Almost 7% of American university students have used prescription stimulants.  Not to party all night, but to study.
The cast of characters here are familiar; Adderall, Ritalin and the newest sibling, Modafinil (aka Provigil). Smart drugs, developed for the treatment of the ill, are now finding homes in the medicine cabinets of the healthy. The question is: will they be in yours?

When I’ve told people that I’m a neuroscientist I occasionally get the response “you must be smart.” While flattered, I don’t necessarily believe this is the case. I’m just one guy who has a lot of knowledge and a lot of interest in one particular subject, in which case I’m no different than many, other, talented, people.

The real meaning behind the word “smart” lies in the fact that is relative. Are you smart? Odds are that you’re brighter than many people in your class/office. But the ego mangler is this: There are always going to be lots of people smarter than you.

A sobering thought, but it not really a big deal for most of us. But what if you are at school or in a cutthroat corporate environment, competing with all those bright sparks around you?

If you were challenging them in the sporting arena, at least you could go to the gym and practice more, but building up the old grey muscle doesn’t happen as easily or as fast as those attached to our skeleton. If only there was a shortcut.

Smart Drugs in action

Our understanding of the inner workings of the human brain has exploded over the last decade. And the drugs to treat many debilitating disorders like ADHD and narcolepsy have followed. But there are still huge gaps in our knowledge.

You may be surprised to hear that nobody really knows the exact mechanism for how the smart drugs I’ve mentioned work. We do have a general idea: Provigil and Ritalin are stimulants and slow the reabsorption, of dopamine and norepinephrine back into neurons after they are released. Retarding this re-cycling process has the effect of prolonging the actions of these neurotransmitters.

Actions which just happen to include maintaining attention and aiding the formation of new memories.

There’s always a catch though. Concurring with our lack of knowledge on how smart drugs act, is our lack of knowledge about long-term use and safety. Promisingly though, drugs like Provigil seem to be relatively innocuous –so far.

But we are just at the leading edge of the revolution in brain chemistry. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to see that the near future holds more, and better, cognition-enhancing drugs than the handful available now. Though this future is a given, now is the right time to think about how we should use these breakthroughs.

More human than human

Anyone with more than a passing interest in sports over the last 30 years will recognize this debate has happened before. The rise of steroids, EPO and other performance enhancing drugs is considered the scourge of the athletic world. But so far the smart drugs appear to be without the devastating physical side effects that characterize sports drugs. Also drugs in sport are unambiguously categorized as cheating while smart drugs are not. Does this change how we look at them?

Also the analogy breaks down completely when we move it to the workplace. The rise of cognitive-enhancing drugs stands to alter the way all of us live our lives, while the appeal of physical performance enhancing drugs is limited to the more athletic amongst us. A survey by researchers from Harvard, Yale and Princeton published last August seems to hint that smart drugs will see general acceptance – whether they are illegitimate or not. Worth noting though is that the people within the study were only keen to take smart drugs if it they didn’t alter things they considered to be fundamental aspects of their personality, like their sense of humor or emotions – basically any mood altering drugs like anti-depressants.

Unsurprisingly, smart drugs that increased concentration, wakefulness or memory were very appealing, as these traits aren’t often seen as fundamental to our personalities.

Take two, and call me in the future

As with all new discoveries the potential for advancement as well as abuse exists. But augmenting our brains brings up potential moral and medical dilemmas. Will tweaking our mental abilities have side effects that aren’t obvious yet?

And with the gap between rich and poor ever widening, and these drugs being expensive, are we on the cusp of a new social class, the Smart-class?

Neuroscience has only just begun to reveal some of the answers surrounding these drugs but that is still only half the story, the story of molecules. To see into the future of these medicines we need to look at a bigger scale. Much bigger.
Smart drugs are now out of our hands, the hands of the scientific community, and are in yours. The question of their use and abuse now lies with you, and society as a whole.

I’ll leave you with this scenario: Would you use cognition enhancing drugs? What if others in your class/office do – could you risk being less competitive?

Feel free to drop your answers (anonymously if you like) in the comments. To catch more neuroscience news, click to subscribe to Email or RSS updates from Very Evolved.

original image by destinysagent remixed by Patrick

The human brain is perhaps the most complicated piece of biology to ever come into existence. It gives us the ability to imagine the future and create great works of art. And both of these things go hand in hand with our amazing ability to lie our asses off.

