Mixing Memory

Marvin

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:57:38 -0500

Back to real blogging soon, but before then, I wanted to post this. You probably saw a bit of this during NBC's Olympics coverage, but the whole thing has to be seen. It's one of the coolest things ever, though me being a huge Marvin Gaye fan might have something to do with me thinking that:

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He's Just a Frackin' Adolescent Ass

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:24:07 -0500

Way, way back in September of 2005, a Danish newspaper published some cartoons depicting Muslims and their prophet, and in response, thousands of Muslim extremists responded with varying degrees of threatened and actual violence. As you all know, this resulted in a storm of media coverage around the world, including pretty extensive coverage in the American media. This coverage resulted in several important and, it seems to me, pretty productive discussions on a wide variety of relevant issues, including self-censorship among journalists, the double standard that exists when criticizing religion (as opposed to other world-views, such as the political), anti-Arab racism xenophobia in Europe, and Denmark in particular, as well as the inappropriatess and unacceptibility of the violent reaction of tens of thousands of Muslims across the Muslim world, which resulted in death and destruction.

I think several conclusions can be and were drawn from that discussion, such as that the cartoons were inappropriate, that self-censorship isn't inherently bad, but that people shouldn't be forced to self-censor for fear of their lives or the lives of others, that religion should be open to criticism, but that such criticism shouldn't be gratuitious, racist, or trade in overgeneralizations, that anti-Arab sentiments are rampant in Europe and the U.S. (duh), and that certain Muslim extremists will use any excuse to behave violently and incite others to do so as well. In the end, Denmark, with its Dansk Folkeparti right-wing xenophobes came off looking pretty bad, but Muslims came off looking much, much worse. Their behavior, and the resulting coverage and discussion of it, was perhaps that strongest indictment of Islamic extremism and its ability to infect the minds of people throughout the Muslim world that anyone could have produced. In this case, it was difficult not to see that many Muslims -- and in this case, it wasn't just a few extremists, but huge mobs of people -- were behaving very badly in the name of their religion.

In addition to media coverage and frank discussion, there was another response in both Europe and the U.S. to the Muslim reaction to the cartoons, though. This response came almost exclusively from right wing groups (e.g., the Folkeparti's youth wing) in Europe, and right wing bloggers in the U.S. (e.g., Michelle Malkin). And as you might imagine, given who was involved, this response didn't involve discussion, but instead used one-upmanship and look-at-me tactics like holding contests to produce even more offensive anti-Muslim/Arab cartoons, or reproducing the cartoons over and over and over again to accompany xenophobic anti-Arab rhetoric. These reactions were, at best, counterproductive. They added nothing to the discussion, and repeatedly illustrated how widespread anti-Arab racism is in the west. A pretty good rule of thumb is that if you want to show that someone's being a giant ass, it's best not to try to be one yourself.

The lesson I'm trying to convey is that in cases like that of the Danish cartoons and the response to them, there are two paths one can take: frank, reasoned discussion, or circus-like attention-whoring, and only one is truly effective. While the former causes people to actually think about what's going on, in all its complexity (and let's face it, the Danish cartoon situation was very complex, raising all sorts of social, political, ethical, and religious issues), whereas the latter may preach to the choir but is harmful more broadly.

Which brings us to 2008. Last month, as you all know, a student at the University of Central Florida got into a bit of trouble because he took a communion wafer, first back to his seat, and then back to his apartment. Catholics were none too happy about this, and at first responded by filing formal complaints with UCF, and then, once that piece of pond scum Bill Donahue got involved, harassing the poor kid and even issuing death threats. The reaction of Catholics in this case hasn't been as extreme as the reactions of Muslims in the case of the Danish cartoons, obviously, but if it hasn't been of the same magnitude, it has turned out to be of the same type: a violent reaction to perceived religious insults. This is unacceptable, and we'd have done well to display their reaction far and wide, and make it clear what Bill Donahue's role in it was, because inevitably, while the kid may have come off looking like a bit of a naive jerk, the Catholics would have come off looking much, much worse, and we might actually have been able to rationally discuss some of the issues that this case raises (like that double standard mentioned earlier in the post). Once again, we had a choice: rational discussion, or the juvenile attention-whoring characteristic of right-wing xenophobes.

Let's go back to 2006 for a minute. That's when I joined ScienceBlogs which, at the time, billed itself as the "world's largest conversation about science." Granted, at the time there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of science on ScienceBlogs (science comprised something like 30% of SB's content), but ScienceBlogs was (and is) a product of Seed Media Group, whose motto is "Science is Culture," and apparently many of the early ScienceBloggers just forgot the science part and focused on the culture (in the form of politics and religion). Now, Seed has been great over the last year and a half or so, more than doubling their blog total, and many of the blogs they've added are almost exclusively science-oriented. But Seed's biggest blog, the one to which everyone else in the network is inclined to link if they want a traffic boost, and which therefore can have a big influence on the content of the entire network, long ago ceased to be about either science or conversation. Instead, it became a prolonged self-aggrandizing, attention-whoring rant (it's likely not a coincidence that the proportion of rant to science, and the tone of that rant, grew in proportion to the blog's traffic).

Now, if we were to take ScienceBlog's self-description as a conversation about science seriously, we might be inclined to believe that ScienceBlogs would be the home of a rational discussion what happened with the UCF student and the idiot Catholics who harassed him. But in all likelihood, before we started to believe that, we'd be reminded that ScienceBlog's biggest name is not interested in conversation or rational discussion, and so we would not be surprised that instead of taking the broadly effective route, that blogger chose instead the juvenile tactics of right-wing xenophobes, in order to show that he is, in fact, the biggest, baddest, most anti-religious atheist in all of the intertubes, and to get all sorts of attention both from his loyal epigones and from religious nuts (it's probably not a coincidence, as well, that the blogger in question is planning on publishing a book sometime soon). There has been a resulting discussion, of course, but instead of focusing on the Catholics and their abominable behavior, the discussion has been about our biggest blogger and his nonsense.

