Lunch Talk: Placebo Effects.

UC Berkeley Cognitive Science C102, Lecture 6.

Expensive placebos work better than cheap ones.
Big placebo pills are more effective than little placebo pills.
Dark-colored placebo pills are more effective than light-colored placebo pills.
Placebo pills that taste bad are more effective than placebos that taste good.
Placebo delivered intravenously is more effective than a placebo delivered intra-muscularly.
Placebo delivered through a needle are more effective than delivered through the mouth.

If you tell somebody that you are giving him a placebo it stops being effective.

A solution to the terrorism problem would be to make everybody wear Google Glass devices. If one sees or smells a bomb-making material, the device reports the incident to the authorities. With this setup everybody becomes a self-policing drone, with Google AI algorithms functioning as a giant external brain.

 Figure from: Intelligence: the eye, the brain, and the computer, by Fischler and Firschein. 1987. p. 18.

tags: problem, solution, detection, control, brain, mind

Lunch Talk: (@UC Berkeley) Mind and Body

UC Berkeley Cognitive Science C102, Lecture 4. Professor John. F. Kihlstrom.

link

tags: lunchtalk, mind, psychology, biology, science

Snack Talk: Feeling machines that think.

Dr. Antonio Damasio on Self Comes to Mind.

The best of both world: an animal awareness (autopilot) to react to the world and an executive function to reflect on the world.

link

lunchtalk, psychology, mind, dilemma

The random walk of a killer's mind.

M. V. Simkin and V. P. Roychowdhury analyzed behavior pattern of a serial killer who murdered 53 people over a period of 12 years.

We propose a model according to which the serial killer commits murders when neuronal excitation in his brain exceeds certain threshold. We model this neural activity as a branching process, which in turn is approximated by a random walk.

Neat. I wonder if you can model the mind of a serial inventor within the same model. Maybe Edison's diary can be a good data source.

tags: mind, brain, information, social, forecast

Lunch Talk: (TED) Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that well be miserable if we dont get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things dont go as planned.

tags: psychology, mind, bias

Lunch Talk: (TED) Dan Dennett on human consciousness

Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.

link.

How Anesthesia Changes Mind.

Studying human brain under anesthesia presents not only ethical, scientific, and philosophical problems, but also involves some down-to-earth technological challenges. For example, it's difficult to collect and correlate people's different types of vital signs, both from brain imaging and more traditional collection techniques. Here's how engineers and scientists managed to solve the problem.

January 1, 2012. MTR -- Brain imaging in human subjects undergoing anesthesia is tricky because it requires anesthetizing people within a scanner and outside a normal operating room. Brown and his colleagues found a way to solve the technical and safety problems: they recruited volunteers who had already received tracheostomies, or surgical holes in the throat. That meant a tube could readily be used to restore their breathing in an emergency. In 2009, the researchers demonstrated that they could safely record both EEG and fMRI data on people under anesthesia; now they are working to correlate the imaging and EEG data with the observable changes seen as patients enter an anesthetized state.

Rather than "modifying" people to make their key vital signs exposed, they found those who's already been "modified" for other purposes. (This approach is generally outlined in Principles 9 through 11 in classical TRIZ problem-solving recommendations. These are instances of Separation in Time from the dilemma resolution techniques.)

Anesthesia studies have already cast doubt on one popular theory, which links consciousness to a particular type of brain wave with a frequency around 40 hertz. Mashour points out that research in anesthesia shows these waves can exist even when patients are unconscious. But the patterns that anesthesiologists see do support another theory: that consciousness emerges from the integration of information across large networks in the brain. 

 I wonder how much of our "everything is a network" thinking is determined by everyday exposure to the Internet. Brain is much more than a network, but we don't have the right words to describe it yet.


tags: mind, brain, biology, philosophy, problem, solution, triz

Intuition: quick answers to wrong questions.

Poetry makes meanings jump at you because the poet makes an effort to split the verse in such a way as  to empasize his intentions. It is much more difficult to do this with prose. In this regard, ppt presentations are closer to poetry than to prose. This passage from Kahneman and Klein (2009) is important, so I'm going to rewrite it as poetry:

Attribute substitution has been described as
an automatic process.
It produces
intuitive judgments in which  

difficult question
is answered by substituting
for an easier one—

the essence of heuristic thinking (Kahneman & Frederick, 2002).

Of course, the mechanisms that produce
incorrect intuitions
will only operate in
the absence of skill.
If people have a skilled response to the task with which they are charged, they will apply their skill. But even

in the absence of skill
an intuitive response may come
to their minds.

The difficulty
is that people have
no way to know where their intuitions came from. 

There is no subjective marker
that distinguishes correct intuitions

from 

intuitions that are produced
by highly imperfect heuristics.

An important characteristic of intuitive judgments, which they share with perceptual impressions, is that 

a single response
initially comes to mind. 

