|
¤ ¤ ¤ § |
¹
£
Media reports
|
| |
|
¹
£
|
£ | |
|
Media reports
|
|
Measuring evil: it's a science
5.11.01 AP objectivity & skepticism ¹ ª º ¶ ² ³ ª ß ç º ð å µ £ +n ¿ ë ƒ New Orleans "Evil" is not a word most psychiatrists like. But some are trying to find a way to measure it. During a symposium Thursday at the American Psychiatric Association convention, Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist, asked more than 120 psychiatrists to help create a depravity scale which could be used by the courts to judge criminals. Every day, judges ask juries to decide whether crimes are heinous, atrocious, cruel, outrageous, wanton, vile or inhuman, aggravating factors which can increase sentences and even lead to the death penalty in some states. But there are no universal standards to define such terms, Welner told the overflow audience. The interpretations often depend on judges' & jurors' emotions & biases, and politics or media attention can influence a prosecutor to seek the death penalty, he said. In his effort to create a scale to measure depravity in defendants, Welner, who has testified as both a prosecution & defense witness, created a list of 26 indications of intent, actions and attitudes which could be used to rate crimes. Among the intents are whether the person meant to cause emotional trauma, cause permanent disfigurement, or terrorize or target the helpless. Actions include whether an attack was unrelenting or the attacker prolonged the victim's suffering. Attitudes include blaming the victim, having disrespect for the victim or taking satisfaction in the crime. Welner is asking judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, psychiatrists and theologians to go to his website & rate each indicator for whether they believe it is especially, somewhat, or not at all representative of depravity. The object is to find indicators which all or most experts agree on, a "consensus morality" which could be used in court.
Thursday's symposium ¹, titled "How Psychiatry
Defines Evil," was held on the final evening of the convention. Dr. Michael Stone of Columbia Univ. also showed
slides of nearly three dozen killers & others whom he considers evil. A woman who burned one of her 3
daughters alive and starved another to death was "at the extreme edge of evil … one of the most clearly evil persons" of more than 400 whose biographies he has read, Stone said. However, he added that "the bulk of evil on a world scale is committed by ideologues & their followers." Wars & persecutions, from the Spanish Inquisition to the fighting in Bosnia, show people are capable of "bottomless cruelty to those outside the tribe, especially in times of hardship & hunger," he said.
unattrib. Apparently so, according to researchers from Emory Univ. GA, who believe the brain finds happiness when its owner is nice to people and plays nice with others. "When people cooperate together, it activates parts of their brains that are activated by other types of rewards," such as money, or even drugs, said study co-investigator & Emory University School of Medicine assoc. prof. of psychiatry Dr. Gregory Berns. Deep in the human brain, there is a mechanism that helps people make choices based on rewards they can receive. For example, someone may choose to work late in order to make more money. Or he can choose instead to go home, to spend more time with his family. In both scenarios, there is a payoff and a consequence.
The Emory report was based on a study of 36 women,
Nash's work on game theory at the RAND Corp. in VA made him a leading expert on the Cold War conflict, and he won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Science for his work. Nash is currently traveling and was unavailable for comment. Nash's theory focused on one-time situations. But the Emory study suggests people will act differently during continuous interaction with other humans.So humans will probably be less selfish in the short term, the Emory study suggests, if they know they have to see those same people again. And people will not just be nice because they have to, but because deep down, it actually makes them feel good. |
It's strictly secular Bush's frequent use of the word "evil" has little to do with his Christianity. Rather, it's a word that evokes something real. 3.31.02 Charlotte Allen L.A. Times auth., The Human Christ Search for historical Jesus
An example is Slate online magazine's Robert Wright "axis of evil" interpretation: "It means Bush is on a mission
from God … It wouldn't surprise me if he thinks that part of his mission is to teach a Godless society about
moral absolutes, to re-inject the words 'good' & 'evil' into serious discourse. If you take the word 'evil'
seriously, the 'axis' part follows; various manifestations of evil are inherently coordinated, since they all have the
same source. Iran & Iraq may hate each other, but they're both on Satan's team." For Wright, Bush had too
many Sunday sermons at Windsor Village United Methodist in Houston, where he found his savior in a midlife born-
again conversion.
The phrase "axis of evil" (by all reputed accounts, coinage not of Bush himself but of former speechwriter David Frum), far from alluding to any Bible passage , seems clearly
lifted, chapter & verse, from the Gospel according to Ronald Reagan, who almost never went to
church. Remember "the evil empire"? And, of course, the word "axis" evokes the Nazi-led trio of nations that slaughtered millions during WWII. Bush
& his speechwriters selected the phrase "evil axis" because, first & foremost, it is rhetorically powerful,
evoking the charnel houses that 20th century tyrannies of the right & left made of entire nations. During those
regimes' years of terror, every day was 9.11.01 for members of disfavored religions, ethnic groups and political
affiliations.
"Evil" is a word that works, not just for politicians & their speechwriters. Look it up in a quotation dictionary.
