Category: Integrating

The Age has a brief article looking at how film makers are trying to avoid the ‘uncanny valley‘ – the phenomenon where artificially created characters seem more unnervingly odd as they are made more life-like.

The idea is that we’re so used to picking up the subtlies of human appearance that android-like figures seem cold and stilted whereas less life-like cartoons or animals can often seem more expressive and ‘warm’ because we aren’t distracted by their not-quite-right attempts at being human.

This is a concept developed by robotics researchers but is also important when film-makers are trying to make likeable characters that audiences will warm to.

The article has noted that film makers have spent a lot of time trying to develop computer software to simulate things like hair movement, in an attempt to improve realism.

It’s hard to say what exactly is off-putting about ‘artificial humans’ though, so it’s not easy to know what to focus on to improve their likeability.

This might be one area where significant advances in human-computer interaction might be driven by the film and entertainment industry.

Link to article ‘When fantasy is too close for comfort’.

Dr Brad Pasanek is a literature researcher at the University of Southern California who has created a database of metaphors of the mind used in 18th century English literature.

It allows you to search by everything from standard keywords to the politics of the author and has over 8,000 entries.

As illustrated by Douwe Draaisma’s excellent book Metaphors of Memory, our scientific understanding of the mind often uses metaphors of the latest technological developments.

It’s no accident that we now tend to understand the mind in computational terms, as an information processing system, whereas in past centuries it was thought to operate on the principles of pressures, fluids and vapours.

Pasanek also runs a blog that highlights some of the background and history to the more interesting examples.

Link to The Mind is a Metaphor database.
Link to The Mind is a Metaphor blog.

Wired has an article on ‘field sense’ – a sportsman’s ability to infer seemingly unknowable information from subtle perceptual cues.

This means that some sportsman appear to have a ‘sixth sense’ of where players are on the field, or can work out where a ball is likely to go before it is struck.

This tends to be present in pro-sportsman and previously, it was just thought to be something you’re born with. An advantage that makes some people more likely to rise to the top.

Wired magazine covers recent research in sports psychology suggesting it’s actually something that it learnt, and might well be teachable.

What happened in that fraction of a second? A lot, Farrow reasoned. Up to a point, he theorized, the direction of a serve was fundamentally unpredictable: Whatever clues existed weren’t ones that an opposing player could discern. By the time the ball had been hit, on the other hand, even a novice could make a plausible guess at its trajectory. What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head. This fraction of time is game- changing. A serve going 120 miles per hour takes approximately a third of a second to travel the 60 feet from baseline to service line. This means that an expert, who doesn’t have to wait until contact, has twice as long to move, plant his feet, and swing.

This discovery fit with something Farrow and other tennis researchers had already suspected: Reflex speed is not the key factor in returning a serve. “People have tested casual players and experts, and their reaction times are essentially the same,” Farrow says. The fact that Roger Federer can drill back a 140-mile-per-hour serve is partly a matter of muscle control. But it’s also about processing subtle visual cues to predict where the ball will go and get to the right spot.

Link to article ‘Wayne Gretzky-Style ‘Field Sense’ May Be Teachable’.

An article in Time magazine discusses how an understanding of the psychology of disgust is being applied to selling products and the arrangement of items in supermarkets.

One key finding has been that disgust is heavily linked to ideas of contamination and this holds even when there’s no risk – just the idea is enough.

For example, people are less likely to want to put a plastic spoon in their mouth that has touched fake plastic vomit, despite the fact that it is no more risky than putting a spoon in your mouth that has touched other plastic spoons in the packet.

Psychologists Andrea Morales and Gavan Fitzsimons has discovered that this principle applies to consumer products that are linked to things that can trigger disgust – rubbish bags, nappies, toilet paper and so on.

Crucially, the contamination principal works here, so people view things less favourably that have been near these products.

Strong preferences were just what the subjects exhibited. Any food that touched something perceived to be disgusting became immediately less desirable itself, though all of the products were in their original wrapping. The appeal of the food fell even if the two products were merely close together; an inch seemed to be the critical distance. “It makes no sense if you think about it,” says Fitzsimons. More irrationally still, the subjects were less comfortable with a transparent package than an opaque one, as if it somehow had greater power to leak contamination. Whatever the severity of the taint, the result was predictable…

“More and more stores organize products by category,” says Morales, “so you have a baby aisle, for example, with diapers and wipes and baby food all together.” Supermarkets might want to rethink that arrangement.

Link to Time article ‘The Science of Disgust’.

I’ve just found an entry on PubMed for a curious sounding case study:

An unusual perversion: the desire to be injured by an automobile operated by a woman.

American Journal of Psychiatry. 1960 May;116:1032.

