It’s official…

Well folks, I’ve finally been made legitimate.

No, I haven’t received my doctorate yet (that won’t be happening for awhile!) Instead my rogue bastardized blogging days are over – I’ve been made an official Nature Publishing Group blogger, writing for the Nature Education site Scitable. I’ll be blogging on all things brain and biology on the psychology group blog, Mind Read, with the fantastic Jordan Gaines of Gaines, on Brains. We’ll be posting weekly on the latest nerdy neuro papers and fascinating psychological phenomena – think similar Brain Study content but now on a legitimate platform.

As always though, Brain Study is dearest to my blogging heart, and I’ll be sure to post Mind Read pieces here, as well as trying out slightly “edgier” content perhaps not suitable for the corporate science blogosphere.

My first post is on one of my personal favorite topics, synesthesia, exploring Hearing, Touching and Tasting in Color. A sneak-peek with some insight into my own form is below:

I don’t know about you, but to me Wednesday is sun-shiney yellow. Tuesday is hunter green, Thursday purple-ish blue and Friday a deep red. Monday is white, a blank slate and a chance for a new week, whereas Saturday is sparkly black. Sunday is gray, the depressing slouch towards the beginning of the work-week, but also a convenient mix of Saturday and Monday.

This color-word association is not a figment of my imagination or an indication that I’m going crazy, but is instead a recognized neuropsychological phenomenon called synesthesia.

So please check out the new site, and let me know what you think!

Finding Mr. Right just got a lot harder

It’s hard being a young woman these days. Chivalry is dying, but many glass ceilings are still firmly in place. We’re supposed to have it all but sacrifice nothing, balancing choosing a career path and a life partner. We can delay having kids by putting our eggs in the freezer next to our vodka, but our similarly aging male partners’ sperm might handicap our chances of having healthy offspring, with higher risks for autism and schizophrenia linked to paternal age.

And now it turns out that hormonal contraception, or The Pill, our revolutionary defense against the inherent misogyny of biology, could be tricking us into choosing the wrong men.

Two studies led by Dr. Craig Roberts from the University of Stirling in Scotland have suggested that taking oral contraception can change your attraction to and preferences for men. In an initial study, Dr. Roberts and his team asked women who were about to go on the pill to rate the attractiveness of a selection of male faces, considering them as both short-term and long-term partners. They were then tested again approximately three months later to see if their preferences had changed. Sure enough, in the second test session women who had started hormonal contraception had significant shifts in their partner preferences, now preferring significantly less masculine-looking faces than they had three months earlier. Conversely, control women who had not started the pill did not differ in their choices from the first session.

In a follow-up study, real couples who had met while the woman was either on or off the pill were assessed for the male partner’s masculinity. This involved complex photo manipulation and judgment of the pictures by outside individuals, who ranked the male faces on features of masculinity. Though these methods are a bit fuzzy and convoluted, the researchers’ results (surprise surprise) matched those of the first study. That is, male partners of women who were already on the pill when they met were judged to be significantly less masculine looking than men whose female partners were not taking hormonal contraception.

Notable masculine features include squarer face-shapes, stronger jawlines and less prominent cheekbones, all of which are typical signifiers of higher levels of testosterone. The authors claim that this shift to preferring less masculine features is perhaps a transition towards subconsciously choosing more faithful or nurturing partners after starting contraception, which can be beneficial for long-term relationship success. However, a major problem with these partner preference shifts is that presumably at some point during a mature, adult, monogamous relationship women go off their contraception, potentially reversing back their partner preferences. This can lead to dissatisfaction in the relationship, female philandering, and some very awkward conversations: ”Sorry honey, you used to do it for me, but now I find you much too feminine for my liking.”

Another major concern is that genetically we are supposed to be drawn towards mates who are more dissimilar to ourselves. This is evolutionarily advantageous, as greater parental genetic variability reduces the likelihood of heritable diseases in the offspring. Basically, your children are less likely to be born with a genetic disorder if you and your partner’s DNA are more different. It has been proposed that some of the shifts in partner preferences after initiating oral contraception are actually towards men who are more genetically similar to you, which can be problematic, but no theories as to why this might be the case.

However, it’s a pretty big stretch to say that preferring men with slightly rounder faces means you’ve undergone a major change in your list of demands for your partner’s personality and genetic makeup (if you happen to have such a list for that). Also, the first study was only performed with 18 women in the experimental condition, which is a pretty tiny population for measuring significant differences in behavior. So the researchers conducted another follow-up experiment to investigate if these effects mapped onto real-world behavior. Researchers tested 2500 women (a much better sample size) in stable relationships who had started dating their partner while they were either on or off the pill, and compared them on several measures of relationship and sexual satisfaction.