There are dozens of reasons to criticize the behavior of that blogger, perhaps the most salient of which is that it's never OK to gratuitously attempt to hurt the feelings of large groups of people, with no other reasonable end but to hurt their feelings, but I think the most tragic consequence of said blogger's behavior is that it pretty much cuts off any discussion of the real issues, and diverts the attention to him. And I find it sad any time the opportuntity for rational discussion of important issues is undercut by adolescent nonsense. And I also find it sad that ScienceBlogs, supposedly a bastion of reason, "the world's largest conversation about science," long criticized for being overly liberal in its political orientation, is dominated by an illiberal, anti-intellectual ass whose idea of a rational response is to emulate Michelle Malkin or the Dansk Folkeparti's youth movement. I feel ashamed to be associated with it, and him.

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Fart Spray (And Disgust) Makes Moral Judgments More Severe

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:05:59 -0500

I've been meaning to post about this set of studies for a while, but because it's relevant to Chapter 4 of Lakoff's The Political Mind, I figured I'd better get around to it before I write the review of that chapter.

It's been a while, but in the past, I've talked a lot about new theories of moral judgment, and Jonathan Haidt's social intuitionist model in particular. Under Haidt's view, moral judgments are largely intuitive (that is, unconscious, automatic, and non-deliberative), and instead of being based on ethical principles, which we use mostly for post-hoc rationalization, they're based largely on emotion. In expounding and (occasionally) testing his theory, Haidt has focused largely on what he calls the "moral emotions," and in empirical tests, he's focused on one of these emotions in particular: disgust.

In a study published in 2005, Wheatley and Haidt (1) showed that hypnotically-induced disgust led people to judge people's moral infractions more harshly. In a study published this year, Schnall et al. (2) replicated and expanded on this finding, but without hypnosis. In their first study, participants read little vignettes like these(from their appendix, p. 1107):

Some U.S. states allow first cousins to marry each other. The state you live in does not currently permit first-cousin marriages but is considering legalizing them. What do you think about such legislation?
How moral or immoral do you, personally, find consensual sex between first cousins to be?

Participants were asked to answer these questions (and similar questions for other vignettes) on a 1-7 scale (7 always meant "perfectly okay," or the equivalent).

In their first experiment, participants read the vignettes while being exposed either to a lot of fart spray ("strong stink" condition), a little fart spray ("mild stink" condition), or no fart spray (control). The fart spray was supposed to induce disgust, which, under Haidt's theory, is associated with immorality. Therefore, the fart spray should increase the severity of moral judgments. Consistent with this hypothesis, for three of the five vignettes in the mild stink condition, and two of the five in the strong stink condition, participants' acceptability ratings (i.e., they rated actions like sex with a first cousin as being more immoral) decreased relative to the control condition.

In a second experiment, Schnall et al. explored the role of people's sensitiveness to their own sense of disgust in the influence of disgust on moral judgments. This time, the disgust was induced by the environment. I'll give you their description:

For the disgust condition, a workspace was set up to look rather disgusting: An old chair with a torn and dirty cushion was placed in front of a desk that had various stains and was sticky. On the desk there was a transparent plastic cup with the dried up remnants of a smoothie and a pen that was chewed up. Next to the desk was a trash can overflowing with garbage including greasy pizza boxes and dirty-looking tissues.

In other words, the disgust condition took place in a typical grad student's office. Ha! They cleaned the room up for the control condition. Participants read the vignettes in one of the two conditions, and before they were left, they completed the "Private Body Consciousness" scale, which is supposed to measure how aware people are of their own "gut feelings" (as Schnall et al. call them).

In this study, Schnall et al. found that, for participants with high "private body consciousness" scores (that is, high awareness of their own internal feelings), disgust significantly increased the severity of their moral judgments overall, while for participants with low "private body consciousness," there was no effect of disgust on the severity of their moral judgments. They replicated this result in a third experiment involving a different disgust manipulation (having participants write about a disgusting experience).

Finally, in their fourth and final study, Schnall et al. added a sadness condition, to show that the effects observed in the previous study were specific to disgust. In this experiment, sadness and disgust were induced by watching videos previously shown to induce those emotions. Replicating the previous studies, the disgust-inducing video increased the severity of moral judgments. Participants who'd watched the sad video produced judgments that were actually less severe (though this result only approached statistical significance) than those of participants in the control condition. So, it's not just negative emotions in general that produce more severe moral judgments, but disgust in particular. Some negative emotions might even make us less severe in our moral judgments (perhaps by eliciting empathy? who knows).

In sum, Schnall et al. found in four studies that, at least for participants who are aware of their feelings, disgust consistently produces more severe moral judgments relative to a control condition. Schnall et al. interpret this finding as suggesting that the feeling of disgust is closely tied to negative moral judgments. Moral emotions, under their view, tell us whether we like or dislike something, and disgust in particular signals a deep dislike of something. So, when we feel disgust, we assume that we dislike something, and when moral questions are involved, this leads us to seeing it as immoral. As they put it, disgust is "embodied moral judgment."

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I Can't Understand Your Accent, So Keep Talking

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:54:30 -0500

I have this friend from New York who, most of the time, speaks in a normal (that is to say, southern) accent that she's acquired as a result of being surrounded for so long by people who speak the King's English ('cause Elvis was a southerner). Occasionally, though, usually after she's been talking to someone back home, she slips into her old Jamaica Queens accent, and when she does, I spend the first thirty seconds or so just trying to figure out whether she's speaking English, and I don't even bother trying to understand the meaning of those strangely accented words she's uttering. After that period of complete incomprehension, though, I seem to get used to her relapsed accent, and suddenly I can understand her perfectly well. Of course, by this time, I've missed enough of what she's saying that I have no idea what she's talking about, but at least the words now make sense.

I'd noticed this happen several times, but never really thought about it, partly because I'm not a psycholinguist, so that sort of thing doesn't interest me enough to think that deeply about it, and partly because I figure everyone should speak with a southern accent, and if they don't, it's not my fault I can't understand them. But earlier this week, I read a paper by Maye et al. titled "The Weckud Wetch of the Wast: Lexical Adaptation to a Novel Accent" (1), because the title sucked me in, and learned a bit about how I adopt to my friends' crazy Queens accent. And I thought I'd share what I learned with you.

