Prof Zeki's Musings

The perils of neural adaptation

2012-01-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

In neurobiology, adaptation commonly refers to a property of nerve cells which makes them less responsive to repeated exposure to the same stimulus at the same intensity. A cell responding well to, say, red light, will become less and less responsive if it is repeatedly stimulated with red light. On the other hand, if not stimulated for a while, it will recover its excitability and will then become as responsive as when first stimulated.

I presume that a basically similar operation takes place over longer periods in other systems, when we become less responsive, for example, to a song which we once liked very much.

There are no doubt many good biological reasons for having adaptation; getting adapted to a new way of doing things may be beneficial in some circumstances. But I fear it perhaps also works often to our disadvantage. Through adaptation, we begin to accept situations that we once might have thought intolerable. Through such a process, we begin to accept, for example, the prying eyes and ever increasing encroachment of the state into our affairs, something that almost no country in the world seems to be immune to. Ultimately, this works to our disadvantage but, through adaptation, we accept it with a shrug of the shoulder.

There are, however, situations where one just does not get adapted, and the neurobiology of the non-adaptive system is interesting to study, especially when applied to the linguistic system.

I recognize that the English language, like any other language, changes with usage. But I can never get adapted to the use of “that” instead of “who” when referring to people.

The most memorable thing I can remember about an ex-British prime minister is that he joined in the contemporary massacre of the English language by speaking of “people that do such things” instead of “people who do such things”.

I cannot get adapted to the vulgarity of the use of “like” – “do you, like, have, any bread, like”.

I cannot get adapted to the hopeless use of the word “inform”, which has become so common as to become a constant irritant - “the report has been informed by the design of buildings”, when I always thought that only people can inform.

I cannot get adapted to the clichés of “cutting-edge” science or “state of the art” technology, commonly used as substitutes for thinking.

I cannot even get adapted to terms that I myself am guilty of using constantly, for example saying “you know” or “I mean” constantly in a conversation – when in fact people don’t know, which is why I am telling them, and what “I mean” becomes clear only after I have told them.

In a strange way, I wish I could get adapted to these irritants, because then they will cease to be irritants.

I suppose that there is a part of our nervous systems that is resistant to adaptation. In my case, this certainly is a feature of my linguistic brain but it is not restricted to it; there are many other things that I just do not seem to be able to get adapted to.

Whether our nervous system becomes less plastic and therefore less adaptable with age, or whether adaptation is not equally potent in regulating all nervous activity, or whether it is a combination of the two plus other factors, a study of the diverse nature of adaptation would be interesting.

Help...wine & cheese experts

2012-01-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

About thirty years ago, some wine experts in France decreed that red wines should be chilled before being served. I was idiotic enough then to believe them and so chilled my red wine …but only once or twice. I rapidly came to the conclusion that I prefer my clarets at room temperature and have never been tempted back since.

Now, in an article published last week in The Daily Telegraph, another group of experts are reported to have patronizingly told us that we have all been fooled for years, that we must really accompany cheese with white wine, not red wine since the reds dominate all but the most robust cheeses, according to them. And of course, we must continue to serve white, never red, with fish.

All this is of course stuff and nonsense. The combination of wine and cheese that go best together are the wines and the cheeses which you like, ones which give you pleasure. I have always preferred my fish with a good claret and will continue to do so. I have always preferred my cheese with a good claret and will continue to do so. I agree more with Dr. Johnson, no wine expert he, when he said that “a fish must swim three times, once in the sea, once in butter, and once in a good bottle of claret”!

No doubt, as with the silly ideas about chilling red wine that the experts pushed some thirty years ago, they will sooner or later be pushing the idea that cheeses are best accompanied by red wine after all. And recall all this fuss about nouvelle cuisine some years ago, much of it extremely dreary. In fact there is a hilarious accompanying article in the same issue of The Daily Telegraph which pokes good fun at a seemingly new brand of nouvelle cuisine restaurant, which has opened in London.

Experts can peddle their silly views only when we lack confidence in our own tastes and in our own judgment. Why we do so is itself a very interesting psychological and neurobiological problem, as is the problem of why some combinations are judged better than others and why, in spite of our better judgments, we defer to the dubious authority of experts.

Which brings me to an interesting puzzle: why is it that, in England, we have the somewhat barbaric habit of serving cheese after dessert (have any experts commented on this?). Well, I have found out the reason, or one reason. I don’t know how true it is, but it is not implausible. The French have cheese pour faire chanter le vin [to make the wine sing], before moving on to the dessert accompanied by dessert wines, which ends the formal dinner. Apparently, in England quite some time ago, there was an anxiety on the part of men to end the formal dinner as quickly as possible so that the women could retire [or be made to retire] to a separate room, and the men could continue with refined binge drinking and men talk. And since dessert ends the formal dinner in both cultures, all they had to do was swap the cheese and the dessert around. And the habit has lingered on.

Attention and the Leonardo Exhibition

2011-12-29T03:14:00.000-08:00

I sometimes wish that the brain had several parallel attentional systems, with the possibility of switching each one on and off at will. I recognize the many difficulties of a nervous systems so arranged, not least of which is the problem that a switched-off attentional system will no longer be capable of signaling danger. But there would also be advantages, and one advantage would have been handy when I attended the Leonardo Exhibition at the National Gallery in London several weeks ago.

It was a dreadful experience, made all the more dreadful by the presence of so many masterpieces which would one could just not contemplate at leisure. Apparently, the Gallery had restricted entry to 185 at a time , instead of the 250 at any one time that they stuff in at such exhibitions. That may relate to the numbers entering; it has nothing to do with the numbers leaving. There must have been at least 600 in the room when I was there, describing paintings to their friends in a variety of languages, gesticulating and pointing to various features and, in general, distracting attention from the paintings and drawings themselves. To all those who do not wish to have such an unpleasant experience but learn about the paintings, I would recommend buying the catalogue instead, and forgetting about the exhibition. Of course, photographs never compare with the real thing, but at least you will be able to view the paintings without the endless distraction imposed by an attentional system that is simply not able, for good biological reasons, to handle many distractions.

I readily admit that I may be more sensitive than others to crowds. In addition to invading one’s peri-personal space with their handbags, etc, they also invade one’s auditory space incessantly. I deplore the endless messages now broadcast in Underground stations, many of which are pointless (“stand behind the yellow lines”; “no flash photography on the Underground”; “please contribute to our charity” and, most useless of all, “there is a good service on all lines this morning” (which, however, is more often than not followed by the announcement: “except for the following – the Circle, District, Piccadilly and City lines”, rendering the first part not only useless but also inaccurate). I hate announcements on planes, and in fact on a recent flight to Japan, I asked the steward if he could shut off the endless announcements on the intercom system (he did). Wherever I go, I am plagued by someone sitting next to me chattering on their mobile ‘phones. But such disagreeable experiences become doubly more so when one goes to a gallery to enjoy oneself and be instructed. So, I think that my days of visiting block-buster exhibitions are now over, unless of course I come across so much money that I can hire the entire exhibition for myself – an unlikely eventuality. Or, even more unlikely, if I could come up with a re-wiring of the nervous system such that a distracting input can be completely shut off.

Visually unconvincing

2011-10-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

…and therefore probably not true!

Following on from my previous post on the Mona Lisa, I was interested in the total disconnect between the alarmist broadcasts about the impending hurricane Katarina pounding New York a few weeks ago and the actual live images that were being simultaneously broadcast. At the start of these alarmist news broadcasts, I thought that the accompanying drumbeats (on the BBC) made sense for once, implying as they did some catastrophic event. But the live scenes broadcast simultaneously with the reports from on the spot correspondents told a very different story. The 170 km per hour winds did not square with the picture of ordinary people hailing a taxi quietly or chatting and laughing, apparently totally unperturbed. Nor were the umbrellas upturned and the almost vertical downpour of the rain gave the lie to the declared strong winds. In fact, the visual picture was of nothing more than an ordinary rainy day.

The drumbeats sounded ridiculous, in retrospect. And, by the simplest of all tests, namely the visual test, all these news readers came out as being extremely gullible and silly.

I wonder – do they actually see the pictures that are projected while they read the news.

Which means that TV news stations should be a good deal more careful if they want their reports to have credibility. In such instances, it is perhaps best (from their point of view) to stick to reading the news without accompanying pictures.

It is not quite that easy to cheat the visual brain.

£60,000 for self reflection

2011-10-02T14:51:00.000-07:00

Next week in London, a canvas by Bob Law entitled Nothing To be Afraid Of V 22.8.69 is to be auctioned and carries with it an estimate of £60,000.

Law apparently “had applied the seductive idea of nothing to a canvas, and asks the viewer to reflect” (according to the auctioneer’s catalogue).

Metro reports the artist David Hockney as saying, “It seems to me that if you make pictures there should be something on the canvas”.

The idea of “blankness” is not new, and not only in painting. I gather that in some Noh performances (which date back to the 15th century), the actor appears before the audience and says nothing for about half an hour. Half an hour, during which the audience’s imagination can be stimulated.

But I have very mixed feelings about this empty canvas by Law and its price tag.

On the one hand, it seems an awful lot of money to pay, when you could have the same thing for much cheaper, for example by painting one wall in your house in white (see my post about my stay in a Tokyo hotel). You could then project your imagination daily on the empty space. If the space is large enough, one could project films regularly on it, thus turning an empty space into a source of infinite variability and fertile imagination.

On the other hand, given the huge sums spent in auction houses on what I believe is very shoddy work, I would prefer a blank canvas. I can project my concepts on to it regularly, whereas I would have to view a bad piece of art daily, were I unfortunate enough to spend so much money on it.

But of course I defer to those knowledgeable about art. Metro reports the head of contemporary art at the auction house as saying, “Bob Law is the most underestimated and overlooked minimal artist in Britain …[who] didn’t get the recognition that he deserved”

Well, he may now. I hope that the purchaser will enjoy enriching his imagination daily.

As for me, I will stick to a white wall.

The Mona Lisa in 30 seconds

2011-08-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

I just heard the tail end of a talk on BBC Radio 3, during which the speaker seemed to lament the very brief period that the average viewer spends in front of one of the world’s most famous paintings, the Mona Lisa.

Apparently, when the painting was in Japan in the 1970s, the average time spent by the viewer was 30 seconds, while at the Louvre (where it is housed), the average time is 15 seconds.

Does this show that the average viewer is not interested in the painting, or that the main interest lies in being able to say that he or she had seen it, as a famous art critic once argued?

Or is there, perhaps, another interpretation as well?

Perhaps part of the reason lies in the power of the visual image, and its ability to give a great deal of knowledge even after a very brief viewing, because the visual brain is so well developed and can acquire so much knowledge over very brief periods of time. After all, volumes of writing on the Mona Lisa will not give the same information and knowledge that a few seconds of actual viewing does.

Some of the most beautiful segments in symphonic works last but a few seconds and yet are experienced as beautiful and emotionally arousing. Why shouldn’t a visual image do the same?

I do not deny the fact that many want to view the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s Pietà at St Peter’s Basilica just to be able to say that they have seen it.

But it is equally rash to deny the huge efficiency of the visual brain, which allows the average viewer to obtain a great deal of knowledge through such a brief viewing.

A very interesting article on financial “irrationality”

2011-08-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

I read quite a few articles on the economy and the economic crisis. Most of them seem soberly written, and pretend to be analyzing the situation in informed, rational ways. And most of them show little understanding of why we are in an economic abyss and do not seem to be able to predict the future accurately. These articles perhaps seem convincing because they are, on the surface at least, apparently rationally written.

Only very, very few acknowledge the irrationality of the system. How could a system, devised by whizz-kid mathematicians employed by major banks and financial institutions be so irrational? After all, before they answer your questions, these kids grab the slide ruler or its modern equivalent to give you a precise, rational, answer.

An excellent article by Danny Schecter is a refreshing departure, because it acknowledges explicitly that the financial system is driven by greed and fear and arrogance. Greed and fear are emotional states that are difficult to analyze rationally. As I have argued here before, greed and its pursuit are very likely accompanied by de-activation of large parts of the brain, and specifically the parts concerned with judgment. Hence the actions and decisions taken by those in this state – especially when the prize is untold riches – is considered irrational, at least when analyzed by people who are not themselves in that state.

But is it really irrational? Yes, if you judge it by the standards of rational judgment. But I think that emotional behaviour has its own logic and rationality, which we commonly fail to understand, precisely because we analyze it with our rational brains.

But no, they are not irrational, if judged by other standards. Would one financial wizard, consumed by greed, consider it irrational when another financial wizard, equally consumed by greed, sells sub-prime mortgages to make fat profits? In the greed world, there is nothing irrational about that. And recent history proves it. Those actions evidently received wholesale approval. Nor was this approval restricted to the financial wizards. Those who bought the mortgages were probably equally consumed by the dream of rich profits, with minimal outlay.

If you think about it, there is nothing really irrational when someone consumed by greed behaves in unethical ways provided that he is rewarded, at least periodically. And of course, he would do it again and again, even after he fails, because in greedy states the cognitive, judgmental parts of the brain are inactive.

This is not unlike the brain system regulating romantic relationships. In phases of intense, passionate love, it appears as if large parts of the brain are inactive. Hence lovers often behave as if they have taken leave of their senses. But in fact, their conduct makes biological sense.

Neurobiologists have for a long time emphasized brain activity when we undertake particular tasks or are in particular states. Perhaps the time has come to give equal emphasis to brain de-activation when we undertake particular tasks or are in particular states.

The brain's mirror neuron system and Britain's "moral collapse"

2011-08-15T04:19:00.000-07:00

Much has been written about the mirror neuron system. At the cellular level, this refers to neurons in the brain that not only respond vigorously when the subject undertakes some action such as grasping but also respond vigorously when the subject observes someone else undertaking the same action. There are many outstanding questions regarding the mirror neuron system, but these need concern us here.

Much has been made of the mirror neuron system. Among the questions that have not been addressed, as far as I can tell, is whether such a system functions in developing concepts related to role models in individuals. The question is not unreasonable. We often imitate the actions of those we admire, and we may even enlarge this imitative behaviour to aspire to what they have achieved. This aspiration need not be limited to the exact field that the role model is in. For example, a sportsperson can inspire us, through their dedication, motivation and self-application, to try to reach equivalent heights in our own chosen field.

That of course is looking at the mirror neuron system – assuming it to be remotely involved in this general imitative behaviour – in a positive light. But can the mirror neuron system also act in what is generally considered to be a negative way?

I recently saw a film which describes true life events related to gangsters – a disturbing film, in which young men took as their models older gangsters and imitated their behaviour. To be sure, there are other factors that come into play here – the absence of a positive role model, the inadequacy of the individual, etc., but I wonder to what extent the brain’s mirror neuron system plays a role.

Which brings me to the recent riots in Britain.

It is of course a fact that these riots did take place largely – though apparently not exclusively – in impoverished areas, which has led some to suspect that this impoverishment is one of the root causes. That may well be so, but I wonder to what extent the absence of positive role models, and the presence of negative role models, at the highest levels of society has not also provided a negative role model, through the brain’s mirror neuron system.

There is a Russian proverb which says that when a fish stinks, it stinks from the head down.

When the Prime Minister speaks of Britain’s “moral collapse”, he should include in that the moral collapse – apparently with impunity – of Britain’s ruling elite. When Members of Parliament can have their hands in the till and behave in ways which, though legally acceptable, are morally wrong, when politicians can lie to the public and to Parliament on important matters of state, when they can have cosy relationships with unelected people who apparently dictate policy to them, when bankers can bring the country to the brink of disaster with impunity – and the catalogue goes on – then they are not providing good moral leadership.

When these same people apparently are rewarded, or simply let off the hook, then the moral collapse is complete. And it provides a negative role model, perhaps through the brain’s mirror neuron system, aided by its memory system.

When the Prime Minister says that at the root of the riots was “indifference to what is right and wrong”, he should keep in mind the model provided by the politicians, who also in many instances seem to be indifferent to what is right and wrong.

Mr Miliband, of the Labour Opposition Party, has blamed “greed, selfishness and immorality” for the riots. Do these words not also adequately describe the behaviour of politicians, en masse, as revealed in the press over the past two years?

Perhaps neurobiologists will now start to consider the relationship of the brain’s mirror neuron system to the development of positive and negative role models.

Nostalgia

2011-08-12T02:03:00.000-07:00

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit...For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police...the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone”
From the opening paragraph of AJP Taylor’s English History 1914-1945

Yes, I know, there was much that was wrong with England at that time.

But still, that every single line in the above paragraph is no longer true, and will never again be true, is a matter for regret.

Skinnerian rats and financiers

2011-08-11T12:39:00.000-07:00

The behaviour of markets is baffling and erratic. Shares slump in the morning, only to recover in the afternoon. The latter gives people hope. More hope when the unemployment figures in the United States go down. Markets rally. These hopes are dashed by close of trade later in the afternoon or next morning, when another set of figures says something else. Gloom and panic buying and selling sets in. This is baffling and erratic behaviour.

But is it so baffling and erratic?

Markets are made of people, and peoples’ behaviour follows certain rules. These rules are commonly similar to rules observed in animals such as rats and pigeons. The American psychologist BF Skinner documented this years ago.

Let us take negative reward, such as pressing a button to avoid an electric shock (in financial terms, not losing money. The shock can be avoided by pressing the button at fixed times (say every 5 minutes) or fixed intervals, say after every 50th press. But the shock can equally be delivered at unpredictable times and unpredictable intervals. The latter two generate very high levels of button presses and are known, in monkeys at least, to induce severe gastric problems, including intestinal ulcers.

They also sometimes result in what is known as superstitious behaviour. If a rat, for example, while trying to avoid a shock in a random negative reinforcement schedule, circles the cage twice and is rewarded with a food pellet on a few occasions when it does this, then the chances are high that it will continue this bizarre behaviour while continuing to press at high rates, presumably in the belief that it will be rewarded again.

So much for the world of rat ideas. Now translate this into the world of financiers. The European Central Bank announces that it will buy Italian and Spanish bonds and some Harvard qualified economist says that this will miraculously solve the eurozone problem. They buy shares (superstitious behaviour) and the markets go up. But then, what they had not factored in, namely the calculation of ordinary brains that such bond-buying will not solve the malaise, sets in, and the markets go down. Then some fancy statement from the Federal Reserve says that interest rates will not go up (superstitious statement that does not take into account the underlying malaise), and the market goes up again. The reality of ordinary brain calculations then sets in, and the markets go down again. Then some official in some bank somewhere announces that there is a strong possibility of printing money (superstitious behaviour), and the markets go up again. The truth is that money printing, bond-buying and low interest rates amount to superstitious behaviour; they do not solve the underlying problems. The brain’s calculations are that those who have borrowed huge sums of money to service extravagant life styles cannot pay this money back without something more radical and convincing. Hence loss of confidence sets in.

All this amounts to high-rate superstitious behaviour. And this behaviour is due to the fact that the financiers do not really understand the system that they have created.

Perhaps they should revert to much simpler systems – ones that their brains, as well as ordinary brains, understand. Then they might find that their behaviour is not so erratic after all and that there is a rationale to this apparently bizarre behaviour.

Simple brain economics

2011-08-11T12:36:00.001-07:00

Two days ago, a geek parading as an economic expert appeared on TV to tell us that the new policy of the ECB (European Central Bank), of buying Italian and Spanish bonds, had worked and that the markets had stabilised. Less than 12 hours later, the great sell-off began, with French banks taking the biggest hit and France’s AAA rating being questioned. So much for the expert.

The truth is that the policy of the ECB and all other policies currently on the table will not work. Only a policy that takes into account brain realities will. I do not say this as an economic expert, which I am mercifully not. I say it based on a much simpler economics, brain economics which itself is based on profit and loss and confidence and reliability. These, it seems to me, are simple and basic factors that the brain has evolved to assess for millions of years. Most brains understand little about the fancy mathematical economic theories developed by artificial intelligence laboratories, and which have proven to be such a disaster – in fact, they may have contributed significantly to bringing about the economic crisis.

Let us suppose that, to finance my extravagant life-style, you lend me £100,000 at 4% and find that, because of my low earnings, I am unable to pay back the interest, let alone the loan. Instead, to service the interest, I come to you for another loan, this time at 6%. You may think me a little nutty and unreliable. However, if you know that I have huge realisable assets – say, land and castles - which I could sell off come the crunch, you might lend me some more. But then you find that I return with a further request for another loan, to service the interest on the outstanding loans, because I am unwilling to tighten my belt. Your confidence will evaporate and my credit rating will go down; you (or your brain) would have calculated correctly. You would rightly ask me to tighten my belt, sell off my assets and balance my books. Your brain will have calculated that I am not credit-worthy, and you would lose confidence in my ability to repay. All promises I make would henceforth be worthless.

This is all there is to it. It is an exact analogy to what is happening, and all this talk about buying bonds here to sell them there and the rest of it is junk talk. This is why all buying of bonds, and raising debt ceilings and lending more money, will not work. One does not need a sophisticated degree from Harvard Business School to realise that.

And quantitative easing?
This means printing money. It, too, will not work and never has except as a temporary palliative which only makes matters worse in the end. All ordinary brains, without the advantage of sophisticated degrees in mathematics and economics, know that printing money simple reduces the value of the money we have, and therefore increases prices. And hence, people with ordinary brains simply take refuge in something that is unlikely to be easy to clone, like gold. All this does not require sophisticated thinking. It amounts to simple and reliable brain calculations.

The one reasonable statement I have heard from an economist came on the BBC today. He said that “markets are finally catching up with reality”. Even that is incomplete, for what reality is this that he was talking about? Well, let me provide the answer: brain reality!

Maybe we should dispense with all these economists once and for all. To paraphrase what a friend of mine said about another friend, “I never believed in artificial intelligence until I met economists”.

British Spring: Loss of fear among British politicians (follow-up to my previous post)

2011-07-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

In its edition of July 15, 2011 Le Monde published an article under the title of "Murdoch: au Royaume-Uni, la peur a changé de camp", an article in which the events surrounding the demise of the Murdoch empire are described as "the UK, living its after-Murdoch spring". It is the first article that I have seen which draws an explicit parallel between the Arab Spring and events surrounding the Murdoch empire, although there may of course have been others, and concludes that there was a common factor - loss of fear.

The point being made here is that British politicians, fearful of tackling what they have perceived as the power of the Murdoch press, have suddenly lost their fear. The article does not mention another important similarity with the Arab Spring: the emotional trigger. Just as the Arab Spring had one(s), so the emotional trigger in this instance, I think, was the revelation that journalists working for one of the Murdoch papers had hacked into the mobile 'phone of a murdered girl and had deleted messages on her 'phone, thus giving false hopes to her family that she may have been alive when the search for her was on. The public was revolted. The trigger was ignited; there was no turning back, and the amygdala in the brains of politicians was de-activated, with consequences that we now know - the demise of the News of the World, plus other events that are waiting to happen.

Then came the revelation that the mobile 'phones of relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan may also have been hacked. I daresay that should the current reported investigations in the USA prove that the mobile 'phones of the victims of 9/11 had been hacked, the emotional volcano will be too hot to contain. This is an extremely emotive issue, and the consequences will be dire.

Although there have been some remarkable Members of Parliament who have fearlessly attacked the Murdoch press, the report in Le Monde and other reports in the British press have consistenly written that politicians here were dead scared of saying anything that may upset the Murdoch press and cost them their jobs and imperil their future rise. But once the emotional trigger was set alight, that fear was lost, presumably through amygdalar de-activation.

Another similarity with the Arab Spring, is that this was a mass event, in the sense that the revulsion at the revelations was widespread. Hence, an aid in the loss of fear was the emotional support of a wide segment of the public (see my previous post).

