Synesthesia is a condition in which people senses become entangled, such that a person might see colours when listening to music or feel a certain sensation while tasting something. It’s a really interesting phenomena, and people who have this ability often go a long time before realising it, as it is not necessarily debilitating and they just assume everyone else is the same!

It’s not an area I know much about so, I found this video by Robert Sims very interesting, and well made.

The theory of sexual selection proposes that certain traits evolved due to the preference of the other gender. These preferences may evolve because the trait is an indicator or genetic fitness, for example through being related to better health. Random genetic mutations that lead an individual to better display this trait are make that person “sexier” to the other sex, and hence the gene is more likely to make it into the next generation.

T1000 Getting jiggy with it. John Connor, get down!!

Many such traits are physical characteristics, as we’ve discussed before, but research on numerous species suggests that certain variations in movement patters can also be “sexy,” particularly when displayed by males and preferred by females, as seen in some birds, ungulates and crustaceans, for instance.

We humans seems to use this fitness indicator too — married couples dance together by tradition, strippers dance instead of just standing there taking their clothes off, and I’ve never heard someone say that they don’t want a partner whose a good dancer! So maybe dance serves to indicate beneficial traits in humans too? A study from 2010 tested this idea.

Confounds

A problem with testing this scientifically are certain confounds that tend to go along with good dancers. For example, if you got a load of people to dance in front of participants, then asked them to rate the dancers’ attractiveness, things like facial attractiveness, clothing or height might get in the way.

To isolate the effect of dancing alone, the researchers had males dance for 30 seconds using a motion-capture system. The movements were then mapped onto an avatar, a faceless humanoid shape that kind of looks like the T1000 from terminator two when it’s in the liquid metal mode. Females then rated the avatars on their dancing quality.

The best dancer

The results indicated that the following are preferable to females in a male dancer:

• Variability and amplitude of movements in the head, neck and trunk
• Faster leg movements
• Move and quicker right knee bending and twisting

Here’s the good dancer:

I know, it looks ridiculous to me too. Here’s the bad dancer:

These are really only preliminary results, and more tests need to be done to test this type of movement. Then it’s necessary to figure out if and how these particular movements could be signals of fitness and health. But in the mean time, now you know what to do on the dance floor!

And here’s (kind of) an attempt by a YouTuber to reenact the good dancer. He seems to have thrown a few of his own moves in, making it only slighty cheesier…

As with bilingualism, it’s generally assumed that being an expert completely beneficial and has no downsides to performance. However we know that expertise tends to be domain specific, for example, chess grand masters can memorise chess boards far more quickly and easily that novices, but on standard cognitive tests tend to fare no better. In fact, if you arrange chess pieces to positions that would never be encountered in an actual game, again their recall is no better than chess novices, showing just how domain-specific expertise can be. But surely within a given domain, expertise can only be beneficial?

Unlucky Kasparov

Castel, McCabe, Roediger and Heitman suggest not. They gave 40 students a memory test consisting of eleven animal names and eleven body parts. The twist here was that all the animal names were also NFL team names, like dolphins, colts, seahawks and bears. After the memory test, participants were given an NFL quiz, and the group was split into two, those scoring above and below the median on this test, to give high expertise and low expertise groups in the domain of NFL knowledge.

The results on the memory test for the two groups was then compared. Indeed, the NFL experts remembered more of the animal names than the non-experts, while there was no difference between groups on the body parts test. So far so good, however, the researchers also tested for incorrect answers — NFL animal team names and body parts that were not part of the original test. The results indicated that the experts were much more likely to make incorrect guesses than the non-experts. The authors suggest that this represents memory errors, the domain-relevant information of the experts got in the way of their accurate recall of the animal names. Since there was no difference between groups in body part experience, false answers were about even between groups on that test.

Is this really the case though? Or was it that the experts consciously noticed that the animal names belonged to the NFL teams and simply reeled off as many as they could remember during recall. Perhaps it was not a case of the existing schema interfering with memory, but a recognition that they already know these names, so why bother taking the extra effort to think back and recall? Why not just reel off my schema? I wonder if the results would be the same if participants were told that they would score 1 point for a correct guess, but minus 1 point for an incorrect guess, which might increase the incentive to actually recall. In other words, maybe this effect is a conscious strategy used in situations where there’s no cost to an incorrect answer.

However, there are other studies that support the authors’ conclusions, which I haven’t read so perhaps my question has been answered before or since. Either way, it’s an interesting thought that the knowledge base acquired by experts might be detrimental in certain tasks.

ref:
Castel AD, McCabe DP, Roediger HL 3rd, & Heitman JL (2007). The dark side of expertise: domain-specific memory errors. Psychological science, 18 (1), 3-5 PMID: 17362368

The age-old advice is that it’s what’s on the inside, not what’s on the outside that makes you attractive. Is that true? Virgin Zeigler-Hill and Erin Myers performed a number of studies to test this theory, but there was one in particular that I found intreresting.

