An Official, Albeit Superfluous, Notice

So it’s probably pretty apparent by now, but I’m officially considering myself on hiatus from the blog for the time being.  I’m sure I’ll be back in some form in the future, and perhaps I’ll continue to provide content in some capacity for the time being–probably on my Twitter feed .  Anyway, the past 10 months or so have been fun, and I want to thank everyone for reading my blog, leaving comments, and sending me emails.

Law And Neuroscience Blog Reading Group

I really do promise to start writing some actual posts soon, but I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to this notice on the Law and Neuroscience Blog (which, by the way, you already read; right?):

just wanted to announce that Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson have graciously agreed to participate in an on-line reading group here on The Law and Neuroscience Blog later this fall.  We have yet to formally set the date, but once we do I will post the official dates and times.  For now, I just wanted to say a few things about this exciting event.  First, as many of you know, Pardo and Patterson have recently written two widely discussed papers which approach the gathering field of neurolaw with a very critical eye:

1. Pardo, M. and Patterson,D. Forthcoming. “Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience.” The University of Illinois Law Review.
2. Pardo, M. and Patterson, D. Forthcoming. “Minds, Brains, and Norms.” Neuroethics.

More news to come, of course, and I’m sure I’ll have some thoughts on the subject to share.

The Neural Case for Health Care Reform

The moral case for health reform was not the focus of President Obama’s address to Congress Wednesday night. It did, however, form the core of the most eloquent and compelling section of the speech, which followed the invocation of the late Senator Ted Kennedy:

That large-heartedness – that concern and regard for the plight of others – is not a partisan feeling.  It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling.  It, too, is part of the American character.  Our ability to stand in other people’s shoes.  A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand.  A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

…

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem.  They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom.  But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, and the vulnerable can be exploited.  And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter – that at that point we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges.  We lose something essential about ourselves.

Congressional Democrats may have capitulated to the idea that the moral case for health reform is politically nonviable and, if that’s what it takes to pass legislation, I can’t condemn them.  But that doesn’t mean that we should forget the argument altogether.  If we can escape the suffocating echo chamber of craven Washington politics, the moral case for action is quite strong.

There are many facets to the argument, but one of the strongest is drawn from empirical evidence.  A long-standing, but perhaps not all that well known, research finding is that one’s socioeconomic status in early life is a strong predictor of health outcomes throughout adulthood and old age.  This relationship holds through the exclusion of any number of potentially confounding variables, including physical activity, diet, smoking, occupation, and any number of others.

Scientists have long suspected that there is a critical period in early life for the fine-tuning of the stress-response system in our bodies, and that low early life class can cause disruptions in its function that remain for the duration of one’s life.  A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences offers evidence that supports this theory.

A group of researchers lead by Gregory Miller from the University of British Columbia examined differences in the expression of certain genetic factors in subjects who had different early life social statuses to search for evidence of altered stress response and immune system function.  In particular, they looked at genes involved in control of the autonomic nervous system and glucocorticoid receptors.

Despite dramatically different early life experiences, the subjects in this study were identically matched in current socioeconomic status as well as a variety of lifestyle factors.  Nevertheless, there were significant differences both in genetic expression and in hormonal function.  Early life misfortune manifested in what the researches called “the adoption of a defensive phenotype,” with higher levels of circulating stress hormones (despite identical perceived stress), elevated autonomic nervous system signaling, and compromised immune function.

The consequences of these biological changes are both real and serious: increased risk of infectious, respiratory, and cardiovascular disease.  Fortunately many of the subjects in this and other similar studies had managed to move up in life, and might be able to afford the medical treatments they will be cursed with.  Others, however, are not so lucky, and with the ever-accelerating income inequality in this country, even more will continue not to be.

Senator Kennedy’s older brother, when speaking at Amherst College in his last public address as President of the United States, remarked that “there is inherited wealth in this country and also inherited poverty.”  This remains true, only now we know that along while some inherit estates, others inherit a lifetime of disease.

