A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy?
What you have doesn't make you unhappy. What you want does.
And want is created by us, the marketers.
Marketers trying to grow market share will always work to make their non-customers unhappy.
It's interesting to note that marketers trying to maintain market share have a lot of work to do in reminding us that we're happy.
I think it's also important to note that our central nervous system conspires with advertisers to make us eternally unsatisfied. The key point is habituation: we very quickly adapt to sources of pleasure, so that the shiny new house/iPod/sports car/t-shirt/etc is taken for granted and stops making us happy. (You can also understand this in terms of dopamine neurons which cease firing in response to a rewarding stimulus once the reward becomes predictable.) The economist Philip Brickman refers to this process as the "hedonic treadmill". Because of our ungrateful brain, we are wired to always want more no matter how much we already have. This is why levels of happiness in America, Western Europe and Japan have largely flat-lined over the last fifty years, even as material wealth has dramatically increased.
Obviously, the surfeit of ads doesn't help, especially since many ads emphasize positional goods, or products whose appeal is that they signal your social position. When someone wears a Rolex watch - a classic positional good - they don't make themselves happy (their brain has already adapted to the luxury good) but they do manage to raise the expectations of everybody wearing less expensive watches. These people now feel inferior, since their Timex has been devalued by the costlier item. Multiply this same psychological phenomenon across a full range of consumer products - from clothes to cars, stereos to shoes - and you can begin to see why having more doesn't make us happier. As Adam Smith observed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, "Riches leave a man always as much and sometimes more exposed than before to anxiety, to fear and to sorrow."
Over at Mind Matters, we've got an interesting article on how believing in free will can affect our ethical behavior:
In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by giving participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick, a biochemist and Nobel laureate (as co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA double helix). Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage begins as follows: "'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons."
The passage then goes on to talk about the neural basis of decisions and claims that "...although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that." The other participants got a passage that was similarly scientific-sounding, but it was about the importance of studying consciousness, with no mention of free will.
After reading the passages, all participants completed a survey on their belief in free will. Then comes the inspired part of the experiment. Participants were told to complete 20 arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that when the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen, too. The participants were told that no one would know whether they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.
The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! (That is, they pressed the space bar less often than the other participants.) Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.
I've always been enamored of this William James aphorism: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will". The legend has it that James used this pithy quote to cheer himself up after suffering from an existential despair. (He'd recently discovered Laplace...) It turns out that such a belief, even when self-imposed, also probably made James a little bit more ethical.
I had an article this weekend in the Washington Post looking at the recent spate of "age defiance" - Dara Torres, Madonna, John McCain, etc. - and some recent neuroscience research:
A s a 27-year old science writer who still gets carded at bars, I often find discussions of the aging process pleasantly abstract. I'm more likely to use Clearasil than anti-wrinkle cream. But the spectacle of Torres's competing and McCain's campaigning has rekindled an important scientific debate about the inevitability of the aging process and what even young and middle-aged people can do to blunt the adverse effects of time.
New research demonstrates that Torres, Madonna and McCain's mother, Roberta -- who is still campaigning for her son at the age of 96 -- aren't rare outliers, but rather examples of a somewhat common phenomenon. According to scientists, it's entirely possible to grow significantly older without getting much slower -- as long as we're willing to put in the work. The elixir of youth, it turns out, is an old-fashioned cocktail: blood, sweat and tears.
This scientific research arrives just as the graying of the baby boomers is leading to an explosive growth in medical treatments that promise a perpetual adolescence. With its offerings of dietary supplements and caloric-restriction diets, face creams infused with fetal stem cells and injections of Botox, the anti-aging industry has managed to turn an inescapable biological process into a lucrative source of anxiety. What the latest science suggests, however, is that the best anti-aging treatment isn't something you apply to your skin or buy in a bottle: It's what you already have in your head. The bad news, of course, is that the same research shows that the passage of time is not an equal opportunity eroder.
Last year, a large study led by researchers at Harvard University compared the brains of young adults and senior citizens. As expected, the scientists found consistent differences between the two groups. The most significant occurred in a brain system known as the "default network," which is active when people turn their attention inward, as when they're trying to remember a name. The default network is defined by a series of pathways between the front of the brain -- this includes areas of the prefrontal cortex -- and the "back" of the brain, such as the cingulate cortex.
Under normal circumstances, the default network ensures that these two brain areas work in perfect sync. "When the front of the brain fires, you want to see the back of the brain fire right back," says Jessica Andrews-Hanna, the study's lead author. "Unfortunately, this connection seems to weaken with age, so that older people can end up with a rather disconnected brain." Andrews-Hanna suggests that deficits in the default network might be responsible for many of the classic symptoms of old age, such as an inability to focus and problems with memory retrieval.
So far, so depressing. The aging process is a biological wrecking crew. But buried in all the bad news are some optimistic data. It turned out that nearly half of the older subjects exhibited brain activity that appeared indistinguishable from that of the young adults: Their default system was nearly as synchronized as those of people in their 20s. Furthermore, these differences in brain activity were correlated with performance on a battery of tests that measured short-term memory, abstract reasoning powers and processing speed. "There really was tremendous individual variation," Andrews-Hanna says, "and this variation was evident both in the brain and in observed behavior."
For more on the inequality of aging, check out Ed Yong's excellent summary of some interesting research on extreme lifespans.
John McCain remarked last week that the hostilities in Georgia marked the "first serious crisis" since the end of the Cold War. His surrogates on the news shows have expanded on that position, as they repeat the talking point about how the world is so dangerous and full of evil.
This strategy shouldn't be surprising: in recent elections, the Republican party has consistently emphasized national security threats and subtly tried to stoke the fear of voters. Remember this Bush ad, which ran during the closing weeks of the 2004 election? After criticizing Kerry for voting against increased funding for the intelligence services, the ad concluded with a pack of wolves emerging from the woods and running straight towards the camera. The narrator explained the imagery: "Weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm". That's some scary stuff.
Furthermore, there's good evidence that such political tactics are effective. Consider the work done by Sheldon Solomon and colleagues on mortality salience. The experiments were clever: the researchers took a large group of politically independent undergraduates and had them stare at some blinking computer screens. While the blinks seemed meaningless - they lasted for just a few milliseconds, which is too brief for conscious awareness - they actually conveyed some emotionally charged information. Half of the subjects were subconsciously "primed" with stimuli that evoked the September 11 terrorist attacks, like the letters WTC or the numbers 9/11. The rest of the subjects just looked at area codes and random groupings of letters.
