vaughanbell

Trend setters may only be visible in rear view mirror

I’ve just found this excellent Fast Company article from last year challenging the idea that there is a ‘tipping point’ in fashions or trends driven by small numbers of highly connected people who have a disproportionate influence over which new products or ideas become popular.

The piece is based on work by Duncan Watts, a physicist and sociologist, who created numerous computer simulations of how trends move through society in a similar way to how medical scientists model how diseases spread.

One study has suggested that the role of key highly influential people in starting fashions or trends is likely to have been vastly overstated. This conclusion has rattled the cages of many in the marketing world who have been focussed on identifying and targeting ‘trend setters’ for many years.

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion…

Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn’t think it’s possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex–too weird and unpredictable–to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can’t most companies do it reliably?

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they’ve broken out. “They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they’ve identified the people who did it first, and then they go, ‘Okay, these are the Influentials!'” But who’s to say those aren’t just Watts’s accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn’t their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?

However, Watts’ work is largely based on computer simulations. These have the advantage of having to be based on very explicit well-defined descriptions of the phenomenon, which many of the more popular accounts are not, but have the disadvantage or having to include various assumptions and simplifications about what actually happens when people pass on ideas.

The Fast Company article is interesting as it looks at how some core marketing ideas are being tested by Watts, and how the public relations world is reacting to having some of their assumptions questioned.

Link to Fast Company article ‘Is the Tipping Point Toast?’

The obscure tools of language

The Economist has an article based on rather a daft premise (‘in search of the world’s hardest language’) that nevertheless manages to cover numerous interesting ways in which diverse languages demand mental somersaults from the speaker or require that the speaker has to think about the world in specific ways.

Beyond Europe things grow more complicated. Take gender. Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes.

Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

The article is clearly inspired by psychologist Lera Boroditsky’s recent article for Edge on how language affects how we reason about the world, but it has a wider scope and is a fascinating look at the diversity of the spoken word.

Link to The Economist article ‘Tongue Twisters’.

New issue of Contemporary Psychotherapy

A new issue of the sleek internet magazine Contemporary Psychotherapy has just appeared online and is well worth checking out if you’re interested in the art of psychological treatment.

The magazine is aimed at psychotherapists and deals with everything from the bricks-and-mortar issues of running a practice to relationship dynamics in couples and families.

However, it doesn’t wander off into the thickets of theoretical jargon and makes a good read if you’re just interested in the world of therapy.

Link to Contemporary Psychotherapy.

Dealing with data of the damned

There’s an interesting article in Wired about how scientists deal with data that conflicts with their expectations and whether biases in how the brain deals with contradictory information might influence scientific reasoning.

The piece is based on the work of Kevin Dunbar who combines the sociology of science with the cognitive neuroscience of scientific reasoning.

In other words, he’s trying to understand what scientists actually do to make their discoveries (rather than what they say they do, or what they say they should do) and whether there are specific features of the way the brain handles reasoning that might encourage these practices.

One of his main findings is that when experimental results appear that can’t be explained, they’re often discounted as being useless. The researchers might say that the experiment was designed badly, the equipment faulty, and so on.

It may indeed be the case the faults occurred, but it could also be the case when consistent information emerges, but these possibilities are rarely investigated when the data agrees with pre-existing assumptions, leading to possible biases in how data is interpreted.

Dunbar is not the first to tackle this issue. In fact, the first to do so is probably one of the most important but unrecognised philosophers of science, Charles Fort, who is typically associated with ‘Fortean’ or anomalous phenomena – such as fish falling from the sky.

Fort did indeed collect reports of all types of anomalous phenomena (interestingly, almost all from scientific journals) and used them as a critique of the scientific method – noting that while scientists say they reason from the data to theories about the world, what they actually do is filter the data in light of their theories and frequently ignore information that contradicts existing assumptions – hence, ‘damning’ some data as unacceptable.

This was later echoed when philosophers and sociologists started studying the scientific community in the 20th century, noting that the scientific method was not a clear practice but more of a tool in a wider consensus-forming toolbox.

Probably the most important thinker in this regard, not mentioned in the Wired article, was the philosopher Paul Feyerabend who noted that researchers regularly violate the ‘rules’ of science and this actually promotes progress rather than impedes it.

The article goes on to discuss research suggesting that part of this bias for information consistent with our assumptions may be due to differences in the way the brain handles this information.

