Thinking with the Emotional Brain

(From a press release) Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored [with fMRI] while they pondered.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward…

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making. The study has potentially wide implications, from politics to business, and demonstrates that emotional bias can play a strong role in decision-making, Westen says.
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Comments: Excellent research. Hyped publicity release. The fMRI results show that the people in this study did not activate the reasoning brain modules that I call the Vulcan. The comments in the last (red) paragraph show that researchers can also reach irrational conclusions when evaluating their own research for the benefit of a publicity release. I am confident that Dr. Westin would have called up his Vulcan and tempered his conclusions if he had been speaking to a professional group.

What I don’t like about these conclusions is their demonstration of the bias in psychology to put reports in the form of what’s wrong with people. (Pleas note that I said bias and meant to suggest that psychologists, like political partisans, sometimes “ignore information that cannot be rationally discounted.")

These conclusions convey the impression that the political partisans were so controlled by their biases that they were unable to think rationally. I don’t believe that impression is correct. As I look at the instructions, I don’t know that the instructions even asked them to think rationally.

If the investigators had wanted to frame a request to think rationally, they could have asked: “Put yourself in the place of a foreigner with no particular interest in this election. How would that foreigner evaluate these things from a logical viewpoint?”

The existence and management of bias has been studied extensively in psychology, particularly in the area of group processes. Collective bias is called “groupthink” and has been the subject of many books, such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0395317045/103-1645611-1198237?v=glance&n=283155

The role of groupthink was widely discussed in connection with the Bay of Pigs incident: http://www.probe.org/content/view/1088/162/

The standard method for dealing with groupthink in group processes is the devil’s advocate: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3645/is_199610/ai_n8747359

The Thinkerer offers a similar method of dealing with individual bias in the form of the Canter. The Canter’s role is to raise objections to your initial thinking. Here, as an illustration, are things the researchers might have heard from their Canters, if they had listened. (And will hear from referees if they submit these conclusions for publication.)

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making. Canter: You can’t say that. You have no evidence that they were engaging in political decision-making. They were partisans, so their decision-making had already been done. You asked them to evaluate. They probably evaluated from the viewpoint of how the item would affect their presentation of their existing position. They were "spin-doctoring."

The study has potentially wide implications, from politics to business, and demonstrates that emotional bias can play a strong role in decision-making… Canter: You can’t claim important implications without saying what the implications are and why they are important. The results do demonstrate the role of bias, but there have been innumerable prior demonstrations of that. You need to cite novel implications to claim that they are important.

Wiring the Modules

A Stimulating Solution to Severe Depression: Canada’s (CBC) weekly science podcast January 21, 2006 carried a report about a new way to treat “untreatable” depression. Most clinically diagnosed depression responds to modern treatment methods. A small number of cases resist current treatments. From the CBC text description:

Now a team of Canadian scientists has developed a radical solution for treatment-resistant depression: brain surgery. These researchers have discovered a "sadness centre" in the brain, and by stimulating that area with electrodes implanted in the brain, they've been able to bring light into these people's lives for the first time.

Here is the link: Quirks and Quarks
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Of some interest is the method for identifying the “sadness center.” In one phase, they had healthy people read sad stories or watch sad movies. Then they used a PET scan to identify active areas. They found a consistent rise in activity in a specific area. In another phase, they used medication to treat sadness. They observed a consistent decline in activity in that same area.

The brain stimulation method has been used on only a few patients, but has produced dramatic results in most of those cases.

Nothing here of direct use to the public. But reverse field. Healthy people can activate the “sadness center” by reading sad stories or watching sad movies. Perhaps they can turn down the “sadness center” with happy or amusing content.

I think most people realize that they can influence their moods by the kind of entertainment content they choose. They probably have some idea about the effect of particular kinds of entertainment content. But I wonder how often people consciously choose a particular kind of entertainment content to get a particular effect on mood.

I am not talking about the passive choice of picking music or other entertainment to match your mood. That works to strengthen a mood that is already there. But you might not want to strengthen a mood. You might want to change a mood.

Have you ever tried selecting a mood and choosing entertainment content to build it? Apparently, this is a fairly common practice in the case of music. For example:
When is Music Used to Change Mood
Objective measurement of mood change induced by contemporary music.