They showed 283 students photographs of people with neutral expressions, each one randomly being assigned an email address that expressed either high or low self-esteem, or just a name. For example:

Low:

• justaloser2007@hotmail.com
• sadeyes@yahoo.com
• slacker82@yahoo.com

High:

• confidenceissexy@gmail.com
• happyguy97@yahoo.com
• happygirl97@yahoo.com
• kingbilly@yahoo.com
• queengillian@yahoo.com

Name:

• thomas.rawlins@usm.edu
• natalie.rawlins@usm.edu
• tonystillson85@hotmail.com
• tonya.stillson@usm.edu
• william.simms@usm.edu
• tammy.simms@usm.edu

Participants were then asked to evaluate these pictures using the “Partner Ideal Scales,” a questionnaire which asks you to rate people certain qualities on 1-7 scales, and the answers are compiled into three dimensions related to ideal partners. These dimensions, along with some example questions are:

Warmth-trustworthiness: understanding, kind, considerate, good listener.

Attractiveness-vitality: nice body, adventurous, outgoing, good lover

Status-resources: successful, nice house, good job, dresses well

They were also asked to rate “This person’s overall value as a potential relationship partner,” giving a total of four dimensions on which the photos were rated.

Results

I’ve copied the graph of results below, hopefully the authors won’t mind.

There were gender differences in which email address is preferable. When men rated photos of women, interestingly the “name” email addresses were rated more highly on all dimensions. In other words, natalie.rawlins@usm.edu is perceived to be more attractive than happygirl97@yahoo.com or sadeyes@yahoo.com. I do wonder if it would have been better not to use the .edu email addresses though, since that might imply certain qualities on the person too.

Comparing high and low self-esteem addresses, low self-esteem email addresses were actually rated higher by men on warmth-trustworthiness and in the overall rating, which might be something to do with social stereotypes regarding modesty that are assigned to women by some (though not all) in our society.

This relates to another study in which participants were led to believe that the 2008 US presidential candidates possessed different levels of self esteem (for example, they were told that linguistic analysis had been performed, when it hadn’t). Male democrats and female republicans rated Hilary Clinton more positively when they were told she had low self-esteem compared to those told her self-esteem was high.

Back to the email study, for women rating men the story was a little different. Here, across the board women gave higher ratings to the high self-esteem emails than the the low self esteem ones. The “name” email addresses were rated equally high in warmth-trustworthiness and status-resources, but not in the other two categories. It’s interesting that the high self-esteem emails were rated higher on the categories most related to short-term mating strategies, aka hooking up, but not those related to more long term strategies, aka monogamy. This is predicted by other theories in evolutionary psychology, which suggest that when looking for a short term partner you look for the best genes, so your child is more likely to be a successful reproducer themselves, but for the long term you look for someone who will help rear the child.

To summarise, if you’re a man, on average there’s no benefit to having a low-self-esteem email address, while with women, just your name seems to be the best option. Note that this isn’t a hard and fast rule! Of course there would be variation and surely some women rated low-self esteem addresses highly, that being their personal preference. The data just show the overall trend. Also note that this is just one study, and you’d like to see it conducted again to see if the results were the same.

There are five other studies described in this paper which all point to the same conclusion – men with perceived high self-esteem are viewed more highly, while for women the results were mixed, sometimes expressing high self esteem led to lower ratings on certain dimensions. This study was a test of that general theory, rather than a recommendation on what email to have.

That said, if you have any feedback on this article you can reach me at awesomeguy67@generallythining.com

(just kidding!).

Wonder if these results apply to license plates too…

The Rosetta Stone people are making a killing through their concept of “natural” language learning. That is, their angle is that with their product, you supposedly learn a new language in the same way you learned your first, which allegedly makes the process easier.

To accomplish this, they use pictures. So you see and hear a foreign word, and a collection of pictures, and you pick the one you think the word represents.

This makes nice, intuitive sense, although if you were skeptical you might think that this method is simply an easier way to increase the size of your product line, since pictures are universal while using words would basically mean re-writing the whole thing for each country you’re selling in. So it’d be good to see a few tests of this learning method.

You’d certainly expect pictures to be more effective, but results have been mixed. Shana K. Carpenter and Kellie M. Olson devised a few studies to tease out the answers.

A Good Old-Fashioned RCT

Using Swahili as the target language, they first did a standard randomised controlled trial. Half were shown a Swahili word with an English word, while the other half got a picture and the Swahili word, probably something like this:

kolb (Photo Credit: EpSos.de)

(Just to clarify, “kolb” is only the relevant part. Don’t run up to four legged animals in Kenya shouting “Here Photo Credit! Heeere Photo Credit!!”)