One of the most frequent literary sources for the word, after the Bible, is likely to be Wm Shakespeare, master of
rhetorical stage effect: "The evil that men do lives after them;" "Sham'st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,
When evils are most free?" This suggests something further: The word "evil" works in the public mind because it
evokes something real; everybody except a handful of pundits knows it is real. Hence, the spellbinding power
& runaway audience success of "The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the
Ring," film that has no overt religious content but is precisely about a struggle of good against evil, evil in all its
grasping, corrupting murderousness.
Because we know people have capacity to create living hells for other people, we don't hesitate to use the word
"evil" when it is appropriate, even in our presumably "godless" society. The Holocaust wasn't evil? Mass murder of
9.11.01were evil. Maybe it's "simplistic" to think so; maybe it's an effort to inject moral absolutes where they don't
belong, but "evil" is the word that springs to mind. If you believe in Satan, you might logically attribute some of the
mayhem to his fiendish cunning. Not surprisingly, Bush & Reagan are hardly the only recent presidents to use
the word "evil" where it seemed highly appropriate. Pres.l Clinton used the word in connection with 1994 shooting
of an Israeli soldier by Hamas militants, 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in an hate spree,
fatal pipe bombing during 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, GA, and 1995 Oklahoma City federal-building bombing
of 1995. Few deemed the word overly judgmental.
At a 1999 dinner VP Gore, referring to mass shootings, declared, "My religious tradition says evil has always been
with us, and we need to meet evil with good." Explicitly Christian language, yet no one accused Gore of
"incoherence," as Wright did in his Slate essay on Bush. As for contents of Bush's "evil axis" reference in his State
of the Union address, accuse him of overstatement in the case of starving, doddering N.Korea, but only if you don't
take the possession of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons seriously, impossible to do after 9.11.01. Recent
New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg details Saddam Hussein's genocidal war against his country's millions of
Kurds in the north, marked by deliberate starvation, inhumanly crowded and filthy concentration camps, and poison
gas that causes death, blinding and cancer. If that's not evil, what is?
Bush is unabashedly religious; as such, he is like many Americans shaken by the events of recent months. No
doubt his Christian faith, incl unequivocal Christian delineation between right & wrong, informs his thinking.
Such forthright faith, at this difficult time of war & looming war, strikes many Americans as a good thing; the
president's popularity ratings continue to soar. However, it's just as crudely simplistic to attribute his every
reference to "evil" to a caricature of Christianity as it would be if Bush himself were a caricature of Christianity "on a
mission from God." Evil, alas, is real, and it is sadly with us. | |
|
[ Proof that stewardship & expecting
the
worst is more profitable than insurance firms' actuarial gambling on the myth that risk is courage & courage is
rewarded.
In the real world of humans, ultimate gain results from diligent minimizing, not brave maximizing.
Reliance on discipline, despite, although not regardless of, costs, is incontrovertibly more dependable. ]
|
Statisticians call a bell curve "normal distribution".
Economist Eugene Fama pointed out if movement of stock prices followed normal distribution you'd expect a really big jump, what he specified as a movement 5 standard deviations from the mean, once every 7000 years. In fact, jumps of that magnitude happen in the stock market every 3 or 4 years, because investors don't behave with any kind of statistical orderliness.
They change their mind. They do stupid things. They copy each other. They panic.
Fama concluded if you chart market fluctuations, the graph has a "fat tail" meaning at upper & lower ends of
the distribution, there are many more outliers than statisticians used to modelling the physical world would have
imagined.
Nassim N. Taleb buys out-of-the-money [ i.e. unlikely but inexpensive
] options by the truckload.
He buys them for hundreds of different stocks; if they expire worthless; he simply buys more. Taleb never sells
options. He only buys them. He's never the one who can lose a great deal of money if stock suddenly
plunges.
Nor does he ever bet on the market's moving in one direction or another. That would require Taleb to assume he
understands the market, and he knows that he doesn't. He buys options on both sides on the possibility of the
market's moving both up & down.
He doesn't bet on minor fluctuations in the market. Why bother? If everyone else is vastly underestimating rare
events' possibility, then an option is going to be undervalued.
Taleb doesn't invest in stocks, not for Empirica and not for his own personal account.
Buying a stock, unlike buying an option, is a gamble that the future will represent an improved version of the past.
No one knows whether that will be true.
So all Taleb's personal wealth and hundreds of millions of dollars Empirica has in reserve is in Treasury
bills.
Few on Wall St have taken the practice of buying options to such extremes. But if anything completely out of
the ordinary happens to the stock market, if some random event sends a jolt through Wall St, Taleb will be very
rich.
Taleb buys options because he is certain that, at root, he knows nothing or,more precisely, that other people
believe they know more than they do.
[ i.e. People can be depended on to fool themselves with belief random
events aren't random. ]
At Empirica, there are no Wall St Journals. There is very little active trading, because options that the fund owns
are selected by computer. Most options will be useful only if the market does something dramatic. Most days the
market doesn't.
The duty of Taleb & his team is to wait & think. They analyze the company's trading policies,
back-test various strategies, and construct ever more sophisticated computer models of options pricing.
|
Empirica inverts traditional practice. There is no feedback other than immediate measure of how much spent & how much of what is spent is recouped.
His trick is a protocol that stipulates precisely what has to be done in every situation. "We built the protocol, and the reason we did was to tell the guys, Don't listen to me, listen to the protocol. I have the right to change the protocol, but there is a protocol to changing the protocol."