Women who had first met their partners while taking oral contraception scored significantly lower on measures of sexual satisfaction and rated themselves less physically attracted to their partners than those women who had met their partners while not on the pill. However, the women taking the pill did have higher overall relationship non-sexual fulfillment and financial stability than those who were off. And in a related twist, women who were on contraception were actually less likely to have separated from their partners than women not on the pill at ‘partner choice’.

So what’s the take-away from this? Don’t take oral contraception and you’ll have better sex with a more attractive man, but will be more likely to break up with him in the future? Go on the pill and you’ll be dissatisfied sexually by your unattractive mate and your offspring will have genetic disorders, but at least you’ll stay together forever? Maybe. Or maybe being on the pill leads you to choose partners based more on long-term than short-term payouts. Or means that you have different priorities in your partner preferences to begin with. Either way, make the decision wisely, your future children may depend on it.

Gender bias on both sides of scientific research

A disturbing new study from researchers at Yale University was released this week in PNAS, reporting that gender bias is still pervasive in science and the workplace. An identical application for a laboratory manager position was given to 127 senior faculty members at a number of research universities, the only difference being that half of the applications contained a male name, while in the other half the applicant’s name was female. Across the board supervisors (male and female alike) ranked the ‘male’ application as more competent, more hireable, and stated that they would be more willing to supervise this candidate. Even more striking was the pay gap that existed between the recommended wages for the male and female applicants, a difference of roughly $3,700 starting salary. This is representative of the reported 23% average earnings difference between men and women in the workplace.

Despite efforts for equal opportunity and the eradication of sexism from science, this study clearly demonstrates that there are significant lingering differences in the perception of male and female applicants and their competence based solely on gender. These findings are particularly disturbing as the job was for an entry-level research position, suggesting that there is a bias against women even trying to get their foot in the door in science. The gender disparity in tenure-track professorships has previously been explained with similar rationales as those used to justify the dearth of women in executive suite positions in finance or industry, namely differences in life choices or a lingering male-domination from previous generations. However, now there is clear evidence that women are discriminated against from the start of their careers, making it far more likely that they will drop out of the profession, and thus perpetuating the gender imbalance in science, particularly at the higher end of the career ladder.

Gender bias in science isn’t just present in a lack of professional opportunities; women are frequently excluded from being subjects in research studies, particularly those involving the brain or behavioral traits. Women can be ‘difficult’ subjects as anatomically our brains differ in size from males, and hormonal fluctuations can affect chemical reactions to pharmaceutical challenges used in experiments. Instead of pursuing and exploring these differences though, females subjects are often omitted from both human and animal research. Results from male participants are then applied to females post-hoc, however this method is far from perfect as these very differences in behavioral and biological performance make extrapolations imprecise and potentially invalid.

For example, a study published earlier this year in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research reported on the differing effects of heavy alcohol consumption and recovery on the brain in men and women. Females appear to be more sensitive to the neurotoxic effects of alcohol on the brain, particularly in the frontal lobe, with a greater proportionate reduction in white matter volume than men with every additional drink. Conversely, male alcoholics show a greater decrease in volume in the corpus callosum (neuron tracts that connect the left and right hemispheres) related to the duration of heavy drinking. Fortunately, abstaining from alcohol was linked to recovery of white matter in both genders, with longer periods of abstinence associated with greater recovery in each region. However, men did not exhibit this trend with less than one year of sobriety, while women experienced neurogenesis only within the first year. While these distinctions between women and men are subtle ones, they are significant and could be related to differences in behavioral ability or possible treatment outcomes.

Ignoring female subjects in research studies biases results and can hinder progress in the advancement of clinical treatments. Similarly, dissuading or not adequately supporting women in their own research endeavors undoubtedly handicaps scientific progress by limiting the intellectual pool of talent. Reports of women being naturally ‘bad’ in science or mathematics have been overwhelming refuted and lingering prejudices, even unintentional ones, hurt not only the individual but the field of science as a whole.

(Thanks to Adam Levy and Ruth Watkinson for the gender bias article.)

Analytical thinking and religious disbelief: A Dawkinsian tale

Last week Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, out-spoken atheist, and author of The God Gene, announced his support for British education secretary Michael Gove’s proposal to put a King James Bible in every state school in the UK. Dawkins stated that, “I have heard the cynically misanthropic opinion that, without the Bible as a moral compass, people would have no restraint against murder, theft and mayhem. The surest way to disabuse yourself of this pernicious falsehood is to read the Bible itself.”