The results did not indicate a difference in the words learned by the participants — pictures were no more effective than words. Why could this be? One reason might be that the picture wasn’t encoded into memory very well. To test this, participants were also asked to free-recall as many pictures (or English words) from the test as they could. People who were presented images rather than words remembered significantly more items. This indicated that the lack of benefit from using pictures was not caused by insufficient encoding of the picture.

So if the pictures themselves are easier to recall than plain words, why weren’t their paired Swahili words easier to remember too? On to the second experiment…

The Multi-Media Heuristic

A heuristic is a basic rule of thumb that the brain uses to save time when processing. Think of it like a stereotype — to conserve the energy that would be spent taking people as they are, it’s easier to assume people possess characteristics associated to groups they belong to. There’s probably a survival thing going on here, since in life-or-death situations you need to respond quickly, so we have a built-in time saving “automatic” reasoning system.

The multimedia heuristic is the assumption people have that text combined with images is easier to remember than text alone. Seems like a reasonable rule of thumb, yet evidence doesn’t support it. Maybe when people see the picture with the foreign word, the energy-conserving multimedia heuristic kicks in and the brain allocates less resources to processing and encoding that word. Why bother with the effort? It’s got a picture with it!

So the test was repeated, but this time participants were asked, for each item, if they thought they’d remember it in five minutes. This test was repeated three times. In the first test, the pictures group was overconfident, and as before there was no difference in performance between groups. However, in the second test both groups saw a dramatic reduction in confidence (perhaps after seeing the results of the first test), and the pictures group did indeed recall more words than the words-only group! The same was found in the third test.

So it works! Perhaps by removing their overconfidence, the multimedia heuristic was assuaged and the brain provided more resources to the learning.

Don’t be overconfident!

In the third test, participants were split into two groups, each of which were tested on both picture-Swahili word and English word-Swahili word combinations. However, one group was given a little message telling them not to be too overconfident:

People are typically overconfident in how well they know something. For example, people might say that they are 50% confident that they will remember a Swahili word, but later on the test, they only remember 20% of those words. It is very important that you try to NOT be overconfident. When you see a Swahili word, try very hard to learn it as best you can. Even if it feels like the word will be easy to remember, do not assume that it will be. When you see a Swahili word with a picture, try your best to link the Swahili word to that picture. When you see a Swahili word with an English translation, try your best to link the Swahili word to that English translation.

Confidence was tested in the same way as the previous test, and indeed, the group receiving the warning reported lower confidence. Did this affect results?

Of course! People receiving the warning performed better than people who didn’t on the picture task, but not on the words task. Since overconfidence is not an issue when remembering word pairs, this both implicates the multimedia heuristic and suggests a way to improve learning of second language words — don’t be overconfident!

Maybe you can now remember the Swahili word for dog, presented earlier? It’s “kolb.” If you’re thinking “Photo Credit” I apologise profusely!

Reference:

Carpenter, S., & Olson, K. (2012). Are pictures good for learning new vocabulary in a foreign language? Only if you think they are not. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38 (1), 92-101 DOI: 10.1037/a0024828

Imagine your kitchen floor is dirty. Since you don’t want to clean it yourself you log in to a robot design website, tell them that you want a robot capable of cleaning your kitchen floor. They give you a quote, you pay, and then they email the design to you. You click “Print,” the design goes to your 3D printer, and out pops a fully functioning robot, yours to command.

That might sound far fetched, yet perhaps it’s not so far away. 3D printing has been around for around three decades and can now print objects in glass, metal, plastics and even bio-degradable materials. It has been used to create everything from jewelery, shoes, aeroplane components and even mechanical devices.

Peter Schmitt of MIT has already successfully printed a mechanical clock, and is working on servo mechanism which could be used to make custom-built robots. Much has been made over 3D printing’s potential to revolutionise industry, putting manufacturing more strongly in the hands of garage hobbyists (if you think piracy of digital goods is a big issue, wait until everyone can pirate 3D objects!). But imagine if manufacturing was taken out of everyone’s hands.

The Prusa Mendel RepRap 3D Printer from RepRap.org

Evolution. Skip this section if you know it.

Evolution works through a combination of replication, mutation and selection. Organisms develops through instructions contained within their DNA, which they gets from their parent/s. For example, daddy tiger and mommy tiger copy some of their DNA and store it in their sex cells. After an evening of tiger love, they combine these sets of DNA to create a new set of instructions for “building” baby tiger.

But the DNA copying process isn’t perfect, and mistakes — called mutations — cause changes a given trait or characteristic — called a phenotype — of the organism to which that DNA will eventually belong. These phenotypic variations may affect the organism’s chances of surviving or reproducing.