After the priming session, the scientists asked the subjects some political questions. For instance, after reading a series of sentences strongly supportive of President Bush and his policies - "I appreciate our President's wisdom regarding the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power," etc. - they were asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 5, whether or not they agreed with the paragraph.
The results were dramatic. When people were primed with neutral stimuli, they gave the sentences an average rating of 2.1, which meant they were in mild disagreement. In general, they thought Bush's post-9/11 policies were a mistake. However, when they were subconsciously exposed to words and numbers that reminded them of terrorism, their political opinions were reversed. They now gave the sentences a rating of 3.75, signaling an endorsement of the Bush administration. They thought the Iraq war was a good idea.
Landau and Solomon then looked at how the threat of terrorism affected the 2004 Presidential election. Some students were asked to think about the possibility of their own death, a process Landau and Solomon refer to as "mortality salience". (Landau and Solomon had previously shown that reminders of 9/11 made people much more likely to think about death and dying.) The other group was primed with thoughts of pain, as they were asked to contemplate their most painful personal experience. The subjects then completed a short survey in which they were asked to rate both George Bush and John Kerry on an eight-point scale.
When people were asked to think about pain, they preferred Kerry by a wide margin. His average rating was 5.5 points, compared to Bush's 2.2. However, when the scientists triggered thoughts of death - the mortality salience condition - Bush suddenly became much more popular. In fact, he now received significantly higher ratings than Kerry. "The most subtle psychological manipulations can profoundly affect our political preferences," says Solomon. "We think we are making these deliberate decisions, but that's just an illusion. When the emotional shit hits the fan, our rationality is the first thing to go.'"
While the scientists associate such a conservative tilt with "terror induced irrationality" it's not clear that these people are any more irrational than those who chose Kerry after being primed with "pain". In both instances, different emotional cues prime our decision-making machinery in slightly different ways. So don't be surprised when you see Obama ads showing people grimacing in pain at the gas pump, or McCain television spots that emphasize the inherent dangers of the world. Political strategists, it turns out, intuitively understand how to bias the brain in their favor.
The paperback version of my first book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, is now shipping from Amazon. Needless to say, everyone should buy the book in triplicate. I'd apologize for the self-promotion, but isn't blogging just one big orgy of self-promotion?
My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section looks at some recent criticisms of fMRI, at least when it's misused:
The brain scan image - a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color - has also become a staple of popular culture, a symbol of how scientific advances are changing the way we think about ourselves. For the first time in human history, the black box of the mind has been flung wide open, allowing researchers to search for the cortical source for every flickering thought. The expensive scanners can even decode the hidden urges of the unconscious, revealing those secret feelings that we hide from ourselves. The machine, in other words, knows more about you than you do: It's like a high-tech window into the soul.
"These [fMRI] images get people excited in a way that other research just doesn't," says Kelly Joyce, a sociologist at the College of William & Mary. "The pictures have a tremendous authority, not only among scientists but among people who might just glance at a brain scan picture in a newspaper."
In recent weeks, however, several high-profile papers have ignited a fierce debate over whether brain scanners are being widely misused and their results over-interpreted. Some eminent figures in the field have taken issue with the metaphors typically used to describe brain imaging, criticizing descriptions of scanners that rely on what Joyce refers to as the "myth of transparency."
The scanners, they say, excel at measuring certain types of brain activity, but are also effectively blind when it comes to the detection of more subtle aspects of cognition. As a result, the pictures that seem so precise are often deeply skewed snapshots of mental activity. Furthermore, one of the most common uses of brain scanners - taking a complex psychological phenomenon and pinning it to a particular bit of cortex - is now being criticized as a potentially serious oversimplification of how the brain works. These critics stress the interconnectivity of the brain, noting that virtually every thought and feeling emerges from the crosstalk of different areas spread across the cortex. If fMRI is a window into the soul, these scientists say, then the glass is very, very dirty.
Here's a link to the Logothetis article in Nature that began a lot of this discussion. What do you think? What psychological states are amenable to localization experiments in brain scanners? How will we feel about most of these brain imaging experiments in ten or twenty years? Frankly, I was surprised by just how critical many scientists were.
As I point out several times in the article, however, fMRI remains an extremely valuable experimental tool, at least when used properly. It's still our best way to make sense of functional networks in the brain, such as the default system. It's also very handy when used in conjunction with other experimental techniques, such as EEG or electrophysiology. But I think only time will tell how well these localization studies hold up.
I really don't understand how Olympic athletes deal with the grief of losing by 1/100th of a second. That's an incomprehensible amount of time and yet it's the defining difference in the biggest event of their lives. I can only assume that, if I lost by a fraction of a second, I would have recurring nightmares for many years afterwards, dreaming of all the ways I could have reached the wall just a little bit faster.
In the post-race interviews, however, I'm always struck by the equanimity of the athletes. Dara Torres, who lost by 1/100th of a second in the 50 meter freestyle, just shrugged off the loss saying something about how "sometimes you win by that amount and sometimes you lose." And she seemed sincere! Perhaps having more experience with these tight races teaches the athletes to adopt a more stoic poise, since they realize that, in the end, there's a large amount of fate and fortune involved. (Sounds like the serenity prayer, I know.) They spend their life training for an event fully aware that it might still come down to the margin of error.
Prior to the development of OMEGA touch pads, finishing times in swimming competitions were measured with handheld stopwatches by 24 timekeepers, three of whom were assigned to each of the eight lanes. OMEGA touch pads made their Olympic Games debut at the Mexico 1968 Olympic Games. Reacting to very slight pressure from the swimmer's hand but not to the movement of the water, the pads allow swimmers to "stop the clock" with their own hands. The time thus registered automatically becomes the official race time for each swimmer.
OMEGA touch pads and starting blocks are part of an integrated timing system capable of recording times to the nearest 1/1000th of a second. However, because it is not possible to build swimming pools in which each lane is guaranteed to be precisely the same length, Olympic and World Records are still recorded to the nearest 1/100th of a second.
