music

1. Seu Jorge – Everybody Loves the Sunshine
2. Felix LaBand – Miss Teardrop
3. The Kooks – Shine On
4. The Avett Brothers – I and Love and You
5. Don Henley – Boys of Summer
6. The Allman Brothers – Sweet Melissa
7. Peter Frampton- Baby I Love Your Way (acoustic)
8. Verve – Lucky Man
9. Zap Mama – Rafiki
10. Duffy – Warwick Avenue
11. Neil Young – Out on the Weekend
12. Ray LaMontagne – You Are the Best Thing

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After delving into this weeks reading, I can’t help but get caught up in the idea of our brains as binary machines.  On the days that I moonlight as a philosopher, this is one of my favorite concepts to mull over- not necessarily that of our brains as machines, but more, the binary nature of our action or thoughts.

While, yes, I agree with and am fully aware of the fact that not all aspects of our worlds and perceptions are mutually exclusive, it’s an interesting idea.  You do, or you don’t.  It is, or it isn’t.  Having had some time to digest this weeks reading on development, it’s interesting to think of how children’s brains may develop in a very similar way.   When it comes to binary, as Heidi Klum always says, you are either in or you’re out.

For those of you not familiar with binary (much like myself), it is essentially a system of a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, each meaning just that – in, or out.  Computers run on this business.  As the chapter points out, if humans invented the way a computer ‘thinks’, it must think in a way similar to the way we humans think.  In other words, if computers run on binary, so should we… shouldn’t we?  They certainly make a good case.

Using the example of a child wanting to be picked up, we can easily apply the binary system.  1- the child is in the air, aware that they are not down.  0 – the child is NOT up, so they must be down.  If a child starts to learn in this way, the book points out that  “they may be able to use this same construct for discovering other schema and eventually for learning a language”.

In the human language, we form sentences, and then full thoughts, by stringing words together in an order that has a significant meaning to us.  There are some words that make sense back to back, while others simply do not.  The same goes for the letters in a word- both of these, the letters and the word order stuff, defined by a process formally known as the Markov Process.  Markov’s idea, in a nutshell, is that certain things just go together in a chain, and certain things do not.  “The next state depends only on the current state, and not on the past”, and, “the occurrence of one element in the chain establishes a probability that another particular element will come next”.

To get a better idea of Markov’s work in action, consider the process we go through to spell a name.  My name, for example: Courtney.  My name begins with a “c”, so, if I’m thinking in binary, it may look something like this:

A: 0 B: 0 C:1

Now, once my brain knows we’re starting off with a “c”, according to Markov, there is a probability established for the next letter.  For example, in the English language, “ca” would be a logical pairing, while “cb” or “cc” would not.  So, now, my brain would go through the binary step again, this time, able to eliminate all the letters that wouldn’t really fit.

C +

A:0 B:0 C:0 D:0 E:0 F:0 G:0 H:0 I:0 J:0 K:0 L:0 M: N:0  O:1

And so it would continue, my brain filling in the next letter according to the language rules that are programmed into it.

Bringing it back to the kids, by applying the system of binary thought to child development and learning, we can perhaps better understand how children develop their communication and understanding of the world around them.  By beginning with a simple system of yes or no, or “up or down”, they can go on to develop complex webs of binary relationships, filling in their processes as they go to eventually form Markov chains of ‘appropriate’ behavior.  CRAZY.  STUFF.

Facebook Stalking and Flow

Hungraian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is widely famed for his theory of flow.  In his work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he discusses his concept of flow- what we may be more familiar with as “being in the zone”, or, the intense state of focus and absorbtion that some of us experience while playing sports, for example, or perhaps spending intimate time with a romantic partner.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is all about the balance of being challenged, having the skill to meet said challenge, and how these two components come together in the form of task motivation and attention.  More specifically, “To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one’s emotions.”  In other words, the flow is the joyful sweet spot we enter when nothing else matters in the world except the activity at hand.  Many, if not all of us, I would bet, have experienced one or more flow characteristics while participating in the activities we know and love.

Enumerated in lecture as intense focus, lack of self-consciousness, feeling of complete control of one’s actions, distorted sense of time, awareness only of one’s current actions and proximal goals, and a desire to engage in the the task for its own sake, these qualities, to me, sound about like what I experience while sucked into the all-too-familiar Facebook procrastination vortex.  When I’m lurking around on Facebook, in what seems like mere seconds, 30 minutes can pass, dinner can burn on the stove, and I can altogether block out any number of obligations I may have.

