November 6, 2009
This is absolutely fascinating, yet another reminder that the structure of language infects everything. Here's Nell Greenfieldboyce, at NPR:
The distinctive sounds of a newborn's first cries may be influenced by the mother tongue of its parents.
A new study of over a thousand recorded cries from 30 French newborns and 30 German newborns found differences in the cries' melody patterns. French cries tended to have a rising melody, while the German cries tended to have a falling melody.
The finding suggests that newborns just a few days old may already be trying to imitate the prevailing intonation patterns of the language they heard while still in the womb.
The moral is that, even before we're born, we are deeply influenced by the syllables and grammars that surround us. The words are still meaningless, and yet they leave a meaningful mark on the brain. This reminds me of that great Wallace Stevens quote: "Speech is not dirty silence/Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier." Babies, it turns out, are also corrupting the silence with a kind of speech. From the moment our brain is made, we start to express ourselves in the terms and forms of language, so that even the most instinctive utterance - the scream of a newborn - is still shaped by culture.
UPDATE: Important qualifications from the always lucid Language Log:
This is a really interesting and suggestive study, which needs to be replicated to be entirely convincing. It finds a fairly large difference in the distribution of pitch and amplitude profiles of French and German neonates, with the French babies tending to produce cries with later peaks that the German babies. The effect size in the reported data is a large one (d=1.0).
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:14 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 4, 2009
As a chronic insomniac, I'm always a little disturbed when I learn about the lingering cognitive effects of a bad night sleep:
In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the cognitive effects of a week of poor sleep, followed by three days of sleeping at least eight hours a night. The scientists found that the "recovery" sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks, especially for subjects who had been forced to sleep only three or five hours a night.
In a similar study in 2008, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that when subjects slept four hours a night over five days, and then "recovered" with eight hours a night over the following week, they still showed slight residual cognitive impairments a week later, even though they reported no sleepiness.
Or this:
In a recent study for The Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists followed 153 men and women for two weeks, keeping track of their quality and duration of sleep. Then, during a five-day period, they quarantined the subjects and exposed them to cold viruses. Those who slept an average of fewer than seven hours a night, it turned out, were three times as likely to get sick as those who averaged at least eight hours.
My problem with these studies is that they make me less likely to fall asleep. To understand why, let's play a simple game with only one rule: Don't think about white bears. You can think about anything else, but you can't think about that. Ready? Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and banish the animals from your head.
You just lost the game. Everyone loses the game. As Dostoevsky observed in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: "Try to avoid thinking of a white bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute." In fact, whenever we try not to think about something that something gets trapped in the mind, stuck in the recursive loop of self-consciousness. Our attempt at repression turns into an odd fixation.
This human frailty has profound consequences. Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, refers to the failure as an "ironic" mental process. Whenever we establish a mental goal -- such as trying not to think about white bears -- the goal is accompanied by an inevitable follow-up thought, as the brain checks to see if we're making progress. The end result, of course, is that we obsess over the one thing we're trying to avoid.
What does this have to do with sleep? For me, insomnia is my white bear. My conscious goal is to fall asleep, which then causes my unconscious to continually check up on whether or not I'm achieving my goal. And so, after passing out for thirty seconds, I'm jolted awake by my perverse brain. It's rather frustrating.
And this is why I can't help but grit my teeth when I hear about how important a good night sleep is. I know it's important, OK? I don't need more reasons to try to fall asleep, because the more I want to fall asleep - the more intensely I'm trying to achieve my goal - the less likely I am to actually pass out. I'll lie awake, haunted by thoughts of white bears and cognitive deficits.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:53 PM • 36 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 3, 2009
This is excellent news. Dan Delong will be back in the classroom today. I'm so relieved.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:32 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why are we so dishonest? Why do we bad things, even when we know we're doing something bad? Ever since Adam and Eve ate that apple, we've assumed that there is something inherently tempting about sin. If left to our own devices, we'd all turn into men at a Vegas bachelor party, indulging in sex, drugs and slot machines. We'd loot and pillage and lie. Immorality feels good, which is why it's so hard being moral.
Some people, of course, are made of stronger stuff, which is why they stay on the righteous path. Because they're better than us, they don't eat too much cake or cheat on their taxes. (Eternal heaven is their reward for avoiding such sins.) There is good and there is bad, and being good is about resisting the allure of the bad. It's about not listening to the snake, telling us to eat the forbidden fruit.