KEELER MH.

I imagine it caused havoc during rush hour.

Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t have a summary, and I’m not able to access back issues of the AJP at the moment, so it will have to remain a mystery for the time being.

Link to PubMed entry.

Philosopher Jerry Fodor has written a wonderfully entertaining review of Galen Strawson’s new book ‘Consciousness and Its Place in Nature’ for the London Review of Books.

In his book, Strawson looks at the assumption that consciousness arises from the physical matter of the brain and comes to the startling but coherent conclusion that maybe everything has the capacity for consciousness.

Fodor explains it like so:

So, then, if everything is made of the same sort of stuff as tables and chairs (as per monism), and if at least some of the things made of that sort of stuff are conscious (there is no doubt that we are), and if there is no way of assembling stuff that isn’t conscious that produces stuff that is (there’s no emergence), it follows that the stuff that tables, chairs and the bodies of animals (and, indeed, everything else) is made of must itself be conscious. Strawson, having wrestled his angel to a draw, stands revealed as a panpsychist: basic things (protons, for example) are loci of conscious experience. You don’t find that plausible? Well, I warned you.

Fodor is always a great read (just have a look at the first paragraph of the review) and he often writes amusing and original articles.

One of his papers (and for the life of me I can’t remember which) takes the form of him explaining a philosophical argument to his aunt.

His ideas causes all sorts of controversy in cognitive science. For example, he argues that humans have a language of thought – a sort of common basic code that all thought is based on.

Artificial intelligence researchers love this approach, as you might expect, but it drives many people nuts as they object to the ideas that the mind is just an information processor and that concepts and beliefs can be independently represented in the brain.

My favourite retort is from a book by Still and Costall called ‘Against Cognitivism’ (ISBN 0745010253) who write that Fodor’s theories are

“where one tries to keep a reasonably straight face while presenting the absurd consequences of the scheme as exciting theoretical revelations”.

Have that sir!

There’s a funny tagline at the bottom of Fodor’s review relating to such criticisms which made me chuckle:

Jerry Fodor teaches philosophy and psychology at Rutgers University. Everyone wonders why he is writing still another book about the language of thought.

And if anyone knows the name of the Fodor article I can’t remember, do let me know!

Link to review of ‘Consciousness and Its Place in Nature’ (via 3Q).
Link to details of book.

Dr Jerome Groopman has written a book on the psychology of medical decision making called How Doctors Think but interestingly, he specifically excludes psychiatrists, as he says their thought processes are too complicated to understand.

Groopman talks about his book on the NPR radio programme Fresh Air, which also has the introduction of his book available online.

The end of the introduction is telling:

I quickly realized that trying to assess how psychiatrists think was beyond my abilities. Therapy of mental illness is a huge field unto itself that encompasses various schools of thought and theories of mind. For that reason, I do not delve into psychiatry in this book.

Among the medical profession psychiatry is one of the more poorly paid and less respected specialities, possibly because traditionally ‘dangerous’ medical interventions (such as surgery) are limited, and it often involves dealing with disturbed and difficult patients – which makes it seem less glamorous to the public.

You’ll notice this at election time. Politicians are quite happy to stand next to grateful working folk who’ve just had a life threatening tumour removed, but are strangely reluctant to stand next to oddly behaving unemployed people who’ve just been saved from suicide.

This lack of status belies the fact that psychiatrists deal with the most complex conceptual problems.

There is very little discussion about the philosophy of cardiology because we tend to understand disordered hearts on a limited number of levels.

In contrast, the philosophy of psychiatry is a huge area, because understanding the disordered mind involves drawing together a number of different levels and approaches in the context of one person’s life and experience.

Psychology, neuroscience, sociology, physiology, philosophy, ethics and law are all needed for even the most simple of consultations. And this is just for starters.

This is not to say that other types of medicine are straightforward, but they certainly deal with fewer philosophical difficulties on a day-to-day basis.

This leads to uncertainty and doctors generally hate not knowing what’s happening as it’s often considered a sign of failure.

Psychiatrists, good ones at least, will spend a lot more time saying they don’t know than other doctors. They handle a lot more uncertainty, and this is what makes some physicians uncomfortable.

The fact that someone could write a book on the thought processes of physicians but won’t even attempt to start on the mental life of psychiatrists is, I think, a very sincere compliment.

Link to NPR Fresh Air on ‘How Doctors Think’.

The Technology, Entertainment, Design conference has strayed from its original focus and now hosts a wide-ranging set of talks, including a number on ‘How the Mind Works‘, all of which are available online as streamed video.

I’m always a bit suspicious of anything in psychology with grand titles like this.

