Put your left brain in, put your left brain out…

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Educated readers doubtless recall my old Acid Logic article “What is Morality?” in which I argued that our sense of morality is less a thought out, reasoned set of rules and more an ethereal sense that is actually physically felt in our body. We avoid doing bad not because we are intellectually opposed to it, but because contemplating bad acts makes us feel uncomfortable.

As mentioned, I’ve been reading Mike Gazzaniga’s book on free will, “Who’s In Charge?”, and he discusses some observations relevant to the morality issue. Gazzaniga is most famous for studying “split brain patients.” These are people, usually epileptic, who’ve had the series of neural fibers that connect their left and right brain hemispheres separated (for therapeutic reasons.) Gazzaniga came to find that in subtle ways these people are really of two minds. The right hemisphere is very literal and has no language function. The left hemisphere is the interpreter (e.g. it can construct stories and explanations – often incorrectly – from observed events), and has rich language functionality.

In the book, Gazzaniga notes the work of another neuroscientist who discovered that when we use our knowledge of other people’s beliefs and intent, we use a particular brain area in the right hemisphere. Gazzaniga was surprised by this because he presumed this would mean that the left brain in split brain patients (the talky brain) would be incapable of keeping track of people’s intentions. He designed a series of experiments to suss this out. Basically this involved asking patients questions like, “If Susie gives what she thinks is sugar but actually is poison to her boss, is she bad?” or the inverse, “If Susie gives her boss sugar that she thinks is poison, is she ok?” These questions, as you can see, are all about Susie’s intent. And, as Gazzaniga’s predicted, the split brain patients (or at least their talking left side) focused on the outcome of the actions, not the intent. It didn’t matter that Susie was trying to kill her boss if it all worked out okay.

It would seem that morality is a series of brain functions. If a piece is missing (or inaccessible), our moral function gets warped, at least by the standards of society.

Did we domesticate ourselves?

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You’ve doubtless heard of the work of Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev. Belyaev is best known for his work domesticating Siberian foxes in the 1950s. He would find the friendliest foxes in a litter and breed them together. He quickly bred the aggression out of the animal. This breeding also resulted in specific physical traits – the bred foxes had floppy ears and upturned tails, like cute doggies.

In fact, this sort of process is presumed to have been what led to the domestication of dogs. When men first started living in permanent encampments (what would evolve into cities) they would leave their garbage at the outskirts. This attracted wolves, the bravest and friendliest of which would approach these cities of man and eat. They mated with similar wolves which led to friendlier and friendlier wolves which led to dogs.

But where does this all lead? Today I came across an argument that such similar breeding occurred in man! No, we’re weren’t bred for friendliness by space aliens; the theory goes, as stated in Michael Gazzaniga’s book “Who’s In Charge?”,:

Hare and Tomasello think that humans may have undergone a self-domestication process in which overly aggressive or despotic others were either ostracized or killed by the group. Thus, the gene pool was modified, which resulted in the selection of systems that controlled (that is, inhibited) emotional reactivity such as aggression… The social group constrained the behavior and eventually affected the genome.

Why are we nice? Because we killed the meanies eons ago.

Of course, not everyone is nice. Psychopaths and sociopaths often play upon the trusting nature of regular folks. But the thing about psychopathy is that it’s only advantageous if the psychopaths are in the minority. If everyone is out to screw everyone else then no one trusts anyone and it becomes impossible to take advantage of people. It’s only when most people are decent that being indecent has an advantage.

Full of Filner

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As most people know, I live in San Diego. As such, it must seem odd I remained quiet during San Diego’s recent controversy – the charges that our mayor, Bob Filner, was accused of sexually harassing women. Filner has now left office (Slate magazine has a delightfully snarky report on the whole episode.)

Of course, as the Filner episode was running, we had allegations that Anthony Weiner, running for Mayor of New York, was still tweeting pictures of his penis out to women.

Now, both men are Democrats, and Democrats (at least in the minds of other Democrats) are supposed to be above this sort of thing. They’re supposed to respect women and fight for equality etc., etc. How could they do this?

