December 2004 – Mind Hacks

Cultivated Perception

Lots of psychology isn’t rocket science – it’s not exactly stuff you couldn’t have figured out yourself if you’d have thought about it for long enough. Often the conclusions from some area of investigation are explained to you and you think ‘Well, hey, that’s obvious’. And of course there’s an argument that true answers often should be obvious, once you’ve been told them.

One of the the things I hoped we could do with Mind Hacks was give people framworks for looking at how our minds work, and how we interact with the environment, so that it becomes easier to spot the obvious in advance. After all, we all have minds, so we all have access to the raw data to draw the conclusions – it’s just that there are many things you don’t notice until you’ve learnt to see them. (Until someone stops me i’m going to call this ‘cultivated perception’).

So, I should be working on designed a questionnaire (a sign that I committed grevious sins in a past life?) and I noticed how I could improve it with a little lesson from Chapter 8 of the book.

Continue reading “Cultivated Perception”

The Social Yawn

All animals yawn (see animalyawns.com) and in humans yawning seems to be contagious. Seeing another person yawn, or even just reading about yawning can make you yawn. (We talk about unconscious immitation in chapter 10 of the book). James Anderson from the University of Stirling gave a lecture in Sheffield last week about yawning – in the introduction he told us that when he lectures on yawning lots of people in the audience, well, yawn. But his talk was only yawn-inducing in the social-contaigon sense.

Yawning, it seems to me, may provide us with paradigm case of an automatic behaviour that, moving along the phylogenetic scale, has become co-opted into a quasi-voluntary social signal.

Continue reading “The Social Yawn”

Hallucinations in macular degeneration

The Fortean Times has an online article about the unusual experiences that can occur in a condition called macular degeneration, where light sensing cells in the part of the eye called the macular cease to work. As well as blindness in the central part of vision, hallucinations can occur.

“Hallucinations? What do you mean?” I asked, totally nonplussed. He outlined several forms of hallucination that were plaguing him. The first one to manifest was what Don described as looking like “a ball of string or basketwork, a globular shape with an aperture on one side”. He would see this image as if projected onto walls or other surfaces. He could sometimes make out a small face inside the aperture, and on the occasions when this became particularly evident the basket-like effect would adjust around it like a bizarre headdress.

This hallucinatory state is known as Charles Bonnet syndrome, after the 18th century philosopher who noticed the condition in his father.

Link to full article on http://www.forteantimes.com

Scientific American ‘Mind’ launches

Scientific American has launched a quarterly magazine on psychology and neuroscience called Scientific American Mind. I have the first issue in front of me which I just bought from the newsagent. It seems to be well put together and mercifully short on adverts, although isn’t cheap at 3.75ukp.

There’s some sample articles in full on the website and various bits and pieces that are worth checking out.

Link to SciAm Mind website.

Finding Geschwind’s territory

A new connection has been found between two of most important language areas in the brain. Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area have been linked to speech production and language comprehension respectively. They were some of the first discoveries that linked particular brain areas to specific mental abilities and are known to be joined by a bundle of neural fibres called the arcuate fasciculus.

Reseachers from London have now discovered that another parallel pathway connects the two areas, although it does not develop until about 5-7 years of age, suggesting that even quite major connections in the brain do not develop until well into childhood.

The pathway runs through an area they have named Geschwind’s territory after Norman Geshwind, the famous American neurologist who theorised that such a connection might exist.

Understanding the connectivity of the language areas is the brain is essential to the understanding and treatment of language problems after brain damage. These sorts of impairments are a common result of serious stroke or traumatic brain injury.

Link to story on newscientist.com.
Link to abstract from the Annals of Neurology.

The face, the brain and Marilyn Monroe

Researchers from London and Italy have just published a study on the brain areas involved in perceiving and understanding faces. They created an elegant experiment where they used morphing to compare how brain activity changes as a photograph is gradually blended from one person to another, for example, from Marilyn Monroe to Margaret Thatcher.