I remember smiling to myself when I started reading Steven Pinker’s (actually very good) book of the same name, where he wrote in the first few pages that the book won’t actually tell you how the mind works, but will just help explain what we’ve worked out already.

I thought it would be better called ‘What I Think About What We Know About How the Mind Works So Far’, but I suspect the publisher’s would have objected.

The joke goes that Daniel Dennett’s equally as grandly titled book ‘Consciousness Explained’ should really be called ‘Consciousness Explained Away’, as he argues that their is no such thing as qualia and no hard problem to solve, two of the main issues thought to be key in consciousness research.

If you want to know more about Dennett’s views on consciousness, you can have a look at his TED lecture.

The other talks are fascinating and diverse. Helen Fisher talks about the psychology and biology of love, Daniel Gilbert talks about happiness and why we are so bad at understanding it, Ray Kurzweil talk about how we’re shortly all to become super evolved drug-enhanced semi-robots.

There’s plenty of other talks as well, so see what catches your interest. None of them will tell you how the mind works, but they’ll tell you some of what we know so far.

Link to videos of TED mind, brain and society talks.

Archive.org has a copy of a 1948 book entitled the Psychological Atlas that is full of weird and wonderful things from the world of 1940s psychology and beyond.

It’s got some serious psychology in there, mixed in with the paranormal, weird and curious stuff, probably reflecting the public understanding of the field at the time.

The Second World War was a critical time for psychology as many influential psychologists (like Gordon Allport and JJ Gibson) were employed to help select recruits and design better functioning equipment.

This helped significantly with psychology being taken seriously as a science, and this slightly post-war volume probably still has some of the hangovers from the pre-war years.

A fascinating read nonetheless.

Link to Psychological Atlas (via BoingBoing).

You would think they’d be lots of good psychological theories of wisdom, as it’s something we talk about all the time in everyday life, but there just isn’t.

Psychologists have traditionally avoided the subject, although, thankfully, this is now starting to change and the New York Times has an in-depth article looking at some of the recent findings.

The article also looks at why the subject has been ignored, partly, of course, because it’s quite hard to define.

Nevertheless, one person who has pioneered the study of wisdom is neuropsychologist Dr Vivian Clayton who began studying this most valued of human traits in the 1970s.

Between 1976, when she finished her dissertation, and 1982, Clayton published several groundbreaking papers that are now generally acknowledged as the first to suggest that researchers could study wisdom empirically. She identified three general aspects of human activity that were central to wisdom — the acquisition of knowledge (cognitive) and the analysis of that information (reflective) filtered through the emotions (affective). Then she assembled a battery of existing psychological tests to measure it.

Clayton laid several important markers on the field at its inception. She realized that “neither were the old always wise, nor the young lacking in wisdom.” She also argued that while intelligence represented a nonsocial and impersonal domain of knowledge that might diminish in value over the course of a lifetime, wisdom represented a social, interpersonal form of knowledge about human nature that resisted erosion and might increase with age. Clayton’s early work was “a big deal,” Sternberg says. “It was a breakthrough to say wisdom is something you could study.” Jacqui Smith, who has conducted wisdom research since the 1980s, says it “was seminal work that really triggered subsequent studies.”

The article discusses some of Clayton’s early groundbreaking work in the field and goes on to look at what modern psychology and neuroscience is telling us about how we understand wisdom and act wisely, particularly in terms of emotion and maturity through the later years.

Link to NYT article ‘The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis’.

The Boston Globe has a well-researched article on how emotion has become increasingly important in scientific models of the mind.

Only two decades ago, cognitive psychology rarely discussed emotion and was largely about the supposedly ‘cold’ computational aspects of mind: memory, attention, problem solving, language and so on.

It is now being recognised that emotion plays an important role in all of these aspects of mental life, largely because of developments in neuroscience.

This new science of emotion has brought a new conception of what it means to think, and, in some sense, a rediscovery of the unconscious. In the five decades since the cognitive revolution began, scientists have developed ways of measuring the brain that could not have been imagined at the time. Researchers can make maps of the brain at work, and literally monitor emotions as they unfold, measuring the interplay of feeling and thinking in colorful snapshots. Although we aren’t aware of this mental activity — much of it occurs unconsciously — it plays a crucial role in governing all aspects of thought. The black box of the mind has been flung wide open.

As an aside, the author of the piece is science writer Jonah Lehrer, who also writes neuroscience blog Frontal Cortex.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘Hearts and Minds’.

Hypnosis and Suggestion is a fantastic website created by Dr Matt Whalley, an academic hypnosis researcher who gives a level-headed and detailed account of what is known about the science of hypnotic states and suggestion.

Hypnosis is a well researched psychological phenomenon and, increasingly, it is being investigated by cognitive neuroscientists.