Today, I found myself considering a scenario. Let’s say you’re a certain type of person – a narcissistic sociopath – who is in love with himself and power. You wouldn’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that if you espoused certain beliefs with a certain charisma you could rise up the ranks of the Democratic Party and gain the love and power that comes from being a successful politician. (The same could be said of the Republican Party – or the Green/Libertarian/Constitution Party for that matter – just with different views.)

The question voters have to ask then is, “How do you separate the power hungry from the true believers?” To this I have to say, “I have no idea.”

Honestly, I think it’s even murkier than what I’ve argued so far. I suspect Filner does on some level really believe his liberal views, as does Weiner (and Clinton and Edwards and Spitzer and many others that have earned notoriety.) But I think they also saw what espousing certain beliefs could get them, and that held a great attraction to them.

Rockanomics

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A while back I stumbled across an interesting and much discussed speech that one of the White House Economic Advisors gave at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Here’s a link to an NPR piece which discusses it and also links to the text of the speech. I think the speech offers a good analysis of the music business and can also be applied to many other industries. I think it also points to a grim, probably unavoidable future for mankind.

The crux of the speech is this. If you were a singer in 1860, you had a limited audience you could service. If you lived in St. Louis, you were limited to people in St. Louis (unless you traveled to New York at which point you could not longer play for people in St. Louis.) Distance basically limited how big you could get; you had to actually be in front of people to sell your product – your voice.

The result was that you had a lot of people in a lot of towns making a living as singers. No one one got really big but they basically got by. Imagine a pie chart representing the potential audience of the world. In 1860 that pie chart would be divied up into tens of thousands of tiny slices owned by each singer in each town etc.

Then radio came along, as did records, tapes, cds etc. Suddenly you could sell your product – your voice – without actually being in front of people. You were much less limited by distance. Certain performers (Al Jolsen, Bing Crosby etc.) grew to be considered the best and grabbed a much bigger slice of the pie. The losers crawled into an alley and died.

Now we have Beyonce and Jay-Z owning a giant chunk of the pie while unappreciated talents such as myself toil in obscurity. (My dad made an interesting point about this – Michael Jackson is still selling tons of albums and he’s dead! With recordings, even death is no barrier to doing business.)

The speech gave evidence of something I think we suspect to be true – that “the best” in the world of music may be partly just “luckier” (and better marketed, branded etc.) Once the hype machine gets going, people figure it’s easier to just buy some album that’s been given the stamp of approval by the masses than take a chance on something unknown.

As we think about it, we can see that this process applies to more than just music. Let’s say you want a cola drink in 1860. I suppose you go down to the local drug store and buy a cola drink made with syrup from a semi-local cola manufacturer. Maybe it’s “Bob’s Cola.” No one can really dominate the cola market because the barrier of distance prevents any one manufacturer from getting into every city in the U.S. But trains start to get better and distribution networks develop and suddenly Coke is king (and Pepsi not far behind.) “Bob’s Cola”, which used to have a small slice of the cola pie, is now gone.

Basically, over the course of the past 150 years we’ve had an increase in networking and distribution and that has enabled market victors to increase their share over various markets. But this is just the beginning. The world is becoming even more networked at a dizzying rate. Will the victors increase their share of the pie more and more until they own the whole thing? Are we headed towards an increase in unequal distribution of wealth? Will hordes of cannibalistic zombies rise from the earth and seek human flesh? The answer to all these questions can only be “YES!”

I’ve got a gut feeling

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Online mag The Verge has been doing some interesting stories lately including this one which notes that the future of psychiatry may be inside your stomach.

Her parents were running out of hope. Their teenage daughter, Mary, had been diagnosed with a severe case of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as ADHD. They had dragged her to clinics around the country in an effort to thwart the scary, intrusive thoughts and the repetitive behaviors that Mary felt compelled to perform. Even a litany of psychotropic medications didn’t make much difference. It seemed like nothing could stop the relentless nature of Mary’s disorder.

