Curing the Closure Addiction

Closure: a long established concept in psychology. I have posted several items on it. Now comes a theory on the neurological basis of closure. And some evidence to support it. The theory was based on earlier findings that binding sites for natural opiates increase in density along, a part of the brain involved in image recognition and processing.
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“The "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. …

In a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging trials with human volunteers exposed to a wide variety of images, Biederman's research group found that strongly preferred images prompted the greatest fMRI activity in more complex areas of the ventral visual pathway.

Biederman also found that repeated viewing of an attractive image lessened both the rating of pleasure and the activity in the opioid-rich areas.

Biederman: “Without thinking about it, we pick out experiences that are richly interpretable but novel."
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In other words, quest questions followed by closure. The present data only bear on visual closure, but Biederman thinks the theory applies widely. There is plenty of psychological support for the notion that people seek novel, but interpretable, experiences and lose interest once they achieve interpretation (closure).

So there we have it. Explanation of why people like to play games, solve puzzles, and generally learn things when the control the process. And when they don’t know the outcome till they get there.

And now we understand the function of formal education. It is to cure people of this addiction to discovering things on their own. The first step is to tell them what they are supposed to know up front. Much more efficient. They don’t waste time finding out things that the experts already know. This strategy keeps them from finding out that they can discover things that the experts do not already know. You can see why that strategy would take hold with the experts.

Another step, of course, is to help people with boredom management. As things become more familiar, they don’t deliver that high. If you tell people the outcome in advance, the will get plenty of practice at boredom. If they manage it in a classroom acceptable way, they will be “good students.” If they don’t, the probably be diagnosed as ADD or AD/HD. Then they can take medication to help them with boredom management.

Now this effort will not completely cure people of their addiction to discovering things on their own. It will, however, let us shift the activity to socially disfavored activities such as games, puzzles or heroin.

But there may be a rent in this garment. Suppose some people take on the puzzle of how to remain curious in an educational system that is designed to cure curiosity. Now that is a question to be curious about. A quest question.

Explorer Modules

Quest questions and state statements. I talked about those before. Now I’ll come at it from a different perspective. Does the brain handle these things differently? Of course, I think it does. But the issue can be settled by fMRI. Here is one step in that direction, from a study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in Nature on 15th June.

These researchers distinguish between exploration (taking actions to find out new things) and exploitation (taking actions that exploit what you already know). What they found was that exploration activated brain areas not involved in taking actions on the basis of what people already knew.

Exploration, of course, corresponds to quest questions. Exploitation is somewhat like state statements although I was talking about statements coming in from the experience of other people. So the evidence I want to see is not in yet.

That research will not be easy to get. Dr Daw, of UCL, pointed out: "Most people switch between exploring and exploiting seamlessly and this has always made it hard to distinguish between someone who is doing something they know will offer the highest pay-out and a person who is testing out new options.” These researchers used a specialized method to make that distinction.

But in the absence of data, I will speculate. It is likely that exploration draws on a lot more brain power than does trying to store verbal input in declarative form. The problem in such research is likely to be that you cannot tell what storage methods the subject is using. Skilled learners probably have routines (such as forming their own quest questions) that activate the exploring parts of the brain.

You could ask them about their strategies, but they may not have noticed. Or they may think everyone else is doing the same thing.

An alternative would be to compare effective learners with less effective learners. See what differences you find between the brain activation. That might suggest some ways to improve learning strategies. The UCL researchers identified particular brain modules that were activated in their paradigm. I think these might turn out the be part of the Explorer system. If so, the best learning strategy might be to turn a learning assignment into an exploration. And you could tell how well people were using that strategy if you know what brain areas were being activated.

Young Mirror Neurons

UPPSALA, Sweden, Jun 19, 2006 (UPI via COMTEX) -- Swedish scientists say children as young as 1 year can learn to predict the outcome of another person's actions as well as adults can. The study by Uppsala University researchers suggests infants learn to predict the actions of others about when they learn to perform such actions themselves.

In this study, infants and adults watched a video of a hand placing toys in a bucket. The researchers tracked eye movements. Adults and 12-month old babies learned to look at the bucket before the hand reached it, showing that they were predicting the outcome of the movement.

This kind of learning is the basis for imitative learning and is probably supported by the mirror neuron system. The fact that it develops so early may suggest the important role it plays in cognitive development. This kind of learning is later dismissed by verbal systems as “mere intuition.”