"You must be hard on yourself & see traditional bias in your motives", never-ending struggle between head
& heart.
Psychologist Walter Mischel did experiments where he puts a young child in a room and places 2 cookies in front of him, one small & one large. The child is told that if he wants the small cookie he need only ring a bell and the experimenter will come back into the room and give it to him. If he wants the better treat, though, he has to wait until the experimenter returns on his own, which might be anytime in the next 20 minutes. Mischel has videotapes of 6 year olds, sitting in the room by themselves, staring at the cookies, trying to persuade themselves to wait.
On profit, loss and the mysteries of the mind
"Kahnemanandtversky". Everybody said it that way. As if the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were a single person, and their work, which challenged long-held views of how people formed judgments and made choices, was the product of a single mind.
In Jerusalem, where their collaboration began in 1969, the two were inseparable, strolling on the grounds of Hebrew University or sitting at a cafe or drinking instant coffee in their shared office at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and talking, always talking. Later, when Dr. Tversky was teaching at Stanford and Dr. Kahneman at the University of British Columbia, they would call each other several times a day.
Wiry, charismatic, fizzing with intelligence, Dr. Tversky was younger by a few years. Dr. Kahneman, as intellectually keen, was gentler, more intuitive, more awkward. Together, the psychologists developed a new understanding of judgments and decisions made under conditions of risk or uncertainty.
But Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky demonstrated that in some cases people behaved illogically, their choices and judgments impossible to reconcile with a rational model. These departures from rationality, the psychologists showed, followed systematic patterns.
Program A, the subjects were told, had a 100 percent chance of saving 200 lives. Program B had a one-third chance of saving 600 lives and a two-thirds probability of saving no lives. Offered this choice, most of the subjects preferred certainty, selecting Program A.
Over more than two decades, working together or with others, Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky elaborated many situations in which such psychological "myopia" influenced people's behavior and offered formal theories to account for them.
Anyone who read their work, illustrated, as one admirer put it, with "simple examples of irresistible force and clarity," was drawn to their conclusions. Even economists, unused to looking to psychology for instruction, began to take notice, their attention attracted by two papers, one published in 1974 in Science, the other in 1979 in the economics journal Econometrica. Eventually, the psychologists' work provided the undergirding for behavioral economics, the approach developed by Dr. Richard Thaler.
Q. Did you set out to challenge the way economists were thinking?
Our work was completely ignored until our 1974 paper, which eventually had an impact on both economics and epistemology. Of course, we did not mind in the least because economists were not our intended audience anyway; we were talking to psychologists. It came as a pleasant surprise when others started to pay attention.
Q. Why is the rational model of human behavior so entrenched in economic theory?
So you get rationality at this level, and it buys a lot of predictive power by this assumption. When you are building a formal theory, you want to generalize that assumption, and then you end up making people completely rational.
Q. You and Amos Tversky are perhaps best known for prospect theory. Could you explain what this is based on?
A. When I teach it, I go back to 1738. In 1738, Daniel Bernoulli wrote the big essay that introduced utility theory. Utility really means pleasure more than anything else. The question that Bernoulli put to himself was "How do people make risky decisions?"
Bernoulli evaluated the possible outcomes in terms of their utility. What he said is that the merchant thinks in terms of his states of wealth: how much he will have if the ship gets there, if the ship doesn't get there, if he buys insurance, if he doesn't buy insurance.
That's really a very simple insight but it turns out to be the insight that made the big difference. Because, if that's not the way that people think, if people actually think in terms of gains and losses and not in terms of states of wealth, then all the mathematical analysis that has been done which assumed people do it that way is not true. It took us a long time to figure it out.
Q. What kinds of things does prospect theory explain?
In my classes, I say: "I'm going to toss a coin, and if it's tails, you lose $10. How much would you have to gain on winning in order for this gamble to be acceptable to you?"
So the function for gains and losses is sort of kinked. People really discriminate sharply between gaining and losing and they don't like losing.
Q. How did prospect theory influence economists?
But it's not as if this has swept economics. It hasn't, and for very deep structural reasons, it's not going to. The rational model has a hold on economics, and it's going to stay that way. Behavioral economists fiddle with it, improving the assumptions and making them psychologically sensible. But it's not a completely different way of doing economic theory.
Q. One of the things you are studying now is well-being. Does this connect in any way to economics?
For example, we are studying one day in the lives of 1,000 working women in Texas. We have people reconstruct the day in successive episodes, as recalled a day later, and we have a technique that recovers the emotions and the feelings. We know who they were with and what they were doing. They also tell us how satisfied they are with various aspects of their lives. We know a lot about these ladies.
Q. What are you finding out?
Q. Why would divorced women be more cheerful?
 Device to measure one's stupidity 4.22.04 Victor Likhachev Pravda
The device to measure whether the person is stupid or clever, looks simple: 2 thick steel wires attached to the
fur
Lev Galenkevich used his friend for his first experiment. Then he measured his entire family. The researcher's
colleagues were saying he was crazy, but asked him to measure their intellect as well. "I picked up the device
description in ancient oriental manuscripts", said the inventor. "There are items sensitive to lepton fields in people. Some people can attract metal because of having strong lepton fields. This proves that the principle used in my device is valid".