Several articles have emphasized the fact that maybe Murdoch did not have as much as power as he was assumed to have, and that he was only perceived to have this power. The point is really largely academic; power is always the power that is perceived, by the brain of course, never the real one which is in any case difficult to calculate.

And the brain may not be far off the mark. After all, when the British Prime Minister is reported as having had no less than 25 meetings with the Murdochs since coming to power, enjoyed a Christmas dinner with them, and when a previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is reported to have had three telephone conversations with Rupert Murdoch before the launch of the Iraq war, what else can the brain conclude?

Add to that the fact the the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, was removed from his position as chairman of a committee to decide the total Murdoch take-over of BSkyB, when he declared - long before these events reached boiling point - that he was "at war" with the Murdoch empire, what else can the brain conclude?

Such events, as the Daily Telegraph said in its editorial yesterday, "would have raised eyebrows in Palermo".

The only reality we have is brain reality - and brain reality seems to have been pretty shrewd at making inferences about power.

So, the amygdala is finally de-activated among a large number of members of that sheepish organization known as the Mother of Parliaments. Papers here are speaking about Parliament finding a role and purpose again. I rather doubt it. Which brings me back to the point: how long does amygdalar de-activation last? An interesting experimental question which may lead to lasting new views about politicians.

The Arab Spring, Twitter, Facebook and the brain

2011-07-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

A great deal has been written about what has come to be known as the “Arab Spring”. Two factors have reportedly been instrumental in enabling it. One of these is hardly credible, at least to me; the other is of profound neurobiological interest.

The first is that this is a social network media revolution, through channels such as Facebook and Twitter. I find it hard to credit this oft-repeated belief. Both Tunisia (where the revolt started) and Egypt are very poor countries, 40% of the population in the latter living below the beltline of $2 per day. I do not suppose that, apart from a tiny percentage, many have the means to acquire computers and mobile ‘phones. Indeed it is hard to believe that Mohammad Bouazizi, the young man who tragically and in despair over his poverty immolated himself, had the means to have access to social media networks at all. Television, commonly available in cafés for communal watching, is likely to have played a more significant role. This is not to say that Twitter and Facebook did not facilitate communication. Of course they did, just as (in a much slower world) the horse facilitated communication during the French Revolution.

The second – loss of fear - is of greater significance and of much neurobiological interest. We have been repeatedly told that the masses who are revolting, commonly against much better equipped security forces, have lost their fear. Fear is associated with certain physiological activity, and especially prominent among brain structures contributing to such activity is a complex nucleus called the amygdala, buried within the temporal lobes of the brain, and consisting of many subdivisions. I would not wish to imply that the amygdala alone is responsible for so complex a state, for the amygdala is connected to many other brain structures which, collectively, are responsible for generating and maintaining the state of fear, as a defensive mechanism to protect the individual. Whatever the role of the different brain structures, the central role played by the amygdala was shown many years ago when scientists described how damage to it results in a loss of fear by animals and humans.

The amygdala has extensive connections within the brain. It is believed that there are two routes to the amygdala, an “immediate” one from the sense organs, which by-passes the cerebral cortex, and a more “leisurely” one that relays signals through the cerebral cortex. The amygdala is also connected to centres, such as those of the sympathetic nervous system, which regulate activity to mobilize the individual for appropriate reaction in response to fearful events or stimuli.

I suppose that the default state is activity – whatever its exact nature - within this system, activity within the amygdala that is relayed to other centres with which it is connected. I also assume, perhaps somewhat simplistically, that de-activation of this system is what leads to the condition that we describe as “loss of fear”.

This raises the interesting question of what triggers the de-activation and what dictates how long-lasting the de-activation and therefore the change from the default state is.

It is obvious that a long set of grievances reaches a point where individuals defy willfully the physiological state and care no longer about the consequences of their action. In the case of the Arab Spring, there was also an emotional trigger – the self immolation by Mohammad Bouazizi. The amygdala is part of the brain’s emotional and social system and the relative influence of the emotional component compared to the more cognitive component in regulating its activity is interesting to determine.

I am of the view that, in Egypt, a trigger, which was far more significant than Twitter and Facebook messages, was the emotional breakdown of Wael Ghoneim on Egyptian TV, an episode that was played and replayed, and presumably seen by masses in the many cafés in Egyptian cities. The episode was actually accompanied by music, hence fortifying the emotional message.

The fear system has been studied largely in animals, but the events of the Arab Spring and other similar events raise important questions about the organization of the fear system in humans, ones which are amenable to study.

One question relates to the time course of the de-activation. Judging by events in the Arab Spring, it can be very long lasting indeed; indeed it may even be permanent. This may yet turn out to be an interesting example of brain-plasticity.

A second question relates to the trigger. There seems little reason to doubt that an emotional trigger was just that, a trigger coming on top of much discontent. This in turn raises the question whether there is a threshold for triggering an amygdalar de-activation, and what the neural mechanisms for maintaining it may be. It also raises the question of how the system returns to its de-fault value, assuming that the change in the brain is not permanent. Finally, it raises the question of how the two routes to the amygdala – the direct one and the cortical one – regulate one another.

A third question is about the potentiating effect on this de-activation caused by group action. There seems little doubt that the involvement of many in the uprising had a facilitating effect but how this works no one knows.

As I said above, the system regulating fear is not confined to the amygdala and an enquiry into the neural mechanisms involved in the loss of fear would no doubt have to extend much beyond it. But the amygdala is a good place to begin.

The Arab Spring is an example of other events where loss of fear is a powerful engine for initiating change. Hence the lessons that it provides for experimentation and the results of such experimentation will have important, general, implications.

A carbuncle on the face of Istanbul

2011-07-14T00:50:00.000-07:00

Istanbul is one of the most wonderful cities in the world. It has an extraordinary history, is rich in fabulous monuments and has a very privileged natural position by the sea - the Bosphorus dividing and uniting it at the same time. It is a delight to be in and I have made a point of visiting it regularly.

One would think that such a treasure is worth treasuring. Yet architects, presumably with the agreement of city planners, have allowed it to be defaced thoughtlessly. One hideous example of this is the huge Ritz Carlton which has been built in such a way as to obscure some of the loveliest views of the Bosphorus on the one hand, and to blight the serenity of a 19th century mosque on the other (see the pictures I took with my mobile 'phone below)

Far from being a delight, like some of the extraordinary constructions of Frank Gehry, the building itself is very undistinguished architecturally. It is a ghetto for the rich which can, regrettably, be seen from land, sea and air. There is no respite from it.

Prince Charles once described the Sainsbury extension to the National Gallery in London as "a carbuncle on the face of an old and well-loved friend". The hideous Ritz Carlton in Istanbul is much worse than that, for at least the Sainsbury wing (which I do not find nearly as objectionable and which, significantly, houses great masterpieces of art and is open to all, rich and poor, for free) cannot be seen from all over London, while the Istanbul Ritz-Carlton cannot be avoided.

What is it that makes those responsible deface their city in this way?

The Daily Mail cartoon, which is the subject of my previous post, may provide a clue.

I presume that the medial orbito-frontal cortex of the brains of architects and planners who allowed this monstrosity to deface the beauty of that well loved city was inactive, or de-activated, during a long period when the building was planned and was under construction.

What could have de-activated the medial orbito-frontal cortex?

Greed comes to mind. Rich tourists, and so on.

Which makes it interesting to ask whether, in the face of greed, the medial orbito-frontal cortex is de-activated, rendering subjects unable to experience beauty.

An insightful Daily Mail cartoon on beauty and brain activity

2011-07-13T02:08:00.000-07:00

There was a neurobiologically interesting cartoon that accompanied the Daily Mail article on our most recent brain study on beauty, published in the open access journal PLoS One last week (you can access the paper here). The study shows that activity in a region of the brain’s pleasure and reward centre, the medial orbito-frontal cortex, correlates with the experience of beauty, whether the source of the beauty is musical or visual. A previous study by another group had shown that this same region is also active when subjects view beautiful faces.

The cartoon by Pugh has a man looking at the photograph of an ugly woman (his wife), with the caption saying “My medial orbito-frontal cortex let me down when I married her”.

There may be some truth to the cartoon. A previous study by us on romantic love had shown that when people who are passionately in love view the picture of their loved partner, significant parts of their cortex become de-activated. This may be the reason why we are commonly less judgmental about those we love.

Purely as conjecture, it may be that when the fictitious character in the cartoon was courting his future wife, with whom he may have been passionately in love, there was significant deactivation of much of his cerebral cortex, leading him not to see her ugliness.

As his love wore off, and with it the de-activation, he became more judgmental and saw the ugliness which he had not seen before.

There are of course other interpretations. But this interpretation is what comes immediately to mind when viewing this cartoon.

You see, one can get ideas about experiments from all kinds of sources.

Sorry...but this is not by Michelangelo

2011-07-10T03:39:00.000-07:00

An article published in The Independent yesterday describes how a highly respected Italian art scholar and leading world scholar on Michelangelo has concluded that a painting entitled Crucifixion with the Madonna, St John and Two Mourning Angels and until now attributed to Marcello Venusti, is in fact by Michelangelo. The art scholar is reported to have have said, “no one but Michelangelo could have painted such a masterpiece”.

The painting is owned by Campion Hall and is on loan to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

More significantly, the scholar is reported to have said, “You can immediately see the difference between this work and that of Venusti”.

Well, I do not agree. I would put it like this: One can immediately see the difference between this work and the work of Michelangelo. From which I conclude that the work in question is not by Michelangelo.

I hasten to point out that I am not, and do not consider myself to be, an expert on art, or on Michelangelo; I am not an art historian nor an expert in dating works of art. That said, the Venusti work seems to be - by the simplest of tests I know, the vision test - not to be by Michelangelo.

Look at the work carefully, and consider the following. First of all, the body of Christ departs significantly from the vigour that Michelangelo imparted to human figures. The face is even more lacking in vigour, determination and resigned acceptance of fate. The sagging breasts are not the sort of thing that Michelangelo, I think, would have invested a vigorous Christ with.

Next look at the vacuous look on the face of St. John. Could Michelangelo really have done this? Compare that vacuous look with any of the figures he painted for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and note the difference. Much the same can be said of the vacuous look on the angel to the right.

Now look at the clouds above the cross – or is it some kind of halo?. They are symmetrically disposed – almost in total symmetry on both sides. It seems to me very unlikely that Michelangelo (going by his other works) would have done this.

Hence, all told, my brain – by comparing the Venusti with the works of the mighty Michelangelo – has come to the conclusion that this painting is not by Michelanglo at all.

I respect the authority of the scholars in this matter; but in this instance I believe that my brain’s judgment is more reliable – at least to me.

A Telephone Library in an Art Museum – a vast improvement on pebbles

2011-07-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

I recently visited the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris for their current, quite wonderful, exhibition of the work of Kees van Dongen. After my visit, I wondered around the museum and came across the installation piece by Christian Boltanski entitled Les Abonnés du téléphone. This is essentially a collection of telephone directories from all over the world (actually not all over the world, since many countries are missing) which the visitor can consult at leisure, since there is a desk and chairs as well as table lamps. It is to all intents and purposes a telephone library. I actually consulted some of the directories, to look for persons I may know. It was engaging and thought provoking. Why were some countries not represented? What had happened to some of the people I knew? The exhibit succeeded in starting a train of thought. Hence, it exercised my brain to some degree – certainly much more than the horror show I last wrote about. For me, it was better, too, than the mandatory Brillo Boxes or soup cans that every museum of modern art must possess.

Moreover, there is no one place I know of in London or New York or Paris, or indeed any of the major cities, where I can consult telephone directories from all over the world, or at least many places in the world. So this collection, imperfect though it is, could serve a purpose, especially as the entrance to the permanent collection of the museum (of which this is part) is free.

But, once the idea of “surfing” telephone directories settles in, I could as well do it from the comfort of my home, by switching on my computer, and the table lamp, and sitting on a comfortable chair and visiting Superpages.com or some such.

Beautiful it is not and does not pretend to be, but….is it art?

By the standard set by Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal, it certainly is.

What do you say?

Outraged at an art gallery

2011-06-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

I am a regular visitor to art galleries, and am increasingly appalled by the trash that curators and museum directors stuff into their galleries and pass off as art. But nothing could have prepared me for an exhibition of graduate students at a famous art college in London. The trash exhibited there – and presumably approved of by the teachers of that venerable institution – was shocking beyond all brief description.

Marcel Duchamp sneered at the art world when he sent a urinal as an exhibit at an art show, and then again with his readymades and yet again when he launched his slogan “art without an artist”. Duchamp was a cynic but a highly intelligent man. I wonder what his attitude would have been had he lived long enough to see that he has, with his statements and actions, licensed not only museum directors and curators to purvey their rubbish, but worst of all, to have licensed teachers at art colleges – including professors – to abdicate all responsibility towards their students, from whom they now demand increasingly large sums. What he seems to have provided some sections of the art world is a recipe for suspending thought. For there was nothing in the collection of bric à brac exhibited to suggest that the students exhibiting had had any formal tuition in anything remotely related to art, save the notion that anything can be called art provided it is exhibited in the relevant artistic setting. Nor did any exhibit suggest that there had been thought behind it. There was not a single item in that lamentable exhibition that I wanted to contemplate or look at after the first glance, or to think about, or to delight in. Instead, the usual collection of stones, of cardboards with illegible scribbles, and on and on. Truly shocking.

I argued in my book Inner Vision that one of the many functions of art is the acquisition of knowledge. In fact, I would argue that this is a very important function of art. But what kind of knowledge does one get from this accumulation of trash? None at all as far as I can see.

Perhaps the only value of this disgraceful exhibition is that it may spur some to start questioning whether we have not gone far enough with this license we have given to the art world and its conceits. When the rot really sets in, that is, when artists who are also teachers by trade, abdicate their responsibility towards the students out of whom they make a living, by encouraging thoughtlessness and by encouraging the notion that anything can pass as art, then the time has come to pension them off so that they can live by their art alone and replace them with those who have a more responsible attitude towards what they profess to teach.

It is regrettable that art, being largely in the subjective arena, is not as open to assessment as science or as other subjects in the humanities, such as English or history. Had it been, and had there been assessors (as there are in science), the ratings given to institutions such as the one I visited would be very low and they would soon lose their government subsidies. Perhaps one good outcome of neurobiology is that it may soon give an objective measure of just how much pleasure this kind of trash gives, and force those who live by teaching art to think a little more and perhaps to communicate some of their thinking to students.

So neuroeconomics tells us what I have been arguing for a long time...

2011-06-19T04:04:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting article in The Guardian today, which goes some way to support what I have been arguing for a long time on this site -- that we should have many more women in top economic positions than we actually do now, at least in Britain. It is good to know that Iceland called in women to clear the economic mess left by men, and that Norway has slapped a mandatory 40% women on financial boards. As I have stated here before, if I were Prime Minister I would pass legislation to ensure that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) should always be a woman.

Neurobiology may yet be listened to by those running our affairs, and may yet come to have a very beneficial effect on society.

A great but empty exhibition at the Uffizi in Florence

2011-06-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Currently, waiting time to enter the Uffizi Museum in Florence is, at a minimum, 2 hours, unless of course you get there first thing in the morning. But right across the main entrance to the Museum is another exhibition, in another wing of the Uffizi, which you can enter without waiting. Once you get inside, it is empty, thus giving you time to contemplate the great works on display at leisure. It is specatcular and contains great drawings by some of the great Italian masters - Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raffaelo, Perugino and others. The exhibition was at the British Museum before going to Italy, and contains masterpieces from both museums. Entry to the exhibition is free, while you have to pay 11 € to enter the main gallery.

An authority explained that the emptiness of the exhibition of drawings at the Uffizi can be accounted for by the fact that the entrance is free. Therefore, it could not be worth much, at least in the estimation of the average person.

Some art curators and historians insist on the fact that one must view an art work in its totality - that is, the context, its commercial value, and so on. How right they are, and what an apt joke Marcel Duchamp played on the art world by sending a urinal to an art exhibition as a serious exhibit. The urinal became a work of art, instantly, because it was now in a new context and, significantly, in the context of an art exhibition.

Hence the necessity for separating art from beauty, which neuroesthetics should do.

And hence the necessity for the "reductionism" that many are so vehemently against. For we should isolate perceived beauty and study its neural correlates, just as we should isolate the other factors such as the commercial value and context and study their neural correlates.

Meanwhile, the magnificent exhibition at the Uffizi is a living testament (at least until it closes later this month) to the true, but sad, opinion of many in the art world - that when discussing a work of art one should do so in context, and above all in its commercial and monetary context.

Coloured Shadows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Milan

2011-05-30T13:20:00.000-07:00

Last week saw the opening of an exhbition of my art work - Bianco su bianco: oltre Malevich (White on White: Beyond Malevich) - at the Museum of Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci in Milan. This was done in the context of my neuroesthetic programme. It is really art inspired by what we know about the brain, and especially its colour system. It is based on colour shadows, which are produced when white light and light of a given colour illuminate an object. Both Leonardo and Goethe wrote about it.

No one really knows how coloured shadows are produced in the brain though many years ago I described colour specific cells in the colour centre of the brain - area V4 - which also respond to their preferred colour when it is produced by shadows.

Although we experimented with the best distances and angles for the projectors in the studio in London before shipping the white sculptures to the Museum in Milan, setting the sculptures up in the Museum presented lots of challanges. The interesting thing is that once you have a white sculpture against a white wall, the exhibit can be infintely variable. Projectors can be set up at different angles within the confines of the space and the work acquires its dynamism from a critical interaction with the viewer; the coloured shadows change depending upon the position of the viewer. Hence one of the exhibits - entitled New York - could be so arranged that from one point of view it could be considered to be New York at mid-day and from another point of view New York at dusk.

I found the experience of exhibiting in a museum quite thrilling. I will post images on the web once I have them

Rendering news more urgent through music

2011-05-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

The news bulletin on BBC Radio 4 is presented without the accompanying introductory music, and without any musical interruptions. This is not true of the news on BBC tv, which is introduced and interrupted by drumbeats. It is also not true of the majority of news broadcasts around the world, whether on radio or tv.

What, I wonder, is the purpose of this?

The visual effect of a scene can be greatly enhanced by music, as is common knowledge to all those who watch films. The neural mechanism underlying this enhancement is not known with any precision, but that there must be some increased activity in the visual cortex when the appropriate music accompanies the visual scene is likely.

Perhaps musical accompaniments to news bulletins have the same purpose, to enhance – what? – the sense of urgency and expectation.

The pre-news bulletin music tends to be somewhat urgent and at times hysterical. Its intended effect, I suppose, is to give the news items that are read some urgency. But the uncritical use of the “urgent” music has, on occasions, a somewhat hilarious and presumably unintended outcome. When I was living in Washington DC, there was an hourly news broadcast, which was preceded by such urgent music, designed to give the news items greater immediacy and importance; it was accompanied by the words, “News, news, news, three dimension news – every hour, on the hour!”, words which were uttered with much force and gravitas. But the intended effect was often nulled by the top news item that followed, which was often something like, “There is a two mile traffic jam in Hicksville”.

On tv, this sense of urgency is sometimes heightened by the pen that newscasters hold in their hands, implying that they write the news which they are employed to read and implying also that there may be a sudden and urgent need for them to change the news in light of incoming information.

With really important and urgent news, you do not need any musical accompaniment, especially of the hysterical variety. But the dullness of dull news may be alleviated somewhat by injecting a sense of urgency into it through another agent, namely music.

I wonder how much effect such musical interjections have in convincing listeners to stay put and listen to the entire broadcast, and through what neural means – does it make them expect something dramatic to happen? Otherwise, why would newscasters use such hysterical music indiscriminately, regardless of the importance of the news that follows?

As for me, I prefer to listen to the news on Radio 4.

Desire, sexual misconduct and deactivation of cortical areas

2011-05-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

It must not be assumed that people who are brilliant in their work, rational in their thinking, caring in their attitude and sympathetic to others in their daily life are necessarily acting “out of character” when confronted with strong desires.

There are situations, and powerful sexual desire is almost certainly one of them, when a person is no longer in control of his or her actions. I say “almost certainly” for I have not seen the results of any experiments on this topic. But there have been papers on the cerebral activity that accompanies intense feelings of love as well as sexual activity. These have shown that, in addition to cortical areas that are active during these experiences, the two states, and especially the latter, lead to de-activation of large parts of the cortex.

Included in the de-activated areas are those which are traditionally thought to be important for judgment. Hence, this cortical de-activation may provide the reason for why we “take leave of our senses” in these conditions and sometimes behave in ways which are injurious to ourselves and others, as well as being incomprehensible and “out of character”.

One consequence is that we are less judgmental about those we love; another consequence is that we are also less judgmental about ourselves, our actions and even our future. Put more briefly, the first and highest priority is satisfy the desire.

How else to account for why great and honourable men and women have risked their future in trying to satisfy their desire, often through behaviour that is incomprehensible and “out of character”?

It is also important to note, as a reflection of brain specializations, that this lapse in judgment is not universal. One who takes "leaves of his senses" in matters of love or desire may be quite rational in judgment of mathematical or historical or scientific problems. In other words, it is not the faculty of judgment that is lost but only judgment in certain domains.

Whenever the world is mesmerized by the downfall of one man through a momentary lapse of judgment, we might do well to recall that in situations of love and desire, we may not be in control of our actions, or be in only minimal control of our actions because of the de-activation of our cortex. Consequently, we should not be too quick to pass a moral judgment.

Who was he talking about?

2011-05-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

At the Cognitive meeting that has just ended in Marmaris, one of the speakers said that a category of people indulge in "repeated risky behaviour despite explicit knowledge of potential losses".

Who would he have been talking about?

Well, it was about alcoholics who drive.

But it could equally describe bankers, or at least some of them.

In fact it is a description that suits bankers better.

What interested me is that the speaker went on to say that perhaps one should look for a "shared dysfunction" in the brain resulting in the reckless behaviour of drunken drivers, who know the possible consequences of their habit and other similar states, where the perpetrator has "explicit knowledge of potential losses".

Perhaps there is a dysfunctional brain organization that leads to states such as gambling, alcoholism and.....banking. These states have a common element - a habit indulged in in spite of the known, unacceptable, consequences.

August Macke and Brain Interactions

2011-04-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

The work of the German Expressionist painter, August Macke, gives an interesting insight into brain mechanisms. As the examples here, here and here show, in his brilliantly coloured paintings he often does not invest his faces with any detail whatsoever, yet one can glimpse even the (emotional) expression on their faces from their comportment, from the postures of their bodies or, in brief, from their body language. Macke is not of course the only artist to have made paintings in which the details on a face are omitted altogether. But looking at his paintings the other day, the neurobiological question came to me somewhat more forcefully than before.

It has been known for a long time that there is a special area of the brain, commonly known as the fusiform face area, whose proper functioning is critical for facial recognition. As well, it appears that another part of the brain, the amygdala (a nucleus buried in the temporal lobe) is critical for evaluating the emotion in a face. Yet, if we were to isolate the faces in Macke’s paintings, it would be hard to discern any emotion at all. It is only in the context of body comportment that the faces acquire an expression.

There is, it seems, another part of the brain that is critical for the recognition of human bodies. An interesting study published last year addressed the question of whether basic emotions such as happiness or sadness or fear conveyed through the face or the body activate the same or different areas of the brain. The conclusion was that there are two regions of the brain which are activated equally powerfully regardless of whether the emotion was conveyed by a facial or a bodily expression.

