Why do people take part in insurrections, like the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the storming of the presidential residence in Sri Lanka, or January’s sacking of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace in Brazil?

Sometimes, that question is answered by pointing to precipitating events—elections and their results, protests that descend into anger, or the speeches of powerful demagogues. On other occasions, we blame insurrections on prejudices, or bigotries—racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, white nationalism.

I’d suggest that we think about insurrections differently—because they originate in our brains.

Indeed, I’d suggest that the insurrections in Washington, D.C. and Brasilia are due to overactivity in the limbic system in the brain—a primitive part of the brain that evolved millions of years ago, which we share with rats and cats and lizards and other creatures.

Social scientists used to focus on rational actions. But in recent years we have made great advances in understanding what goes on in the brain when we think politically. The biology of radical politics is no exception.

Scholars have explored why people rebel as long as there has been political science. In the early 1970s, one sociologist hypothesized that the reason was poverty, or “relative deprivation.” Political scientists and economists, using sophisticated mathematical models, also tried to explain rebellion, but found it hard to come up with a rational explanation. Very few people, the math showed, had any personal incentive to risk life and limb for the rather abstract benefits of overthrowing a government.

From a rational point of view, rebellions seem pointless. A political scientist even coined the phrase “the paradox of revolution.”

Enter neuroscience.

Since the early 2000s we have been able to look at what happens inside our heads when we think. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans which measure changing blood flow to brain cells, we can now see which parts of the brain get activated when we engage in various activities, like shopping, thinking about sex, and feeling remorse.

This perspective has also entered into the realm of political analysis—finally putting the “science” in political science. Of course, fMRI isn’t useful for studying rebellions in real time; there’s no way to scan people’s brains at the moment they storm the palace. But we can design experiments that observe how people who share insurrectionist views react to hate-speech and views that are articulated by politicians on the far right. Presenting subjects with statements about vulnerable minority groups during some brain scan studies, and showing them photos of political candidates they didn’t agree with during others, researchers could literally see what happened in would-be insurrectionists’ brains.

When neurologist Giovanna Zamboni and colleagues conducted such an experiment a little over a decade ago, they found that a part of the brain known as the ventral striatum, which is associated with the limbic system, was activated when individuals who were identified by psychological tests as “radicals” were exposed to hate-speech statements or other intolerant  assertions about other groups or minorities. These studies have been replicated in recent years and their findings confirmed and refined.

That the ventral striatum was activated is remarkable. This part of the brain is one of the oldest, in evolutionary terms. It is what makes animals respond positively to simple rewards in social situations and to negative stimuli in dangerous moments, such as fear that they might be attacked. The ventral striatum is linked with amygdala, the fight-and-flight center in the brain. When people hear statements about—or see images of—groups or individuals that they fear, the brain reacts as if it is attacked.

In contrast, study subjects who, based on personality tests, were identified as “moderate” or “conservative” used parts of the brain that only humans have evolved, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning and working memory and associated with listening, speaking, and reasoning. In another study, from 2011, young people with far-right views showed greater activation of amygdala, indicating that they were less likely to reflect on political statements and more likely to revert to fight-or-flight mode.

The most interesting part of this body of research: Generally, brains respond differently to politics than to policy. Scans show that when people think about politics—as in the rough and tumble partisan struggle—the fight-and-flight amygdala gets activated. But when people are exposed to questions about policy, they use the more advanced parts of the brain. In fMRI studies dating as far back as 2009, scientists found that the dorsolateral frontal cortex lit up in people exposed to arguments about economic policy.

I started out as a biologist before becoming a political scientist. Together, those two different academic fields offer a similar lesson: To prevent rebellions and insurrections, we should avoid angry and polarized debate. And when possible, we should avoid political hot-buttons and instead talk about the policy issues that affect our lives.

Biological research suggests the advantages of such an approach go beyond de-polarizing the public square. When we really listen to each other in debates about policy and related politics, we learn new things. And learning new things may make us less likely to develop degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Humans are the product of 8 million years of evolution. We have the capacity to use the powers with which we have been endowed, namely to learn by being attentive, and through open deliberation. Human evolution hardwired us to process information, and make progress, through listening. But when we engage in hate speech and angry rebellion we revert to an evolutionarily primitive stage.

Neuropolitics shows us a way out of the current polarized debate and into a better future.

The post Blame the Brain, Not Bolsonaro, for Brazil’s Riots appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event itself represented a novel attempt to cope with the challenges of coronavirus. For the first time in its 16-year history, Zócalo, which has produced more than 600 events to date, presented its first last night without a live audience. Instead, the evening discussion, entitled “How Does Music Change Your Brain?,” was conducted live on Zócalo’s YouTube channel, with the panelists speaking over internet video links while remaining at home, as California authorities have mandated.

The format produced a fast-paced discussion between panelists—as well as freewheeling exchanges among the hundreds of audience members on YouTube’s live chat. At one point, after actor and songwriter Mary Steenburgen, one of the evening’s panelists, explained how she had been drawn to the accordion, the Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who also plays accordion (and is a Zócalo board member), appeared on the chat and offered to jam with her once the discussion was over.

NPR host-at-large Elise Hu, the event’s moderator, began the night by asking why the effects of music on the brain are so powerful and meaningful. That touched off a conversation that mixed the musical and the medical, with panelists discussing both detailed neurological research as well as their personal experiences with music.

Steenburgen, an Academy Award winner, recalled how she woke up from a 2007 surgery on her arm, which required a general anesthetic, and “felt very different … I felt as if the sound of my brain had changed. I was obsessed with anything musical.”