People who so casually dismiss the products of the mirror neuron system may be ignoring one of the most powerful brain systems they were born with. People who pay attention to the products of that system may gain an advantage over those who do not. An unfair advantage, I suppose, from the viewpoint of verbal systems. But my intuitive feeling is that people get the service they look for out of their brains. And don’t get the service they don’t look for.

The Engineer Module?

We have long known that language is organized into hierarchical structure that could not be constructed without advanced planning. Some people have noticed that human actions are usually organized in the same way. (Probably not just humans, but I’ll stick to human behavior in this discussion. Psychologists are such anthropomorphic chauvinists.) Some people have suspected that the brain modules that support the organization of actions evolved long ago and later came to support the organization of language.

Now there may be solid evidence about that idea:

Broca's area in the brain (and its counterpart in the right hemisphere) is a major center for organizing hierarchies of behaviors. This is the finding of Etienne Koechlin and Thomas Jubault of Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Ecole Normale Supérieure, described their experiments in the June 15, 2006, issue of Neuron.

Broca’s area has long been known as a major speech “center.” If these results are correct, its role in speech is the same as its role in organized planning of behavior. This operation represents much of the work that I like to attribute to the Engineer. And it would be working with what the Thinkerer calls joblets.

It is reinforcing to see recognized brain modules tied to the behavioral functions describe in the Thinkerer.

Focus and Ritalin

Further research on Ritalin may help us understand the neural mechanisms of focus. We know empirically that it increases the ability to focus. Note that I left off the usual qualifier “in people with attention deficit disorder.” I have seen reports that it is being widely used by college students with no such diagnosis. So I think the effect is not limited to people for whom it is prescribed.

According to a recent report in the Journal of Neurophysiology, Ritalin raises norepinephrine levels in the brains of rats to help focus attention while suppressing nerve signal transmissions in the sensory pathways to make it easier to block out extraneous stimuli. This combination of effects may help explain the paradox of a stimulant that decreases hyperactive behavior.

The combination may also help describe the difference between Focus and Scan. Both are important to brains. Formal education seems to be mainly concerned with focus, to the neglect of scan. That is reasonable because formal education is socially driven and so seeks to focus a child’s attention on what suits society and the educational system.

Where, I wonder, in the educational system, does the child learn how to manage focus and scan effectively? To choose what to focus on and to choose when to go into scan mode. We can tell children what to focus on. We can even believe that they do what they are told to do. (Ok, it worked for Tinker Bell.)

But teens become increasingly and obviously self-directed. I suspect that self-direction chooses what to focus on by going into the scan mode and scanning over possibilities. I suspect that the skill of effective self-direction is more valuable than the skill of explaining initiative, referendum, and recall.

And I wonder whether children can get that skill from Ritalin.

See Brain Remember

(HealthNewsDigest.com).. DURHAM, N.C. -- People may permanently store memories in their brains, even if they cannot consciously recall them, according to a study by Duke University Medical Center researchers. The team's findings were published in the May 24, 2006 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.
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Standard paradigm: Show list of words. Later show another list containing old words and new words. Subjects say whether a word is old or new. Research shows that various kinds of cueing or psychological set can increase chances of correctly recognizing old word as old. Evidence generally supports the conclusion that the memories are always stored and that reporting errors are produced by failure of access at the time or retrieval. (I think this is now called Error 404.)

In this study, researchers used fMRI to observe activity in the medial temporal lobes (MTL), an area known to play a role in the paradigm. An old word always elicited increased activity in the rear portion of the MTL, regardless of whether the subject recognized it as old. That is certainly the result to be expected from the psychological literature, but this research shows a new way to study the process.

In this study, for example, we get evidence about what happens in failure to recognize. When a subject correctly reported that the word was new, there was increased activity in a front portion of the MTL. But when subject failed to recognize an old word, there was increased activity in both parts of the MTL.

I would interpret this last result in terms of the pandemonium model. The two parts of the MTL are reporting conflicting conclusions. The rear MTL is saying “old data!” But it is not shouting loud enough to quiet the other part. In the behavioral paradigm, you add cues or psychological set. These probably boost the activity of the rear MTL (testable hypothesis) and increase the odds of recognition. With fMRI, we can see that when the two modules remain in competition, the result is an error.