I respect the conservative commitment to individual responsibility, but I don’t see how you can look at this science and yet fail to see the moral case for increased collective responsibility in tending to the sick.  It proves that the goal of egalitarian policy is not just the fulfillment of an abstract moral code but the achievement of real consequences for the lives of other Americans. Liberals should care about fairness not as an end in itself but as a means to the end of making the world a better place for others.

And I believe we can do it.  The main focus of this blog is how we might understand our own nature.  Concluding his speech at Amherst, President Kennedy shared Robert Frost’s thoughts on this subject:

Take human nature altogether since time began,
And it must be a little more in favor of man,
Say a fraction of one per cent at the very least,
Our hold on the planet wouldn’t have so increased.

Miller, G., Chen, E., Fok, A., Walker, H., Lim, A., Nicholls, E., Cole, S., & Kobor, M. (2009). Low early-life social class leaves a biological residue manifested by decreased glucocorticoid and increased proinflammatory signaling Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (34), 14716-14721 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0902971106

The Neural Basis of Multitasking

In a headline-grabbing recent study, the NHTSA revealed that talking on a cell phone–even with a hands free headset–is effectively the same as driving with a .08 blood alcohol reading, or legal intoxication.  Texting is even worse, but a poll released yesterday showed that a majority (52%) of the world’s drivers often have their thumbs occupied behind the wheel.  These are only particularly dangerous examples of a common and rather curious fact about how our brains work: we’re really quite bad at multitasking.

It’s surprising, because our brains are essentially massively parallel processing machines.  Even the simple activity of gazing out at the ocean in total bliss requires the coordination of millions of perceptual processes.  When it comes to large-scale goal directed attention or action, however, we struggle to do more than a single thing at once.  A paper published last month in Neuron looked into the brain activity associated with multitasking and attempted to understand why.

A research group at Vanderbilt led by Paul Dux studied the changes that occur when people learn to perform two different tasks–a visual-manual task and an auditory-vocal task–at the same time.  fMRI brain scanning revealed that no areas of the brain respond only when the two activities are undertaken together. In other words, there is no part of the brain explicitly devoted to handling multitasking.  The researchers did find, however, that many regions of the brain were involved in these tasks but that only one, the left inferior frontal junction (IFJ), was more active when they were performed together.

The subjects in this experiment initially found it very difficult to multitask, but they got better with training.  The researchers thus looked at what was happening in the IFJ when these improvements were made to understanding how multitasking works in neural tissue.  They considered three separate hypotheses, each of which made different claims about the neural response to multitasking training.

In the first story, we get better at multitasking because the processing moves away from the slow abstraction of the prefrontal cortex to direct inflexible circuits linking sensory and motor areas.  To test this theory, the researchers looked at the effective connectivity between the regions involved in this task.  Even with training, however, there was no strengthening in the direct circuits between perception and response.  The information was still passing through the IFJ, it was just doing so more quickly.

A second hypothesis, then, was that dedicated circuits formed within the IFJ to segment and accelerate multitasking processes.  Dux and his colleagues performed a pattern classification analysis to evaluate this theory.  Pattern classification works by teaching a computer algorithm to discriminate between the brain response associated with different activities.  According the this second theory, classification performance should improve if the IFJ develops dedicated pipelines to handle the individual requirements of the multitasking procedure.

In fact, however, classification performance slightly decreased with training, indicating that the second hypothesis was also false.  This result does suggest, though, that there were some sort of changes within the IFJ, so the researchers turned to the third hypothesis.  They scanned several additional subjects using high temporal resolution fMRI focused just within the IFJ both before and after multitasking training.

With this new fine-grained data, the researchers were able to reach the conclusion that training leads to gains of efficiency in the central processing module within the IFJ.  The degree of improvement in reaction time corresponded to the acceleration in IFJ processing as revealed by fMRI. This shows that, even though the brain is massively parallel, complicated behaviors must  pass through this bottleneck before they can be executed.