Moving along with my Facebook example- I find that I am most in the flow in the beginning stages of my Facebooking experience, especially if I am trying to seek out information of some kind, or am particularly interested in the subject of my investigation.  Why is this, you ask?  As mentioned in lecture, flow flourishes when one has clear, short-term goals, a balance or match between perceived challenges and one’s skills, and immediate feedback about the accomplishment of those goals.  Since, when I’m Facebooking, I tend to have all of these things in line, it’s no wonder that I usually slip into a state of flow. Examining the below diagram of the flow “channel”, it becomes easy to understand where exactly the flow is able to occur, and why, at times, it is lost.

As I mentioned before, and Csikszentmihalyi mentioned even before that, flow is all about the balance between challenge and skill.  Being a superior Facebook stalker is something of a skill, sure, and also definitely a challenge.  Once the mission is accomplished, however, I, at least, usually find that I grow bored and more interested in moving on to a different activity.  Flow lost!  The same thing happens when we find a task TOO challenging, like when I have to hunt down an old classmate who moved away and whose last name I can’t recall.  Then, too, I would lose my flow, and perhaps, also, experience some feelings of anxiety.

The concept of flow seems to lend itself quite well to media, and, not surprisingly, numerous studies, especially involving video games, have been conducted around it.  Sherry (2004) explored how people prefer video games and activities with that perfect skill/challenge balance, and even more interestingly, how what we once thought were gender variances in video game preference are actually better understood as skill differences.  I do not avoid games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty because I am female and, thus, don’t like them, but, according to Sherry (2004), instead, because I am simply not good at them.  Makes sense to me.  Keller and Bless (2008) also did some similar work, this time with Tetris, and found support for the flow, challenge, skill relationship as well.

If you ask me, Csikszentmihalyi and his flow theory are one of the more applicable and widely relatable topics we’ve been over in class.  Whether it be the art of computer stalking, the sport of your choice, video games, or beyond, I would venture to guess that we’ve all been pulled into the ‘flow’ one time or another.

“Neurocinema”

According to the guy(s?) at the Neurocritic, a really cool blog -though confusingly liberal with the use of the royal ‘we’- that deals with what’s new and exciting in brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience, Neurocinema is the new en-vogue concept among the big minds in the biz these days.  “What is this Neurocinema,?” you may ask.  The Neurocritic calls it “a new filmmaking process that studies a viewer’s sensorimoter, cognitive, and affective response to film stimuli.”  Researchers are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the changes in blood flow to different areas of our brains, or in applied terms, to measure how and which different parts of our brain are stimulated by certain elements of film.  Their analysis of fMRI, along with physiological cues like sweat and heart rate, is becoming an important tool to discovering what scenes ‘work’ and what scenes don’t.

British movie producer, Peter Katz, is apparently a big believer in the Neurocinema buzz.  As a horror movie producer, it’s his job to determine how best to scare viewers, and using fMRI to determine fear responses seems to be an effective way to go about that.  According to an interview with CNN, “[Katz] wanted to understand how to make a horror film quantifiable […] On the timing, [he] wanted to see just how precise [he could] get.”

Even better-known big-shots like James Cameron are starting to hop on the Neurocinema train.  He told Variety that “a functional-MRI study of brain activity would show that more neurons are actively engaged in processing a 3-D movie than the same film seen in 2-D”.

A little light shed on the joke that is The Great Gatsby- 3D?  Something had to add a little pop to the sordid, society affairs of East and West Egg…

The inspiration for all this?  It all seems to come back to Hasson, and his 2004 and 2008 studies in fMRI. which, using inter-subject correlation analysis (ISC), “[provided] a quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of different styles of filmmaking on viewer’s brains.”

In their 2004 paper, Hasson et al. studied 5 people watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly while hooked up to an MRI scanner.  They then assessed the correlations in brain activity among the subjects and found them to be highly significant.

Later, in their 2008 study, Hasson et al. compared their findings from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly to those of subjects viewing an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and a shot of people congregating at Washington Square Park.  According to the same method of analysis, the Hitchcock scene had the highest correlation among viewers, followed by The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, then Curb Your Enthusiasm, and finally, the Washington Square Park unstructured footage.