Dawkins’ tongue-in-cheek support for the measure highlights his proselytism of critical thinking over blind acceptance of the scriptures. This more rational and methodical type of thought is affectionately known as “System 2″ in the neuroeconomics and decision-making literature, and a new study published last month in the journal Science suggests that Dawkins, as an atheist, is not alone in his analytical thinking habits. The other mode of thought, System 1, relies more on instincts and heuristics (quick decision-making tools based on past experiences), and is thought to underlie much of an individual’s conviction in religious beliefs. The stories that make up the dogma of organized religion often require acceptance of supernatural processes that are difficult to rationalize, such as immaculate conception or resurrection. These leaps of faith require a reliance on intuition over analytical rationalization, and as such individuals with strong religious beliefs are thought to have a greater activation of System 1, whereas disbelievers engage System 2 more frequently.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia tested this hypothesis of a distinction between religious believers and non-believers in dual-process thinking (System 1 vs. System 2) by carrying out several experiments assessing analytical abilities and religious beliefs in 179 undergraduate students (insert joke about the oxymoron of analytical thinking and undergrads here). The tasks required “an analytical overriding of initial intuitions”, meaning that the first obvious answer to any problem was wrong, and an inhibition of this initial response and critical re-assessment of the problem was required to arrive at the correct answer. Participants then completed three questionnaires asking about religiosity, intuitive and supernatural beliefs. Successful analytical thinking on the cognitive tasks was negatively correlated with all three measures of religious beliefs, such that the ability to over-ride an immediate intuition was associated with greater religious disbelief.

Follow-up studies aimed to assess the directionality of these trends – i.e. whether a lack of religious beliefs led one to think more critically, or if a tendency towards analytical thought resulted in greater disbelief. Researchers attempted to answer this by exposing participants to a series of subtle primes of words and images that were meant to subconsciously evoke connotations of analytical thought, and then asking them about their levels of religious or supernatural beliefs. For example, in one test students were primed with an image of either Rodin’s The Thinker or a control image matched for pose, material and familiarity. During a pilot test, viewing The Thinker was related to an increase in analytical reasoning, and during the experiment seeing it resulted in an increase in self-report levels of religious disbelief as compared to control images.

In the final and most devious manipulation, researchers had participants rank their religious beliefs on a questionnaire presented in either standard font or in a more challenging and difficult-to-read one. Reading in an unusual font, known as perceptual disfluency, requires greater cognitive effort, which the researchers hypothesized would result in increased recruitment of System 2. This would then over-ride any natural inclinations towards System 1 and presumably reduce reliance on intuitions. Sure enough, participants who filled out the difficult-to-read questionnaire rated themselves as being less believing, regardless of previously obtained baseline levels of belief.

The researchers caution against reading too much into these experiments, stating that no estimation on the value of religious beliefs can be interpreted from the findings. Additionally, disbelief could stem equally from a lack of intuition-based thought as an increase in analytical thinking. My main question regarding these findings is just how unaware the participants were to the researchers’ objectives in the study. A psychology experiment, a setting less than welcoming to religious convictions, and particularly one with an emphasis on cognition and critical thinking, may cause individuals to feel sheepish about their beliefs in supernatural phenomena, religious or otherwise, and lead them to under-report their personal levels of faith. Thus the setting of a research laboratory, as well as any expectation bias introduced by the researchers, should be considered as a caveat for the results of this study.

On an unrelated side note, today marks the one year anniversary of Brain Study! A big thank you to all of my readers, be they friends who feel obligated to check in every week or poor unwitting strangers who stumble across the blog through Google searches. Hope everyone’s enjoyed reading this past year as much as I’ve enjoyed writing, and stay tuned for more posts on our brains, bodies and life as a graduate student in science!

Sex at Dawn vs. sex today

There has been an undeniable shift in the conventional nuclear family over the last several decades, with increases in single parent, step-parent, grandparent and single-sex parent homes. A recent survey by the New York Times stated that as of 2009, women who gave birth under the age of 30 were for the first time less likely to be married than not. These trends, along with the rise in divorce rates seen over the last 40 years, support the relationship narrative put forward by Dr. Christopher Ryan and Dr. Cacilda Jetha in their book Sex at Dawn of long-term, semi-monogamous mates, rather than story-book life-long, monogamous marriages.

