dothetest.co.uk, is the Transport for London site which brought you the urbanised inattentional blindness video. Now they’re back with a feast of change blindness-YouTube goodness, here, here, and here.
The moral is the same, and evidence-based: even large things can be hard to spot if you don’t know they are there, so look out for cyclists.
The University of Pennsylvania have announced a Neuroscience Boot Camp. Over 10 days in August 2009, through “a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits”, the Boot Camp promises to cover all the neuroscience you need to know to be an informed consumer of neuroscience research.
The Boot Camp is aimed at grad students and professionals from law, policy, education, business, ethics and other fields for which recent neuroscience research could be relevant. The Boot Camp is based out of Penn’s Neuroethics centre, so it is sure to be run by people who are used to thinking through the possible implications of findings from cognitive and affective neuroscience research.
Link Neuroscience Boot Camp
Link Neuroscience Boot Camp goals
Mirror’s Edge is a first person computer game in which you play an urban free-runner, leaping, sliding, and generally acting fly across the roofs of a dystopian city (see the trailer here). It looks good. In fact, it looks amazing. But, reportedly, to actually play it is even better, sickeningly better.
Clive Thompson, writing for wired.com, suggests that the total interactivity of the environment (if you can see something, you can jump on it, or off it) along with the visual cues about what your character’s arms and legs are doing (they appear in shot as you run and jump) makes the game a convincing proprioception hack. In other words, it remaps your body schema so that you feel more fully that you are the character in the game. When your character runs fast, you feel it is you running fast. When you character jumps across between two buildings and look down, you feel a moment of sickening vertigo.
Research into illusions of proprioception — your sense of where you body is in space — has shown that our body map is surprisingly flexible. It is possible to mislocate your hand, for example, coming to believe that it is directly in front of you when in fact out at the side, or behind you (see video here). Jaron Lanier has reported on an early virtual reality experience he had that made him feel like he had the body of a lobster, with 6 extra limbs. The important feature of all these illusions is that they rely on precisely timed visual feedback. Although visual input can reprogramme our body image, it only does so when there is a tight coupling between what we see and feel. The importance is not the level of detail in what we see, but in the fluidity of the interaction. If Mirror’s Edge makes you feel like you are really are doing Parkour then it is because it has the correct kind of visual feedback (your limbs, in a fully interactive world) with the correct timing.
A final thought: if a computer game really is immersive for something as visceral as free-running, isn’t that kind of surprising, given how complex free running is physically, and how simple the commands used to control a computer game are? Perhaps what this is because when we automatise an action such as a run, a jump or a roll part of the process of making it automatic is losing the experience of the component parts. So, when a computer game feels like real, it is because real feels like nothing — we just ask our brains ‘jump’ and the motor system sorts out the details without our any deep experience of how the jump is performed.
link Clive Thompson’s report on playing Mirror’s Edge
link YouTube trailer for the game
Tim Harford, who blogs as the Undercover Economist, presents a rollercoaster ride through the field of neuroeconomics, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/pip/plke4/"'Money on the Brain' for Radio 4. The documentary is available via Radio 4’s Listen Again site for the next week, and reportedly via a podcast (which I unfortunately can’t find). This whistle-stop tour covers neuromarketing, behavioural economics and the possible effects of hormone levels on risk tasking among stockmarket brokers. The programme features great interviews with some top researchers, such as Paul Glimcher and, Glimcher aside, many of these researchers have an almost relgious optimism about the potential for fMRI-scanning, believing it will eventually tell us how economic decisions are made, why we follow crowds, what we’re thinking at any point in time, what age we should be able to vote and how much we value things like clean air. Admist this heady atmosphere the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer brings us back to earth again: “You can’t read the mind. We understand quite little about the brain.” he begins. And then,
A former chairman of the Harvard Psychology deptartment once asked me “Gerd, do you know why they love those pictures [the fMRI activity maps]? It is because they are like women: they are beautiful, they are expensive and you don’t understand them”If you read a classical article on neuroeconomics what you will find is mostly results which have been already known and recycled, and very little new insight.
Boom!
