Reflections on the Group Project

I have to admit that I initially had reservations when I heard that this class required a group project, since I'd never really had a truly positive experience in working with a group on an academic assignment before.  In almost every case, and especially in high school, I'd usually end up being the one who shouldered the majority of the burden in order to ensure that the job was done right.

I am very happy to report that my experience this time around was emphatically nothing like these previous nightmare scenarios.  My partners were simply great.  Everyone got along, everyone was dedicated to making sure the presentation went as well as it could go, and everyone had ideas to contribute.  I never felt like anyone was slacking off or tending towards dictatorship.  It was even, dare I say it, fun!  The best part was probably getting to sit around and keep a running Mystery Science Theater 3000-like commentary going on the movies we watched, especially with the occasional silliness and all the anachronisms present in Westworld.

The experience has definitely made me look at group work with a more open mind: we got the work done, it was fun doing it, and I got to make some new friends.  And I would definitely like to take this opportunity to thank Josh and Lucie if they're reading this.  You guys are awesome!

Link

For the last 11 years, I’ve owned a Yorkshire Terrier named Link.  This is (a very blurry picture of) Link:

(And yes, for those of you who are wondering, I named him after the protagonist in the Legend of Zelda series.  I was nine and a bit obsessed.  And yes, his name is still awesome.)

Everyone has the tendency to believe that their dog is smarter than they probably are.  It’s possible I’m guilty of this too, but Link always struck me as a pretty smart dog, or at least a fast learner.  When we first got him, he would always try to dash out the door whenever we tried to leave.  We initially got around his attempts to escape by throwing a toy in the opposite direction.  He’d get distracted and run after the toy, after which we’d quickly exit and close the door behind ourselves.  That only worked twice: he quickly caught on, and we had to devise new methods of getting him to stay inside.

Also, he learned very quickly that the word “outside” indicated that we were going to take him for a run.  Any time we said it in conversation, his ears would perk up, and he’d head for the door.  We tried to get around that by spelling the word out, but after a little while, he figured that out as well.  Now, everyone in my family is careful to not mention the word around him unless they want to deal with a hyperactive dog for the next few minutes. 

And now, even at age 11, he still shows a propensity for figuring out our habits—especially those that predict when he gets food.  

Social Neuroscience Experiment

Earlier this week, I participated in my first social psychology experiment.  Naturally, then, I wasn't quite sure what to expect.   

The experimental environment was far simpler than I had expected.  I sat by myself in a soundproof room (intriguing to me, since I'd never been in one), situated in front of a computer equipped with what seemed like a modified Playstation controller.  

The actual experimental task was much simpler than I expected as well.  My job was to fixate on a point in the center of the screen and identify a highlighted image that appeared in an array of blurred objects.  The highlighted image could be either a person, a house, or nothing at all.  The salient object would also be randomly highlighted at the corners by four colored squares (blue or green), with each color indicating a degree of reward associated with getting the image correct (green for high reward, blue for low reward).    

There was a catch, of course: the presented array lasted a very short amount of time, so discerning what object I had seen proved difficult at first.  But over the course of the experiment, I noticed that my accuracy and reaction time increased significantly compared to the first trial.  Moreover, I noticed interesting patterns in my selection behavior emerge: I was a lot faster and a lot more confident in selecting faces than anything else, and I was much more careful to be correct in selecting the green (high-reward) images.

I don't know if these responses were what they were expecting or actually examining; it's entirely possible they were examining something else about my behavior, but what it might be, I can only speculate.  Regardless, it was certainly an interesting experience.  And hey, I contributed to science!  That's pretty awesome in itself.

David Hume

If I had to pick a favorite philosopher, I would probably select the 18^th-century Scottish intellectual David Hume.  Hume is quite rightly a giant in the field, and his arguments, buttressed by cogent reasoning and a sharp wit, have maintained influence to this day.

Perhaps one of Hume’s most interesting intellectual developments was his account of how ideas are generated.  Hume held that whatever non-mathematical ideas we have are ultimately predicated upon experience—upon sense impressions—such that we cannot imagine anything whose constituents are not elements of our prior experience.

This account still allows for an explanation of how we can imagine things that we have not experienced—for example, a golden mountain.  When we have an idea of a golden mountain, we take two ideas, “golden” and “mountain,” and combine them in our mind.  By the same process, we may generate ideas of unicorns, ghosts, and most controversially, God.  Importantly, however, these constituent ideas rely on prior experience, so we could not imagine a mountain of a color of which we are unaware.  In this way and in others, Hume was arguably one of the first to engage in a sort of proto-psychology.