At first, this was distressing. “I wanted my old, much quieter mind back,” she said. But when she realized her new reality wasn’t going away, she decided to “take what [she] was hearing and then express it in songs.” After considerable work with other songwriters and a music lawyer, she became an award-winning songwriter herself. “Glasgow (No Place Like Home),” a song she co-wrote for the 2019 film Wild Rose, won critics’ and audience awards, and was short-listed for an Oscar.

Steenburgen, now star of the NBC TV drama “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” about a young coder who develops the power to hear people’s innermost feelings through song, still isn’t sure what happened. “But to this day, my brain is different from what it was,” she said. “Logic would tell me that I got access to something that was there already … I had a grandmother who was extremely musical. Sometimes I’ve wondered, ‘Could I have done this all along?’”

UCLA neuroscientist and ethnomusicologist Mark Jude Tramo, who directs the Institute for Music & Brain Science, said that Steenburgen’s experience reminded him of Dr. Oliver Sacks’ account of Tony, a patient who got hit with lightning and became preoccupied with piano music. Tramo added that surgeons often listen to music as they work, and it may have an effect on them and their patients. “I recommend that you ask your surgeon what he was playing,” he said.

Tramo laid out both evidence and anecdotal experience of how music can affect brains, and noted that these insights are not new: “Remember, Apollo was the god of both medicine and music,” he said. But Tramo stressed that we need more research—including clinical trials—so that medicine can make better use of music in actual treatment.

Music treatment, as he pointed out, “is effective, but it is not available to everyone because of Medicare and third-party payers.” Tramo, who also serves as co-director of the University of California Multi-Campus Music Research Initiative, later quipped that we “want to make the hospital a little bit more like Disneyland, and a little bit less like Salem”—during the witch trials, that is.

USC Brain and Creativity Institute research psychologist Assal Habibi, who is also a classically trained pianist, described her research with children, starting at age 6. She noted that children who study music improve their emotional development, are better at being empathetic, and show improved cognitive skills and executive function. When asked why, she noted that music training changes the function and structure of the brain. She added: “We know that children, when they’re moving to a rhythm, … they tend to be more social.”

Habibi also cited evidence that music can help with depression and anxiety—and not just in children. In one intervention in her research, older adults were put into a choir, and the experience helped with their hearing skills, which allowed them to enjoy socializing more, and that in turn improved their overall well-being.

The current pandemic came up repeatedly throughout the evening, including during a question-and-answer session that featured questions drawn from suggestions made by audience members on the live chat.

Habibi suggested that people make use of this time to “have an artistic experience at home as a family.” Have children play on pots and pans, and experiment with music. “I would emphasize that they play whatever they want to play,” she said.

Steenburgen took note of the powerful scenes of people in Italy singing from their balconies. “It not only put smiles on their faces and lifted them up,” she said. “But it lifted all of us up who saw that” online.

Perhaps that could be an inspiration, Steenburgen said, just as the difficult moments after her surgery convinced her to embrace songwriting for the first time. “Maybe during this time when we’re all stuck in our houses,” she said, “people will say yes to some things they’ve never said yes to.”

Several audience members asked what books the panelists recommend on the subject. Here are a few:

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Emotion and Meaning in Music by Leonard Meyer
The Unanswered Question by Leonard Bernstein
Music of the Hemispheres by Mark Jude Tramo (forthcoming)
The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio
This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

A few of our favorite independent bookstores:
Powell’s Books, Diesel Bookstore, The Last Bookstore, Skylight Books, {pages}, Kramerbooks, Politics and Prose Bookstore, and Stories Books.

The post How Music Heals—and How It Can Help Us Find Solace in the Time of Coronavirus appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

He was right, especially about the brain’s divinity. As some of the brain’s secrets have been revealed, we’ve been able to see surprising connections between the evolution of the brain and the very human practice of seeing gods in charge of our universe.

I am a psychiatrist and researcher on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Twenty years ago I started collecting postmortem brains to facilitate this research, and became interested in how our brains evolved. A century ago the German researcher Korbinian Brodmann published data showing which parts of the brain developed early in human evolution and which parts developed more recently. At that time, relatively little was known about how specific brain areas functioned, so it was not possible to interpret the evolution of the brain’s inner workings.

But over the past two decades, brain-imaging techniques—including functional MRI’s and diffusion tensor imaging—have allowed us to say with relative certainty which brain areas are responsible for specific cognitive abilities—and thus the order in which we acquired them.

Korbinian Brodmann (1868-1918), the German researcher who published data showing which parts of the brain developed early in human evolution and which parts developed more recently. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Take for example the fact, demonstrated by archaeological evidence from caves in South Africa, that approximately 100,000 years ago early humans began to adorn themselves with necklaces. They also began wearing more tailored clothing, as shown by studies of the evolution of body lice that attach to clothing. Early humans had become aware, for the first time, of what other people were thinking about them. Does my new bearskin look good on me? Will people like my necklace of seashells? The consumer economy had been born. And since we now know the specific brain areas that are involved in thinking about ourselves—introspective thinking, as it is called—we also know when those brain areas and introspective thinking developed in the course of human evolution. As a result, we now have an evolutionary timeline for the development of specific human cognitive traits.

I found this intriguing, particularly because I majored in religion as a university student. And because, over the years, I visited many of the world’s religious shrines, including Europe’s Gothic cathedrals, Peru’s platform mounds, Egypt’s pyramids, England’s stone circles and monumental earthworks, and Turkey’s Gobekli Tepe, discovered in 1995 and apparently built about 11,500 years ago as the world’s first known holy place. Now, with a timeline of human cognitive traits, another thought occurred: We might be able to track the development of human religious thought and specifically our beliefs about gods.