Music has offered POD (play-on-demand) features for most of the last century, so its use as an active mood-mover may result from its availability. Now that we have POD features on most entertainment, people may want to experiment with mood-moving by DVD or video recording.

Entrepreneurial Alert: Some enterprising person might go further. How about mood-movers on the web? A website, for example, that offers links or playlists selected to encourage a particular mood. This is not something you would do for treatment of disorders, of course. But it might be a useful way for healthy people to send wireless messages their brains modules.

Why the Mind is in the Brain (2)

Scientists Work on 'Trauma Pill' By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer Sat Jan 14, 1:04 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060114/ap_on_he_me/trauma_pill_1

After stress, people often develop post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD). The symptoms (such as flashbacks) make people feel as if they are reliving the trauma. Apparently, what happens during and after a traumatic event is that the brain (quite reasonably) says “I don’t ever want to see this situation again. I will record everything I might need to stay out of this.”

James McGaugh and colleague Larry Cahill have shown that adrenaline and other emergency hormones lead the brain to add extra strength to the memories it is storing at the time. (McGaugh is director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California at Irvine.)

That was the best out ancestors could do. We still carry those ancestral brain parts. Sometimes they overdo their jobs. What this news article describes is research seeking ways to prevent or undo the effects of the kind of memory that appears in PTSD. A plausible mechanism for treatment is propranolol, a drug used to treat high blood pressure. That is now under investigation.

And what can you do with this information? This article is all about promising, but undemonstrated, methods for treating PTSD. Why would it be of interest to the public? Maybe it was just a slow news week. But one of the DIY tools of cognitive engineering is the Two-stage Knowledge Amplifier.

Stage 1: What is it like?
Stage 2. What is the opposite?

What is it like? The most familiar (and harmless) thing it is like is known as “flashbulb memory.” When a person has a strong emotional experience, the person may have vivid recall of many irrelevant details. The Kennedy assassination is a familiar example. Many people could recall where they were when they first heard the news. They could recall how they got the news and where they were standing or sitting. Adrenaline at work again.

What is the opposite? My view is that the opposite of “strong emotional experience” is boredom. And I suspect it has the opposite effect on memory. As I suggested in my blog about homework, boredom is just your brain’s way of telling you that what you are doing is not important. And therefore, not worth remembering. So if there is something you want to remember, you will do better if you learn about it when you are not bored.

But is there some way to get better memory storage without a traumatic experience? Sure. Broaden the question of what is it like? We started with “strong emotional experience.” Does it have to be strong? Of course not. You don’t need (and don’t want) the kind of memory boost you get out of PTSD.

Does it have to be unpleasant? Of course not. People also vividly remember their hard-won successes. (And seldom seek treatment for it.) Success (psychologists call it reinforcement), frustration, and humor are all examples of mild emotional experiences that are known to favor better recall. And they are all readily available to help your brain store memories. If your mind remembers to use them.

Why the Mind is in the Brain(1)

And what you can do with that knowledge.

Exercise boosts mood in depressed patients
Even a single bout of exercise—30 minutes of walking on a treadmill—can lift the mood of patients suffering major depressive disorder. Researchers say the findings show immediate benefits… All patients had recently been diagnosed with major depressive disorder; none were exercising regularly or taking antidepressants.

“The question,” said lead researcher Dr. John Bartholomew, an associate professor in the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin, “was whether an individual bout of exercise would provide benefit. Bartholomew emphasized that a single session on the treadmill can offer only symptomatic relief, providing transitory improvement in mood rather than a change in diagnosis.
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Exercise is a mood-altering activity. Psychologists (and people) have known that for years. This study is of medical interest because it suggests that exercise might make useful contributions to the treatment of clinical depression. I am commenting on it here for two reasons:

First, it serves as an additional reminder that the mind and the brain are one. The same thing viewed from different perspectives. We keep needing reminders of this because our verbal systems operate from the perspective that the “mind” is independent of the brain. That doesn’t matter if the just want to talk about the “mind.” It is a misleading perspective if we want to do something about the workings of the brain.

My other reason for commenting on this study is that it points to a good example of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) cognitive engineering. I could give you a review of the literature about how exercise alters moods, alertness, and other “mental” functions. But that would just tell you about what exercise does for other people. What does exercise do for you and your brain?

