The informed judgment of economists…and the neurobiology of confidence

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...

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.

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

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

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

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

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”