Lies? Nope. Just misconceptions

If you live in the U.S. you may have seen a fairly new show on FOX called “Lie to me” (and if you haven’t – don’t worry, you’re not missing anything). Anyway it’s about a detective who can tell if you’re lying just by the way your “body gives you away”. Of course if you’ve seen any cop show then you’ve seen this sort of thing before, the only problem is that it’s complete garbage.

If we step into the real world, away from the stereotypical way that scriptwriters think shifty liars behave, then we’d better start our review of how to lie by dismissing some common misconceptions.

(1) Liars talk faster and talk longer in addition to showing signs of nervousness. This accurately describes just about every one in my lab with a deadline and a cup of coffee. What it doesn’t show is the mark of someone lying. These behavioral cues are so generic as to be next to useless in determining whether someone is holding back the truth.

(2) Liars fidget and either don’t make eye contact or stare at you too much. It’s a good description of many scientists, mathematicians and introverts in general. Again behavior so generic and free of context that it’s as easy to believe as it is wrong. If this one was really true then every computer geek I’ve met was lying like their life depended on it. The poor things are shy little flowers in reality.

So is that’s the end of this analysis? Are you home free to lie like a electrified lying machine on St. Fibber’s Day? If the “How to spot a liar” tips that are all over the web are actually rubbish, are there no behaviors that give you away?

Not so fast. From a neuroscience perspective lying is hard work. How much “work” it is in cognitive processing power is hard to pin down, but the catch is it’s always more work than sticking to reality.

And the hard working brain makes mistakes.

Thinking about lying

The ability to create artificial realities in our mind is pretty much what makes us humans and not goldfish. It’s our extra cognitive abilities that allow us to imagine all sorts of fictional possibilities and plan for the future. But we don’t actually use all our extra cognitive power continuously, because it’s just much easier to process reality without alteration.

It’s speculation, but passively taking it all in is cognitively simpler than creating a false reality because of evolutionary pressure to ensure that first and foremost the brain operates quickly. Think of it as a survival tactic that makes it difficult for us to confuse reality with what you’ve made up. Back in the Stone Age you don’t want to spend a long time pondering “should I run away from saber toothed tigers or are they cuddly little cereal box mascots?”

Let’s take a more modern example: You arrive at work late because of an accident on the highway. It’s not hard to explain. In fact you can just launch into casual conservation about it over lunch without even thinking about the details. Memory recall and conversation are almost so effortless they are as unnoticeable as thinking about moving your arm to scratch your behind.

But what if you are late to work because you overslept and you create a lie that you are late because of an imaginary car accident? First you have to synthesize the details of the lie, while simultaneously examining that what you’ve said is believable. Next up you have to talk and think about what you’re going to say next instead of it just flowing. Memory is now working double time – what actually happened and what you said happened and who you said it to.

This is where the cognitive load comes into play and “mistakes” appear. Since humans are self-aware and we know when we’re lying we simultaneously try to screen our facial and other physiological reactions to try and appear what we think is natural.

“What we think is natural” is key here, because it’s unlikely that you have an accurate picture of how your body behaves from someone else’s point of view. When you’re self conscious about lying you’re also thinking “Should I make eye contact? Ok a little? Whoops! That might be too much! Do I normally do stuff with my hands when I talk? Wait a second – are they on to me?”

And it’s this last thought that adds another cognitive dimension: you are trying to monitor what your audience’s reaction is “Do they normally look at me like that? Is that the same expression they normally have?”

And that’s where lies fall apart and you get busted. Not because of the behavioral myths I mentioned, but because your behavior changes from normal.

How to lie convincingly

When dealing with people who are unfamiliar with you it’s hard to tell when you’re being untruthful because they are looking for change from normal behavior. Since strangers don’t know what’s normal, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. What is actually useful is learning how to fib to people you’ve met before.

1) Monitor behavior. It’s all about planning ahead. Begin by deliberately observing what you do during a normal conversation. Do you make eye contact? What does your voice sound like? The key though is facial expressions. It’s a tough one to monitor, since you can’t see your face when you talk. Talking to a mirror isn’t natural either, so the least intrusive method for practicing is with a real web cam conversation where you can see your own feed.

2) Avoid contact. As I mentioned the longer people know you, the better they can spot deviations from normal. Often this is quite subtle: your target processes what you’ve just said and if your behavior isn’t conforming to what they’ve seen before, even if they can’t put their finger on it, they’ll know something’s up. Again it’s all about planning ahead – keep your distance and contact to a minimum before going in for the big fib.

