February 8, 2010
Sam Anderson, in New York Magazine, takes on ChatRoulette, that strange new site that connects you, via webcam, with a stream of strangers:
The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it "the Holy Grail of all Internet fun." Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive--one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.
The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click "start" you're suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they're staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click "next," instantly calling up someone else. The result is surreal on many levels. Early ChatRoulette users traded anecdotes on comment boards with the eerie intensity of shipwreck survivors, both excited and freaked out by what they'd seen. There was a man who wore a deer head and opened every conversation with "What up DOE!?" A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers' portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who'd give him a topic. One man popped up on people's screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four. Occasionally, people even made nonvirtual connections: One punk-music blogger met a group of people from Michigan who ended up driving eleven hours to crash at his house for a concert in New York. And then, of course, fairly often, there was this kind of thing: "I saw some hot chicks then all of a sudden there was a man with a glass in his butthole." I sing the body electronic.
You can probably tell where this story is headed: ChatRoulette, of course, proves to be a profound disappointment. Anderson doesn't meet the Whitmanesque masses, but is instead rejected by a slew of surly teenagers and online weirdos:
I entered the fray on a bright Wednesday afternoon, with an open mind and an eager soul, ready to sound my barbaric yawp through the webcams of the world. I left absolutely crushed. It turns out that ChatRoulette, in practice, is brutal. The first eighteen people who saw me disconnected immediately. They appeared, one by one, in a box at the top of my screen--a young Asian man, a high-school-age girl, a guy lying on his side in bed--and, every time, I'd feel a little flare of excitement. Every time, they'd leave without saying a word. Sometimes I could even watch them reach down, in horrifying real-time, and click "next." It was devastating. My first even semi-successful interaction was with a guy with a blanket draped over his lap who asked if I wanted to "jack of" with him. I declined; he disconnected.
There are two things to say about ChatRoulette. The first is that it exploits a pretty fundamental reward mechanism in the brain, which we've known about since Pavlov: the power of random reinforcement. It turns out that predictable rewards get boring rather quickly, as the brain adapts to new stimuli. (Are you still excited about your Christmas presents? Exactly. You've been designed to be ungrateful.)
Human interaction, of course, is pretty damn predictable. We've got elaborate rituals for dealing with strangers, thus minimizing the chance of a surprising interaction. ("How are you?" "Good, thanks. How are you?" "Great. Thanks for asking. Have a nice day.") And then there's the fact that the vast majority of our interactions are with people we already know, whether it's family, friends or co-workers. So they probably won't surprise us, either. The end result is that our social exchanges become tedious and rote. They might be rewarding, but they're rarely exciting.
And this is where ChatRoulette comes in. I've only played around on the site for a few minutes, but it seems to me that its allure is inseparable from its unpredictability. Will this new person be a masturbator or a friendly stranger? Will we be rejected or will we do the rejecting? It all reminds me of Vegas, where people are willing to endure big losses for the occasional thrill of a surprising gain. (According to the data of Wolfram Schultz, an unexpected reward generates a much larger dopaminergic signal in the brain.) Of course, those gamblers know they're wasting time and money, but the possibility of an unexpected reward is simply too tantalizing. ChatRoulette takes this same logic to the social realm: at its core, it's a slot machine made of other people.
The other thing to say about ChatRoulette is that it reminded me of an urban subway. Like a dense city, the website mixes together strangers, forcing them to stare at each other for a few fleeting seconds. This momentary mixing, while often unpleasant and awkward, turns out to be a crucial function of cities. Jane Jacobs, in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, argued that every healthy city was defined by its ability to facilitate social interaction. She saw the busy sidewalk as an improvisational "ballet," in which information freely flowed between city dwellers. Her book identified the specific urban ingredients⎯from short city blocks to mixed-use neighborhoods⎯that encouraged "the intricate mingling of diversity."