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The Political Mind, Part IV (Chapter 3)

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:51:17 -0500

In Chapter 3, we finally get to read all about the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent. I knew this was coming, of course, but for some reason, when I finally got to this chapter, I still felt surprised. I mean, at some point, you'd think he'd give up metaphors that even his own epigones can't find evidence for. But no, he clings to them even more desperately in this book, writing (I wish I could parody him this well, but he really wrote this):

It should be noted that these models [the "Strict Father" and "Nurturant Parent" models] are descriptive not prescriptive. They do occur in people's brains. They are not something I am suggesting that people follow; people just do follow them. Newton, as a scientist, described how objects move; he had no power to make them move that way. The same is true here. American politics does use these models. All I can do is describe them.

He later directly compares them to Newtonian gravity, and again laments that there's nothing he, or we, can really do about them. He just reports the facts, folks. Ah, the existential condition of the lonely scientist, helpless to do anything but observe the Truth, and when he or she can't get the Truth published in mainstream peer reviewed journals, write books about the Truth for non-scientists. But I digress...

To be fair, he does add something new to the rehashed nonsense about strict fathers and nurturing parents: gratuitous neuroscience. I learned, if nothing else, that Lakoff is all about Hebbian learning (he even writes, "neurons that fire together wire together"!!!). I honestly did not see that coming. Here's a wonderfully gratuitous passage, as an example:

Primary metaphors arise spontaneously, usually during childhood, when two different parts of our brain are activated together during certain experiences. For example, when we are children, we are held affectionately by our parents and feel warmth. Whenever we pour water into a glass, the level goes up; whenever we pile more things on a table, the level goes up. This experience occurs over and over, every day of our lives.

Two different parts of our brain--one characterizing verticality and the other quantity, or one characterizing temperature and the other affection--are activated together, day after day. Activation spreads outward along networks of neurons from those two brain centers, and eventually two paths of activation meet and form a single circuit linking those two areas of the brain. (p. 83)

And on the next page:

Because temperature is publicly discernible, while affection is not, the temperature synapses fire more often and so are stronger. As a result, activation will flow from temperature to affection, and not in the opposite direction. (p. 84)

This is how we get the AFFECTION IS WARMTH and MORE IS UP conceptual metaphors, apparently (by the way, isn't warmth one publicly discernible sign of affection, in Lakoff's own story, and therefore aren't we dealing with a strong association that's been lexicalized, rather than a metaphor? I'm just sayin'). These are nothing more than just-so stories of course (no one's done any research testing this view; none whatsoever), and they're really kind of silly, but they allow Lakoff to say, "thus, metaphorical thought is physical" (p. 84). This is all just gratuitous neuroscience, designed to make his "Newtonian" model of progressive and conservative thought sound genuinely scientific, instead of like something Lakoff developed through informal text analysis. I think I've said this before but, ugh.

With this knowledge of how Lakoff sees metaphors being formed in childhood, we can move on to the political family metaphors, which are formed because "most people's first experience with governance is in their family" (p. 85). This association between governance and family causes government and family to fire together a lot, and thus wire together, creating the NATION (or GOVERNING INSTITUTION) AS A FAMILY metaphor. It's not clear, from Lakoff's work, how we form particular versions of that metaphor, as Lakoff notes that people raised in strict father families may have nurturant parent metaphors when it comes to governing institutions, but I think Lakoff had reached the legal just-so-story-pulled-out-of-his-ass limit for one chapter at this point, and therefore had to skip making up an explanation for that part of his model.

At this point, I think we can try to represent Lakoff's model schematically, so that it makes a little more sense (it still won't make much sense). It would look something like this (click for a larger view):

So, we have family, and we have government, and the networks of cells representing them fire together (co-activation), yielding the metaphor THE NATION IS A FAMILY. This then turns into either the Strict Father or Nurturant Parent version of the metaphor, who knows how. These sub-metaphors then lead to the ethics of obedience and empathy, respectively, and these ethics are related to the emotions of fear and empathy, respectively. For pure conservatives (who don't really exist) and pure progressives (who are the saviors of our democracy), every issue activates their corresponding metaphor, ethic, and emotion, but for biconceptuals, conservative frames can cause them to experience fear, the ethic of obedience, and thus think in terms of the Strict Father metaphor, while progressive frames cause them to take the other route. Sound about right?

Take an example. You're a biconceptual, and somebody raises the issue of terrorism. If they say, "What do you think about the war on terror?", the "war on terror" metaphor will activate fear, which will in turn activate the ethic of obedience, which will in turn activate the Strict Father metaphor, and you'll say that you think we should kill 'em all. If, on the other hand, they ask, "How do you think we should punish criminal acts of terrorism," the "criminalization" part will activate empathy (for the victims, I guess), which will in turn activate the ethic of empathy, which activates the Nurturant Parent metaphor, which causes you to advocate arresting terrorists and trying them in criminal courts. Or something like that.

A much simpler model, of course, would be built on assocations (emotional and conceptual), schemas, episodic memory, and retrieval cues, instead of metaphors that Lakoff just made up in his head, and these grand meta-narratives, but hey, it's his book. On to Chapter 4.

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The Political Mind, Part III (Chapter 2)

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:43:47 -0500

Chapter 2 of Lakoff's new book is titled "The Political Unconscious, and it's absolutely terrible. It's also the first chapter likely to really piss off conservatives, or really anyone who might approach the chapter critically. Oh, and it has plenty of gratuitous neuroscience to top it all off.

First, let's look at what will inevitably piss conservatives off. Lakoff writes that there are "thoroughgoing progressives" who "hold to American democratic ideals on just about all issues," and that these progressives "are the bedrock of our democracy" (p. 46). Progressives, then, need to "reclaim" our founding values, because conservatives have undermined them at every turn.

Why are progressives true Americans while conservatives are, at least to the extent that real conservatives exist (more on that in a bit), killing everything that's good about this country? Why, because of the brain, of course.

Lakoff begins with a description of progressives and their brains. He writes (with a straight face, we can assume):

Behind every progressive policy lies a single moral value: empathy, together with the responsibility and strength to act on that empathy. (p. 47)

No, he wrote that, really. This means that any time conservatives act out of empathy, they're acting like progressives, but again, we'll get to that in a moment. We're talking about progressives right now.