If a mutation in daddy tiger’s DNA causes baby tiger to have sharper claws, it might get food more easily and therefore have more chance of surviving and passing this beneficial mutation on. If it results in weaker knees, the tiger might not catch any food and then die without passing on it’s DNA. This is evolution through natural selection. It is this process that eventually produced intelligent humans like yourself, able to ponder their own ancestry.

Replication, mutation, and selection. If machines can print 3D items, mechanical devices and even robots, is it possible to create “life,” or at least, objects that reproduce and whose offspring is subject to selection pressures?

Replication

Replication would require a 3D printer able to print, and construct, itself. The RepRap machine, designed by Adrian Bowyer of Bath university and seen the video above, is almost there. It knows how to print the plastic parts necessary to build itself. With the ability to build components out of different materials, it doesn’t seem infeasible that a modified RepRap could include construction as well as production capabilities. The printer contains a small hard drive, and the parent copies its own design onto its child’s hard drive. Replication achieved.

Mutation

Naturally, you want your printer to build things perfectly, so designers will try to remove mutations from the process. Also, the “DNA” in this analogy is the design on the computer, which we know is highly resilient to copying errors. However, you could imagine some flaw that creates mutations in the child design, or a non-natural form of mutation where the printer theorises about future designs that would increase its child’s ability to reproduce itself, and tests these, keeping logs of previous “tests” in its hard drive.

Selection

Natural selection could work here, as the printers need access to a source of power and raw materials. For power, you could imagine each one has a solar panel, and tests theories on how to build more efficient ones. The raw materials area a harder part though.

Automation

At what point would you be able to leave the printer running, then move all humans off the planet with confidence that they would continue to thrive? Presumably, you’d need to give the printers a head start, for example, the ability to build none-replicating drone scouts to look for raw materials, and transport robots to return it to the replicating “queens,” with the queens playing a sort of real-life game of Civilization. Or perhaps the queens themselves would produce new queens that could move and source the raw materials. Perhaps the queens see scouts from other printer families as threats, and build warrior drones to fight their resource wars.

If self-replicating machines were made that were capable of finding the resources and energy they needed to continue to reproduce, at what point do you call it life?

Of course I’m just thinking out loud with all this, but I think it’s interesting and fun to consider the possibilities. Many people think of 3D printing as a door to a techno-utopian future where the means of production is held inside every household — and maybe it is. However, if we manage to build completely self-replicating machines with the capacity for mutation and a form of selection pressure, I’m just saying, they might lead to a different future.

Researchers at the University of Parody today published new findings on the effects of unimaginative neuroscience article titles on anxiety, depression, and the desire to throw shoes at your computer screen.

The research was inspired by the fact that every single time — EVERY SINGLE TIME — a study involving brain imaging is conducted on a new topic, articles pop up all over the internet with “Your Brain On” headlines. “Your Brain on Love.” “Your Brain on Literature.” “Your Brain on… whatever.”

Researchers split participants into two groups. The first was presented with a series of “Your Brain On” neuroscience article headlines, while the control group was repeatedly beaten with a stick.

Compared to the “Beatings” group, the “Headlines” group reported increased anxiety, depression and decreased will to live, however, this may be because the control group was told they had better report high scores or else the beatings would continue at considerably higher intensity.

The paper ends by indicating that science journalists should drop this article structure immediately in the name of all that is holy and righteous, and also that watching the following is advisable to all readers and writers of neuroscience.

Bill Hicks, “Your brain on drugs.” (not safe for work)

P.S. The source of the problem:

I have experienced the second TV program that made me want to throw my shoes at the TV — a broadcast of Prime Minister’s Questions.

In PMQ’s, members of the opposition get to ask the PM questions about his party’s policies and actions. Ostensibly the point of this is to reach useful conclusions and actionable steps that will improve the country. Occasionally there was an inkling of that happening. But the bulk of it was shoe-throwing-bad (if you’re wondering, the other program that made me wish for more aerodynamic footwear is Big Brother).

I watched in complete disbelief as questions on issues affecting the country were answered with ad hom attacks aimed at the asker! It seemed like the aim was to “beat” the asker, rather than respond intelligently to the question. These attacks are always followed by jeering and cheering, as though this is considered acceptable.

This philosophy — of winning the discussion rather than productively debating — you also see disgustingly often when politicians are being interviewed on TV. It’s often done with a restatement of the responder’s position on the issue, or some random hyperbole. Something like:

Q: “How do you respond to the claim that your policies have increased unemployment?”
A: “This is a complex issue and we need to look at all our options and make the right moves going forward, to encourage growth and get the economy back on track.”

Doesn’t answer the question! And yet, seems like it does.