Of course, most Americans don't live in neighborhoods that Jacobs would endorse. We like our privacy and suburbs, which means that our cities look more like Phoenix than Manhattan. While this makes us more comfortable - I like my air-conditioned car as much as the next person - there's some suggestive evidence that it also makes cities less innovative. A few years ago, I wrote about this PNAS paper, which analyzes vast amounts of data to figure out why some cities are so much more innovative than others:
While certain institutions can encourage innovation, the scientists are quick to point out that the innovative abilities of cities are ultimately rooted in the one thing that every city has in common: lots of human interaction. "Cities concentrate our social interactions," Bettencourt says, "and that's what leads to this explosion in knowledge creation and innovation." Think of people as particles and the urban space as a container: as more and more particles enter the container (the population of the city is increasing), each particle increases its speed. The end result is that the particles are constantly colliding. According to the scientists, these random urban collisions are the source of innovation. Creativity spontaneously emerges from human friction.
ChatRoulette is an online version of the friction that cities produce for free. It's like a subway ride on your computer, a chance to bump into strangers on the "street" without leaving your desk. Sure, there are lots of weirdos out there, and plenty of those strangers won't stare back. But every once in a while, a meaningful interaction might occur, as the social slot machine dispenses a few quarters. I'd like to think that if Walt Whitman were around - and boy do I wish he were - he'd write a poem about ChatRoulette.
PS. I forgot to describe my own experience on ChatRoulette. I spent the first 20 minutes getting rejected, propositioned and yelled at. It was gross, crushing and so entertaining. Then I found a nice twentysomething male in Oslo who worked as a computer programmer. We talked for 5 minutes about the weather. It was a perfectly banal conversation, but in all my years riding the subway in NYC I can only remember a handful of spontaneous chats with my fellow riders. Of course, those same riders also didn't ask me to take off my clothes. (As usual, the internet is just like real life, only more so.)
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February 5, 2010
The neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga has written a lovely appreciation of Jorge Luis Borges in the latest Nature (not online). Quiroga focuses on Borges interest in neuroscience, which led him to write his classic short story Funes the Memorious, about a man who cannot forget:
In the story of Funes, Borges described very precisely the problems of distorted memory capacities well before neuroscience caught up...In a study using electrodes to probe the hippocampus in epileptic patients for clinical reasons, we identified a type of neuron that fires in response to particular abstract concepts. For example, one neuron in a patient fired only in recognition of different pictures of the actress Jennifer Aniston; another responded only to images of another celebrity, Halle Berry. It is thus possible that these neurons link perception and memory by creating the abstract encoding we use to store memories -- especially considering that we tend to remember concepts and forget irrelevant details. If these neurons are lacking, the ability to generate abstractions may be limited, leading to pathologies such as autism or characters like Funes.
Even without this scientific knowledge, Borges's intuitive description is sharp: Funes, he wrote, was "virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas ... His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them ... To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars."
I've written about Funes before, but it's worth pointing out that the short story isn't Borges' only work with neuroscientific implications. One of my favorite Borgesian parables is The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, which describes a "certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge". What makes this encyclopedia so peculiar is its division of knowledge. The animal kingdom, for instance, has been parsed into the following categories:
(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.
The moral of the story is that all categories are arbitrary; there is no natural way to subdivide nature. Of course, our own classification schemes don't seem strange at all - they seem necessary and true. That faith, however, is a mere side-effect of the mind, which has a weakness for essences. This is known as essentialism, and it's reflected in our instinctive belief that there is something intrinsic to every thing, from tigers to chairs to water, that make it that particular thing. (A tiger born without stripes is still a tiger, right?) Look, for instance, at Platonic idealism, which argues that behind the chaotic confusion of details - there are so many different kinds of chair - there is an ideal chair, which reflects the essence of all chairs.