Ryan and Jetha question the naturalness of our society’s emphasis on exclusive and eternal pair-bonds. They cite the polyamorous relationship tendencies of our early ancestors and the sexual habits of our closest living relatives, free-loving bonobos and chimpanzees, as evidence that we were not always this way. They also list current hunter-gatherer societies who maintain looser definitions of sexual relations and expectations, and who have adjusted their property owning and child-rearing practices accordingly. Examples include the Curripaco tribe of Brazil, where a couple who hang their hammocks together are considered married (until one hangs her hammock elsewhere), or the Dagara of Burkina Faso, one of many societies in which every woman is called “mother” and every man “father” as questions of paternity are highly uncertain. Allocations of resources and affection are spread equally throughout these tribes, treating all as family and ensuring the well-being of every member of the community.

Ryan and Jetha’s research is wide-ranging, in-depth and highly interesting, including evidence from anthropological, biological, philosophical and historical perspectives. Their arguments are compelling and for the most part well-thought-out, identifying flaws in the standard narrative of the evolution of sexual relations. The analysis on the anatomical differences in primates as evidence for different mating styles is particularly provocative and entertaining. For example, who would’ve thought that large external testicles were an indicator of sexual competition within species, preparing the males for battle in a “sperm war” in more free-wheeling and promiscuous females? As such male gorillas, the largest living primates, have the smallest relative penis and testicle size, as they enjoy a relatively stable role in the social hierarchy and a lack of sexual competitors. And who knew that female baboons vocalize during orgasm to attract attention from other future potential male suitors? Certainly puts Meg Ryan’s famous deli scene in When Harry Met Sally into a new perspective!

However, one issue that I felt was glaringly under-addressed in their sexual manifesto was the question of jealousy. The authors acknowledge early on that this fundamental problem arises when contemplating the benefits and detriments of a more inherently promiscuous lifestyle, and promise to address the issue in full later in the book. However when the big moment arrives, they merely cite more tribes existing today who practice non-monogamous pair-bonding and communal child-rearing, and state that jealousy is not an issue in these societies. They further suggest that our deep feelings of jealousy are a learned result of our mating and marriage practices, stemming from the agricultural revolution and commoditization of women and children. There is no mention of the biological underpinnings of jealousy (thought to involve activation in the anterior cingulate cortex, the same area involved in feelings of emotional and physical pain, in case you were wondering), its potential evolutionary benefits, or its prevalence in modern society.

Now perhaps this is rather naive and un-empirical of me, but I find it difficult to swallow that the intense physiological pangs that nearly all of us have felt in the course of our romantic lives are a culturally created phenomenon. The visceral and automatic nature of these feelings would suggest that jealousy is a more organic emotion, rather than a learned response to a threat of ownership or security. Also if, as Ryan and Jetha claim, our naturally non-monogamous ways are the reason so many relationships fail, then why are we unable to evolve away from these underlying promiscuous tendencies but have developed these accompanying negative emotions in the meantime? Jealousy is a highly unpleasant experience that I would imagine few desire to feel, so why is it that we have created this emotion in ourselves that can be so painful?

For the most part, I found myself agreeing with Ryan and Jetha’s hypothesis that humans were originally a more “promiscuous” species, rejecting life-long mates in favor of short-term or non-monogamous relationships. However my question to this new narrative they present is, so what? Are we to change our dating, mating and marriage habits today because our ancestors did it differently 2 million years ago? As our lives and cultures have evolved, to the extent that they are almost incomparable to the ones maintained by our ancestors, is it not natural that our sexual and romantic relationships would change as well? And even if these behaviors are more natural to humans than the practices we hold today, could we ever feasibly go back to that way of life, even if we wanted to?

(Thanks to Jesse Sleamaker for the recommendation for this book).

Salivating for stocking stuffers

In the spirit of this season of holy consumption, I thought it appropriate to write about an article released earlier this year in the Journal of Consumer Research on salivating over material goods. Author David Gal, an economist at Northwestern University, proposes that when we covet an item, be it ice cream or an iPhone, we literally drool over it. He hypothesizes that this response mechanism is induced by our reward system, with desired material items stimulating the same pathways and neural regions as the hunger for food or other natural reinforcers do. This includes the striatum, amygdala and hypothalamus, areas involved in reward responses and homeostatic mechanisms such as hunger and satiety. Activation of these areas in response to salient stimuli signals that these items are rewarding and could be important for survival. Supporting this claim, in previous research the mesolimbic dopamine reward pathway is seen to light up in a similar manner for luxury items and sports cars, which are secondary learned reinforcers, as for natural incentives such as food and drugs.