This of course raises the further question of how an emotion conveyed through a bodily expression is then referred back to the face, to invest it with that same expression, for example of fear or happiness, when in fact the face itself contains no detail, as in some of Macke’s paintings. This presumably requires a system of back-connections from the two areas implicated in representing emotions regardless of their source, to the areas involved in registering faces and bodies. But what these connections are remains a puzzle.

Putting off decisions

2011-04-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

A very interesting article, ostensibly about the euro, but ending with a very sensible amd unanswered neurobiological question, appeared in today's New York Times.

Undesirable rewards and brain activity

2011-04-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

No sooner had I written that I do not expect Spain to seek a bail-out, because the Spanish Prime Minister had not denied that they will do so, than a high ranking Spanish official actually made just such a denial. In words reminiscent of those used by Mr Barroso, the President of the European Commission, Elena Selgado, the Spanish finance minister said that the risk of contagion to Spain is "absolutely ruled out".

This frightens me somewhat and raises an important neurobiological question.

Following my line of thought, itself influenced by my experience of what politicians say and do, I would expect that this means that there is a high chance that Spain will actually seek a bail-out. This would of course be a disaster, and a most unwelcome prospect.

So, the biological question is this: when what we expect happens, apparently there follows strong dopaminergic activity, especially in orbito-frontal cortex. We are somehow "rewarded" because we predicted correctly. But what is it that happens in our brains when we predict correctly but the outcome is one that we absolutely do not want?

I do not know whether anyone has done experiments along these lines.

Still, I am not entirely without hope that, on this occasion, my general prediction will turn out to be completely wrong and that Spain will not seek a bail-out.

My hope rests on two facts:

The lesser of the two is that the denial did not come from the highest level, that is from the Prime Minister himself or, heaven forbid, from Mr Barroso!

The more reliable one is that the denial came from a woman.

As I have consistently argued, women are to be trusted a lot more than men when it comes to financial matters.

So, I am trusting her words and hoping that Spain will not need to seek a bail-out.

As for the experiment above, it is still worth doing.

Beyond Marcel Duchamp...

2011-04-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

Following on from my post yesterday, I had an idea…

with reference to the Tate Modern exhibition entitled the "finiteness of art"…

A cleaner at the Tate Modern apparently removed a pile of garbage that was part of the exhibition, thinking that it was actual rubbish and not realising that it was actually a part of the exhibition.

I suggest that the rubbish pile that is actually a part of the exhibition should be cleared daily.

This would heighten the meaning of the "finiteness of art" (which is the title of the exhibition)

It would also make the act of throwing out the rubbish daily a part of the exhibition, thus elevating it to an event as well as an exhibition, and strengthening the viewer's involvement in wondering what this daily throwing out of the rubbish could be about.

It would thus also raise contemporary art to new heights.

I have only one question…

Have we underestimated the intelligence of the cleaner, who " accidentally" mistook the pile of rubbish for what it actually is, a pile of rubbish?

We must call a halt to rubbish collection in art galleries

2011-04-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

Marcel Duchamp was subversive in more ways than one. By sending a urinal to an art exhibition and introducing the concept of “art without an artist” he turned concepts of art upside down, focused in the popular mind the separation between art and beauty, and was instrumental in introducing the emphasis in contemporary art on the viewer as an active participant in creating the work of art, by questioning his or her relationship to the viewed art work. Perhaps without realising it, he introduced a profound neurobiological angle to art more forcefully than ever before.

But his work has had, I believe, another and very unwelcome outcome. It has licensed museum curators and directors to collect all kinds of rubbish and exhibit them as art works, with the fatuous expectation that visitors to museums will start delving deeply into themselves and questioning their relation to what is displayed.

I recently visited an important, though not major, art gallery in an important European city and couldn’t help feeling that this process has now gone on to absurd levels. Filing cabinets, doors, chairs, a collection of dolls, the inevitable Brillo boxes, sticks and stones and bric à brac of all sorts clutter the museum. If their intention is to start a questioning process, why not just tell all prospective visitors to question everything that they see in their lives, and save museum space for more inspirational works? In fact, what impressed me most in the museum I visited was not the collection on display but rather the spacious rooms and the inviting architecture. The museum itself, rather than what was on display in it, became the main attraction.

I believe that this mindless process, of collecting junk and displaying it as art, must stop, which might also halt the production of these mindless works at source, or at least help to reduce it. How to do so is another, and more difficult, matter. But an incident at Tate Britain in London some years ago may point the way. Wandering through the vast and seemingly aimless collection of bric à brac at the museum I visited, I actually found it difficult at times to distinguish between displays which form part of the museum’s collection and accidental objects left there by chance. Apparently, a cleaner at Tate Britain experienced the same difficulty a few years ago. He or she threw out a bag of rubbish, accidentally we are told, that was part of an exhibition supposedly emphasizing “the finite existence of art”. The bag was recovered but is now apparently covered at night and staff have been made aware that it is part of an artistic exhibition.

The cleaner evidently had no time to question the relationship of his or her being to the rubbish bag, and reached the right conclusion. Perhaps what she or he did was not quite so accidental after all. It was, after all, about "the finite existence of art"

He or she represents, perhaps, the views of many!

The inevitable...at last

2011-04-08T01:24:00.000-07:00

So, true to my prediction, Portugal has finally asked for a bail-out. The surprise is that they did it now, well before the June 5 elections due in that country.

Of course, as my readers know, my prediction was not based on knowledge of economics – though one does not need to know much economics to predict such an outcome – but to the denials of the politicians. Chief among those was Mr Barroso, the President of the European Commission and himself a Portuguese, who was (when I first wrote on the topic) at the forefront of those who denied vehemently that Portugal would need a bail-out.

These politicians may have learnt their trade from the planners of the London Underground where, as I have written before, 95% of the time, “No exit” actually means “short-cut”. But because it is only 95% of the time, there is a 5% chance that one will get it wrong, and hence the smug satisfaction of getting it right – presumably coupled to a release of dopamine in the brain, if neurobiological results on expectation and reward are anything to go by.

If I get a smug satisfaction from having predicted correctly, I am also of course very saddened by the enormous economic hardship that this will cause the Portuguese. Economists are now saying that the hardship would have been less if the Portuguese government had applied for a bail-out months ago, when the writing was on the wall. But economic predictions are not, at least in my experience, as reliable as predictions based on the opposite of what politicians say.

Economists are also now saying that Spain has a 20% chance of seeking a bail-out. I do not agree. Mr Zapattero, the Spanish Prime Minister, has not denied that Spain will seek a bail-out, from which I conclude that this will not be necessary. Only, and if, he starts denying it will I believe that this will be necessary.

We shall see.

It has not happened…YET

2011-04-03T02:37:00.000-07:00

Predictability and unpredictability are both neurobiologically interesting and, with little doubt, there is a complex neural machinery, including activation of the brain’s reward system when what one has predicted has come true.

But what is it that happens when what one has predicted does not happen or, better still, has not happened over a prolonged period?

I am reminded of a prediction I made here on November 29, 2010 that Portugal, like Greece and Ireland, will seek a bail-out. My prediction was not based on any economic knowledge, of which I have none (but does anyone else?). Rather, my prediction was based on the fierce denial by the Prime Minister of Portugal at that time and by the President of the European Commission, Mr José Manuel Barroso. When politicians deny anything fiercely, there is a good chance that it will happen. That is common experience.

Belief that what they have denied strongly will happen is a sort of negative gambling, gambling on what one believes has a very high chance of happening, as opposed to true gambling when one acts in the knowledge that what one wants will not happen.

But Portugal has, to date, not sought a bail-out. So, my prediction has not come true, over a prolonged period.

Now Mr Barroso has spoken again. This time, in a reference to the opinion of many in the financial world that the possibility of a bail-out has become more probable in light of the resignation of the Prime Minister of Portugal, he has shrugged such a possibility off as unlikely given that Belgium, which has had no government for the past several months, is doing well financially, the implication being that so can Portugal, without seeking a bail-out.

That Mr. Barroso should deny that there will be a bail-out makes it that much more likely to happen, in the calculations of my brain in light of past experience.

What happens if I am wrong, if my brain miscalculated? There must be some deterrent neurotransmitter somewhere that will make me more circumspect in the future.

But, given that a politician has denied the possibility so vehemently, at present my brain calculates that this is still very likely.

Two faces of the gambling habit

2011-03-30T15:09:00.000-07:00

A variable ratio reinforcement schedule is one that generates gambling behaviour. In such a schedule – commonly used on pigeons in psychology laboratories – a pigeon is reinforced with some kind of food pellet after it presses a panel. But it does not get a reward every time it presses. Rather, it may get a reward after the 10th press and the 12th press, with nothing happening for the next 80 presses, after which it may get a reward for the 81st press, and so one. In brief, the pigeon is rewarded unpredictably. Such a reinforcement schedule generates very high response rates. It is very similar to what happens in gambling – where one (unpredictable) response is enough to pave the way for an uncontrollable gambling habit, even in spite of the common knowledge that the chances of winning are very slim.

There is the obverse to this, too, and a hilarious but true article by Henry Farrell, in response to an article by Alan Greenspan in yesterday’s Financial Times, captures it nicely. This exemplifies how we are often lulled into a sense of security where there is no room for it, because the accident that is waiting to happen has not happened, even when we are aware that such an accident may happen (just as the gambler knows that winning is an accident and that he will ultimately lose). Greenspan’s article contains the following :

“Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognize it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is irredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates.”

Farrel goes on to enumerate some “rare exceptions”:

"With notably rare exceptions, Japanese nuclear reactors have been secure from earthquakes.
Though unredeemably(sic) opaque, Mr. Madoff’s operations delivered excellent returns, with notably rare exceptions.
With notably rare exceptions, the levees protecting New Orleans have held fast in the face of major hurricanes.
With notably rare exceptions, locking all exits to the workplace is a harmless way to improve your employees’ productivity.
With notably rare exceptions, petroleum extraction has minimal environmental impact."

To which I may add that, with notably rare exceptions, planes are able to land and take off at London Heathrow Airport, which has just been voted 99th in a list of airports.

All of which makes me wonder whether the neurobiology underlying the gambling behaviour in fixed-ratio reinforcement schedules is not very similar to the neurobiology underlying the – what should I call it ? – negative variable ratio reinforcement!!

Vive Christine Lagarde

2011-02-08T01:42:00.000-08:00

I have argued in several previous posts that society could profit handsomely by having a larger percentage of women in top economic posts. My argument has not been based on the demand often made, of equality between women and men. On the contrary, it is based on the biological inequality between the two sexes which, I think, is sometimes in women’s advantage and ultimately works to the advantage of society at large. In economic matters, the general tendency of women to be risk aversive and to plan for the future is a great asset when compared to the risky behaviour of men who seek instant gratification. Had there been more women in top economic posts, we may not have had the recent economic recession or not have had it with the same severity.

Now, France’s articulate and elegant Christine Lagarde, the first women minister of finance in a major industrial country, has echoed my words. Let me say at once that she has not referred to me; indeed I would be amazed if she knows of my existence. But she speaks from the same biological book as I do. In The Independent of yesterday, she is reported as having said that “the 2008 financial collapse was, at least in part… driven by the aggressive, greedy, testosterone-fuelled mood of male-dominated, hi-tech trading rooms”. In other words, the testosterone concentration inequality between men and women had ultimately worked to the disadvantage of the world economic system. I couldn’t agree more.

She added, "In gender-dominated environments, men have a tendency to... show how hairy chested they are, compared with the man who's sitting next to them. I honestly think that there should never be too much testosterone in one room." Right on the spot – due to biological inequality again!

There have been many studies on decision-making in the field of neuroeconomics. I wonder how many have factored in differences between men and women in such matters, or have designed experiments specifically to address that question. This surely would be worth doing.

Meanwhile, in Germany the head of the Deutsche Bank, who is described by the bank’s spokesman as being a “gentleman from the old school”, expressed the hope that economic boards “will be prettier and more colourful one day” when more women hold top economic posts [Deutsche Bank apparently has no women on its board].

No comment!

Tatsuo Miyajima, the artist of our endlessly changing world

2011-01-30T06:18:00.000-08:00

Last week in Sendai, Japan, I was enormously pleased to be able to have a public dialogue with the wonderful Japanese artist, Tatsuo Miyajima.

Most artists, or at least most of the ones I know, deny having a philosophical outlook that they try to translate into their works. Some had thought of the work of Cézanne and others as being a “painted epistemology”. But Cézanne himself denied this and Daniel-Henri Kahnwiler, the art critic and art dealer, insisted that none of the many painters he had known (which included Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain and Maurice Vlaminck among others) had a philosophical culture.

Not so with Tatsuo Miyajima. He is deeply rooted in a rich Japanese, and indeed Oriental, philosophy that can be summarized in a single line: “Nothing is permanent except change”. And he expresses this in what are visually mesmerizing displays of ever-changing variously coloured digital numbers. The numbers exclude zero, which in his culture is a metaphor for death. But in that Buddhist culture there is no real death, there is only change.

In a sense, therefore, Miyajima is using a new, electronic, medium to deliver a message rooted in ancient Oriental philosophy. And it works very well, partly because it is visually so attractive, partly because the medium is new and partly because it engages the viewer so forcefully in trying to understand the message. Indeed, Miyajima says of art that it is like a mirror, in which the viewer enquires into, and understands something about, himself. That something is the ineluctable progression of time, the inevitability of change and, by comparison, the banality of the moment.

But, of course, the moment is not banal, for it is part of the change and it is the most deeply registered and experienced in the chain.

I hope that one day soon, London will have the pleasure of seeing a larger number of his works, and I hope that the catalogue for that exhibition will include these lines from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets (Burnt Norton):

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end
And all is always now.

which seem to me to be a very good general description of Miyajima’s approach.

His work has inspired me to think of many experiments, some of which I hope I will be able to do. At any rate, discussing his work with him in relation to the brain and its activity was a real delight.

Empty walls and a rich imagination

2011-01-30T04:47:00.000-08:00

Some two weeks ago, I went to Tate Britain in London to view the Eadweard Muybridge exhibition when, in another part of the Gallery, I was confronted by a room with four immaculately clean white walls. Was this part of an exhibition, I wondered? It could have been. After all, one of the characteristics of contemporary art is to involve the viewer more imaginatively in what the artist is trying to depict, or for that matter cannot depict. Nor is contemporary art entirely new in this endeavour. Sandro Boticcelli ,who set out to illustrate all of the cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy left some of them un-illustrated. The pages corresponding to these cantos are left blank – as if to engage the viewer more imaginatively in translating Dante’s difficult concepts about love and beauty, which Dante himself confessed he found difficult to render in language. But the empty walls at the Tate were not, it turned out, part of an exhibition. They were just that – empty walls, the room being decorated for another exhibition. But it did get my imagination working.

Not long after, in Tokyo last week, I stayed in a delightful hotel. Nothing luxurious, but my room was a delight to wake up in and to return to at night. What could have been the source of this delight? Well, quite simply EMPTY WALLS. There were none of these art works, sometimes in the form of posters, chosen by the management or the interior designer. Instead the bareness of the walls, decorated in white, invited the imagination to wonder, and to wander as well, and create an imaginary museum in a small room. What would I put here, or there, if allowed? What would merge best with the remaining colours of the room, mostly brown? After all, to decorate a room, you have to begin with an empty wall.

I do not know whether this baring of the walls was intentional on the part of the management. But this was Japan, and of course it could have been. For many of the beautiful prints and drawings from Japan have a compelling characteristic, which is that they are set against relatively large empty spaces that are a stimulant to the imagination. It was those empty spaces in Japanese drawings that so influenced Paul Klee in his early drawings when there was a craze for things Japanese.

The Japanese, if I understand them, are masters of the unsaid and the unstated, of subtlety and ambiguity, all of which constitute powerful stimulants to the imagination.

I can really recommend a beautifully but sparsely furnished room with empty walls!

Smug satisfaction at predicting what is easily predictable

2010-11-29T11:50:00.000-08:00

Why, I wonder, do I [and many others] get a satisfaction (or kick) when something so self-evident, which we had become so accustomed to predicting, turns out to be true? Why does not the brain adapt to repeated exposure and become indifferent, instead of satisfied.

On London Underground, “No exit” usually means “short cut”. This is true most of the time but not always. So whenever I take the exit marked “No exit” and find that it is indeed a short cut, I feel well pleased, as if I had discovered something new, when in fact I have not. I suppose the fact that it is not always true gives me the thrill of knowing that I had predicted correctly, for I could have got it wrong.

The same is true of politicians, at least in the UK. Whenever the Prime Minister of the UK declares that a minister who had been caught in some scandal or another has “my full support and backing”, it is almost certain that the said minister will resign sooner rather than later. But it is not always so, which is perhaps why we are satisfied when we get the prediction that the minister will resign right, even if past experience shows that our prediction is likely to be right.

Consider next the vehement protests of the Irish Government that they will not seek a bail-out, that they will refuse to borrow more money to get themselves out of debt (a somewhat ridiculous situation when one thinks about it). The more vehement the denial, the more apparent it became that they would seek a bail-out, which is what they did in the end. But there always remained the possibility that they may not, which is what gives us the satisfaction of having made the correct prediction. If we had known it as a certainty that the denials meant that they would actually borrow the money to process the debt resulting from borrowing money, maybe we would have less satisfaction with our prediction, which results from our knowledge that politicians lie.

Currently, the Portuguese Government is angrily denying that they it seek a financial bail-out, a denial echoed by the President of the European Commission, Mr Barosso, who was “absolutely” certain that this would not happen.

Well, my prediction is that it will; and if I turn out to be correct, I shall feel a certain satisfaction at having been correct. We will wait and see.

The general point I am making is that, even when the brain becomes accustomed to the fact that certain statements mean the opposite, it still entertains the possibility that, on some occasions, the statements are correct. And hence, when it finds that its predictions are correct, it gets some satisfaction, even if the predictions are what would be expected from past history anyway.

All of which points to some interesting brain experiments on prediction.

Biological necessity for having more women in top economic posts

2010-11-29T11:26:00.000-08:00

In an editorial last week, The Financial Times strongly supported the appointment of more women to boardroom roles, saying that the “number of women on UK boards is lamentably low”, thus echoing what I wrote here some time ago. But The Financial Times uses different arguments, based on diversity and equal opportunity. The case that I would like to make for more women being on boards of companies and in top economic positions is perhaps a little more radical. It is based on biological differences between male and female brains which, in many instances, works to the advantage of women and ultimately to that of society as well.

One such difference is that women, through biological inclination, are more risk aversive than men. This is, I think a biological imposition, since women have to think more carefully of building a stable environment for growth of the family in as prosperous social conditions as possible. It is likely, therefore, that they would be more prudent in their management of the economy. Had I been in power, I would probably insist that the job of Minister of Finance (in Britain, Chancellor of the Exchequer) should always go to a woman; I would probably also want to ensure that a woman is minister for housing and perhaps even for army supplies. I do not believe that men are as good at these jobs. In fact, as it turns out (also reported in The Financial Times some time ago and about which I wrote here), “the more women there were in a company’s management [in France], the less the share price fell in 2008”.

It is interesting to note that, in the latest documents released by Wikileaks, one from a US diplomat in Berlin describes the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, as “risk aversive” – presumably pejoratively.

Well, we know what all those risk-prone men in top economic jobs, together with their male economic advisors, did to the world economy.
So perhaps being risk aversive in certain areas is not such a bad thing after all.

Denial of blindness and mind blindness (or denial states)

2010-11-14T08:38:00.000-08:00

A correspondent has asked me whether there is any visual equivalent to the state I described in yesterday's post about peri-personal space.

Well, not exactly but there is something similar known as anosognosia. This is a condition in which humans blinded by lesions to their primary visual cortex (V1) become completely blind and yet deny being blind. The denial is, as I understand it, persistent. In other words, when they bump into objects and cannot identify them visually, they still deny that they are blind.

This raises interesting and important questions about brain mechanisms that determine perceptual states and the extent to which such mechanisms are under the control of further brain mechanisms which dictate and determine knowledge.

There is yet another syndrome, which has more general applicability. It is a term no longer in use, because advances in our understanding of how the visual brain works have made the term inappropriate. But in the early stages of neurology it described states when, following lesions in the brain, patients could see but could not understand what they had seen. The neurologist Hermann Munk called this syndrome Seelenblindheit, and was usually referred to in English as mind blindness.

I think that the term should be re-introduced to describe certain groups of humans, amongst whom I include politicians but also a good number of academics (economists do not fit into this category for they seem incapable of either seeing or understanding the economic picture).

Blithely those suffering from mind blindness persevere even in spite of the knowledge that their senses and intellect gives them. They are mind blind, or in states of denial. When they are cured of their mind blindness by some mysterious cortical mechanims, it is often too late.

By re-introducing the term, we might be able to take the syndrome more seriously and study it neurobiologically. It may yet give us important insights about the knowledge-acquiring system of the brain.

Experienced and un-experienced extensions of body parts

2010-11-13T13:07:00.000-08:00

A well documented syndrome is that of phantom limbs, in which sensations from an amputated limb do not disappear but remain and are often painful. Subjects with this syndrome may also feel that they are able to move their limbs. In short, a missing part is not necessarily experienced as missing, even when the subject knows that it is missing.

I presume that someone born with one limb missing will not experience that limb. From which it follows that the phenomenon is due to the persistence in the brain of some record of that limb, even in its absence.

There is a counterpart to this condition, which I experience on a regular basis in the streets and the Underground system of London. People carrying backpacks or bags do not seem to be aware of the extension of their bodies, and hence are quite happy to invade my peri-personal space. They do not do so with their actual bodies, but with the artificial extensions to their bodies. They brush against me continually, sometimes forcefully, without even being aware of having done so.

Thus the brain does not appear to accommodate, in its calculation of the space occupied by the body to which it belongs, any artificial extensions of that body, even when such artificial extensions become daily props.

Presumably, if the artificial extension becomes a permanent fixture, the brain may gradually take account of it. But this must be a very long process, assuming that it occurs at all.

The result is of course most irritating, because people around us invade our peri-personal space continually, brushing against us with the artificial extensions to their bodies. A Japanese colleague of mine told me that this kind of peri-personal space invasion is much frowned upon and disliked in Japan. Good for the Japanese.

This irritating invasion of other peoples’ space by artificial extensions to the body, if appropriately studied, may give us useful hints about how the brain represents the body of which it is a part.

Material for a control experiment on politicians

2010-05-16T14:25:00.000-07:00

Returning to what I wrote earlier today, I now read in a BBC report that (according to one politician) the Labour Party "may have been reluctant to do a coalition deal with the Lib Dems because they knew what was in store for an incoming government".

So perhaps the frontal cortex in the brains of these politicians was exerting some control on the subcortical reward centres of their brain, preventing them from triggering the operations that would lead to immediate reward.

If only the brains of these politicians could have been scanned at that time, and the activity in these brains compared to that of politicians who wanted immediate reward in spite of long term difficulties, we might have had an interesting insight into the operations of the brain.

I daresay there will be many more such opportunities in the future.

Greed for power and brain activity

2010-05-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Most people in Britain, and many around the world, will have watched with (perhaps) some interest but with no surprise the dash for power between two parties – Conservative and Labour – neither of whom won an absolute majority. They haggled and bargained with the Liberal Democrats, offering all sorts of goodies to form a coalition government. They were both greedy for power, as indeed all politicians are.

But, on this occasion, it was putting short term gains before long term interests. Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, had warned days before the general election that the economic situation is so dire that whoever wins power will subsequently be out of power for a generation. This is because the government in power would have to take some very tough economic decisions to get Britain out of the deep financial problem that it is in.

No matter – the politicians want power and they want it now. Short term gains set against long term interests!

What is it that happens in the brain when an individual sacrifices long term interests for short term gains?