So I began to merge the new neuroscience of brain evolution with what is known archeologically regarding hominin behavior at different stages of development to get a sense of how our thinking about religion evolved. I also reviewed the anthropological literature regarding thinking about gods among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. And finally, I consulted some theories on child development. As child development specialist Jean Piaget noted, “the development of thought in children closely parallels the evolution of consciousness in our species.”

Ultimately I concluded that human thinking about gods probably had its origin in brain developments that occurred about 35,000 years ago. At that time humans acquired the ability to project themselves backwards and forwards in time in a way not previously possible. Psychologists refer to it as having acquired an autobiographical memory. This period was marked by extraordinary advances in human behavior, including new tools and weapons, the first musical instruments, sculpted ivory figures, and thousands of drawings and paintings in the caves of Spain and France.

This period also saw the first unequivocal examples of human burials with valuable grave goods, indicating a belief in an afterlife. This was an important development because the acquisition of an autobiographical memory enabled modern humans to understand fully and for the first time that they were ultimately destined to die. Faced with such knowledge, we created an afterlife for ourselves so that death would not be our final end. The afterlife was peopled by those who had died in the past—our ancestors. Proof of their existence in an afterlife came from dreams in which our ancestors sometimes visited us. Even today in hunter-gatherer societies it is common for people to interpret their dreams in this manner.

Thus began the practice of ancestor worship, which posited that your deceased ancestors could help you. This was probably the main form of religion from about 35,000 years ago until the beginning of the agricultural revolution. As long as you had ancestors looking after you there was no need for gods.

All this changed about 10,000 years ago when people began to plant crops, domesticate animals, and settle on the land. Previously deceased members of the group had been buried wherever they had died, as demanded by a migratory lifestyle. However, the new settled lifestyle allowed relatives to be buried beneath the family’s house. In some cases, the skulls of deceased relatives were displayed in the house.

By 8,000 years ago some skulls were being painted and modeled with plaster so as to resemble a human face, suggesting that ancestor worship was becoming more elaborate and important. Human masks and human figurines, some three feet tall, also appeared.

As the agricultural revolution progressed, people began living together in villages, then towns, and finally cities. Each hunter-gatherer group had brought its ancestors to be worshipped, and as the towns increased in size a hierarchy developed among the ancestors, with some considered to be more important than others.

Ultimately a few very important ancestors broke through the celestial barrier and came to be regarded as gods. This probably happened between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago since by 6,500 years ago, when the Mesopotamians were using a written language for the first time, they recorded the existence of several gods. This was the origin of modern gods and religions.

Given our new technology for studying the brain, we are on the threshold for better understanding how and why it works as it does. Just as our genome includes DNA inserted thousands and millions of years ago, so too our brains include ancient functions. By better understanding the evolutionary origins of such functions perhaps we can improve our species.

The post How the Evolution of the Human Brain Led Us to God appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And when it did appear, “empathy” was a translation from the German Einfühlung, literally “in-feeling,” with the surprising meaning of projecting one’s own feelings into nature and objects of art.

This meaning is strange to us now. But the feeling we call “empathy” has shifted dramatically over the last century from a description of an aesthetic response, to a moral and political aspiration, to a clinical skill, and today, to the firing of neurons. Returning to empathy’s roots—to once again think about the potential for “in-feeling” with a work of art, a mountain, or a tree—invites us to re-imagine our connection to nature and the world around us.

James Ward, one of two psychologists who brought “empathy” into English. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Aesthetic empathy was first described in the 1870s, when father and son art historians Friedrich and Robert Vischer expounded on Einfühlung to explain how we imaginatively bend, stretch, or shrink ourselves to inhabit forms we perceive. To “feel into” a Doric column was to feel it reaching upwards; to feel into a winding road was to sense it hesitating; and to feel into a heavy weight sitting on a pillar was to experience it straining earthwards.

With Einfühlung or empathy, one experiences beauty by unconsciously melding one’s feelings and impulses of movement with the object. To imagine a mountain rising is to project my own feelings of striving upward into it. Psychologists vigorously debated whether the phenomenon engaged actual movements of muscles and limbs, or was merely a mental exercise that made use of “the mind’s muscles.”

As it happened, the same decades that saw Einfühlung become vital to art psychology also saw the rise of the new field of experimental psychology. Students from all over the world flocked to German psychological institutes and laboratories to carry out experiments evaluating sensation and perception. It soon became imperative to translate German terms into English. It was thus in 1908 that two British psychologists, Edward Titchener and James Ward, coined “empathy” for Einfühlung.

Titchener, director of the Cornell psychological laboratory, fashioned the term empathy on analogy to sympathy, but distinct from it. Sympathy, a much older term, was touted by moral philosophers of the 18th century as an in-born moral sentiment. Adam Smith, famous for his free-market economics, called sympathy a means of “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.” But if sympathy meant one felt with or alongside of another, Titchener explained that with empathy one entered into the object and experienced it from the inside.

Empathy was first described in these years as a kind of “aesthetic sympathy.” But empathy soon expanded to take over the territory formerly covered by sympathy. German and American psychologists debated the merits of empathy between individuals, and empathy for objects became less popular.

Edward B. Titchener, one of two psychologists who brought “empathy” into English. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As a means to understand others, empathy gained cultural influence after the Second World War. Soldiers suffering from war trauma and neuropsychiatric injuries put clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in high demand. Some clinicians turned to empathy as a therapeutic skill that required the therapist to put aside judgment in order to see the world more fully from the client’s perspective.