Taking this a step further, the physical outputs of this heightened reward arousal state can include the secretion of saliva, triggered by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Salivation occurs in response to cues for food or water as part of the natural metabolic system, preparing us for mastication and digestion. However, Gal claims that it is also a byproduct of the autonomal arousal system controlled via the hypothalamus, and that salivation can indicate any desired or salient stimulus, whether it be naturally rewarding, such as a member of the opposite sex, or a secondary conditioned reinforcer, like money or material goods.

Gal investigated this theory by presenting 169 undergraduate students with images of either money or mundane items, such as office supplies. While viewing the stimuli, participants were asked to keep cotton dental rolls in their cheeks and under their tongue to measure their saliva output. The weights of these cotton swabs were then compared to baseline measurements taken before the experiment to assess the increase in salivation due to the images presented. A second condition involved priming participants with feelings of either efficacy or helplessness by asking them to recall a time when they had felt either powerful or powerless. Gal hypothesized that money, symbolizing economic control, would be more coveted by those who felt they had little power, making it more desirable and rewarding than to those who deemed that they had greater power at the time of the experiment. Supporting this notion, only participants induced with feelings of powerlessness had significantly increased saliva output in response to the monetary cues. Individuals who felt powerful had no difference in salivatory rates when viewing the money images, nor was there a difference in saliva outputs in either power condition among participants in the control office supply group.

In a second follow-up study, Gal repeated the experiment using coveted luxury items in the place of raw currency. Gal exposed young men to images of sports cars, while also inducing in them the goal of winning a potential mate. He achieved this by presenting some participants with images of attractive women with whom they were to imagine going on a date with, while those in the control condition were to imagine having their hair cut. Men who viewed the sports cars as opposed to the mundane images had greater salivation rates compared to baseline ratings, but only when they had been primed with the goal of mating. The mating prime had no effect on saliva output in the control condition, and viewing the sports cars without the salient goal did not increase salivation rates on its own.

Importantly, increases in saliva production seem to be contingent upon the immediate rewarding value of the goods, only enhancing salivation rates when the presented stimuli were seen to help achieve a recently primed goal. This suggests that the triggering of salivation by reward cues is dependent upon the present desire or need for the item, much like the more visceral feeling of hunger in the presence of food.

So as you are finishing your Christmas wish-list this year, dreaming of drool-worthy duds and mouth-watering machines, perhaps rank your heart’s desire on how quickly they’ll come in handy and how moist your mouth feels afterwards. You’ll be sure to find them more rewarding.

Happy holidays everyone!

(Thanks to Emily Barnet for this article.)

The brain’s social network

Neuroscientists often attempt to attribute various behaviors and traits to certain regions of the brain. These findings make for neat science and great headlines, and while some of these results are little better than phrenology claims, many are highly reliable. The good ones are confirmed and replicated by multiple labs and substantiated using a variety of different methods, such as lesion, animal and human imaging models. For example, we know with relative certainty that much of the occipital lobe is in charge of processing visual information and that the hippocampus is heavily involved in transitioning from short term to long term memory. However, there is much in our behavior and our brains that we still do not understand, and it is highly tempting to simply assign certain sections of the brain to different traits, when in fact the underlying mechanisms are much more complicated. This tendency has become increasingly easy in the past decade with the rise of functional neuroimaging studies, where a region of the brain is seen to “light up” with activity when performing certain types of tasks. Voxel based morphometry (VBM) studies take these investigations a step further, looking at how gray matter volume in our brains correlates to different types of traits and behaviors. Two recent examples of VBM studies have investigated the neural correlates of social networking and extroversion, finding connections between amygdala size (among other regions) and social tendencies.

The first study, out of University College London and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences, found that people with more Facebook friends had increased gray matter volume in certain regions of the brain associated with social interactions. The authors of the study had hypothesized that the number of online friends one had could predict the relative brain size of regions important for social networking, particularly those involved in social cognition and mentalizing (the ability to recognize social cues and take another’s perspective). These areas include the fronto-parietal cortical circuit, medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala. However these frontal cortical regions were not identified in the study, and instead the researchers discovered greater volume in the left middle temporal gyrus, right entorhinal cortex and right posterior superior temporal sulcus, as well as the amygdala to a lesser extent. These areas are implicated in social cognition, perception of movement and intention (both physical and social), and autobiographical and associative memory. Based on these findings, the authors speculate that individuals with greater brain volume in these regions are more adept at the skills needed to maintain online socio-personal connections, such as enhanced memory of face-name combinations and awareness of movement of individuals in social circles. However, of these regions only the amygdala was correlated with real life social interactions, and none of the other originally proposed areas were found to correlate with social network size.