Over at the Times website, Harold McGee takes a question on salt and baking:
Q: Is there any truth to the old cook's adage that adding a pinch of salt brings out the sweetness in sugars? If so, can you please explain the science behind it?
Harold McGee replies: I'm not sure that salt makes sugar taste sweeter, but it fills out the flavor of foods, sweets included. It's an important component of taste in our foods, so if it's missing in a given dish, the dish will taste less complete or balanced. Salt also increase the volatility of some aromatic substances in food, and it enhances our perception of some aromas, so it can make the overall flavor of a food seem more intense.
I don't want to quibble with Harold McGee, as I'm such a big fan, but I think there's a better explanation for why salt makes sweet things taste a little bit sweeter. Although the sweet taste receptor seems to be a G-protein coupled receptor, there's also evidence that applying a sodium-channel blocker (TTX) can dramatically inhibit the activity of all taste receptors, suggesting that sodium plays a key role in the cellular detection of every taste (and not just the taste of salty things). Perhaps, and this is a pretty big perhaps, the extra concentration of salt when added to a dark chocolate souffle or a slightly bitter caramel makes it easier for the sweet taste receptors to fire an action-potential, since there are more sodium ions floating around the apical membrane. If so, that would explain why pastry chefs always add a pinch of salt to bring out the fullness of the other flavors. Just a thought.
There's a very cool study in the latest Nature Neuroscience that looks at how professional basketball players make predictions about whether or not a shot will go in. Obviously, this is a key skill, as being able to anticipate the position of a basketball gives players additional time to jostle for a rebound.
The experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices watched a video clip of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the players were significantly better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right 44 percent of the time.
What allowed the professionals to make such accurate predictions? It seems that they were internally imitating the movement of the player on the television screen, and not simply making judgments based on the arc of the ball. (Unlike the coaches and writers, the players were able to make accurate predictions as soon as the ball left the hand, suggesting that they were "reading the body kinematics" of the person taking the shot.)
Furthermore, the experts also demonstrated increased activation in their motor areas, especially during missed shots. The scientists speculate that mirror neurons are involved, allowing professionals to to engage in a "covert simulation of the action". In other words, when professional basketball players watch another player take a shot, mirror neurons in their pre-motor areas might light up as if they were taking the same shot. This automatic empathy allows them to predict where the ball will end up before the ball is even in the air.
The same researchers have also done some cool studies of expert tennis players.
It's a nightmarish scenario: after a car crash, a man is brought into a hospital with a severe injury to his frontal lobes. When he wakes up, the doctors realize that their patient is missing one crucial mental faculty: his memory has been erased. He has no idea who he is, or even where he came from.
"There was a bundle of clothing that came in with him when he entered the hospital, and in there we found a voter registration card from Mexico," Felix says.
The ID had a name -- Omar -- and a picture. But as he healed after surgery, the patient no longer looked like the picture. And when the Mexican consulate contacted Omar's family back home, the family said Omar was not missing.
Still, Marti Gillum, a nurse practitioner, says the patient indeed remembers some things. She says he has been crying and talking about his five kids.
"He's homesick," she says. "He tells the nurses he wants to go home."
But he doesn't know where home is.
The staff do know what he likes to eat -- melon, fruit and fish - but that's not much of a clue.
When asked in Spanish what his name is, he replies, "Cindi."
"That's what his response is to anything you ask him. When you say where he's from, that's what he says," nurse Kristy Lopez says. "We think he's trying to say something else, but the words aren't coming out."
My profile of Read Montague and the dopamine prediction-error hypothesis is now online. I wanted to write this article for two main reasons. First of all, I think the dopamine story is incredibly exciting and remains one of the best examples of how subtle shifts in neural firing rates can allow the brain make sense of the real world. Yes, I know there are caveats, but the prediction-error hypothesis is still a very powerful paradigm. Wolfram Schultz should win a Nobel Prize.
Secondly, there's so much crappy fMRI research out there - and it always get so much press attention - that I wanted to do some reporting on the best brain scanner experiments, even if they required a little more explanation than "The "fill-in-the-blank" brain area is responsible for sarcasm/romantic love/jealousy/etc." Not only has Montague's lab helped pioneer some very clever paradigms - he invented hyperscanning - but he insists on using very rigorous analytic techniques. He's a scientist who is skeptical of the technology and his own data. As Montague told me: "All of these [fMRI] studies with twelve, thirteen subjects are completely bogus. Where we're at with brain imaging right now is where genetics was thirty years ago. The stuff we think is signal is really noise. We've got no handle on individual variation, so we end up throwing out most of the really interesting stuff." A typical Montague fMRI experiment will involve at least 75 subjects, which is an extremely large n for the field.
Here, by the way, is Montague's latest Science paper which looks at how people with borderline personality disorder play simple economic exchange games.
Sometimes, I wish America had British libel laws. This sort of dishonesty masquerading as "scholarship" makes me furious:
Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up "extensive connections to Islam" -- Mr. Obama is Christian -- and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.
Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is "Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday -- at No. 1.
The Times does a solid job of undermining many of Corsi's claims, such as this little lie:
In exploring Mr. Obama's denials that he had been present for the more incendiary sermons of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Corsi cites a report on the conservative Web site NewsMax.com that Mr. Obama had attended a sermon on July 22, 2007, in which Mr. Wright blamed "the 'white arrogance' of America's Caucasian majority for the world's suffering, especially the oppression of blacks."
Mr. Obama, however, was giving a speech in Florida that afternoon, and his campaign reported he had not attended Mr. Wright's church that day.
William Kristol, a columnist for The New York Times, had cited the same report in a column, and issued a correction.
Despite these factual flaws, I have no doubt that the book will be extremely successful, and not only because it's already a bestseller. I think the real damage done by texts like this is their mere existence. By making an accusation - even if the accusation is clearly wrong - the book gives its proponents a claim to defend. As a result, the airwaves are soon filled with pundits "debating" the merits of the book: the lie has been turned into an issue that seems worthy of debate.
