Brain damage can help you detect liars

A study measured how accurately 3 groups of people could determine if someone was telling a lie.

Group R: damage to the right hemisphere

Group L: damage to the left hemisphere

Group N: normal (no brain damage)

Those with damage to the left hemisphere (L) were more accurate than those with damage to their right hemisphere (R). This supports the notion that complex emotional perception and processing happens more in the right hemisphere.

The surprise is that group L did better than group N. That is, those with damage to the left hemisphere were better at detecting lies than those with NO brain damage. In that sense, one's left hemisphere is a handicap when it comes to recognizing complex emotions (that explains a lot about me).

I don't know what study established these results, but it was mentioned in a PSYCH 261 lecture.

Poor Little Albert

Today in psych class, we heard about Little Albert, an 11-month-old baby that was the sole subject of a rather cruel and unethical psychology study done in the 1920s.

Little Albert was shown little furry animals. Like any baby, he wasn't afraid. That is, until the experimenters repeatedly scared the poop out of him every time he saw a furry animal. They'd make a loud clang with a metal bar when he saw a rat, and that would make him cry. After a while, they no longer needed make the noise; Albert had successfully associated the loud noise with little furry animals, and the animals themselves would make him cry. Even a mask of Santa Clause freaked him out. Check out this sad video.


His family moved away before they could undo the conditioning. Such an experiment would not be allowed on a baby today. Poor little guy.

If any man took a Santa mask and got THAT in-your-face with any of my kids, I'd give HIM a dose of conditioning.

According to Wikipedia, Little Albert died of hydrocephalus at the age of 5.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

I listened to an audiobook version of "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker. It was interesting, though somewhat long-winded at times (almost 23 hours)... making sure to hammer home each claim with strikes from every conceivable angle of evidence.

The idea of the book is refreshing and fun... that different people are born with different brains. I expected some differences. But it goes a lot deeper than I thought.

Some of the more interesting results he discusses include evidence from twin and sibling studies showing that about 50% of the variation in many behaviours can be attributed directly to genetics. Cool.

The book then takes a surprising turn, describing the three laws of behaviour genetics by Eric Turnkeimer.

1. All human behavioural traits are heritable.
2. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
3. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioural traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

Hard to believe, but Pinker spends some time unpacking the evidence behind those results. It's quite an eye-opener.

But, you'll have to check the book out yourself to get that story.

The God Virus: A book review

Just finished reading The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture by Dr. Darrel W. Ray. In addition to my review, I interviewed Dr. Ray (see below).

In case you didn't receive the memo, I'm atheist. So this book, describing the ways in which religion behaves like a virus of the mind, was "preaching to the choir".

Indeed, I have often thought about how religions have built-in features that promote their own propagation. The metaphor is deep. In fact, it's not just a metaphor at all. If a virus is something that evolves by mutating and multiplying within a population of hosts, then religion IS A VIRUS. And that's Dr. Ray's thesis.

One continuing theme in the book is that religions deactivate the critical-thinking capacities of the infected. Religions frown upon objective questioning of the dogma, and instead insist that faith is a moral virtue.

He also points out the guilt cycle. Religion places unrealistic expectations on us, which makes us feel guilty. Naturally, those same religions also offer a way to relive that guilt. It's one-stop shopping for the gullible.

As I stated in a previous post, Dr. Ray uses the term "genetic suicide" to describe priests that take an oath of celibacy; it's the end of the line for those genes. And why would they do that? The same reason people commit suicide by flying planes into buildings... religion. The point that Dr. Ray makes is that religions hijack the rational brain and cause the infected to behave in a way that is good for the virus, even if it's bad for the host. A great biological example:

The lancet fluke (Dicrocoelium) infects the brain of ants by taking control and driving them to climb to the top of a blade of grass where they can be eaten by a cow. The ingested fluke then lays eggs in the cow gut. Eventually, the eggs exit the cow, and hungry snails eat the dung (and fluke eggs). The fluke enters the snail's digestive gland and gets excreted in stidky slime full of a seething mass of flukes to be drunk by ants as a source of moisture. [p. 22]

Religion does the same thing. It is not designed for the best interests of the organism. It's designed to look after its own interests, to create as many copies as possible (how the hosts fare is of no direct consequence).