If only morality were so easy! A new paper demonstrates, once again, that the human brain is the ultimate category buster, blurring the lines of good and bad, black and white, until everything is gray. The reason is that our behavior is deeply contextual, profoundly influenced by our surroundings and immediate situations. Whether or not we're able to resist sin, then, might depend more on the details of the sin - and whether or not it triggers our automatic urges - then on the strength of our moral fiber.
That, at least, is the tentative conclusion of a clever new fMRI study by Joshua Greene and Joe Paxton at Harvard University, who argue that sometimes we do the right thing because the wrong thing simply isn't tempting, even if it leaves us better off. Consider a hypothetical wallet, stuffed full of cash, which you find on the subway. Our moral intuitions (influenced by Genesis) tell us that everyone wants to take the money and run, that we're all attracted by the possibility of unearned cash. But this latest study suggests that, at least for the people who take the wallet to the police, there is no temptation to resist. They don't steal because they don't want to steal; telling the truth isn't hard work. They are living, in other words, in a state of moral grace, at least when it comes to the wallet. (Interestingly, Greene and Paxton found that people who behaved dishonestly in the experiment exhibited more activity in brain areas, such as the prefrontal cortex, associated with self-control. In other words, they might be trying harder to resist, but it's doing no good.) Here's Piercarlo Valdesolo, describing the study in Mind Matters:
Greene and Paxton were interested in why people behave honestly when confronted with the opportunity to anonymously cheat for personal gain. They considered two possible explanations. First, there is the "Will" hypothesis: in order to behave honestly people must actively resist the temptation to cheat. In other words, returning the wallet depends on your ability to stifle your desire to take the cash and buy yourself something nice. Alternatively, there is the "Grace" hypothesis: honest behavior results from the absence of temptation. Returning the wallet requires no particular ability to control your treacherous urges - the urge simply isn't there.
These two hypotheses make competing predictions regarding the brain regions activated when acting honestly as well as the time it should take participants to decide to act honestly. If "Will" is correct then people who choose to act honestly should exhibit heightened activity in brain regions responsible for cognitive control (presumably resulting from the struggle to ignore immediate desires). But if "Grace" is right then no such increase should occur. Furthermore, people should take a longer time to decide to act honestly if doing so requires a conscious act of "Will," but a relatively shorter time to act if all you need is a bit of "Grace."
In order to test these possibilities the researchers measured neural activity in an fMRI machine while participants played a computerized game wherein they could gain money by predicting the outcome of coin flips. Correctly guess heads or tails, you get some cash. In one condition, participants recorded their predictions before seeing any of the flips, precluding the opportunity to cheat. In the other condition, participants were rewarded based on self-reported accuracy after the flips, and therefore could fudge their predictions in accordance with the outcome of the flip. I got 100 percent correct, Mr. Experimenter, must be my lucky day!
Consistent with the "Grace" hypothesis, those who acted honestly (who guessed wrong and self-reported as much) showed no increased activity in control-related areas relative to others who guessed wrong but did not have the opportunity to cheat. Honest reporting of scores, then, didn't require will-power, these participants simply did not feel the urge to cheat. Reaction time data further supported "Grace" showing that participants who acted honestly took no longer to do so, on average, when they had the opportunity to cheat than when they did not.
Why might such a state of temporary moral grace exist? The answer returns us to evolution, and to our history as social primates. One possibility is that we come pre-programmed for certain kinds of ethical behavior, as it might be more important to have an honest reputation within the group than to have a few extra dollars. And so we return the wallet, not because we've triumphed over our sinful urges but because, at least on this one subway ride, the urge did not exist. It will be interesting to conduct some follow-up studies, and see if it's possible to induce this state of grace in strangers. How can we make people think about their social reputation, and not the cash? We're so concerned about our credit history, but what about our virtue history?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:56 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 2, 2009
Michael Posner and Brenda Patoine make a neuroscientific case for arts education. They argue that teaching kids to make art has lasting cognitive benefits:
If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you try it? Judging by the abundance of products, programs and pills that claim to offer "cognitive enhancement," many people are lining up for just such quick brain fixes. Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts--such as music, dance or theater--strengthens the brain's attention system, which in turn can improve cognition more generally.
We know that the brain has a system of neural pathways dedicated to attention. We know that training these attention networks improves general measures of intelligence. And we can be fairly sure that focusing our attention on learning and performing an art--if we practice frequently and are truly engaged--activates these same attention networks. We therefore would expect focused training in the arts to improve cognition generally.
