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15 posts tagged the brain
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Greene’s “dual-process theory” of moral decision-making posits that rationality and emotion are recruited according to the circumstances, with each offering its own advantages and disadvantages. He likens the moral brain to a camera that comes with manufactured presets, such as “portrait” or “landscape,” along with a manual mode that requires photographers to make adjustments on their own. Emotional responses, which are influenced by humans’ biological makeup and social experiences, are like the presets: fast and efficient, but also mindless and inflexible. Rationality is like manual mode: adaptable to all kinds of unique scenarios, but time-consuming and cumbersome.
“The nice thing about the overall design of the camera is that it gives you the best of both worlds: efficiency in point-and-shoot mechanisms and flexibility in manual mode,” Greene explains. “The trick is to know when to point and shoot and when to use manual mode. I think that this basic design is really the design of the human brain.”
”The Biology of Right and Wrong (via theatlantic)
What disturbs me is that I’ve never learned to use the manual mode of any camera I’ve ever used.
As computer graphics and robots get more human, they often seem more surreal. New research (and this image) prove that the famed “uncanny valley” is real indeed.
In this review, The Economist discusses recent research attempting to corroborate “the uncanny valley” effect.
What is the uncanny valley? Basically, when we look at animations or robots, we are comfortable with their verisimilitude…up to a certain point: the point past which they come to resemble us too much. And we become anxious, creeped out; we experience the vague sensations of creepiness, eeriness, and the uncanny.
This “uncanny valley”, which somehow smacks of truth, is not a transparently obvious concept. Why do we shy from images that barely deviate from “natural” humanity, while embracing cartoonish figures whose contours intimate rather than replicate the image we have of homo sapiens?
Confused as always by words themselves, I cast a quick etymological glance at “eerie,” “creepy,” and the “uncanny.”
“Eerie” comes from the Old English “earg,” for “cowardly.” A fear oozing from our lily-livers.
“Creepy” comes from the Old English “creopan,” which described the movement of the body close to the ground.
“Uncanny” is the most baffling. In bald terms, it means that which is not canny. And “canny” ultimately derives from the German “können,” to know. In a sense, this English meaning (as opposed to Freud’s German understanding of Das Unheimliche), characterizes our estrangement from knowledge, our sudden recognition of the unknown.
All of this suggests that we fear the almost human more than that mostly not human because we fear the judgment such proximity would level at the tawdry predicament of being the primates we are. Just as people fear the class immediately beneath them most of all, there must be something about ourselves, something collective rather than specific, about which we would rather remain in the dark. We are too cowardly to assume or imagine the perspective of the almost human. Too close for comfort indeed.
A wandering mind often stumbles downhill emotionally. People spend nearly half their waking lives thinking about stuff other than what they’re actually doing, and these imaginary rambles frequently feel bad, according to a new study that surveyed volunteers at random times via their iPhones.
People’s minds wander at least 30 percent of the time during all activities except sex, say graduate student Matthew Killingsworth and psychologist Daniel Gilbert, both of Harvard University. Individuals feel considerably worse when their minds wander to unpleasant or neutral topics, as opposed to focusing on current pursuits, Killingsworth and Gilbert report in the Nov. 12 Science.
These new findings jibe with philosophical and religious teachings that assert happiness is found by living in the moment and learning to resist mind wandering, Killingsworth says.
Mind wandering serves useful purposes, he acknowledges, such as providing a way to reflect on past actions, plan for the future and imagine possible consequences of important decisions. “We may tend to reflect on things that went poorly or are a cause for worry,” Killingsworth proposes. “That’s not a recipe for happiness, even if it’s necessary.”
In his new study, people’s minds actually wandered more often to pleasant topics than to unpleasant or neutral topics. But those reveries offered no measurable mood boost over thinking about tasks at hand, the researchers found.
It’s important to note that the new data apply only in the short run, comments psychologist Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Positive flights of fancy may lead to creative problem solving and planning that makes people happier down the road,” he speculates…
You can improve your mental function simply by having conversations…but the tenor of the talking makes a difference. Turns out a friendly conversation helps, but once you turn competitive, the benefits dissolve.
Do you think the same is true on social networking sites?
You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake, but his voice may give away even more. Both men and women can accurately assess a man’s upper body strength based on his voice alone, suggesting that the male voice may have evolved as an indicator of fighting ability.
A team led by Aaron Sell at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recorded the voices of more than 200 men from the US, Argentina, Bolivia and Romania, who all repeated a short phrase in their native tongue. Sell’s team also put the men through a battery of tests of upper body strength…
“Take stock of those around you and you will … hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”
José Ortega y Gasset, quoted by Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death. Are any exempt from this condition, from this fundamentally illusory and defensive relationship with reality? And is it the purpose of psychology to reduce the necessity of our illusions, to increase the accuracy of our picture of reality, or to improve our adjustment to the social order? Or does the former lead to some deeper happiness, stability, tranquility? (via mills)
Mills asks a question here that haunts me almost daily, especially in those times that I communicate my fantastical imaginings of the reality principle in ways that are either mercantile or foolishly self-oriented. I’d certainly be less disturbed if I hadn’t known many instances in which my engagements with fantasy inspired a quick-form mental convalescence.