Can this knowledge help us learn to multitask better?  Of course, we probably don’t need anyone to be talking or texting while driving.  But there are plenty of endeavors where better multitasking could be valuable.  An interesting application of this research, on the neurotechnology horizon, would be using real-time fMRI to train people to multitask and let them directly “see” the improvements in their IFJ.  Either way, I found this paper fascinating, and if nothing else it shows how the rapidly expanding toolbox of cognitive neuroscience is allowing us to examine more complicated and interesting questions than we once thought possible.

Dux, P., Tombu, M., Harrison, S., Rogers, B., Tong, F., & Marois, R. (2009). Training Improves Multitasking Performance by Increasing the Speed of Information Processing in Human Prefrontal Cortex Neuron, 63 (1), 127-138 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2009.06.005

Health Care and our Psychological Shortcomings

I thought this was a great article by James Surowiecki in today’s New Yorker (and see some good commentary by Matt Yglesias).  Surowiecki argues that the troubling turns in the health-care debate become pretty easy to understand if you consider the way our minds work:

But the public’s skittishness about overhauling the system also reflects something else: the deep-seated psychological biases that make people resistant to change. Most of us, for instance, are prey to the so-called “endowment effect”: the mere fact that you own something leads you to overvalue it. A simple demonstration of this was an experiment in which some students in a class were given coffee mugs emblazoned with their school’s logo and asked how much they would demand to sell them, while others in the class were asked how much they would pay to buy them. Instead of valuing the mugs similarly, the new owners of the mugs demanded more than twice as much as the buyers were willing to pay. The academics Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely showed the same thing in a real-world experiment: posing as ticket scalpers, they phoned people who had entered a raffle to win tickets to a Duke basketball game. People who hadn’t won tickets were willing to pay, on average, a hundred and seventy dollars to get into the game. But those who had won tickets wanted twenty-four hundred dollars to part with them. In other words, those who had, by pure luck, won the tickets thought the ducats were fourteen times as valuable as those who hadn’t.

Also playing a role in Surowieki’s explanation is rampant status quo bias, and, while he doesn’t mention it, I’d throw a health dose of risk aversion into the mix (although that’s somewhat linked with the endowment effect).

When you think about it, it’s probably not too surprising that emotions are running so high.  It’s banal to observe that health care is deeply personal and cuts right to our most deeply rooted survival instincts, but it’s still true.  You can’t really blame the people who were whipped into a frenzy last fall over Barack Obama’s putative “palling around with terrorists” to feel uneasy with letting the man make decisions about health care–despite how unsubstantiated claims about the actual level of government intervention in health care itself actually are (and let’s not forget that Research 2000 poll showing the broad overlap between “birthers”–people committed to the idea that Obama is secretly a foreign national–and those who believe the “death panel” rumors).

Wrap this up with evidence that conservatives are dispositionally inclined towards a stronger threat response, and this mess becomes somewhat more understandable.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as dismayed and disgusted by where we are as anyone else who supports reform, but I do think we should countenance the argument that it’s largely a product of our flawed psychologies.  Somehow I find myself feeling mildly sympathetic towards the town-hall nuts, and even though I’m not exactly sure where to go from there, admitting our weaknesses is probably a good first step.

What Shape Will the Neuro Revolution Take?

I’ve been meaning to write about Zach Lynch’s new book The Neuro Revolution for some time now.  I actually haven’t had a chance to read it yet, because I’m too busy falling behind on Infinite Summer.  Lynch came and spoke at MIT last month though, so I feel like I have a reasonably good sense of the argument.  I posted some brief thoughts on my Twitter feed in response to this excellent review of the book in Cerebrum magazine (via Zach Lynch himself), but I felt it was necessary to expand them here.

For a bit of brief background, Lynch argues that we’re on the brink of a paradigm shift where basic neuroscience research and the nascent field of neurotechnology will fundamentally alter almost every dimension of the world we live in.  It’s an ambitious thesis, for sure, but probably not a startling one if you’re the type that reads this blog.  Even if it sounds somewhat premature, Lynch’s point is that the revolution is coming, and, even if we’re not exactly sure what form it is going to take, it’s best to get ready for it.