They even have some longitudinal evidence:
In 2004, E. Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto at Mississauga published results from a randomized, controlled study showing that the IQ scores of 72 children who were enrolled in a yearlong music training program increased significantly compared with 36 children who received no training and 36 children who took drama lessons. (The IQ scores of children taking drama lessons did not increase, but these children did improve more than the other groups on ratings of selected social skills.)
Just a few additional thoughts. The current obsession with measuring learning certainly has some benefits (accountability is good), but it also comes with some serious drawbacks, since it diminishes all the forms of learning, like arts education, that can't be translated into a score on a multiple choice exam. That's why the research cited above is so important: it helps us appreciate the "soft" skills that we tend to neglect.
But I think that even this clinical evaluation of arts education misses an important benefit: self-expression. I shudder to think that second graders, at least in most schools, are never taught the value of putting their mind on the page. They are drilled in spelling, phonetics and arithmetic (the NCLB school day must be so tedious), and yet nobody ever shows them how to take their thoughts and feelings and translate them into a paragraph or a painting. We assume that creativity will take care of itself, that the imagination doesn't need to be nurtured. But that's false. Creativity, like every cognitive skill, takes practice; expressing oneself well is never easy.
Finally, I think arts education, and the self-expression it encourages, can give children a tiny taste of an essential mental state: flow. First proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow is a condition of complete and effortless focus, characterized by total immersion in the task at hand. We don't notice the clock, or think about what we're eating for lunch - we're just thinking about what we're doing. (Not surprisingly, people are exceedingly happy while engaged in flow activities, be it composing a poem or constructing a Legos set.*)
Children have an extraordinary natural capacity for flow. (I've always loved this Auden aphorism, which he adapted from Nietzsche: "Maturity - to recover the seriousness one had as a child at play.") Unfortunately, I think most school kids never experience a taste of flow at school. Instead, they are drilled in all the usual subjects, from arithmetic to reading. The downside of this pedagogy is that it leads kids to conclude that learning is a dry and tedious pursuit, where we will always count the minutes until recess. Perhaps arts education improves our attentional system because it shows children that attention isn't always hard work. Sometimes, we want to focus, because we enjoy what we're focused on.
*I once wrote an entire essay in grad school on the presence of flow in the novels of John Updike. I think one of the reasons Updike was so interested in sex was that he saw the act of sex as a prime example of flow, a blessed state of grace in which we glimpse our larger purpose. Unfortunately, for most adults sex is their only flow experience, as work is full of meaningless drudgery.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:05 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 30, 2009
I still don't have any additional details, but the initial newspaper report from the Jacksonville Journal-Courier is disturbing:
A Southwestern High School English teacher has been suspended after reports he had students in his classes to read an article about homsexuality in the animal kingdom.
Dan Delong of Carlinville acknowledged his suspension but declined to comment further until he spoke with his union representative.
Delong is said to have allowed students to read the article "The Gay Animal Kingdom" from the June 7, 2006, edition of Seed magazine. Seed magazine is a science and culture publication.
The article by Jonah Lehrer talks about the research of Joan Roughgarden, a biology professor at Stanford University who said she has documented homosexual societies among the more than 450 animal species.
School district secretary Pat Milner said a special School Board meeting has been set for 6 p.m. Monday at the district office in Piasa to discuss personnel/employee discipline.
Here, in case you're interested, is the controversial article.
UPDATE: Here's a Facebook page in support of Mr. Delong. And be sure to check out some of the comments below by his former students.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:04 AM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 29, 2009
In the latest N+1, Marco Roth takes a critical look at the rise of the "neuronovel":
The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel--the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind--has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. ince 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (de Clérambault's syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional "presiding psychiatrist" and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette's syndrome), Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers's The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington's disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray's Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in "literary fiction." There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.
The essay is largely a lament for the decline of pre-neuroscientific novels, which weren't so infatuated with this "new reductionism of mind to brain, eagerly taken up by the press--especially the New York Times in its science pages." Here is Roth:
By comparison with most 19th-century novels, and even with most 20th-century modernist novels of the "stream of consciousness" school, the neuronovels have in them very little of society, of different classes, of individuals interacting, of development either alongside or against historical forces and expectations.