Curiously, the piece mentions a 2003 study, where students were apparently asked to select the more accurate representation of gravity in an fMRI scanner, but unfortunately, I can find no trace of it.

However, a 2005 study by the same team, where participants where asked to match theories supported to different degrees by the data they’d seen (to do with how drugs relieve depression), came to similar conclusions. Namely, that brain activity is markedly different when we receive information that confirms our theories compared to when we receive information that challenges them.

In particular, contradictory information seems to activate an area deep in the frontal lobe (the ACC) often associated with ‘conflict monitoring’, along with an outer area of the frontal lobe (the DLPFC) associated with sorting out conflicting information, likely by filtering out some of the incompatible data so it is less likely to be registered or remembered.

There is clearly much more to scientific reasoning than this, as it is vast and complex both within individual researchers and between groups of people. I was particularly interested to read that breakthroughs were most likely to come from group discussions:

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit ‚Äî researchers solve problems by themselves ‚Äî Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn‚Äôt the presentation ‚Äî it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they‚Äôd previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

Although it turns out that discussion with people from a diverse range of people is most important – having a room full of people who share assumptions and expertise tends not to lead to creative scientific insights.

Link to Wired article on scientific reasoning.

Kim Peek has left the building

Nature.com reports that the remarkable Kim Peek, inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in the 1988 film Rain Main, has passed away.

Despite clear and disabling difficulties in day-to-day living, Peek accumulated an encyclopaedic knowledge of numerous subjects areas, could read two pages of a book at once and could instantly calculate the day of the week for any given date.

For many years Peek was thought to have autism, but scans completed in 1988 by neuroscientist Daniel Christensen and colleagues indicated that there were significant brain abnormalities, most strikingly a malformed cerebellum and an absence of the corpus callosum – the bundle of fibres that connect the two hemispheres of the brain.

Among other findings, this suggested that the most likely diagnosis was a genetic condition called FG syndrome.

Perhaps the best profile of Peek, co-written by Christensen, appeared in Scientific American [pdf] which captured both the man himself and discussed the science behind his remarkable abilities.

He was also the subject of numerous documentaries and you can view one of the best of them, Kim Peek – The Real Rain Man, on YouTube.

UPDATE: SciAm have made their article on Kim Peek freely available on their website as a tribute.

Link to announcement from Nature.com.
pdf of excellent SciAm article ‘Inside the mind of a savant’.
Link to documentary Kim Peek – The Real Rain Man.

Sampling from the stream of consciousness

The New York Times has a fascinating article revisiting a classic problem in psychology of whether our accounts of our individual ‘streams of consciousness’ have any useful role in the scientific understanding the mind.

Many of the early studies in psychology relied on people simply reporting ‘what they thought’ and got a bad reputation due to the rather haphazard ways in which studies were conducted.

In part, this led to a swing in the other direction, where the extremes of behaviourism suggested that not only were these methods useless but that the ‘stream of consciousness’ played no causal role in our behaviour – in effect, it was seen as uninteresting mental fluff.

Thankfully, mainstream psychology has moved on and now often tries to integrate conscious experience with objective observational data, but this isn’t always the easiest of tasks either practically or theoretically (indeed, the difficulty is the basis of the ‘hard problem‘ of consciousness).

Recently, psychologists have developed the experience sampling method to try and make sample the stream of consciousness a little more systematic. It involves giving someone a device that beeps randomly and when it sounds, they have to record exactly what they were thinking about or have to rate a certain aspect of the current psychological state.

The resulting mental freeze-frames are remarkably diverse.

On the third day of Melanie‚Äôs experiment, as her boyfriend was asking her a question about insurance, she was trying to remember the word ‚Äúperiodontist.‚Äù On the fourth day, she was having a strong urge to go scuba diving. On the sixth day, she was picking flower petals from the sink while hearing echoes of the phrase ‚Äúnice long time‚Äù in her head.

These dispatches from the front lines of consciousness might be useful to a novelist seeking authentic material. But can they contribute to a scientific understanding of the mind?

…Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside, says after-the-fact interviews should be treated with caution: one cannot assume the subjects will be honest, or that they are not twisting their answers to conform with their own biases, or telling the experimenter what they think he wants to hear, or simply filling in details they forgot.

The article is riffing on the recent book by Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel called Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic and a recent article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies where the debate was opened out to a range of cognitive scientists for their views.

Link to NYT piece ‘Taking Mental Snapshots to Plumb Our Inner Selves’.