Anyway, since progressives are all empathy, all the time, they believe in fairness, equality, and they believe that the purpose of government is "protection and empowerment." Mostly what I got out of this section, though, is that tort reform is bad, because of empathy.

From progressives, Lakoff moves on to "neoliberals." Neoliberals, while not as bad as conservatives, have, by embracing the Old Enlightenment (why Neoliberals if it's about the Old Enlightenment? This is just one of the many things that makes this whole book feel like it was written in a hurry), lost their sense of the centrality and ubiquity of empathy in progressive thinking. And it's why Bill Clinton supported NAFTA: the free market isn't empathetic, but it is rational, to Old Enlightenment thinkers, so... oh, I really don't know what that means, but Lakoff wrote it, so I figured I'd let you know.

The other thing is, neoliberals hate framing (apparently PZ Myers is the web's most outspoken neoliberal), believing it to be relativism, not reason. But framing, Lakoff tells us, is "real reason," and until neoliberals realize that (and, presumably, become progressives), conservatives will "answer liberals' facts and figures with no facts or figures, but with their own moral-based frames presented with emotion and symbolism," and "their framing will win" (p. 53). So wake up and smell the "real reason," neoliberals!

Speaking of conservatives, they don't do empathy. All of their policies are about authority. For Lakoff, conservative politics

[Begin] with the notion that morality is obedience to an authority--assumed to be a legitimate authority who is inherently good, knows right from wrong, functions to protect us from evil in the world, and has both the right and the duty to use force to command obedience and fight evil. (p. 60)

According to this view, "people are born bad" (p. 61), and must be taught discipline and responsibility if they're to function fairly and morally in society. It's not surprising, then, that conservatives dig the free market and privatization; it's all about us, the citizens of this country, being responsible adults to whom our authoritarian father, the government, gives us freedom, so long as we don't break the rules (then we get punished).

Here Lakoff makes perhaps his only good point on the topic of politics: privatization doesn't mean getting rid of government, it just means being governed more and more by private companies instead of the government. Since he doesn't follow this up with any other good points, it only gets one sentence here. It's a shame, really.

Anyway, now on to that part I promised you about how real conservatives don't exist, or at least not in great numbers. Towards the end of this chapter, Lakoff gives us the concept of "biconceptualism." This means that some people have both progressive and conservative thoughts -- that is, they dig obedience in some areas of politics, and empathy in others (the two are mutually contradictory, so they certainly can't go together in the same political policy!). Unfortunately for us progressives, most conservatives don't realize they're really biconceptuals. Or as Lakoff puts it, "Many self-identified 'conservatives' have many, many progressive views without being aware of it" (p. 70). That's because these things are all unconscious (that's true, they are), and separate in our brains (that's probably true too), so conservatives never consciously run into contradictions in their thinking, even though they're really mostly progressives. You see, "biconceptualism is simply a fact about brains" (p. 71), and research has shown that we can resolve contradictions unconsciously (he throws in some gratuitous neuroscience here to tell us which regions of the brain neuroimagers have guessed this might, possibly, if we squint really hard at the data, take place in). Oh, and some bullshit about neural binding is in there too. Ugh.

Finally, Lakoff's second good point in the chapter: "framing comes before policy" (p.67). That is, policy is (I'd say largely, Lakoff would say completely) "about fitting... moral frames" (p. 68), and if you want people to buy policies, you have to show them how policies are relevant to their moral frames. "Health insurance" should be changed to "health protection," for example, because it highlights the fact that health care is about, well, protection, not about money. He ends the chapter by suggesting that we make people conscious of their moral frames, and the relevance of policies to them, so that the neoliberals can become progressives, and all those self-identified conservatives who are really unconscious liberals will vote for our side.

In closing, let me just say that I find this sort of reductionism, both in reducing the two political ideologies to one emotion and one moral frame (empathy vs. obedience to authority), and the very reduction of politics entirely to morality, to be simplistic, silly, and in some cases, pretty damned offensive. Don't get me wrong, morality is very important in politics, but it's about so much else as well, like social identity, social relationships, power relationships, and so on, and so forth, all of which, presumably, involve the brain. But Lakoff's been stuck with his absurd reductions since he published Moral Politics, and he's sticking to them, dammit, as in the next few chapters, they become even more central. It's enough to make you want to just throw the book out. Or travel back in time and not get the damn thing.

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The Political Mind, Part II (Chapter 1)

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:06:58 -0500

The first thing to say about Chapter 1 is that it's much better written than the Introduction. In fact, if you buy the book, I recommend skipping the introduction, and starting with Chapter 1. Chapter 1 is, in fact, the best chapter in the book. That's because it contains a pretty good discussion of scripts, schemas, frames, and the like, and how important they are in our thinking. The discussion is dotted with what I've taken to calling "gratuitous neuroscience" (I even mark "g.n." in the margins any time he uses it, and he uses it a lot throughout the book), but overall it's pretty good. If the chapter didn't end with a section titled "We Are In the Melodrama," which is just a bunch of speculation and pseudoscience, I'd even say the chapter was very good. As it is, though, good's modifier will have to be "pretty."

The goal of this chapter, and the book itself, is (as the intro suggests), all about the New Enlightenment. Lakoff writes:

In a New Enlightenment, cultural narratives will not be gone, replaced by cold, hard reason. Cultural narratives are part of the permanent furniture of our brains. But in the New Enlightenment, we will at least be self-aware. We will recognize that we are all living out narratives. It will be normal to discuss what they might be, to raise the question of what influence they have, and whether we can or should put them aside. (p. 34)

Since to do this requires understanding how our thinking relies on "narratives" ("narratives" is a good word for this sort of book, but more technically, you can think of them as scripts, schemas, and/or frames), this is Lakoff's first task, and he accomplishes it with Anna Nicole Smith. Well, using her as an example. He notes that when she died, all of the narratives of her life came to the fore. He lists the "Rags to Riches" narrative, the "Gold Digger" narrative, the "Reinvention of Self" narrative, the "Woman's Lot" narrative, and several others, and discusses how the particular narrative lens through which you see her life determines how you evaluate her actions, her death, and everything else about her.