At such moments, our fancy cognitive talents actually become a disadvantage, since they allow us to justify practically any belief. We use the brain as an information filter, a way to block-out disagreeable points of view. Consider this experiment, which was done in the late 1960's, by the cognitive psychologists Timothy Brock and Joe Balloun. They played a group of people a tape-recorded message attacking Christianity. Half of the subjects were regular churchgoers while the other half were committed atheists. To make the experiment more interesting, Brock and Balloun added an annoying amount of static - a crackle of white noise - to the recording. However, they allowed listeners to reduce the static by pressing a button, so that the message suddenly became easier to understand. Their results were utterly predicable and rather depressing: the non-believers always tried to remove the static, while the religious subjects actually preferred the message that was harder to hear. Later experiments by Brock and Balloun demonstrated a similar effect with smokers listening to a speech on the link between smoking and cancer. We silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance.
The point is that it doesn't really matter if the claims in this book are debunked. If you want to believe that Obama is a dope smoking Muslim Marxist, the brain will find a way.
Some new research sheds light on why chili plants are spicy:
It has been thought that the chemicals known as capsaicinoids, which surround the seeds and give peppers their characteristic heat, are the chili's way of deterring microbes. But if so, then microbial infestation should bring selective pressure on chilis -- the more bugs, the hotter the peppers should be.
That has never been shown in the wild. Now, however, in a study of wild chili plants, Joshua J. Tewksbury of the University of Washington and colleagues show that the variation in heat reflects the risk that the plants will be attacked by a seed-destroying fungus.
My own little vegetable garden has been hard hit by fungus this year, but the hot peppers are in full bloom. Now I know why - capsaicin is the original fungicide.
Of course, that still doesn't explain why capsaicin tastes "hot," and why spicy food "burns" our tongue. For that, we need to investigate the physiology of taste. It turns out that capsaicin - this plant protectant - binds to a special class of vanilloid receptor inside our mouth called VR1 receptors. After binding capsaicin, the neuron is depolarized, and it signals the presence of spicy stimuli.
But here's the strange part: VR1 receptors weren't designed to detect capsaicin. They bind spicy food by accident. The real purpose of VR1 receptors is the detection of heat. They are supposed to prevent us from consuming food that is too hot, in the thermal sense. (That's why our VR1 receptors are clustered in our tongue, mouth and skin.) So when they are activated by capsaicin the sensation we experience is that of excessive heat. We start to sweat and get the urge to drink lots of water. But that pain is just an illusory side-effect of our cell receptors. There is nothing "hot" about spicy food.
I was on The Takeaway this morning talking about the ineffectiveness of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and the potency of the placebo effect. Even though most studies demonstrate that HGH does little to enhance athletic performance, world class athletes continue to take the banned hormone. Why? Because they're convinced that HGH is effective. As a result, the drug gives them a mental edge - because athletes expect to perform better, they do perform better. The illusion of an advantage, if it's sincerely believed, can be a real advantage.
Here's more on why I'm in favor of taking HGH off the banned substance list. And here's more on the neuroscience of the placebo effect.
This seems a wee bit reductive to me, but it's still an interesting hypothesis:
One of the more intriguing patterns in psychology is that different cultures are characterized by different personality types. A team of psychologists has proposed a new explanation: the legacy of disease. They matched the personality scores of people to historical data on the prevalence of major diseases in each country. They found that a history of disease in a country corresponded to a personality characterized by a less promiscuous orientation - especially for women - and by less extraversion and openness to experience. The idea is that more inhibited personalities evolved to prevent the spread of disease by minimizing risky social contact.
Note the verb "corresponded," which has to do a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Cultures are incredibly complex entities, so I think one has to be careful coming up with simple explanatory relationships. (We should make every researcher attempting to "explain" history via data-mining read Isaiah Berlin's classic essay on Tolstoy and history.) This could also be a case of looking for the keys under the streetlight: there is so little quantifiable historical data from a wide-variety of cultures that it can be tempting to put the numbers we do have through the statistical grinder, looking for subtle correlations between rates of leprosy and introversion, etc.
That caveat aside, speculation sure is fun. Personally, I'd be interested to look for correlations between measures of personality in various cultures and the preference for certain types of drugs. Some cultures prefer beer or wine (and have for millenia) while others favor opium or coca. How do these intoxicants influence, over vast stretches of time, the collective habits of people?
Dr. Felix Rey was the first doctor to diagnose Vincent Van Gogh with epilepsy, after the artist was hospitalized following this bizarre incident:
When Gauguin left their house, van Gogh followed and approached him with an open razor, was repelled, went home, and cut off part of his left earlobe, which he then presented to Rachel, his favorite prostitute. The police were alerted; he was found unconscious at his home and was hospitalized. There he lapsed into an acute psychotic state with agitation, hallucinations, and delusions that required 3 days of solitary confinement. He retained no memory of his attacks on Gauguin, the self-mutilation, or the early part of his stay at the hospital.
At this point, Dr. Rey prescribed potassium bromide (still used as an anticonvulsive medication by veterinarians) and bed rest. After a few weeks, Van Gogh began to recover and started work on Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear and Pipe, which captures his serenely confused mood. It didn't take long, however, before the hallucinations and psychotic episodes returned. (It seems that Dr. Rey never told Van Gogh to avoid absinthe.) In May 1889, Van Gogh entered the mental asylum at Saint-Remy. A month later, he would complete his masterpiece Starry Night, which is a view of the stars from his hospital window.
In the latest issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, there's an interesting letter from Dr. Rey, describing the illness of the painter:
Vincent was above all a miserable, wretched man,... he would talk to me about complementary colours. But I really could not understand why red should not be red, and green not green!... When I saw that he outlined my head entirely in green (he had only two main colours, red and green), that he painted my hair and my mustache - I really did not have red hair - in a blazing red on a biting green background, I was simply horrified. What should I do with this present?
I was on the Brian Lehrer show (no relation) this morning talking about insight, firefighters and the right hemisphere. Give it a listen. And I'm curious how readers engineer their own insights. Warm showers? Long walks? Richard Feynman preferred strip clubs, a cognitive strategy I have yet to test.
One of the great themes of post-Darwinian science is the inter-relatedness of life. From the perspective of our neurons, there is little difference between a human and a rat, or even a sea slug. All animals use the same ionic cells and the same neurotransmitters. Pain receptors in different species share a similar design. Blood and flesh and skin are always constructed of the same elemental stuff. We share 98 percent of our genome with chimps.