Hume is also famous for his profound skepticism in denying our ability to know causation as anything other than extraordinarily high correlation.  Furthermore, his demonstration that inductive reasoning is circular has been a consistent but convincing thorn in the side of the empirically-inclined ever since. 

I could go on about his support of religious toleration or his commentary on political philosophy, but I believe the ideas I have presented provide enough reason as to why Hume remains perennially fascinating and is perhaps my favorite philosopher.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

Of the economic choice games I’m familiar with, I’m going to have to opt for the classic prisoner’s dilemma as my favorite.  While it’s hard to be emotionally attached to a mathematical model—at least for me, though I’m sure there’s someone out there who is—I believe it rightly inspires awe for the explanatory power it provides. 

It seems as if there’s an almost limitless number of ways to adjust the parameters of the game: you can change the number of players, iterate the game a certain number of times (or assume it’s played indefinitely), alter the reward distributions, alter the participants’ knowledge of their partner’s intentions, and so on.  Each alteration provides the game with new explanatory powers.  I don’t claim to be familiar with all of them, but it’s clear that the prisoner’s dilemma can be used to derive profound insights from fields as varied as political science, economics, and even evolutionary theory. 

The latter is probably my favorite example of how the game can arrive at powerful theoretical explanations.  If applied to evolutionary theory, the prisoner’s dilemma (and, additionally, other economic choice games) can provide a model by which altruistic behaviors may be selected for in nature.  The explanation is perhaps too long to get into here, but the gist of it is that if organisms enter into a game on the assumption that both will cooperate on the first turn, then both will have the greatest opportunity for long-term benefit.  This encourages altruistic behaviors, at least at the outset, though of course rational self-interest can take back over if one of them cheats. 

While I don’t understand every application of the prisoner’s dilemma—there are few who actually do—it continues to intrigue me like no other economic game.  

On Breaking Social Norms

To fulfill this little project, I decided, quite contrary to my normal inclinations, to make this morning’s C-2 ride as obnoxious as possible for every unfortunate soul within earshot.   

Once the bus driver had pulled away from the stop, I pulled out my phone and proceeded to have a very loud conversation with no one.  It went something like this:

“YEAH?”

“I’LL BE THERE IN A SECOND.”

“I’M ON THE C-2.”

“THE C-2.”

“THE C-2.”

“I SAID I’M ON THE C-2.” 

“YEAH, OK.  I’LL SEE YOU SHORTLY.”

I’m not sure how many people realized the conversation was fake, but the higher-than-is-acceptable volume of my voice had a demonstrable effect.  I was the target of a number of dirty looks, and the guy sitting across from me moved down a few seats.  Needless to say, there’s probably not much chance of me making friends with anyone on that bus.  (And thank God I didn’t know anyone.)

What was particularly interesting about this little venture was just how difficult it was to actually do it and break the social norm governing volume in a public place.  I was incredibly nervous before making my fake call and while making it.  I was trying the whole time to talk myself out of doing it, and because of that, I almost didn’t follow through.  And even after I had finished the ordeal, I could feel (and see, when I extricated my gaze from my lap) everyone on the bus staring daggers at me.  My cheeks flushed with the shame of my (truthfully very mild) transgression.

After a taste of the inward and outward shame afforded me by this incident, I can only imagine how hard doing something seriously offensive would be for me.

Social Neuroscience Talk: Susan Fiske

Earlier in the academic year, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Princeton’s Susan Fiske titled “Varieties of (De)Humanizing: Divided by Status and Competition.”  Dr. Fiske focused primarily upon the thesis that social cognition and dehumanization, or the tendency of people to view members of outgroups as less-than-human, varies along predictable dimensions. 

These dimensions, warmth and competence, may be familiar from class.  Warmth represents how we view the social intent of the agent in question—whether they mean us good or ill—and competence represents how able the targeted person is capable of bringing about what they intend.  Dr. Fiske explained how high/low degrees of warmth and competence could be represented in a 2x2 grid, the quadrants of which correspond to certain social emotions.  These are pride (high warmth/high competence), corresponding to ingroup members; envy (low warmth/high competence); pity (high warmth/low competence); and disgust (low warmth/low competence), reserved for social outgroups like the homeless and drug addicts.

What was particularly fascinating was Dr. Fiske’s explanation of how changing the context of a person assessment changes how an experimental subject perceives that person neurologically, primarily in the medial prefrontal cortex.  For example, if researchers explained that an apparent drug addict were given a story in which they were attempting to go to rehab or something similar, the subject’s evaluation of that person would increase in warmth.  Moreover, if people with injuries (in the “pity” category) were explained to have been responsible for their injury, sympathy for that person diminished.  And amusingly, people seem to exhibit schadenfreude for people in the envy category (bankers, lawyers, etc.): they seem to enjoy the idea of bad things happening to them.