And since this is about politics, he also looks at some political narratives. He uses the first Gulf War as his primary political example, noting that the first Bush administration initially used a "Self-Defense" narrative to justify potential war with Iraq, because Iraq's invasion of Kuwait threatened our oil supply. When polls showed that the country was not willing to go to war for oil, Bush Sr. immediately changed the narrative to the "Rescue" narrative, telling us that innocent, weak Kuwait needed to be rescued from the clutches of the evil, powerful Iraq with its Hitler-like leader Saddam Hussein. When Bush shifted his rhetorical strategy, people began to think about the war differently, and public support skyrocketed. This, at least, is the story that Lakoff's been telling for more than a decade now, and repeats in this book.

The only blemishes on the narrative sections of Chapter 1 are the sections on neural binding (a topic he revisits frequently throughout the rest of the book). In case you're not familiar with the concept of binding, consider how visual information gets processed. The input, of course, is reflected light that strikes your retina, and the end-result is what you consciously see. But in between, different types of visual information get sent off to different parts of the brain. For example, color and motion information are processed not just by different cells, but by entirely different brain regions (color in the early visual system, motion higher up, and independent of color). Somehow, between the time that color and motion get divided up in the visual system, and the time that you actually experience seeing colored objects moving, the two information streams are put back together to form a complete image. Otherwise, we'd just see color and colorless moving things separately, and that'd be pretty weird. This combing of different information streams is called binding, and the binding problem, which is just the problem of how binding works, is one of the most difficult unsolved problems in cognitive science today. No one really knows how it works for low-level perceptual information. Trying to figure out how it works for high-level conceptual information would be a nightmare.

What's more, we don't know enough about how conceptual processing goes on in the brain, particularly at the level of "narratives," to have any idea whether binding of the sort that we deal with, but Lakoff has decided, for reasons that I can't figure out (he doesn't cite anyone for this, he just states it as fact) that for narratives, "neural binding is the mechanism that creates a linkage between such highly general even structures and particular kinds of actions or narratives." That is, we have what you might call "meta-narratives," or very general event structures (e.g., actor, goal, action, end state, and the relationships between them), and attaching them to particular narratives (say an election narrative, with candidate, the goal of winning an election, campaigning, and actually winning/losing the election), occurs through neural binding. Honestly, there are much simpler potential explanations (e.g., associations, as in episodic memory), but Lakoff's going to go with the highly speculative and implausible one, 'cause that's his wont. As I said at the beginning, this nonsense feels to me like little more than gratuitous neuroscience, perhaps to make his discussion of narratives seem more scientific to lay readers, but I think Lakoff really believes it. So much the worse for him, I suppose, and definitely so much the worse for his readers.

The chapter ends on a really, really bad note. He claims that the reason we can and often do become so personally involved in politics is because:

The same part of the brain we use in seeing is also used in imagining what we are seeing, in remembering seeing, in dreaming what we see, and in understanding language about seeing. The same is true of moving. The same parts of the brain used in really moving are used in imagining that we are moving, remembering moving, dreaming about moving, and in understanding language about moving. (p. 39)

In other words, we get interested in politics because of mental simulation and perceptual symbol systems. If you've hung around this blog for a while, you may know what I think of the concepts of mental simulation and perceptual symbol systems: they range from vague nonsense (mental simulation) to vague and largely unsupported hypothesis that relies on creating a straw man view of traditional theories of mental representation (perceptual symbol systems). That's essentially what they are: no one really has any clue what mental simulation is, or how it would work, and there's certainly no empirical support for the idea (how can you empirically support an idea with no real content?); and perceptual symbol systems theory (the idea that we process our concepts in the sensorimotor systems) has, as people have tested it, remained empirically indistinguishable from its opponent theories. That is, it's pretty much untestable in the strict sense. But again, Lakoff doesn't care -- these are his pets, and he's going to trot them out any chance he gets.

Finally, he gives us mirror neurons. I think that's all I need to say about that.

In sum, then, Chapter 1 contains a pretty good discussion of our use of narratives in everyday thinking, which he diminishes with pseudoscientific talk of neural binding, and he concludes the chapter with speculation and more pseudoscience, in the form of mental simulation and mirror neurons. It's a frustrating chapter, because it had promise, but this sort of frustration with Lakoff has been the way I've experienced him since Metaphors We Live By, so I guess it would be unreasonable for me to expect more from him.

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The Political Mind, Part I (Introduction)

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:07:53 -0500

Well, I've got Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, and I've read the first few chapters, so I figured I'd start sharing my thoughts about them. For now, I'll do it on a chapter by chapter basis, which makes sense, because the chapters are pretty disjointed and, at least after the first few, it's hard to really say anything general about the book. Really, the sections within the chapters are really disjointed as well, so even chapter-by-chapter reviewing is a little tenuous, but I imagine reviewing each little section would be tedious in the extreme. I guess after a couple posts, we'll see how this works out and make changes if needed.

Introduction

So, the intro. I have to start by saying that the introduction is really sloppy, repetitive, and if I were a betting man, I'd say it was hastily written after the rest of the book. But it does state the thesis of the book clearly (over and over). That thesis can be summarized as "Old Enlightenment Mind" vs. "New Enlightenment Mind," or as Will Smith might put it, "Old and Busted" vs. "New Hotness." Lakoff argues... well, not so much argues as states, over and over again (did I mention it's repetitive?), that

Most of us have inherited a theory of mind dating back at least to the Enlightenment, namely, that reason is conscious, literal, logical, unemotional, disembodied, universal, and functions to serve our interests. (p. 3)

Now, I'm not qualified to speak to whether this represents actual Enlightenment thought about the mind. I'm pretty sure it's not entirely accurate, but Lakoff's mostly right in that, at least in the brain sciences (I don't know about the general public), this was the legacy of the Enlightenment up until the 1970s or 80s.

By contrast, under the new view of mind which Lakoff claims cognitive science has given us (a claim that's at least partially true), most thought is unconscious, metaphorical (that parts not so true), emotional, embodied (that may or may not be true, depending on what he means, and since it's Lakoff, we can be certain he means something that's largely untrue), situational, etc. In other words, the new view is the exact opposite of the old view.