Children are natural essentialists. Frank Keil, a psychologist at Yale, has done some interesting work that captures this tendency at work. He begins by showing his young subjects a variety of visual transformations: a tiger that's been dressed in a lion suit, a porcupine that has been turned into a cactus, a real dog that resembles a toy. Not surprisingly, the children dismiss these transformations as irrelevant and superficial. The porcupine is still a porcupine. The dog is still a dog. The tiger is still a tiger, even if it looks like a lion. It was only when Keil told the children that the transformations also took place on the inside - their internal essences had been altered - that the little kids were convinced the animals had changed categories. The tiger was now a lion.
The lesson is that even a kid would find the Borgesian encyclopedia peculiar. Plato thought it was possible to "cut nature at its joints, like a good butcher". But this faith assumes that nature has joints, and that the essences we perceive are real and everlasting. Unfortunately, those essences are mostly figments of the mind, projections of a brain that is born believing in Platonic forms.
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February 4, 2010
Megan O'Rourke has a really eloquent and important article on the history of grieving in the New Yorker. She spends a lot of time on the life and death of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who invented the five stages theory of human grief. (It turns out the stages don't really exist.) But I was most interested in this paragraph on the death of public funeral rituals - we no longer grieve with others, unless we're grieving over Princess Diana or Michael Jackson - and how it was driven, at least in part, by the new sciences of the mind:
With the rise of psychoanalysis came a shift in attention from the communal to the individual experience. Only two years after Émile Durkheim wrote about mourning as an essential social process, Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" defined it as something fundamentally private and individual. In a stroke, the work of mourning had become internalized. As Ariès says, within a few generations grief had undergone a fundamental change: death and mourning had been largely removed from the public realm. In 1973, Ernest Becker argued, in "The Denial of Death," that avoidance of death is built into the human mind; instead of confronting our own mortality, we create symbolic "hero-systems," conceptualizing an immortal self that, through imagination, allows us to transcend our physical transience. ("In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die," the young Nick Adams thinks in the last line of Ernest Hemingway's "Indian Camp.")
In other words, we became so focused on the internal mechanics of the mind - the private electrical events taking place inside our skull - that we neglected the social world, and the cultural web in which we're embedded. How could a ritual compete with the id?
Furthermore, I think this emphasis on the primacy of the individual brain (at the expense of larger social structures) has only been exacerbated by the rise of modern neuroscience. With rare exceptions, the field is forced to study the brain in artificial isolation, so that we look at people all by themselves in brain scanners, or study them one by one in the lab. (It's ironic that even the field of social neuroscience is forced to use experimental tools, like fMRI machines, that require isolation.) And so the mind becomes the brain and the brain becomes a collection of fleshy parts, like the insula and the PFC.
But we are not meant to be alone: The private events inside the brain depend, in larger part, on where we are and who we are with. It reminds me of something Nicholas Christakis, who studies human social networks along with James Fowler, recently told me: "The story of modern science is the story of studying ever smaller bits of nature, like atoms and neurons," he said. "But people aren't just the sum of their parts. I see this research as an attempt to put human beings back together again."
Christakis, for instance, has done some interesting work on the widower effect, which is the poignant observation that the death of a spouse significantly increases the likelihood that the surviving spouse will also die. According to the data, the death of a wife in the previous 30 days increases her husband's risk of death 53 percent, and the death of a husband increases his wife's risk of death by 61 percent.
When I spent time with Christakis and Fowler last summer, Christakis told me about one of his patients, an elderly woman with severe dementia. She was being cared for by her youngest daughter, who was clearly exhausted. This wasn't particularly surprising: there was a large body of research documenting the mental toll of caring for an ill parent. But then Christakis got a telephone call.
"The call is from the best friend of the husband of the daughter who is taking care of my patient," Christakis says. "And he's worried about how the husband is doing, because the husband is really stressed out." For Christakis, the complaint was a revelation: "It might seem like an obvious idea, but I suddenly realized that the effects of illness aren't limited to the primary caretaker. Instead, they cascade through the network, from person to person to person." The stress of grief, in other words, was like an infectious disease.
The lesson is that no mind is an island; our neurons depend on the neurons of others. Even when the tools of modern science require us to be alone, it's worth remembering that such loneliness is an artificial construct, a distortion of the lab.