I wonder, though, if there might not be two modes of fantasy, one healthy and one noxious, both surging from the same wellspring of distortionary impulse. The first faculty of invention requires the discipline of science or art, the willingness to patiently mold our perceptions of reality into coherent communicable forms. Schrödinger’s equation, E.O. Wilson’s The Ants, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Goya’s Third of May would all be examples of what I will call productive fantasy.
The second form of invention, the one we fall prey to on a basis of minutes rather than days, is passive. It’s the kind of fantasy that hoodwinks us into spouting nonsense about politics or technology at dinner parties, or that intensifies our quotidian intimations of immortality. These fantasies of consumption are the will-o’-the-wisps that most often erode our character and constitution, and often spring from impulse or self-defense.
These consubstantial delusions are inevitable, though, and I’m not sure that the first serves as any buttress whatsoever against the second. We are, in fact, such stuff as dreams are made of, for better and for worse. As the Bard himself knew all too well.
“By keeping lots of brain cells buzzing, Google seemed to be making people smarter. But as [UCLA professor of psychiatry Gary] Small was careful to point out, more brain activity is not necessarily better brain activity. The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”
What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”
Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains |Wired Magazine
(So long, I’m off to read a book)
(via byronic)
If this nascent research on the web’s alteration of our neural pathways has merit, and our brains lose their capacity for extended concentration, and, ironically, we can no longer benefit from the prodigious increase in information at our behest, then I have some questions for those of you out there with an actual education in neuroscience.
First of all: what is the effect that long, extended reading has on our ability to process the more fragmented information we get through the web?
Many if not most of the people I know balance their web time with extended time reading of long fictional and non-fictional narratives. In the morning, they will troll their RSS feeds and Tumblr dashboards; and in the evening, they will sit down to read a novel or a feature piece in the NYRB.
But here is what I don’t know, not even “experientially:” are these two forms of engaging information complementary or incompatible practices?
Does our morning time spent scrolling through Tumblr undermine our ability to read Thomas Mann at night? Or does a careful, considered perusal of a long feature piece in the New Yorker help us assemble and consider the shards of discourse scattered across the web?
“If my metaphor only suggests the possibility that our species is more than an optimized ape, that something terrible and glorious befell us—if this is merely another fable, it might at least encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are.”
“Thinking Again: What Do We Mean by Mind,” by Marilynn Robinson, Commonweal Magazine
Robinson asks a fundamental question: if we squash the ethereal and immaterial notions of consciousness to a hunk of neurally charged meat, how does such a reconceptualizing blunt in any way the mysteriousness of the human mind?
“Man, jostling perpetually between the two poles of experience and imagination, would deepen the ideal life of the people he knows/meets and know/meet the people whom he’s imagined into life.”
Marcel Proust, Le Côte de Guermantes, my transl.
“L’homme jouant perpétuellement entre les deux plans de l’expérience et de l’imagination voudrait approfondir la vie idéale des gens qu’il connaît et connaître les êtres dont il a eu à imaginer la vie.”
It’s exactly this chiasmus that makes it so difficult for us to know one another. Not only do we, as subjects, supplement our friends, acquaintances, and colleagues with an ideal that might be irrelevant, inaccurate, or even ill-advised; we, as objects of another’s field of awareness and vision, will always be insufficient to the ideals and imaginations of those we meet. I often want to blame this complication on adjectives, which seem to force us into a natural state of hypertrophied personal idealism. To see anyone as “lovely,” “cool,” “intelligent,” or even “wrong,” is to saddle a poor soul with the weight of foreign and inchoate imaginings. I know it’s silly and wrongheaded to blame any psychological phenomenon on a grammatical form; but I do it despite myself. I do believe that we’re pragmatic souls, and that we muddle our way through all these force fields of idealization, hoping we can recalibrate other people’s visions at the same time we freeze our own.
People with Williams syndrome — a rare genetic disorder with a variety of symptoms — are known for being almost compulsively loving and trusting. The syndrome is often called the “anti-autism” because people with Williams, rather than isolating themselves from others, are hyper-social. Children with Williams, for example, often climb into cars with perfect strangers or tell random salespeople that they love them.
But this hyper-social quality is not the only thing that characterizes Williams disorder, there are a wide variety of much less-publicized symptoms that affect their interactions with people and handling of daily tasks. And, one of the most unfortunate aspects is that even as people with Williams thrive on emotional closeness, other symptoms of the syndrome make it really tough for them to develop relationships…