The distinctions are just as murky from the perspective of behavior. Ants exhibit altruism. Parrots use symbolic logic. Gorillas mourn the death of a family member. Humans exhibit all sorts of animal instincts. Most neuroscientists who study consciousness believe that it exists in a gradient, and that chimps are not unconscious, but simply less conscious. Attempts to draw some clear biological line between humans and every other animal species usually end up falling back on some murky references to enlarged prefrontal cortices, but that hardly strikes me as a rigorous demarcation.*
I bring this up in the context of Proposition Two, an initiative on the ballot in California. Nicholas Kristof summarizes what's at stake:
The most important election this November that you've never heard of is a referendum on animal rights in California, the vanguard state for social movements. Proposition 2 would ban factory farms from raising chickens, calves or hogs in small pens or cages.
Defining what is cruel is, of course, extraordinarily difficult. But penning pigs or veal calves so tightly that they cannot turn around seems to cross that line.
More broadly, the tide of history is moving toward the protection of animal rights, and the brutal conditions in which they are sometimes now raised will eventually be banned. Someday, vegetarianism may even be the norm.
Perhaps it seems like soggy sentimentality as well as hypocrisy to stand up for animal rights, particularly when I enjoy dining on these same animals. But my view was shaped by those days in the barn as a kid, scrambling after geese I gradually came to admire.
I completely agree. There is no excuse for animal cruelty, regardless of whether it's perpetrated by an individual (in which case it's a felony) or by a factory farm (in which case it benefits from federal agricultural subsidies). I'm not a vegetarian, but I am pretty strict about eating humanely raised meat. Prop 2 is an important step in the right direction.
*After all, prefrontal function varies widely in humans. Are people with low prefrontal function less worthy of basic rights?
Over at Mind Matters we recently featured an interesting article by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Adina Roskies (two philosophers at Dartmouth) reviewing a recent paper by Joshua Greene, et. al. The paper tested the dual-process model of morality, which argues that every moral decision is the result of a tug-of-war between the "rational" brain (centered in the prefrontal cortex) and the "emotional" brain, rooted in areas like the amygdala and insula.
In their study Greene et al. give subjects difficult moral dilemmas in which one alternative leads to better consequences (such as more lives saved) but also violates an intuitive moral restriction (it requires a person to directly or intentionally cause harm to someone else). For example, in the "crying baby" dilemma subjects must judge whether it is wrong to smother their own baby in order to save a large group of people that includes the baby. In this scenario, which was also used by the television show M.A.S.H., enemy soldiers will hear the baby cry unless it is smothered. Sixty percent of people choose to smother the baby in order to save more lives. A judgment that it is appropriate to save the most lives, even if it requires you to suffocate a child, is labeled "utilitarian" by Greene et al., whereas a judgment that it is not appropriate is called "deontological." These names pay homage to traditional moral philosophies.
Based on previous fMRI studies, Greene proposes a dual-process model of moral judgments. This model makes two central claims. First, when subjects form deontological judgments, emotional processes are said to override controlled cognitive processes. In other words, the subjects who are unwilling to smother the baby are being swayed by their emotions, and they can't bear the idea of hurting a helpless child. This claim has been supported by a flurry of recent behavioral studies and neural studies. Greene's dual-process model also claims that controlled cognitive processes cause utilitarian moral judgments. The new Cognition study puts that second claim to the test.
Neuroimaging reveals only correlations; it cannot determine whether a certain brain area is causing a particular judgment. But intervening in a process can provide evidence of causation. In the Cognition study, Greene et al. attempted to interfere with moral reasoning by increasing the cognitive load on subjects. They had subjects perform the moral judgment task at the same time as a monitoring task, in which subjects viewed a stream of numerals and responded to occurrences of "5." If this added cognitive load interferes with the controlled cognitive processes that cause utilitarian judgments, the researchers surmised, then subjects should make fewer utilitarian judgments and should form these judgments more slowly.
As hypothesized, added cognitive load led to longer reaction times for utilitarian judgments, but the researchers found no effect on reaction times for deontological judgments. Although it took subjects longer to approve of acts like smothering a baby when also looking for the number 5, it did not take them longer to approve of acts like not smothering the baby.
I find this research interesting for a few reasons. While stories of Darwinian evolution often stress the amorality of natural selection - we are all Hobbesian brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes - our psychological reality is much less bleak. We aren't fallen angels, but we also aren't depraved hominids. Greene has helped illuminate the intricate network of brain areas that keep us, most of the time, from hurting other people. (As Richard Rorty put it, "avoidance of cruelty" should be the founding principle of liberalism. He was right, as the emotional areas of the brain are automatically activated in response to the sight of someone else in pain. We can't help but sympathize with strangers, or what Adam Smith called fellow-feeling.) One of the interesting implications of this new Greene paper is that distracting the prefrontal cortex with a simple task might actually make us a little bit more sympathetic. Because our "rational" brain is distracted, we might become more likely to rely on our moral emotions, especially in situations that require a fast reaction time.
The second reason I find this research fascinating is that it helps us understand psychopaths, who seem to have a problem with their emotional brain. When normal people are shown staged videos of strangers being subjected to pain - like a powerful electrical shock - they automatically generate a visceral emotional reaction. Their hands start to sweat and their blood pressure surges. But psychopaths feel nothing. It's as if they were watching a blank screen. Most people react differently to emotionally charged verbs like kill or rape than to neutral words like sit or walk, but not psychopaths. The words all seem equivalent. When normal people tell lies, they exhibit the classic symptoms of nervousness. Lie detectors work by measuring these signals. But psychopaths are able to consistently fool the machines. Dishonesty doesn't make them anxious because nothing makes them anxious. They can lie with impunity. When criminologists looked at the most violent wife batterers, they discovered that, as the men became more and more aggressive, their blood pressure and pulse actually dropped. The acts of violence had a calming effect.
The history of science is littered with surprising discoveries that forever changed our conception of the unvierse and ourselves. The earth is a sphere, even though it appears flat. Life has no designer, even though it looks designed. But this may be the most surprising discovery yet, a fact that seems to undermine one of the basic truisms of my morning routine:
It was long thought that caffeinated beverages were diuretics, but studies reviewed last year found that people who consumed drinks with up to 550 milligrams of caffeine produced no more urine than when drinking fluids free of caffeine. Above 575 milligrams, the drug was a diuretic.