Brain development rate linked to IQ
ß
¹
Smart children have a different rhythm in their heads, a seesaw pattern of growth that lags years behind other young people, say govt scientists who mapped the brains of hundreds of children. Seeking a link between neural anatomy and mental ability, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health and McGill University in Montreal discovered it where they least expected, not in sheer brain size or special structures, but in the patterns of childhood growth.
Brain development in children with the highest IQ peaked 4 years later than among average children, the researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Philip Shaw at the NIMH child psychiatry branch and his colleagues periodically scanned the brains of 307 healthy children from age 5 to age 19. To monitor the living brains, they used magnetic resonance imaging, which can detect the anatomical differences between gray matter, composed of neurons and other brain cells, and white matter, composed of the nerves that connect them. They gauged intelligence by giving each child standard IQ tests.
In general, every brain blossoms from a single cell in the womb, growing at a rate of 250,000 cells a minute until, by early childhood, it has more neurons and more connections between them than the average adult brain. Unused cells and synapses then atrophy and die.
The scans revealed tell-tale waves of change that coursed through the brain's prefrontal cortex, a thick wrinkled carpet of cells that orchestrates memory, attention, perceptual awareness, language, reason and consciousness. "The story of intelligence is in the trajectory of brain development," Shaw said. "What differs with intelligence is the rate of these changes."
The anatomical scans revealed that among the most intelligent children, the cortex displayed the most prolonged period of growth and the most rapid rate of change. The cortex also was thinner in early childhood, grew thicker, then thinned more rapidly.
By the teen years, however, the cortex could be seen to be thinning in all three groups and, by adulthood, the brains could no longer be distinguished by IQ differences, said NIMH brain imaging expert Jay Giedd.
No single brain scan could reveal a child's IQ. The patterns only revealed themselves across a large group. The differences are measured in fractions of a millimeter of brain tissue that emerge over a decade or more.
No one knows whether such subtle developmental changes in the cortex are caused by the genes inherited from a child's parents, by the biochemical influences of life experience, or by the interplay of both.
Brainteaser: Scientists dissect mystery of genius
Albuquerque NM A young man in a white physician's coat and a bow tie is walking toward us down the sidewalk, a plastic five-gallon bucket swinging from his hand.
When looking for creativity inside a human brain, the first thing you notice is nothing unusual. Most scientists say that current brain imaging technology doesn't tell you much more.
Brain imaging remains in some ways as crude a tool as simply cutting open the brain and looking inside. Haier and Jung use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure various parts of the brain. Then they compare the pictures to intelligence scores on a verbal or pen and paper test.
Intelligence research is full of surprises. For example, the brains of smarter people, as measured by IQ, tend to be less active but more efficient, Haier says. In a controversial paper, he contends based on structural MRI scans that men and women think differently. For men in Haier's study, having more gray matter in certain areas corresponds to a higher IQ, while in women, it made no difference.
While men and women may use different brain pathways to think, Haier says their average IQ scores are not significantly different. If confirmed and refined, the discovery could prove tremendously valuable to clinicians, including neurosurgeons.
The MRI is only one of the MIND Institute's research tools. An MRI is static, like a photograph. It's about form, while functional MRI, positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) reveal the brain's functions. |
traditional investing psychology:
Normal trader gets feedback from his daily winnings,
IBM researcher eyes databases with a conscience 8.27.02 Martyn Williams IDG News Service ß
Most people don't think twice about offering any information to their doctor or physician, and possible misuse of the data won't keep them up at night worrying. But when supplying mundane personal information for storage in a
computer database, the reaction is different. With headlines telling of
purposeful & inadvertent data leaks and system intrusions, people are becoming increasingly aware of the
amount of personal data held on them in myriad databases from govt agencies to credit card companies, their
employer or even the local dry cleaners. An IBM researcher is hoping to change this mistrust by duplicating the
basis of trust in physicians.
"I had been doing work in data mining; people were starting to worry about data mining becoming too powerful a
technology," said IBM fellow & database project lead scientist Rakesh Agrawal at IBM's Almaden Research
Ctr. "I was talking about this with my brother, Rajeev, who is a doctor; he said 'When we are studying to be a
doctor, we take the Hippocratic oath. That is one of the biggest tenets in medicine'."
"I started wondering why databases cannot be like that," said Agrawal, who then set off to build a database system
that had at its foundation a responsibility for the data it holds. The result is a blueprint for a Hippocratic database
that not just specifies to users how & where the data collected will be used and where it will be shared, but
crucially also includes a verification element to make sure the system is living up to its promises. Agrawal
presented details of the system at the Very Large Databases 2002 conference in Hong Kong last week.
Before data is collected, types of information to be obtained and basic rules about how the data will be used are
decided. These rules include who should have access to the data and how long it will be retained. When it comes
time for a user to enter information, an application at the user end will interact with the database to check that its
data privacy policies are acceptable to the user, who has already programmed their preferences into the
application.
A customer's name, address and e-mail address might be required for the purpose of registration. Other
information, such as a credit card number and details of purchases are also needed to fulfill the order. Some data
sharing will also take place; customer name & address with the shipping co., and name & credit card
number with credit card co.