By the way, if you're interested in the power of social networks, I recommend Connected, by Christakis and Fowler.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:34 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 3, 2010
Sharon Begley has an excellent Newsweek cover story on the rise and fall of anti-depressant medications, or how a class of drugs that were once hailed as medical miracles are now seen as barely better than placebos:
In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, Kirsch and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants--not the 75 percent he had calculated from examining only published studies--had also been achieved by a dummy pill.
The extra effect of real drugs wasn't much to celebrate, either. It amounted to 1.8 points on the 54-point scale doctors use to gauge the severity of depression, through questions about mood, sleep habits, and the like. Sleeping better counts as six points. Being less fidgety during the assessment is worth two points. In other words, the clinical significance of the 1.8 extra points from real drugs was underwhelming. Now Kirsch was certain. "The belief that antidepressants can cure depression chemically is simply wrong," he told me in January on the eve of the publication of his book The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Anti-depressant Myth.
The 2002 study ignited a furious debate, but more and more scientists were becoming convinced that Kirsch--who had won respect for research on the placebo response and who had published scores of scientific papers--was on to something. One team of researchers wondered if antidepressants were "a triumph of marketing over science." Even defenders of antidepressants agreed that the drugs have "relatively small" effects. "Many have long been unimpressed by the magnitude of the differences observed between treatments and controls," psychology researcher Steven Hollon of Vanderbilt University and colleagues wrote--"what some of our colleagues refer to as 'the dirty little secret.' " In Britain, the agency that assesses which treatments are effective enough for the government to pay for stopped recommending antidepressants as a first-line treatment, especially for mild or moderate depression.
I'm currently working on a longer article on a related subject, so I won't go into detail here, but I think it's worth pointing out that anti-depressants might still prove to be a very useful class of drugs, just not for depression. To understand why, it's important to realize that antidepressants don't work the way the way the big pharm companies tell you they work, at least on their websites.
Their neat little story goes like this: antidepressants increase the brain's supply of serotonin, thus correcting our chemical imbalance. This implies that sadness is simply a lack of chemical happiness. The little blue pills cheer us up because they give the brain what it has been missing.
There's only one problem with this theory of depression: it's almost certainly wrong, or at the very least woefully incomplete. Experiments have since shown that lowering people's serotonin levels does not make them depressed, nor does it worsen their symptoms if they are already depressed. And then there's the "Prozac lag": although antidepressants increase the amount of serotonin in the brain within hours, their beneficial effects are not usually felt for weeks.
But just because antidepressants don't work via some silly and obsolete chemical model of depression doesn't mean the drugs don't trigger important changes in the brain. In recent years, scientists have found that the little blue pills modulate the neural pathways of plasticity, up-regulating trophic factors and neurogenesis. Because they make our mind more malleable - and help counter the the toxic effects of stress - the drugs have potential implications far beyond the treatment of depression.
Consider this 2008 study by Italian researchers, published in the journal Science. The scientists were interested in seeing if fluoxetine, the active ingredient of Prozac, could increase the potential of brain cells in the adult rat. They studied animals with severe cases of "lazy eye," a condition characterized by poor vision in one eye due to underdevelopment of the visual cortex. The scientists showed that fluoxetine gave brain cells the ability to take on new roles and form new connections, which erased the symptoms of the disorder.
Jose Vettencourt, a lead author on this paper, told me that "The drug appears to make brain cells quite young". The scientists are currently repeating the experiment with humans, raising the possibility that fluoxetine might one day be used to treat lazy eye and related conditions.
And then there's this brand new paper:
Widely used antidepressants may help patients recover cognitive functions, such as memory skills, that are damaged following a stroke, according to research released Monday.
Escitalopram, a type of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI, was linked to improved cognitive functioning in a group of stroke patients who did not have symptoms of depression, scientists found.