So even a Starbucks grande, with 330 milligrams of caffeine, will not send you to a bathroom any sooner than if you drank 16 ounces of pure water. Drinks containing usual doses of caffeine are hydrating and, like water, contribute to the body's daily water needs.
Can that be? The last time I drank a large Starbucks coffee I had the misfortune of sitting in a window seat on a transcontinental flight. Let's just say that I was yearning for a catheter. The real question, of course, is this: If coffee isn't a potent diuretic, then why does it seem like one?
Razib has a super-interesting post on the prevalence of obesity among individuals of mixed race. His post was based on this paper:
The sample included 215,000 adults who reported one or more ethnicities, height, weight, and other characteristics through a mailed survey. ... The highest age-adjusted prevalence of overweight (BMI greater than or equal to 25) was in Hawaiian/Latino men (88% ; n = 41) and black/Latina women (74.5% ; n = 79), and highest obesity (BMI greater than or equal to 30) rates were in Hawaiian/Latino men (53.7% ; n = 41) and Hawaiian women (39.2% , n = 1,247). The prevalence estimates for most admixed groups were similar to or higher than the average of the prevalences for the ethnic groups with whom they shared common ethnicities. For instance, the prevalence of overweight/obesity in five ethnic admixtures--Asian/white, Hawaiian/white, Hawaiian/Asian, Latina/white, and Hawaiian/Asian/white ethnic admixtures--was significantly higher (P < 0.0001) than the average of the prevalence estimates for their component ethnic groups. ... The identification of individuals who have a high-risk ethnic admixture is important not only to the personal health and well-being of such individuals, but could also be important to future efforts in order to control the epidemic of obesity in the United States.
Although Razib considers some interesting genetic explanations, my own hunch is that cultural factors are the more important variable here. As Michael Pollan points out, one of the central problems with American eating habits is the absence of an indigenous food culture. Instead of relying on time-tested habits - modern Tuscans are still enjoying their 18th century peasant diet, full of legumes, durum wheat pasta and bitter greens - we've switched over to a diet based on Nabisco's bottom line and horribly misguided agricultural subsidies, which encourage farmers to grow high-fructose corn syrup. This shiny new diet, wrapped in the impressive vocabulary of nutrionism, has erased all the culinary wisdom accrued over the centuries:
In many cases, long familiarity between foods and their eaters leads to elaborate systems of communications up and down the food chain, so that a creature's senses come to recognize foods as suitable by taste and smell and color, and our bodies learn what to do with these foods after they pass the test of the senses, producing in anticipation the chemicals necessary to break them down. Health depends on knowing how to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled; this looks ripe; that's one good-looking cow. This is easier to do when a creature has long experience of a food, and much harder when a food has been designed expressly to deceive its senses -- with artificial flavors, say, or synthetic sweeteners.
Note that these ecological relationships are between eaters and whole foods, not nutrients. Even though the foods in question eventually get broken down in our bodies into simple nutrients, as corn is reduced to simple sugars, the qualities of the whole food are not unimportant -- they govern such things as the speed at which the sugars will be released and absorbed, which we're coming to see as critical to insulin metabolism. Put another way, our bodies have a longstanding and sustainable relationship to corn that we do not have to high-fructose corn syrup. Such a relationship with corn syrup might develop someday (as people evolve superhuman insulin systems to cope with regular floods of fructose and glucose), but for now the relationship leads to ill health because our bodies don't know how to handle these biological novelties. In much the same way, human bodies that can cope with chewing coca leaves -- a longstanding relationship between native people and the coca plant in South America -- cannot cope with cocaine or crack, even though the same ''active ingredients'' are present in all three. Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice can lead to problems.
Ok, back to this paper on mixed-race adults and obesity. I wonder (and this is pure hypothesis) if one of the driving factors behind the data is the absence of food culture. The best way to illustrate the point is to describe my own experience. My father was raised on a steady diet of Jewish-American foods, from pickled herring to brisket. If left to his own devices, he would eat nothing but pastrami on rye with a smearing of spicy mustard. My mother, on the other hand, was raised on a Pennsylvania-Dutch diet, full of agrarian dishes like mincemeat pie and pickled red-beet eggs. Her uncles were all corn farmers.
So what food culture did I inherit? A smattering of everything. I like most deli foods - gefilte fish remains a hurdle to overcome - and I've learned how to pickle my own red-beets. I always have lox in the fridge and one of my favorite recipes is for sweet-corn chicken soup. (Thanks, Grandma!) But the point is that my food culture is all a la carte - I pick and choose what I like and leave the rest. My eating habits are thoroughly post-modern, severed from any ethnic or cultural tradition. While that culinary freedom certainly comes with advantages - my pantry is stuffed with everything from dried sweet corn to sichuan pepper - I've also missed out on some evolved wisdom. A genuine food culture, after all, isn't merely a collection of recipes - it's a way of life.
So I wonder if part of the explanation for the link between mixed-race adults and obesity is that, like me, these people are less likely to inherit a set of culturally specific food traditions. Razib notes that this lack of food culture might also lead to a diet that doesn't mesh well with genetics:
Different populations have different propensities toward different food stuffs; e.g., consider the amylase and lactase examples. Perhaps mixed-race children because of their bicultural background are exposed to a hodge-podge of dietary regimes which aren't optimal to their genetic makeup, which are relatively recent and so might not have a ready made cuisine?
Robert Krulwich had a really lovely piece on Weekend Edition discussing Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, split-brain patients and the emergent self. Much of the piece was drawn from my chapter on Woolf in Proust Was A Neuroscientist.
Here is how I summarize the paradox in the book, using the phenomenon of blindsight to make my point:
The one thing neuroscience cannot find is the loom of cells that creates the self. If neuroscience knows anything, it is that there is no ghost in the machine: there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.
This is all undoubtedly true. And yet, if the mechanical mind is denied the illusion of a self, if the machine lacks a ghost, then everything falls apart. Sensations fail to cohere. Reality disappears. As Woolf wondered in The Waves: "How to describe the world seen without a self?" "There are no words," she answered, and she was right. Deprived of the fictional self, all is dark. We think we are blind.
Update: While on the NPR website, be sure to check out the live recordings from the Newport Folk Festival. Highlights include Gillian Welch and She and Him.