The talk was, in sum, a thoroughly engrossing experience and a testament to the explanatory power of social neuroscience to enthrall.

Hormones

In 9^th grade, when I was 14, my rather poor running technique caused me to develop shin splints after only a week or two in gym class.  One trip to the doctor later, and I was prescribed a mild steroid to treat the feeling of knives digging into my shins. 

I don’t particularly remember what steroid it was specifically, nor do I have concrete memory of how it was administered (though I believe it was in pill form).  In any case, taking this anonymous steroid certainly diminished the pain of walking significantly, though I began to notice other, mild changes in my behavior.  Now, one could possibly chalk this up to the placebo effect and my prior expectations of what steroids do (I remember thinking it was strange and oddly funny that I was taking steroids), but I definitely noticed little things.  I remember being more irritable, and I was less inhibited in trying the more “macho” aspects of gym class. 

Again, these were mild steroids, so the effects probably wouldn’t have been anything too significant.  Certainly, I didn’t experience anything close to “’roid rage,” but I was still happy to finally get off of them once my shin splints healed, and my mood seemed to improve noticeably.

A Brief Overview of Emotion

It seems that the answer to the question “what is emotion?” changes depending upon the perspective invoked.  From the perspective of the layman, emotion encompasses various states of mind from happy and sad to angry and fearful.  Explaining what emotions are usually seems to elicit a description of experiencing these feelings without a hypothesis as to what underlies them.

Of course, there are other, more intricate perspectives which are too numerous to explore here.  However, it is perhaps most appropriate to consider emotions from a neuroscientific standpoint, and I think any scientifically useful definition of emotion must draw upon its neurological underpinnings.  The issue is hardly settled, but I’ve seen theories explaining emotion as cognitive interpretations of bodily states as well as heuristics that provide information or motivation without having to refer directly to conscious cognition.  As to whether emotions arise from interpretations of bodily states or are the result of cognitive processes causing these states, I do not know enough to speak.  However, the heuristic model of emotion seems to make sense from an evolutionary perspective.  For example, it would seem more adaptive for an organism to experience fear immediately and react to that motivation rather than having to reason through the situation before responding.

In any case, I believe that a definition of emotion must involve an evolutionary understanding of its function (from its possible role as a social signal as well as its role in motivating action) as well as an understanding of the underlying biology and neurobiology.  

Visual Perceptual Learning via Inception

Well, it looks like Chris Nolan might have been on to something: it appears that learning via inception may actually be possible.  

In this experiment, Shibata et al. used an fMRI online-feedback method to induce visual perceptual learning (VPL) in the absence of real and specific target stimuli.  This online-feedback method recorded "activation patterns corresponding to the pattern evoked by the presentation of a real and specific target orientation stimulus" in order to repeatedly induce similar patterns in participants without their knowledge of what was being learned and without external stimulus presentation.  Participants were subsequently able to perform better in an orientation discrimination task, demonstrating a causal link between induced specific neural activity patterns and VPL.

It’s hard to read this paper without wanting to shout "Inception!", but even the researchers seem to have realized this implication.  In the final paragraph, they say that this fMRI neurofeedback method can "'incept' a person to acquire new learning, skills, or memory."  I personally hesitate in touting the implications of this paper for the types of learning the authors note, however.  It would seem that the ability to "incept" such learning depends on the plasticity of the region of the adult cortex in question, and it is an open question—perhaps out of my own ignorance—as to how plastic certain cortical areas actually are.

The application of this method to other areas of the brain, if possible, would carry significant ethical ramifications: while it would certainly be admirable to augment the brain in such a way that a person could learn more, it could feasibly be used to incept certain maleficent ideas into participants.  Nonetheless, this study is a fascinating example of the possible uses of fMRI technology to do more than simply record brain data.

Ghost from the Machine: A Sketch of an Ideal Brain Scanner

                

If given the opportunity to design any brain- or mind-reading device, it would be difficult to restrain oneself from creating an ideal scanner unconstrained by the limitations of current technology.  To that end, my device would render the highest spatial and temporal resolution possible, and it would not, through some miracle of technology, sacrifice one for the other.  It would essentially be able to read brain activity in real time as well as locate the activity with utmost precision.

 

                I admit that I don’t have the technical expertise to suggest its mechanism with certainty, but I have a hunch it would be based upon measuring the brain’s electrical activity.  It would be a direct measure, similar to an EEG, but the device would be able to locate this activity with a high degree of precision similar to an fMRI.  However, it would avoid the problems inherent in fMRI readings, specifically the fact that fMRI merely measures the correlation between brain activity and blood flow.