That is a quest question. You will not find the answer in any book. As with any quest, you find the answer in yourself. But here is the beginning of a map.

This quest only works if you exercise frequently. Fortunately, exercise has general benefits, so you might already be doing it frequently. Or you might be on the verge of doing it frequently. If you want some suggestions on crossing that verge, try these:
Resolutions.
Habits.

Once you are exercising frequently, this quest calls for nothing more than another habit. Start paying attention to what you are thinking about and how you feel. Pay attention before, during, and after exercise.

You will probably find some of these characteristics:
More upbeat.
More alert.
More new ideas.
Sharper thinking.

You may want to print the Strengths page in the Thinkerer and circle the strengths that seem to be a little better.

Risky Business (3)

In previous blogs on this topic, I described a study showing how different levels of risk or uncertainty resulted in different patterns of brain activity. I suggested several viewpoints that the participants could have used under the uncertainty condition.

The experiment showed that the uncertainty condition produced activity in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). That activity could be interpreted as increased vigilance, alertness, or emotion. I think it might correspond to a subjective feeling, “This is unfamiliar territory. I need to be cautious.” There was a corresponding behavioral change toward increased caution.

The viewpoints I suggested are all mental strategies for morphing the situation into a more familiar territory. From the findings of the study, we know that the when the participants were given the odds, they treated the situation as more familiar territory, were less cautious and did not power up their the amygdalas. My speculation is that any of the viewpoints I described would readjust the situation to be subjectively like the condition in which the participants were given the odds and would give the same results.

These viewpoints illustrate what humans often (but not always) do to take cognitive control of an unfamiliar situation. They search through what they know to find points of similarity. They take a viewpoint that lets them see the matching points and use them to make a head model of the situation. That head model represents cognitive control and makes them more comfortable with the (previously) unfamiliar situation.

I think this process corresponds to what psychologists call closure. In common terms, this means finding a subjectively satisfying result. I described this process in other blogs:

TOTE unit http://cognitveeng.blogspot.com/2005/09/tote-units.html

Module quests and closure http://cognitveeng.blogspot.com/2005/07/module-quests-and-closure.html

Is this what module closure looks like?http://cognitveeng.blogspot.com/2005/09/is-this-what-module-closure-looks-like.html

The conceptual model I have in mind, derived from the TOTE unit, is that brain modules are activated with an internal goal. In the present case, the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) were activated to deal with the uncertain situation. The internal goal was something like, “Find a satisfactory strategy to deal with this situation.”

I believe that any of the viewpoints I described would be satisfactory to most people and so choosing one would deactivate the amygdala and OFC. The person would probably experience this closure as, “Now I think I know how to handle this situation.”

The important cognitive elements illustrated here are
Exploration
Flexibility of viewpoint
Choice.
Making a conscious choice may be quite important in this case. That action may be needed to produce subjective closure and turn off those emotional modules.

The exploration viewpoints are objective winners here, since they would collect information from the situation and help select the best strategy. (Best here means approved by economists and statisticians.)

But the pragmatist’s strategy is not bad either. It may not maximize the payoff, but if it satisfies the amygdala, it unloads one brain job and lets the brain get on to other work.

Maybe the real risk here is that the participant will waste brain power on the petty cash in the experiment rather than using it effectively on, say, that calculus test.

Risky business (2)

In my previous blog, I described a study showing how different levels of risk or uncertainty resulted in different patterns of brain activity. I also posed the question of whether there is a less emotional and/or more useful to respond to uncertainty. Here I open the fan of possibilities for you to examine.

But first let me pose a quest question: Suppose the same experiment is done with an added condition. The experimenter gives the same instructions as in the original uncertainty condition. “You get $10 for drawing a red card. Some of the cards are red.”

As you will recall, the uncertainty condition left the participants uncertain about the best strategy, activated emotional brain parts, and led them to be more cautious than they were when the experimenter told them the percentage of red cards in the deck. The new condition I propose is this: The experimenter offers to let the participant examine the deck and count the cards for a price of, say, $12. How would you expect that offer to affect the results?

(Psychology students note: The above experiment could be run without the fMRI to study the acceptable price, the effect on conservatism strategy, and the relation of individual differences on acceptable price.)