As it happens, a very interesting paper appeared a few months ago in the Journal of Neuroscience, which had studied this very problem. Using a relatively simple and clever design, the authors show that the impulse to immediate gratification – in which the reward parts of the sub-cortex of the brain play an important role – is “censored” or modulated by the frontal cortex. In situations where immediate gratification takes precedence over long term gains in the behaviour of individuals, there is a relaxation of the strength of activity between the frontal cortex – which might be thought of as censoring the sub-cortical nuclei - and the sub-cortical nuclei involved (the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area).

Hence one can surmise that among many politicians there must have been a significant reduction in the control that the frontal cortex exerted over their sub-cortical nuclei.

This of course raises the question of what factor inhibits these connections.

I have previously argued on this site that greed de-activates the frontal cortex in the brains of those who manage financial affairs. The study I refer to here is consistent with this suggestion, if one substitutes greed for power for greed for money. But it would be good to go beyond and learn how greed inhibits the judgmental activity of the frontal cortex.

Abandon the search for perfection?

2010-05-03T04:51:00.000-07:00

The eminent Indian author, Radhika Jha, has a very interesting, but somewhat puzzling, suggestion for changing this world and making it a better place. I mean puzzling for so creative a person as her.

She believes that we should get rid of our obsession with perfection – that we all want the unattainable – the perfect wife, the perfect child, the perfect car, and so on.

She proposes that, instead, we form a club of the 99 percenters, those who do not search for perfection because “perfection is not creative”.

We should instead, she believes, “make imperfection our goal”, and acknowledge that there are many solution to our problems, none of them perfect.

This is an interesting challenge, but one that, I think, goes against brain realities, especially in art.

Let me first say that she is probably correct, from a neurobiological point of view, in saying that perfection is not creative. For once a painter has created the perfect painting, for example, the impulse to carry on is somewhat dissipated.

I recall Balthus, the French painter (who never allowed me to view his canvases when he was still working on them), once surprisingly inviting me to his studio to see a painting that he had all but finished. Why, I asked him, was he giving me this privilege which he had always denied me before?

“Because”, he replied, “I am, for the first time, satisfied with this painting. And that is the end of me”.

What is creative is the seeking of perfection – and not attaining it.

This perhaps is not a recipe for making the world a happier one, because of the frustration that it entails.

But it is a recipe for making the world a richer one.

And consider this: Radhika Jha has said that she searched for the “ideal” village to describe in a novel but could not find it. So she created one from her imagination instead.

Exactly so.

Perfection (and the ideal) as I have argued in my book Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, reside in the brain, a synthesis of many experiences. But the individual example may not satisfy the synthetic one created from many examples.

Hence the impulse to create, and reflect in a creation, the synthetic concept in the brain.

This is a frustrating and very difficult task, more often than not accompanied by failure, but a failure that leads to greater creative efforts.

So, in a sense, by creating the ideal village from her own imagination, Jha is disowning her suggestion that we should not seek perfection.

Interesting thought!

String theory and the brain

2010-05-03T04:18:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, I was inadvertently put on the wrong panel, a panel on mathematics! Now let me say that I respect and fear mathematicians because I am so feeble at the subject. Once, when sitting next to a very renowned mathematician at dinner, I asked him whether he could explain to me in lay terms what his research was about. He replied “No”. End of conversation!

But on this occasion, I thought it would not be right to chicken out just because I had been put on the wrong panel. So I went there determined to give the brain a prominent place in the discussion, which took place over dinner.

The question I raised, to which no mathematician could provide an adequate answer, but which actually absorbed most of the evening’s discussion, was simple:

Given that there is no real experimental evidence for string theory, is it plausible that physicists and mathematicians would have come up with such a theory had we not had the kind of brain organization that we have?
The great mathematicians pondered the issue over the evening and could not provide an answer (nor by the way can I, at least not definitively).

I still think that the question is a very interesting one.

It goes beyond string theory to nanotechnology.

I have heard George Whitesides, eminent chemist, say that there are many phenomena in the world of nanotechnology that we have no intuition about but that we can formulate mathematically.

His general view, which I hope I am summarizing correctly, is that at the nano level, particles behave in a way that has not been properly formulated in our intuition, but which we can understand mathematically.

This raises the interesting question whether the mathematical brain has intuitions that are quite distinct from ordinary experiential intuitions.

Which comes back to the question I started with: whether we would have had these mathematical intuitions had we not had the kind of (mathematical) brain that we have.

I am not sure that I am formulating the questions precisely enough, but there is some interesting material for thought there.

Ethical stocks!!!

2010-04-28T10:29:00.001-07:00

I read a somewhat bizarre news item on the front page of The Financial Times yesterday. Apparently an ethical equity index has been launched "in response to increasing demand by investors for so-called ethical stocks in the wake of the financial crisis". The group of 533 European companies consists of companies that derive their revenues solely "from sources approved 'according to the values and principles of the Christian religion'".

Among the companies in the index are BP, HSBC, Nestlé, and Royal Dutch Shell.

Making money, as I have argued before on this site, is closely related to greed and, as I have also argued, I have the strong suspicion that when the brain's greed system is in operation, those parts of the brain that regulate ethical conduct are de-activated. Perhaps the greater the amount of money to be made, the greater the deactivation of the system that regulates ethical behaviour.

Now let me say that such an experiment has not been reported yet, to my knowledge. But I strongly suspect - just by watching human behaviour (and there has been plenty to watch in the past year alone and, as I understand it, there is a spectacle going on right now) - my conjecture will turn out to be true.

Perhaps it is wise to stop pretending - and fooling ourselves and others - that making big deal money can be made entirely ethically. Perhaps we should put money (and the greed that commonly goes with it) into separate compartments.

Of course there are rich individuals who have behaved entirely ethically and in accordance with the principles of their religion.

But I have not heard of many very big companies that do so.

Why not admit that greed is incompatible with high ethical standards?

I’m upset about Amsterdam

2010-04-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

I stopped in Amsterdam on my way to give a lecture in Groningen, with the specific purpose of visiting the exhibition at the Hermitage entitled Matisse and Malevich: Pioneers of Modern Art. I was in fact especially interested in seeing the Malevich paintings on display, since I am myself preparing a Malevich event for October (about which more later). But there was ONLY ONE Malevich in the Amsterdam exhibition, entitled Black on White. It is at the very end of the exhibition. I felt cheated by that…especially since Matisse and Malevich are advertised in letters of equal size on the posters. I wonder whether there is a Trades Description Act in Holland, equivalent to the one in England. If there is, I think that there would be a good case for saying that the act has been infringed.

The curators may have done this deliberately…and tantalized the visitor to the end, or they may have had another symbolic idea in mind. Whatever, I still feel cheated.

Of course I could have asked for my money back…but actually, the rest of the exhibition was very enjoyable, so I didn’t (not that they would have given it back, I imagine). There are some wonderful paintings from Matisse and Picasso, as well as many others. Perhaps the most memorable quote in the exhibition is one attributed to Picasso, which I had not encountered before.

Picasso, apparently, did not want to dissociate himself completely from depicting the external reality, as Malevich did. “You have to start somewhere” he is quoted as saying. “You can always erase reality later on”.

Interesting thought, that. I think that artists always do erase reality to a greater or lesser extent, and substitute their own reality – created by their brains, instead.

Zero and cognitive factors

2010-04-02T06:05:00.000-07:00

I write about a topic of which I am very largely ignorant but which nevertheless seems interesting.

The overall question is: to what extent is our concept of zero shaped by religious, philosophical or metaphysical considerations and to what extent is it based on our mathematical sense.

The question came to me after attending a very interesting lecture/discussion on Indian mathematics given by Dr. George Gheverghese Joseph as part of the Royal Society’s 350th Anniversary celebrations.

As I understand it, the concept of zero was developed in India in the Vedic period, which stretched from the second millennium to the 6th century BC.

It is strongly related to a concept called Sunya which means nothingness, emptiness, void, while Sunyata refers to “emptying the mind of all impressions”, presumably to achieve peace.

It is a concept that has been used to describe an important aspect of the arts, namely the capacity to realize the void and represent it, while within the context of Sunya, architecture is also related to the void – “It is not walls that make a building but the emptiness”.

Is there, one wonders, any relation between the concept of zero and these almost philosophical and quasi-religious views about emptying the mind to achieve peace?

The view held by the Vedic mathematicians is that the number zero, being no number at all, is the necessary condition for the existence of all numbers.

But our view of zero, unlike our view of other numbers, seems to have evolved. In the 19th century, division by 0 was considered to be a meaningless operation, while it is viewed differently today. It is indeed critical in computational operations.

But zero is apparently also linked to very large numbers, indeed to infinity, a question that fascinated the ancient Indian mathematicians, whereas the ancient Greeks, apparently, had a horror of large numbers and infinity, preferring finite geometrical representations.

All of which would seem to suggest that the number zero, unlike natural numbers, is one that is open to other influences and open also to conceptual modifications. Perhaps this is also true of infinity.

It is worth thinking about in the context of the mathematical brain.

Parliament, the brain’s synthetic concepts and negative ideals

2010-03-30T23:22:00.000-07:00

In my book Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, I wrote about the brain’s synthetic concepts and equated these with ideals.

To summarize, I hypothesized that our ideal of, for example a house, is a synthesis of all the houses that we have seen. The ideal house cannot be easily matched in reality because the individual house commonly does not satisfy the brain’s synthetic concept, synthesized from many houses. In other words, the individual house commonly departs from the “ideal” house.

I equated the brain’s synthetic concepts to the Platonic Ideals, which also can rarely be experienced and can only be accessed through a thought process.

Plato seems to have hesitated over whether we make ideals of common objects such as houses. His preoccupation was more with things like justice, honour, and love. I believe, by contrast, that the brain forms synthetic concepts of all its experiences, from common objects to lofty characteristics such as justice and honour.

When we speak of ideals, we commonly have something positive and desirable in mind. With synthetic concepts, it is different. If synthetic concepts are built up from many experiences, then it stands to reason to suppose that negative experiences also go into their making.

This latter point, about negative experiences being incorporated into the synthetic concepts, is one that I did not make in my book. It is worth doing so here, giving as an example my experience of Parliament.

When I was young, I had a certain admiration for Parliament and parliamentarians had my respect. To have been invited to the House of Commons (which I have not) would have been a certain privilege for me. I conceived of it as the Mother of Parliaments, whose members were largely concerned with the welfare of the country. They would, I imagined, put country before party and way above personal profit.

Like everyone else, I have of course witnessed the reality which has now become etched into my synthetic concept of parliament and parliamentarians: a body consisting of many members sitting more in a gravy train, unable to assess critically because both hands are in the till. A body consisting of members – assuming the reports to be true – whose spouses buy pornographic movies, others who adorn their homes, and yet others their gardens, while passing the bill to the taxpayer as expenses. Some have apparently made false statements to obtain money for dubious ‘second homes’. A few, I gather, have even been charged.

Most of these members have protested that they have done nothing illegal. Perhaps not. Perhaps their actions were legal because the rules were framed by Parliament itself. But wrong doing does not fall only within jurisdiction of the law. There is also a moral question, of whether it is right for those sent to represent them should behave in this way.

I have heard recently that some parliamentarians have even offered themselves for rent, to influence policy, reputedly at rates of between £3000-£5000 per day, presumably depending upon the type of service provided. Not that long ago, a famous businessman reportedly boasted that he could “rent” any member of Parliament. Sadly, this may yet be true, at least in some cases.

It is inevitable that such experiences, though indirect, should now have become part of my brain’s synthetic concept of Parliament. And in this instance, it is the negative component that dominates.

Hence, I much prefer the synthetic concept to the ideal, because the synthetic concept handles both negative and positive experiences.

Just as “positive” synthetic concepts become ones that we strive for (perhaps because they strongly stimulate the brain’s reward system), so “negative” synthetic concepts are ones which we prefer not to experience further. It is instructive to learn that a record number, 146, of present Members of Parliament will not seek re-election. Some of these may have reached retirement age, some may have been exposed. But there still must be quite a few in whom a positive synthetic concept has been gradually transformed into a negative one.

This sad little story has, of course, much grander implications when we come to think of brain concepts and the experiences that shape them and the relationship between Ideals and brain concepts.

As for me, it would now mean nothing to me to be invited to, or visit, the Houses of Parliament; every time I walk by its buildings in Westminster, an institution which I once admired seems like a shabby den of somewhat pathetic characters for whom I have little respect, a shabbiness that is accentuated by the apparent, and seemingly deceptive, grandeur of its appearance. This is a sentiment that, I suppose, is shared by many – perhaps even a majority – in the country.

So would I consider it a privilege to be invited into such a chamber now?

Of course not.

Pessimism and the brain’s reward system

2010-03-29T22:59:00.000-07:00

When I first went to University, Bertrand Russell came to address us. Among the things he said are two that I have retained and have since always lived by. His first advice was for us to be very selective in what lectures we attend. Lectures, he said, were the relics of medieval times when there were no printing presses. The best way to learn is to spend one’s time in the library, and go to lectures only when we had a fair amount of background information in order to be able to assess critically the lecture and gain a better insight. I have always adhered to this advice, which has served me well, I think. There are of course exceptions. I recall the many brilliant lectures of AJP Taylor, then a lecturer at University College, on history, a subject that I knew little about, or the very polished and witty lectures of Peter Medawar, then Professor of Zoology, among whose memorable lectures was one in which he mauled mercilessly Teilhard de Chardin and his book The Phenomenon of Man, a book which I have not bothered to read.

The second piece of advice was better. You must come to believe, he said, that this is a deeply evil and wicked world, and you must believe this both intellectually and emotionally. Then you will be happy.

I have come to believe this, and it has made me happy, or perhaps happier than I would otherwise be.

I always expect the worse from this evil and wicked world, and am often pleasantly surprised when the worst does not come to pass but never or rarely surprised or upset when it does.

I gather that the dopaminergic system in the reward centres of the brain respond even more vigorously to the expectation of reward than to reward itself. Hence, perhaps, the disappointment.

But when one is expecting a negative reward, as I do, and gets a positive one instead, then do the dopaminergic neurons respond even more vigorously?

I wonder about the physiology of this pessimism that leads to happiness. Whatever it is, this is a piece of advice from a venerable philosopher that I am happy to pass along.

Astrologers and economists

2010-03-21T04:31:00.000-07:00

I read in an American newspaper some two weeks ago that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States had found that the economic predictions of a gentleman with psychic powers “weren’t particularly accurate”. The gentleman, apparently trained by Nepalese monks in the art of time travel, had (according to the report) predicted that the Dow Jones industrial average would rise between April and June 2002, when in fact, according to the SEC, it had fallen.

Well, did the highly paid economists do any better?

According to a BBC World Service report broadcast some two years ago, many in India seek the advice of astrologers in money matters.

They could do worse.

They could seek the advice of economists.

Sisters?

2010-03-21T04:27:00.000-07:00

I was asked last week whether the outcome would have been different if Lehmann Brothers had been Lehmann Sisters.

I think it almost certainly would have (see my previous posts on the topic of women in economic positions)

If meadow voles could talk to tigers and humans…

2010-03-21T04:23:00.000-07:00

We have all been reading reports of marital infidelities among prominent and high profile personalities, some of whom have been advised, or are seeking, sex therapy and sex counseling for their serial infidelities. Does such therapy and counseling work, would it have any effect, or is it just throwing good money after bad?

The conclusion to be drawn from work on the love life of voles (rodents) suggests that such counseling is, at best, fraught with difficulties, and at worst is useless.

I have given an account of some of this work in my book Splendors and Miseries of the Brain.

Meadow voles, unlike prairie voles, are notorious for their promiscuity, a behaviour that, in female meadow voles, has been directly linked to receptors for a neurohormone, oxytocin, which is critical in pair bonding and has an important relationship to the dopamine “feel-good” system in the brain.

Monogamous prairie voles have a good deal more of the receptors for oxytocin in their brains than do meadow voles. Injecting antagonists to oxytocin in prairie voles renders them promiscuous too. But injecting oxytocin into promiscuous meadow voles does not turn them into monogamous animals, because they just do not have enough receptors for oxytocin.

Hence, if meadow voles, shunned in a society of prairie voles, could communicate with humans or tigers (assuming there to be promiscuous tigers who seek sex counseling), they might tell them not to waste time or money but to seek pharmacological remedies instead.

Of course, voles are far removed from humans. Yet humans also have oxytocin (and vasopressin, another neurohormone closely linked to pair-bonding and more prominent in males).

I suggested in my book that differences in receptors for these neurohormones may similarly be critical for determining the extent of infidelities in humans.

In an article published in Nature last year, Larry Young, one of the pioneers in the study of the brain’s love system, writes that “Variations in a regulatory region of the vasopressin receptor gene, avpr1a, predicts the likelihood that a male vole will bond with a female”. He adds that in humans, “different forms of the AVPR1A gene are associated with variations in pair bonding and relationship quality. A recent survey shows that men with a particular AVPR1A variant are twice as likely as men without it to remain unmarried, or when married, twice as likely to report a recent crisis in their marriage.”

This is not good news for sex counselors in this domain. It suggests that modifying behaviour to make promiscuous men monogamous requires a more radical intervention than the spiritual and “psychological” counseling that sex therapists indulge in. There are of course deep ethical and biological objections to a more radical pharmacological intervention.

This is not to suggest that spiritual counseling does not work. It may, but my guess is that it only works in a very limited number of cases, and then only at a heavy price, of continual dis-satisfaction.

In the fight between biology and morality, biology has commonly won in the end.

I am not advocating promiscuity or monogamy, or anything else. All I am trying to convey is that, in regulating romantic relationships, and in framing laws that regulate such behaviour, account must be taken of biological realities.

An economic hoot

2010-02-26T08:09:00.000-08:00

Shares in the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) reportedly went up by 6% yesterday, on news that their losses for the past year – at a mere £3.6 billion compared to the £24.3 billion the previous year - “were better than expected”! This substantial loss, being much “better than expected”, also allowed RBS to pay out some £1.3 billion in bonuses to their employees. Apparently if they did not pay out these vast sums, the talent of these employees, which gave them a loss of £24 billion last year and £3.6 billion this year, might leave for other banks (presumably ones also dependent on government handouts).

Meanwhile the Lloyd’s group reported losses of £6.3 billion for last year, but were apparently very upbeat because they expected a “significant improvement” for 2010.

And the gullible have sent the shares of RBS up by 6%.

It reminds one of the friar who consumed one bottle of scotch per day and landed an appointment at a seminary, where drinking was forbidden. Once the Father Superior became aware of the friar’s drinking habits, he gave him a severe dressing down and told him to stop it.

So the friar cut down his consumption of whiskey to half a bottle per day. This earned him the gratitude and friendship of all at the seminary.

It has been postulated that the dopaminergic neurons in the reward centres of the brain are more active during the expectation of reward than when the reward is obtained. Perhaps this explains why rewards are often disappointing.

But what if the reward far exceeds expectations, as a diminution in loss to a mere £3.6 billion, obviously was.

Would this entail an even more vigorous activity by these dopaminergic neurons?

An interesting brain experiment for neuroeconomics?

Economic "experts"

2010-02-23T04:26:00.001-08:00

This week "Forum", a BBC World Service Programme, featured a very perspicacious man - Moises Naim - a former Venezuelan Trade and Industry Minister. He summed up very nicely what so many think about economists and their spectacular failure in predicting what they profess to be able to predict. Without actually saying so, he perhaps conveyed very well the deep contempt in which economists are held worldwide and even suggested briefly that they might learn from neurobiological experiments. I doubt that economists would want to listen to him, but for the rest of us he is worth listening to.

London Underground and the Concept of “Defensible Space”

2010-02-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

Over the past few years, London Underground has seen great improvements. And vast sums are being spent on improving it, no doubt in preparation for the Olympics in 2012.

But there has been one very retrograde step – the removal of arm rests between seats on some lines.

Arm rests act not only as arm rests but as aids in defining our territory while we are sitting there. And territoriality is one of the most primitive instincts we have.

Airlines give you better scope to defend your space or be oblivious to it, at a price.

Travellers in steerage have almost no defence and have to fight to define their space on the arm rest, sometimes leading to considerable aggravation.

But for a considerable extra sum, one can travel in business class, where there is far less chance of one’s territory being invaded. Still, the danger exists. I saw two people struggling in business class on a flight from Japan until one of them begged to be seated elsewhere. Unfortunately, the plane was full and he had to endure the misery of having his space invaded for the rest of the long flight.

And for a huge extra sum, one can travel in first class, where the problem does not even arise.

London Underground keep telling us that they are investing vast sums to make our journeys safer, more punctual and pleasanter.

Pleasanter? If they had bothered to read a little about the psychology of territoriality, they may not have abolished those arm rests, which no doubt reduce the amount of angst among passengers as they struggle – instinctively – to defend their space. Their removal makes for a less pleasant journey.

The concept of defensible space is one that all those engaged in such enterprises should look up. Unless, of course, their aim is to make life less pleasant.

Le Crazy Horse in Paris

2010-02-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

Le Crazy Horse in Paris used to be a great cabaret – I recall many years ago a very aesthetic show in which, through a very clever arrangement of lighting, one only got a glimpse of the girls on parade – from which one was expected, I suppose, to reconstruct the rest (but the brain is able to recognize a form with exposures as brief as 16 milliseconds).

Those days are gone. Le Crazy Horse is now an over-priced cabaret – or rather a cross between a cabaret and a theatre – with a boring show, a faded carbon-copy of its former self.

I last visited it some two years ago, and the only thing I retain is a handout leaflet which said that they had the world’s “most beautiful and most inaccessible women”.

Those who wrote that line are smart – for inaccessibility is the key to the fantasy world recreated there. It is the inaccessibility that creates endless possibilities – in the mind. Once something is totally accessible, it is also rigidly defined, and hence limits the precious role of fantasy.

I suppose that for Dante, too, Beatrice was inaccessible, opening up extraordinary possibilities in his mind. Had she been accessible, he may not have written of her as he did. After all, he has nothing to say about his wife, who must have been totally accessible.

The gulf between the inaccessible girls at Le Crazy Horse and Beatrice is not quite as wide as may seem, although some may be outraged at the suggestion.

But fantasy obviously comes at a price – and viewing those inaccessible girls at Le Crazy Horse is now for those who have cash to spare. What they are paying for is not really a glimpse of the girls at all, but the world of fantasy that that view provides.

And why not?

The bite in the apple

2010-02-14T13:39:00.000-08:00

I always assumed that the bite in the apple which is the logo of Apple Mac represents eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil - though I never bothered to enquire.
I was told yesterday by a seemingly well informed person that it is meant to represent a bit of computer history - the bite that Alan Turing, the brilliant English scientist and decoder of Enigma, took from an apple dipped in cyanide. This was his way of commiting suicide after being hounded by the authorities for his homosexuality.

Is this well known?

As an interesting aside, following a recent petition to Downing Street, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, apologised on behalf of the British Government for the way in which Turing was treated, which was a decent thing to do.

The specificity of synaesthetic memories

2010-02-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

Synaesthesia is a condition in which experience in one modality (for example auditory) triggers an experience in another (for example vision). Commonly a specific note or number generates a specific colour. This naturally argues for a very specific set of connections in the brain – from say a specific part of the auditory cortex to a specific part of the visual brain - in fact to the colour centre (V4). And not only to any part of V4, but the part in which that specific colour is generated and registered. [It is known that there are groupings of cells in V4 that prefer specific colours].
But if my experience is anything to go by, synaesthesia also affects memory in highly specific ways.