Most of the time
we have to trust this first impulse,
and most of the time we are right or are able to make the necessary corrections if we turn out to be wrong, but 

high subjective confidence is
not a good indication
of validity (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1978). 

Checking
one’s intuition is
an effortful operation

of System 2, which people
do not always perform
—sometimes because

it is difficult
to do so and sometimes because 

they do not bother.

This is related to the question why creative thinking is slow thinking (you have to engage System 2) and why in a brainstorming sessions you never know what you missed with your solution.

tags: psychology, brainstorming, thinking, mind

Kahneman D., Klein G. 2009. Conditions for Intuitive Expertise. DOI: 10.1037/a0016755.

Type 2 diabetes: it's all in the mind.

Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) - “In Chinese medicine 2,000 years ago, people knew urine could be sweet and people would be thirsty -- they knew the signs of diabetes,” Xing said. “But it wasn’t common.”

The same pace of social change and urban prosperity that has fueled China’s economy in the past decade has fanned the spread of Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, as people ate fattier foods and led more sedentary lifestyles.


Type 2 diabetes linked to obesity affected almost 1 in 10 Chinese adults in 2008, the New England Journal of Medicine said in a study published last year. That would be a higher rate than in the U.S., where the National Institutes of Health estimates 8.3 percent of the population had diabetes in 2010. Another 148 million Chinese are on their way toward developing the disease.

Clearly, type 2 diabetes is an urban environment disease. Just like swamps facilitate malaria and close proximity to livestock produces flu strains, cities create hundreds of millions of diabetics. Our commitment to certain types of mass manufactured foods is incompatible with the lifestyle. Ever since I did the diabetes 2 project with Roche, I've been amazed of how simple the cure for this disease is and how hard it is to make it work on a large scale. Mind seems to be the most difficult organ to inoculate against wrong commitments.

tags: health, care, problem, solution, scale, infrastructure, mind

Tech changes the way we think, have sex, and separate.

Recently, a study published in Science noted that frequent use of search technology (Google) changes the way we think:

...when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.

Now, there's a study showing that the use of the Pill changes the way women chose their partners:

Women who used OC [oral contraceptives] scored lower on measures of sexual satisfaction and partner attraction, experienced increasing sexual dissatisfaction during the relationship, and were more likely to be the one to initiate an eventual separation if it occurred. However, the same women were more satisfied with their partner’s paternal provision, and thus had longer relationships and were less likely to separate. (h/t NS).

It appears there's a trade-off between attractiveness and paternal reliability. The Pill skews the trade-off toward the reliability.

tags: trade-off, biology, technology, information, detection, mind

Problem-solving through insightful learning

An amazing chimp uses water as a tool to get food.

A systematic study of creativity in animals was pioneered by Dr. Wolfgang Kohler. His most famous experiment involved a chimpanzee who figured out how to make a telescoping stick to reach for a banana lying far away from the cage.

In 1917, Kohler published The Mentality of Apes (1917), where he described his experiments and proposed the concept of Insightful Learning, a process of problem solving by manipulating information about objects in one's mind. His work lead to the Gestalt theory of creativity.

tags: psychology, creativity

Fast-paced TV cartoons leave children mentally exhausted:

"When children have to process a lot of information very quickly, it is difficult to process because it's unusual. In this case [SpongeBob episodes] a lot of things are happening that can't happen in real life," she explained. "We think it leaves them mentally exhausted -- at least for a short time."

This is one of the conclusions from a study published this week in Pediatrics. It appears to be consistent with the research that shows adults suffering mental fatigue from interacting with fast-pace media (I wrote about it earlier).

The difference between books and video is that we lose control over the pace of events. Even when an adult reads to a child, the child still has a chance to slow down the process, e.g. by asking a question. The same is probably true about interactive, but not real-time games. What's particularly bad about fast-paced "out of control" media experiences is that for many people they define what a mentally challenging activity should be. In other words, high-speed brain processing becomes confused with hard mental work on solving a difficult problem. The same way creativity is being assessed by what one feels about the idea (the so-called "aha!" moment), instead of the value of the outcome.

tags: creativity, mind, brain, psychology,

A review of The Mystery of Consciousness

Philosopher John R. Searle writes in The New York Review of Books:

A technology for selectively erasing memories.

CNet writes:

Now scientists in Israel say they have devised a method to erase memories that trigger cravings in rats addicted to cocaine--a method that works so well it actually results in rats ignoring the place where they had been scoring the drug.

The protein they use is known for inhibiting learning processes by affecting memories. I wonder if it can be used in reverse, i.e. to improve learning by selectively erasing memories that prevent us from learning. That is, it's much more difficult to teach a person who clings to prejudices and obsolete ideas, than somebody with a fresh mind. If we were able to control memory deletion mechanism, we could free up our minds from the baggage of unneeded information and, as a result, increase our creativity by escaping "the curse of knowledge".

tags: creativity, brain, mind, psychology, biology, education, information

Problem solving and bilingualism.