Participants were treated within three months of the stroke in one of three ways: a low dose -- 5 to 10 milligrams -- of escitalopram, a placebo pill or problem-solving therapy but no medication. (The standard dose of escitalopram, also known by the brand name Lexapro, for treating depression is 20 milligrams.)
After one year, the group on escitalopram had higher scores on tests assessing thinking, learning and memory functions as well as ones testing verbal and visual memory. The group treated with medication also had greater improvements in activities related to daily living.
The point is that we might still be taking Prozac, et. al. years from now, just not for depression. The pills do something - they just aren't great at cheering us up.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:54 PM • 32 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Via Vaughan at MindHacks, comes this link to a preview of a documentary-in-progress on The Blue Brain, that epic attempt to create a conscious supercomputer.
I was fortunate enough to profile the Blue Brain in 2008:
In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain.
The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. "This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up," says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. "There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there."
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February 2, 2010
Ross Douthat reflects on the recent news that teenage birthrates inched upward during the Bush era, after more than a decade of decline:
The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it "crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work."
In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton's presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year's worth of bad news, you'd also have to give them credit for more than a decade's worth of progress.
More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate. The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results -- but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.
I think Douthat overstates the equivalence: there's much more evidence that abstinence-based sex education is a failure (such as this 2007 Congressional study) than there is for contraceptive sex ed, which has been linked to mild reductions in teen pregnancy. But I think his larger point is accurate: it's really difficult to change the sexual habits of adolescents.
That's because we've been trying to change behavior with facts and information. We've assumed that the way to get kids to wear condoms is give them statistics about sexually transmitted disease, or that the way to get students to abstain from sex is to lecture them on morality, or the difficulty of caring for a child while in high school. The problem with such facts is that they don't help teens deal with their moment of sexual decision, which most likely occurs when they're half naked and deranged with desire. In other words, we've assumed that sexual choices are rational choices, influenced by classroom exhortations and dry information. But that's wrong.
Look, for example, at this R-rated experiment, by the behavioral economist Dan Ariely and neuroeconomist George Loewenstein. They began by asking twenty-five male undergraduates at UC-Berkeley a series of provocative sexual questions. The first set of questions concerned their sexual preferences. Could they imagine having sex with a 60 year old woman? What about getting sexually excited by contact with an animal? Did they like getting tied up during sex? The next set of questions dealt with sexual morality. Would the male students slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with them? Would they keep trying to have sex after their date said "no"? The final set of questions was about safe sex. Would the men insist on using a condom? Is it safe to have unprotected sex if you "pull out" before ejaculation?
Each male student answered these naughty hypotheticals in two different states of mind. In the first condition, the subjects were told to answer the questions without being aroused. They were supposed to contemplate sex in an un-sexual state of mind. In the second condition, the subjects were shown pornography while answering the questions. (They were alone in their dorm room for this part of the experiment.) When asked in advance, the men didn't think that being aroused would significantly alter their answers. They assumed that their sexual preferences were relatively immune to such temporary emotional biases.
The men were completely wrong. Their desire to engage in peculiar sexual acts - like being tied up, or getting spanked while having sex - nearly doubled when they were aroused. Their morality was even more malleable: they were three times more likely to commit a sex crime⎯such as using a date-rape drug⎯when staring at pornographic images. And, of course, being aroused also made them much less likely to use condoms. Although the undergraduates could all recite the benefits of sexual protection, this rational knowledge was irrelevant. The charge of arousal was simply too powerful: they could no longer resist doing the wrong thing, even though they knew it was wrong. As Ariely and Loewenstein drolly concluded: "Efforts at self-control that involve raw willpower are likely to be ineffective in the face of the dramatic cognitive and motivational changes caused by arousal."
The point is that we've been arming our kids with the wrong mental tools. Instead of giving them statistics, we need to provide them with the cognitive tools to deal with temptation. Instead of urging them to abstain, we need to show them how to abstain. There is no secret recipe for overcoming our "hottest" urges, like sexual desire. But you could do worse than giving kids a short lesson in metacognition. I think Walter Mischel's work with four-year olds and marshmallows is relevant here:
At the time, psychologists assumed that children's ability to wait [to delay gratification for a second marshmallow] depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel's conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the "strategic allocation of attention." Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow--the "hot stimulus"--the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from "Sesame Street." Their desire wasn't defeated--it was merely forgotten. "If you're thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you're going to eat it," Mischel says. "The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place."