I often listen to BBC Radio 4 in the evening, just before the shipping forecast at about 23:45 and the news at midnight. The shipping forecast is preceded by a tune known as sailing by. I cannot be the only one in whom the music conjures up the sea and a boat – that, after all is the title of the tune. But the mental image the music triggers in me – which is always very clear – is also very precise. It is not, as one might imagine, of the rough seas around the British isles, but of a clear, azure blue sea, more like the sea one encounters in the Aegean, around the Greek and Turkish coasts. The boat I see is not any boat but an old fashioned one, of which a perfect example can be seen here. And I am always looking from the boat at the sea.

I have been listening to this tune for years and the mental visual image it creates has never changed. This argues for a highly specific set of connections that link the visual memory system with the immediate auditory input. Experts might have other terms to describe the phenomenon; for all I know it may not even fall under the term synaesthesia. But whatever term one might choose to describe it, the fact remains that it is testament to an astonishing specificity in cortical connections.

Autism as a dual disorder

2009-12-20T12:10:00.000-08:00

Autism is a complex neurological disorder of varying degrees of severity. Among its characteristics is a difficulty in social interaction and in reading the minds and intentions of others.

But social interaction involves at least two people, and in thinking about autism I wonder whether we should not also consider the way in which apparently normal people are also “impaired” in interacting with frankly autistic people.

I was very frustrated over a year ago when dealing with a lady who seemed remarkably ill equipped at social interaction, and seemed to lack all intuition. Communication with her was very difficult and other, apparently normal, individuals who came into contact with her shared my experience. I wondered, as did others, whether she is autistic.

It gradually dawned on me that the difficulty was two-way, that I in return was very ill-equipped to communicate with her, because I had no mental representation of a person from whom one could elicit no anger, or sadness, or joy or approval, or disapproval, or indeed any emotion, whatever one said or did.

Hence I suggest that, if we consider autism spectrum disorder to be, in part at least, a social disorder, we must envisage the possibility that the “disorder” is shared and that it is partly also a "disorder" in the individual with whom the interaction is occurring, and who has no mental framework to deal with this apparent difficulty of reading the mind of an autistic individual or interacting with them. It may be worth considering whether, in dealing with autism, we should not also try to generate rules that will make our interaction with autistic individuals more easy. This may even have the beneficial effect of easing their problems.

It is of course possible to argue that we would be able to learn how to deal with this lack of social interaction more readily than individuals with an autistic spectrum disorder. My experience with this lady has taught me otherwise. I found it very difficult to read into her mind and thus interact with her constructively even in spite of the long time during which I had to interact with her.

Hence I think that autism spectrum disorder should not be considered as confined to individuals but to social interactions in which both sides, the autistic and the apparently normal, are deficient in communicative skills, with each side lacking the mental representation of how to interact with the other.

At any rate, this is something worth thinking about.

How reliable is Wikipedia?

2009-12-20T11:32:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia is a splendid idea. I often consult it, as do millions of others. But it seems that reliance on it alone can be dangerous.

I recently consulted Wikipedia about the phenomenon known as “Blindsight”. This is a condition in which subjects who become blind through damage to their primary visual cortex can apparently discriminate with high accuracy objects presented to their blind fields but are totally unaware that anything has been presented there. They are just able to discriminate, for example, whether a visual stimulus moves to the left or to the right but deny having seen anything.

That, at any rate is one version.

There are some, amongst whom I include myself, who have doubts about the phenomenon. I will not detail here the articles that I and others have written to express these doubts. But anyone consulting the article on “Blindsight” in Wikipedia would not even realize that this is a very controversial topic. They would instead have the impression that it is a well established and agreed-upon phenomenon.

But that is far from being so. It is a very controversial phenomenon. But the Wikipedia article doesn't give any hint that it is, or refer to any articles that have questioned the phenomenon. I hasten to add that I do not know who has written the article and have not bothered to look it up.

I suppose, and hope, that no scholar relies exclusively on Wikipedia or indeed on any single source. The danger comes more from, and to, those who, not being conversant with the literature on the subject, assume the validity of what is written and propagate it unquestioningly.

Blindsight is not the only article in Wikipedia that is misleading. There are others, some of them self-serving articles. It is of course the essence of good scholarship to allude to other findings or interpretations, even ones with which the author may disagree. Apparently, when some people think they can get away with it, they will not do so.This is perhaps less likely to happen in peer-reviewed articles.

On the other hand, unlike articles published in peer-reviewed journals, Wikipedia gives us the opportunity of modifying the articles and eradicating the errors. I am myself dis-inclined to do so. It would be too time consuming. It is sufficient to be aware of the danger in order to avoid the consequences. So I will continue to use and enjoy Wikipedia while being aware of its shortcomings.

The Acropolis Museum and the Parthenon Marbles

2009-12-20T11:07:00.000-08:00

I recently visited the new museum at the Acropolis in Athens.

One reason for building a museum at the Acropolis is to house the Parthenon Marbles, which Lord Elgin, British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, bought from the Turks when Greece was under Ottoman rule and transported to England. They are now on beautiful display in the Duveen Galleries at the British Museum in London. Greece wants these marbles back because they constitute a very important heritage for the Greeks – as indeed they do for all of humanity.

I want here to comment on only one aspect, which is the way these marbles are intended to be displayed in the new Athens museum, should they every be returned.

It is very poorly thought out and an utter failure.

We would find it intolerable if, when listening to music, another piece of music were to be played.

It is similarly true that, in vision, too many distractors (in the form of too many other visual stimuli) interfere with our ability to appreciate what we are looking at. There are indeed studies of the phenomenon of “visual crowding”, which show a degraded ability to perceive visual stimuli when they are surrounded by other stimuli. This phenomenon has been more usually studied with peripheral vision but it is applicable to central vision as well.

Back to the Acropolis Museum. The background against which they intend to display the Parthenon Marbles, if they are returned, is so cluttered with other displays as to be totally distracting. Somehow, our visual field is invaded by so much else that it cannot concentrate on one item.

And this distracts from, and diminishes, the beauty and the inspiration that the Parthenon marbles provide.

This cluttering is actually a problem with many museums, especially ones that do not have enough space for all they want to exhibit.

The recently refurbished Museum of Modern Art in New York is splendid not only for its rich collection, but for the remarkable way in which they are displayed, with enough space around most paintings to enable the viewer to concentrate on each without the crowding that distracts.

Perhaps there is a minimum distance that should separate one exhibit from another. Perhaps it is worth establishing some general principles regarding this through psychophysical studies in vision. Indeed those specialized in psychophysics have actually come up with some rules. Perhaps architects and interior designers should have the humility to learn a little about visual science and visual psychophysics before they embark on such grandiose schemes.

I do not know who designed the Acropolis Museum. And I do not know who the curator is. All I know is that these precious marbles, which, though born in Greece, belong to all of us, are a huge inspiration and deserve to stand in isolation, without the distracting effects of other stones, as indeed they currently are in the British Museum.

Whether the marbles should be returned to Greece or remain in Britain will, ultimately, be a political decision. There is no doubt that a large number of lawyers will be involved in deciding whether the terms under which Lord Elgin transported the marbles to England were legitimate or not. I am not able to comment on these.

But I can comment on the aesthetic side and say that, on aesthetic grounds alone, the marbles should stay in London where they can be freely viewed by all and where they continue to provide a dazzling inspiration for millions.

If a time comes when a better place for them can be found than their current house in the splendid Duveen Galleries in London, then the question of their re-patriation can be re-visited.

Beauty without the brain?

2009-11-15T12:55:00.000-08:00

This week-end, I watched a very interesting programme on BBC2 TV, entitled “What is Beauty”.

The question is naturally interesting, and it is a subject that I am very interested in. And I learned a great deal from watching this programme, which covered a vast expanse, from cave art, through Michelangelo, to Matisse and Gaugin, and contemporary art, to give just a few examples. Its presenter derived some 10 principles which define, according to him, the characteristics of what constitutes beauty – among them selection, surprise, spontaneity, animation, simplicity, surroundings, etc.

I am not in a position to comment on whether these are the characteristics of beauty or of the beautiful, though I strongly agree with him when he says that all art is abstraction. The presenter, beginning the programme by asking “what is beauty?”, ended it by saying that art is beautiful because of what it is and because of how it is done. But, in a programme addressing the question of what is beauty through the visual medium alone, there was not a word about the perceiving organ, the brain. Indeed, the word brain occurred only once throughout the programme, in a somewhat indifferent reference, when the presenter spoke about the idealization “simmering in Michelangelo’s brain”.

The flaw in the programme, for me, was the title: “What is Beauty?” I wonder: can one really answer or even approach such a question today without even the vaguest of references to the brain? I personally do not think so. When we speak of surprise, or pleasure, or surroundings, or unity, or abstraction, we can actually say quite a lot – even in our present state of imperfect knowledge – about brain activity in relation to these experiences. The programme would have been excellent had it not been for the title. Just as any discussion about what is beauty would be sterile without copious reference to the debates about this question in the humanities, so any discussion about what beauty is is very incomplete without at least a lip service to the brain. In that sense, what promised to be a powerful programme ended up being somewhat disappointing.

Cortical de-activation and ethics classes at business schools

2009-11-15T03:26:00.000-08:00

On October 28, “The Financial Times” carried a column, apparently without any sense of irony, entitled “Is it possible to teach ethics to business school students?”

The answer is, of course, “Yes, it is”.

But the more important question is, “Will it influence their behaviour?”

I think not, especially where big money is involved.

Imagine a business school student, from one of the leading business schools and with a good background in ethics and moral philosophy, confronted with a situation in which he or she (more likely, he) can make billions, even if it entails suffering among hundreds of small savers? And why restrict ourselves to billions? The same would be true if the gains to be made are in the millions or the hundreds of thousands or the thousands, or even the hundreds. Will there be anything to stop him? Will his ethical education be of any value or practical use?

Evidence over the past two decades shows that it will not. I restrict myself to more recent evidence because it has been better exposed.

The question rather should be: “Is it possible for business school students, or better still those making money, to use any knowledge derived from their ethical studies to regulate their behaviour when confronted with the prospect of unheard of riches?”

I think not.

But why should this be so?

The reason lies, I have suggested in these columns, in the de-activation of judgmental areas of the cerebral cortex, including the frontal lobes, when greed holds sway. This is still conjectural and, to my knowledge, has not been properly studied by neurobiologists. But we have evidence from another brain system, the one regulating love. Evidence has shown that there is a strong cortical de-activation of judgmental areas when we are in love.

Hence it is useless to tell a person in love that their lover is not worthy for one reason or another. Their de-activated cortex cannot accept that conclusion.

Likewise, it is useless telling someone about to make billions that their conduct is unethical. I conjecture that, faced with greed, their de-activated cortex cannot accept that conclusion. And so, all these ethical courses will be found to be totally useless.

Notice that, in both cases, the judgmental de-activation is highly selective. Those who are passionately in love can exercise judgment in matters not relating to their love affairs, and those who are greedy for money can nevertheless exercise their ethical standards in matters not relating to their greed.

It may indeed be interesting to conduct an experiment in which the extent of cortical de-activation is plotted against the extent of gains to be made from greedy behaviour. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a straightforward, proportional, relationship. There is, after all, such a relationship between extent of hate experience and activity in certain areas of the brain.

I myself do not consider greed as either bad or good, but only as a biological reality that we are faced with.

And it is with biological realities that economists and business schools, as well as government regulators, should deal.

Neurobiology of fictional characters in literature

2009-11-10T07:34:00.000-08:00

The Egyptian writer, Alaa Al-Aswany, author of the very successful The Yacoubian Building, was interviewed in Harriet Gilbert’s World Book Club this morning on the World Service of the BBC. His answers to the questions were brief and succinct, indicating a man who has thought deeply about things and thus able to respond briefly and with assurance.

I was especially struck by his comment on the creation of fictional characters, which raises an interesting neurobiological problem, though I cannot figure out a good way to study it.

Al-Asnawy said that, in creating his fictional characters, a moment comes when they acquire their independence and he is no longer in control of them; he merely describes their actions. He put in brief and forceful words what I have often considered, in a somewhat vague way, to be true of some of the great characters in world literature, that the characters are independent of the author, though I never envisaged that there comes a moment, during the writing of the novel, when they acquire their independence. Think of Anna Karenina, or Emma Bovary, or of Julien Sorel in Scarlet and Black. Oddly enough, I have never thought in the same way of Shakespeare, because the power and beauty of his language somehow always reminds me that it is Shakespeare who is writing.

One of the fundamental operations of the brain leads to a capacity to distinguish between self and not self. Indeed, Immanuel Kant thought that this is an a priori with which we are born and into which all experienced is read. I presume that there must be a radical shift in the brain of an author when he or she realizes that the character is no longer their creation but has acquired an independence which they can only describe – a moment when the character becomes detached from the self and becomes the non-self, and when the author knows that the character he or she is creating is separate from them.

I am not sure that I am communicating this well; I am sure that Al-Asnawy would be able to describe it better than me. Nor have I figured out a good way of studying it. But that it must involve a potentially describable shift in neural activity seems very likely. And it shows the power of the arts to point the way to interesting experiments in neurobiology and neuroesthetics.

The day dreams of economic "scientists"

2009-10-23T07:53:00.001-07:00

The early morning news today was full of cackle about how Britain will later in the day be deemed to be "technically" out of the economic recession. The economists thought that the figures, when released later in the day, would show that the economy had expanded. Not by much, mind you, just 0.2%. But to the ever optimistic economists, who actually seem to know very little, this meant that we could now see light at the end of the tunnel...

But, within hours the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be a train coming in the opposite direction!!!

For when the figures were released a few hours later, it turned out that the UK economy had "unexpectedly" shrunk by 0.4% between July and September, making this recession the longest since records began!

It says it all.

The portentous ignorance of the economists and the financial advisers is crushing. And it goes well, as ignorance commonly does, with their optimism.

Every single move, whatever its nature, is hailed as a sign of recovery. When house prices do not fall at the rate they had been falling at previously, this is a sign - to the economists - that house prices are on the rise again! When the pound gains a cent against the dollar, this is a sign - to them - that the recession is over.

And they call themselves scientists. What a joke. What I fail to understand, is why they remain so arrogant.

The BBC carried an interesting report a few months back, about how, in India, people are consulting astrologers on where to put their money. They could actually do worse. They could consult economists!

The correspondent himself went to two astrologers. If my memory serves me right, one of them told him to put his money into something when some star was equidistant from another, while another told him exactly the reverse.

Our economic scientists do not fare much better. But I bet that they charge a good deal more than the astrologers.

Apart from making fools of themselves and giving us all the occasion to laugh at them, their optimism raises a serious neurobiological point.

Alan Greenspan predicted that there will be another economic recession, because humans have an extraordinary capacity for optimism when the going is good.

But it seems that humans, or at least economists, have an extraordinary capacity for optimism, period! Regardless of whether the going is good or bad.

Bank of England policymaker agrees with me

2009-10-15T00:21:00.000-07:00

It is good to record that, months after my previous post (22nd February 2009) about the importance of having more women in top economic and financial positions, I now have agreement from an economist/banker.

The Guardian reports this morning that Charles Goodhart, a previous Bank of England policymaker, no less, who is now Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics, no less, has said that ‘the worst financial crisis since the second world war could have been prevented if more women were on the boards of major companies. "Women tend to be more cautious and have a longer term outlook. I think that men can be more aggressive and prepared to take larger risks," he said. "There would have been less likelihood of the financial crisis if we had a larger number of female chief executives in the financial sector."

He said that there were "remarkably few" female chief executives in the financial sector and that it is "a great pity". "I think that the longer term and cautious tendency that women have and less of the alpha male would be beneficial."’

This echoes my words nicely…Thank you, Charles Goodhart. There is hope yet.

Ineffectual warning signs for the greedy

2009-10-14T11:49:00.000-07:00

I was in stitches this morning, laughing my head off about a new gadget that a major company is launching to temper the greed of financiers and bankers, and others who deal with money. The gadget is some kind of instrument that measures the galvanic skin response and turns the readings into a colour scheme. Some colours (I suppose red) signal to the wearer of the gadget that he or she is getting too emotional, and should ‘cool it’. This, the makers believe, will make the financiers more risk aversive.

But this does not take into account that greed is a powerful emotion, and that such gadgets cannot control it through their warnings. Those whose greed and rapacity is above normal (which I suppose is true of many if not most financiers) can hardly be expected to be put off by some warning light, when they are prepared to risk ignominy, imprisonment and disgrace – and even the possibility of losing their entire fortune. After all, many of those currently in prison for financial mis-demeanours have had far more forceful warnings than the one delivered by a gadget strapped to the wrist.

It is like telling someone who is madly in love that they should desist because of some warning sign. It wouldn’t work, and never has. Part of the reason is that, in states of deep love, large parts of the cerebral cortex become de-activated, though the deactivation and consequent suspension of judgment is specific to the loved person. I have suggested elsewhere that with greed, too, there is a cortical de-activation and suspension of judgment, this time specifically related to the money to be made.

Under such conditions, and faced with the prospect of making millions, nay billions, one would hardly expect a banker to notice a red light telling him that he is getting too greedy.

Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that bankers are laughing all the way to their own banks, because of the huge amounts they are making owing to the imbalance between the interest they give on deposits and the interest they charge on loans. I have read that bankers in England are braced for huge bonuses, somewhere in the region of 5 billion pounds because of this artificial success.

But there are warning signs – far more potent than ones that come from wrist strapped gadgets. The latest comes from Nouriel Roubini, who was once referred to as the ‘prophet of doom’ because he was one of the very few who predicted the recent economic crisis, but who is now regarded as an economic guru, because he was one of the few who predicted it. He told the BBC a few days ago that another economic problem may well be on the way.

Is anyone listening? Probably not. With greed ruling, much of the judgmental part of the collective cerebral cortex is simply inactive, and therefore impervious to such warnings, be they from a grand guru or from a wrist gadget.

Alan Greenspan doesn't get it quite right

2009-10-08T13:26:00.001-07:00

Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of the United States and thus effectively presided over the largest economy in the world for very nearly two decades. However controversial his monetary policies may have been, his words, on economics at least, are nevertheless worth listening to.

In an interview he gave to the BBC last month, Greenspan predicted that the economic crisis will occur again. All economic crises, according to him, have one common source, however much they may otherwise differ. The common source is "the unquenchable capability of human beings when confronted with long periods of prosperity to presume that it will continue."

I would like to suggest that there is a simpler common source that is common to economic crises - GREED. And since greed is part of human behaviour, and does not seem to have altered much through the ages, it will lead to another economic crisis, and then another.

That is why I have urged those in the field of neuroeconomics to turn their attention to the neurobiology of greed.

I do not pretend for one moment that learning about the neural basis of greed will produce a cure for economic crises, far from it. But it would provide us with an interesting picture.

And I make this prediction - that, when confronted with greed and the prospect of earning huge sums of money - large parts of the brain become de-activated.

Worth a try, isn't it?

Perhaps not quite so asymmetrical after all

2009-10-08T13:15:00.000-07:00

I commonly write and speak of the relationship between neuroesthetics and the arts and humanities as being highly asymmetric. By this I mean that we have a great deal to learn from the artists and the humanists but little or nothing at all to teach them in return. I would doubt very much whether Cézanne would have improved on his paintings if he had known what we know today about the visual brain and visual perception or that Beethoven’s music would have benefited by knowledge about the auditory cortex. In the same way, I would be surprised if our present day knowledge about brain mechanisms would do much to improve or modify the output of many currently active artists. I am also not sure that we have much to teach philosophers or historians of art, although we have a great deal to learn from them.

But perhaps the relationship is not quite as asymmetric as I think, or should not be. In preparing the lecture I am to deliver in Dublin on Francis Bacon, in connection with the celebrations of the centenary of his birth there in 1909, an acquaintance recommended that I should read one of the greatest works ever written on Bacon – a book by the French philosopher, here doubling as art historian, Gilles Deleuze. He exhorted me to read every line, digest it and then meditate on it, to gain important insights into the work of the master.

This was enticing and my enthusiasm was fortified by the exciting title of the book, The Logic of Sensation. I have been studying visual perception and sensation all my life, and here is a book, written by a philosopher, addressing the issue through the art of Francis Bacon. I lost no time in obtaining it.

The great American writer, HL Mencken, once wrote of an actress – probably Sarah Bernhard – who could instill fear and even terror in a recitation of the multiplication table. This same talent, magnified to the nth degree, is present in Deleuz’s writing. The effect of the windy and bombastic phrases is to produce a numbness of the senses, a general cognitive paralysis; its portentous ignorance adds a further intellectual shock.

He tells us on page 34 that “The Figure…acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head and acts through the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone”! What could this mean, since the brain is part of the nervous system? My friends assure me that it is a metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Aren’t metaphors meant to help one understand better, to clarify? It makes no sense. Perhaps it would be worth learning a little neurobiology here. He might have clarified his thoughts and told us what he meant.

Fast forward to page 81, where we are told that “In Bacon, primacy is given to the descent” But this fall is “not necessarily a descent in space…It is the descent as the passage of sensation, as the difference in level contained in the sensation”. And “Why is the difference in level not experienced in the other direction, as a rise? Because the fall must not be interpreted in a thermodynamic manner, as if it produced an entropy…Kant laid down the principle of intensity…and concluded that the plurality apprehended in this magnitude could only be represented by its approximation to negation = 0…Consequently even when sensation tends toward a superior or higher level, it can make us experience it only by the approximation of this superior level to zero, that is, by a fall”.

The ellipises are all mine, but they do not alter the meaning significantly, because there is no meaning.

And so it goes on.

I have indeed tried to re-order the words in two paragraphs. This did not improve the passages, I admit at once. But even more interestingly, it did not make the passages any worse.

I am urged to have patience, to read and then re-read. Ultimately, I am told, I will gain the impenetrable insights. This implies that my inability to understand is really due to my somewhat limited capacities. This, alas, may well be true.

But if the price to pay for gaining these insights is to spend interminable hours trying to gain them, I will forgo the pleasure. After all, there are other art historians who have written far more eloquently on Bacon and other artists, or at least have written in language that I and others like me can understand.

More on Art Without Art…and something new about Money Without Art.

2009-09-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

I have found out more about the non-event at the Venice Biennale (see my post of September 12), the poster for which is now selling at 1000 Euros. Apparently, even though it never took place, people spoke about it with wonder and said how much they had enjoyed it.

Well, at least they had done so in their mind. Why not?

As well, a correspondent sent me a link to another non-event, from which there remain some photos. Maybe they also cost a fortune now.

Art is of course inextricably linked to money. And art, or at least good art, is difficult to produce. Art is really the realization of a brain concept. But, as I have argued in my book, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, artists more often than not find it difficult to translate the rich concepts in their brains, derived from many experiences, into a single work of art or even a series of works. This leads to dis-satisfaction, and in the fiction of Balzac (The Unknown Masterpiece) and Zola (The Masterpiece), even to suicide (there are also examples of suicide from real life).

One solution to this depressing state is not to produce a work of art at all, but only to think about it.

So, I would like now to extend the “art without an artist” of Marcel Duchamp and what I have called “art without art” of Richard Prince and Pasquale Laccese and introduce what I believe to be a new concept, though of course steeped in examples taken from the past.

I call it Money without Art.

Given that people are prepared to pay astronomical sums for works of art by great artists, or fashionable ones, and given the difficulty of producing works of art, I have this suggestion.

Just let the artist sign an empty canvas or a frame, with the inscription: “I had such and such a concept in mind” for this work.

The artist then need not bother with producing the work, and therefore need not be worried about being dis-satisfied. All he or she needs to do is to sell it to a collector. The collector will have the guarantee that the artist thought about the work, even if momentarily, and therefore be satisfied. His acquisition should increase in value with time. Viewers can conjure up all sorts of scenarios for what the artist could have produced.