The book, then, is about the implications of these two views on politics. As he puts it, "We have to consider the mind as a factor--or actor--in politics" (p. 4). The old view of the mind is misleading, and lets conservatives win, while the new view of the mind, if taken advantage of, will provide for a progressive utopia. Or something like that. And how do we bring about this progressive era? Through utilizing our new knowledge of the mind in a "campaign to change brains."

Now, I find the idea of a "campaign to change brains" a little frightening, with good reason I think. Contrast the following two statements from Lakoff:

Deft politicians (as well savvy marketers) take advantage of our ignorance of our own minds to appeal to the subconscious level. Meanwhile, honest and ethical political leaders, journalists, and social activists, usually unaware of the hidden workings of the mind, fail to use what is known about the mind in service of morality in truth. (p. 10)

In short, the bad guys are manipulating us by changing our brains using knowledge (perhaps implicit) of the new view of the mind, while the honest and the ethical among us are not. A couple of pages later, he writes:

The very idea of 'changing brains' sounds a little sinister to progressives--a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. I sounds Machiavellian [Ed. "Machiavellian"? Don't you mean Orwellian?] to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But 'changing minds' in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how the brais work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains--and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded. (p. 12)

So in this passage, he says it may seem like the Republicans do it, but it's not so bad, while in the previously quoted paragraph, he's told us it's what the bad guys -- and by bad guys, he means the Republicans, of course -- do, while the moral among us don't. This seems at least somewhat inconsistent to me, and as a result, his short and half-hearted attempt to convince us that the campaign to change brains is just a regular ol' campaign to change people's minds, and isn't some nefarious scheme to manipulate people into thinking like Lakoff (or other progressives), doesn't quite work. Particularly since the whole point of the introduction is that changing people's minds through facts and reasons doesn't work.

The rest of the introduction is filled with foreshadowing of what's to come, along with plenty of signs that it's going to be sloppy on the science. For example, he repeatedly (I forget, did I mention the first chapter is repetitive?) states that 98% of our thought is unconscious. Now, I'm fond of saying 95% of our thought is unconscious, but at least I'm willing to admit that I pulled that number out of my... unconscious. Lakoff, on the other hand, provides us with an actual cite for this number: a book by a journalist which quotes a neuroscientist using the 98% figure without citing evidence it. Lakoff himself admits that this number is a basically guess, but then uses it over and over again anyway. That's just not a good sign (foreshadowing of my own: the science doesn't get much better).

That's the intro, then. It's by and large worthless, and if you do buy the book, I'd recommend skipping it and moving on to Anna Nicole Smith (that'll make sense soon).

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"Psychological essentialism in selecting the 14th Dalai Lama"

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:02:16 -0500

There's an interesting short paper by Paul Bloom and Susan Gelman in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Science with that title. Unfortunately, it's not yet available without a subscription (though Bloom tends to put his papers on his website once published, so it might show up there sometime in the near future), but if you have a subscription or access to a university library, you can read it here.

If you're not familiar with the idea, "psychological essentialism" is the belief that entities have an internal set of necessary properties, or an essence, that make them what they are. For example, people tend to believe that there's something about tigers (their DNA, perhaps) that make them tigers. There's a great deal of evidence that people are "psychological essentialists" about natural kinds (animals, elements, that sort of thing), and a growing body of evidence that we tend to be psychological essentialists when it comes to certain social categories as well, like gender, race, and sexual orientation.

Bloom and Gelman relate the story of the selection of the 14th Dalai Lama, in which those doing the selection presented a child with objects that the 13th Dalai Lama had owned, as well as similar objects, and observed which of the objects the child selected. Since he picked all of the objects that had belonged to the Dalai Lama, he was chosen to be the 14th, and current Dalai Lama. They conclude:

Our point here is not that the authentic objects were actually imbued with the essence of the 13th Dalai Lama (a metaphysical question that is beyond the scope of our inquiry). What matters is that the Tibetan bureaucrats believed that the objects were. Hence they constructed a procedure that presupposes the existence of invisible essences - essences that require special powers to perceive - and used this procedure to make a decision of major importance. We take this as evidence of the ubiquity, naturalness and importance of psychological essentialism. (p. 243)

Bloom, P. & Gelman, S.A. (2008). Psychological essentialism in selecting the 14th Dalai Lama. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12(7), 243.

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The War and Peace Phenomenon

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:30:20 -0500

Here's a little tidbit from my personal life that I thought I'd share, because I find it pretty amusing. I've always ridden the bus to work, because as anyone who's spent time on a college campus knows, it's impossible to get good parking spots unless you show up at about 4 am. On the bus, and while waiting for the bus, I read. I don't read work-related stuff, because I like to underline and take notes, and with the bus bouncing me around, my underlines become strike-outs (when I go back to the paper, I wonder, "Why did I dislike this passage so much that I struck it out?"), and my handwriting becomes even more unreadable than it ordinarily is. So I read books; novels mostly. A couple years ago, I started designating one of the books I'm reading my "bus book," which means that I only read it on or waiting for the bus, and I don't read anything else on or waiting for the bus. With about an hour and a half of bus time (including waiting and riding) a day going to and from work, I went through about a book about every week or ten days this way.

Then gas prices started rising, and I began to ride the bus more and more, until I go to the point where I rode the bus pretty much everywhere that I couldn't walk. That dramatically increased my bus time, and as a result, I started going through books at an alarming rate. So to compensate, I just started reading longer books. The last few "bus books" I've read include August 1914 (896 pages), November 1916 (1040 pages), Anna Karenina (864 pages), The Brothers Karamazov (824 pages), and Don Quixote (992 pages). Which one of these is not like the others?

Anyway, after reading those long books, I decided it was time to read the mother of all long books, War and Peace. At 1424 pages, I figured it would take me almost 3 weeks of bus riding to read it. It's been 3 weeks, and I'm almost finished.