Link to Radio 4 documentary ‘Money on the Brain’
Also on Mindhacks.com The fMRI smackdown cometh
Also on Mindhacks.com Don’t believe the neurohype
Also on Mindhacks.com Is Banking on Neuroscience a false economy?
“Songs of Couch and Consultation” is a 1961 novelty album of songs about the psychiatric profession by folksinger Katie Lee (who, according to Utah Philips, went on to become an environmental activist and one of the founders of EarthFirst!). The songs are reported to be in dubious taste, but you can hear a sample of three here, including MP3s of “Will to fail” (“I secretly am enjoying myself / while slowly i’m destroying myself”!) and the marvellous big band feeling of “Repressed Hostility Blues”.
link Cover art of Katie Lee’s “Songs of Couch and Consultation”.
link WFMU blog post on the album, including MP3s.
I cannot recommend strongly enough Goodale & Milner’s book on vision ‘Sight Unseen’. The title refers to the idea they pursue throughout the book that our everyday conception of vision is thoroughly misleading. Rather than vision just being ‘what we experience’, it is, in fact, a collection of specific eye-behaviour links (‘visuomotor functions’) of which our conscious perception of the world is only an evolutionary-recent addition. Goodale & Milner have spent their careers investigating this area and base their narrative around a selection of seminal experiments and case-studies of patients with selective brain injuries. Almost no background knowledge is assumed yet the book takes the reader into the intricacies of the psychology of vision. The triumph of the book is that it gives a flavour of how research proceeds while also managing to provide an intuition-shaking overview of the whole topic. I will never think about seeing in the same way again. This is a rare book which is accessible but will also be of interest to those working in the field. If you have any interest in how a research field develops or in the psychology of vision then you should read it.
Goodale, M. & Milner, D. (2004). Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press
(Full disclosure: I did not get asked to do this review, nor did I receive payment or a free book. I did it because I liked the book. I am actively engaged in research in this area)
Dan Gilbert has a brief interview in this month’s (paywalled) Psychologist magazine. From which the following nugget of wisdom:
Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens
to make it irrelevant. But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under their own weight and psychologists start hunting for all the babies they tossed out with the bathwater. Social psychology is where they typically go to find them. So the challenge for social psychologists watching yet another revolution that promises to leave them in the dustbin of history is to remember that we’ve outlived every revolutionary who has ever pronounced us obsolete.
Link Gilbert Lab
Link Psychologist Magazine (sorry, subscribers only, but you can browse issues older than six months for free)
I respect Gary Marcus’ research tremendously, but I found his latest popular science book glib and unconvincing. For details of why read my review of “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind” from BBC Focus magazine #191 (July 2008):
I am currently reading Daniel Moerman’s “Meaning, medicine and the ‘placebo effect'”. As well as containing many interesting asides, the book discusses what is at the heart of the so-called placebo effect: patients’ response to the meaning of their treatment. Moerman calls this the ‘meaning response’. This response to meaning explains why two inert pills produce more cures than one inert pill, and why inert injections are even more effective (because “everybody knows” that injections are more powerful than pills). But importantly, it is possible to show that doctors are as important in producing the meaning response as patients. Gracely et al (1985) looked at the effect of placebo on pain in patients having their wisdom teeth extracted. The study was set up as a standard double-blind (neither the doctor nor the patient knows if the patient is getting a real medicine or an inert placebo), with the possibilities being a placebo, fentanyl (which usually reduces pain) and naloxone (which usually blocks reduction in pain, so could be expected to increase the pain of the procedure). The twist was that for the first half of the experiment the doctors, but not the patients, were told that a supply problem meant that no patient would be getting the pain-relieving fentanyl. In the second half the doctors were told that the problem had been resolved, so that now the patients might receive fentanyl. By comparing levels of patient pain in the placebo condition is possible to gauge the effect of doctor expectations on the meaning response of the patients. In this condition patients are all receiving inert substances, and they all ‘know’ the same thing: they might receive a placebo, pain-relief or ‘pain-enhancement’. The doctors don’t tell them about the supply problem and, for that matter, they don’t know themselves for definite what the patient is given. The only difference is that for the patients in the first half, the doctors think they know that pain-relief is not a possibility, whereas in the second half it is. The graph of the results, copied from Moerman’s book is below:
As you can see, patients in the PNF group — those whose doctors thought they might receive pain-relief had a large pain-relieving placebo effect compared to those in the PN group — those whose doctors thought they couldn’t receive pain-relief (update in the original edit of this post I had these labels the other way around, incorrectly)
What I think is interesting about this study is, firstly, it confirms the need for rigorous double-blind controls in studies of medicine and, secondly, just how significant an effect this subtle manipulation has. The doctors don’t know anything definite, and they certainly aren’t telling the patients what they suspect or guess, but somehow — a look? a slightly brighter smile? a slightly lowered tone? — they communicate their knowledge of the probabilities to the patients who then experience a real change in their levels of pain because of it.