They found that the brain did not respond in the same gradual manner, and that activation shifted to specific areas at certain points in the blending process. When the blending was in its early stages, participants perceived the picture as the same person with physical changes to their face, an experience which caused activation in the inferior occipital gyrus. When the level of blending affected recognition of the pictured person, the right fusiform gyrus was activated, an area thought to be involved with judgements of familiarity for faces. When a participant was already familiar with the people in the pictures, the temporal lobes became active when the final face became clear. These areas have been linked to semantic memory and naming.

This study is important as it shows specialised areas of activation for different stages in the face perception process in a single experiment.

These stages have been hypothesised to exist for quite some time in a model developed by psychologists Vicki Bruce and Andy Young, largely from studies on people with prosopagnosia, a condition where face recognition can be impaired, usually after brain damage.

Link to BBC News story.
Link to story in The Guardian.
Link to abstract from Nature Neuroscience.

Hack #102 : Alter Input With Expectations

This is a hack which never made it into the book, but we thought it worth sharing. At this point, to get the most out of this hack, look at this figure (in a pop-up window) quickly before reading on. It’s not important to try and work out what it is, but have a good look. Seen it? Now, without further ado…

Hack #102: Alter Input With Expectation

The balance between feed-forward and feed-back connections in the brain gives a clue to the balance between raw sensation and expectations in constructing experience.

Feedback is ubiquitous in the brain. The brain is not just massively parallel [Hack #52], it is also massively interconnected- an awesomely complex cybernetic system.

Continue reading “Hack #102 : Alter Input With Expectations”

First week shouts

Our heroic contributor Alex Fradera has a nice way with some kind words about the book here

Suffice to say that if you want to know about the brain, and the mind, and you want a bunch of mavericks to illuminate it using cognitive and visual illusions, pop culture and web-references, wrapped up in a very chic, sleek simple design, you couldn‚Äôt go far wrong

Need To Know give us a mention too (cheers guys) and we got our first review at amazon.com which was four stars and said, amongst other things that the book is ‘unconventional in several ways’ – which i like!

Ghosts in the machine

Controversy has erupted over Michael Persinger’s findings that applying weak complex magnetic fields over the temporal lobes can induce unusual experiences, particularly the experience ‘sensing a presence’ in the room, which Persinger has linked to religious belief and spiritual experience.

This work was part of a larger project in which Persinger and his colleagues have reported strong links between temporal lobe disturbance and anomalous beliefs and experiences throughout the population.

However, a group of Swedish neuroscientists led by Pehr Granqvist have reported that they’ve failed to replicate Persinger’s results with magnetic stimulation when they used a double blind approach to running their experiments (where neither the experimentor nor the participant knows whether they are getting magnetic stimulation).

Persinger has replied by stating that the Swedish study was not an accurate replication.

Link to story on nature.com

Online neuroscience tutorial

The second part of a three part neuroscience tutorial has just been published on kuro5hin.org. While the first part covered the basic physiology of the neuron and how signals are generated and propogate within them, the second part deals with how signals are passed between neurons, over the synapse.

The synapse is the principal part of the neuron where neurotransmitters are released. Because of this, it is where most psychoactive drugs have their effect, which often work by mimicking or altering the normal function of neurotransmitters as they communicate signals throughout the brain and other parts of the nervous system.

Imaginary friends

Psychologists from the University of Oregon have been studying children’s imaginary friends. Their study found that 65% of children had imaginary friends at the age of 7, a much higher rate than expected, and that the presence of an imaginary friend is linked to better emotional understanding and ‘theory of mind’ skills (the suggested ability that allows us to figure out and represent others’ beliefs and intentions).

Other studies on imaginary friends in children have also shown that they seem to be quite normal and generally linked to positive psychological development.

Interestingly though, some of the children report that their imaginary playmates don’t always do what they’re told and sometimes won’t go away when expected to, or bother them inconveniently. It seems that even from quite a young age, we are not always master of our own imaginations.