Of course, the artist must be an eminent one, or at least considered to be eminent. No one would want to pay a penny for an empty canvas by me. But it would be quite another if the empty canvas were signed by a great artist.

I would be surprised if an empty canvas by Picasso or Matisse signed and inscribed with the words “I wanted to paint such and such on this canvas, but did not do so” would not fetch thousands. Just as I would be surprised if the empty page not illustrating the last Canto of the Paradiso, from Boticelli’s series of illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, did not fetch thousands if it were ever to come on the market.

The application of this concept of Money without Art (or Monsart, for MONey Sans ART) would also be an addition to contemporary art which, I am told, questions more profoundly the relationship of the viewer to the work of art and to the concept in the artist’s mind.

After all, with an empty canvas, the possibilities are limitless, and so perhaps is the cash.

A very wise billionaire

2009-09-17T12:56:00.001-07:00

A great deal of knowledge is gained by studying the faces we encounter. We may feel safe or threatened, we may empathize or distrust. All this is of course done immediately, in seconds and perhaps even in fractions of a second. So important is the knowledge gained from a face that the brain has a whole area devoted to facial recognition and to the recognition of facial expressions. But we still do not know how the brain evaluates a person from the many very rapid calculations that it must perform on the many details in a face. Indeed, we don’t even know precisely what these calculations are. But facial perception is being studied intensively by neurobiologists and we shall no doubt gain a great deal of interesting information about this perfected system.

When the brain detects a pleasant or nasty face – one to be avoided – it is of course doing so with respect to its own past experience. I often think that when we feel a certain danger in a face, of whatever source, we should trust our instincts and perceptions and ignore all other advice. For what may appear as a nasty face to one may appear as exceptionally pleasant to another. Each one according to his or her own experience.

We have all read stories about gigantic swindles being perpetrated recently, in schemes commonly known as Ponzo schemes. Some of those running these schemes must have had an extraordinary ability to look their customers (who in some instances were trusted “friends”) in the eye and know that they were going to swindle them out of all their money, without arousing any suspicion in the ill-fated customer. But not all were quite so naïve.

A friend recently related to me the true story of a billionaire who wanted to invest a huge sum of money in one of these schemes, which promised huge returns – of 10% or more. Apparently unlike many others who invested their millions with this man, our billionaire asked to meet the top man face to face before signing over his millions. His request was refused. He immediately cancelled the deal.

This was a wise man, one who trusted his instincts more than the judgment of those who recommended him to invest in such a scheme. But there is another side to the coin. Presumably, the many others who invested their millions – and lost – did so without studying the top man face to face. Or of course, they might have perceived danger signs, but other faculties – the reputation of those running the schemes, their past history, and so one – may have led them to over-rule their mistrust. Or, quite simply, some of us may have a less perfected facial recognition apparatus in our brains than others.

Whichever is the correct answer, perhaps we should all take the wise man’s action to heart and act accordingly in our dealings. After all, unlike many others, he is still swimming in his millions.

Art without art

2009-09-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

Marcel Duchamp played one of the biggest jokes on the art world, when he used the ready mades to propagate his doctrine of art without an artist, the signed urinal which he exhibited (and which today no doubt costs a fortune) being one of the best known examples. It of course raised a whole set of questions about art, which are still being debated.

Now a gallerist friend of mine in Milan, Pasquale Leccese of Le Case d’arte, and the artist Richard Prince have gone a step further. They prepared a poster advertising an exhibition in the Panama Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. But there was no exhibition; it never took place.

The result?

Well, the poster, which sold for 10 Euros then, is now selling for 1000 Euros. It has become a collector’s item.

What a hoot!

But there is of course a serious side to this one, too.

After all, Sandro Botticelli, who illustrated all of the Cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy, left some un-illustrated. Especially notable is that the Canto in which Dante speaks of how the highest fantasy fails him and the last one, in which he simply abandons his will and desire to the love that moves the sun and the other stars are left un-illustrated by Botticelli, thus leaving it to the imagination of the viewer or the reader to create their own (mental) images.

I imagine that the pages left blank by Botticelli are worth millions today.

Reductionism...the hate word

2009-09-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

Now that neurobiology has started to explore the neural correlates of subjective mental states such empathy, love, desire, beauty, reward and much else besides, the hate word “reductionism” is being used to stigmatize and call into question the efforts of neurobiologists in this direction. Our detractors insist on the “holism” of subjective experiences, and some at least seem desperate to find a source other than the brain for these experiences.

Clearly, this kind of research touches a raw nerve among them. Their motives are probably varied, but these motives do not interest me much. What is interesting to consider is the extent to which an unquestioning adherence to holism can impede research and a better understanding of how the brain functions. The visual brain provides an excellent example.

Salomon Henschen (Sweden) was the first to chart the location and extent of the primary visual receiving centre in the brain, followed by Tatsuji Inouye (Japan) and Gordon Holmes (England) who charted it in greater detail, the former in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War and the latter in the aftermath of the First World War. Both Henschen and Holmes believed that the primary visual centre (now commonly referred to as V1) in the brain was the only brain area for vision and that vision, being experienced in a wholesome way, was a unitary, wholesome, process. In the service of this doctrine, they and many others dismissed, often contemptuously, evidence that may suggest that, however wholesome our experience may be, the brain processes that lead to these experiences are in fact fractionated. Indeed, Gordon Holmes was even blind to his own evidence, which showed (in one patient) that the faculty to perceive visual motion may be selectively spared (I have reviewed this evidence in detail in my book, now sadly out of print, A Vision of the Brain). Indeed, so forceful was their dismissal that the clinical evidence which may have supported another view simply vanished from the literature. One would find it very hard to find any reference to it in the papers on the visual brain published between 1918 and 1970.

But one of the striking discoveries about vision since 1970 has been that there are many visual areas, each with its own distinctive connections and specialization, of which the areas specialized for visual motion and colour are perhaps the best studied to date. Even perceptually, in very brief time frames, vision is not the wholesome process that many thought it to be. For it turns out that we see colour before we see motion by about 100 ms, an enormously long time in neural terms.

This does not mean that vision is a not a wholesome experience but only that the process leading to that experience are widely distributed in separate areas of the brain. The challenge for neurobiology now is to understand how, in the longer term, that is to say for periods exceeding 100 ms, the brain integrates the results of activities in its separate parts to give us our wholesome experience.

Had we insisted on a holistic approach (as indeed was done for a long time), we would never have undertaken the research that revealed the brain processes that are instrumental in giving us our wholesome visual experience. To stigmatize this research as “reductionist” is silly. The research is simply a step in understanding better the brain process that lead to holistic experiences.

Should you eat bacon or caviar, or just stick to nouvelle cuisine?

2009-06-17T02:44:00.000-07:00

We are all inundated by reports telling us not eat this or that, and become somewhat confused when we are later told that what was not recommended is actually good for you. I believe that there was a recent report that eggs are good for you, after all. Somewhat irritating, after I deprived myself of eggs for so many years.

To all those who are confused by these contradictory statements about what we should or should not consume, I recommend reading the excellent article at DC’s improbably science. This is written by David Colquhoun, Professor of Pharmacology at UCL, who has done as much as anyone to debunk bad science and the myths of alternative medicine. The particular piece I am referring will not only help you to assess the evidence about eating bacon (and much else besides) for yourself, but also constitutes an excellent introductory course to statistics for the lay person. Read it.

More on women...

2009-04-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

A correspondent, M, criticizes me severely for praising Margaret Thatcher in a recent posting, where I quoted her as saying that she always insisted on running the economy as she would run the household as a housewife (my post of February 22, 2009).

M thinks that she started and promoted the era of corporate greed, not only in Britain but around the world. It is, as we all know, this corporate greed that has brought us to where we are.

M is of course quite right, and I agree with him. I believe that her policies did start the era of corporate greed and turned Britain into a less caring, humane and compassionate society than it used to be.

It also encouraged policy-makers in other countries to pursue these same policies and make the world as a whole a less caring place.

I was really trying to say that men would not think and talk like that. But M is right. After quoting her, I should have added, “However, she did not take her own advice seriously enough to incorporate it into long term economic policies”.

So, my apologies to M.

For me, it still remains that there are far too few women in leading financial and economic positions. It would only be right to have more. I am hopeful that they will follow a more careful economic policy, given their less reckless attitude. This more circumspect attitude may in the end be traceable to a difference in the way the feminine brain functions.

The "Gas Tank" Theory of Love

2009-04-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

Some time ago (April 28, 2008), I wrote a piece about the objectivity of subjective experiences. I now recall that, many years ago, Martin Bell – then a correspondent for the BBC in the United States – reported on what he called Lee Marvin’s “Gas Tank” Theory of Love.

A lady he had been living with had brought a court case against him, demanding half of his earnings for the period they had been living together. But how much did he love her? Lee Marvin replied that if measuring love was like a fuel gauge, his feelings for her never got above “half a tank”.

Now this seemed funny and improbable at the time. But in fact measuring a full brain “gas tank of love” is not quite so improbable after all.

Romantic love correlates with activity in a specific set of areas. Brain activity that correlates with subjective mental states such as hate, or experience of beauty, or expectation of reward, seems to be proportional to the intensity of the declared subjective mental state, at least in some brain areas.

For example, activity in the putamen, a subcortical brain station, is propotional to the declared intensity of hate experienced by the subject.

Now suppose that we are able to calculate the exact number of cells in the putamen and determine the ones whose responses correlate with the experience of hate and suppose further that we have a precise figure for their electrical discharge rates per second. If we had this information, we should be able to tell whether, at any given moment, the hate is of the “full gas tank” or “half gas tank” variety. And so too with love.

This is of course taking a very simple approach. In practice, we would also need to have the same information for the other areas whose activity correlates with the experience of hate (or of love). And we would also have to calculate the responses of areas whose activity merely correlates with the experience of love or hate, without being related proportionately to the intensity of the experience.

This is all of course a long way off – some will wish ardently that is forever off. But it is worth recording that Lee Marvin was not being far from biology when he was trying to give a measure to the intensity of love that he felt. The gas tank analogy was, I believe, not a bad one after all.

The female brain and economics

2009-04-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

In my previous post (February 22nd, 2009), I lamented the fact that there are not more women in top economic posts. I ventured the opinion that, if there are indeed differences between the male and the female brain (and who can deny that, at some level, there must be), this may work to the advantage of women – and the advantage of society – where it comes to economic matters. Had women been in charge of our financial and economic affairs, we might not be in quite the mess we are in today, so I wrote.

In this context, I was interested to read a report in The Financial Times dated March 2nd and entitled “Why women managers shine in a downturn”. The article is by Michel Ferrary, a professor of business management at Ceram Business School in France. He reports that …”the more women there were in a company’s management, the less the share price fell in 2008. A significant coefficient of correlation links the two variables”.

The only large company whose share prices rose in 2008 was the luxury goods company Hermès. Its share price rose by 16.8 % and 55 percent of its management are women. And, to a lesser extent, the story is repeated with other companies with highly feminised managements.

By contrast, companies with mainly highly masculinised management saw their share prices fall dramatically. Alcatel-Lucent, which only has 8.6 % female managers – presumably the rest are males – saw a 69.3% decrease in share prices – and the story is repeated across other companies.

Among French banks, contrast BNP Paribas with 38.7% female managers and whose share price fell 39 % in 2008, with Credit Agricole, which has only 16% female managers and whose share price decreased by 62.2%.

The article traces this to the fact that women “tend to be more risk-aversive and to focus more on a long term perspective”

One would, of course, like to see statistics for other countries besides France before reaching firm conclusions. But this interesting study supports my view that the female brain may confer distinctive economic advantages, to the benefit of all, and that we should, therefore, pursue seriously having equal numbers of women in topic economic and financial posts. If we persist in having unequal numbers, then we should advantage the women and have a smaller percentage of men.

In praise of women

2009-02-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

A friend recently wrote to me, to enquire what I thought about an article which has apparently appeared recently and which describes differences between male and female brains. Apparently when females undertake judgments of beauty, both of their cerebral hemispheres are engaged whereas in males it is the right hemisphere alone that is engaged.

I have not been able to trace this article but recall having seen another article along somewhat similar lines many years ago, which again purported to show that, in females, both hemispheres are engaged when undertaking certain tasks whereas males use one hemisphere alone for the same task.

Interesting.

One conclusion from such studies is that male and female brains are different, which of course in a sense they are.

Another conclusion is that women need both hemispheres to do what men can do with one hemisphere.

To which I would like to add a speculation: that women do many things better than men, precisely because they use both hemispheres and are thus more engaged with the task.

If my speculation has any merit, then it makes sense to engage women a lot more in many areas of our lives than we actually seem to do, even in the most advanced societies. It is in any case their right, since they gain to lose as much as men when wrong decisions are made.

Consider our present economic plight. I have seen a most interesting documentary produced by PBS.org. It is in five parts and is entitled Frontline: the Meltdown. It is well worth watching.

One of the striking things to emerge from this documentary is that there is only one woman among the leading personalities who have dealt with economic crisis, one woman alone (I exclude the women who were being interviewed about their views). The documentary does not make this point, but it became obvious when I viewed it.

One woman alone!

I wonder. If the effort had been more equitably distributed between men and women, and above all if there had been more women in powerful economic and financial positions, would we be in such a mess today?

Would women be quite so reckless in promoting debts which they know can never be repaid? How many, I wonder, of those who purchased mortgages which they knew they could never repay were women? I bet a minority. Would they have accepted complicated economic formulations prepared by mathematicians who do not understand economics and accepted by economists who do not understand mathematics?

Women, on the whole, have a better instinct to preserve and stabilize and hence their judgment in these matters is often better, unlike men who can be, and often are, reckless in these same matters. There lies one difference between men and women and the advantage lies with women.

Margaret Thatcher always insisted on running the economy as she would run the household as a housewife. Never spend beyond your means. I don’t think that male economists over the past 15 years would think like that. They certainly haven’t acted like that.

If such differences are traceable to differences in brain organization, then why not use that to advantage? In any case, given that women suffer as much as men from the economic downturn, and probably a lot more, why not at least make them share in the decisions? It is, I think, scandalous, that they have such a minor representation in deciding our affairs, especially our economic affairs.

And here is my favourite quote of the week. It comes from Paul Volcker. He is quoted as saying “Even the experts [economists] don’t know quite what’s going on”!!!

Did they ever?

And of course, the overwhelming majority of “experts” who got us into this mess are men.

Neuroeconomics…and greed

2009-02-07T08:44:00.000-08:00

I am a fan of the discipline that has become known as neuroeconomics. It has enlisted gifted neurobiologists and is probing highly interesting questions such as the neural parameters of decision making, the representation of reward and the relationship of neurotransmitter activity to reward expectation. I am sure that it will continue to give us many insights into brain organization.

Yet there is a cardinal area which it seems not to have explored so far, namely greed. Greed is currently on everyone’s lips, for it is principally greed that has brought us to the current economic crisis, not economic policies; or, if it is economic policies, then it is economic policies governed by greed. It is a word on everyone’s lips except the economists.

Greed is defined in Webster’s dictionary as inordinate and reprehensible acquisitiveness. This is a neurobiologically interesting, and almost certainly wrong definition. To the practitioners of this greed, there is nothing reprehensible in what they have done or are doing. To those brilliant strategists who advised that a policy of selling mortgages to those who are unable to repay makes sound economic sense, there was nothing reprehensible in their advice. To those inept economic policy-makers, there is nothing to be ashamed of or to regret in what these policies have brought about, the ruin of many families and businesses. To those bankers who, brandishing the begging bowl for economic bailouts from governments, are now re-brandishing the begging bowl ever more insistently for bonuses, there is no feeling of shame, nor are they ashamed of the luxurious beachside conferences arranged in elegant resorts to discuss their bankrupt policies.

Nor is greed limited to them. It also characterizes, for example, those who signed on to mortgages which they knew they could never pay back.

Why should this be so?

I believe that like love and hate, greed probably has neural correlates; it is likely that, as with hate, the degree of activity in relevant brain area(s) will be found to correlate with the intensity of greed experienced. Greed is also probably regulated by neurotransmitters and the receptors for them. It almost certainly depends upon a host of other, as yet unknown, factors as well. But there is one neurobiological prediction that I want to make about greed now – namely that it de-activates those areas of the brain, if any, that control shame and regret and, up to a point, judgment as well.

We have found that the frontal cortex (along with some other cortical areas) is de-activated in those who are passionately in love. It is for this reason, that those in love tend to be less judgmental about their lovers. It is also probably for this reason that it is pointless to try to convince one who is deeply and passionately in love about the folly of their action. Hence, in Pascal’s words, “The heart has its reasons, which reasons knows nothing about”.

And this brings me back to greed. President Obama has now joined the swelling number of people who are angrily condemning the greed of bankers and the incessant demand for bonuses from those who have brought us to this economic abyss. These cries mean nothing to the greedy; they are of no avail. They do not see the shame and have no regrets. This is because, I conjecture, greed also inactivates those parts of the brain that control shame and regret. But, when inactivated, neither shame nor regret are felt. The greed system of the brain then operates uncontrolled according to its own laws, which is that of acquisitiveness, but one which is never seen as reprehensible. Hence the inadequacy of the dictionary definition.

Like love, greed also has its reasons, which reason knows nothing about.

I shall be interested to see if my predictions about greed and the brain come true.

In defense of Senator McCain

2009-01-22T01:20:00.000-08:00

This morning I heard an interview with an economist on the World Service of the BBC. He told us that no one knows the extent of the liabilities that the banks have and no one really has a clear solution to the economic problems. Asked if President Obama has the right strategies for solving the economic problems, he replied that “he has the right strategists”,

And then this jibe…

“Unlike Senator McCain who did not even know that there are economic strategists” or words to that effect.

Well, are there any?

If there are, are they anything but strategists in name?

They do not know the liabilities, they did not foresee the extent of the economic disaster, and they do not have the solutions.

So, is Senator McCain not right when he professes not to know that there are any economic strategists?

Given the mess that these so-called economic strategists have got us into, the wonder is that anyone believes that there are economic strategists.

There may be many criticisms that could be leveled against Senator McCain.

This is not one of them.

Creativity and the richness of brain concepts

2009-01-18T04:10:00.000-08:00

In two recent blogs, I argued that self-censorship, whether known or unknown, is an unwelcome brake on creativity; it stifles self-expression and hence prevents a work from reaching the heights of great art. But, as I have argued in my recent book Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, it is not the only impediment. I view all art as an effort to translate brain concepts into a work. These brain concepts are synthetic ones – the result of many experiences. But a single work of art, or even a series of works, more often than not cannot translate these synthetic concepts adequately. Yves Saint Laurent once said (I think to Christian Lacroix) that he suffered greatly when creating. He is not alone in that. Most artists do the same and say as much.

One, very common, way of avoiding this difficulty is to abandon all attempts at creating a work; another is to leave it unfinished. But Balzac in particular highlights a third way, which also ends in failure. In his The Unknown Masterpiece (Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu), he writes of a painter who progressively destroys a painting through the richness of concepts in his brain, by trying to put too much into the work. When he finally allows others to see the painting, on which he has been working secretly for 10 years, they see nothing but “a mass of confused colours contained within a multitude of bizarre lines”. Of it Balzac wrote that it was about “a work and its execution strangled by the great abundance of the creative principle”, which I translate into the richness of the synthetic concepts in the brain.

It ends, of course, with the suicide of the artist, just as in Zola’s novel, The Masterpiece (L’Œuvre), the painter Lantier commits suicide because of the richness of concepts in his brain.

It is interesting to note that both Cézanne and Picasso greatly admired Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece. Picasso was so taken by it that he purchased (or rented) the apartment in Paris in which it was set. Of the principle character in the short novel (Frenhofer), Cézanne said, “Frenhofer, c’est moi”.

The novels of Balzac and Zola constitute, in this context, very interesting neurobiological documents. But they do not address, and neither has neurobiology to date, the mechanisms that drive an artist to want to create, often desperately. It is an extremely interesting problem for neurobiology, which stands to gain a great deal from learning about the problem by studying what the great creative artists have had to say about it.

Artistic creativity and the brain

2009-01-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

I wrote a blog in May in which I discussed the improvisations of the jazz pianist, Tord Gustavsen. In it, I put forward the view that great artistic achievements must be free of all censorship, and above all self-censorship which, I imagined, may possibly be imposed by activity in the frontal lobes of the brain. In this context, I was very interested to read about an imaginative experiment in a recent paper by Charles Limb and Allen Braun, published in PLoS One. They studied the activity in the brain of professional jazz pianists while they (the pianists) were improvising. There is much of interest in this paper, but here I concentrate on one result which I found especially exciting in view of what I said in my earlier blog. Limb and Braun found that there was extensive de-activation in the frontal cortex as well as in those areas of the brain that are thought to regulate emotions. The authors write that the frontal areas that were de-activated in their study are thought to be important for the conscious monitoring, evaluation and correction of behaviour:

“The [frontal cortex] may be involved in assessing whether such behaviors conform to social demands, exerting inhibitory control over inappropriate or maladaptive performance”

And there you have it!

Any artistic achievement that is tailored to conform to social demands rather than to the real, uninhibited, feelings of its creator, is destined not to reach the heights of achievement, or even fail. It is only when an artist is dis-inhibited that he or she can reach the heights of artistic achievement.

This is perhaps what Wagner and Schopenhauer meant when they said, in a somewhat clumsy way, that an artistic work must “flow from the sub-conscious”, which I interpret to mean without self-censorship. This is perhaps what Proust also meant when he wrote in his Contre Sainte Beuve, “Every day, I become more aware that it is only outside [intelligence] that the [artist] can attain something of himself and the only material of art” (see my earlier blog).

It is at any rate wonderful to have in this recent work a neurological insight into a prized characteristic of all art, but especially of jazz and dancing.

Brain concepts and divorce rates

2008-12-26T11:12:00.000-08:00

In my recent book, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, I argued that one of the root causes of human misery can be traced to the fact that our acquired, post-natal, brain concepts– be they that of a house, a car, a symphonic rendering or a lover - are a synthesis of all the experiences that we have had of that particular attribute. But the individual example – of a car, or a house or a lover - that we experience at any given moment may not satisfy the synthetic concept, thus leading to disappointment and misery.

Disappointment can be defined as a failure to come up to expectation. But expectation with respect to what? A synthetic brain concept of course.

I recently read an interesting account of Japanese divorce rates which seems, on the face of it, to support this view in an important domain. Apparently, Japanese divorce rates have soared in the past few years. Husbands and wives are, seemingly, deeply disappointed with one another.

What is it that has brought this sudden increase about?

According to a BBC report, it is the retirement of the husband in a society where longevity has improved (aided as well by a new law which allows a divorced woman access to her husband’s pension). The retirement creates, according to the report, the opportunity for the married couple to spend more time with each other. Apparently, especially disastrous has been the post-retirement cruises in foreign lands, when the spouses find themselves even closer to each other.

Proximity of course increases the opportunity for experiencing something different from the synthetic brain concept of a lover, or a husband, or a wife that an individual may have; hence increases the opportunity for disappointment as well.

After all, Dante was never disappointed with Beatrice because he virtually never spent any time with her. All he did was to see her on two or three occasions. She smiled at him on one and not the other. She then married a rich banker and died young. He did not experience her long enough to be disappointed with her. Instead he could exalt his brain concept of her. He tells us as much in La Vita Nuova: I shall write of "la gloriosa donna de la mia mente" (the glorious lady of my mind) as no man has written of any woman.

In one version of the famous Majnun-Leila legend, when after a long separation Majnun had the opportunity of seeing Leila, he said ”Be gone from me. My concept of Leila is so much more beautiful than you”. He did not want to experience her!