                With a sufficiently advanced degree of precision and knowledge about the brain, it is conceivable that the device could read conscious thought from brain activity.  The advantages of such a device are innumerable and would conceivably allow us, with enough time and experiments, to unlock all or nearly all the secrets of the brain.  We could, for instance, measure the brain activity related to a certain task and determine which aspects of this activity contribute to conscious experience and which are effectively subconscious.  Whether such a device is realistic now or at any point is an open question, but the increasing growth rate of technological sophistication provides plausible enough grounds to think that we can at least approximate this ideal some day.

Derek Paravicini

                

                Since I don’t personally know anyone with a brain injury or disorder, this week I turn instead to the fascinating case of Derek Paravicini.  Derek is perhaps the archetypal idiot savant: he is a prodigiously gifted musician who, while being extraordinarily adept at the piano and possessing an exceptional ear for music, otherwise suffers extreme cognitive and motor impairments.

                Derek is fascinating primarily for the duality of his condition and what it offers to the curious neuroscientist.  His most notable gift is his impeccable ear and seemingly endless ability to assimilate musical idioms.  He can reportedly recall from memory any piece he has ever heard and play it on piano.  Even more astounding, he can interpret the pieces he plays dynamically, taking audience requests and reinterpreting, say, “The Girl from Ipanema” as a Beethoven scherzo.  Furthermore, he has the fine motor control necessary to play the panorama of pieces in his repertoire and the requisite working memory to remember how to play them.

                Of course, these incredible gifts come at a severe cognitive cost.  Derek is blind and severely mentally disabled, showing an inability to remember his own age or even count properly.  More curiously, while he displays the precise motor control necessary to play piano exquisitely, he lacks the ability to perform simple tasks like buttoning the buttons on his shirt.

                It would of course be intriguing to see the inner workings of Derek’s brain to determine the neurological correlates of both his severe deficits and exceptional talents.  Would his prefrontal cortex be less developed than his primary audio cortex, say?  How would his primary motor strip be affected?  Sadly, these are as yet questions to which I can only speculate.

September 6th: Statistics, Journal Articles, and Confusion

                For me, one of the most consistently confusing things about reading empirical science journal articles is the abundance of references to statistical methods and models with which I have little familiarity.  This is generally more a product of my relatively elementary understanding of statistics than any fault of the researchers—though I expect that if they were in error, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell unless it were especially egregious.  I’ve only taken an AP Statistics class in high school, so once the subject matter goes beyond p-values, Bayes’ Theorem, and the like, I’m mostly lost; I find it difficult to understand a lot of the models proposed in the articles this week, for example.  I feel as if I have a good grasp of the conceptual aspects of basic statistics, but it’s certain that there’s more for me to learn.

                Furthermore, the manner in which most journal articles are written can occasionally interfere with my initial understanding of technical points, even if I am usually adept at grasping the main points of experimental design.  Now, I understand that the purpose of such papers is information rather than entertainment, but it often seems that the pervasiveness of passive voice and the density of field-specific jargon do much to obscure the more technical and subtle points in my mind.  Again, this has less to do with the authors—these characteristics are largely matters of journalistic convention—and more to do with the way I am accustomed to reading.  The disconnect between the thrill of scientific discovery and the occasional drudgery of reading journal articles is somewhat disappointing, however: I often wish that most science articles would read as excitingly as the content within, though this fancy is hardly important in light of the enlightenment these papers can provide.

Why Study Neuroscience?

My interest in the field stems from a desire, rooted in philosophy, to know how the brain constructs the world around it.  To that end, my interest in the neuroscience of social behavior arises largely from a preoccupation with the manner in which our brains influence the way we interact in and model social situations. 

My particular curiosity regarding the subject was first piqued when Dr. Harris delivered a guest lecture in my Neuro101 class.  The part of the lecture that remains most prominent in my mind involves how the brain often processes certain individuals—the homeless, drug addicts, and the like—as something less than human, neurologically speaking.  This type of dehumanization phenomena continues to fascinate me, for it offers potentially remarkable insight into how people are susceptible to violating personal codes of ethics and societal norms when faced with these social outcasts: if the brain literally does not process them with the same mechanisms as it does for those of a social in-group—if it does not process them as fully human—this neurological dehumanization makes it all the easier to mistreat them.  Naturally, I’m excited in what this class offers in regards to the prospect of further insights into how the brain constructs the world, particularly how this influences our perceptions of other individuals. 

Moreover, and more practically, I am interested in pursuing a thesis in neuroscience, and the methods-based aspects of this class should familiarize me with the various methods of the field.  In this way, I may have a more fertile intellectual ground from which to pursue a research question. 

Finally, and quite simply and sufficiently for me, neuroscience is fascinating.  Why not study it?