Super thinker

Superman in the pose of Rodin’s statue The Thinker outside the headquarters of Bancolombia in Medell√≠n.

I’m not quite sure about the intention of the statue as in the UK it would probably be considered an ironic take on the stereotype of the financial whiz kid and unfortunately I found it on the weekend so there was no-one around to ask.

However, popular culture is well represented in serious art here, in a large part due to the influence of Medell√≠n’s most famous artist, the painter and sculptor Fernando Botero.

The psychological effects of brain theories

The Frontal Cortex has an interesting piece on how giving people information suggesting that neuroscience undermines our everyday concept of free will can alter our ethical behaviour.

The post discusses two experiments where participants had been given information suggesting that free will was an illusion – one passage taken from Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis that argues against the everyday concept of free will on the basis of neurobiology.

It seems even these relatively brief encounters with information arguing against free-will had a noticeable effect on behaviour:

It turned out that students who had read the anti-free will quote were significantly more likely to cheat on the mental arithmetic test; their exposure to some basic scientific spin – your soul is a piece of meat – led to an increase in amorality. Of course, this is a relatively mild ethical lapse – as Schooler notes, “None of the participants exposed to the anti-free will message assaulted the experimenter or ran off with the payment kitty” – but it still demonstrates that even seemingly banal materialist concepts can alter our ethical behavior.

In another study, information on a “disbelief in free will” reduced people’s willingness to help others and increased the amount of unhelpful behaviour toward others.

The issue of free will in neuroscience is complex, but it is interesting that the information provided doesn’t bear directly on the issue of whether it is best to help other people or not.

Clearly though, biological explanations have an association with the idea that people are less in control of their actions, as we also know from other studies.

Science tends to assume that theories are not neutral in that they affect how we look at the world as researchers, but it is interesting to find out that this also happens on a personal psychological level as well.

Link to Frontal Cortex on ‘Free Will and Ethics’.

The addiction affliction

Slate has just published an article I’ve written on the over-selling of addiction. It discusses how difficulties with doing some things to excess – shopping, sex, internet use – are being increasingly described as addictions due to a perfect storm of pop medicine, pseudo-neuroscience, and misplaced sympathy for the miserable.

Like a compulsive crack user desperately sucking on a broken pipe, we can’t get enough of addiction. We got hooked on the concept a few centuries back, originally to describe the compulsive intake of alcohol and, later, the excessive use of drugs like heroin and cocaine. Now it seems like we’re using it every chance we can get‚Äîapplying the concept to any behavior that seems troublesome or ill-advised…

This creeping medicalization of everyday life means that almost any problem of excess can now be portrayed as an individual falling foul of a major mental illness. While drug addiction is a serious concern and a well-researched condition, many of the new behavioral addictions lack even the most basic foundations of scientific reliability.

Link to Slate article ‘The Addiction Habit’.

The stress of ancient Peru

An ingenious technique, just published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, was used to look at patterns of stress in their lives of long-dead people from Peru, some who lived more than a thousand years ago.

The study analysed strands of hair from bodies dug up from five archaeological sites for traces of the hormone cortisol – known to be released when we experience stress.

Hair grows about a centimetre a month and as the body creates the hair, it incorporates traces of chemicals that are present at the time. This means it is possible to look back over the length of a strand of hair and see which chemicals were affecting the person’s body at the time when that bit of hair was formed.

This is the basis of drugs tests that analyse hair for substances like heroin and cocaine, but a few years ago it was discovered that cortisol also left its mark.

A team of researchers, led by anthropologist Emily Webb, took this idea and applied it to the hair of long-dead people from ancient sites across Peru to see how stress affected their lives in the months and years before their deaths.

The researchers found that, in general, stress increased in the months leading up to death – perhaps suggesting death through chronic illness or maybe that the individuals were aware of their impending demise.

The results also showed that in some individuals, stress could suddenly drop for certain periods, perhaps for a month at a time, whereas for others the patterns of stress seemed to go in cycles.

What this does suggest is that then, as now, while there are clearly some things which tend to stress us all, many stress responses are highly changeable and probably quite individual.

Link to DOI entry and summary of study.
Link to write-up by ars technica (via Neuron Culture).

2009-12-18 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The New York Times reports that antipsychotics are more likely to be prescribed to children from poorer families in the US.

There’s an excellent piece on Tiger Woods, the media, and the selling of sex addiction over at Dr Petra.

Time magazine reports on the climbing suicide rate in the US military with only a third happening in war zones.

