loquacious

The Brain Science Dot: hidden forces in human thinking

I'm not quite sure what to call this dot, nor really sure what it means, yet.  But I think it does fit somewhere into the world of the major dots I'm trying to connect, under the assumption that there are some key interacting forces in our culture (and maybe the world) that are driving current affairs and might provide some kind of hints as to what direction things are headed in, or conflicts that may await us.

If I'm moving toward something here, it's that we're not really all that much in control of ourselves and our perceptions of the world. According to many books I've been reading, there are unseen battles going on in our heads, which we are largely unaware of. These battles impact our ability to think and the actions we take.  Without doubt, these have always been around, and as a believer in evolution, they no doubt at one time served an important evolutionary purpose (or at least they did not have an evolutionary downside). I think what I'm starting to wonder is if there now might be some serious downsides to how our brains work, given the world we now live in.

Just a few thoughts here, I'm sure it's not all adding up to anything yet (damn my brain...maybe it's purposely trying to thwart me?).

• Randomness: our brains are hardwired to see patterns and meaning where there is none. Randomness may actually be threatening to our brains, so we actively ignore it, causing us to misinterpret the world.
• Evil is Easy to Get Used To: based on Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect, shows how easily it is we can accept 'evil' things that would otherwise shock us, based largely on whether we think that authorities have approved such actions. Calls into doubt whether any of us have any real moral compass of our own, when other pressures come into play.
• More than One Brain: it's not even clear that we're in charge of our own brains. They make up some of their own shit part of the time. Our brains are particularly bad at managing times when they are receiving contradictory information.
• We can't trust our own Perceptions: and finally, even the inputs we think we are getting are not very trustworthy. Of what does get in, the brain is editing and/or filling in the missing parts, sometimes to disasterous results. 
• We're completely unaware of our biases: check out this great website, which can tell you more about your unconscious biases than you really ever wanted to know. They are beyond our control. How can we be just if we are unaware of the reasons for the judgments we make?
• Lakoff has written extensively about the (invisible to most of us) frames that guide our lives, opinions and decisions.

So, are we in control of ourselves? Can we shape our own futures -- and especially, can we change our perceptions/how we are?  I think it's the idea that all of this is invisible to us, that we're unaware of it, that I find so interesting. It makes working logically through problems much more difficult if there are forces at play that logic has no bearing on.

When I was working as an artist, I was always most fascinated with unsurfacing ideas or notions that lay beneath the surface of the human psyche, to get people to be willing to question ideas or assumptions which they found so apparently obvious that they had never thought to question them. I guess that interest continues still.

Book: The Drunkard's Walk: how randomness rules our lives

Leonard Mlodinow
2008
272 pp
Rating: 4 out of 5

Quite a fascinating book, which I am sure I will not do credit to here, at least partially because the discussion of some mathematical concepts got a little beyond me at times. But mostly very readable, I would not want to frighten anyone away from reading the book because of some challenging math/logic problems.

The book's thesis is that humans are not very adept at understanding randomness. We seem to be built to recognize patterns, and so randomness is a little hard for us to recognize when it happens. The author points this out in several ways, but the two that stick with me are:

1. Things that are actually random can sometimes appear to have a pattern. Think about it, if random things happen enough times, at some point they will appear to be happening in a patterned way. It's built into the definition of randomness!  But we are easily (and gladly, it would seem) fooled into thinking there is an actual pattern.
2. We just really want to see patterns where there are none. Mlodinow points out many experiments that have pretty much proven this. We especially want (and try to) see patterns that confirm our existing biases when confronted with absolutely randomized series of events.

The book starts with a rather brilliant examination of why people tend to fixate on what are really pure coincidences as somehow meaningful or part of a pattern, or even worse yet, having some kind of direct causal link when there absolutely is none. I've always thought that of course, in an infinite universe, anything can occur, so of course 'miraculous' seeming coincidences are going to naturally (if you will) occur all the time. I find that most people are not very appreciative when one brings this up. Mlodinow explains that too.... as beings that tend to excel (again, proven in experiments) when we feel more in control of any situation, randomness is seen as tremendously disempowering.... and therefore threatening.

I think this is giving me an idea for a new dot... one that has to do wtih limitations of our own brains/perceptions, and how they interfere with us accurately understanding the world around us.

8 Hours of Sleep: A Myth?

Fairly interesting article about sleep in the latest SA Mind. Sleep has never been easy for me, so I'm always interested in learning more about it. As it turns out, we're the only mammal that seems to want to try and sleep for a continuous period of time. Even odder, it now seems that until recently (several hundred years ago, with artificial nighttime illumination) in fact most people did not necessarily sleep 8 straight hours at night. Instead, they'd sleep for 4, then wake up to have sex, family time, do some chores around the farm, or whatever, then back to sleep for another 4 hours before getting up. The writers actually postulate that it's only the demands of an 8am work start time that now force most people to try and do the 8-in-a-row version of sleep, since there is no longer really 11-12 hours available at night to get 8 hours of sleep.