Obviously I agree with all of this.  At the same time, I feel as if the mechanics of the revolution are likely to take a somewhat different course than the one Lynch charts out.  It’s hard to miss the sense of empty trendiness about the many neuro-ized words (for lack of a better term) that mark the movements of his argument: neuroeconomics, neurofinance, neuromarketing, neurolaw, neurowarfare, neuroenhancement, etc.  There was a moment in the talk when, on introducing the fourth or fifth of these terms–I forget which one–he seemed to lose the audience a little bit.

Which is not to say that I don’t think neuroscience will inform economics, law, or even warfare.  Clearly, I do.  But, precisely because I believe the revolution is going to be so thorough and fruitful, it’s not going to take the form of a laundry-list of buzzwords.  The maturation of the biological study of decision-making, for instance, is not a world where universities house a Neuroeconomics department alongside the traditional Economics faculty, but one where the study of economics naturally draws from neuroscience research.  Likewise, the study of neurolaw will not stand outside that of jurisprudence or criminal procedure; instead, legal debate will turn on the insights neuroscientists can offer about guilt, harm and responsibility without causing any sort of fuss.

To offer an analogy, consider how nobody really talks about “dot-coms” or “e-commerce” anymore.  What was new and shiny and reeking of hype only a decade ago has now become just the standard way of operating.  It’s much more noteworthy now to be a company that doesn’t do business online than to be one that does.  I suspect a similar process will occur as the neuro revolution plays out, although this analogy strikes me as limited in several ways so I wouldn’t follow it too far.

This shift will occur because neuroscience will–and already does–challenge our intuitions and alter our fundamental understanding of ourselves.  Esoteric philosophical debates about reductionism and elimitivism aside, the still-surprising notion that the brain is the seat of all our thoughts and actions will become commonplace, and we will start to see brain research as a more powerful and accurate, but not actually all that revolutionary, means to answer questions we already are asking.

Or so I hope.  Of course, in a country where less than half of the population believes in evolution–and, if you look at what people actually think Darwin’s theory entails, that number drops below 10%–it might be asking too much for neuroscience, which is equally if not more existentially challenging than evolution, to gain the necessary breadth of acceptance for the neuro revolution to really succeed.

Something I’ve debated much and still don’t have an answer for is exactly how widespread that acceptance will have to be.  In some cases, such as with neuroeconomics or finance, it might be sufficient for only an engaged elite to reach a full understanding.  The situation is more fraught in the domain of neuroenhancement or law, which necessarily draw from the mores of society at large.  What’s troubling is that many of the implications of neuroscience are not just novel but often deeply counter-intuitive.  But this is probably a question for another post, if not a book.

Again, I want to stress that I haven’t read the book, so I could have gotten the wrong impression from the hour and a half or so that I heard Lynch talk about his ideas.  This isn’t really meant as a criticism; if anything, I’m taking what Lynch was arguing and going a step further.  But, in line with my support for the project, I think this analysis might actually help the neuro revolution avoid the natural skepticism that greets potential hype.  In any case, I’m certainly enthralled to see such vibrant discussions of these topics.  Obviously I’m intellectually exercised by them, but I completely agree with Lynch that the neuro revolution is on the horizon, in some form, and it’s best we prepare.

Brain Research on the Margins

One of the most valuable insights of economics, and one of the oldest, is the idea that we value goods on a marginal basis.  The core of the idea, which traces back to Adam Smith, is that our choices are not about x amount of any good but x more of that good.  If you’re packing for a hike, you might find the idea of paying for a bottle of water ridiculous–there’s so much right there in the sink!–but easily shell out $5 for a tasty bag of trail-mix; six miles in and sucking on a dry Camelback, however, you’d quickly part with a similar sum to some bush-dwelling grifter peddling Aquafina.