Here's the thing I find amusing, though: I've read hundreds of books on the bus at this point, including well known classics, lesser known classics, well known contemporary books, lesser known contemporary books, and everything in between, and with very few exceptions, people have never said anything about what I'm reading. Oh sure, people sometimes ask, "What are you reading," and tend to follow up with, "Oh, yeah, I've read that," regardless of whether I'm reading Hemingway or Roger Schank, but they never just comment on what I'm reading out of the blue. But literally every time I get on the bus, someone comments on War and Peace. Every time! The conversation almost always goes like this:

Person on/waiting for the bus: "Is that... You're reading that?"
Me, looking at the book in my hands and wondering what else they think I might be doing with it: "Yup."
Person: "Wow."
Me, trying to make it obvious that I'm trying to get back to my book.
Person: "I've heard it's good. Is it?"
Me: "It's pretty good, yeah."
Person: "I've always meant to read that, but never got around to it."
Me: "You should."
Person: "Wow, you're reading that."

What is it about War and Peace that makes everyone feel like commenting on it? And why are the comments always the same? It's freaking me out. Thankfully, I'll be done with it this week, and can move on to a book no one thinks worth commenting on. But I'll always wonder what it is about War and Peace that gets people's attention.

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Cool Visual Illusions: The "Ghostly Gaze" Illusion

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:35:17 -0500

UPDATE: I've messed with some of the images below the fold, which will hopefully make it easier for people to see the illusion without having to move all round the room.

Last year, Rob Jenkins published a seriously spooky-looking illusion (it freaks my son out) in the journal Perception (1). Take a look at this face (from Jenkins' paper, Figure 1, p. 1266):

Spooky, right? Hopefully you all see a spooky looking woman (it's actually a combination of two female faces, which is why it looks so creepy) who is looking to your left (her right). Now take a look at the face again, only this time, much smaller:

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Lakoff in the NYT

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:41:27 -0500

There's a review of George Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, in today's New York Times. You can read the review here. Some key excerpts:

Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a "New Enlightenment," progressives will exploit these discoveries. They'll present frames instead of raw facts. They'll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It's not the platform that needs to be changed. It's the voters.

I have to say, I've always thought there was a not-so-vague Orwellian quality to Lakoff's work, and if that paragraph is at all faithful to this new book, then I now know that I was right. And besides, how the hell would neuroscience show that "pure facts are a myth." And if it did, what would the status of neuroscience itself be?

The basis of Lakoff's theory is simple: the mind is the brain. Any connection that forms between your thoughts also forms between your neurons. As you internalize a metaphor, a circuit in your brain "physically constitutes the metaphor." This parallel development continues as mental complexity increases. "Narratives are brain structures," he proposes.

I wish I had some idea, any idea, what the hell that means. I know for a fact (though not a pure fact, as those are apparently neurally impossible, whatever a "pure fact" might be) that this paragraph is an accurate description of Lakoff's work, though, because he and others have been saying that conceptual metaphor theory is, now, the neural theory of metaphor, even though what that theory is exactly no one has said, and no peer reviewed research on the neural theory of metaphor exists as of yet. But hey, if you want to convince people of a theory that has no scientific basis, write a book for non-scientists. And if you're really egotistical, write a book for non-scientists in which you tell them how they should act to win elections and change people's opinion about the important issues of the day based on unproven (and in fact entirely speculative) science.

And if there are some CMT folks out there, yes, I know of Narayanan, which I believe Ray Gibbs calls an "existence proof" of the neural theory of metaphor, it's neither an empirical test nor a peer-reviewed publication. I'm not even sure how it's relevant to the neural theory of metaphor as a theory a.) of metaphor or b.) of neural organization. Perhaps you can explain it to me.

And finally:

From this, Lakoff's agenda follows. In place of neoliberalism, he offers neuroliberalism. Since voters' opinions are neither logical nor self-made, they should be altered, not obeyed. Politicians should "not follow polls but use them to see how they can change public opinion to their moral worldview." And since persuasion is mechanical, progressives should rely less on facts and more on images and drama, "casting progressives as heroes, and by implication, conservatives as villains." The key is to "say things not once, but over and over. Brains change when ideas are repeatedly activated."

I've defended Lakoff in the past, arguing that he's not trying to manipulate people, but convince them, but again, if this is accurate, it sounds like I was wrong.

Anyway, should be a fun book, especially if it's as nonsensical as the review. I'm going to see if I can get a copy tomorrow. Maybe we can all read it together.

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Best Mirror Neuron Comment Ever

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:52:22 -0500

Hahahahaha!!! From the comment section to this post:

HULK SEE MOVIE, HULK LIKE SMASH THINGS, HULK F5 NEURONS EXHIBIT ABOVE-BASELINE BOLD ACTIVITY.

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Sex = Mirror Neurons!

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:47:19 -0500

We already know that mirror neurons are responsible for social interaction (except when they're not), meaning, art, religion, sports, dinosaurs, sun spots, Marxism, post-it notes, freeze-dried fruit, Harleys, and and Firefox 3.0, so it's not at all surprising that we're now learning that they're responsible for sex as well. Oh, I know, I know, we'd already learned that mirror neurons were responsible for sexual orientation, as I mentioned like two years ago, but we're just now learning that they're responsible for all sex. But we should have known already, right?

Let's start with the sexual orientation paper(1), since it's older. This paper started from the premise that viewing sexually arousing material would activate the reward system (really? who'da thunk?) and the motor system (apparently you have to move to have sex). The authors, Ponseti et al., then hypothesized that, if this premise is true, reward system and motor areas will preferentially respond to stuff that fits with your sexual preferences. That is, if you're heterosexual, heterosexual stuff will produce more activity, and if you're homosexual, then homosexual stuff will produce more activity. So they showed 26 women (12 heterosexual, 14 homosexual) and 27 men (12 heterosexual and 15 homosexual) pictures of sexually aroused male and female genitalia, along with control pictures (from the thoroughly normed International Affective Picture System), while they were hanging out in an fMRI machine. Each participant got to view 30 male genitalia, 30 female genitalia, and 30 control images for 300 ms each. The participants also had to rate the pleasantness of each image.

For all four groups (heterosexual and homosexual males and females), pictures of their preferred sex were rated as more pleasant than either the control pictures of the pictures of the non-preferred sex, and the control pictures were rated as more pleasant than non-preferred sex pictures. This suggests that the manipulation worked. Consistent with their hypothesis, activity in the reward system (specifically the ventral striatum and the thalamus) was greater when the participants looked at their preferred sexual pictures than when they looked at the other pictures. This means that viewing sexual images that you like is rewarding. They also found increased activity in the ventral premotor cortex when viewing the preferred sexual stimuli. This is (thought to be) where motor neurons live, so it stands to reason that we'd conclude from increased blood flow to it that the mirror neurons are involved, as it couldn't possibly be any other type of cell in that region.