The second study, just published this week in PLoS ONE, also reports that individuals who are more extroverted show increased volume in the amygdala, as well as in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Researchers from the Netherlands administered the NEO Five Factor personality assessment to 65 individuals to subjectively measure extroversion and neuroticism levels. They also had participants undergo an MRI scan and used VBM analysis to measure the size of certain pre-determined regions of the brain against extroversion scores, including the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex and OFC. Controlling for age, sex and total gray matter volume, researchers discovered that individuals who scored higher on the extroversion scale had significantly larger amygdala and orbitofrontal cortices, as well as finding a significant correlation between total gray matter volume and extroversion scores.

As stated above, the amygdala is one of the brain’s emotional centers and is important in social interactions, both online and offline. It is crucially implicated in recognizing and processing positive and negative emotions, both in oneself and from the facial expressions of others. The OFC is also commonly associated with emotion regulation, as well as reward valuation and decision-making, mainly through its connections to limbic structures such as the amygdala, striatum and hypothalamus. However, it is not typically linked to social interactions, and the authors speculate that their findings are evidence of the amygdala and OFC’s involvement in a greater sensitivity to positive experiences and social interactions, rather than interpersonal skills themselves.

While the findings from these two studies are intriguing and compliment one another nicely, caution must be taken in the interpretation placed on these results. Correlation analyses state only an association, not a causation, and, as recently brilliantly exhibited by Business Week, these connections can be highly questionable at times. This is particularly true of imaging studies, where investigators can potentially go fishing for regions to attribute their target behaviors to. Interpretations for correlations are quick to come by and rationales for connections in unexpected areas of the brain can be justified all too easily when a publication is on the line. A priori regions of interest are thus crucially important, providing groundings for current explorations based on previous studies and alternative research methods. I am in no way denouncing VBM studies and their value and viability generally, or these studies in particular, however I do caution about the interpretations that can be carelessly made with them. Additionally, in studies like these it is unknown whether the size of the regions predicts the behavior, or whether the brain adapts and grows to incorporate new connections based on the repetition and reinforcement of certain actions. In regards to the studies at hand, their confirmation of the amygdala’s role in social interactions is highly supported, however it is unknown whether the increase in brain size is a predictor of social ability and network size, or whether practice of interpersonal skills helps to foster neurogenesis in these regions.

External (and internal) influences on decisions

We like to think that we are in control of our decisions. Yet evidence from various neuroeconomics and marketing studies have shown that many of the decisions we make in our day-to-day lives have less to do with our own personal choices than we would like to think, and that we are instead easily influenced by internal visceral states and external suggestions and primes.

According to Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed, many of the decisions we make, particularly in supermarkets and shopping situations, are often determined by manipulations made by marketing executives. Whole Foods and other supermarkets prime us to shop by arranging their stores, displays and prices in a certain way to make us perceive their products in a particular manner. They fill their stores with flowers, particularly right at the entrances, connoting freshness and evoking thoughts of newly picked produce right from the fields, when in fact much of these products have been sitting in warehouses for weeks. They also display items packed unnecessarily in ice or sprayed with water, again ensuring us of their freshness and vitality. These manipulations do little for the products themselves, but affect our perception of them and therefore our willingness to pay.

Bodily states can also alter our decision-making processes and preferences. Previous studies investigating the effect of visceral states on external decisions have shown that when in a condition of hunger, people have a greater desire not only for food but also for money. Fasted individuals also make riskier bets on a financial decision-making task involving lottery choices, opting for the riskier option significantly more often when fasted, and choosing the safer bet when full. This finding is supported by the animal literature, in which animals are more risk-averse when sated but risk-seeking when hungry. This is presumably an evolutionarily selected trait prompting exploration and risk-seeking when in states of hunger, which could potentially lead to the acquisition of new food sources.

A similar “state of urgency” might be expected to be seen in situations where people have to use the restroom, choosing an immediate satisfaction over long-term outcomes. However, in a clever study published last year in Psychological Science (and that recently won an Ig Noble award), individuals with a full bladder actually chose the delayed reward more often than instant gratification.

Led by Mirjam Tuk, researchers in the Netherlands had participants consume either 700 or 50 ml of water and then complete a delay discounting task. The discounting task involved binary decisions between two set options, one a small reward that participants could receive immediately and the other a reward of greater magnitude they would receive after a certain period of time. Participants also had to indicate how badly they needed to urinate, ranging from “very urgently” to “not urgently at all”. Individuals who had consumed the larger amounts of water (and who reported a greater urgency to urinate) chose the delayed option more often than those who had received the smaller serving of water.