The big “so-what” here brings us back to Katz and Cameron- that it is, indeed, possible to structure a film to achieve certain audience results.  As Hasson et al. found, the more highly structured the film was, the more overlap there was in the fMRI scans of the viewers- as in, they were all looking in the same spots, focusing on the same things.  It’s a little creepy, to me at least, to think that a group of people can be sitting in a room, all exercising their own “choice” as to where they want to look, interpreting and presenting attention based on their own personal preferences, and yet, they all look the same place.  Weird.

All in all, Hasson and the rest of these guys are doing some really interesting stuff here with fMRI, and it seems, already, like it’s all being taken very seriously in the film industry.  The fMRI has come a long way since Stroop and friends, that’s for sure.

Phineas Gage – Where’d He Go?

This week’s lecture brought with it a whole lot of discussion of neuroimaging and the basic methods we have of doing such.  But, after a few hours of mulling over the topic, the only image I seem to be able to focus on is that of poor Phineas Gage and a sadly misplaced tamping rod.

 

So, “Who is this Gage?”, you may ask, or better- “what makes him so cool, and why are we talking about him 200 years later?”.  Well, let me spin you a tale.

Phineas Gage was a railroad foreman, and, from the sound of it, a damn good one.  Quite unfortunately for him, he found himself on the wrong side of a tamping iron – more or less, a crowbar without a bend in one end- as it was mistakenly blasted through the air.  Somewhat predictably, for all you dark-minded readers, the iron found Gage, more specifically, the left side of his face, and blasted on through his frontol lobe and out the top of his head.

 

Okay, so where are we going with this? Here’s the kicker- the guy lives, and not only does he live, he allegedly “within a few minutes, walked with little or no assistance and sat upright in a cart for the 3/4-mile ride to his lodgings in town.”

 

WHAT??? On top of that, when Dr. Edward H. Williams examined him, he couldn’t believe Gage’s manner of injury as he sat there describing the incident to him, until,  “[Gage] got up and vomited; [and] the effort of vomiting pressed out about half a teacupful of the brain, which fell upon the floor.”

 

Long story short, aside from a brief stint of infection and some vision loss, Gage healed well and survived for another 12 years, continuing to lead an active life.

 

Now, again, great story – but what’s the significance?  The important part comes into play after Gage healed and went back to his daily comings and goings.  Although Gage was functional and active, his friends said he was “no longer Gage.”  His employers, who had lauded him as highly efficient and as “a great favorite”, refused to let him return to his previous positon at work.  His primary doctor, John Martyn Harlow, described his condition as such- “The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man.”

While Gage was able to walk and talk and, for all intent and purpose, function, something was clearly wrong. In their 1994 study, Damasio et al. concluded that the iron had damaged both sides of Gage’s frontal lobe, but, in 2004,  Ratiu et al. concluded that only the left side was damaged.  The frontal lobe oft theoretically associated with emotion and practical decision-making, it was easy for scientists, theorists, and lay people alike to take the case of Gage and run with it.  As we learned in lecture, the case of Gage led to a lot of theories about localization of brain function because he was one of the first case studies of a circumscribed brain injury- that is to say, and injury that only affected a localized part of the brain.

 

While there is evidence and account that Gage experienced a marked change after his accident, it is unclear as to how much was exaggerated and/or fabricated to meet the needs of faulty science.  Even today, brain injury cases are wraught with difficulty, challenged with sampling difficulties and experimental control issues.

 

Phineas Gage left work that day as Gage no longer.  And yet, his name and his story, of the man before AND after the accident, are among neurosciences most iconic.

 

Nature vs. Experience: The Case of Twins

In the spirit of week two and my second blog post, I thought it appropriate to delve into another type of twos- twins, and, more specifically, what part genes and experience play in their psychological traits and development. In this past week’s readings, Pinel spent a lot time discussing genetics and how the popular question of nature vs. experience is not as simple a dichotomy as we would like to make it out to be.

By studying twins, however, we are at least able to compare and contrast differences in a way we would otherwise be unable to in individuals that did not share genes. Since identical twins share all of their genes, and fraternal twins share around 50%, by studying them, researches can estimate the heritability of their traits.

The Minnesota Twin Study is a famous and oft studied example of this sort of study- one that attempted to test the effects of environmental factors versus genetics. As it was found, adult identical twins were more similar in all the tested psychological dimensions than fraternal twins, no matter if they were raised together or apart. Since identical twins share all their genes, any differences between twins reared apart would have to be due to their environment. These findings lead scientists to be able to conclude that twin similarities are then due to their genes, not the environment they are raised in.

