Researchers from the Department of Pharmacology, Nippon Medical School, showed that chronic treatment of adult mice with fluoxetine (Prozac) caused changes to granule cells, one of the main types of neuronal cells inside the hippocampus, and to their connections with other neuronal cells. The granule cells appeared to undergo serotonin-dependent ‘dematuration’, which increased their activity and reversed adult-type plasticity into an immature state. These changes to the cell’s plasticity were associated with increased anxiety and in alternating between periods of hyper or hypo activity.

Katsunori Kobayashi explained, “Some of the side effects associated with Prozac in humans, such as anxiety and behavioral switching patterns, may be due to excessive dematuration of granule cells in the hippocampus.”

If you’re interested in more info, read the full journal article here

We want a leader who can ACT now, all this thinking and dithering is taking too long; while innocent civilians succumb to a murderous dictator (Libya)

We want a leader with a strategy, outline your exact plan for the Libyan assault and we want a time line and a plan for resolution.

We want diametrically opposed outcomes, and we need it now!

The process of formulating a stereotype, and the eventual appeal to its wisdom is the result of  what I consider to be a rather elaborate set of neurological, and therefore, also network and behavioral level processes. But lets suffice it for the purpose of discussion to regard it as the acquisition of information, an assessment of probabilities, and the formulation of a decision committed to memory, in order to repeat when presented with similar future conditions. It’s a fundamentally evolutionary process carried out on a timescale we can actually, sorta grasp. By process, I refer to learning; it’s what the brain as an organ is optimized to do- record, adapt, and innovate solutions. If not for the mechanisms I glossed over having been involved in stereotyping, animals would face each new real world condition without a set of pre-existing set of tools or experiences to draw upon, and effectively surmount that challenge. Survival could get real rough and costly in such a state of affairs.

So how then is it that something fundamental to the animal life process, also open to such criticism, to be likened to the grabbing of low hanging fruit?

Being thermodynamically driven organisms, it has to be written into the most basic and unconscious motivations of all animals, to conserve energy in functions vital to life including, but not limited to, reproductive fitness. Continuation of life itself demands this. And our brains, the organ charged with executive responsibility for our capacity to achieve ends, must then also be wired at its core to adopt such energy conservation principles, or else fail the organism in self-preservation.

I’ve referred to findings in studies which have examined on some level, the metabolism of the brain and the effect that increased demand for cognitive resources has on animal behavior. The findings of such studies repeatedly confirm the assertion that as the demand for information increases as tasks require, the ability to meet demand reaches a critical threshold where brain networks crucial to critical planning and intelligent decision making exhaust and so, other modes of thinking , such as those influenced by emotion are allowed to dominate the neural networks of decision making. In other words, brain regions critical to planning and decision making get tired and give up- delegating the task to the emotionally reactive networks. The consequence is making decisions which don’t maximize success.

I consider the appeal to stereotypes as a departure from engaging the critical thinking regions naturally optimized to solve problems, but instead represent the reliance on lesser optimized networks to inform our decisions to act one way or another. The brain is an optimized pattern recognizer , functioning for the benefit of an organism; yet this function evolved in the context of human history where we lived in relatively isolated populations. One where many, if not all of those we interacted with daily looked very much like ourselves. Only very recently have we had the challenge of getting along in close proximity with people who look and act in a manner perceived relatively different to our own. Today, these archaic stereotyping mechanisms have become rather annoying and noxious to social cohesion. In urban centers, it may look (depending on your eyesight)  as though people manage to get along relatively well next to “others”, but we only have to look a few millimeters below the surface to reveal the tensions that exist.

The political atmosphere in the United States seems to be showcasing more of that tension day to day, and I read it as a signal of our increasing reliance as a society, on the non-critical, emotionally driven networks of our brains. Whether or not it’s a deliberate agenda of the politics in our nation, as a consequence, we’re forced to accept the low hanging stereotypical fruit placed before us to help explain the ever- so- complicated social interactions we’re involved in. Appealing to stereotypes helps us to categorize, and therefore, feel we’ve mastered our circumstances. I don’t know what could be further from the truth- as the struggle is ever more apparent as we fail to make progress on any structural and social reform in the country.