In the broader neuroeconomic project of moving the determinants of economic choice from abstract theory into the circuits of the brain, an important step will be to account for the cause of this marginal calculation.  Despite its centrality to economic thought, however, previous studies have paid it little attention.  A paper published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience, however, reveals subtle signals in the brain regions previously known to drive economic choice that correspond to the computation of marginal value.

A group at the Wellcome Trust Center and University College, London lead by Alex Pine and Raymond Dolan examined the neural correlates of marginal and intertemporal difference in economic behavior.  They scanned the brains of their participants while they repeatedly chose between different amounts of money that would be available at different points of time in the future.  To ensure realistic decision-making, the subjects received a gift-card corresponding to their choice in a randomly selected trial that was activated at the prescribed time.

This paradigm has been used in many neuroeconomic studies before, but the researchers here engaged in a novel strategy of analysis to reveal the effects of marginal calculation on brain activity.  From the behavioral results, which revealed a clear pattern of diminishing marginal utility (for example, subjects cared less about the difference between $45 and $46 than they did about the difference between $5 and $6), they built an economic model for each participant that revealed his or her individual rates of marginal and intertemporal discounting.

By applying this model to the shifts in blood flow measured by fMRI, the researchers found different response patterns that correlated to separate economic factors.  The activity of some brain regions tracked only the pure dollar amount of each reward or the effects of delayed receipt, but a response within an area called the dorsal striatum–an area commonly implicated in economic valuation–correlated with the integration of these signals into a single unit of marginally and temporally discounted valuation.

That a circuit including the striatum is involved in decision-making is well established (and see here and here for other research drawing on that knowledge), but this study begins to bring into focus the subtleties of neural computation within this large structure that truly determine behavior.  The rapidly maturing field of neuroeconomics is already moving past where gross localization research is useful, and this paper is valuable for demonstrating how increasingly intricate microeconomic models can illuminate–and draw from–brain research.

Pine A, Seymour B, Roiser JP, Bossaerts P, Friston KJ, Curran HV, & Dolan RJ (2009). Encoding of marginal utility across time in the human brain. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29 (30), 9575-81 PMID: 19641120

Karl Rove is Highly Evolved

Two links, presented without commentary:

Karl Rove — Obama and the Permanent Campaign: Turning Critics into Enemies isn’t Presidential

Robert Trivers — The Elements of a Scientific Theory of Self-Deception

From the Annals of Not Seeing That One Coming

Sorry about the radio silence recently.  I’ve had a lot of late scans and such that have made it hard to find time to sit down and write.

In the meantime, here’s a quotation to chew over.  My roommate is a consultant, and he brought home some abandoned books from the office the other day.  I was paging through one, called The Evolution of Financial Services, which looks to be a report put out by Oliver Wyman (and written by Niall Ferguson) sometime in the fall of 2007.  Paging through, this caught my eye in the introductory overview:

Imporovements in Risk Management

The consensus view is that aided by regulation and innovative financial products, financial institutions have raised their risk management techniques to a level of sophistication and effectiveness never seen before.  For example, firms are now using derivatives and other tools to diversify balance sheet risk through the purchase of credit default swaps (CDS).

As Figure 5 shows, outstanding CDSs have grown from next to nothing 10 years ago to more than $20 TN today.  Firms are seeking to remove risk from the balance sheet altogether through the sale of repackaged asses such as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and asset-back securities (ABS).  New entities like conduits and Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) have emerged, whose primary purpose is to trade these instruments.  While regulatory demands are a burden to financial institutions, new techniques and instruments have allowed banks to lower their risk profiles significantly. 

Not sure if this needs any comment…

Health Care and Our Limited Moral Intuitions

Ezra Klein wants to know “what happened to the the moral case for health-care reform?”

This year, however, it’s not just been the opponents of the policy who have relied on the “mellifluous language of the standard economic theory of markets.” It’s been the advocates of reform. Ask yourself what the administration’s one-line goal is on health-care reform. Is it “equal treatment for everybody?” Is it “if every American is guaranteed a lawyer, why not a doctor?” Is it even “guaranteed health care for everyone?”