A striking aspect of the meaning response is that one could suppose that patients have control over their experience of different levels of pain. After all, we know that the pills are inert. Could we just imagine ourselves a ‘placebo effect’ in all situations where we have unnecessary pain? Sadly, normally we can’t do this — the meaning response doesn’t work like that. Doctors are required to give patients permission to feel less pain. Perhaps a fundamental part of the creation of meaning is that it requires other people.
Update: A great recent post by Vaughan ‘placebo is not what you think’, which deserves to be linked up with this post
Refs
Gracely, R. H., Dubner, R., Deeter, W. R., & Wolskee, P. J. (1985). Clinicians’ expectations influence placebo analgesia. Lancet, 1(8419), 43.
Moerman, D. E. (2002). Meaning, medicine, and the “placebo effect”. Cambridge University Press: New York.
“Why the mind is not a computer: A pocket lexicon of neuromythology”
Raymond Tallis (2004, originally published 1994).
Neuromythology is the shibboleth of cognitive science that the mind is a machine, and that somehow our theories of information, complexity, patterns or representations are sufficient to explain consciousness. Tallis accuses cognitive scientists, and philosophers of cognitive science such as Chalmers, Churchland and Dennett, of the careless use of words which can apply both to thinking and to non-thinking systems (‘computing’, ‘goals’, ‘memory’, for example). This obfuscation “provides a framework within which the real problems can be by-passed and the illusion of progress maintained”. At his best Tallis is a useful reminder that many of the features of the brain which are evoked to ‘explain’ consciousness really only serve as expressions of faith, rather than true explanations. Does the mind arise from the brain because of the complexity of all those intertwined neurons? The processes inside a cell are equally complex, why aren’t cells conscious? Similarly for patterns, which depend on the subjective perspective (yes, the consciousness) of the observer rather than having an objective existence which is sufficient to generate consciousness; and for levels of description, which, with careless thinking are sometimes reified so that the mind can ‘act’ on the brain, when in fact, if you are physicalist, the mind and brain don’t have separate existences. Moments of the argument can appear willfully obstructive. Tallis maintains that there is no meaningful sense in which information can exist without someone being informed, any more, he says, than a watch can tell the time without someone looking at it. He’s right that we should be careful the word information, which has a very precise technical meaning and also colloquial meanings, but if you suppose that subjective consciousness is required to make information exist (and rule-following, representation and computation to pick a few other concepts about which he makes similar arguments) then you effectively disallow any attempts to use these concepts as part of your theory of consciousness. The disagreement between Tallis and many philosophers of cognitive science seems to me to be somewhat axiomatic — either you believe that our current models of reality can explain how matter can produce mind, or you don’t — but Tallis is right to remind us that the things we feel might eventually provide an answer don’t in themselves constitute an answer.
In essence what this book amounts to is a vigorous restatement of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness — the stubborn inadequacy of our physical theories when faced with explaining how phenomenal experience might arise out of ordinary matter, or even with beginning to comprehend what form such an explanation might take.
Disclaimer: I bought this book with my own money, because I needed something to read at the Hay Festival after finishing Ahdaf Soueif’s wonderful ‘Map of Love’ (200) and because Raymond Tallis’s essay here was so good. I was not paid or otherwise encouraged to review it.