The Information age and the effect of bringing nearly limitless information into our hands may contribute to some of the critical thinking brain network overload, which causes us to grab the sweet parcels of correlative data which we falsely ascribe to causal relationships.

You’re being lazy, yes, lazy when you fail to seek further into the causes of circumstances we find ourselves in. They are harder to find, yes indeed. But don’t let that stop you from thinking about any and EVERY thing with a critical eye.

The institution of science is no safe guard of critical ideas either, for I believe much of what is published doesn’t go far enough to explain what the authors offer as an explanation. More and more studies pinpoint mere correlations as if it were enough to demonstrate that people who , for instance, report drinking tea twice daily have lower incidences of heart disease, or cancer, or whatever health condition allows the researcher to secure grant funding. I fault all of us for perpetuating lazy thinking, and for those of us that recognize it and say or do nothing to challenge the authority and structures that support it.

Just an aside…

Image via Wikipedia

Reflecting upon the increasingly desperate situation of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant in Japan, there are some ideas which begin to stir, and so I write:

We all have family; be it small, having 2-3 immediate relatives, or whether it contains several brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles on your maternal and paternal branches.
It’s likely that you also have a natural sense of responsibility toward your family, your kin. You would likely give them the shirt off your back, if they needed it.

It’s no stretch of my imagination to consider members of nations also, as kin, in the same way. Although it’s far easier, and common to perceive people of another nationality as outsiders, there are moments in which we do seem to recognize that we share the same human lineage, and treat one another as brothers and sisters of different mothers. Natural disasters exemplify that scenario, and in the wake of Japans recent events, many of us have had the compunction to assist in any way we can. As Americans, monetary assistance is the help we like to give.

With the threat of a nuclear disaster however, it’s hard to see how monetary help alone can help deal with the potential of radiological fallout near the reactors. Today, the Japanese have officially reached out to the U.S., their brothers across the ocean for help in dealing with the atomic energy crisis. This problem seems to demand a global/family effort to help resolve.

In the outset of this post I called for you to think about your own families. If you’re old enough, there’ll definitely come a time that you’re called upon to offer significant support to a relative, whether it be emotional, or financial support. And because we’re family, we have a natural motivation to invest in our kin, and to help them in any way possible. It may not always be the easiest thing to decide to do, especially when we’re struggling ourselves; but any selfish thought is usually stifled by the realization that by helping your folks, you’re contributing toward the collective good of your family, and also investing in your own welfare.

The appeal to our collective good shouldn’t only extend as far as our immediate relatives, but it rarely seems to extend much further. The good of your neighbor, too, contributes to your well being. It’s likely that all nations who can lend a hand will recognize on some level, that the well being of Japan and of its people, is integral to the well being of our respective nation states. We’re a family spread across the Earth, and we have a responsibility to those needing a hand in getting back on their feet.

Also, don’t forget New Zeland, Haiti, Libya, Egypt, and Bahrain in their efforts to recover.

Related articles

• For Japan With Love (weddingchicks.com)
• Time To Seal Off Fukushima Dai-Ichi (pinkbananaworld.com)
• Why no looting in Japan? (caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com)

I’ve been inspired to write about decision making in the Information age for a long time due to my own experiences with the data deluge brought on by the use of twitter, facebook, and the internet; but a lot of recent publications and media focus on brain health and behavior have pushed me to blog about the matter.