What we know is that some people are more susceptible to hypnotic suggestions than others.

Research has shown that the level of hypnotic susceptibility is known to be stable across the life span and related to genetics.

A twin study shown that hypnotisability is likely to be heritable and recent molecular genetics studies have shown that it may be influenced by a gene known as COMT.

Interest has recently begin to focus on what makes some people highly hypnotisable compared to others.

A recent study looking at brain structure found that the front part of the corpus callosum was almost a third bigger in highly hypnotisable people.

This matches up with other neuroimaging studies which have suggested that highly hypnotisable people show differences in the function of frontal lobes, particularly the anterior cingulate cortex.

These differences are likely to be linked to an ability to become very ‘absorbed’ in things, with a simultaneous reduction in conflict and distraction when highly focused.

This might explain why hypnotic suggestions seem to have their effect on highly hypnotisable people, as they become absorbed in what the hypnotist says and can voluntarily ‘switch off’ the need to constantly self-monitor and evaluate their own reactions.

Interestingly, research suggests that we aren’t very good at working out how hypnotisable we are.

Matt Whalley’s site is a fantastic introduction to what is known about the science of hypnosis, including a list of frequently asked questions, an overview of the current theories of hypnosis, its history and its use by legitmate clinicians.

A fascinating read and well worth investigating if you’re curious about this intriguing human phenomenon.

Link to Hypnosis and Suggestion website.

Jeremy Dean is the author of PsyBlog and also a postgraduate psychology researcher. He’s asking for people to spend 15 minutes completing some online questionnaires as part of a study on emotion.

The project is based at University College London but you can participate over the web.

There’s more information at the link below.

Link to Jeremy Dean’s emotion study.

Despite what the headlines might say, no-one has simulated a mouse brain. What has been created is still quite impressive though.

Scientists from IBM have created an artificial neural network which contains the simulated equivalent of the number of neurons in an actual mouse cortex, but with less synapses.

The mouse cortex contains about 8 million neurons, each of which has an average of 8,000 synaptic connections.

The simulation used the same number of ‘neurons’, but used an average of only 6,300 synaptic connections per brain cell, and each neuron fires about ten times slower than in real life.

Crucially, the simulated neurons are only vague approximations of the actual thing.

This is no reflection on the researchers, but really a result of the fact that we just don’t know enough about how single neurons work to create truly accurate simulations.

Also, the model was made up of simulated neurons of one particular type only to make things a little more straightforward.

Finally, there was no attempt to recreate the ‘architecture’ of the mouse cortex – that is, the division of the model into sections which do different functions, and no attempt to account for the function of non-neuronal brain cells.

The sheer scale of the model is impressive though, and shows that these large scale models are becoming technically feasible.

Previously, the technical restrictions of dealing with the computations and moving the data about quickly enough had not been overcome for a simulation of this size.

The project was run on a BlueGene/L supercomputer to make it possible.

IBM have released a short technical report on the project which is available at the link below.

pdf of report ‘Towards Real-Time Mouse Scale Cortical Simulations’.
Link to Wikipedia page on artificial neural networks.

The BPS Research Digest has a wonderfully straightforward explanation of a branch of psychology called psychophysics, which attempts to understand the relation between physical qualities and the psychological impressions they cause.

The piece is written by Mind Hacks co-founder and psychophysicist extraordinaire, Dr Tom Stafford, who explains how this key area of psychology uses mathematical models to understand how the brain makes sense of the physical world.

Tom explains how psychophysics tackles these sorts of problems and then explains one of the most important discoveries in psychophysics: Weber’s law.

Psychophysics is heavily used in ergonomics and human-computer interaction.

Knowing, for example, how noticeable something is (like a warning light), gives a huge advantage when trying to design safe and easy-to-use software interfaces, jet fighter cockpits or even home appliances.

Link to BPSRD article ‘An introduction to psychophysics’.

Time magazine has recently published two articles on psychedelic drugs: the first on the recent publication of successful psychedelic treatment studies and the other suggesting LSD was first taken up by the cultural and business elite before becoming a staple of the 60s underground.

We covered some of the research investigating the therapeutic potential of various psychedelic compounds in December last year if you want an idea of what sort of studies are being conducted.

The first article notes the slowly changing attitude of the authorities towards doing scientific studies on these drugs, and name checks MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organisation who have done much to promote trust between government and scientists on the issue.

The second article uncovers a few interesting anecdotes about key establishment figures (including one of the Time Inc. founders!) trying psychedelics when they were first being discovered by the USA in the 1950s.

Link to Time article ‘Was Timothy Leary Right?’.
Link to Time article ‘When the Elite Loved LSD’.
Link to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.