In one of her love songs, the legendary Egyptian singer, Oum Kalthoum, declares: “I suffer in your presence; I need the mercy of distance.”

Just in case there is any misunderstanding – this is not a Japanese phenomenon at all. According to a Daily Mail report in 2006, there has been a similar tendency in Britain. Also, not all couples who see a lot of each other become disappointed; in a highly variable system there is bound to be a percentage whose brain concept of their lover or spouse is never disappointed But a sufficiently large number do so to make the divorce rates in Western societies approach about 48%, significantly greater than in Japan. Their acquired brain concept of what a spouse or partner should be is, apparently, not satisfied by their experience of the spouse or lover.

Motivations for studying hate

2008-12-06T09:11:00.000-08:00

Hate is a very interesting condition and, like love, has no doubt been a major force in shaping human history and destinies. It thus seemed naturally interesting to learn something about the neural processes underlying it, which is why we undertook a study of it, to complement our earlier studies of romantic and maternal love. Our study of hate has still a long way to go, and we plan more experiments in this area in the future.

But there is another reason why I was interested in pursuing a study of hate. I have long had an academic colleague in whom I found nothing but hate, but I found it very difficult to pinpoint the source of this hatred towards me. For, to the best of my knowledge, I had done nothing to harm him in any way, indeed had been friendly and well-meaning towards him.

It must be the colour of my eyes or my manner of speaking, I thought.

And then I found that his hatred was not directed against me alone. It was more general than that – evident in letters he had written to, or about, other colleagues.

So, I concluded that he was just full of hate.

And I was really curious to learn about which parts of his brain become active when he looks at me and others – people whom he apparently hates irrationally (for there is no obvious reason why he should hate us).

Experiences – including unpleasant ones - can also be motivating factors in undertaking scientific work.

I was somewhat surprised by the results that we obtained. Given that hate is commonly irrational – and the example I give above obviously so – I expected to see significant de-activation of frontal, parietal, and temporal cortex, just as with romantic love, where people also commonly take leave of their senses. But, with hate, cortical de-activation was much more confined, in fact to an area which has also been found to be de-activated in cases of obsessive-compulsive disorders.

I have tried to account for this by supposing that the hating person wants to use all his judgmental powers to calculate how to harm the hated person. Indeed, activation of parts of the brain – in particular a structure known as the putamen, which has been linked to disgust and to motor preparation in an aggressive context – would support this.

As I say, there are many more studies yet to be done on brain processes and hate. The original inspiration – from my hating colleague – will be forgotten as more interesting insights are gained.

But it is as well to pay my compliments to him for being – at least in part – the inspirational source for this study.

Do I hate him in return? Of course not! How could anyone hate someone who inspires an interesting study!?

The informed judgment of economists…and the neurobiology of confidence

2008-10-05T01:53:00.000-07:00

This week, The Economist publishes a survey of economists’ views on the economy, especially the American economy.

It is, we are told, “not, by any means a scientific poll of all economists” since only 142 of 683 research associates in economics responded.

The Economist asks, “Does their opinion matter?” and answers it by saying that “economists opinion should count for something because…most of them approach policy decisions in the same way. Their assessment of the [presidential] candidates’ economic plans represents an informed judgment …” I take it they mean that most of them use the same facts and use the same, or similar, brain processes to reach their judgment.

What did they find? Well, here it is:

that “Our respondents generally agree the economy is in bad shape, that the election is important to the course of economic policy and that the housing and financial crisis is the most critical issue facing America”

I would have loved to have heard Charlotte Green read this as a news item on radio.

Popular opinion which, of course, is not usually well informed could not have agreed more with the “informed judgment” of the economists, at least on this occasion.

This morning, on the BBC World Service, two highly eminent economists were interviewed. One of them said that this was the worst, most unprecedented, crisis that America had faced in years, that the short term outlook was miserable…or words to that effect. The other said that all things were marvellous, that far from being a crisis, the present situation created new opportunities for, among other things, “moral hazards”. “Moral Hazards”? Well, I am almost sure that I heard it correctly, but I don’t know what the term means. I am not an economist.

The thing that puzzles me about economic advisers is their sense of certainty – communicated in the assurance with which they utter their opinions. Where does this certainty come from? There must be some neural mechanism which weighs all the evidence and reaches a conclusion. But a conclusion must be subjected, I suppose, to another mechanism, one that weighs the extent to which the conclusion is reliable and the extent to which it must remain in doubt. Let us call this mechanism X. Mechanism X could, in turn, be in one of two broad states: call them C for confidence and D for doubt.

Do you suppose that, given how economic advisors have blown it big time on this occasion (according to object criteria), their factor X was not operational? Or that only the C part of it was operational, while the D part was switched off?

Is factor X inoperative in us all when we, on occasions, are certain of a conclusion that turns out to be seriously wrong? What is it that turns off factor C or D?

Subject for future studies. Meantime, we can all put our own confidence either in economists who say that the picture is rosy or those who say that it is gloomy. Does it much matter? Events seem to take little notice of them.

Please do it again, Charlotte...

2008-09-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

Charlotte Green is one of the best news readers in the world. She regularly reads the news authoritatively and dispassionately for BBC Radio 4, in a rich, resonant voice that never betrays a trace of emotion or of bias. She is a pleasure to listen to and, through her reading, all the news - good and bad – becomes a sober and unemotional record of events. She makes listening to the news a pleasure, and thus even manages to lessen the displeasure that one may have at hearing about certain events.

Except on one occasion (though I understand there have been others) when she got the giggles. Apparently, someone whispered something in her ear that made her crack up!

And what a pleasure it is to listen to her bursting into laughter, which I have done several times. I have read that many people wrote to the BBC that day, not to complain but to ask them to replay the excerpt, so much had they enjoyed it.

So they should!

Laughter is very infectious, and why it should be so is a most interesting neurological problem. But it also has other, more physiological, benefits. Apparently it boosts the immune system, reduces stress hormones, massages the heart and diaphragm (thus providing some “internal” exercise for muscles) and engenders a “feel good” factor.

Of course, it would be most interesting to find out many things about laughter - why it is so infectious, how nervous activity relating to laughter is communicated to the immune system in such a beneficial way, and through what neural mechanisms it changes one’s subjective state to make one feel good, or better, even in difficult times.

It will take a long time to understand these mechanisms. But, while waiting, we can go on and treat ourselves to a good laugh.

So, instead of sending a birthday or greeting card to a friend, just send them this link on the occasion:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/audio/2008/mar/28/charlotte.green

It will make them happy, boost their immune system, exercise their muscles, put them in a "feel good" frame of mind…and cost you nothing.

A forgotten but (perhaps) important experiment in colour vision.

2008-08-03T05:44:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, in 1983, I published a paper on colour vision, in which I described an experiment that seemed to me to be important. Although the paper has been cited many times, the particular experiment I am referring to has never, to my knowledge, been quoted by anyone. In fact, even I had forgotten all about it until very recently, when someone made what seemed to me to be an inaccurate remark about colour opponency.

Colour opponency refers to the fact that there are three pairs of colours which have been described as those that “cannot live with each other, and yet cannot live without each other”. They are red-green, blue-yellow, and white black. For, as most people know, when we look at a green surface for a brief period of time and then transfer our gaze to a neutral, blank, screen the colour of the after image is red. A yellow surface will produce a blue after image and a white surface a black one.

One explanation of these opponent effects – the one most often repeated – is that they are due to adaptation in the retina. The explanation here is something like this: that a green surface reflects more green light, leading to the adaptation of the “green” or middle wave receptors. Thus adapted, the activity in the opponent “red” receptors holds sway. The result – we perceive red. The same explanation applies to other opponencies.

The experiment I described was derived from, and an extension, of the colour experiments of Edwin Land. Land had shown that a green surface which is part of a complex, multi-coloured, scene can be made to reflect more red light and yet still look green (though a darker shade of green). This is because the brain undertakes a somewhat complex operation to discount changes the wavelength composition of the light reflected from that surface. This makes sense. After all, a green leaf looks green when viewed at mid-day or when viewed at dawn and dusk (when it actually does reflect more of the long-wave or red light). If the perceived colour of the leaf were to change with every change in wavelength composition reflected from it, then the surface would no longer be identified through its colour.

It seemed to me interesting to take this one step further and get humans to look at a green surface that was part of a complex scene and get that green surface to reflect more red light (twice the amount of red than of green light). It still looked green. Now, by the traditional explanation, the after image should look green, because the “red” receptors, having adapted, would defer to the “green” receptors, which had not been as vigorously stimulated and hence had not adapted. Not a bit of it. The after image was red! I repeated this experiment with other colours and got the same general result. The after image is not related to the wavelength composition of the light reflected from a surface. Rather, it is strongly dependent upon the colour of the surface viewed. Since the colour of a surface, when part of a complex scene, is independent of the wavelength composition of the light reflected from it alone, it follows that the colour of the after image is also independent of the wavelength composition of the light reflected from that surface.

Hence the colour of the after image is constructed by the brain after the colour is constructed. It has nothing to do with retinal adaptation.

But no one has taken the slightest notice of this experiment and, as I said, even I forgot about it. That is a pity. It still seems to me to be an important experiment, but evidently no one shares my view.

Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and the brain's anxiety system

2008-08-03T05:09:00.000-07:00

Something puzzles me about fashion design and the brain.

Coco Chanel was undoubtedly one of the greatest designers of the past century, if not the greatest. She liberated women from constraints and allowed them to be both comfortable and elegant. The classical Chanel suit looks good on women of all ages and sizes. More than any other design, it has stood the test of time.

Yves Saint Laurent took this a step further, and used fashion to symbolise the growing power and independence of women, and at the same time make them look good.

But fashion and elegance, it seems to me, have another and perhaps more important purpose – to feel good, something that Coco Chanel especially understood well. This presumably correlates with activity in some reward centre of the brain.

And here comes the puzzle. Chanel and Saint Laurent both used beautiful women for their designs and shows – one might even say “ideal” women, chosen for their grace, and beauty, and sex appeal. Such women, by definition, are “exceptional” in their appearance. Yet many women who pay a fortune to be dressed by couturiers such as these are not in the same league of beauty or appeal. So what is it that makes them spend so much money on clothes designed with “ideal” women in mind?

I suppose that donning such clothes makes them feel good by changing their image of themselves, which must involve a considerable nervous apparatus. I recently saw a woman dressed in the latest, expensive, fashion. Her general physiognomy suggested that she felt good and did not lack in self confidence. Yet to an external observer, the latest designs she was wearing were very ill suited. Never mind, she felt good in them – a subtle change must have occurred in her brain!

I was therefore interested to read a recent paper entitled “I am not as slim as that girl” by HC Friederich and others [Neuroimage, 37:674 (2007)], in which the authors asked female subjects to compare their own body shapes to that of “idealized” women shown and rate their level of anxiety as they viewed these pictures. It turned out that, in addition to brain areas concerned with body-shape processing, there were activations in brain areas whose activity correlates with anxiety, the activations in these areas being proportional to the declared level of anxiety.

This is interesting, but also surprising. I certainly could not tell from my observation of the lady referred to above that she was suffering from any anxiety, far from it. So, perhaps splashing all this money out on a Chanel suit or Saint Laurent trousers really works by reducing the activity in the anxiety centres in the brain. Clearly worth further study.

Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and the brain’s reward system

2008-08-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

Those studying reward and punishment in animals and humans often use very simple methods, which turn out to be remarkably effective. In studies of reward and punishment, the subject is instructed to take some action. If the “correct” action (as determined by the experimenter) is taken, there is a small reward – in the form of a peanut or a sugar pellet or a reinforcing sound. If the “wrong” action is taken, a mild electric shock or a disturbing noise is applied. Perhaps as important is this: that when a “wrong” action is taken, often nothing happens – there is simply no reward. That is all. The absence of a reward is itself a punishment.

These are simple but important lessons that those designing public buildings such as airports might wish to learn. The entire design of Terminal 5 at Heathrow shows an abysmal ignorance of the brain’s reward system. Consider this: that when you enter the building, you are ushered to lifts, which have no call buttons. So you cannot even take an action, either rewarding or punishing. If a lift goes by without stopping (punishment), there is nothing you can do – like pressing a button and watching a light come on (reward).

The sign-posting is about the most inept you can imagine. When you arrive and try to make your way to Heathrow Express, there is one arrow pointing forward. You proceed down the hall until you get to the end, and find nothing (punishment). You turn back and, after some searching, find that it was on your left, but there is no filter arrow to indicate it (punishment). Once you get the right direction, a sign tells you that the quickest way to Heathrow Express is by the lift, not the escalator (reward – but read on). So you take the lift and go to the Heathrow Express hall only to find that there are no ticket machines and no ticket counter (punishment) or, if there is one, it is extremely well hidden (Recall that, as a punishment, you would have to pay more to buy your ticket on board the Heathrow Express). So now, you take the escalator back up (remember, lifts have no call buttons, at least on the outside) and go to the arrivals halls, where the automatic ticket machines are located, and then back down again.

This disgrace even permeates the BA lounge. If you follow the sign to access it, you are told to go back to the escalator, retrace your steps one floor down, where you will find the lounge located below. Once you get there, you are ushered upstairs again, where you end up where you started from! I have seen many bewildered passengers wondering what this is all about. The reason is simple. Apparently BAA wants you to visit the shops through this detour! That this is punishment is implied by the fact that premium passengers (those paying upwards of £5000 for a flight) are allowed in without having to retrace their steps, although one would have imagined that they might have more money to squander on shops. In fact, much of the internal architecture of the terminal – emphasizing space – is lost because it is cluttered with shops. Indeed, one gets the impression that the airport is more of a shopping mall than an airport, with passengers a nuisance to be tolerated provided they shop.

The huge new BA lounges are inviting at first. But then, if you want to go to the champagne bar and also have a nibble or two, you will find no food there (punishment). To get the food, you have to back-track some distance – greater or lesser depending on whether you want hot or cold snacks. The best of all is that there are no announcements (punishment) – not that there isn’t an intercom system. There is, but I suppose that they don’t want to be bothered with it. So you have to rely on the electronic notice boards. But these are not everywhere (punishment). There is none (punishment) in the champagne bar, where the tycoons and tycoonettes congregate. I saw one tycoonette who was outraged when informed casually by another passenger that there are no announcements, and she had to walk a good distance to find a board which announced that her flight to Istanbul was closing – in a satellite building which takes some 10 minutes to get to. The poor old dear, she had to gulp her champagne quickly and rush cursing to the nearest exit.

We are told that this is the biggest free standing building in Europe, perhaps the world. You would imagine that such a building – a gateway to the world – would have an inviting and aesthetically pleasing entrance, which could be viewed and admired. Forget it! The front is covered by concrete buildings and fly-overs to deliver those lucky enough or rich enough to use taxis and limousines (at about £80 for a taxi ride to central London, this makes even Heathrow Express – the most expensive railway route in the world – seem reasonable). The only way you can admire the building – if indeed you want to after these punishing experiences – is from the runway, providing you are sitting in the correct position in the plane.

It seems to me, then, that BAA and architects could learn a thing or two by making a greater effort to study the reward and punishment systems of the brain. There is even an Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, founded by John Eberhard, from which they could get some help. There are of course some architects who do this already. Philippe Rahm, in Paris, actually studies papers in neuroscience and incorporates the lessons he derives into his designs. He sets a good example.

This of course will take time. Meanwhile, Heathrow remains the worst airport in the developed world (though you would be forgiven to think that you have arrived in the non-developed world). It is a puzzle that so many want to use it – with its long delays, its inept and rude staff, its designs that are wholly removed from human needs, one would have thought that most would by now have abandoned it or at least protested vigorously enough for something to be done. But I suppose actually getting to London (or getting away from it) must be a bigger reward, worth all these punishments. Terminal 5 is bad, very bad. But it could be worse. You could end up in Terminal 3 or Terminal 4! There are clamours for the monopoly of BAA over British airports to be broken up. I would advocate going a step further – break up the monopoly over Heathrow, and let different companies run the different terminals. That will introduce more competition, which will be a good thing.

The incredible Sargy Mann and the amazing powers of the brain

2008-05-28T04:37:00.000-07:00

I recently visited the exhibition of Sargy Mann’s latest paintings. It was really a dazzling festival of colour. There were exquisite juxtapositions – brilliant orange against light green, violent red against a nervous purple, a yellow against a calming blue. All the paintings were representations of his wife, Frances.

What is amazing about all this is that these are the paintings of Sargy since he became completely blind. Never in his previous and much admired work has there been such an explosion of colour. He explains that his memory for colour and “for how colours will look together…and even the feel of how much pigment on the brush to mix with how much of another colour” is still very good. But the loss of sight has given him a freedom that he did not have before – a sort of restriction imposed by the reality of the seen world of which he is now free. In deciding to paint a chair, he thought to himself, “…you silly bugger, you won’t be able to see it. You can make the chair any colour you like. This was a breakthrough and of course it applied equally to all other surfaces…” “From then on, I chose the colour chord for each painting intuitively, thinking in an overtly decorative way which, before, I would never have allowed myself to do. It seems that blindness has given me the freedom to use colour in ways that I would not have dared to when I could see”. And what a result! The sighted viewer is intrigued by un-accustomed colour juxtapositions and aesthetically mesmerised by them.

Because those who become colour blind following damage to the colour centre in the brain – area V4 – are often unable to even remember colours or their quality, I assume that Sargy’s V4 is intact and healthy. Nor is his colour experience equivalent to the phantom chromatopsia which I described in a previous blog, and which is also a consequence of retinal blindness, for in that condition only few colours are experienced and they are restricted in space.

Sargy’s paintings in brilliant colour raise very interesting questions about the healthy – indeed vigorous – functioning of a visual area that is deprived of a visual input and must rely entirely on memory. But it also raises another point which I alluded to in my last blog, namely creativity in the absence of all restrictions, inhibitions and censorship. Here we have it from a painter’s own words, but above all from his wonderful canvases, how artistically healthy this freedom is! Finally, it also of course raises the neurological problem of how the prohibition on the use of certain colours, implied in the statement “which, before, I would never have allowed myself to do” works.

I look forward so much to the next batch of paintings from Sargy Mann.

The haunting beauty of Tord Gustavsen’s paintings…and Cézanne

2008-05-26T02:48:00.000-07:00

Tord Gustavsen’s sublime jazz improvisations are a sort of musical painting, and not only because, for me at least, they induce a synaesthetic visual impression of vast and lonely spaces and an extraordinary sensuality. I have listened to the lonely notes that introduce At Home and Draw Near time and time again and they never fail to create that visual impression. I do not know whether this is unique to me or whether others share the experience. But Gustavsen discusses visual imagery in his article entitled The Dialectical Eroticism of Improvisation, so I cannot be far off the mark. How one sensory input provokes another is of course a problem that is worthy of study in neurobiological terms. But the article offers a very interesting musical glimpse into the problem of improvisation, coming as it does from a master improviser and raises important issues in the neurobiological study of creativity. And it also raises in my mind some parallels between the characteristics of improvisation in music and painting.

Gustavsen thinks of improvisation as “on-the-spot composing [which] involves a certain amount of on-the-spot analysis”, a process in which the composer is “constantly forming and being formed by” the music being improvised. The composer-improviser is thus changing through the music that he or she is composing. In this, the process is perhaps not vastly different – except in the time scale – from painting. Henri Matisse once wrote, “A Cézanne is a moment of the artist, not of nature…Despite the continual use of the same means, there are different effects; it’s the man, Cézanne, that has changed” (my emphasis). What is the neural process that mediates such a change, which in the case of music must be immediate?

There is, as well, the emphasis on the continual play between whet he calls the micro and the macro levels, while maintaining the unity of the whole work. This is the advice that Denis Diderot gave, advice passed to Cézanne by Piassaro and enthusiastically accepted by the latter: “Nothing is beautiful without unity”, to which Cézanne replied: “I advance… all of my canvas at once, together. In the same movement, the same conviction, I bring into relation everything that is scattered” since “Only from their sum, their relation and interaction, do the objects they define reveal themselves to the viewer”– a description that can equally, and accurately, be used to describe the improvisations of Gustavsen.

In the process of improvisation, the musician may make mistakes or take unsatisfactory steps. “When you disappoint yourself, it is therefore crucial to be able to transform the disappointment into a kind of challenge that can enter into a dynamic dialectical movement towards satisfying totalities”…much as I imagine Cézanne and other painters – when they make a mistake – use the mistake as a challenge to enter into a new dynamic.

Gustavsen is insistent on the critical role of the listener. He writes: “The shaping of a musical landscape takes place in the listener”. Not dissimilar to the (then) controversial view of Cézanne: “I conceive of [painting] as a personal apperception. I situate this apperception in sensation, and I ask that the intelligence organize it into a work”.

There are, of course, many other interesting points in Gustavsen’s article and above all in his music. I have highlighted only some here, to draw attention to the similarity in the creative process. A reading of Gustavsen’s article and his music show the enormous challenge to the neurobiologist who wants to understand the neural bases of creativity – the integration of the micro with the macro within a concept, the use of working and long-term memory, the mobilisation of the emotional and motor brain, the planning and the execution – a lifetime’s work, I imagine.

There is however one element that I missed in Gustavsen’ s article, but which I hear in his music. That relates to censorship – I mean self-censorship. It was Schopenhauer and Wagner who insisted that a work of art should flow “from the sub-conscious”. I take this clumsy phrase to mean that it should be free from the worry that it may not accord with the views or concepts of listeners or from the artist’s inhibitions; I take it to mean, in brief, that it must be free of all censorship and above all self-censorship. As with Ella Fitzgerald’s marvellous modulatory improvisations, or Martha Argerich’s sensational rendering of Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto (and especially its second movement), one feels that (in spite of what he says about the listener), Gustavsen is playing for himself and in the process engaging the listener more. Self-censorship must, possibly imposed by activity in the frontal lobes, surely be one of the greatest enemies of art in general and improvisation in particular. Perhaps this is best summarised in the opening lines of Marcel Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve:

“Chaque jour, j’attache moins de prix a l’intelligence. Chaque jour, je me rends mieux compte que ce n’est qu’en dehors d’elle que [l’artiste] peut…atteindre quelque chose de lui même et la seul matière de l’art”

which in free, rather than literal, translation, can be rendered into:

“Every day, I attach less importance to intelligence. Every day, I become more aware that it is only outside it that the [artist] can… attain something of himself and the only material of art”

Musical inspiration at a cognitive neuroscience meeting

2008-05-22T13:13:00.000-07:00

The Cognitive V meeting in Marmaris, Turkey, organized by Professor Oğuz Tanridağ, had an unusual element, a daily recital.

Now there is nothing unusual about that. Many meetings organize a musical recital to entertain attendees and speakers and perhaps provide a pleasant distraction after an intellectually demanding day.

What was unusual about the Marmaris meeting was the timing of the recital – first thing in the morning, before the lectures and seminars.

This is an ingenious idea. There are many good reasons for listening to music before listening to, or delivering, lectures. They provide, first of all, an inspiration, which is always a good thing. But standards in music are very high and, one hopes, that these very high standards cross boundaries to instill in the rest of us a desire to achieve high standards too. When it comes to giving lectures, very few - or perhaps none - begin to approach the high standards of musical performers. The ums and ahs with which so many of us incessantly infect our lectures, the occasional or sometimes serially wrong order of slides, the film clips that do not function adequately, the excess of slides which we skip because we did not prepare according to the time allotted to us…all these, or their equivalents, would be intolerable in any musical performance. Performers would be booed off the stage for far lesser transgressions than that, as many eminent singers have discovered.