3) Practice. It’s not always possible to avoid having contact with people you’re trying to deceive, and the only answer is practice. Actors are liars and great actors rehearse. Unless the actor is Keanu Reeves, actors have to make behaving differently to how they normally act, believable. Since lying is differently from normal behavior so you’ll need to be acting. And good acting takes practice.

As you can see the best way to effectively lie is to prepare in advance. This takes a lot of time, and in the end, it’s often simpler just to be truthful. Of course there are many good reasons to invest in the great art of deception, and the most practical application that comes to mind? Poker.

By the way, you’re all welcome to come and play at my next game. I’m not very good, honestly.

This is no lie though, clicking on the Email or RSS updates will get you instant updates to all the articles here at Very Evolved.

original image alexindigo remixed by Patrick

Since the time of ancient Greece, political scientists and campaign managers alike have been studying society for clues on how political attitudes and behaviors are shaped. But could the nature of our politics be less about society and more about us? Could it all come down to biology?

Inheritance

We inherit many attributes from our parents like height, eye color and even some behaviors like altruism. But it’s only in the last 15 years that the concept has emerged that our genes are helping shape complex behaviors like our political nature.

Of course even simple things like our height aren’t as straightforward as pure genetics – a poor diet during childhood or by your mother while you are in the womb will lower your height below your theoretical genetic maximum. And so it is with our social and political leanings, a mix of inheritance and environmental influences underlies everything about us.

Social attitudes like shyness, compassion, altruism and attitudes towards risk all have well-established biological bases in neuronal circuitry, and hence have very heritable patterns. That these traits are part and parcel of our political conduct and can be influenced by our genes certainly points to a role for genetics, but the big question is why? Why would we evolve these traits? Why have we developed such a complex concept as politics?

Many of these attributes aren’t actually unique to humans. Our fellow primates are also well equipped to manage complex social interactions and have cognitive abilities to solve technical problems. But this doesn’t mean that learning a complex social behavior like politics is the same as learning how to find food and build shelter.

And this where is the work of two political scientists, Fowler and Schreiber, highlight an interesting concept: That there is a network of brain activity that differs between people who are knowledgeable and naïve about politics.

Politics on the brain

People who were either Democrats, Republicans or politically naïve were asked to answer a series of questions about national politics while being examined by fMRI. In each case the neuronal activity of two particular brain regions varied – the medial prefrontal cortex and the medial parietal cortex. However it was only Democrats and republicans that showed increased activity here while the politically naïve people actually experienced a decrease in activity below normal.

The key conundrum that this data solves is that these regions of the brain are pretty active most of the time and actually switch off when doing more technical problem solving type tasks. It’s conundrum because it takes an awful lot of energy to keep neurons firing and it’s not an evolutionary advantage to go wasting precious calories when you don’t need to.

But apart from being even more active when pundits are asked about politics, these regions have been previously linked to times when we are making moral judgments or observing social interactions. The implication is that political behavior is a form of social cognition. Political situations require that we consider the mental states of others and assess the social and emotional environment around us – exactly what these brain regions are great at. And when the politically naïve are forced to consider these issues they approach the questions like they were technical problems and deactivate these brain regions.

So now we have an idea about what this neural network does, but considering it is so energetically costly to operate why did we evolve it?

Cooperation and trust

We’ve all heard the quote “Survival of the fittest” as the neat catchall summary of the theory of evolution but how do we explain altruism where an individual reduces their “fitness” to enhance the survival of others? This is one of the big questions in terms of evolutionary biology.

This goes broader than the level of the individual – politics and political groups are merely more sophisticated examples of coordinated mass behavior where the actions of any one individual campaign member does not affect the outcome of an election.

We are now entering the realms of evolutionary speculation, but it is clear from an observational point of view that a coordinated group of people should be able to out-compete a lone individual. And by extension, a large coordinated group can outcompete a smaller coordinated group. Hence it is advantageous for otherwise fit individuals to assist the less fit members of their group.

The sum of its parts

Our genes regulate our neurons and our neurons coalesce to form our brain so it is not surprising to find that biology can impact our social and political behavior. But biology is fuzzy by nature. We can never point to a particular clump of neurons or genes and say “This makes a George Bush or an Obama”.

While I’m a staunch neuroscientist, every discipline has its limitations. The really huge discoveries in this area actually still lie ahead of us, at the intersection of neuroscience and political science.

In the meantime there’s still heaps to discover by getting instant Email or RSS updates here at Very Evolved.