Researchers hypothesized that this was because bladder control involves deliberate inhibitory measures on the individual’s part, which then promote inhibition and self-control in other aspects of life. The authors call this idea “inhibitory spill over”, where conscious cognition in one aspect, influenced by a visceral state, leaks over into other domains. This contradicts other theories of self-control, which believe restraint to be a limited personal resource that can be depleted through instances of restriction in one area, thereby allowing lapses of control at other instances.

These studies provide evidence that we should be aware of our surroundings and current physical and mental states when making important decisions, particularly concerning money. Clearly we do not live or function in a vacuum, nor make our decisions in one, but being mindful of the subconscious influences that are upon us, both internally and externally, can help us to make better decisions with a clearer mind and less biased approach.

Leadership skills?

In our hyper-driven and competitive culture, gaining access to the elite “C-suite” of a corporation, and the money and power that engenders, is highly coveted. Ambition, drive, hard work, and a certain degree of ruthlessness are regarded as essential qualities in an aspiring leader and traits necessary for someone working his or her way to the top. However, two interesting commentaries on leadership and advancement in the professional world have recently questioned these qualities and brought to light their similarities to two seemingly very different life paths.

In the first, journalist Jon Ronson makes the claim that top business leaders are four times more likely to have psychopathic tendencies than the normal population. In his new book The Psychopath Test, also brilliantly re-told on This American Life, he claims that 4% of business leaders demonstrate psychopathic tendencies, as compared to 1% of the normal population. He attributes this to a significantly less active amygdala, the region of the brain associated with fear and emotion. In psychopaths, or potentially CEOs, fear and empathy are diminished, enabling them to act selfishly or in the spirit of Machiavelli, if you will. Abnormal amygdala responses allow them to take risks and ruthless measures to get ahead and leave them disinhibited from the feelings of guilt, apprehension, or remorse that most of us would feel after firing employees or conning someone out of their money.

In his book he interviews Al Dunlap, the CEO of Sunbeam toasters and a man known for his cut-throatness and proclivity for firing people with glee. Ronson informally administers the classic PCL-R (Psychopath Checklist-Revised) to Dunlap, on which he scores higher than normal, though not high enough to register as a true psychopath. However, Dunlap does manages to turn nearly every item he answers affirmatively to into a positive quality for business. For instance, reinterpreting “a grandiose sense of self-worth” as “believing in yourself”, and “lack of remorse” as “freeing yourself up to move forward and achieve more”.

While the claim that most CEOs are secret psychopaths may not hold true, a second theory does carry more weight. Originally raised in neuroscientist Dr. David Linden’s new book on pleasure, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, and reiterated recently in an opinion piece for the New York Times, Linden makes the comparison between addictive personality traits and leadership skills. He cites compulsivity, risk taking, and a depletion in pleasure as tendencies that could be utilized to facilitate perfectionism, a push towards new financial ventures, and an unwillingness to settle in business. However these traits can easily manifest disadvantageously in society’s leaders, the most obvious example being the poor risky decisions made in the financial and political sectors that resulted in the global recession.

Additionally, it is not only these personality traits that drug users and innovative leaders have in common. Paradoxically, many of the creative geniuses and political and financial authorities of our time have struggled with drug or alcohol abuse at some point in their careers. Indeed, it would be surprising for these men and women to apply their sensation seeking tendencies towards only one aspect of their lives, and thus it is not uncommon for influential leaders and those in power to abuse drugs or alcohol. A new book on cocaine use, The Anatomy of Addiction by Dr. Howard Markel, has brought these tendencies to light using Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, as a prime example. In addition to Freud, Linden also lists Winston Churchill, Aldous Huxley, and Alexander the Great, as well as countless others, as examples of leaders who have struggled with addiction. However, it is important to note that most of these writers, CEOs, dignitaries, and geniuses were not on drugs at the moment of their breakthroughs.