I’m going to tell you about an experience that I often have rock-climbing and then I’m going to offer you some speculation as to the cognitive neuroscience behind it. If you rock-climb I’m sure you’ll find my description familiar. If you’re also into cognitive neuroscience perhaps you can tell me if you think my speculation in plausible.
Rock-climbing is a sort of three-dimensional kinaesthetic puzzle. You’re on the side of rock-wall, and you have to go up (or down) by looking around you for somewhere to move your hands or feet. If you can’t see anything then you’re stuck and just have to count the seconds before you run out of strength and fall off. What often happens to me when climbing is that I look as hard as I can for a hold to move my hand up to and I see nothing. Nothing I can easily reach, nothing I can nearly reach and not even anything I might reach if I was just a bit taller or if I jumped. I feel utterly stuck and begin to contemplate the immanent defeat of falling off.
But then I remember to look for new footholds.
Sometimes I’ve already had a go at this and haven’t seen anything promising, but in desperation I move one foot to a new hold, perhaps one that is only an inch or so further up the wall. And this is when something magical happens. Although I am now only able to reach an inch further, I can suddenly see a new hold for my hand, something I’m able to grip firmly and use to pull myself to freedom and triumph (or at least somewhere higher up to get stuck). Even though I looked with all my desperation at the wall above me, this hold remained completely invisible until I moved my foot an inch — what a difference that inch made.
Psychologists have something they call affordances (Gibson, 1977, 1986), which are features of the environment which seem to ‘present themselves’ as available for certain actions. Chairs afford being sat on, hammers afford hitting things with. The term captures an observation that there is something very obviously action-orientated about perception. We don’t just see the world, we see the world full of possibilities. And this means that the affordances in the environment aren’t just there, they are there because we have some potential to act (Stoffregen, 2003). If you are frail and afraid of falling then a handrail will look very different from if you are a skateboarder, or a freerunner. Psychology typically divides the jobs the mind does up into parcels : ‘perception’, (then) ‘decision making’, (then) ‘action’. But if you take the idea of affordances seriously it gives lie to this neat division. Affordances exist because action (the ‘last’ stage) affects perception (the ‘first’ stage). Can we experimentally test this intuition, is there really an effect of action on perception? One good example is Oudejans et al (1996) who asked baseball fielders to judge were a ball would land, either just watching it fall or while running to catch it. A model of the mind that didn’t involve affordances might think that it would be easier to judge where a ball would land if you were standing still; after all, it’s usually easier to do just one thing rather than two. This, however, would be wrong. The fielders were more accurate in their judgements — perceptual predictions basically — when running to catch the ball, in effect when they could use base their judgements on the affordances of the environment produced by their actions, rather than when passively observing the ball.
The connection with my rock-climbing experience is obvious: although I can see the wall ahead, I can only see the holds ahead which are actually within reach. Until I move my foot and bring a hold within range it is effectively invisible to my affordance-biased perception (there’s probably some attentional-narrowing occurring due to anxiety about falling off too, (Pijpers et al, 2006); so perhaps if I had a ladder and a gin and tonic I might be better at spotting potential holds which were out of reach).
There’s another element which I think is relevant to this story. Recently neuroscientists have discovered that the brain deals differently with perceptions occurring near body parts. They call the area around limbs ‘peripersonal space’ (for a review see Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003). {footnote}. Surprisingly, this space is malleable, according to what we can affect — when we hold tools the area of peripersonal space expands from our hands to encompass the tools too (Maravita et al, 2003). Lots of research has addressed how sensory inputs from different modalities are integrated to construct our brain’s sense of peripersonal space. One delightful result showed that paying visual attention to an area of skin enhanced touch-perception there. The interaction between vision and touch was so strong that providing subjects with a magnifying glass improved their touch perception even more! (Kennett et al, 2001; discussed in Mind Hacks, hack #58). I couldn’t find any direct evidence that unimodal perceptual accuracy is enhanced in peripersonal space compared to just outside it (if you know of any, please let me know), but how’s this for a reasonable speculation — the same mechanisms which create peripersonal space are those which underlie the perception of affordances in our environment. If peripersonal space is defined as an area of cross-modal integration, and is also malleable according to action-possibilities, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that an action-orientated enhancement of perception will occur within this space.