Speaking from experience , one behavioral consequence I attribute to the flood of information, is a hair trigger visceral response when inundated with information I deem irrelevant. Just tell me the meaty bits! In 140 characters, or less . In an underhanded manner, twitter, which by design forces us to be succinct with our outgoing messages, is also making me even more of a grouch about how I consume information. This has some positive AND negative consequences. For the pro, I more quickly discard that which doesn’t inform me. The con, is that I TOO quickly discard that information, some of it having actually been necessary connective tissue in the body of a story. The experts have been deliberating and weighing in on just how the information flood is changing the way our brains are wired, and about how our attentional capacities are altered by our consumption of multiple information streams. Most of us in the Western world think we’re handling the steady swarm of information like master multi-taskers, myself included. However, the bulk of new studies suggest that not only is my ability to focus and attend to a single task affected by all this information, but a more severe and deleterious process is occurring – that I’m becoming poorer at decision making. Well, before I shot off a How Daaare They?! at the perceived negative character judgement, I paused. I considered the ways in which it might be, that they’re actually right about this.

I wrote previously about the perils of multi-tasking and balancing life, which quite  honestly is still a struggle; though I do earnestly believe I’m a more effective multi-tasker now, than I was a few months ago. I have the compartmentalization of tasks in a daily planner to credit for that.  WINNING (?), or so I thought, but I realize I have the flipside of the multi-tasking crisis to deal with, apparently.

First let me discuss some of the studies, and their conclusions.

One study, conducted at the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University suggests that when faced with the increased load of informational units needed to complete a task successfully, a threshold is reached, at which the Dorsolateral Prefrontal cortex ( DLPFC, my favorite brain region) decides to quit. The consequence is a drop in critical decision making ability, a rise in anxiety and fear, and poorer performance in the task at hand.

A brief description of the experiment :

Volunteers are tasked with “combinatorial auctions”, a system which offers bidders a head spinning array of items that can be purchased in a package, or individually. The challenge is to buy the desired combination at the lowest price possible, a common economic type of decision. In order for the scientist to draw any conclusions, the experimenter must burden the volunteers’ decision making ability so that the decision making process can be scored. Sure enough, as the number of combinations or choices that the volunteers were presented with increased, their performance went in the other direction and critical purchasing mistakes were made, resulting in spending more money than they would’ve, had their choices been more well considered. In order to verify the biological link between the poor decision making and poor performance, they were hooked up to fMRI machines while performing the task. The scans confirmed scientists’ general assumptions, that during the task, the activity in the DLPFC , the critical decision making region of the brain, increased as they were challenged. The novel finding however, is that at some point, presumably when the volunteer experiences “information fatigue“, the activity in the DLPFC dropped off, and activity in the emotional centers of the brain, normally held in check by the DLPFC, began to increase. When this happened, volunteers’ performance sucked correlatively.

From this study, we’re forced to consider a few things about our personal decision making in my opinion.

Number one

How do we tend to make choices? Do we decide based on immediate concerns?

Perhaps it’s easy to think about the question when it’s “what will I have for lunch or dinner today?” Many of us may make the choice based on what’s most palatable and rewarding to us at any given moment.

Alternatively, do we decide based on foresight, or a plan? You might make that lunch decision based on a prior decision to eat healthier, for example. The way we decide something as simple as this may have far reaching consequences and warrant close attention.

Number two

How is Facebook, Twitter, Social Media, and the easy accessibility of the Internet on the whole, influencing how we make decisions?

We have an ever-present connection to a literal world of information at our hips through the proliferation mobile computing and smart phone technology. Is this fundamentally changing how we consume information , and thereby putting us at risk for “information fatigue” and inhibited DL-PFC’s?

How long can you go without checking your email, or how long is it between realization that you’ve received a text message – you look at your phone-  and/or you choose to reply or to ignore it?

Each of these events , the incoming tweet, status update, and text message represent a choice for us. Do we acknowledge it, read it, reply to it, or decide to do nothing. 50 such events over the course of a day seems a hell of a lot to deal with in terms of getting in the way of our overall productivity, but the case is being made that each event contributes to “information fatigue” . And what’s the consequence? Apparently, we ARE making poorer, more emotionally driven decisions, starting with that very compulsory decision to attend to the message alert whenever our phone beckons.