Now, if you're like me, you're probably thinking: wait a minute, if mirror neurons respond when you perform an action or see a similar action, wouldn't they respond to pictures of same-sex genitalia, regardless of sexual orientation (I know the Neurocritic is wondering just this)? But hey, it could be that heterosexuals have "other sex's sex organs" mirror neurons, and homosexuals have only "same sex's sex organs" mirror neurons. Hey, that might be what makes us straight or gay! Or it could be, as Ponseti et al. argue, that in order to think about sex, we have to simulate sexual behavior in our brains (or as they put it, activate "action representations of sexual behavior"). My own interpretation is that sex involves moving, and so it's only natural that the motor system would get all hyped up, but perhaps I'm naive.

So, after Ponseti et al., we can conclusively say that sexual orientation is (at least partially) mirorr neurons. Now let's move on to sex in general. With a paper by Mouras et al.(2), we have data that will allow us to do that. In their study, Mouras et al. had ten heterosexual males (I know, I know, this study just uses guys, but gals and gays have mirror neurons too; didn't you read the part about the Ponseti et al. study?) watch porn and control flicks while lying in an fMRI machine, and with a doohickey attached to their penises to measure their erections. Mouras et al. then correlated blood flow in various brain regions with the level of arousal. They found correlations between BOLD signals and erection size in the following regions: right frontal operculum, right middle frontal gyrus (primary motor), postcentral gyri (sensory face), inferior parietal lobules (eye movements and stuff), left supramarginal gyrus (spatial orientation and other stuff), and bilateral insulae (body representation, emtion, etc.).

Of these regions, I know that some people have argued (though nobody really knows) that there are mirror neurons in the insula, somebody (as far as I can tell, without actual evidence) has hypothesized that they're also in the supramarginal gyrus(), and the authors suggest that they're also in the frontal operculum (a suggestion at which the Neurocritic scoffs), so it stands to reason (through rampant speculation, and knowledge that mirror neurons = everything) that this data "suggests the concept of a positive feedback loop, as motivational state may increase the response of mirror neurons, while the response of these neurons could further increase the level of motivation" (4). Furthermore, Mouras et al. argue:

we suggest that a... perception-action coupling mechanism mediated by the mirror-neuron system prompts the observers to resonate with the motivational state of other individuals appearing in visual depictions of sexual interactions, with observers activating motor representations and associated erectile responses associated with the observed depictions. (p. 22)

This would explain why men like strip clubs, 'cause we all know that men who go to them get aroused by "resonat[ing] with the motivational state" of the exotic dancers. My own theory is that what happens is, we see sex, we get aroused, causing our mirror system to simulate sex in our brains, causing us to get more aroused, causing more simulations, and so on. Sounds perfectly reasonable.

Anyway, there you have it. Never mind that we have no idea what's going on in those regions when they're active during sexual arousal, or in at least some cases, whether those regions really are part of the mirror system; I think we can safely conclude that sex = mirror neurons.

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Brain Activity and Meaning

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:32:46 -0500

Blogs and the mainstream media have been filled with neuroscience news lately. First we learned that sarcasm happens in the brain, and then that sexual orientation is in the brain too. There was even an attempt (sarcastic, I hope) to account for sports fandom with mirror neurons (I've heard that the actual reason we like watching sports is because we have retinas(1)). Neuroscience is all the rage, man.

I haven't, however, seen much coverage of what I think is the coolest recent neuroscience finding. That finding was reported in a paper in the May 30 issue of Science, titled "Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns" (2). And the finding is even cooler than the title suggests! They used fMRI data from some nouns, along with data from a huge corpus of texts, to predict the activity of new nouns, so that they could actually tell you what noun a person was looking at by looking at the person's brain activity, despite the fact that the model they were using to predict fMRI signals had never actually "seen" that noun before.

To understand how they did this, let's start with their model (the image below presents a schematic explanation), which is really pretty simple. To start, Mitchell et al. collected "intermediate semantic features" for a bunch of words using a huge corpus (a trillion words, give or take). "Intermediate semantic feature" is just a fancy way of saying co-occurrence information. In essence, Mitchell et al. compute a metric that tells you how often two words co-occur. If you do that for a bunch of words, what you get is a high-dimensional space with a bunch of vectors representing the co-occurrence relationships between the various words in the space.

From Mitchell et al., Figure 1, p. 1191

After collecting "intermediate semantic features" (I just like typing that) for 25 verbs, they began feeding the model the data for a bunch of nouns. If we consider each "intermediate semantic feature" a dimension, then what they did in essence is look at the value on each dimension for each noun. They then compare the values for each noun fMRI data from participants who looked at that noun. Using a fancy equation, this allows them to associate each "intermediate semantic feature" with activity at each voxel (a 3D pixel in an fMRI image) in the fMRI data. They then use the associations between semantic features and brain activity to predict the brain activity associated with new nouns, given those nouns semantic features. Their model was able to accurately predict the voxel by voxel brain activity associated with new nouns between 68 and 83% of the time (the average accuracy was 77%), all of which are reliably above chance (which would be 50%). Even when they gave the model new nouns from semantic categories that it hadn't been trained on (e.g., if it were trained on animals, plants, body parts, and clothing, it might be tested on nouns in the tools category), and it was still accurate above chance (the average accuracy dropped to 70%, but that's still pretty good).

In summary, then, by comparing semantic information for nouns with the brain activity associated with looking at those nouns, Mitchell et al. were able to derive associations between meaning and brain activation, and use those associations to predict the brain activation of nouns not used in training their model. Once trained, then, their model can accurately guess what word you're looking at by looking at your brain activity, even if you're looking at a word that the model's never seen before. Perhaps most interesting of all, because they were using fMRI data averaged across several participants (9, to be exact), the ability of the model to predict words from activation suggests that their is a lot of overlap in how and where particular words are represented in the brain across individuals. That is, it suggests that we all represent words in our brain similarly. I don't know about you, but that strikes me as a much cooler finding that one showing that sarcasm happens in the brain.

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