  - Why did the cat bark? 
- He wanted to learn a second language. 
(A children joke).

NYTimes publishes an interview with Ellen Bialystok, a neuroscientist who has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her recent work shows that, among other things, bilingualism delays the onset of Alzheimer's symptoms.

I also find it interesting that researchers see differences in physical brain activity when mono- and bilinguals solve the same problems:

...when we look in their [bilinguals'] brains through neuroimaging, it appears like they’re using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.

On the problem-solving side, I find that using abstract system-level language instead of a specific engineering or technology jargon helps me and my students approach the problem from a different perspective. I call this language "Inventorese." Maybe it should count as my 5th one :)

Finally, long-held common sense belief on the subject turned out to be wrong:

Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage.

tags: brain, mind, communications, psychology, creativity, system, five element analysis, health, bias

Creativity prescription: 2 miliamps to the scalp.

An old technique for electrical stimulation of the brain is getting a new life. According to a Nature Neuroscience article

Last year a succession of volunteers sat down in a research lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico to play DARWARS Ambush!, a video game designed to train US soldiers bound for Iraq... With just seconds to react before a blast or shots rang out, most forgot about the wet sponge affixed to their right temple that was delivering a faint electric tickle.

Volunteers receiving 2 milliamps to the scalp (about one-five-hundredth the amount drawn by a 100-watt light bulb) showed twice as much improvement in the game after a short amount of training as those receiving one-twentieth the amount of current1. "They learn more quickly but they don't have a good intuitive or introspective sense about why," says Clark.
== Nature 472, 156-159 (2011) | doi:10.1038/472156a ===

The article also mentions development of Thinking Cap, a device for stimulating people's creativity. Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney in Australia, claims that in earlier experiments electrical stimulation helped people solve creative problems three times faster than in control conditions.

tags: creativity, brain, health, games, electronics, mind

Inventing the future

Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, sums up the 10,000-hour (10-year) rule for becoming an expert:

... it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas... The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again.

Now, if it takes 10 years to become an expert, one of the most important questions a would be expert faces on day one of his or her 10-year term is "In which area should I become an expert, so that my expertise will not get obsolete by the end of the full term?" One way (the best way?) to answer it is to create a new domain of expertise, as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, James Watson, Tom Perkins, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Zack Zuckerberg, and others had done before.



Another question, which arises on or beyond the 10-year expertise boundary, is how to avoid the curse of knowledge, a mindset that locks one's creativity within a set of "expert" assumptions.



tags: creativity, brain, system, mind, philosophy, technology, quote, timing, inertia, psychology

½ + ½ > 1

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/311/5763/1005.full DOI: 10.1126/science.1121629

Due to mind's relatively slow background information analysis processes, splitting an invention or a problem-solving session into two parts may help you come up with a better solution.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as between different houses or different cars) should be left to unconscious thought. Named the “deliberation-without-attention” hypothesis, it was confirmed in four studies on consumer choice, both in the laboratory as well as among actual shoppers, that purchases of complex products were viewed more favorably when decisions had been made in the absence of attentive deliberation.

Dijksterhuis et al., On Making the Right Choice. Science 311 (5763): 1005-1007.

This approach is especially helpful when running a reverse brainstorming session on the first day and a problem-solving session on the next.

tags: creativity, mind, brain, brainstorming, reverse brainstorm, research, psychology, efficiency

Connecting dots ... with language

From a random neuroscience blog:

There is a study that was done with rats in a rectangular room with four white walls. They put some cheese in the corner and turned the mouse around a few times and dropping him into the white room. 50% of the time, the rat would go the wrong direction because he had no reference point to find which corner the cheese was in. So, they painted one of the walls blue, so now you would probably hypothesize that the rat would be dropped in the room and think “cheese is left of the blue wall.” Guess what. 50% of the time, the rat went the wrong direction! Researchers concluded that the rat was not able to link those two concepts - ‘left’ and ‘blue wall.’ He knew ‘left’ and knew ‘blue’ but could connect those two pieces of information.

Guess who else cannot connect that information— humans ages 1 - 6 years old. Liz Spelki puts it like this— a child’s brain begins as a bunch of islands. On one side of the brain you have an island “blue” and another on the other side of the brain the island “left” and somewhere in between these there exist ideas like “wall.” At around age 6, children are able to put together phrases in spatial language and think “left of the blue wall” which in turn connects those islands in the brain so the children can understand what “left of the blue wall!” means.

Connectivity in the brain is provided by white rather than gray matter; the white matter is the first to go when people develop Alzheimer's.

tags: brain, mind, invention, science, biology, creativity