The following section can be skipped if you don’t care to lose track by indulging my ramblings…

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A few things dawn on me as I write this:

1. The Information age could hardly be called such without acknowledgment of the role of Personal Computing.

2. Another defining leap was made with the invention of mobile computing, and mobile phone technology.

3. The amount of invasion we experience is indeed steadily climbing just as our acceptance of that technology climbs.

Related to the previous question ( Number one) about how we make food choices, is there a causal/correlative relationship between the adoption of personal computing and the way we make food choices due to the very link the Temple University study identifies? I know the link between personal computing and obesity has already been identified in some fashion, however, I would be curious to find out whether DLPFC exhaustion due to the steady deluge of choices and information we undergo mediates and explains this as yet unsatisfactorily explained outcome?

I imagine it’s plausible, considering the neurotransmitter dopamine being implicated in normal DL-PFC function, and with the DL-PFC having connections with the Caudate nucleus- another Dopamine rich region of the brain crucial in modulating how we assign value, motivation, and reward to behavior. I can begin to imagine the experiment that aims to show such a connection. Anyone looking for a cognitive science thesis project ? Send me a message ;D.

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The Evidence suggests that not only does our decision making suffer when given too many choices, but that we altogether lose the capacity to make ANY choice. Decision science has shown that people faced with a multitude of choices are apt to make no decision at all.

How many of you have those decisions you know you ought to make, those tasks you know you have to get done, but they’re the least appetizing among a plethora of options, and so you postpone them; instead choosing to deal with the more immediate and pressing concerns, which you’ve evaluated as such?

Is that kind of procrastination a character flaw? Or is it something that we can absolve ourselves of personal responsibility? Afterall, if the studies are true, and our brains are rewired and have adapted to the information overload by turning off our critical decision making centers, thereby allowing emotional judgment to rule our lives, how much responsibility do you own up to? This is a question for philosophers, and maybe some conspiracy theorists in some regard, but I pose it to you the reader , philosophy degree or not, conspiracy theorist, or not. Your life may really depend on it.

I want to suggest that we who dive into the information flood waters, without metaphorical life preservers, are in danger of replacing the long term positive and fruitful decisions we ought to be addressing , with the immediate decisions about whether to acknowledge, and reply to the most recent, and therefore urgent beckon for attention. This is a REAL CONCERN of mine, which I am forced to take even more vigilant strides to mind with myself , and those I love. I share this with all of you in the hopes you gain a new level of understanding about your own behavior, and can take corrective action to make sure you stay on the course your DL-PFC would have you take.

Related articles

• You: The Science of Making Decisions (newsweek.com)
• The Multi-tasking Fallacy (brillianttimemanagement.wordpress.com)
• Study: Smoking Impacts ‘Decision-Making’ Part of Teens’ Brains (aolhealth.com)
• Neuroscience of Decision Making (psypress.com)
• Mind Mapping for Decision Making (wordsmithsuk.wordpress.com)
• How our brains optimize our rewards (mindblog.dericbownds.net)

Read more here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101025121901.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

Read full article here.

Read the full press release here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100902121051.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

What’s a little weird about this , and my having just found this article today, is that NOT even two days ago I was pondering this very question. Well, not exactly this VERY question, but I was actually pondering the function of dreaming. Surely dreaming has an ancient and widespread evolutionary history, I thought, for we have some evidence that other mammals distantly related to us are capable of dreaming in their sleep. So I wondered, how far back, or how distant on the phylogenetic tree is dreaming shared among life on our planet.

I know, according to dream research, that the Dorsolateral Pre-frontal cortex is heavily involved in the process of dreaming. Well, if other animals dream in a similar way that we do, they’ve gotta have some analogous structures…. I don’t know where to carry this investigation further, but I just thought that this finding played into my weekly musings pretty nicely… that is all.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100817122405.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

The SCIENTIFIC process, that ivory tower which our civilization (Western) holds in high esteem, relies heavily on modeling. So? Well…’Modeling’ requires a lot of something we don’t often ascribe to the eggheaded nearsighted concept of a scientist we grew up nurturing. Modeling is an art, requiring lots of imagination and creativity.