Link to story in Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Left-handers survive best in violent societies

A study investigating the number of left-handed people in tribal societies has found that the more violent the society, the higher the number of left-handers in the population. The researchers speculate that this is due to left-handers having an advantage in hand-to-hand combat, as shown by the higher number of left-handed champions in sports like boxing and fencing.

Some researchers have linked left-handedness to neurobiological stress during the early stages of brain development, so it has been a puzzle why left-handedness remains a common trait in the population, when this sort of biological stress has been linked to other, less advantageous traits, such as higher rates of nervous system and immune system disorders.

The advantage in combat may be one way (among, potentially, many others, including better non-verbal intelligence) in which left-handers have an edge on their right-handed peers.

Link to story on nature.com

Vaughan

I’m one of the contributors to the book and have been kindly asked to write for mindhacks.com. I’m a clinical and research psychologist and there’s more about my work at my staff page.

You can find me on Twitter here (@vaughanbell) where I also post various mind and brain snippets.

License:
I write because I enjoy it. I don’t get paid so my best return is that people are kind enough to read my work. I release all my writing on this site under the Creative Commons Attribution License v 2.0. This means you can copy and re-publish my work anywhere, without my permission, as long as you don’t pass it off as your own.

To be fair though, I’m hardly going to get lawyers involved if you do rip off my stuff, so if you don’t have the courtesy to acknowledge where the article came from, fine, you’re rude. I’ll just take it as a rather ill-conceived complement.

Full disclosure:
The words are all my own, they’re not paid for, and are written because I enjoy it. We don’t take paid adverts. Any product I mention is because it’s caught my eye. When there might be a conflict of interest I will endeavour to recognise this and mention it in the post. Most pertinently, I am an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor for The Psychologist, and am an unpaid member of the editorial board for the excellent open-access science journal PLoS One.

Occasionally, publishers will offer to send us a free book, or will send us one out of the blue. If I mention a book on the blog, I will state if it was sent for free. I will not necessarily mention a book just because you send us a copy. We do not always accept the offers. Actually, this rarely happens and so far, most books that I’ve mentioned are my own or from the library.

I’ve occasionally noticed posts about your own papers…
Aren’t you just promoting your own work?
Well spotted. If you’re a researcher you should too. Write your research up as a short, accessible, jargon free summary and post it on the net. Science should be accessible to everyone and the net is the perfect place to set it free. If it’s about the mind, brain or human behaviour, let us know and we’ll feature it.

UK-a-Go-Go

It’s taken a couple of weeks to cross the Atlantic, clear customs, and get through the warehouses… Mind Hacks is now in stock at Amazon UK, with a dispatch time listed of 3-4 days. And if you order now, you get 30% off.

Buy Mind Hacks at Amazon UK, and get it in time for Christmas.

(Also available to purchase from Amazon.com, currently at 34% off. You’ll need to order soon if you want to get it as a gift.)

Read on for the sales bit.

Continue reading “UK-a-Go-Go”

Sinister Research

A couple of interesting bits of research on handedness in the news today.

Chimps brains are asymmetrical in similar ways to human brains, and this is reflected in whether they’re left or right handed too. Why we have a preferred hand is still being debated, but this research shows handedness isn’t a consequence of the same brain asymmetry which arose with language (the language centres are on the left side of the brain). Handedness must have arisen much earlier, and been present 5 million years ago.

Continue reading “Sinister Research”

Applying the hacks

It’s good to try some of the ideas in Mind Hacks on real-world problems. We have a piece up on the O’Reilly Network today, using visual attention concepts to comment on Flickr’s Daily Zeitgeist toy. Photos continually fade in and shrink down on a grid of pictures–what does this mean, from the perspective of change blindness and the attention-grabbing nature of rapid movements?

Read the full article for more: Paying Attention (or Not) to the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist.

(To situate this in the book, we’re making use of “Blind to Change” [Hack #40] for not noticing the photos fading in, “Grab Attention” [Hack #37] for noticing them shrink, and “Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision” [Hack #17] for not being able to see where the photo has shrunk to because your eyes are in motion as it does so. See the book’s table of contents for which chapters these are in.)