However, it is important to note that the twins reared apart, despite being raised by different people, were all raised in fairly similar ways. In their book, How Children Develop, Siegler, Deloache, and Eisenberg make the important point that if, in fact, the twins had been raised by more differing parental units- say, African bushmen or Los Angeles rap stars, the ‘experience’ factor could certainly have had more influence on their psychological traits.

To explore another perspective on the nature vs. experience non-dichotomy, according to Pinel, there is a lot of evidence out there that individuals with similar genes (twins, for example) seek out similar things. In this way, genes actually affect experience, rather than the two standing apart as separate factors. The multiplier effect is the term used to describe a gene that motivates the individual who possesses it to act in this way- to seek out experiences that match the behavioral consequences of the gene. So, for example, two twins that both share a genetic makeup that makes them, say, especially creative, may both be drawn to the arts as they develop. In this way, their genetic makeup actually has a visible effect on their experiences; again, demonstrating that nature vs. experience is not the simple dichotomy that many think of it as.

A final interesting point raised by Pinel, in a study on a sample of 7-year-old twins, it was found that IQ heritability was greatly effected by socioeconomic status. In twins that came from affluent families, the heritability estimate for IQ was far higher than for those from very poor families. Although there is much to be said that genes effect the development of behavior, this study, among others, goes to show that experience can play an important role of its own.

The Coolidge Effect

With my inaugural post -and those that will follow- I hope to put into layman’s terms some of the more salient and, in my mind, socially applicable topics brought to light in this course.  For any outside readers I am so optimistic as to think may stumble upon this blog, what you find here are merely the musings and ideas that come of a communication student dropped into a science-based course.

Kicking things off with perhaps one of the most ‘salient’ topics of them all (and certainly one of the most interesting), let’s talk sex.  More specifically, the so-called Coolidge Effect.

As the story goes, our great American leader and his wife were on a farm tour when they each, separately, were introduced to the farmer of said farm’s prized rooster.

The farmer boasted to the missus that the rooster copulated upwards of 10 times a day- to which she responded, “Be sure to tell that to Mr. Coolidge.”

Judging by her response, it seems safe to assume that she wasn’t engaging in sexual activity nearly as often as she would have liked.  But, based on a whole lot of scientific very convincing research, this wasn’t necessarily because her husband was some sort of prude.

Again to President Coolidge, the farmer boasted about his rooster, to which Coolidge countered with something along the lines of, “Oh really?  Same Hen every time?”  When the farmer clarified that it was, in fact, with a different hen each time, Coolidge simply replied “Be sure to tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

=      ????????

What does it all mean?  The answer lies within the Coolidge Effect.  Coolidge may not have been a prude- on the contrary, according to the effect that carries his name, he may have just been bored.

Numerous experiments have been conducted on a variety of animals exploring the prevalence of the Coolidge Effect.  Although the original experiment was conducted using rats, male monkeys, hamsters, and even insects all seem to exhibit some variation of the same response.  Simply put, these animals, time and time again, are more sexually receptive to the unfamiliar mate than to the one that they had previously copulated with.

Even in an experiment conducted by Lester and Gorzalka (1988) examining the effect in females, the difference between the fresh partner and the familiar partner was still significant.

(On a side note: this experiment is a great example of where the different ethical restrictions for animals versus humans comes in handy)

The reason behind it all seems to be able to be boiled down to dopamine, fondly referred to by Psychology Today as the “I gotta have it” substance that runs through our brains.  As they explain, the same phenomenon that allows us to suddenly have room for dessert after a gut-stuffing meal is responsible for our desire, or lack thereof, for a sexual partner.

When the rats in Beach and Jordan’s 1956 study had copulated to their heart’s content, they grew exhausted and began to ignore the females around them.  However, with the introduction of a new female (the dessert, so to speak), they were re-energized, and, again, ready to copulate.  In other words, the new female gave the male rat a dopamine spike strong enough to overcome his refractory period.

Bringing this all back around to the Coolidge’s, it certainly seems a little clearer where the Mister was coming from.  Sure, Mrs. Coolidge was probably a very exciting prospect for him at one time, but, going with the story, it sounds like she may have become just another turkey dinner to him when all he wanted was dessert.  The whole thing sure sheds some light on why “how to add novelty to your relationship” seems to grace every other woman’s magazine cover.