The problem here is that free-form debating of a topic isn’t very useful. It’s too open to hacking. We are able to out-debate people even when we are wrong and they are right. We are able to change people’s minds to our way of thinking regardless of what the actual truth is. We even have scientifically researched ways of doing so — although sometimes good old-fashioned talking over the other person is all that’s needed.

This problem is only exacerbated when groups of people are mass-debating because it’s hard to come to a satisfactory conclusion without someone else butting in first.

Free-form verbal debate is highly effective in finding out who the most charistmatic, silver tongued and/or dominant person is. It’s not very effective in reaching productive conclusions.

For that, the scientific way is better. Scientist A writes a paper, and scientist B responds with their criticisms. Scientist A can then publish another addressing these, perhaps after collecting more data. And so on. Because it’s all laid out in writing, it is obvious to everyone if a question has been dodged.

This is too slow for politics, but maybe there’s a middle ground…

Who Dares Wins

Future of British politics? (Note the isolation booth)

Who Dares Wins is a game show in which opposing contestants sit in sound-proofed booths, betting on which one of them can list the most items from a particular category, for example, films starring Johnny Depp, or number 1 singles. As soon as I saw this, I knew it was essential to politics.

I propose that this studio be repurposed for interviewing politicians, CEOs of companies that have done something naughty, and perhaps built into the House of Commons itself (neon lights, dramatic music and all).

Here’s how it would work.

The interviewer sits in one booth, the politician in the other. In the middle is be a large screen to display the arguments and responses thus far. A number of online tools have been created to visually represent debates in this way, so we already know how to do that.

The interviewer asks their first question, and it appears on the screen. During this time, the microphone in the politician’s booth is switched off. The booth is sound-proof, so no one can hear them no matter how loudly they shout.

Next, the politician gets his chance to respond. The interviewer’s booth is switched off and the politician’s turns on. They get their chance to reply, and their responses appear on the screen. Then the response is analysed by an impartial adjudicator, to ensure that it does in fact answer the question, and isn’t some clever ducking and weaving.

If the answer is suitable, it goes up on the board, and the interviewer gets to challenge these responses. The process continues in this way.

If the answer isn’t suitable, it will be quite obvious to all. The interviewer or adjudicator could then challenge the response, and if it cannot be defended, that answer would be stricken from the board and they could be invited to answer again.

Personal attacks and logical fallacies from either side would also be stricken off the board, and perhaps a small punishment applied, such as a smacked bottom or a gunging.

Advantages

No longer would people be able to dodge questions without appearing to do so.

No longer would people be able to win arguments through verbal jiu jitsu.

No longer would people be able to win arguments by having the loudest voice.

Potentially hilarious.

Disadvantages

None.

Political debate is broken, people. To fix it we need sound-proofed booths and neon lights. Particularly, neon lights.

My belief about the nature of reality is that the only “thing” that exists is matter. That is, there is no soul, no heaven and no hell. Effects aren’t caused without an interaction with different pieces of matter, and consciousness exists within the confines of the physical head that gives rise to it.

However, although I used to be extremely firm in this position, now I am less sure, because of one question. I don’t know how to answer this from a materialist perspective. Maybe there’s just a really simple answer that I’m missing, but I’ve spoken to many people on this and no one has given it to me. Maybe you can. So here’s the question.

Where is the cat?

“HAHAHA puny humans you will never find me. (Photo by Tambako the Jaguar

I can make a picture of a cat in my head; I can close my mind and think of it. So I’m perceiving this image of a cat.

Where is the image? Where is the cat?

I first heard this question (well, I added the cat part myself) in a lecture on the mind/body problem, and my initial answer is that the cat is simply a 1:1 correlate of certain neurological activity in the brain. That is, if you open up my head you won’t see a picture of a cat, but you’d see something that’s the equivalent of it, sort of like the dots and dashes of Morse code are not English characters, but they are equivalents of them. From a materialistic perspective, you’d theoretically be able to interpret the activity in my brain through some technology, and recreate the image of the cat that I am picturing on a screen.

In fact, we’re past theorising on this, as a famous experiment last year that was widely reported as “Mind Reading” in the media demonstrated. Here’s what they did:

1) Measured brain activity as someone watched a load of YouTube videos
2) Linked up the brain imaging data with the image on the screen, creating a sort of database whereby such-and-such brain activity relates to, say, a red object in the middle of the screen, such-and-such relates to certain shape moving to the left, and so on. I’m probably over-simplifying, but that’s the gist.
3) Get the same person to watch a new set of YouTube videos, again while in the scanner measuring brain activity.
4) Use the database created in step 2 to predict what the person was seeing in step 3.

Here’s how the reconstructions compared to the original videos:

It’s important to note that the brain may not code imagined images in the same way as those you see with your own eyes, and also that each person’s brain will likely code the image of the cat in different ways (hence the need for steps 1 and 2), but, since all of the activity of the mind is thought to have a direct neural correlate, the principle is the same.