UN advisor claims banks knowingly welcomed billions of laundered drug money into the system at the height of the financial crises to prevent collapse, according to a piece in The Guardian.

Wired Science reports on a study finding that geek stereotypes like Star Trek put women off an interest in technology careers. If you think that’s bad, Counsellor Deanna Troi nearly put me off a career in psychology.

A fascinating study on actually feeling pain through watching others’ discomfort is expertly covered by Neurophilosophy.

The Boston Globe covers the UK government’s recent fingers-in-ears la la la not listening firing of their top drugs advisor.

There’s a wonderfully in-depth analysis of the motivations of internet trolls over at Culture and Cognition.

New Scientist has an interesting piece on the psychology of saying the wrong thing despite deliberately trying to avoid it.

A fascinating if slightly baffling study on the cognitive effects of cuteness is covered by The Neurocritic.

CNN Money ranks clinical psychologist as the 23rd best job in America, psychiatrist as 24th.

Drug company Glaxo are said to have paid $1 billion to settle law suits over their Paxil antidepressant, according to Bloomberg.

Furious Season’s Phil Dawdy, the internet’s only crowd-funded investigative mental health journalist is having a fund-raiser and it’s been a bit slow. There’s still a chance to support his work.

Alzheimer’s risk linked to level of appetite hormone, reports BBC News.

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers an ingenious study find that even non-verbal hints in TV dramas can perpetuate racial biases.

There’s an interesting piece about important subtleties in the reporting of brain surgery for mental illness over at Neuroskeptic.

The Economist has a fascinating piece on a new study finding that stressed mothers are more likely to spontaneously miscarry male foetuses than female ones.

Information deluge will overload the brain, say numerous press stories based on a report funded by AT&T, Cisco, IBM, Intel, LSI, Oracle, and Seagate.

PsyBlog has an excellent summary of the fundamental attribution error and a brilliant study on trainee priests.

A Japanese department store is to sell two humanoid robots modelled on the purchaser, reports Wired UK.

Science Daily reports on a new study finding that a type of psychological treatment called Interpersonal Psychotherapy is useful in preventing obesity in ‘at risk’ teenage girls.

People really are happier in those US states identified as having better ‘quality of life’? asks the BPS Research Digest.

The Splintered Mind light-heartedly considers whether academics should try product placement.

Why do people dance? asks The Guardian covering some curious and intriguing research on the psychology of ‘dance confidence‘.

The Society for Neuroscience posts the video of a discussion between scientist and professionals magicians on consciousness, cognitive science and the art of magic.

Patricia Churchland on neuroscience

The BBC World Service recently hosted a discussion with philosopher Patricia Churchland, one of the pioneers of a type of philosophy of mind that directly engages with ongoing discoveries in cognitive and neuroscience.

The discussion starts of with the inevitable recap of Cartesian dualism, where mind and brain were thought to be completely separate entities, before launching into an interesting debate on how we can integrate our experience of the self and subjective experience with evidence from brain science.

The discussion took place at London’s Wellcome Collection who also have a brief interview with Churchland who discusses what she’s currently working on.

Churchland has become interested in oxytocin, which must rank alongside dopamine as one of the most misused bits of brain-behaviour evidence in popular discussion.

While she doesn’t entirely avoid the current over-excitement which portrays oxytocin as a form of ’empathy potion’ she tackles the science far more completely than you’ll find in your average mainstream media discussion.

Link to BBC World Service discussion with Patricia Churchland.
Link to brief interview at Wellcome.

The ancient mind was planning earlier than thought

Science News covers a fascinating new archaeological study that mapped the the remains of an 750,000 year-old settlement lived in by the ancestors of the human race and found evidence for tasks being organised in different areas, suggesting a degree of intelligence and problem solving that was not thought to have arisen until much later in evolution.

The study, just published in Science, analysed the pattern of artefacts in the Gesher Benot Ya‚Äôaqov site, located in what is now Northern Israel.

Previously, only modern humans, Homo sapiens, were thought to have developed the mental capacity to organise and separate their daily tasks. However, this site was settled by hominin ancestors of the human race and shows distinct signs of planned organisation:

Daily behaviors occurred in two main parts of a rectangular living area excavated at GBY, the researchers conclude. One area hosted primarily flint-tool making and preparation of fish for eating. In another area, situated around a large hearth, residents resharpened used stone tools, fashioned new tools out of basalt and limestone, ate fish and crabs, and cracked nuts after roasting them.