Instead, Roth argues that the new neuronovel subscribes to a cheap oversimplification of reality, in which "the proximate causes of mental function [are explained] in terms of neurochemistry, and ultimate causes in terms of evolution and heredity." The end result, Roth suggests, is "that the new genre of the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel's diminishing purview."
It's a perceptive and provocative essay, but I don't buy it. For one thing, Roth fails to place the new "neuronovel" in its proper historical context. There is nothing new or trendy about novelists borrowing the language and theories of contemporary science, or even indulging in reductionism and determinism when it suits their aesthetic principles. Consider Emile Zola, the proud founder of naturalism who aspired to write "the scientific novel." The novelist, Zola declared, must literally become a scientist, "employing the experimental method in their study of man." Unfortunately, this led Zola to proclaim his blind faith in heredity and biological determinism. As he wrote in his preface to Therese Raquin, "I have chosen people completely dominated by their nerves and blood, without free will, drawn to each action by the inexorable laws of their physical nature." Of course, Zola's theories are now woefully obsolete. As Oscar Wilde declared, "Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism."
The point is that the "reductionism" and "chemical determinism" that have supposedly been embraced by 21st century neuronovelists is both 1) not new and 2) far more subtle and nuanced than the reductionism and determinism celebrated by many 19th century realists. There's a long and rich history of fiction interacting with the latest scientific facts, and I think it's important to understand the neuronovel in this context. George Eliot famously described her novels as a "a set of experiments in life." (She was particularly interested in contesting the ideas of "social physics," the determinism of her day.) Virginia Woolf, before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, said that in her new novel the "psychology should be done very realistically." Gertrude Stein did research on automatic writing with William James, before doing research in a neuroanatomy lab at Johns Hopkins. Whitman worked in Civil War hospitals and corresponded for years with the neurologist who discovered phantom limb syndrome. (He also kept up with phrenology, the brain science of his day.) Or look at Coleridge. When the poet was asked why he attended so many lectures on chemistry, he gave a great answer: "To improve my stock of metaphors". In other words, this dialogue between contemporary art and contemporary science isn't some newfangled idea, or some 21st century publishing trend designed to sell books. Rather, it's part of a distinguished attempt to grapple with the implications of scientific theory, to understand how our new facts fit with our experience.
The second problem I have with Roth's essay is his misreading of many of the neuronovels he cites. Let's begin with Saturday, Ian McEwan's 2005 retelling of Mrs. Dalloway. The protoganist of the novel is a neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne. Roth reads Saturday as a brief in favor of "stark biological determinism":
We're always in Perowne's scientific mind, a mind capable of reflecting on itself in up-to-date terms of neuroscience, though we also catch glimpses of his creator guiding us, as in the surgeon's reflections on the superiority of neuroscience to ordinary language. When Perowne drives by an antiwar demonstration, a host of half thoughts arise, on war, death, terrorism, the justness of the cause. A voice tells us that all this occurs in "the pre-verbal language that linguists call mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second. . . . Even with a poet's gift of compression, it could take hundreds of words and many minutes to describe." Of course McEwan has almost done just that, even down to the color of Perowne's thoughts--"a sickly yellow"--but only while conceding the insufficiency of his chosen medium, like a painter ruing the fact that he is not a photographer.
I'd argue that Saturday is stuffed full of ambiguity. Instead of simply embracing the one-dimensional world view of the neurosurgeon, McEwan strives to constantly complicate it. As I wrote in Proust Was A Neuroscientist:
McEwan simultaneously contests the materialist world his character inhabits. Though Henry disdains philosophy and is bored by fiction, he is constantly lost in metaphysical reveries. As he picks up fish for dinner, Henry wonders "what the chances are, of this particular fish, from that shoal, ending up in the pages, no, on this page of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition." And yet, despite the odds, our reality holds itself together: the fish is there, wrapped in newspaper in the plastic bag. Existence is a miracle.
It is also a precarious miracle. Woolf showed us this with Septimus, whose madness served to highlight the fragility of sanity. McEwan chooses Baxter, a man suffering from Huntington's disease, to produce a parallel effect. Baxter's disease, thinks the neurosurgeon, "is biological determinism in its purest form. The misfortune lies within a single gene, in an excessive repeat of a single sequence--CAG." There is no escape from this minor misprint.