Original image by nathangibbs remixed by Patrick

Fowler, J., & Schreiber, D. (2008). Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature Science, 322 (5903), 912-914 DOI: 10.1126/science.1158188

Our brain has a very complex relationship with money. From a purely economic perspective it really should be simple – money is a tool that’s used to get something done, no different to a shovel or a hammer.
But while the mathematics of economics may be coldly rational, our brain is not. The human brain is a biological filter, through which cash becomes more than an emotionless inanimate bit of paper with a number printed on it. And now thanks to a recent study we can see exactly how thinking about money changes the way brain works.

Pay cut or pay rise?

The revealing work published in PNAS this month, examines what happens in our brain when we experience the so called “money illusion”. In a nutshell this is where we see an increase in income as a positive thing even when costs go up by the same amount.

Let’s take a less abstract look at this by using a common thought experiment to demonstrate the illusion:

Let’s say your income goes up by 2% but inflation rises by 4% at the same time, completely negating the increase. Would you rather take a 2% pay cut and have the price of things remain the same, or take the 2% salary increase with 4% inflation? Clearly both things are the same so it doesn’t matter what you choose. But when we ask this question to large numbers of people the majority always choose the salary increase. But if it makes no difference, why is there a bias?

Economists have often been skeptical of the existence of the money illusion. The purchasing power of cash in the inflated financial example above has not changed, and people aren’t stupid they are aware of what is going on. A rational mind is right to see no change. But what do you know, the human mind is not a completely rational place. But skepticism of the money illusion was well founded, since other than question based surveys there really hasn’t been a lot of hard evidence to pin down why this illusion exists. Until now.

Big winners are big grinners

The subjects of the study were asked to solve a series of simple problems and were rewarded monetarily based on how well they performed. At the end of the test everyone had to spend their money by picking items they liked from a catalogue of goods ranging from CDs to computer accessories. The whole time they did this the researchers monitored their brain activity by fMRI.

The twist in this simple exercise comes when the experimenters tweaked this arrangement by getting subjects to do this whole process twice: The first time the cash rewards were small, and the cost of the catalogue items were also low. The second time around the cash prizes were doubled and the cost of the items in the catalogue were also twice as expensive.

Obviously there is no difference in how much purchasing power the money has between the two experiments, all the subjects knew this, and yet there was still a striking difference in the neuronal activity between experiments.
One region of the brain (the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex) had much higher levels of activity only when the numerical value of the cash prize was higher. And wouldn’t you know it, this region of the brain has been previously been associated with sensations of elation and joy in response to pleasurable experiences. Big numbers bring big joy it seems. David DiSalvo also has a good write up of this effect here.

Inflated consequences

This confirmation that the money illusion actually exists turns out to be pretty important. It explains for example, why the economy can be re-flated by liberal financial policies. It’s also probably a factor that explains why nominal salaries rarely fall, whereas the actual value of your salary in does drop in value during periods of inflation.

But this is just the tip of the economic iceberg, the effect of our irrational perception of money can go way beyond how much you think you get paid.

Take for example the housing market. It’s not breaking news to say that property prices rose quickly in the last few years and was followed by the current devastating bust. The money illusion can easily contribute to muddying understanding between the nominal and actual value of mortgage interest rates.

It seems like a logical thing that when inflation is low, the monthly nominal interest payments on mortgages are low compared to the rent of a similar property.
So property prices now appear to be cheap. People, for whom the money illusion is a factor, are now likely to buy instead of rent, which produces an upward trend on house prices when inflation declines. But when inflation decreases it also increases the “real” cost of mortgage payments in the future.

This is an example of how the money illusion can act irrationally with people basing their purchase decision on the current low nominal mortgage payments while failing to accurately asses the less obvious effect of future inflation – the real loan cost. Repeat this over thousands of customers and voila: a housing bubble.

Clearly the money illusion isn’t wholly and solely responsible for the mess we’re in now. But here’s one thing you can take to the bank: The human brain isn’t a purely rational economic machine, and it’s our weird relationship to money that we need to keep an eye on as well as the market.

Here’s something that’s no illusion though: the Email or RSS updates to Very Evolved. No inflated numbers, just cool science.

original image by kevin

Weber, B., Rangel, A., Wibral, M., & Falk, A. (2009). The medial prefrontal cortex exhibits money illusion Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0901490106

Why do some people cheat while others don’t? It might be a black and white question about morals, but regular readers will know that when the human mind is involved, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. A great new study published this month shows that the behavior of those around us has a bigger influence on our honesty than we might like to admit, and that bad behavior might be contagious.