In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it's what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. (When Odysseus had himself tied to the ship's mast, he was using some of the skills of metacognition: knowing he wouldn't be able to resist the Sirens' song, he made it impossible to give in.) Mischel's large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification. "What's interesting about four-year-olds is that they're just figuring out the rules of thinking," Mischel says. "The kids who couldn't delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that's a terrible idea. If you do that, you're going to ring the bell before I leave the room."
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:43 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 1, 2010
In response to my recent post on the neuroscience of musical predictions, Alex Rehding, the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard, wrote in to offer a musical theorist perspective. He makes several excellent points, and complicates the neuroscience in useful ways, so I thought I'd reproduce the relevant parts of his email below:
The point you raise in your latest posting -- about expectation and prediction -- is one that has fascinated music theorists pretty much for the last 200 years. I realize that yours is a science blog, and I'll try my best to resist the urge to add too many traditional music-theoretical talking points.
There is one interesting problem with this model, though, that has generated some interesting discussion in the music-theoretical world over the last twenty or so years. If we derive pleasure from anticipating potential connections - and especially being surprised by thwarted expectations - then it becomes difficult to explain why we would want to listen to a piece more than once: the novelty factor wears off, the uncertainty factor becomes less pronounced. In principle, the piece should get less interesting each time we hear it. Experience, however, shows that this is not the case: we greatly enjoy re-hearing familiar pieces. The whole recording industry makes a lot of money on the basis of this phenomenon.
Personally, I'd frame the discussion slightly differently. (And please take my views with a huge grain of salt. I'm a lay listener, not an expert.) I think our inexhaustible need for new music - we want the latest Rihanna radio hit - demonstrates that, once we memorize a piece of music, it grows a little stale. The essential surprise is drained out of the notes, so that there are no subtle patterns left to learn. And that's when our attention begins to wander, and we buy the current pop phenom on iTunes. While there are certain songs I will be listening to forever - most of Blonde on Blonde, late 70s Bruce, Astral Weeks, Otis R., a few Pavement songs, Wilco, a little Bright Eyes, etc. - I'm always struck by the short half-life of most of my music. The stimulus goes from intoxicating and enthralling to tired and tedious in a few short listens. And so we keep on consuming, searching for another shot of acoustic excitement. I think the recording industry makes a lot of money on this phenomenon.
We can now see the neural anatomy that makes this cultural learning possible. The auditory cortex, like all our sensory areas, is deeply plastic. Neuroscience, stealing vocabulary from music, has named these malleable cells "the corticofugal network," after the fugal form Bach made famous. These contrapuntal neurons feed back onto the very substrate of our hearing, altering the specific frequencies, amplitudes and timing patterns that our sensory cells actually respond to. The brain, in other words, tunes its own sense of sound, just like violinists tune the strings of their instrument. One of the central functions of the corticofugal network is what neuroscience calls "egocentric" selection. When a pattern of noises is heard repeatedly, the brain memorizes that pattern. Feedback from higher-up brain regions reorganizes the auditory cortex, which makes it easier for us to hear that same pattern in the future. So when we get sick of the latest top 40 jingle playing on the radio, these are the cells to blame. Their infinite capacity to learn means that we quickly get bored.
This, of course, raises the larger question of why certain pieces of music don't go stale. Why are we still listening to Bach's fugues, or Beethoven's symphonies, or Kind of Blue? What is it about these particular soundwaves that allows them to evade the corticofugal boredom? I'd suggest that their place in the canon is inseparable from their ambiguity - their ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations - so that new listens reveal new elements to listen for. In other words, we are continually surprised by their sounds, by the capacity of the music to subvert our expectations. Frank Kermode famously argued that literature worked the same way: What makes a novel or poem immortal is its complex indeterminacy, the way every reader discovers in the same words a different story. The same book manages to inspire two completely different conclusions. But there is no right interpretation. If there were - if there was only one way to read Hamlet - then the words would be far less interesting. The art that endures is the art that never loses its capacity to surprise.
