as Newsweek does, stressing the ventral striatum in the first sentence) to get at the broader policy implications of a brain-based perspective on economic choice.

We don’t simplify because we’re stupid or because we’re so gripped by the intoxicating promise of reward that we cannot think clearly.  We simplify because the “rational,” algorithmic mode of decision-making places a huge burden on our cognitive resources.  When our ability to simplify decisions and rely on intuition evolved, moreover, none of our choices carried direct consequences that extended 30 years into the future.  But because we’re bad at intuitively making those decisions, we’re equally bad at intuitively realizing when we’re facing one.  This is where choice architecture comes in, and why I think it’s so important to move in the direction of paying attention to whether an actual human can best solve the variety of problems we face in our increasingly complex world.

Although I think the involvement of the ventral striatum in simplification strategies and of the other regions identified by the study is incredibly interesting from a scientific perspective, you can see why it’s not neccessary to know exactly what brain regions are involved in simplifcation to be sure that we do simplify.  Just thinking about the fact that the brain is a limited, physical system that evolved under certain constraints and values efficiency points you in that direction.  This illustrates, I think, the weird state of neuroeconomics research: the field is still incredibly young and has not come close to realizing much of its promise, yet there are still issues where its insights can and should be implemented right now.