Agrawal isn't the only person working on such a system. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
endorsed its Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) earlier this year and has won the support of industry
& govt for the platform, intended to allow users to examine a site's privacy policy to ensure it
matches their own preferences.
The Hippocratic database sets limits on the amount of time the data can be used for the stated purposes,
perhaps up to one month for issues directly related to the purchase, one year for recognizing customers
when they return and 3 years for basic registration, then ensures the information is cleared from the
database.
people become powerless. If you overvalue possessions, people begin to steal.
The Master leads
Practice not-doing,
Tao Te Ching
9.5.04 BBC
According to new research from scientists at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, revenge is linked to the area of the brain associated with enjoyment & satisfaction.
The study: The Swiss researchers tested 7 pairs of men as they played a game that involved an exchange of money. The men were each given 10 units of money and told they could increase their winnings if they trusted one another. They could not see each other while they were playing.
results: If one of the men didn't play fair, he was usually punished by the other. In fully 6 out of the 7 cases, the opponent chose to reprimand the other player. During the reprimand, the dorsal striatum region of the brain was activated, an area known to be involved in feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction.
"Instead of cold, calculated, reason, it is passion that may plant the seeds of revenge," psychologist Brian Knutson of Stanford University wrote in a commentary accompanying the study findings that were published in the journal Science. He equated it to an aggressive driver who refuses to allow another car to pass in front of him in heavy traffic. "After squeezing back the intruder, you can't help but notice a smile creep onto your face," Knutson wrote in Science.
Anatomy of give & take
Economic theory goes only so far in explaining why people buy, sell, save or trust. Scientists are looking inside the mind for answers.
Houston The two women had money in mind. Phuong Tang, 25, wriggled into a $2.5-million brain scanner at Baylor College of Medicine. Across the hall, a technician loaded Tang's trading partner for the day, Kavita Belur, 26, into the bore of a similar machine, like a fresh artillery shell.
As the pair wavered between cooperation and betrayal, scientists recorded how their brains changed. The researchers hoped to discover the
There was a riskier but potentially more profitable way. They could trust each other.
Inside the scanner, Belur made up her mind. She decided to gamble her entire nest egg on her trustee's goodwill.
She pushed the button, putting her money in play.
In virtually every area of markets, human behavior has economists stumped.
Economists know all this from personal experience, but they don't know how to factor the quirks of human behavior into their mathematical models. This is no small matter. Efforts to set interest rates, revamp health insurance, privatize Social Security, revise pensions, police the sale of securities and alter legal liability rules rely to some degree on economists' ability to make reliable predictions about the choices people will make.
Pioneers in neuroeconomics believe the key to understanding economic behavior lies deep in the brain, at the level of cells and synapses. The brain is above all an economic engine forged by evolution through eons of scrounging for scarce resources, they argue. So the ability to trade things of value is the defining characteristic of the brain, the keystone of human character.
Inside her scanner at Baylor, Tang made up her mind. She signaled her decision with a tap of a button. As the trustee, she had chosen cooperation. She split the proceeds of her partner's first investment evenly.
A team of researchers led by Read Montague, director of Baylor's Human Neuroimaging Laboratory, and Baylor neuroscientist Brooks King-Casas scrutinized the synapses of both women for cellular evidence of the relationship building up between them.
So little is known about the biology of decision-making that researchers had no theory to test. They wanted to gather as much data as possible during the financial interactions in the hope that signatures of brain activity might emerge.
In sprays of light on a computer screen, the researchers could see how levels of activity shifted. Men typically showed the greatest activity in the seconds before making an investment decision, women in the moments before they revealed their decision to their trading partner.
With each round of negotiations between the two women, a reputation for fair dealing took hold in their neural tissues.
"It literally feels good to cooperate," said Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont dir. Paul J. Zak. As the hormone level rose, people also were more likely to reciprocate trust. "The stronger the trust, the more the oxytocin went up, and the more trustworthy you were. Interestingly, participants in this experiment were unable to articulate why they behaved the way they did," Zak said. "But nonetheless their brains guided them to behave in 'socially desirable' ways, that is, to be trustworthy."
When a decision forms, the brain moves faster than self-awareness. The brain unconsciously prepares to act a measurable length of time, up to 500 milliseconds, before a person consciously decides to act. In other words, the brain is always one step ahead of itself, calculating the potential costs and benefits of each choice at a cellular level.
"Most of the brain is dominated by automatic processes, rather than deliberative [thinking]. A lot of what happens in the brain is emotional, not cognitive," said Carnegie Mellon University behavioral economist George Loewenstein.
Every brain is of two minds about the future.Two competing neural systems interact during choices that hinge on a conflict between short-term and long-term benefits, Harvard University researchers reported.
Critics have often argued that volunteers playing experimental games in brain scanners are no measure of real market behavior. So researchers led by Lo at MIT studied working traders during their normal business day.
To measure brain activity indirectly, he wired 10 currency speculators at a Boston brokerage to sensors monitoring heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, body temperature and skin conductivity. By the end of the day, the traders had made 1,200 split-second trades, averaging $3 million to $5 million apiece.