I think Professor Rehding makes another essential point in his discussion of rhythm:
The other point that I think is quite important in this respect -- and that's one that most music theory traditionally ignores -- is the importance of rhythm and pulse. We don't simply yearn for the eventual return of the tonic, but we want it to fall in one particular place (or a small range of places) within the temporal order of the piece of music. Composers generate a lot of tension by carefully manipulating the temporal features of their music: a musical climax is not merely about writing loud music but also about the careful gradual build-up and the decline afterwards.
This idea is an even more urgent given current musical trends. Over the last few decades, popular music has been transformed by its rhythms, so that some rap songs consist of nothing but words propelled by a pulse. Why is this so exciting, at least for the auditory cortex of people under 25? Does rhythm also take advantage of our musical prediction machinery? Or is it a kind of acoustic scaffolding, making it easier for us to follow the subtle patterns in the rest of the song?
I won't even venture a bad guess to those questions. But I want to thank Professor Rehding for his feedback and comments.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:04 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 27, 2010
For the most part, self-control is seen as an individual trait, a measure of personal discipline. If you lack self-control, then it's your own fault, a character flaw built into the brain.
However, according to a new study by Michelle vanDellen, a psychologist at the University of Georgia, self-control contains a large social component; the ability to resist temptation is contagious. The paper consists of five clever studies, each of which demonstrates the influence of our peer group on our self-control decisions. For instance, in one study 71 undergraduates watched a stranger exert self-control by choosing a carrot instead of a cookie, while others watched people eat the cookie instead of the carrot. That's all that happened: the volunteers had no other interaction with the eaters. Nevertheless, the performance of the subjects was significantly altered on a subsequent test of self-control. People who watched the carrot-eaters had more discipline than those who watched the cookie-eaters.
What accounts for this contagion of discipline? One possibility, of course, is that watching someone eat a cookie makes us think about the deliciousness of cookies. In other words, we're primed to crave a reward, since we just saw a reward get consumed. vanDellen, however, argues that the spread of self-control is mostly driven by the "accessibility" of thoughts about self-control. When we see someone resist the cookie, we're cognitively inspired, and temporarily aware that resistance is possible. We don't have to surrender to impulse.
Consider the last experiment described in the paper. In this study of 117 subjects, those who were randomly assigned to write about friends with good self-control were faster than a control group at identifying words related to self-control, such as "achieve," "discipline" and "effort". This suggests that thinking about self-control - or watching it happen - makes us more attuned to its benefits. We think about our waistline and calories, and not just chocolate-chips.
The contagiousness of self-control has important consequences. For one thing, it helps explain why Dominos, Taco Bell and McDonald's spend so much money on television ads. Their commercials are testimonials for indulgence - they show people happily consuming thousands of calories - and so that makes us less likely to resist. Why munch on carrots when a large pepperoni pizza is only a phone call away?
This study also begins to reveal the ways in which culture can impact character. Kids who grow up surrounded by rituals of discipline - they watch people counter their impulses all the time - have a very different sense of their own potential. They don't have to eat the cookie because they've watched their parents and peers eat the carrot. This is an implicit kind of knowledge - it's not something you can measure on a multiple-choice test - and yet it has profound implications for our success in the real world.
Last year, I wrote about this idea in the New Yorker:
Mischel is also preparing a large-scale study involving hundreds of schoolchildren in Philadelphia, Seattle, and New York City to see if self-control skills can be taught. Although he previously showed that children did much better on the marshmallow task after being taught a few simple "mental transformations," such as pretending the marshmallow was a cloud, it remains unclear if these new skills persist over the long term. In other words, do the tricks work only during the experiment or do the children learn to apply them at home, when deciding between homework and television?
Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. "For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience," she says. "I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don't have self-control is a pretty futile exercise." And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist. One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification--eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week--was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that "intelligence is really important, but it's still not as important as self-control."
For the past few months, the researchers have been conducting pilot studies in the classroom as they try to figure out the most effective way to introduce complex psychological concepts to young children. Because the study will focus on students between the ages of four and eight, the classroom lessons will rely heavily on peer modelling, such as showing kindergartners a video of a child successfully distracting herself during the marshmallow task.
The point is that self-improvement isn't impossible, and that changing the habits of one kid just might help change a classroom. Nobody is an island.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:14 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 26, 2010
Cable news is not good for the soul. People make fun of Jersey Shore, but at least those randy kids don't reinforce our deep-seated political biases. A new paper by Shawn Powers of USC and Mohammed el-Nawawy of Queens University of Charlotte looked at the effect of international cable news on the ideology of its viewers. Not surprisingly, they found that people were only interested in "news" that didn't contradict what they already believed:
Powers and el-Nawawy show that global media consumers tuned in to international news media that they thought would further substantiate their opinions about U.S. policies and culture, and provide them with information on the international issues that they deemed most important. The study found a strong relationship between the participants' attitudes toward U.S. policy and culture and their choice of broadcaster. Those who were dependent on BBC World and especially CNNI were overall more supportive of U.S. foreign policy.
This shouldn't be too surprising. As Ken Auletta recently reported in the New Yorker, cable news has grown increasingly partisan in recent years, seeking out an ever more balkanized audience. He cites a study of 35,000 viewers conducted by TiVo: for each Democrat who watches Fox News there are eighteen Republicans, and for every Republican who watches MSNBC there are six Democrats. It turns out that everybody wants their own set of facts.
This is an old phenomenon that's been exaggerated by new media trends. Partisan voters are convinced that they're rational⎯only the other side is irrational⎯but we're actually rationalizers. The Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990's to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton's presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What's interesting about this data is that so-called "high-information" voters⎯these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress⎯weren't better informed than "low-information" voters. According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn't erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn't follow Republican talking points⎯and Clinton's deficit reduction didn't fit the "tax and spend liberal" stereotype⎯then the information is conveniently ignored. "Voters think that they're thinking," Achen and Bartels write, "but what they're really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they've already made."
The bleak lesson is that we turn the spotlight of attention into an information-filter, a way to block-out disagreeable points of view. Consider this experiment, which was done in the late 1960's, by the cognitive psychologists Timothy Brock and Joe Balloun. I describe the study in my book:
Brock and Balloun played a group of people a tape-recorded message attacking Christianity. Half of the subjects were regular churchgoers while the other half were committed atheists. To make the experiment more interesting, Brock and Balloun added an annoying amount of static⎯a crackle of white noise⎯to the recording. However, they allowed listeners to reduce the static by pressing a button, so that the message suddenly became easier to understand. Their results were utterly predicable and rather depressing: the non-believers always tried to remove the static, while the religious subjects actually preferred the message that was harder to hear. Later experiments by Brock and Balloun demonstrated a similar effect with smokers listening to a speech on the link between smoking and cancer. We silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance.
Cable news takes advantage of this cognitive weakness. Interestingly, however, this latest study found that not every cable news channel reinforced the beliefs of its audience. The big exception? Al-Jazeera English, which reduced the dogmatism of viewers:
The longer participants had been watching AJE, the less dogmatic they were in their thinking...The reduced dogmatism applies only to the cognitive levels of thinking, or the way in which people process new information. People who are less dogmatic in their thought are more open to information that contradicts their worldviews, whereas people who think very dogmatically are more likely to ignore or minimize information that does not support their own beliefs. These levels of dogmatism are strongly related to political and cultural tolerance, and how people behave in confrontational situations.
Thanks to Eric Barker for the pointer.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:49 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