One of the most striking examples of religion's selfish promotion:

By actively attacking condom use and birth control [in Africa], the god virus facilitates the HIV virus. The result is a conversion to Catholic sexual practices or death from HIV. [p. 55]

Dr. Ray also discusses crime and religion. As an atheist, I feel good about the fact that atheists comprise about 0.5% of prison inmates, even though we are between 6 and 10% of the population. [p. 121]

There is a chapter on science, and how religions simultaneously use it and contradict it. Dr. Ray points out that many religious proponents "rail against science even as they use the tools that science gave them" [p. 228]. And that "religion uses the fruits of science to make the world far more dangerous". "Those who are waiting for heaven don't focus well on the problems of today." [p. 226, his italics]

My only ciriticism of the book is that I didn't really get a feel for its organization. The chapter headings divvy up the topics, but I didn't get the sense that each section belonged only in its chapter. But this could be more to do with me than the book.

Final analysis, I really liked the book. Every biologist, evolution enthusiast, and theologian should read it. "Religion is a virus" is not just a metaphor, it's reality.

---

Here is my interview of Dr. Darrel Ray.


Download MP3. Music by DASJAMBO.

Link: Recovering Religionists

On Being Certain: A book review

The book: "On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not" by Robert A. Burton, M.D.

This book shook the foundation of my epistemological world. The crux is that the sense of knowing something is a feeling like anger or pride. Thus, the fact that you "know" something does not mean it's true.

He gives an example. Right after the Challenger exploded on take-off (back in 1986), a psychology researcher collected statements from a number of people about what they were doing when they heard the news. A few years later, he asked them again. They all remembered vividly. Except, their memories didn't necessarily match what they'd written. When shown their statements, some continued to insist that the statement was wrong, but their memory was right. It's a vivid demonstration of how utterly convincing the feeling of certainty is. But, it's just a feeling.

He goes further. We don't even have any way of knowing what unconscious mental processes went into a belief or conclusion. So introspection is of little use for determining which beliefs are true and which are false.

He gives examples involving medical doctors. One proclaims, "I believe in the necessity of research, but I know that personal experience is the 'proof of the pudding.' " Like many doctors, this one leans heavily on his own personal judgement based on experience. But how do we know that the judgement is tied tightly to reality?

Science is the best bet.

... we should know when we are basing our decisions on science and when they are based upon unsubstantiated experience, hunches, and gut feelings. But, as we've seen, we aren't reliable assessors of such arbitrary distinctions.

His suggestion is that we modulate the conviction of our beliefs by attempting to consider the probability that each is correct, and reflect that uncertainty when we express our beliefs to others.

Toward the end of the book, Dr. Burton seems to suggest that our brains are equipped with a sensory system for perceiving a representation of brain state. This is nothing short of a theory of consciousness, and nothing short of fascinating. Just like we have a sensory cortex for processing tactile and visual information, we might also have a sensory cortex for processing mental information. He doesn't say it point-blank, but launches the notion for the reader. It blew my mind. I'm not sure I agree with it, but then again, this book makes it abundantly clear that we should not let the feeling of believing fool us.

Poor kitty, but nice neurons

My graduate student and I are working on a neural network model of the visual system. We've been learning a lot about neuroscience, and I'm loving it. I'm also sitting in on PSYCH 261 (Physiological Psychology), and this week we covered the visual system. The prof. showed us this short YouTube video:


It shows Hubel and Wiesel in the 1960s measuring how certain neurons react to different light stimuli. They clamped a cat's head down and stuck an electrode into its brain (OK, the sad part is over). They found that certain neurons reacted to particular patterns of light, not just brightness. It's those patterns that we're trying to get our computerized visual system to spontaneously generate, thereby positing a theory for how the visual system achieves this organization. We're getting there.

Hitler was a moral vegetarian

Wow, the animals really caught a break from Hitler. Well, the non-human animals, anyway.