Market trades, the sensors showed, were the stuff of sweaty palms, heavy breathing and pounding pulses. Snap judgments, honed by intuition, outweighed high-minded economic calculations. These were "gut" decisions.
Scientists are not sure how the electrical snap of synapses adds up to a financial decision, or how these insights might be assembled into a working theory of economic behavior.
For 9 rounds, the 2 women played in perfect trust. Belur as the investor always put up the maximum possible. Tang, the trustee, in turn always equally divided the spoils.
The most rational move for Belur, therefore, was to refuse to risk any money in this last round, to end the game richer than her trading partner. The women balanced on the cusp of betrayal.
Unknowingly, they had defied the rules of game theory. They should have betrayed each other at the earliest opportunity. Had trust hormones triumphed over the theorem of self-interest? By playing together in such harmony, each had earned 300 points, meaning each would be paid $30. Tomlin counted out the one-dollar bills from a small lock box. Tang eyed the growing stack of bills.
Study spots brain's selfishness 'off-switch'
Civil society may hinge on a tiny piece of tissue at the front of the human brain, a new study suggests. Experiments involving a "fairness" game show that the right side of this region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex helps people suppress selfish urges in obviously unjust situations, even at their own expense.
"They understood the unfairness of it all, but they simply couldn't inhibit their need for getting the money," said University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa Center of Excellence for Aging & Brain Repair dir. Paul Sanberg. Sanberg was not involved in the study, which is published in 10.6.06 issue of Science.
This behavior is demonstrated in an oft-used tool in behavioral science called the "Ultimatum Game."
Humans are highly socially evolved, and punishing unfairness "helps sustain cooperation in groups," said study lead researcher Ernst Fehr, director of Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich.
In the study, they had participants play the game under two conditions. In the first condition, the researchers passed a mild electric current through the right or left hemispheres of Player 2's DLPFC, temporarily deactivating these brain regions. Other participants took on the Player 2 role under sham conditions where no real electric current was flowing.
"The big surprise," Fehr said, "is that a relatively minor inhibition of the right DLPFC removes or weakens the subject's ability to override their self-interest."
The experiment shows that this part of the cortex "is clearly very important for our social behavior, our societal evolution," Sanberg said. The right side of the DLPFC helps people resist those strong urges for sex, money and general acquisitiveness that come from more primitive sites outside the cortex, he said.
One intriguing line of research is whether the right-side DLPFC functions similarly in everyone, even hardened criminals or sociopaths. |
|
Brain's Darwin machine
Scientists find evidence of a perpetual evolutionary battle in the mind. The process, they suspect, is the key to individuality. 4.11.06 Robert Lee Hotz L.A. Times related series
La Jolla CA Alysson Muotri was looking for brain cells that glow in the dark. With growing frustration, the 31-year-old Brazilian cancer biologist stared through his microscope at slides of brain tissue for any evidence his experiment had succeeded. His eyes ached.
In debates over creationist doctrines, evolutionary biologists often are hard-pressed to explain how nature could make something as intricate as the human brain. Even Alfred Wallace, the 19th century biologist who discovered natural selection with Charles Darwin, could not accept that such a flexible organ of learning and thought could emerge by trial and error.
Underlying every personal difference in thought, attitude and ability is an astonishing variety of brain cells, scientists have discovered. Some neurons fire only when they perceive a straight vertical line, others when they are exposed to a right angle. Some respond to the emotions in a facial expression or to social cues. Others retain a memory long after conscious recollection has faded.
If Muotri's suspicion was correct, a peculiar string of biochemicals caused the billions of neurons in each person's brain to develop in distinctly different ways, so that even identical twins could develop minds of their own.
… researchers hope to learn how biochemistry becomes thought. Among the molecules of mental life, they are finding signs of an evolutionary struggle for survival.
For many years, scientists were convinced that the brain quickly lost its ability to produce new neurons. But in the last decade, independent research teams at the Salk Institute led by Fred W. Gage and at Princeton University by Elizabeth Gould showed that even middle-aged minds generated thousands of new neurons every day in areas crucial to learning and memory. |
At the Salk Institute, Gage, 53, was consumed by the mystery of the new neurons he had discovered. In the brain's unexpected ability to renew itself, he saw the potential for repairing brain damage from maladies such as Alzheimer's disease or spinal cord paralysis.
Gage, boyish, unfailingly affable, with a trim, sand-colored mustache and a wave of blond hair that crested over a high forehead, was among the most influential neuroscientists of his generation. He orchestrated his laboratory's research efforts the way an impresario manages an opera company, artfully matching the ambitions of 30 scientists to questions that best challenged their abilities.
Gage deployed tools all but unheard of a generation ago, computerized gene micro-arrays, automated gene sequencers, genetically engineered animals. His working arrangements were also at the cutting edge.
One section of his Salk laboratory was set aside for experiments with stem cells from human embryos, where work could proceed independent of federal funding and unencumbered by federal policies that restrict such research.
In 2003, he co-founded Brain Cells Inc. to exploit his discovery that humans generate new brain cells throughout life. Almost immediately, 2 staff scientists in his Salk laboratory found that a curious DNA sequence muddled their efforts to discover how neural stem cells produced new neurons.