Furthermore, the war had exposed social fault lines between those of different races, religions, and cultures. Social scientists began to take a new look at empathy as a way to improve interpersonal relations. Experimental psychologists developed tests of empathy as a capacity which, similar to intelligence, could now be measured and quantified. A variety of empathy scales were designed to chart who possessed more, and who had less, of the ability.

In popular journals and newspapers of the 1950s, advice columnists touted empathy to better connect husbands and wives, mothers and daughters. Performers such as Lucille Ball spoke of empathy with their television audiences, and psychologists studied empathy between workers and managers in industrial settings. The concept of “cultural empathy” circulated in the 1960s to forge links between those with different ethnic, racial, and national identities.

Only recently, however, has empathy garnered new attention as a hard-wired capacity in the brain. In 1996, scientists in a neurophysiology laboratory in Parma, Italy, announced the discovery of “mirror neurons.” These neurons, wired up in a macaque monkey’s prefrontal lobes, fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but also when the monkey perceived another monkey performing that action. Neuroimaging experiments soon determined that humans possessed a mirror neuron system spread across different areas of the brain.

The use of neuroimaging techniques to test social psychological abilities has exploded over the past decades in the interdisciplinary field of social neuroscience. Empathy is now frequently identified as a pattern of neural firing. Social, cognitive, and neuro-scientists still struggle to precisely define empathy’s many varieties, and debate how it can be measured in the laboratory. Some neuroscientists argue that empathy is a complex social response that relies on both emotional and rational components, and can best be appreciated in real world settings.

The discovery of mirror neurons gave empathy research a new prominence. Image courtesy of PLOS Biology.

But these debates don’t question that empathy is an interpersonal connection. The very design of “mirror neurons” experiments reveals that we regard empathy only as a way to understand other humans.

We’ve come a long way from a sense of “empathy” that celebrates our ability to enter into divergent forms, and non-human, even inanimate, objects. Today, we discount the capacity to inhabit objects with our imaginative power. We even fault this kind of projection of the self’s feelings as a naïve humanizing of things and nature. To say, as Vischer did, that “a tree bends and shakes its head like a weary human being,” sounds to contemporary ears to be an unscientific anthropomorphism.

And yet, there may be a pressing reason to see ourselves in nature once again. Aesthetic empathy might help to bridge the cleft between humans and our natural environment. We might consider how to cultivate an ability to live within and animate our natural world, as these early theorists described.

Doing so might offer a vital emotional and imaginative spur to efforts to avert climate change. What if we bolster a rational grasp of the scientific consensus that we are rapidly moving toward climate catastrophe, with an engaged, empathic immersion in nature? If we can perceive that a tree wearily shakes its head, can we also sense the pain that might be felt by melting icebergs, eroding shorelines, and devastated coral reefs? Artists and aesthetic psychologists celebrated this powerful human capacity over a hundred years ago. It might be time to revive it.

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Work in cognitive neuroscience depicts what the brain does as we read Flaubert and Taylor, and indeed almost anyone: decode, integrate, infer, analyze the meaning of their content, and sometimes, if we are very lucky, use their thoughts to germinate our own. It would seem that there are two disconnected stories here: one scientific and one philosophical. Yet when Taylor’s understanding of the purpose of language is connected to current studies of the reading brain, we can better grasp how the simple decoding of visual symbols can become the basis for the most sophisticated of human thought processes.

After two decades of research on the reading brain, an insight came to me. Human beings were never born to read; we invented it. It is a remarkable biocultural caveat. Unlike other inventions—wheels and various physical tools—this invention quickly reshaped the biologically driven neuronal networks in our brain. Reading necessitated the creation of totally new connections among some of the brain structures underlying language, perception, cognition, and gradually, even our emotions.

And this changed our species. A reading brain circuit emerged which enabled ever more elaborate connections, giving literate humans a platform for the development of new thought. My own work on what is called deep reading explores the full panoply of linguistic, cognitive, and affective processes that we gradually learn to deploy when we read. With these processes, we furnish what we read with imagery and background knowledge, we analyze it critically, we empathize or search for its perspective, and finally we use generative processes that lead to insight and novel thought.

Deep reading represents what Proust called that “fertile miracle of communication.” It’s what happens when readers use all their linguistic capacities to go beyond what is written on the page to generate their own best thoughts—sometimes new to them, sometimes new to the whole of humankind. Put another way, reading has altered the brain of each literate individual, propelled the intellectual development of the species, and given us a history of past knowledge as a readily available foundation for our future growth.

The field of cognitive neuroscience asks how this can happen—cognitively, linguistically, and physiologically: How can the human brain learn a new cognitive function that has neither a genetically prewired program nor a prescribed set of dedicated structures (like the visual cortex)?

From this view, the study of the reading brain helps us to understand how the brain learns anything new. We now know, for example, that the brain’s plasticity allows it to rearrange or make new connections among its older structures (like those used for language, cognition, and perception) and to recycle and repurpose neuronal groups within those structures to help us learn to read. Quite literally, neuronal working groups in the visual cortex that were originally dedicated to recognizing faces and objects have been repurposed to identify letters and letter patterns.

Charles Taylor’s work on language in his new book The Language Animal forces us to address a deeper set of questions about written language. He wants to move us “from a narrow view of the functions of language as encoding information … (to a view which) escalates into wider questions about the shape, scope, and uses of language.”