They also mention in this article something that I've always found extremely interesting: that left to our own devices, the human internal clock runs in a 25 hour cycle. Not 24. This has been proven by locking subjects into dark rooms for weeks and weeks. Everyone operates on a 25 hour cycle, naturally - but when exposed to the earth's 24 hour cycle, we grudgingly adjust. No wonder everyone's grumpy - we innately feel that we're being cheated out of 1 hour each and every day we live!

I'm really struggling to come up with a natural-selection based reason why we'd have a 25 hour cycle. Did the earth once (recently) have a 25 hour day? Maybe we're actually from a different planet with a 25 hour day? ;)   This is one of those things that's going to bug me until they figure it out.

Book 25: The Ethical Brain

The Ethical Brain: the science of our moral dilemmas
Michael S. Gazzaniga
2005
178 pp.
Rating: 4 of 5

A pretty interesting book. Gazzaniga has a go at many of the ethical dilemmas that are being brought forth by brain science. He covers stem cell research, end of life issues (when does life actually begin or end, in strict scientific terms? his answers might surprise); brain enhancement techniques (through drugs, or through genetic manipulation); free will and responsibility (are criminals really to blame if the problem they have is a brain 'disorder'?); and what it means to be 'moral', and is there a universal moral sense shared amongst humanity?

Like Mind Wide Open, The Ethical Brain  goes into interesting but not too technical detail on the structures of the brain, and modern experiments that look at what parts of the brain are involved in doing what kind of chores. Like Mind Wide Open, this book shows that we have different parts of the brain that compete with each other, and also talks about a part of our brain that might act as a sort of organizer of the impulses of the various parts of the brain. This area is what tries to make sense of contradictory messages from different brain centers. If there is no good reason, it makes one up by trying to find any kind of potential reason, and has your vocal chords say something that can't possibly be true. Most famously, this is seen in some stroke/paralysis patients, who when asked why they can't move a paralyzed arm, frequently will say things like "that's not my arm" (even though they can see it is attached to their body), or "I just don't feel like moving it." They really believe these answers -- it's their 'meta brain's'  best guess (but  they respondent has no idea that it is a guessed response).

The book is quite rich with examples and some great moral/ethical dilemma situations, which would probably make for great party games as well.

Book 22: Seeing Red

Seeing Red: a study in consciousness
Nicholas Humphrey
2006
160 pp.
Rating: 1 of 5

  An unfortunately complex and annoying book, trying to get at the difference between seeing, perceiving and experiencing. It has the noble goal of saying something philosophical about the nature of consciousness. Maybe I've been out of grad school too long at this point, but this 160 page book read like 320 pages because you have to read every page twice.

In this day and age, that just shouldn't be necessary. Skip it.

Book 18: Mind Wide Open: your brain and the neuroscience of everyday life

Mind Wide Open: your brain and the neuroscience of everyday life
Steven Johnson (2004)
216 pp.
Rating: 5 of 5

Okay, every chapter of this book was great, but I’m a little pressed for time so I’m not going to blog about each one, which is too bad since each one had it’s own insight and interesting connection to one of my favorite questions: what does it mean to be human/to be conscious?

Again, I did not intentionally read this right after Rattling the Cage, but the two books go really well together. Right off the bat, Johnson starts to tackle the consciousness question. He goes into some detail to explain what it means to be conscious of self (stage 1) and conscious of others (stage 3 I think).  From why babies are so adept at recognizing the human face (we need to understand quickly that other consciousnesses exist), to our ability to easily distinguish between the facial expressions connoting 412 distinct emotional states, to the current best thinking about what ‘causes’ autism (failure to recognize other minds and their emotional states), to why people are ticklish (yes, it has to do with recognizing consciousness in others), this is a scientific whirlwind (yet very readable, thank god) of discovery about the brain.

I hate having to overly simplify every complex book I read, but here goes for this one: The idea that we are each one conscious person is apparently out of date. The various parts of our brain, while networked certainly, also remain quite autonomous (for various evolutionary reasons). This is why it’s pretty easy for humans to perceive things that aren’t actually there, or not perceive things that are there.  He goes over many common examples of how to quickly and easily show parts of the brain conflicting with each other (example – the Stroop Test. Quick, say out loud the color of the text of the word in quote here: “blue”).  In additional, he gives some pretty interesting information on the hormonal chemistry of the brain, and how biology and environment can permanently subtly alter the chemicals that might well determine important aspects of your or my personality.