In one such experiment, the researcher hoped to learn how a particular gene affected the life cycle of a neuron. She altered mouse embryos to deactivate the gene. At first, these artificial rodents seemed normal enough. Yet upon close study, some of the creatures seemed dimwitted. A few had memory problems. Others had trouble learning.
Intrigued, the scientist compared the genetically engineered neurons to natural cells. The only major difference she could detect was the activity of this puzzling genetic sequence. Her experiments had taken 2 years. Crestfallen, she turned her attention elsewhere.
"At the time, we could not make heads or tails of it," Gage recalled. "We would have long discussions, but I could not get anyone interested in working on this."
Scientists called the curious genetic sequence a "jumping gene." It could move up and down the double helix of DNA to insert itself into the genetic structure, like a black snake crawling along a branch into a bird's nest.
Despite the name, the sequence was not a gene but a primitive precursor, called a long interspersed nuclear element, or LINE, that struggled for survival inside the microcosm of a cell. The LINE sequence belongs to a mysterious family of mobile genetic elements called retrotransposons.
For 600 million years, it existed solely to copy itself. All mammals contain such LINE sequences. But as species became more intelligent, they retained fewer types. No one knew why. Mice harbored 3,000 different kinds of LINE elements, rats 500. Humans had about 100 types that differed from one person to the next.
All told, there are as many as 850,000 copies of such junk DNA in the human genetic structure, composing almost half of every cell's heredity. Most researchers dismissed it all as the detritus of parasites, viral infections and evolution's failed experiments.
Unlike the other molecular relics littering the human genetic code, however, the particular human sequence that cropped up in the Salk laboratory, called an L1 LINE, was still on the move. So many thousands of times had it copied itself into the human genome that it now made up one-fifth of a cell's DNA.
Most copies were stranded far from any functional gene. Many were truncated, broken off like an aria interrupted by a cough. Every once in a while, the sequence landed close enough to a gene to disrupt its behavior or change its expression.
A single jumping retrotransposon is the reason that Great Danes, dachshunds, border collies and certain other domestic dogs have patchy black-and-tan coats, researchers at Texas A&M University recently reported. It landed in a gene that affects the color of dog hair.
But no one had ever heard of these DNA strands reweaving the genetic fabric of individual brain cells.
Gage asked Muotri to look into it. The Brazilian was a cancer geneticist, not a neurobiologist like most of the researchers in the Gage lab. Gage had recruited him to study brain diseases, drawn by his intellectual energy and persistent curiosity. When that project failed to materialize as expected, Muotri was open to a new question, even one outside his immediate field.
The idea of jumping genes didn't seem so strange to him. Such mutations were a rare cause of genetic disorders such as hemophilia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. In a gray T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops, Muotri had the look of someone who came to La Jolla for the surf, not the science. He wore a carving of a hammerhead shark on a chain around his neck and a watch with three dials on his right wrist.
"I felt like an odd fish in the aquarium," Muotri would say later. "I decided to look with the cancer mind-set. Maybe I [would] learn something."
Gage invested more than $1 million in private funds, time and laboratory resources in the experiment. No federal agency would fund it.
"They probably think I'd gone off the deep end," Gage said later. "It was too wild."
Muotri and Gage wanted to know whether the L1 sequence was actually moving around in developing brain cells.
Normally, the sequence copied itself into reproductive cells in the testes and ovaries, where a randomly remodeled gene might be passed to succeeding generations. The sequence did not seem active in any other type of cell in the body.
They could not experiment on people, so they inserted the human DNA into a custom-made brood of mice. To make the L1 sequence visible under a microscope, Muotri and his colleagues added to it a molecular tracer, a green fluorescent protein, that would light up whenever the DNA intruder entered a growing cell.
With a splinter of hollow glass, Muotri injected the sequence into mouse eggs, then transferred them into female mice, where he hoped the new DNA would take hold in growing embryos. Of 7 brown mice in the litter, 2 contained the altered human DNA. He bred those with wild mice to create a family in which the L1 sequence was poised to jump into any cell of the body. He ended up with 20 transgenic mice.
To search for evidence of brain activity, he sliced each mouse into wafers 40 microns thick and mounted tissue from every organ on slides. If the sequence had jumped anywhere, it should reveal itself, like a firefly at midnight, with a fluorescent glow. Searching the slides under ultraviolet black light was such an eyestrain that Muotri could only keep it up for about 4 hours a day.
At the same time, the fluorescence was depleted by exposure to ultraviolet. So the longer he looked, the fainter the light became. During a break halfway through one scanning session, Muotri browsed research articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He stiffened.
At the University of Pennsylvania, a rival research team had already conducted his experiment and published the results: They examined the entire animal for signs that the sequence was jumping from cell to cell outside reproductive organs but failed to find any evidence of the brain activity that Muotri sought.
"They checked skin, they checked liver, they checked everything including the brain," Muotri recalled. "They looked for the same thing I was looking for and could not find it. They reported exactly the result I did not want to see."
The Brazilian brooded. By 2005, he had spent 2 years chasing the L1 sequence. His fellowship would run out soon. Should he abandon the experiment? What was the likelihood he might find something that skilled competitors had overlooked?