Roasting allowed the inedible shells of various nuts to be easily peeled off. It also reduced levels of bitter substances, called tannins, found in acorns.

‚ÄúHominids who were responsible for the organization of space at GBY had very advanced cognitive abilities that have generally been considered an important marker of human intelligence,” Goren-Inbar says.

Many researchers have thought that the mental capacity to plan and organize living spaces around different activity areas first arose among Homo sapiens roughly 100,000 years ago, well after the species originated around 200,000 years ago.

Until now, hominid sites from before 100,000 years ago had yielded stone tools and bones of various animals but no signs of separate activity spots in common living spaces.

Link to write-up from Science News.
Link to summary of scientific study in Science.

Travelling at the speed of thought

Discover Magazine has an excellent Carl Zimmer piece discussing efforts to understand the speed of the human nerves – a quest that has lasted for well over one hundred years.

Although our experience of the world seems instantaneous, different nerves in the body work at different speeds and, of course, cover different distances – to the point where taller people experience a slight sensory lag compared to shorter people owing to the greater length of some of the nerve pathways.

Speed is not necessarily of the essence, however, and as with dancing, it is timing and co-ordination that seems key:

Sometimes our brains actually need to slow down, however. In the retina, the neurons near the center are much shorter than the ones at the edges, and yet somehow all of the signals manage to reach the next layer of neurons in the retina at the same time. One way the body may do this is by holding back certain nerve signals‚Äîfor instance, by putting less myelin on the relevant axons. Another possible way to make nerve impulses travel more slowly involves growing longer axons, so that signals have a greater distance to travel.

In fact, reducing the speed of thought in just the right places is crucial to the fundamentals of consciousness. Our moment-to-moment awareness of our inner selves and the outer world depends on the thalamus, a region near the core of the brain, which sends out pacemaker-like signals to the brain‚Äôs outer layers. Even though some of the axons reaching out from the thalamus are short and some are long, their signals arrive throughout all parts of the brain at the same time‚Äîa good thing, since otherwise we would not be able to think straight.

Link to Discover article ‘What Is the Speed of Thought?’

On the soul of robots

New Scientist has an interesting article discussing research on how we attribute personality traits to robots. This is not just the human-like android from research labs, it’s the robots that are already in widespread use in the workplace and home like the floor-cleaning Roomba.

This is a fantastic snippet about a study on the commercially available Aethon TUG robot, used to deliver supplies on hospital wards, and what staff made of the machine:

TUG, which is made by Aethon, can navigate a building’s corridors and elevators on its own and tell humans it has arrived with a delivery…

The lack of any social awareness led interviewees to complain that they felt “disrespected” by the robot. “It doesn’t have the manners we teach our children,” said one, “I find it insulting that I stand out of the way for patients… but it just barrels right on.”

Luckily for TUG, its unvarying, one-size-fits-all social skills happened to be a natural fit in the relaxed atmosphere of the post-natal ward, says Mutlu. But the same default settings were interpreted as demanding and attention-seeking on the oncology ward, which is a more stressful and busy place to work. “If you are going to design robots with human-like capabilities you have to design the appropriate social behaviour that goes along with it,” Mutlu says.

This reminds me of perhaps the only study that has evaluated what personality traits people attribute to the synthetic speech on a voice mail system, rating it as practical, intelligent, courteous, efficient, straight-forward, sophisticated, methodical, progressive and alert.

Link to NewSci article ‘Learning to love to hate robots’.

Understanding witchcraft

YouTube has a fantastic documentary about the work of the pioneering anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard who was one of the first researchers to try and understanding the psychology of people he was studying.

He is most well known for his 1937 book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande where he studied the role of magic and prophecy in the lives of the Sudanese Azande people from their perspective.

This was one of the first times that an anthropologist had attempted to understand other cultural beliefs as a coherent system, rather than simply listing the ‘odd’ or ‘irrational’ practices from a Western perspective.

One of his main conclusions was that the Azande were making rational decisions based on different assumptions, in contrast to the general colonial opinion that the people of Africa were somehow ‘backward’.

Evans-Pritchard became one of the founders of social anthropology and was influential in a change of perspective in understanding other cultures.

He was also a keen photographer and there is a fantastic collection of his photos that attempted to record the people he met at the Oxford University Pitt Rivers museum.

The documentary is a great overview of both the man and his work with the Azande and Nuer people in Africa.

Link to documentary ‘Strange Beliefs: Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard’.