Author: vaughanbell

Time flies when you’re having fun, but why? It’s curious if you think about it. Someone whose visual perception was affected by enjoyment would seem rather unusual but the fact that our ability to judge time changes dramatically when we enjoy ourselves seems perfectly unremarkable.

A recent article in the scientific journal Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society attempts to answer exactly this question by reviewing the evidence for the curious link between emotion and time perception.

One of the greatest paradoxes in the field of time psychology is the time‚Äìemotion paradox. Over the last few decades, an increasing volume of data has been identified demonstrating the accuracy with which humans are able to estimate time. Confronted with this amazing ability, psychologists have supposed that humans, as other animals, possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time…

However, under the influence of emotions, humans can be extremely inaccurate in their time judgements (Droit-Volet & Meck 2007). For example, the passage of time seems to vary depending on whether the subject is in an unpleasant or pleasant context. It drags when being criticized by the boss but flies by when discussing with our friends. That is the time–emotion paradox: why given that we possess a sophisticated time measurement mechanism, are we so inaccurate in our temporal judgements when experiencing emotions?

The article is full of studies that found surprising ways in which our time perception is distorted: by the emotional expression on other people’s faces or by the age of people we meet (older people slow time, younger people quicken it).

Link to scientific article on the time-emotion paradox.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Science News has an intriguing article on what we might call ‘plant psychology’ as some biologists are increasingly thinking of our green leafy friends in terms of their memory, communication and behaviour.

On a related note, an edition of ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind from the end of last year focussed on the ‘psychology’ of bacteria.

These sorts of discussions are the interesting result of our current most popular way of understanding the mind: the cognitive approach.

This attempts to explain the mind in terms of an information processing system, so mental processes are defined in terms of how they perform computations.

For example, memory is the process of encoding, storing and retrieving information. Perception transforms sensory data, such as light spots on the retina, into elaborated experiences; and attention selects which channels of processing to prioritise.

In its most basic, and somewhat caricatured form, the cognitive approach says our minds are just calculations because we have been able to successfully describe what parts of it do using maths.

But if the mind is just calculations, it makes it very difficult to say what is and what isn’t a mind.

If something learns, reacts and communicates, all of which can be described in information processing terms, than many things could be described as having minds. Computers, plants, bacteria, perhaps even whole ecosystems.

Indeed, many of the big debates in psychology (consciousness, intentionality and so on) are attempting to define the mind outside of the computation metaphor, and this is where the hard work lies.

Discussions about whether plants have minds make us think about how we define our own minds, as simply saying ‘a mind is what humans have’ doesn’t help us understand how to make sense of them.

Link to Science News on plant cognition.
Link to All in the Mind on bacteria cognition.

The Boston Globe has an excellent article on the moment when a a group of huddled doctors turned a side-show curiosity into the medical revolution of surgical anaesthesia.

16th October 1846, Boston, Massachusetts, was when the first operation under anaesthesia was conducted in with a brave patient and liberal doses of ether.

The piece is interesting because it notes that the pain killing properties of certain gases or vapours, like laughing gas (nitrous oxide) and ether, were already well known, but the use of them in an operation needed a fundamental change of attitude in the medical establishment.

This was largely due to the fact that pain was considered beneficial during an operation, as it ‘stimulated’ the patient and supposedly made them less likely to die, but because that experiencing pain was considered to be morally virtuous.

Removing pain through ‘artificial’ means was therefore considered ethically dubious and consequently regarded by suspicion by the high horse riding doctors of the time.

Interestingly, the article notes that some of these views continue to this day in attitudes regarding anaesthetics and ‘natural’ childbirth:

Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. Though the idea of pain as necessary may seem primitive and brutal to us today, it lingers in certain corners of healthcare, such as obstetrics and childbirth, where epidurals and caesarean sections still carry the taint of moral opprobrium.

In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients’ base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health.

The article is by Mike Jay who wrote the The Air Loom Gang, a biography of madman, spy and accidental architect James Tilly Matthews.

The biography is one of my favourite books of all time and was interested to see that Jay has another book just out called The Atmosphere of Heaven about a Victorian medical society who pioneered the study of laughing gas.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘The day pain died’.

An upcoming article for the Journal of Forensic Sciences gives a fascinating insight into the rituals and methods of the Sacra Corona Unita (United Holy Crown) Mafia group from Southern Italy through the post-mortem examination of the bodies of their victims.

Many of the victims are members of the Sacra Corona Unita themselves, giving an insight in the organisation’s “mystical approach to all ceremonies among members. Tribal rituals, secret codes, and theatrical punishments transformed the ‘onorata societ√†’ into a kind of distorted Masonic lodge”.

The article recounts the oath of the criminal fraternity and the significance of their tattoos, as well as describing a study on 83 murder victims. Strikingly, each of the victims who were Mafia victims themselves had a ritual object left with them.

As usual in mafia organizations, each member had a nickname, and ritual symbolic objects were found beside the buried bodies that referred to the member’s lifetime. For instance, the horns of a bullock were found beside the body of the son of an SCU member named the “Bull” and a mouse beside the body of a member known to be a police informer, known as the “Prostitute.

The murder and burning of the bodies of the victims conformed to the symbolic code understood by all the members. It made explicit reference to the membership ceremonies that warn that the unfaithful will be burned to ashes (just like the holy picture burned during the ceremony).

This technique, obviously, also has some strategic advantages because it makes the possibility of identifying the victim more unlikely and eliminates any traces left by the executors. This mode of operation is called “lupara bianca” (white lupara): “lupara” is a gun with a sawn-off barrel with a high lacerating power at short distance, “white” means a “murder with disappearance of the body.”

Link to article.
Link to DOI entry for same.