A mule is a biological hybrid, an offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. According to a new paper, all of this cross-pollination has real benefits: mules are significantly smarter than either of their parents. No regression to the mean here:
Six of each animal were shown sets of two food buckets, each marked with a different symbol.In order to gain access to the food, the animals had to pick the correct bucket. The mules learned to discriminate between more pairs of symbols than the horses or donkeys, and did so more consistently.
The scientists argue that the intelligence of mules results from their genotypic diversity. It's long been recognized that such diversity can produce improved physical characteristics - mules are also stronger than their parents - but this study suggests that diversity also has cognitive benefits. And there's no reason to think that the hybrid principle is limited to mules. So go out and rescue a mutt and marry somebody with an entirely different set of recessive genes.
One of the lessons of my article on insight (based largely on this research) is that mind wandering isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least if you want to tap into the obscure associations prevalent in the right hemisphere:
Schooler's research has also led him to reconsider the bad reputation of mind wandering. Although we often complain that the brain is too easy to distract, Schooler believes that mind-wandering is an essential mental tool. "Just look at the history of science," he says, "The big ideas seem to always come when people are sidetracked, when they're doing something that has nothing to do with their research." He cites the example of Henri Poincare, the 19th century mathematician, whose seminal insight into non-Euclidean geometry arrived while he was boarding a bus. "At the moment when I put my foot on the step [of the bus]," Poincare wrote, "the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it...I did not verify the idea; I should not have had the time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with the conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty." Poincare credited his sudden mathematical insight to "the work of the unconscious," which continued to mull over the mathematics while he was preoccupied with unrelated activities, like talking to a friend on the bus. In his 1908 essay "Mathematical Creation," Poincare insisted that the best way to think about complex problems is to immerse yourself in the problem until you hit an impasse. Then, when it seems that "nothing good has been accomplished," you should find a way to distract yourself, preferably by going on a "walk or a journey".(Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, preferred the relaxed atmosphere of a topless bar, where he would sip 7-Up, "watch the entertainment" and, if inspiration struck, scribble equations on cocktail napkins.
And now, via David Peak, comes this fascinating anecdote about Maya Angelou's writing process. He notes that Angelou "used to play solitaire when she wrote her poetry, claiming that by using her 'little brain,' she was unlocking her 'big brain.'" Other research suggests that distracting your conscious attention with puzzles is also an ideal way to make big, complicated decisions.
It's exactly why writing in poetic forms can be so effective and liberating. By focusing on the puzzle of the restrictions (syllabic, accentual, rhyme, etc.), you become open to ideas and themes you wouldn't have otherwise considered.
The devious slogan for the New York State lottery is "All you need is a dollar and a dream." Such state lotteries are a regressive form of taxation, since the vast majority of lottery consumers are low-income. As David Brooks notes:
Twenty percent of Americans are frequent players, spending about $60 billion a year. The spending is starkly regressive. A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income.
A new study by Emily Haisley, Romel Mostafa and George Loewenstein explored some of the reasons why low-income people spend so much money on a product that only returns fifty three cents on the dollar. (Lotteries are such a bad deal that they make slot machines look good.) Here's the abstract:
In two experiments conducted with low-income participants, we examine how implicit comparisons with other income classes increase low-income individuals' desire to play the lottery. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to purchase lottery tickets when they were primed to perceive that their own income was low relative to an implicit standard. In Experiment 2, participants purchased more tickets when they
considered situations in which rich people or poor people receive advantages, implicitly
highlighting the fact that everyone has an equal chance of winning the lottery.
The study neatly illuminates the sad positive feedback loop of lotteries. The games naturally appeal to poor people, which causes them to spend disproportionate amounts of their income on lotteries, which helps keep them poor, which keeps them buying tickets. The saddest part is that these destructive games are run by the government.
Ed Yong has an excellent summary of a new experiment simulating the natural evolution of an artificial language as it's passed from one person to another. Every time we use a language we are subtly bending the rules and words to fit the contours of the brain:
Together with Kenny Smith at Northumbria University, they have provided the first experimental evidence that as languages are passed on, they evolve structures that make them easier to transmit effectively.
The team tracked the progress of artificial languages as they passed down a chain of volunteers. They found that in just ten iterations, the made-up tongues had become more structured and easier to learn. What's more, these adaptive features arose without specific plans or designs on the part of the speakers. The appearance of design without the guiding will of any designer is another trait that offers compelling parallels to biological evolution.
This experiment reminds me of some fascinating studies done on deaf children in Nicaragua. Until the early 1980's, the deaf citizens of Nicaragua remained tragically isolated. The country didn't have a sign language, and deaf children were confined to overcrowded orphanages. However, when the first school for the deaf was founded in 1981 the situation immediately began to improve. The children were never taught sign language (there were no teachers), but they suddenly began to speak with their hands. A makeshift vocabulary seemed to spontaneously evolve.
But the real transformation occurred when younger deaf students were introduced to this newly invented sign language. While older students were forced to converse in relatively imprecise terms, these second generation speakers began to give their language a structure. No one had taught them grammar, but they didn't have to be taught: the young children automatically imposed their innate knowledge onto their growing vocabulary. Verbs became inflected. Adjectives became distinct from nouns. Concepts that older speakers represented using a single sign were now represented by multiple signs enclosed within a sentence. Although these Nicaraguan children had never known language, they invented their own.
Sheena Iyengar has done some very cool studies on the debilitating effects of excessive choice. In one experiment, she ushered some undergraduates into a room with a variety of Godiva chocolates on a table. The students were then given vivid descriptions of each candy. They learned, for example, that the "Grand Marnier Truffle" consists of a "luxurious milk chocolate butter cream with a hint of liquor, housed in a dark chocolate shell and rolled in cocoa powder." After being told about all of their delectable options, the students chose the best sounding chocolate and rated it on a scale of one to seven. In the final part of the experiment, the students were offered a small box of Godiva chocolates or a five dollar cash payment as compensation.
The students were divided into two groups. The first was the "limited choice" condition: they were only given six different chocolates to choose from. The second group, in contrast, saw a table covered with thirty different flavors, the full Godiva range. In theory, the group with more chocolate options should enjoy their chocolates more, since everybody could choose their favorite kind of chocolate. Don't like Grand Marnier? Then get the cognac truffle. Don't like liquor in your candy? Get the dark chocolate ganache. It was an ideal maximizing situation.