Bernie Madoff is the latest poster child for blatant dishonesty, perhaps successfully taking the crown from long time champions Enron. But these are just two prominent examples; we’ve all heard of someone who’s stolen from work, cheated on their taxes or of an athlete using illegal drugs.

But what’s this got to do with you? You’re a good person right? But what happens to you when you see someone behaving unethically and getting away with it?

That’s the question Dan Ariely of Predictably Irrational fame asked in his recent paper examining the contagious nature of unethical behavior.

Cold assessment of risk versus reward

One of the classical attempts to explain bad behavior looks at it as a simple economic problem. When given the opportunity people will cheat up to the level they think they can get away with. Along this line of thinking, there is a conscious or unconscious calculation of risk vs. reward. For example, when stealing a pen from work you are unlikely to get caught, but the reward is small. But at the end of the day you still get paid your salary and also have a pen, so you are ahead of the game, having maximized your reward.

But as I’ve covered many times here on Very Evolved, the human brain is not a purely rational place especially when money is involved.

Also we are not alone. We never make decisions in a social vacuum – everything we do has consequences for those around us and this is factored into our decision making process. And vice-versa – observing how others behave lets us know how we should act if we want to fit in.

But does this extend to cheating and unethical behavior?

Honestly I’m trustworthy

The setup of the experiement involved asking several large groups of students to solve a series of 20 math problems within a certain time limit. The subjects were then instructed to write down how many they solved and then shred their answer sheet so it could not be checked. The researchers then paid out cash based upon how many problems people reported getting right.

The catch was that the time limit to do the problems was short enough that no one could realistically solve all of them.

Of course we’re not really interested in how good people are at mathematics under pressure, so the real test began when a planted subject loudly announced halfway through that he’d solved all of them and what he should do now.

Everyone in the study knew that this must be impossible given how little time they had, so this person was clearly an example of blatant cheating. At this point the plant takes all of the money and leaves without any penalty or shame.

The effect on the remaining people was unmistakable: the barefaced dishonesty caused a massive increase in cheating across the group.

Thinking this might conform to the cold calculation theory that people will assess the risk of getting caught and cheat up to that level, the experimenters changed one simple aspect of the study: the T-shirt of the blatant cheater.

When the shameless cheater was wearing a plain shirt like the rest of the students at the university where the test was being conducted, group cheating rose dramatically. But when the cheater wore the shirt of a rival university everything changed.

Seeing this outsider being brazenly unethical actually caused the levels of cheating to go down below normal.

Surprisingly, the identity of the cheater matters. Insiders, or those people on your team have a much greater influence over our perception of what is morally acceptable than strangers do. This also argues against the decision to cheat being based on a cold risk-reward calculation, otherwise seeing the rival university member cheating and getting away with it should have encouraged dishonesty as much as any in-group member.

Should we be looking for the next Bernie Madoff?

Given that Bernie’s portfolio always returned a profit year after year and never lost despite what the market was doing, it had to be clear to other fund mangers that this was impossible and some cheating was involved. So the question arises: How many followed Bernie’s example?
Knowing how people from the in-group respond to bad behavior of one of their own it seems likely that we haven’t seen the last of the unethical fund manger. Perhaps not on this scale or with the same scheme, but the contagious nature of bad behavior makes it likely that more unethical events are yet to be discovered, a conclusion that Ariely also considers possible.

Do you really want to cheat?

Fortunately there are two silver linings we can look to. First, now that Bernie has faced the consequences he is no longer like our T-shirt wearing cheater. Just as bad behavior can spread, seeing unethical actions punished may help to correct the ethical quagmire that Bernie helped create.

And the second comes from the final experiment from the study. This time the planted test taker doesn’t cheat, but merely asks loudly at the beginning “is it OK to cheat?” A bold question to be sure, but it the effect is to bring to the forefront of our minds the ethical considerations of what what we are about to do. The results? Everyone cheated less than normal. It seems that even without examples of good or bad behavior, just considering the ethics of the situation is often enough to keep our moral compass pointed in the right direction.

To use a well-worn phrase; the moral of the story is that individual acts of unethical behavior can have a very potent influence effect on the honesty of the whole group. So now you can ask yourself one question:

Are you setting the right example for your group?

I think a good example to set would be to encourage you to get instant updates to Very Evolved via Email or RSS.