I am not one to criticize drug taking or experimentation, but I am against the romanticization of these habits that can so easily become dangerous compulsions (compulsivity is clinically referred to as the persistence of a behavior despite negative consequences). Light experimentation with mind-altering substances is often cited as having provided inspiration and cognitive expansion perhaps not otherwise possible in our daily world. However, truly addictive drugs such as cocaine or opiates rarely provide these experiences without some potentially devastating long-term consequences. It is possible to maintain a recreational relationship with some of these substances, however it is a slippery slope that should be rappelled with extreme caution. The personality traits of curiosity and the desire for exploration, both personal and intellectual, do seem to foster innovation and creativity, and compulsivity can be analogous to perfectionism or a relentless drive for success. However, compulsivity can also lead an individual from exploratory recreational use to drug abuse and dependence, and it is important to keep in mind that those individuals who created corporate, creative or intellectual masterpieces while on drugs may have done so in spite of, not because of their addictions.

(Thanks to Tanner Brown for the Sam Harris link)

Does the internet control our minds?

As some of you may have noticed, I get a lot of my ideas for posts from the New York Times. I like to think that it is a relatively unbiased source of information, and I believe that it has several interesting news articles or opinion pieces every week. However, even my beloved NYT is guilty of a potentially dangerous trend towards self-fulfilling bias, regurgitating back opinions to me that I already agree with and information I know to be true. (Though in their defense they did publish a great op-ed piece recently calling this phenomenon to our attention.)

Everyone is guilty of cognitive bias and selective attention. Quite simply, we prefer to read things that confirm what we already believe. Both the sources that we choose to consume, as well as the information we retain from these sources, will more than likely further cement our own original views. It is very difficult to change one’s opinion on an important topic, not only because we rarely seek out conflicting beliefs, but because even when we do we are prone to misinterpret, disregard or even forget anything that disagrees with us. While ideally we would all make unbiased decisions about the content and media we consume, clearly this is not the case; it is no big secret that conservatives watch Fox News while liberals prefer MSNBC or the Daily Show. However, nowadays search engines and online news sources are further filtering down the selection of content for us to consume by crafting search and recommendation results based on previous articles or links selected. With these algorithms, even if you wanted to branch out from your usual media content you might be unable to, or it would at least involve more in-depth clicking or search terms.

We covet and praise the use of personalized prediction models on sites like Netflix and last.fm to recommend music and movies similar to what we already know and like.  But when the decisions made by mathematics and computers affect not only our artistic tastes but also our world views and political opinions a dangerous line begins to blur. Nowadays, it is no longer the government censoring information and ideas, it is our brains and the information readily available to us.

This also brings up the scary question of how reliant we actually are on the internet and technology at large, not only for our news and celebrity gossip, but more importantly for the ability to work, communicate and connect with people personally and professionally. In a rather bizarre survey conducted by the McCann WorldGroup, 53% of youth would rather sacrifice their sense of smell than give up their computer or smart phone. To put it bluntly, our society is obsessed with technology; we have become addicted to the internet. As someone who researches drug addiction, I do not use this term lightly, but really the comparisons are telling. Escalation of use, inability to cut back when attempted, a feeling of urgency or craving to get online after prolonged periods of abstinence, persisted use even in the face of negative consequences, not to mention the surge in rewarding dopamine we experience when our iPhones “ping” with a new email or text message.

In the spirit of true Pavlovian conditioning, that noise, that pervasive ping, has taken on the ability to arouse us in the way that a natural reward would. It has become associated with the news that someone has reached out and contacted us, and thus has achieved the same rewarding significance. The excitement or joy you get when you hear that ping and anticipate opening an email (is it a letter from a friend? a Facebook invite? or the ever disappointing listserv update), increases your arousal and causes dopamine to be released into the basal ganglia (particularly the nucleus accumbens), just as seeing a friend or being invited to a party would in real life. Over time, this ping has become associated with social interaction, and the feeling of reward this evokes has gradually been transferred from the email content to the cue itself. So now this ping, whether it’s from your own phone or the hundreds of others like it, creates this same state of arousal and surge of dopamine that anticipation of intimate interaction in real life might elicit. If you’re like me, you are also hyper-sensitive to this sound, assuming you’ve heard it in a song or ambient noise. Greater attention is allocated to perceiving the ping from the cacophony of sounds we are inundated with every day, just as a drug user has greater vigilance to perceive cues associated with drugs and their related paraphernalia from a vast array of sensory stimuli.

The internet is an invaluable tool in our arsenal and without a doubt no one would advocate returning to a time before it. However, we should keep in mind just how much time and energy we spend on it, and how reliant we have become. The uprisings in the Middle East and Northern Africa and the resulting internet shut downs protesters in Egypt and Syria were subjected to should remind us that the internet is not necessarily a constant, and perhaps it is important to keep our reliance on it, both personally and intellectually, in check.

(Thanks to Emily Barnet for the McCann survey.)