But all the different options didn't help. In fact, they made things much worse. Students only given six chocolates to choose from were happier with their choices than students offered thirty different choices. They thought their chocolates were much tastier. They were also four times as likely to choose a box of chocolates instead of cash at the end of the experiment. Less choice resulted in more post-choice satisfaction.
Iyengar argues that having more alternatives detracts from our pleasure for two reasons. The first reason is that all the superfluous options require lots of cognitive effort. We have to keep all the different chocolate flavors in our short-term memory, and then try figure out which chocolate we would most enjoy. Choosing a truffle becomes hard work, and all that work makes the actual truffle less enjoyable. The second problem with "excessive choice" is that it causes us to question our decision. We might select the Grand Marnier truffle, but then wonder about the cappuccino bonbon. We become acutely aware of all the chocolates we didn't choose. More possibilities means more regret.
Now Iyengar has published a new study showing that one way to combat the effects of excessive choice is to group items into categories. It turns out that even useless categories make people happier with their choices.
61 college students were led into one of two simulated magazine stores.
Each "store" had the same 144 magazines, but those in the first store were grouped into three categories, using plaques on the shelves. Magazines in the second store were separated into 18 categories, like "computing," "crossword" and "bridal." When the students were later asked to estimate the variety of magazines available, those who visited the second store gave higher answers than those who visited the first store.
In another study, students who chose from a coffee menu liked their choices better when the menu grouped the coffees into categories, even if the names were meaningless -- for example, "Lola's."
Consider the cereal aisle of the supermarket. As far as I can tell, there is no logic to the placement of cereals. Grapenuts are right next to Lucky Charms which are next to the full Kashi range. Instead of this haphazard organization - I always get totally overwhelmed by my cereal options - why not arrange the cereals by type, so healthy cereals are in one section, kid cereals (my favorite) are in another area, etc. This way I would be better able to navigate my breakfast possibilities.
I was on The Takeaway this morning talking about irrational voters, Peter Jennings and why trying to multi-task is like running Microsoft Vista on an old computer.
Do you scoff at those pale Tofu dogs in the health food aisles of the supermarket? Are you one of those people who taunt vegans by talking about Big Macs? A new study suggests that you should think about biting your tongue: According to the researchers, how we feel about a sausage, regardless of whether it's soy-based or beef, says more about our personal values than about what the sausage actually tastes like. In fact, most people can't even tell the difference between an ersatz vegan sausage and the real thing. (It should be noted, though, that not all vegan products are equally deceptive: a soy hot dog, in contrast, only fooled 37 percent of subjects. And I'm guessing the soy ice cream fooled nobody.)
The clever experiment went like this: a large group of people were given a "human values" test which seeks to measure fifty six different values (loyalty, ambition, social order, etc.) Then, the subjects were asked to rate a variety of sausages. People who scored high on "social authority" - they believed it was important to support people in power - tended to label the "vegetarian" sausage as inferior, even when the vegetarian sausage was actually from a cow. Likewise, people who scored low on "social power values" tended to score the vegan sausage much higher than the beef sausage, even when they were actually eating meat. Instead of judging the food product on its merits, they ended up preferring the product that more closely conformed to their value system. The scientists also conducted a similar experiment with Pepsi. Sure enough, people who fit the Pepsi demographic - they think having an "exciting life" is very important - always preferred Pepsi, even when they were actually drinking a generic cola.
This research conforms to a growing body of evidence suggesting that our gustatory preferences are an incredibly subjective thing.
Sales of new homes fell in June for the seventh time in the past eight months, more proof that the worst housing slump in decades is getting deeper.
The Commerce Department reported Friday that sales of new single-family homes dropped by 0.6 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 530,000 units following an even bigger 1.7 percent fall in May.
The decline was slightly smaller than had been expected and sales were revised up a bit for May. Even with those changes, new home sales are down by a sharp 33.2 percent from a year ago.
At first glance, now would seem like an excellent time to buy a home. In most urban areas, home prices are down at least 20 percent from their peak in 2007. Shouldn't lower prices lead to increased demand? After all, interest rates are still low by historical standards.
The problem, of course, is that people are afraid that the real estate market will only get worse. No one wants to pay interest on an investment that continues to decrease in value. This is a textbook example of loss aversion, which is the kahnemanandtversky principle that losses hurt more than gains feel good. Kahneman and Tversky stumbled upon loss aversion after giving their students a simple survey, which asked whether or not they would accept a variety of different bets. The psychologists noticed that, when people were offered a gamble on the toss of a coin in which they might lose $20, they demanded an average payoff of at least $40 if they won. The pain of a loss was approximately twice as potent as the pleasure generated by a gain.
So far, so obvious. Losing stuff sucks. But I think some recent research on loss aversion can shed some light on the real estate malaise. The problem for home buyers right now is the possibility that they might lose something in the distant future. They think about how awful it will feel to live in a home that's worth less than their mortgage. But, according to a study by Dan Gilbert and colleagues, that prediction is actually false. As Gilbert notes, loss aversion is an affective forecasting error. We think it will really hurt to buy a home that's decreasing in value, but it's actually not that bad (at least, it's not that bad until foreclosure hits). Here's the abstract:
Loss aversion occurs because people expect losses to have greater hedonic impact than gains of equal magnitude. In two studies, people predicted that losses in a gambling task would have greater hedonic impact than would gains of equal magnitude, but when people actually gambled, losses did not have as much of an emotional impact as they predicted. People overestimated the hedonic impact of losses because they underestimated their tendency to rationalize losses and overestimated their tendency to dwell on losses. The asymmetrical impact of losses and gains was thus more a property of affective forecasts than a property of affective experience.
The key to ending the housing bust, then, might be as simple as getting people to realize that their fear of buying a home is mostly the fear of a cognitive illusion. Losing something always hurts, but it doesn't hurt nearly as much as we think it will.
A new paper in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, tries to reverse-engineer the tricks of magicians to learn about the blind spots of the brain. Wired Science explains:
Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit cognitive patterns that scientists are only beginning to understand. Now some psychologists are considering how they can use magic to advance our understanding of the brain -- and perhaps help inoculate us against advertising.