But there is more to music than that. I often listen to a symphonic work before preparing and giving a lecture and learn a lot from it (in preparing my Marmaris lecture and before delivering it, I listened to Beethoven’s Triple Concerto). A symphonic work has, after all, a structure, it has a theme which is developed and recapitulated, or there are variations on a theme, tempi that have to be integrated into the structure, changes in emphasis – all these teach one a lesson in how to deliver a lecture even if one never achieves the high standards of musical performances.

Of course, great artists themselves often fail the high standards that they set themselves, even if we are not always aware of their shortcomings, as we are of obviously faulty lectures. Herbert von Karajan was once asked if his performances, which gave pleasure to so many, gave him true satisfaction. He replied that the performances after which he could say, “This time I got it right” could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

So maybe the idea of having recitals before having the lectures was a pleasant – and highly effective – way of reminding the speakers, musically, to maintain high standards. And it worked very well. It is an ingenious idea that other conference organizers might consider adopting.

As an aside, one of the many reasons for choosing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto before my lecture is that it is beautiful but not in the least emotional, at least to me. Beauty without emotion…now there’s a subject for a future blog.

Ich bin ein Berliner...

2008-05-16T04:17:00.000-07:00

A great event took place in Berlin last week – the launch of the Association of Neuroesthetics (AoN), the brain child of Alexander Abbushi. The meeting brought together neurobiologists and artists, and a packed house that included even lawyers. The speakers seemed able to talk and address each other with ease. Nowhere was there a hint of the much written about “two cultures” of CP Snow. Hence in his presentation Philippe Rahm, an architect, relied on scientific evidence as the basis for his designs, Olafur Eliasson discoursed on his work which has undercurrents of enormous interest to neuroesthetics – time, uncertainty, ambiguity – while Christine Macel, a curator, also emphasized the element of time in the artists she chose to speak about. Ernst Poppel, a psychologist, gave a talk which sits as easily in a scientific auditorium as in an art gallery. To round up the evening, there was a wonderful reception and dinner at a Berlin restaurant with pre-Weimar rooms – very atmospheric and perhaps symbolic of the new vitality of Berlin. In that setting, scientists and artists seemed to be able to converse with each other with even less difficulty.

It may seem strange that the AoN should be based at the Charité Hospital, among the largest in Europe, and that the driving force behind it, Alexander Abbushi, should be a neurosurgeon by trade. Well, it shows something important in science – especially during our times – that the crossing of boundaries is relatively easy when the interest and curiosity are there. In his endeavour, Abbushi has had strong support at the highest levels of the Hospital but above all from the Director of the Department of Neurosurgery, Peter Vajkoczy. In fact, all this is not any more strange than the meeting at the Italian Academy at Columbia, which I reported about in a previous blog. The Italian Institute, more used to dealing with issues relating to Italian art and humanistic traditions, also had a full house when neuroscientists addressed brain issues that are of interest to the study of art and creativity. The establishment of the AoN at the Charité is perhaps even less strange, and in fact very apt, when one considers that among those who worked there in the past was none other than the great German physicist and physician, Hermann von Helmholtz, the founder of the discipline of psychophysics and an expert on colour vision (Young-Helmholtz theory of colour vision). But Helmholtz was a polyhistor, also interested in the arts and aesthetics, and wrote about music and painting.

So perhaps what Abbushi and his colleagues have done is not to bring in a new culture that would bridge the gap between CP Snow’s “two cultures”. Rather, they have resurrected an approach that goes back to Helmholtz, and before him to Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and even Plato and which has been merely dormant for well over a century.

Well done Alexander, well done Charité Hospital, well done Berlin…and well done neuroesthetics.

Social Synaesthesia and Human Resources

2008-05-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

An interesting article in The Times Higher Education by my colleague David Colquhoun has inspired me to write this blog, in which I describe a condition that is well known but, to the best of my knowledge, has not hithero been categorized and named. I call it social synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia is a condition in which one sensory input provokes two sensory experiences. A good example relates to colour, when different musical notes produce in the brain of the perceiver different colours, each colour specific to a note. Several composers reputedly have had the condition. Another example, also related to colour, is one in which different Arabic numerals are perceived in different, and distinctive, colours. It is important to observe that when “normal” people listen to notes, the activity in their brain is limited to the auditory cortex. With synaesthetes, the notes not only produce activity in the auditory brain but also in the colour centre of the visual brain – area V4 – implying that there are direct connections between the two brain centres in synaesthetes but not in “normals”. Obviously enough people have the condition for there to be synaesthesia societies in Europe and the United States.

In truth, synaesthesia may encompass a great deal more. I myself have a synaesthesia that I thought was bizarre until I discovered (after having written briefly about it in a synaesthesia newsletter) that it is not as uncommon as I had presumed. My synaesthesia consists in associating words with distinct personalities that are not easy to describe but which I definitely experience. The first letter of a word determines largely, but not exclusively, the personality. This can lead to extraordinary personality changes. For example, I always associated Calcutta and Bombay with distinct personalities. Now that these have changed to Kolkata and Mumbai, respectively, so have their personalities for me. It is actually a condition that has enriched my life in a variety of ways, and I would hate to be without this “abnormal” condition.

A personality change, brought about by re-naming their profession, is precisely what seems to have happened in the example of Human Resources, which is nothing more than a new name for what was commonly known as the Personnel Department. Human Resources is a grandiose but strangely inappropriate term for the old profession. It implies a deep knowledge of human desire, motivation and action derived from a profound knowledge of the human condition through a study of psychology and world literature. The French, too, have adopted the term wholesale. And how pompous it sounds in French, when applied to the old Personnel Department – resources humaines! I can just imagine some unpublished manuscript by André Malraux, hidden in a Paris attic and suddenly discovered, entitled Les Resources humaines – perhaps a companion novel to his La Condition humaine or perhaps a first draft of it! How hilarious that would be!

These are not mere speculations, for in the case of Human Resources, the change in name from Personnel Department, has actually brought up a synaesthetic change in personality, one that is well worth a neurobiological investigation, given its social importance in regulating the affairs of institutions, including universities. No longer content with dealing with admittedly highly important matters such as salaries and wages and other such-like, the change in name has given them a wholly undeserved confidence and mystique that enables them to be promoted to “senior management” teams and even dictate the number and type of courses that employees, even senior and highly intelligent ones, should take. Some of these courses verge on the absurd, as David has pointed out in his many blogs. Handing such powers over to them constitutes an abdication by the universities of their responsibilities – that of dictating the type and quality of course that a university should offer. This abdication is obviously brought about by the perceived change in the capacities of those who deal with matters belonging to traditional personnel departments through the application of a new term. It constitutes a socially transmitted example of synaesthesia, but one which still requires some re-organization of the brain. Hence the synaesthetic change in personality has also a social dimension, for it obviously induces a change in the belief of others that those who have so renamed and thus reinvented and upgraded themselves have indeed acquired an insight and knowledge that their erstwhile colleagues of personnel departments had not. Nor does it end there. For the synaesthetic change in personality brought about by a name change seems also to have induced a perceptual change in others. Human resources departments are hated and despised by most other members of the institutions that they profess to run and organize, a contempt that is linearly related to their seeming incapacity to understand and handle human resources (now used in its proper context). It is no wonder, as David says in his blog, that some highly successful businessmen think it desirable to do away with them altogether.

From a neurobiological perspective, just as synaesthesia is worth studying to shed light on what kind of connections and processes in the brain are modified to enable one sensory input to provoke another, so it would be really worth investigating neurobiologically how a change in name can alter so radically peoples’ perception of themselves, as well as others perception of them. Perhaps a detailed longitudinal study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, for the future?

The objectivity of subjective experiences

2008-04-28T03:18:00.000-07:00

Perhaps not enough has been made of the extent to which brain imaging techniques are beginning to enrich our understanding of the brain. Most people marvel – and with good reason – at the fact that these imaging techniques demonstrate with fair certainty that specific experiences – for example of colour or of visual motion – correlate with activity in a specific area of the brain. But imaging techniques have gone way beyond and have made what was thought to be outside the realm of objective observation the target of experimental studies, and with huge success. Fear, expectation of reward, the experience of love and of beauty – all of them thought until recently to be unverifiable, or not easily verifiable, subjective experiences - have been shown to have neural correlates specific to them. Hence, to ascertain that someone is in love, I need only show them the picture of their [suspected] lover and note whether there is any activity in the brain areas that have been shown to correlate with feelings of love. In time, no doubt lawyers will be using such evidence in court proceedings.

But there is another aspect to these studies that has escaped comment although its impact may yet turn out to be as great as the demonstration that subjective feelings have distinct neural correlates. The experience of beauty provides a very good example.

In 2004, Hideaki Kawabata and I published a paper showing that the experience of beauty correlates with activity in the orbito-frontal cortex, a part of the brain that is linked to reward. In that study, we showed subjects many paintings – abstract, landscape, portraits, still lifes – and asked them to rate the paintings in terms of their beauty. Different subjects gave different ratings to the same paintings. Sometimes, a painting judged to be of high beauty by one subject was given a low rating by another. Yet whenever a subject a painting in the scanner that they rated as beautiful viewed, there was increased activity in the orbito-frontal cortex. Moreover – and this is the critical point – the increase in activity was directly related to the declared rating assigned to the painting. Hence the subjective experience could be localized and quantified.

Ours is not the only study to show that the activity in specific parts of the brain is often quantifiably related to the declared subjective experience. At least two dozen other studies have shown the same result for different subjective experiences. This, it seems to me, is a major achievement of brain imaging studies. It brings subjective experiences firmly into the realm of measurable science.

The changing brain studied through violence

2008-04-16T23:41:00.000-07:00

I have recently read a paper that, I believe, has not received the attention it deserves, at least in the media. It is a study of the re-organiztion of the brain in response to violence. What it is that suddenly triggers a violent behaviour in some individuals is not known with any certainty, but it has long been suspected that exposure to violence leads to increased violence. We have, after all, been repeatedly told that watching violent movies results in individuals who are more readily capable of violence. But why and how?

A paper by Chris Kelly and his colleagues at Columbia Univeristy has far-reaching implications in this regard. They showed volunteer subjects clips of violent films and measured activity in different areas of the brain, using brain imaging techniques. Their results show, in brief, that repeated exposure to violence reduces the intensity of activity in a specific region of the brain known as the lateral orbito-frontal cortex progressively. The implication here is that the more violent movies are watched, the greater the reduction in orbito-frontal activity. This in itself may suggest an adaptation that makes individuals more immune to violence, adaptation being a very common occurrence in the brain. But the study goes further, to show that connections between brain areas must be in a dynamic state, and hence modifiable by experience – in this case the experience of violence – even in adult life. For the orbito-frontal cortex is connected with another brain area – the amygdala – which is known to be responsive to fearful and aggressive faces. This connection seems to be critical in the control of aggressive behaviour. The strength of connections between the two brain areas diminished progressively as violent movies were watched, and led to more aggressive tendencies. The study also strongly suggested that there developed a progressive diminished control over the initiation of violent aggressive behaviour. For there was a concomitant increase in activity within areas known to be critical in motor planning (for aggressive behaviour, among others). This suggests that the connections between the orbito-frontal cortex and yet other regions of the cortex are also in a dynamic state.

It is important to note that the study exposed subjects to violent films over relatively brief periods, each clip viewed lasting seconds rather than hours, as is common for violent movies. Hence, it does not take prolonged exposure to alter strength of connections in the brain, and in this instance, to loosen the inhibition that leads to violent aggressive behaviour.

There is a lesson in this for society, and that is why I am surprised that so little has been made of it by the media. We have discussed endlessly whether the extent of violence shown in Western movies is not damaging our already violent societies. And yet here is a study, which shows that even brief exposure can alter the balance of connections in the brain and tip them in a direction that is not socially advantageous. And there is, perhaps, a problem for legislators too. What if someone can come armed with evidence derived from brain scans to show that the crimes that he or she has committed is the result of altered brain states, induced by watching violent movies? It would be a manner of shifting responsibility. I do not know enough about law to discuss this point, but I should not be at all surprised if defence of this kind surfaces in future hearings of criminal violence cases.

But there is, above all, a great deal of interest in learning that such complex behaviour is held in check by a fine system of balance through the interactions between brain areas and that this balance is so vulnerable – even over very brief periods and even in adult life – to environmental influences. There is much in this work that is of interest for future studies in the neurobiology of aggressive behaviour and violence.

Tristan und Isolde at the Met…..

2008-04-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

It has now been established that there is an area in the visual brain that is specialized for registering human bodies or, to put it differently, that is active when we perceive bodies. This should not come as a surprise. The brain has devoted special areas to many features that are important to us, and human bodies are very, very important. Bodies do, after all, give us a lot of information about the psychological state of a person at any given moment; we can communicate much through our body language. And the brain seems to have developed a marvellous system for recognizing at a glance, through the perceived body language, whether one a person is arrogant or diffident, proud or humble, and much else besides. Which brings me to the Metropolitan opera’s recent production of Tristan und Isolde.

To convey visually all that there is in Tristan requires an artistic and dramatic flair that is evident not only in the motion of the singers on stage but also in their inaction, the postures they adopt in the still moments. From this point of view, the Met’s recent and ill-fated production was a disappointment, or at least partially so. The staging was visually stunning in its simplicity and very effective in its use of colour. It descended once into kitsch, when Tritsan and Isolde, having swallowed the love potion and realised their profound love for one another, the lighting turned to red, eliciting laughter from the audience (something which I have not experienced before) and distracting attention from the accompanying music. Both lead singers fell ill and did not appear together except for the final performance. Illnesses prior to or during performances are bound, I imagine, to have a severe negative effect on such demanding singing and acting roles. In the performance that I attended on March 25^th, Deborah Voigt had cancelled out owing to her illness and was replaced by Janice Beard. It must be a nightmare to be forced into such a role at relatively short notice and I don’t think that she managed to pull it off. Tristan is a dignified hero, burning with a love so intense that he knows, and is resigned to, the fact that he cannot achieve it on earth. The love potion that he drank in the first Act made him inherit “eternal torment”, he laments in the last act. Ben Heppner, recovering from an illness, was not physionomically up to the role of Tristan on that particular evening. His body language simply did not convey what I believe the music intends him to convey. There was however one glorious moment, and it occurred at the end of Act 2, when King Marke sings his sad and beautiful lament: “Mir dies? Dies, Tristan, mir?” What was deeply impressive in this particular performance, apart from the splendid singing of Matti Salminen as King Marke, was the highly effective way in which body language communicated the psychological state of the protagonists – both Tristan and Isolde. They managed to communicate, through the immobile postures they adopted, as effectively as the music that feeling of unrepentant guilt, forced on them by factors beyond the control of either. It made me wonder about the neural mechanisms that underlie our ability to perceive so much in body language, even when still. Is this result of activity in the cortical area in which activity correlates with the presence of bodies? If so, then this area must be doing a great deal more than just registering the presence of bodies? Or is the activity in that area relayed, or perhaps influenced, by some other cortical area? To have felt what I felt during those moments, I assume that there is some connection with the emotional brain. Interesting questions for future study. At any rate, this one moment was worth crossing the Atlantic to see. Incidentally, I tried to see the live broadcast in London, where it was relayed to many theatres. Guess what, they were all sold out! Now on to Barcelona, for Robert Carsen’s extraordinarily rich – I speak from a neuroesthetic point of view, of course – production of Tannhäuser, last seen at the Bastille in Paris and about which I will blog in the future.

….. and neuroscience at the Italian Academy at Columbia

What were neuroscientists doing giving talks about the brain and its operations at the Italian Academy (www.italianacademy.columbia.edu), an institution supposedly devoted to Italian studies? And why did they have a full house, with many coming from the humanities? Well, the Director of the Academy, David Freedberg, is a wise man. He was among the first to embrace the field of neuroesthetics and understands that the humanities have much to offer to future studies of the brain, and that neuroscience in turn can help illuminate interesting and important problems in the humanities. The example I give above from Tristan is one among many. And the full house at the meeting he organized is testament to the fact that there are many who share this interest. All honour to David, to Anna Ipata, and to the excellent speakers at the meeting.

The sex life of voles - and the law

2008-03-23T02:29:00.000-07:00

Voles are rodents who have a sex life which may be of considerable interest in understanding some expects of human sexuality and in reflecting on some aspects of the law relating to it.

In brief, there are two varieties of vole – the prairie and the montane voles. They differ from each other significantly with respect to their taste for monogamous and polygamous relationships. They have been studied by Larry Young and Thomas Insel in the United States. By and large, prairie voles lead a largely monogamous existence, with apparently the occasional fling. By contrast, montane voles are promiscuous and polygamous. What is it that differentiates these two varieties? Is it morality, or what may pass for morality in the world of vole ideas? (We would, or at least some would, perhaps refer to polygamous humans as immoral). Is it their up-bringing, or is it their biological constitution?

As you might have guessed, the latter seems to be the causative factor and has been traced to two neuro-hormones called oxytocin and vasopressin. These neuro-hormones have many effects but most relevant here is that they are involved in bonding between individuals and are effective in learning and memory in a social context. They are released in the reward centres of the brain when voles (and humans) have sex, which becomes therefore a rewarding experience with the chosen partner. If release of the two hormones is blocked in prairie voles, they too become promiscuous. If, on the other hand, they are injected with these hormones but prevented from having sex, they continue to be faithful to their partners, that is to have a monogamous but chaste relationship. On the other hand, injecting montane voles with these neurohormones does not make of them monogamous creatures, for the simple reason that they do not have sufficient receptors in their brains for them.

There is no evidence that these two neurohormones act in exactly the same way in humans. It would indeed be surprising if they did, given the infinitely more complex structure of the human brain and of human behaviour. But there is good reason to suppose that what applies in these animals also applies, at least in some form, in humans. And humans too can be categorized as being strictly monogamous (or serially monogamous) at one end and promiscuous to varying extents at the other. It would be highly interesting to learn whether (mainly) monogamous humans have higher concentrations of oxytocin and vasopressin, and a richer concentration of receptors for them in the reward centres of the brain, compared to more promiscuous humans. It may be that humans can be divided into several categories – ranging from the strictly monogamous to the extremely promiscuous - depending upon these concentrations. We might even find that there is a straightforward, linear, relationship between the concentration of these neuro-hormones and the incidence of promiscuity.

Which brings me to the law. No doubt the law of divorce regarding promiscuity and adultery has been much liberalised in Western countries. I do not know how the law apportions blame or arranges settlements in these instances. But the demonstration raises, it seems to me, broader issues that are relevant to the law and to how it may be modified through legislation in the future, in light of scientific findings like the one described briefly above, and others like them. For if individuals can demonstrate scientifically that their conduct, however much disapproved of by society and prohibited by law, is the consequence of their biological constitution, then the law would probably ultimately have to take account of that, as indeed it already does in certain instances. It will have to address the thorny question of the balance between biological imperatives and social prohibition. I therefore see a broadening of interest among legal legislators and the judiciary in neurobiological studies that relate to complex human conduct which comes within the province of the law. It is for this reason that, when Editor, I initiated a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on the theme of Law and the Brain. It was perhaps but a small step in a debate which, I am certain, will become increasingly important in the future.

The colour vision of the blind

2008-03-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

In my book, A Vision of the Brain, I described a strange syndrome which I named phantom chromatopsia. In all, I have seen four patients suffering from it and have studied two in detail. The syndrome is one in which blind people see colours, usually purple or golden. The colour spreads and fills their entire “field of view”. But they take no pleasure in the sensation. The experience plunges them into a state of deep depression. One patient told me that he often felt suicidal during the chromatopsic episodes.

I accounted for the syndrome by reference to the known organization of the human visual brain. Of the many areas that constitute the visual brain, one – the V4 complex – seemed especially interesting in this context. Described by us many years ago, it is specialized for colour perception and total damage to it leads to the inability to see the world in colour – the syndrome of acquired cerebral achromatopsia. I accounted for phantom chromatopsia by supposing that an abnormal pattern of cellular activity restricted to the V4 complex results in the generation of a colour percept in the absence of an external, coloured, stimulus. The abnormality of the percept – large uniform areas of purple or gold – could be accounted for by the abnormal nature of the internally generated pattern of cellular activity compared to the normal one generated by a coloured object in the field of view.

A very interesting recent result obtained by Dr. Beauchamp and his colleagues at the University of Texas takes this a step further. They found that when they stimulated part of the colour centre through electrodes embedded in the area, the patient reported seeing colours which were not there. And what was the colour? bluish purple!

Still, the correspondence between these new results and the clinical syndrome is not complete, nor would one expect it to be, given that a pathological irritation in the V4 complex is different from a controlled stimulation of only a part of this area. The coloured area projected to the field of view in this new study is limited, whereas the colour invades the whole field of view in the pathological state. Moreover, the subjective colour produced by electrical stimulation was always purple-blue. The authors account for this by supposing that their electrode was stimulating a group of cells specialized for blue – a reasonable interpretation in light of the fact that cells constructing particular colours seem to be grouped together in the V4 complex.

But the main interest of the finding lies in showing that artificial stimulation can result in perceived colour in the absence of a coloured stimulus. This adds further to the evidence that colours are generated in the brain, that the brain does not passively chronicle the colours in the external world but actively constructs them. Isaac Newton saw this long ago when he wrote, “For the Rays, to speak properly, have no Colour. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this Colour or that” – the power and disposition residing, I believe, within the V4 complex. Edwin Land also put it succinctly – “Colour is always a consequence, never a cause” – meaning that it is the consequence of some activity in the brain (though he did not specify where that activity might occur).

This highly interesting study gives powerful evidence in favour of these suppositions.

Romantic love and madness

2008-02-23T12:14:00.000-08:00

Many, especially in the media, have commented about the work we published in 2000, showing the pattern of activity in the brain when those who are "madly and passionately" in love view a picture of the one they love. But there is another aspect of these results which is just as interesting, and which has received much less attention and comment. I refer to the fact that, under the same conditions, that is when a lover views the picture of the one he or she is passionately in love with, large parts of the brain, and particularly in the frontal lobes, become de-activated. The frontal lobes are of course those parts of the brain which have been traditionally associated with higher cognitive functions, including judgment. The clear implication is that judgment is more or less suspended, or at least much attenuated, when we are confronted with the one we love passionately.

In a sense, of course, this is a formal demonstration of what many have written about - the madness of love. We often ask someone who is passionately in love with a person whom we disapprove of: "Have you taken leave of your senses?" Well, in fact they have. And hence it is commonly, though not always, futile for disapproving parents and friends to try and prevent a liaison. The pattern of activation in their brain renders them less judgmental of the person they love than of others. The qualification is critical, for judgment is not suspended; it is only judgment about a particular individual that is suspended, implying a very selective brain procedure where judgment is concerned.

Here then is a possible neural basis for the "madness" of love that poets and writers since the time of Plato have written about. Nietzsche once wrote: "There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness". Perhaps the "reason" is to be sought in the pattern of neural de-activation that we have observed.

Of course, this pattern of activation is the one observed in the early and passionate stages of romantic love, a stage that usually does not continue indefinitely. One presumes that when a relationship becomes stabilized, or indifferent or even hostile, then the de-activation that is so prominent a feature of the passionate phase of love is no longer evident. It would be interesting to pursue such a study. It is now clear that there are chemicals, among them nerve growth factor, whose concentration rises during the early and passionate phase of romantic love, only to drop to normal levels once the relationship is stabilized or ended.

Nor is this suspension of judgment unique to romantic love. In a further study of the brain's love system, we studied the neural correlates of maternal love. The pattern of de-activation was remarkably similar to the one observed in romantic love, again leading one to believe that this constitutes the neural basis of the suspension of judgment - after all, mothers tend to be far less judgmental about their own children than about other children.

These are small steps in learning about the neural basis of love. There are other interesting discoveries to which I will return later.