Taylor’s work is particularly helpful for understanding how our brains have insights while we’re deep reading. Understanding the processes behind these elusive insights makes cognitive neuroscientists throw up their hands in exasperation. They’ve tried to capture a glimpse of these processes with existing brain imaging methods. But in a meta review that hoped to identify the “neural signature of insight,” neuroscientists Arne Dietrich and Riam Kanso wrote: “An insight is so capricious, such a slippery thing to catch in flagrante, that it appears almost deliberately designed to defy empirical inquiry. To most neuroscientists, the prospect of looking for creativity in the brain must seem like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

It is here that Taylor provides a wholly different view of the evanescent dimension at the heart of language, both oral and written. Going back to 18th and 19th century German thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamann, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Taylor pushes us to consider the protean dimension within language that propels us to give ever more refined, precise word-based flesh and sinew to our thoughts.

Humboldt wrote, evocatively, that within language there is always a “feeling that there is something which the language does not directly contain, but which the mind/soul, spurred on by language must supply; and the drive, in turn, to couple everything felt by the soul with a sound.” Taylor builds on that to say that “possessing a language is to be continuously involved in trying to extend its powers of articulation.” This constant yearning to articulate more and to find and express greater meanings is key to Taylor’s argument that language is a deeply human project.

Taylor’s life-long efforts to articulate this ineffable, protean dimension at the heart of language have changed my own view of written language. In the past I struggled unsuccessfully to describe how our inferential and analytical processes prepare the reader for insight. Now, however, I interpret the entirety of the deep reading processes as part of the intrinsically human drive toward meaning: its discovery and its articulation.

I think history bears this out. Over 50 years ago, before neuroscience was an established field, the first surgeons conducting split-brain research asked a linguist to help them ask the right questions as they studied the language structures of the human brain. Then, as now, our understanding of language and the brain can only progress when we are able to ask the right questions.

In this moment, when the neurosciences are adding to an increasingly precise topography of language in the brain almost daily, we need the questions that Charles Taylor raises about the “shape, scope, and uses of language” to really understand what is going on. And, as Taylor describes and Gustave Flaubert’s “cracked kettle” metaphor exemplifies, whatever we find out will not be our last iteration of these processes. For, however narrowed by all our efforts, it is the gap, the crack, between language and human aspiration that drives us forward and gives our lives their unquenchable desire for meaning.

The post Does Philosophy Hold Crucial Insights for the Neuroscience of Inspiration? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This spring, DARPA’s Haptix program hit the media with one of its newest hand prosthetic prototypes. This device from the Defense Department’s research lab adds a novel feature to prosthetic technology: that of a sense of touch. “Without sensation, no matter how good the hand is, you can’t perform at a human level,” Justin Tyler, a researcher at the Functional Neural Interface Lab at Case Western Reserve University, said in a statement. This mentality aligns with today’s goals of prosthetic technology research—to design devices that are biologically inspired, capable of mimicking the anatomical and functional features of a human limb. The only way to perform at a human level is to replicate the human form.

The recent progress in prosthetic technology—like finger joints that move like individual fingers and biomaterials that move like human muscle—has been nothing short of extraordinary. However, the last comprehensive review of prosthetic use, published in 2007 by the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics, demonstrated that the rate of device abandonment (a person discontinuing use of a device after obtaining it) has not decreased in the last 25 years even with these large gains in prosthetic technology. To date, the rate of abandonment is 35 percent and 45 percent for body-powered and electric prosthetic devices, respectively. It turns out that the pursuit of technology that imitates human form and function with increasing accuracy might be hurting a critical component of prosthetic adoption: how easy it is to use.

Not surprisingly, the technology to enable a prosthetic device to move and feel precisely like a biological hand introduces increased complexity to the device. For example, typical high-tech devices are controlled by the activation of residual muscles in the arm or some other external control feature. Thus, adding a feature like independent control of individual fingers may require significant focus or attention from a user. From a practical perspective, this adds a level of inconvenience for everyday use. For example, in the video below the user appears to be able to use the prosthetic arm well, but note that the device is controlled with his feet. Because of this, the device can only be used when standing still.

In addition, properly using the hand requires a person to learn about a variety of device controls. The forethought required to operate this type of device in a complex way can be quite burdensome for a user and may require extensive training. This high cognitive load can be distracting and tiring compared with how effortless it is to use a biological hand, or more rudimentary if using a less nimble prosthetic. This is exaggerated further by the fact that the majority of patients who come into a prosthetist’s office are older adults, who may be more likely to struggle with the increased device complexity.

In theory, designing a prosthetic device with full biological capability is a dream come true, an accomplishment we’d expect to see in an upcoming sci-fi thriller. Better yet, it would be a feat in engineering that would go down in history. But as a researcher in this field, I believe that too often, we overlook the potential for usability. Regardless of the technological advancement, it’s important to consider whether this progress is also a step forward for designing a favorable device for the user. We assume that performing “at the human level” is the ultimate goal. But this may not always be the case from the user point of view, especially if mastering the technology that enables “human level” performance would render you incapable of concentrating on anything else. This dichotomy may explain why the prosthetic abandonment rate has not decreased even as technology has improved.

Technology itself can’t tell us about the wants and needs of a potential user. Perhaps at the end of the day, all a user needs is a reliable device that renders him or her functional, if not to the same degree as she would be with an actual human limb. Simply obtaining a prosthetic device can be difficult. Prosthetic devices, especially those with advanced technology, come with considerable costs, those of which may range from $30,000-$120,000. And because insurance costs are categorized by function, they can be difficult to be approved for coverage. Thus, a user’s goal may be far more conservative than an engineer’s goal, focused not on a specific parameter but rather in simply obtaining any device.

This might be a textbook case of allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Too often, it seems that device design lacks a “human factors” approach, driven as it is by many scientists with relatively little input from patients. The people in need of prosthetics may get involved only when a product reaches testing, rather than at the initial stages of device design.