But McEwan doesn't make the logical mistake of believing that such a deterministic relationship is true of life in general. Henry knows that the real gift of our matter is to let us be more than matter. While operating on an exposed brain, Henry ruminates on the mystery of consciousness. He knows that even if science "solves" the brain, "The wonder will remain. That mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its center. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?"
Saturday does not answer the question. Instead, the novel strives to remind us, again and again, that the question has no answer. We will never know how the mind turns the water of our cells into the wine of consciousness. Even Baxter, a man defined by his tragic genetic flaw, is ultimately altered by a poem. When Henry's daughter begins reciting Mathew Arnold's "Dover Beach," a poem about the melancholy of materialism, Baxter is transfixed. The words "touched off a yearning he could barely begin to define." The plot of Saturday hinges on this chance event, on a mind being moved by nothing more real than rhyming words. Poetry sways matter. Could anything be less likely?
McEwan ends Saturday the way he began it: in the dark, in the present tense, with Henry in bed. It has been a long day. As Henry is drifting off to sleep, his last thoughts are not about the brain, or surgery, or materialism. All of that seems far away. Instead, Henry's thoughts return to the only reality we will ever know: our experience. The feeling of consciousness. The feeling of feeling. "There's always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there's only this."
McEwan's work is a potent demonstration that, even in this age of dizzying scientific detail, the artist remains a necessary voice. Through the medium of fiction, McEwan explores the limits of science while doing justice to its utility and eloquence. Though he never doubts our existence as a property of matter--this is why the surgeon can heal our wounds--McEwan captures the paradox of being a mind aware of itself. While we are a brain, we are the brain that contemplates its own beginnings.
Update: Be sure to check out Marco Roth's extremely smart and insightful reply in the comments below.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:23 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 27, 2009
Natalie Angiers profiles dopamine, which isn't just about rewards:
In the communal imagination, dopamine is about rewards, and feeling good, and wanting to feel good again, and if you don't watch out, you'll be hooked, a slave to the pleasure lines cruising through your brain. Hey, why do you think they call it dopamine?
Yet as new research on dopamine-deficient mice and other studies reveal, the image of dopamine as our little Bacchus in the brain is misleading, just as was the previous caricature of serotonin as a neural happy face.
In the emerging view, discussed in part at the Society for Neuroscience meeting last week in Chicago, dopamine is less about pleasure and reward than about drive and motivation, about figuring out what you have to do to survive and then doing it. "When you can't breathe, and you're gasping for air, would you call that pleasurable?" said Nora D. Volkow, a dopamine researcher and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "Or when you're so hungry that you eat something disgusting, is that pleasurable?"
In both responses, Dr. Volkow said, the gasping for oxygen and the wolfing down of something you would ordinarily spurn, the dopamine pathways of the brain are at full throttle. "The whole brain is of one mindset," she said. "The intense drive to get you out of a state of deprivation and keep you alive."
The caricature of dopamine as the chemical of hedonism and pleasure - it's what drives us to enjoy sex, drugs and rock and roll - was always mostly misleading. While dopamine does predict the arrival of rewards, the neurotransmitter is much more important that. Many dopamine researchers, for instance, refer to the chemical as our "neural currency," since it allows us to quickly assign a value to the multitudes of things and ideas in the outside world. (In other words, dopamine is the price tag of sensory information.) When we see something we want - and it doesn't matter if it's a chocolate cupcake or a glass of water - the mere sight of the object triggers a wave of emotional desire, which motivates us to act. (Emotion and motivation share the same Latin root, movere, which means "to move.") The world is full of possibilities, and it is our dopaminergic feelings that help us choose between them.
And it's not just chocolate cupcakes and lines of cocaine that make our dopamine neurons excited. In an oldish profile of Read Montague, a leading dopamine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, he notes that one of the innovations of the human brain is that dopamine also evaluates abstract ideas:
From the perspective of the brain, an abstraction can be just as rewarding as the tone that predicts the reward. Evolution essentially bootstrapped our penchant for intellectual concepts to the same reward circuits that govern our animal appetites. "The guy who's on hunger strike for some political cause is still relying on his midbrain dopamine neurons, just like a monkey getting a treat," Montague says. "His brain simply values the cause more than it values dinner." According to Montague, the reason abstract thoughts can be so rewarding, is that the brain relies on a common neural currency for evaluating alternatives. "It's clear that you need some way to compare your options, even if your options come from very different categories," he says. By representing everything in terms of neuron firing rates, the human brain is able to choose the abstract thought over the visceral reward, as long as the abstraction excites our cells more than apple juice. That's what makes ideas so powerful: No matter how esoteric or ethereal they get, they are ultimately fed back into the same system that makes us want sex and sugar. As Montague notes, "You don't have to dig very far before it all comes back to your loins."