So when I was asked “where” my mental image of the cat is, that’s why I responded in this way — the image is located in the brain – it’s just in a different format.

But really, I’m not satisfied with that answer. Because in my mind I can see (well maybe not see, but certainly perceive) the cat; not the equivalent neural ‘code’, but the actual cat. I know where the neural code is, but I don’t know where the cat is.

I can’t think how the materialistic model can explain where the cat is. Doesn’t this mean then that there’s more to reality than the purely materialistic? That the materialistic model is incomplete? What am I missing?

To use a computer analogy, the words you are reading now (hello!) are represented in a chip in a computer as a string of 0′s and 1′s. That’s like the neural code in your brain. But the actual words are represented on the screen in front of your eyes. What’s the equivalent of the screen in the case of the cat? Where is it?

I’m actually asking this to you – do you know where the cat is? Am I making a simple mistake? Please leave a comment and help me out!

Where is reality?

That’s probably enough for one day, but just to take this one step further; we know that what we see is not the world. The image we see is a mental construction of the world, and psychology has identified numerous examples of how we each see the world a little differently. An obvious example is colour-blindedness. Since the brain is constructing the world we see around us, and if we assume that the neural code and the image are different things… where is reality?

Ref:

Nishimoto S, Vu AT, Naselaris T, Benjamini Y, Yu B, & Gallant JL (2011). Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies. Current biology : CB, 21 (19), 1641-6 PMID: 21945275

A study in 2009 tested the effect of Tetris on memory consolidation. Forty participants were split into two groups. After watching a film showing traumatic stuff (surgery, people drowning etc), one group sat quietly while the other was told to play Tetris for 10 minutes. All participants kept a diary for a week where they recorded their flashbacks. The Tetris group reported fewer, and scored lower on the Impact of Events questionnaire.

Before we go on to the reasons and implications of this, might I suggest this listening music for the rest of the post?:

Photo Credit: Profound whatever

The idea is, that if you keep the visuo-spatial system busy, it has a harder time consolidating this memory. Other tests have suggested that the visuo-spatial element is key – verbal tasks, for instance seem to make flashbacks worse. This is thought to be because PTSD and flashbacks stem from two kinds of mental processing – visuo-spatial, and verbal/narrative. If the ratio is too heavy on the visuo-spatial side, you’re more likely to get flashbacks. This is also in line with other research on the beneficial effects of expressive writing as a form of therapy — perhaps this helps to bring the ratio back towards the verbal/narrative side.

So if you want to reduce unpleasant flashbacks, it’s best to carry a Gameboy around with you at all times, and if something traumatic happens, just whip it out and play for 10 minutes.

But since that’s pretty inconvenient for most people, there might be another way. Other research suggests that memories can be altered when you recall them, that is, the memory is loaded up and then “re-saved” when you’re done reminiscing/ruminating, and it’s possible to make “edits” to the “file” while it’s “loaded.” Maybe this plus tetris could equal something useful in therapy or self-help sessions. The idea is, you think back over the traumatic event and hold it mind. Then, start playing Tetris. I don’t know if this would work but if the authors of this paper are right that Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy (holding a memory in mind while moving your eyes around) works due to demand on the visuo-spatial system, then Tetris should too. Another advantage is you don’t have to feel like a twit sitting there moving your eyes while thinking bad thoughts.

Other suggestions would be basically to do the opposite of anthing related to accelerated learning during this session. So no exercise before hand, which helps sprout new neurons and aid learning, and no sleep afterwards, which also helps with memory creation. It’s like Accelerated Unlearning. How’s that for a book title? All I need to do is take this simple idea, explain it in five pages, then throw in 245 pages of anecdotes and other filler. Bestseller!

Interestingly, this only seems to affect involuntary flashbacks, because when a questionnaire about the film was administered after 1 week, the groups scored about even. Which is good since that would cause problems for students who use computer games as a break!

Here’s a short and interesting introduction to the topic of laughter by UCL professor Sophie Scott. It’s interesting that laughter seems to have an evolutionary heritage that goes way way back, since other animals appear to do it too, but more interesting to me is what goes on in the brain when we hear laughter, and how the brain seems to prepare for it. I’ll let you watch the video to get the rest, it’s only five minutes and time well spent if the title catches your interest at all.

There you have it. If you hear of any “rat-tickler” jobs going, let me know.

Jay Uhdinger of the appropriately named jayuhdinger.com has put together a free course on meditation and CBT.

The course is called Success != Happiness and covers techniques to help you gain greater control over your emotions and ultimately more happiness. Everything in Jay’s course is fully supported by research. CBT is widely used in psychotherapy these days and focuses on the idea that your emotions are closely linked to your thoughts, and by changing your thoughts, you change how you feel. Mindfulness has more recently caught the interest of researchers and has been linked with all kinds of positive things, including more happiness and increased cognitive function.