A human-factors approach to the design of prosthetic technology would introduce user ideas earlier in the design process. If prosthetic technology exists to serve as an assistive device for a person who has lost a limb due to a congenital condition or traumatic accident, then the success of device design will be based on the ability of researchers to understand the needs of the user at the beginning of this process and ultimately to design or adapt novel technology to address those needs. This mentality may, to some extent, explain the rise in 3D-printed hands by groups like Enabling the Future. These at-home projects may lack flash, but they offer a potential user the chance to be heavily involved in the design and testing stages. Moreover, this environment allows testing around prosaic daily activities, such as getting dressed or helping a loved one or child prepare for her or his day, that often get overlooked in lab-based scenarios. Lastly, the cost of 3D printing is significantly less compared with obtaining a market device.

The current state of prosthetic technology finds researchers at a crossroads between technology and usability. One road involves plowing ahead in the incessant quest for greater technological complexity of prosthetics so as to approximate the human body. That road leads to more buzz about the wonders of technology and interesting peer-reviewed academic publications, but may not improve the overall utility of these devices from a user perspective. The other road will lead scientists to integrate themselves and their work with actual patient needs, and to progress in a more user-driven direction.

Once we establish a technology that allows us to mimic the human form effortlessly, perhaps this dialogue between scientists and users will become irrelevant. But until that time, let’s abandon this idea that designing a device that performs at a human level, no matter its complexity, should be our sole focus. It’s time we acknowledge that prosthetics are only as good as their usefulness to real patients in everyday life. It’s time, in other words, for greater collaboration between scientists and prosthetics users to close the gap between technology and practicality.

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One sits atop my neck, the other stares back at me. A constant reminder of my craziest-ever impulse buy.

Let me explain.

A few years ago, I impulsively purchased a life cast head fitted out with electronics. My animatronic doppelgänger can blink, wink, and move its lips in sync with my recorded voice. It is an altogether strange and rather disturbing companion that each time we exchange glances makes me wonder what ever possessed me to buy it in the first place.

I tell my astonished friends it was purchased as an aid for the neuroscience course I was lecturing. The truth is I have no real idea why I made such a ridiculous decision. All I can say is, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

This is a funny thing to say, since I’ve been studying impulsive behavior for years. But when I fell victim to it myself, I was hard-pressed to explain why—and the fact that I’d impulsively purchased an extra head just made it that much harder to explain!

Psychologists’ categorize modes of thought in two ways: System I is non-conscious and error-prone but rapidly able to integrate numerous types of interacting information. System 2 is conscious, plodding, and capable of handling only a few items of information at a time. So with my head purchase, how had System I (buy a second head!) overwhelmed System 2 (one head is enough)?

The answer may be “feelings,” the fascinating “third rail” of our two-track way of making decisions. Feelings are hard to define despite the fact they play such a crucial roles in our lives. “While we know without question that we feel it, just how it feels is a good deal more obscure,” writes University of California psychologist Bruce Mangan. “The feeling … is not a color, not an aroma, not a taste, not a sound … (such) experiences are much more diffuse, they have a cloud-like quality that usually spreads out over larger portions of our conscious field.”

Consider, for example, the following controversial topics: immigration, same-sex marriage, genetically modified food, and abortion.

Irrespective of how much you actually know about any of these issues, you will almost certainly have a feeling of rightness or wrongness about each one.

To get a sense of what thinking by feeling is like, read the following paragraph:

“A newspaper is better than a magazine. The seashore is better than the street. At first it is easier to run than to walk. You may need to try several times. It takes some skill but it is easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If it breaks loose, however, you will not get a second chance.”

At first glance, reading this text may cause you confusion, disagreement, or even a feeling of discomfort. While all the words make perfect sense individually and every sentence is grammatically correct, the overall effect is confusing and incomprehensible.

There seems to be no way of making sense of it. But there is: Re-read the paragraph keeping in mind the word “kite.”

I’ll wait for you … Done reading now?

With a reason, a way to tie the meanings of the sentences together, the text is now clearer, transforming an uncomfortably worded paragraph into an eloquent statement about a beloved toy for all ages. The paragraph feels as right as, previously, it felt wrong, which pretty well defines the essence of this way of “thinking.”

The making of Lewis’ cast head.

“Fringe” thinking often arises as the result of priming, the practice of using certain stimuli to produce a desired response. Take the following questions, for example: What’s the common abbreviation for Coca-Cola? What sound does a frog make? What’s a comedian’s humorous story called? What do we call the white of an egg?

If you answered Coke, croak, joke and yolk, you’d be wrong. An egg white is called albumin, not yolk. Coke, croak and joke primed your brain to focus on a rhyming answer rather than the right answer.

Studies have illustrated the power of priming to affect the way we feel about certain stimuli. In 2008, a University of Chicago study used the American flag to discover how small environmental factors influence political judgment. Two versions of an online survey were distributed to both Democratic and Republican voters, one including a small American flag and one without. The study found that voters who were exposed to the presence of the flag tended to favor the Republican Party, even up to eight months after taking the original survey.

“The effect was not moderated by political ideology or any other measured variable, which suggests that the flag produced the same conservative shift for both liberal and conservative participants,” the researchers commented.

Every type of sensory input forms part of an interconnected network; a particular aroma, for example, may trigger visual, emotional, and possibly muscle memories. Grocery stores often use the smells of coffee and freshly baked bread to trigger impulse purchases among shoppers. But the use of aromas is often more subtle. Some travel agents, for instance, infuse a faint odor of coconut oil into their premises, giving rise to memories of sun-drenched tropical beaches.