The purpose of pleasure, then, is to make it easier for the pleasurable sensation - the delicious taste, the elegant idea, the desired object - to enter the crowded theater of consciousness, so that we'll go out and get it. That's why we've got a highway of nerves connecting the parts of the dopamine reward pathway - the nucleus accumbens, ventral striatum, etc - to the prefrontal cortex. (This also means that a well-turned phrase or pretty painting will be more likely to get stuck in working memory, since it's more rewarding. Aesthetics are really about attention.) Drugs like amphetamine and cocaine, which induce more dopaminergic activity, are chemical shortcuts: because those dopamine neurons in the midbrain are so excited - the neurotransmitter is skulking in the synapse - the world is suddenly saturated with intensely pleasurable ideas, which we can't stop thinking about. We want to talk to everyone and touch everything. If attention is like a spotlight, then these drug makes the filament burn brighter. The end result is that we can't look away.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:40 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 26, 2009
In a recent NY Times Magazine, Mark Bittman (aka the Minimalist) waxes enthusiastic on the potential of online grocery shopping:
That's why, to focus on things that could happen in our lifetimes, we should take a look at improving online grocery shopping. The one time I tried shopping online I was sent a free watermelon -- how does that happen? -- but that didn't make up for the even-less-than-supermarket quality of the food. This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser. You could specify, for example, "wild, never-frozen seafood" or "organic, local broccoli."
You could also immortalize your preferences ("Never show me anything whose carbon footprint is bigger than that of my car"; "Show me no animals raised in cages"; "Don't show me vegetables grown more than a thousand miles from my home"), along with any and all of your cooking quirks ("When I buy chicken, ask me if I want rosemary"). You would receive, if you wanted, an e-mail message when shipments of your favorite foods arrived at the store or went on sale; you could get recipe ideas, serving suggestions, shopping lists, nutritional information and cooking videos. If poor-quality food arrived -- yellowing broccoli, stinky fish, whatever -- you would receive store credit without any hassle.
While those would all be nice benefits - don't get me started on industrial meat production, because I turn into a self-righteous bore - I think the most important improvement triggered by online supermarket shopping would be a reduction in impulse purchases. By now, you are probably all tired of hearing about Walter Mischel and his marshmallow experiments. To summarize, Mischel tested the self-control of young children by asking them to not eat a marshmallow sitting right in front of them. Not surprisingly, most kids had a tough time waiting, with an average delay time under three minutes. They'd look at the yummy marshmallow, a pillowy sphere of sugar and corn starch, and their weak willpower muscles would wilt.
But there was one simple way to dramatically enhance the self-control of four-year olds: Instead of giving them an actual marshmallow, show them a picture of a marshmallow. Although the practical consequences were the same - if they picked up the picture, they could get a tasty treat right away - the presence of the photograph was much less alluring, a much "cooler" stimulus. The end result is that most kids didn't have trouble resisting the reward. (You can also teach kids to draw an imaginary picture frame around a real marshmallow, a cognitive trick that also enhanced willpower.)
What does this have to do with online grocery shopping? When we shop in a supermarket in person, we are confronted with an endless supply of "hot" stimuli, the shelves full of temptations. Maybe it's Haagan-Dazs ice cream, or all those different kinds of potato chips. Perhaps our weakness is dark chocolate or Snickers or sour gummy bears. The point is that everyone has a favorite food, and seeing that food right in front of us makes it much harder to delay gratification.
Like those four-year olds, however, we can ignore that pint of Haagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche when we're only looking at a picture of it. The stimulus has been cooled off by the online shopping experience - it's an abstraction, a mere image - which allows us to make more responsible shopping decisions. The same logic also applies to non-food impulse purchases, from cashmere sweaters to electronics. (This suggests that whenever we feel our self-control slipping away we should leave the store immediately and go shopping online. If we still want to buy the sweater on our computer, then maybe it really is a good deal.)
So here's a research proposal: someone should do a carefully controlled study looking at how our online supermarket decisions differ from our in person supermarket decisions. I'd bet that we make healthier choices when those tasty snacks are just photographs, shrunken to fit our computer screen.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:17 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