The good thing about Jay’s course, apart from it being 100% completely free, is that it is so well put together. The lessons are in both theory and practice, which I like. By understanding the aims and means of each section, you don’t have to take the practical tips on blind faith and you have a better idea of why you’re doing what you’re doing. And the animations are really cool and high quality.

I hope you’ll go check out the course, click below to give it a try:

Jay Uhdinger’s Success does not equal happiness

One huge frustration I have with learning Spanish — and I understand I’m not alone on this — is missing loads of what’s being said while translating one particular word.

While listening to a dialogue, my attention latches on to words I recognise and I try to retrieve the English translation. But before I find the English word, the speaker is three sentences away and talking about something else.

This is probably a consequence of the way we tend to learn second languages — that is, using our first language as a useful intermediate between a new foreign word and a meaning we already know. But it can be a detriment in comprehension, especially in the earlier stages of learning a language, when listening is far more of a conscious process.

This has nothing to do with the topic. I just find it funny. (Credit: Elephi Pelephi)

Generally I think conscious translating is a mistake. There are times where it’s OK to do this, such as when there’s a gap in the conversation, but I find it’s best to stay focused on what’s being said, not to “zoom in” on any particular word.

I’m hardly an expert and I don’t know what the more linguistically talented might think, but that’s my opinion. Just let go of the words you 50% understand, and keep listening.

The Cohort Model of spoken language comprehension, first proposed by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978), might explain why this works:

“According to this theory, the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with that input. These candidates compete with one another for activation. As more acoustic input is analyzed, candidates that are no longer consistent with the input drop out of the set. This process
continues until only one word candidate matches the input; the best fitting word may be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner.” (ref)

Here’s what happens, according to the cohort model. You hear a Spanish word, say “beber” meaning “to drink.” It sounds familiar but you don’t immediately get the meaning. So you try to translate it, probably rolling your eyes upwards as you do so. Behind the scenes, your brain is creating a cohort of possibilities as to what the word was. Maybe it creates a shortlist of Spanish words starting with “b,” plus a few others that rhyme, and looks up their associated meaning.

Perhaps the reason you stop and put some conscious effort into translating this word, is that you intuitively feel that this is a serial process, where the brain translates words one-by-one, and either gets the meaning or loses it forever — but it is not. The brain does not stop searching for the meaning of an unknown word even though it continues to listen to other words — in fact, it actually uses the input from future words to help filter down to the correct meaning of previously heard words, presumably while they are held in the phonological loop.

Have you every thought you understood what someone said, only to realise you misheard it based on something they said later? You could also deduce, then, that the brain doesn’t even have a concept of a correct word, and is always feeding back data based on probabilities; what it thinks is the most probable meaning.

So to continue the example, if you continued to listen to the speaker instead of temporarily disengaging your attention to consciously translate “beber,” you might hear “cerveza,” the Spanish word for beer and put two-and-two together. The meaning of the previous word comes to you in a flash.

Open Monitoring/Listening

This method of listening is very similar to a type of meditation called open monitoring. In this you sit and just allow any thought or perception to pass through your consciousness, being fully observant of it but not holding your attention on it.

Likewise, in open listening, as it could be called, you focus on the entirety of what is being said, rather than trying to follow the dialog word by word. By not focusing on a single word, you devote more of your attentional capacity to collecting more input.

You might also reason that the more practice one has with open monitoring meditation, the better they should be at language comprehension.

If you speak a second language let me know if you found the same when you were learning. Also, if you meditate a lot, let me know how you find language learning, or comprehending people in even your native language. Do you seem to find it easier than others to understand people with strange accents? Has this improved after your meditation experiences?

Just to expand on the previous post about the effect of action video games on attention, here’s a little more detail about the experiment in the paper.

In this test, a group of participants, all with little or no video game playing experience, were randomly assigned to two groups.

The first group (9 people) were asked to play Medal of Honor, for one hour per day, for 10 straight days. The second (8 people) played Tetris for the same time period. This is a good control condition, because it helps to cancel out improvements that might be made in, for instance, hand-eye coordination as opposed to actual cognitive improvements.

Playing this game may bring cognitive benefits.

At the end of the training, participants were giventhe enuration, useful-field-of-view and attentional blink tests described in this post. The group who played Medal of Honor performed better than the Tetris group, and this difference was statistically significant at the .05 level.

Additionally, the researchers carried out a mediation analysis, to see if the benefits on these tasks could be accounted for by game playing skill. In other words, did the people who improved the most at Medal of Honor over these 10 days also perform the best on the cognitive tasks? The results did not reach statistical significance (0.13), altough the effect was pretty strong with an adjusted r squared of 0.43. That means 43% of the variation in cognitve performance was accounted for by improvements in playing Medal of Honor.