What does this mean for the rock-climber? Well it explains my experience, whereby holds are ‘invisible’ until they are in reach. This suggests some advice to follow next time you are stuck halfway up a climb: You can’t just look with your eyes, you need to ‘look’ with your whole body; only by putting yourself in different positions will the different possibilities for action become clear.
(references and footnote below the fold)
Continue reading “Rock climbing hacks! (now with added speculation)”
Transport for London have combined two of my favourite things: safety for cyclists and classic Psychology experiments. The website dothetest.co.uk provides a test of awareness that Mind Hacks fans will instantly recognise as an updated (urbanised!) version of Hack #41: “Make Things Invisible Simply by Concentrating (on Something Else)”. Fantastic!
Link to the awareness test here
Link to a previous post on mindhacks.com discussing inattentional blindness
Following on from my earlier post about the way psychologists look at the world, let me tell you a story which I think illustrates very well the tendency academic psychologists have for reductionism. It’s a story about a recent paper on the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, and about a discussion of that paper by a group of psychologists that I was lucky enough to be part of.
Cognitive Dissonance is a term which describes an uncomfortable feeling we experience when our actions and beliefs are contradictory. For example, we might believe that we are environmentally conscious and responsible citizen, but might take the action of flying to Spain for the weekend. Our beliefs about ourselves seem to be in contradiction with our actions. Leon Festinger, who proposed dissonance theory, suggested that in situations like this we are motivated to reduce dissonance by adjusting our beliefs to be in line with our actions.
I believe that the important thing about psychology is the habits of thought it teaches you, not the collection of facts you might learn. I teach on the psychology degree at the University of Sheffield and, sure, facts are important here — facts about experiments, about the theories which prompted them and about the conclusions which people draw from them — but more important are the skills which you acquire during the process of learning the particular set of facts. Skills like finding information and articulating yourself clearly in writing. Those two things are common to all degrees. But lately I’ve been wondering what skills are most emphasised on a psychology degree? And I’ve been thinking that the answer to this is the same as to the question ‘how do psychologists think?’. How does the typical psychologist[*] approach a problem? I’ve been making a list and this is what I’ve got so far:
1. Critical — Psychologists are skeptical, they need to be convinced by evidence that something is true. Their default is disbelief. This relates to…
2. Scholarly — Psychologists want to see references. By including references in your work you do two very important things. Firstly you acknowledge your debt to the community of scholars who have thought about the same things you are writing about, and, secondly, you allow anyone reading your work to go and check the facts for themselves.
3. Reductionist — Psychologists prefer simple explanations to complex ones. Obviously what counts as simple isn’t always straightforward, and depends on what you already believe, but in general psychologists don’t like to believe in new mental processes or phenomena if they can produce explanations using existing processes or phenomena.
I am sure there are others. One of the problems with habits of thought is that you don’t necessarily notice when you have them. Can anyone offer any suggested additions to my inchoate list?
Readers of mindhacks.com might be interested to read my review of the last chapter of Darrell Huff’s classic How To Lie With Statistics, over at my personal blog idiolect.org.uk. The last chapter gives Huff’s rules of thumb for interrogating statistics and I’ve provided some slim commentary on the workings of science, reason and whatnot. See you there!
The Plymouth Marine Laboratory brings us footage of experiments on the giant axons of the squid — the work that brought us the action potential. Quoting:
“The Squid and its Giant Nerve Fiber” was filmed in the 1970s at Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England. This is the laboratory where Hodgkin and Huxley conducted experiments on the squid giant axon in the 1940s. Their experiments unraveled the mechanism of the action potential, and led to a Nobel Prize. Long out of print, the film is an historically important record of the voltage-clamp technique as developed by Hodgkin and Huxley, as well as an interesting glimpse at how the experiments were done. QuickTime video excerpts from the film are presented here.
Link: excerpts from The Squid and its Giant Nerve Fiber
(via Three-Toed Sloth)
Mind Hacks 