It’s a talent we all possess and so it’s responsible for continuously molding us as a species, and not to be understated. From a species of hunter gatherers to the sprawling agrarian and urban dwellers we are today, it’s the human mind and its ability to create possibilities other than we have before us which helps define us. Look around you, you’ll realize that everything you see, touch, or hear right now, is there right now because it was first in someones mind and subsequently manifested. Our urban centers are the supreme expression of creativity in my point of view. An immersive reality of our own construction, seemingly set apart from nature, yet supported by it just the same. It’s that very capacity to create which keeps the coals burning in the ivory tower. Raw unbridled imagination. Interestingly, to me, this imagination extends not only forward into our future, but it also reaches far back into the past. It’s perhaps one of the most important tools we have in the quest trying to answer the question of where we come from. Cosmology, that branch of Science/Philosophy which deals with the study of origins, also relies on creativity and imagination. I should stop here and point out that science, and cosmology–which every culture on Earth knows something about, but by a different name, be it Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Animism- all have something very interesting in common, and you’ll recognize the theme if you’ve been paying attn. They’re all expressions of human creativity and the diversity therein. They answer that haunting question of who and what we are, and try to give us perspective, thereby removing existential anxiety from our minds, that we can go on about our lives. COSMOLOGY, as the ‘ology’ is a little different than what came before in that it tries to reconcile its model of origins with objectively testable and verified statements. In steps the institution we know as SCIENCE.

As I started with in the beginning of the blog, Science relies heavily on models, which rely on assumptions, those statements and suppositions which we MUST begin with as the foundation of our models. The study I cite here engages on the testing of various models of human migration and population size as they relate to the genetic evolution of mitochondrial DNA. A short list of simple assumptions or premises which are key to understanding or refuting the claims of this study :

1. DNA is the heritable element of biological organisms, it passes down conserved from parent to offspring.
2. DNA is the heritable element responsible for parent/offspring likeness, but it also mutates, and at a predictable rate across generations.
3. Mitochondrial DNA allows you to trace maternal lineages and therefore migrations across time.
3a. Mitochondrial DNA mutations occur at a calculable rate and can in essence be used as a clock. The more mutations occurring in a mitochondrial gene then, the more divisions, therefore persons, therefore generations or time span is assumed to have passed between the originally sequenced Mt DNA and the newly investigated sample.

Let me unpack that, The more differences that are seen upon genetic comparison (DNA base pair comparison of genes Mitochondria have, 37) of Mitochondrial DNA from fossil bone and a currently living human,or of another fossil bone (of similar or different geologic age) the more distant the relationship between the individuals is implied. And that relationship can be expressed by a number of years between them.

So science being the self correcting institution it is, people often try to improve upon previously established models. Regularly adding in corrections for factors that the prevailing model left out- but which may be important for accuracy of the output. This study compared the output of 10 different ‘genetic similarity’ or molecular clocks, each which aim to accurately gauge the amount of time that has passed between two samples of mt DNA of different geologic ages. The result, a confirmation that the differences between the 10 models are miniscule and that they’ve pretty much come up with the same number-200,000 years between humans living today and the oldest sample of mitochondrial DNA believed to come from a human progenitor, hence the nom, Mitochondrial Eve.

Here is an example of research which, for ideological or faith based reasons may be hard for some to swallow. But it is also the perfect example of research, the methodology, and of the assumptions which scientists base their conclusions on, however grandiose they may seem. So long as you understand the causal chain of ideas, and can exercise reason you too can understand, and even intelligibly refute how it is scientists arrive at those grandiose claims, which sometimes can stand at odds with religious propositions.

Understanding is the first step to neighborly tolerance, and it should be required of all of us even when we challenge prevailing religious or scientific notions.