Because everyone makes sense of the world in a different way, these sensory-memory networks are personalized to each individual. Even seemingly trivial aspects of an advertisement, marketing strategy, or retail display can cause a flood of positive or negative associations, both conscious and non-conscious, that influence feelings about the message. Feelings arise rapidly and, once established, can prove hard to change.

Which brings me back to my second head.

After having impulsively decided to buy it, I then had to undergo the lengthy and extremely uncomfortable—not to say costly—process of having it made. This involved being smothered in a blue plastic gunk and breathing via straws stuck up my nose. As I waited the 30 minutes it took for the cast to harden, the technician cheerfully recounted how, when making the prosthesis for actor John Hurt in The Elephant Man, the weight of the mold had broken the poor man’s nose.

By this time, the folly of my impulse was apparent, but I became more determined to see it through. Why?

A likely explanation is what psychologists’ call “cognitive dissonance.” This says the more we invest in any course of action, the less likely we are to back off, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it has been a terrible mistake.

This explanation may be attributed to companies that have foundered and battles that have been lost. Those in charge found it harder to admit their impulsive decisions had been wrong than to press on and hope that, somehow, it would be alright.

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In popular culture, black and white are thought of as simple opposites, but my colleague Jose-Manuel Alonso and I have been uncovering ways that we perceive black and white differently, and how our brains have evolved mechanisms that create these differences. I want to walk you through some of our experiments that have led to an interesting answer to a 400-year-old puzzle.

If you look at the left side of the two busts of Caesar paired at the top, you’ll see a three-dimensional white sculpture, because we interpret the two-dimensional variations of brightness in the image as shading caused by light reflected from an object. In the photo on the right, we perceive essentially the same three-dimensional shape, but lit from the opposite side, and appearing to be made of a darker material. So not only is our judgment of the illumination different, but so is our judgment of the object’s material properties. This photo is just the contrast reversal (photo negative) of the photo with the white bust, so comparing the two illustrates how we interpret gradual variations of light versus variations of dark.

The difference in how we use black and white cues to infer the properties of an object is even more evident when the changes in brightness are more distinct. The bright streaks on the black bust above appear to be highlights, and from their sharpness and small scale relative to the object, we can estimate the glossiness of the material. If the contrast of the image is reversed (the right side of the image pair above), we see a white or even metallic bust, and the black streaks appear to be smudges or paint. In this situation the two tones give entirely different sorts of clues about illumination and material properties.

These examples illustrate a basic asymmetry in the way we perceive white and black: We interpret difference in lights as information about illumination, while differences in darks reveal something about materials. These interpretations fit well with the physics of the world: Illuminants light up objects, and are reflected less by highly absorbent materials and holes.

Other basic asymmetries have been noted for centuries. Galileo Galilei, who was as perceptive as he was creative, observed that Venus appeared larger through his telescope as a light object against the dark night sky than it appeared as a dark object against the bright day sky. Ernst Mach, for whom the speed of sound is named, demonstrated that letters are difficult to recognize if some strokes are white and others black, suggesting that the two shades may be processed separately by the brain.

We began our experiments by testing whether subjects could pick out blacks and whites on unbiased backgrounds with equal ease. We created randomly arranged background panels with an equal number of equal-sized black and white pixels, and then asked observers to count the number of larger targets presented on the background as quickly as possible. To make the targets clearly different from the background pixels, we made them nine times larger in area. The targets were either all black or all white. To our surprise we found that people counted black targets significantly faster and with many fewer errors. You can see that black targets are easier to identify than white ones in these 12 examples:

How could we explain this discrepancy? Galileo had attributed the illusion of Venus’ size to light scatter in the eye, which would enlarge the image of a light area compared to a dark area. Herman von Helmholtz, the polymath physicist and physician, showed that there was too little light scatter in the eye for Galileo’s explanation to be complete, but the actual cause remained unclear. Helmholtz took Galileo’s observation and made a simpler, abstract version of it with equal-sized white and black squares on the opposite backgrounds. The white square appeared larger, so he called it the “irradiation illusion.” We noticed that something akin to the irradiation illusion was occurring in our backgrounds, too: Even though there were equal areas of black and white, there appeared to be more white area.

We measured the magnitude of Helmholtz’s irradiation illusion by asking people to increase the area of the black square until it appeared to be the same size as the white. Then we calculated the ratio of the physical sizes of the squares. Similarly, we measured the magnitude of the area illusion in the background by having people increase the ratio of black to white pixels until the areas appeared equal. Since the ratios required by the two corrections were approximately equal, we reasoned that both illusions must share an underlying cause. We became more convinced that our ability to see black versus white targets was influenced by the irradiation illusion when we found that if we used backgrounds with what people saw as the “balanced” ratio of black to white, targets of the two shades were equally easy for viewers to see and count.

Our next step was to search for a brain mechanism that could explain the irradiation illusion. When Keffer Hartline recorded the first electric signals from single retinal nerves responding to light stimulation, he found two types of nerves whose responses are shown on the left side of the figure below. One kind of neuron generated spiking electrical signals when exposed to light (bottom two rows). The other kind generated spikes in the dark, but turned off when exposed to light (top row). Since then, such cells have been found in eyes of many species as disparate as insects and mammals, separated by more than 500 million years of distinct evolutionary pressures, suggesting that this neural strategy fits something fundamental about the world, across many environmental niches.