No. It’s “bend the curve.” And the problem with “bending the curve” is that it’s a broadly testable proposition. This is, in part, why the Congressional Budget Office’s skeptical assessments pose such a threat to health-care reform. If the White House’s primary objective was health care for every American, or guaranteed care that you could keep even if you lost your job, or choice of insurance plans for every American, you could spend a bit more on health care and say you were achieving your goal. But if you say that the point of health-care reform is to save money, and then the outfit charged with estimating such things says it won’t, that strikes at the heart of the project.

There are basically two points operating together here.  The first, which Ezra draws out, is about confused messaging.  The center of the venn diagram of the bills floating around Congress is legislation that does a pretty good job of offering coverage to everyone and a mediocre job at controlling costs.  Yet, Ezra points out, the messaging out of the White House is all about “bending the curve” and cutting our long-term spending.  I think this is basically true, but it also ignores the perhaps more interesting question: why does the moral case for health care disappear so easily?

Perhaps things would be different if the administration were making its case to the broader public in the language of moral imperatives.  (And, for the record, I do believe it should be the moral imperative of a modern society to ensure health care for all citizens).  But why do congressmen and commentators so quickly dismiss the reality of increased coverage as they haggle over the numbers?  The Blue Dogs are barking rather loudly about cost–particularly with regard to subsidies–but when you follow these complaints to their logical conclusion, they’re arguing that fewer people should have access to health care (or, depending on how the math words, that certain people should have access to less health care).

Imagine that one night a stranger, bloodied from a car accident, knocked on one of these congressman’s door and asked for help.  Were the congressman to refuse and leave the stranger to die on his stoop–or even just to suffer all night until a good Samaritan  passed by–he would be met with universal opprobrium.  Such a decision would be a noxious affront to our moral sensibilities.  And yet, when congressmen take action that, however indirectly, leads to similarly adverse health outcomes for real people, they are praised by institutions of Washington commentary for their centrism and fiscal prudence.

To understand why this happens, it’s worthwhile to consider the (oft-discussed on this blog) work of Joshua Greene in the field of moral psychology.  I won’t spend too much time rehashing the details–for the uninitiated, see my earlier posts or Professor Greene’s website–but the basics are that our moral intuitions often cut in very different ways about situations that have similar consequences but different mechanisms.  Actions that involve close, personal interaction arouse–pushing someone off a footbridge into the path of an oncoming trolley or failing to help the man on our stoop–arouse our moral emotions and move us to express harsh condemnation.  Actions taken at a distance, however, are viewed more calculatingly, which often leads us to a different judgment.

When I worked in Professor Greene’s lab, we used to joke that some of the more complicated scenarios we employed to probe the moral sense seemed almost absurdly complex.  In one example, the protagonist pulls a switch that drops a workman through a trapdoor onto the path of an oncoming trolley, causing a collision that sounds an alarm and stops a separate trolley that would otherwise mow down five other workmen.  Compare that to the almost insane-looking chart of our current health care apparatus (chart thanks to the indispensable Jon Cohn).

The effect of those dense coils of arrows is to wring all of the moral responsibility from the system.  Although it’s true that the decisions of individual congressmen will lead to very real differences in the health outcomes of actual people, the path those decisions must take is far too convoluted for that fact to impress upon the emotional brain.  I’ve also theorized–but haven’t yet been able to test–that just using the language of costs and benefits shifts the brain into a mode that blunts the influence of moral intuition.  We certainly can put moral concerns up against fiscal ones, but I suspect that even if the White House had tried this it would have had limited effect.  Eye-deep in congressional procedure, it’s almost impossible to think in intuitively moral terms.

That said, the key word is “almost.”  There’s still a sound argument that it’s our absolute imperative to provide health care for all Americans.  Morality is on our side.  But it is not obviously so.  My recommendation for the August recess is to try to make a case for reform so that the public, as much as is possible, understands the moral consequences of the legislative process.