These results suggest that playing Medal of Honor garners improvements in the attentional processing systems of the brain. However, note the limitations I mention in the previous post on this study.

Note that the version of Medal of Honor they played was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, from 2002 (the study was fromn 2003). However, it’s perfectly reasonable that the results apply to more recent versions of the game (both are first person shooters).

It’s often said that the youth of our society wastes their time playing video games; ostensibly a purely diversionary activity with no inherent merit. However, as someone with a youth misspent in this way, I have to disagree. There are many ways I feel video game-playing may serve me well in the future. For example, should powerful aliens invade our planet and challenge our species to a Street Fighter II tournament, killing all those who they defeat, I for one would fancy my chances. However on a more mundane level, research published in Nature indicated that video game brings cognitive benefits that transfer to activities other than the game itself.

Waste of time or brain trainer? credit: blindfutur3

Flanker compatibility

In this test, participants are distracted on a task by stimuli, which they have to ignore. The task becomes progressively more difficult, so it’s a good way of testing attentional capacity. When video game players were tested against non-players, they performed better on this task, suggesting they have greater attentional capacity.

Enumeration task

In this second task, squares flash on a screen briefly, and participants simply have to say how many there are. If there’s a small number of squares, you just ‘know’ how many there are. This is called ‘subitizing.’ As more and more squares are displayed you eventually lose your ability to subitize and must count the squares manually.

Video game players could subitize greater number of squares than non players (4.9 vs 3.3 on average), again this is consistent with the idea that video games bring beneficial effects — or at least, that video game players possess these benefits. In this case, the benefit is being able to focus on more distinct objects at once.

Widening the training zone

The next task was the “Useful Field of View” task, where the aim is to locate a certain target amongst a field of distracting ones. However, the twist here is that the field of view is extended to three eccentricities — 10, 20, and 30 degrees. The field of view when playing video games typically reaches around 20 degrees, so this is a good way to see whether the attentional benefits video game players have extends beyond the range of view they experience whilst playing. The results indicated that the players outperformed non-players at all ranges.

As with the previous tests, this is tricky to interpret. On one hand it could indicate that video games bring attentional benefits, and that these benefits extend beyond the normal field of vision experienced while playing. On the other hand, it could simply indicate that some people take to video game playing because they have better attentional qualities to begin with. Because this task is further from the conditions of the video game playing itself, you might reason that it is more in line with the latter. It’s impossible to say because this was a quasi experiment — there was no randomisation of group assignment.

Quick thinking – the attentional blink task

A common aspect of the games played by the participants is the need to act fast under pressure (see below for a list of games). To see if there was a difference on this ability between video game players and non-players, a variation on the attentional blink task was used.

In this task, a stimuli is displayed, followed 200-500 ms later by another. Typically, people have trouble processing the second stimuli because of fixation on the first. In the variation, participants had to detect a certain following stimuli from a sequence which included a few distractors. Again, the video game players out-performed the non-players.

Incidentally, experienced meditators also do better on this task.

Experimental task

As mentioned earlier, it’s impossible to determine cause and effect conclusively with this type of study. By selecting specific groups (players versus non-players) instead of randomising, you never know if you’re simply selecting groups who differ on the variable you’re studying to begin with. For instance, do video games attract or create people with enhanced attentional abilities.

To get around this, and experimental task was performed, where a group was told to go play an action video game, while another went off to play a puzzle game. The action video game players did better on the enumeration, useful field of view, and attentional blink tasks after training.

Video games are beneficial for attention?

While these results are consistent with the idea that video game playing brings cognitive benefits, the studies do have some limitations. Mainly, the sample size was pretty low. The enumeration task had the highest number of participants, and even that had only 13 per group. The others has only eight or nine per group.

For the quasi-experiments, this makes it even more likely that the results were due to the samples selected, despite the fact that they were highly statistically significant. For the experiment, the same applies. The significance levels were higher in the latter but that’s expected given it was only for 10 days.

Also, the transfer is fairly similar. Action video games and these tasks still involve sitting and looking at a screen. We don’t know if the results would be different in other situations in more natural settings. But overall it’s nice that by video game playing might, possibly, have benefits beyond helping me defeat an invasion by 2D beat-em-up-obsessed aliens.

Which games did they play?

In the tests comparing video game players with non-video game players, here’s a list of games that the players were into. Note that this study is from 2003!

• Grand Theft Auto 3
• Half-Life
• Counter-Strike
• Crazy Taxi
• Team Fortress Classic
• 007
• Spider-Man
• Halo
• Marvel vs Capcom
• Roguespear
• Super Mario Cart

Reference:

Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2003, May 29). Action video game modifies visual selective attention. Nature, 423, 534 –537. pdf