These neurons are called ON and OFF cells, because of their behavior in response to light. Until recently, they had been generally considered to be opposite but equal. However, we found that when we measured the responses of ON cells to increasing equal increments of light on a black background, the response increased rapidly but then plateaued (red curve). On the other hand, OFF cell responses increased roughly in a straight line as light was decreased on a white background (blue curve). The more rapid initial increase in ON outputs explains why we are more sensitive to small increases of light in dark settings than to small decreases of light in bright settings. The plateau at the top of the ON response curve explains why we are more limited at distinguishing progressively lighter shades than we are darker shades. The neural explanation for both the irradiation illusion and Galileo’s observation arises from the same difference in the response curves.

Remarkably, these simple but different responses of the ON and OFF cells also explain some black-white asymmetries that seem almost paradoxical. For example, it is easier to make out black text on a white background than white text on a black background, despite the fact that we are capable of seeing much tinier white dots on black backgrounds than black dots on white backgrounds. The reason for this is that the ON response expands strokes of white letters slightly so that they become more difficult to distinguish. The same effect “expands” a white background, making small black dots seem smaller.

Whites and blacks in images of the world thus arise from different physical causes, provide information about different aspects of the world, and are processed differently by the brain. The differences in how we see shades originate in the beginnings of sensory neural processing. We have yet to figure out the neural mechanisms that allow us to make inferences about illumination and materials from different scales of lights and darks, so we may have much to learn from the strategies that artists use to depict them. If you look at black and white drawings not as impoverished versions of the colored world, but as pared-down illustrations of the cues we use to understand what we are looking at, you can enjoy them as intellectual puzzles, and it may change the way you look at art.

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Bergen blends psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to put forth a new theory of how the brain understands words and sentences. He argues that people understand language by creating experiences in their minds—“embodied simulations”—that mirror interactions in the physical and social worlds.

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It all started with what Marcus called “the dumbest video game on the planet”: Guitar Hero. It’s a game that’s “very easy for ordinary people,” said Marcus, “but for people with rhythmic impairments it’s not so easy.” All the game requires is pressing the right button at the right time as colored dots slide down the screen. Yet the game was torture for Marcus, and even more so when the virtual crowd started booing. (“I became very familiar with that phenomenon,” he said.)

Marcus discovered he had no sense of rhythm when he tried to learn the recorder in fourth grade. “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” said Marcus, “became my Waterloo very quickly.” His teacher dropped him after just two lessons.

This time around, things were different. With some encouragement and feedback from his wife, Marcus got better at Guitar Hero, eventually making it all the way through Foghat’s “Slow Ride” without the crowd booing. The game was a “gateway drug” to the real thing: “I decided I was going to spend the last two weeks of the summer trying to become musical,” said Marcus. “I practiced for six hours a day, and by the end of the two weeks, I sort of started to sound faintly musical.”

Marcus studies how children learn language and explained that scientists used to think there was a “critical period” during which children must acquire certain skills–either before age three or before puberty. But they later discovered this wasn’t set in stone and that it is possible for adults to acquire languages later in life.

Marcus was struck by Stanford biologist Eric Knudsen’s studies of barn owls, who navigate in the dark by using an internal map of the visual world. Knudsen distorted the perception of a group of owls by 23 degrees with a prism. The younger owls adjusted easily, but the older owls were unable to adapt. However, in a later study, when the older owls’ perception was adjusted incrementally, by just six degrees at a time, they too were able to make the same adaptation.

Marcus applied this idea to his guitar practice, focusing on learning just one or two chords at a time. He approached the guitar from an engineer’s perspective, trying to understand what made learning difficult.

Marcus spoke with guitar teachers about strategies that worked with their students. A Suzuki Method teacher told him that practice at home is more important than what happens in the classroom. She tells parents not to correct their children until they’ve made the same mistake three times, in order to create an environment where children and parents aren’t at odds. Another teacher told him that she has her students play the songs in their head on the subway away from their instruments–and to start from the middle of the song rather than the beginning so they can develop a sense of where they’re getting stuck and overcome any difficulties.

At a rock ’n’ roll summer camp where Marcus played with 11- and 12-year-olds, he discovered that although the kids were faster on their fingers, he had the advantage of knowledge gleaned from listening to music over many years.

Before the question-and-answer session, Marcus joined fellow guitar players Barrett Tagliarino–who had opened the evening by playing two songs solo–and Greg Bryant for a brief jam session. An audience member asked how long it had taken Marcus to learn the song. It was an improvisation, he replied–so either three minutes (about the length of time they’d rehearsed earlier in the day) or three years (Marcus’s total guitar experience).

The audience also asked Marcus how music impacts his mood, and what he discovers about his body, and the mind-body connection, when he plays.

Playing music “definitely puts [my mood] up,” said Marcus, who thinks people listen to and play music as a form of self-medication. Guitar has also made him much more aware of his body. For the first time in years, he’s riding a unicycle again–and he’s better than he was in college, he thinks, because he’s more aware of his body thanks to the guitar. In addition, guitar teaches you better posture–and improves your rhythm. At a wedding a few months ago, Marcus even managed to dance in time with the music. “For the first time in my life, people actually complimented me on my dancing,” he said.

There’s also a rush that comes from learning something new on guitar–the same “joy of discovery” and hit of dopamine that Marcus experiences when he learns something new in science.

But he cautioned that adults can be their own worst enemies when it comes to learning a new skill. “Older people have to cut themselves slack and often don’t,” said Marcus. They want to sound like Santana the first time out, whereas kids can enjoy the process rather than focusing too much on the end result.

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s.
Read music and gaming experts’ opinions on what we’ve learned from Guitar Hero here.
Read more from Kaiser Permanente on how music can improve mood here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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