He ought to finish what he started, he decided, no matter how futile the effort. His wife lent a hand. Marchetto, red tank top, blue jeans and yellow hair, was a splash of primary colors against the laboratory's gray concrete walls. She knew little about neural anatomy. Her doctorate was in skin cancer biology. But she was more meticulous than her husband.
As her eyes learned the microscopic maze of synapses and support cells, she could see a glow inside the translucent spheres of brain cells.
"It was, like, crazy green," she recalled. First one cell, then five, 10, a dozen. She found the fireflies in the brain.
In the black light of the microscopy room, her brilliant smile was like the moon emerging from the clouds."Please," she said, calling her husband to the microscope. "This is a neuron."
They caught it in the act. To their wonder, the L1 sequence had left its distinctive mark wherever they looked in the mouse brains, throughout areas devoted to memory, learning, emotion, motor control and the senses.
They discovered that the sequence affected only developing brain cells. It also seemed to home in on neural genes, arbitrarily changing their behavior. Every time it affected a gene, it set that neuron apart from its neighbors in the brain and from all other cells in the body.
In the mouse experiment, the sequence jumped into one of every 100 brain cells. Unpublished data from follow-up experiments by colleagues suggest that in human cells, the sequence jumps into 80 of every 100 neurons.
"Every neuron may have a different genetic profile," Muotri said. "Almost all the cells have at least one L1 insertion."
The researchers were elated but puzzled. From the standpoint of conventional evolutionary theory, any independent genetic change in a neuron was a dead end. The random changes caused by L1 inside a brain cell could never be passed on directly through the genetic shuffle of sex.
At this point, Muotri and Gage had an audacious thought. Perhaps the sequence, striving for its own survival inside the growing neuron, made the brain more responsive to changing circumstances. Had natural selection seized on the one rogue sequence most useful for crafting an infinitely adaptable human brain?
"There are subtle differences in everything we do throughout our lives," Gage said. "Maybe this is how we generate a deeper adaptability to deal with the unexpected. "We believe the sequence is generating this diversity to fine-tune the brain".
|
When it comes to trust, a whiff of oxytocin can go a long way 6.2.05 Joseph B. Verrengia AP
Swiss and American scientists demonstrate in new experiments how a squirt of the hormone oxytocin
stimulates trusting behavior in humans, and they acknowledge the possibility of abuse can't be ignored.
Other scientists say the research raises questions about oxytocin's potential as a therapy for conditions such as autism, in which trust is diminished. Or, perhaps the hormone's activity could be reduced to treat more rare
diseases, such as Williams syndrome, in which children approach strangers fearlessly.
Oxytocin is secreted in brain tissue and synthesized by the hypothalamus. That small but crucial feature located
deep in the brain controls biological reactions like hunger, thirst and body temperature, as well as visceral fight or flight reactions associated with such powerful, basic emotions as fear and anger.
Then, elevated concentrations of the hormone were found in cerebrospinal fluid during and after birth, and
experiments showed it was involved in the biochemistry of attachment. It's a sensible conclusion, given babies
require years of care, and the body needs to motivate mothers for the demanding task of childrearing.
In recent years, scientists have wondered whether oxytocin is generally involved with other aspects of bonding
behavior, and specifically whether it stimulates trust.
In the experiments, the researchers tried to manipulate people's trust by adding more oxytocin to their brains. They used a synthetic version in a nasal spray that was absorbed by mucous membranes and crossed the blood-brain barrier. Researchers say the dose was harmless and altered oxytocin levels only temporarily.
http://www.themarriagebed.com/oxytocin.shtml http://www.oxytocin.org/ http://www.oxytocin.org/oxytoc/ picture |
Trust in a bottle Nasal spray makes people more likely to place faith in another person. 6.1.05 Michael Hopkin Nature
Can you bottle trust? The answer, it seems, is yes. Researchers have produced a potion that, when sniffed, makes people more likely to give their cash to someone to look after.
The potion's magic ingredient is oxytocin, a chemical that is produced naturally in the brain. Its production is
triggered by a range of stimuli, including sex and breastfeeding, and it is known to be important in the formation of social ties, such as mating pairs and parent-offspring bonds. It is perhaps no surprise that the compound has been nicknamed the 'love hormone'.
The researchers, led by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, investigated whether this effect can be produced
simply by getting people to inhale oxytocin rather than stimulating them to produce it. Such chemicals, they explain, can easily enter the brain when sniffed.
Investors were more willing to part with their cash when they inhaled the potion, Fehr's team reports in Nature1. Of 29 subjects given oxytocin, 13 handed over all of their cash. Only 6 of the 29 subjects given a placebo to sniff
invested all 12 of their credits.
Knowing more about how trust is encouraged could help with everything from business to the treatment of
psychological conditions. Damping trust may be useful for people with Williams syndrome, for example, in which patients are overly friendly. "Increasing trust may be useful for people with social phobia or autism," Fehr adds. Perhaps, but it seems a trifle extravagant, says Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Modern advertising already uses tricks to get us to trust a brand that probably make us boost our own oxytocin levels. "It lures you in with images of wonderful landscapes or sex, and it probably works in exactly the same way," says Damasio. |
|
§ite map courtesy of FreeFind |
presented by § |
OCIAL JUSTICE |