Now to the fan of possibilities, assuming the original uncertainty condition. Here are some viewpoints the participant could take to reduce the uncertainty (and presumably the level of the emotional response).

Viewpoint: statistician (Vulcan). If I have no information about the number of red cards, I start by assuming that that all numbers are equally probable. The experimenter said “some red cards.” That expression implies any number from 2 to 20. It would be to my advantage to draw a cord if the expected value of a draw exceeds the $3 I am spending to draw. If 30% of the cards are red, the expected value of the draw is $3. Since the deck has 20 cards, 30% is 6 cards. Any number from 7 to 20 favors drawing. An number from 2 to 5 favors taking the sure thing. Only 4 numbers favor the sure thing.

My initial analysis thus favors drawing. But I also note that drawing is equivalent to buying information on cards at $3 per test. My best strategy is to buy that information and use it to estimate the odds.

Viewpoint: strategist (Vulcan and Empath). I agree with the analysis of the statistician, but I will not assume that all numbers are equally probable. The experimenter chose the number for the objectives of the experiment.
Obviously, I can estimate the frequency of red cards by drawing cards at $3 each. If I get mostly cards of one kind or the other, I will quickly conclude that the deck is loaded in favor of one choice or the other. The number that will keep me uncertain over the greatest number of trials is 10 red cards (50% odds).

Despite my insightful analysis, I reach the same conclusion as the statistician.

Viewpoint: Explorer. I don’t see anything dangerous here. I will get a little money for very little effort. If I take the sure thing, I will collect $72 and learn nothing. If I draw cards, I will find out whether drawing pays better than $3. If it doesn’t, I can change strategies. But my view is that I was buying information, not throwing away money.

Viewpoint: pragmatist. I am not going to overthink this problem. I can expect to come out of this with more money than I brought in. The best case is $240. The worst case is nothing. These values are small compared to my tuition at Caltech. I will do what feels most comfortable and be content with the result. I’d rather spend my brain power thinking about my calculus test tomorrow.

How would a participant be affected by adopting one of these viewpoints? You probably have an opinion already. I will post my speculation in a later blog.

Risky Business

The brain responds to different levels of economic uncertainty by activating different sets of brain modules. That’s the finding of research by Caltech economics professor Colin Camerer and his colleagues. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060111082311.htm)

Two conditions were used: risk and uncertainty. In both cases, Caltech students played a game in which they chose between a sure thing (say, $3) or drawing a card that could either win them $10 or nothing. They played the game while being scanned by fMRI, so that the researchers could see what brain areas were being activated.

In the risk condition, the students were told that half the cards were red (worth $10) and half were blue (worth nothing). In the uncertainty condition, the students were told nothing about the odds of winning on a trial.

These conditions represent familiar models in game theory, economics and statistics. The risk condition is not risky at all, at least not to anyone who understands gambling. The statistician story: You win $5 on half the trials. On average, 24 trials (the number used in the experiment) will get you $120 if you draw a card every time. If you take the $3 on every trial, you will have $72 at the end of the game. You are quite certain about the best strategy.

In the uncertainty condition, the students did not know the odds and so could not (as easily) determine the best strategy.

Brain findings: In the risk case, the dorsal striatum tends to light up. In the uncertainty case, the more emotional parts of the brain known as the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are involved.

Camerer’s interpretation: the OFC and amygdala presumably work together when a person is confronted with a bet on unknown odds. The amygdala sends a "caution" message and the OFC processes the message. Under such circumstances, students become more cautions. In this case, they drew fewer cards. The increased caution cost them money.
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Selby's comments: “The increased caution cost them money.” This is the kind of finding that economists are fond of citing as evidence that people do not always make good economic decisions (and would do better if they got advice from economists). But it is only the experimenter, with a God’s eye view of the situation, who can know the correct strategy. If there had been only five winning cards in the deck of 20, the average pay-off per draw would have been $2.50 and the cautious strategy would have saved them money.

Still, the results are important in showing how the brain changes its modules according to the demands of the situation. They are also useful in raising the question of whether there is a less emotional way and/or more useful to respond to uncertainty.

I am confident that there are several such ways. I will go into the fan of posibilities in a later blog. Meanwhile, I suspect that some readers will mull it over, sleep on it, and come up with their own ideas.