Their last hope for Mary was Boston-area psychiatrist James Greenblatt. Arriving at his office in Waltham, MA, her parents had only one request: help us help Mary.
…
Greenblatt also prescribed Mary a twice-daily dose of probiotics, the array of helpful bacteria that lives in our gut. The change in Mary was nothing short of miraculous: within six months, her symptoms had greatly diminished. One year after the probiotic prescription, there was no sign that Mary had ever been ill.

We all recognize there’s a relationship between our mood and gut. Anxiety often causes gastrointestinal issues and depression can result in a dull ache in the stomach. But we largely presume this relationship to be one way, our mind affecting our stomach.

For Greenblatt, this radical treatment protocol has actually been decades in the making. Even during his psychiatric residency at George Washington University, he was perplexed by the way mental disorders were treated. It was as if, he said, the brain was totally separate from the body. More than 20 years of work treating eating disorders emphasized Greenblatt’s hunch: that the connection between body and mind was more important than conventional psychiatry assumed. “Each year, I get more and more impressed at how important the GI tract is for healthy mood and the controlling of behavior,” Greenblatt said. Among eating disorder patients, Greenblatt found that more than half of psychiatric complaints were associated with problems in the gut — and in some patients, he says he has remedied both using solely high-dose probiotics, along with normalizing eating.

I’m reminded of a segment in one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books where he described the work of some scientists studying facial expressions. These two fellows were spending all their time making faces of different emotions at each other. After two weeks of making sad or depressed faces one of the guys reported that he was actually feeling miserable. The relation between mood and face was a two way street. Maybe the same is true with the stomach.

The era of electronic music

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I’ve long loathed the pretentious writing of New Yorker music writer Sasha-Frere Jones. I’ve spent considerable hours envisioning his screaming body being dipped into a vat of boiling hot AIDS. Nonetheless, he has a pretty good recent post about the challenges for musicians in the Spotify fueled era of free music.

What about an excellent, working band like Dawn of Midi, whose new album, “Dysnomia,” received a score of 7.9 in Pitchfork this week? (I’d say 8.9 but who’s counting?) This band uses a grand piano, an upright bass, and a drum set to make their music; touring means they either play venues with grand pianos on site (relatively common) or that they rent a very big van (uncommon, if we’re talking about small bands trying to drag around a grand piano). More to the point, their music needs to be recorded in a well-equipped live studio by a skilled engineer; Garageband and other popular home-recording software programs are of no use in properly capturing a mechanically traditional band, that is, despite an advanced aesthetic vision. Some kind of business model needs to remain in place, or we won’t have albums like “Dysnomia.”

This makes a point I’ve been thought about. In this new era, where the music is essentially a giveaway (hopefully to build audiences for live shows or increase t-shirt sales), music produced electronically has a distinct advantage. If you have even a bare bones digital music recording set up (such as Garageband which is free with Macs) and some good samples, it’s not that hard to produce good sounding music. (I’ve recorded plenty and posted it here. You can argue about the quality, I suppose, but some of it has gotten on television and in short films.) All you really need to invest is time. But if you want to record live instruments (guitars, drums, tubas, voice, etc.) you need space to record them (ideally space designed for proper acoustics), expensive mics, maybe some amps, etc. The proposition gets a whole lot pricier.

Here’s a scenario that illustrates the issue. Let’s say you’re doing a film score and the director says, “I want some slow, soothing chords over this scene.” You could write out some music for four cellos, hire the players, rent a studio, mike the instruments and record them; this might take days. Or you could sit down at your MIDI keyboard, find a “soothing” patch and knock out a minute’s worth of music. This could be done before lunch.

Now I would generally agree the first option is going to sound better but’s going to cost a lot more.

Synaptic re-calibration

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The premise of this “Connectome” book I’ve been reading is that we can get to the very essence of a person by mapping the specific way their neurons connect within their brain. Neurons connect with each other, as you probably know, via points called synapses. At a synapse, one neuron fires a blast of chemicals (neurotransmitters) to a receiving neuron. If the second neuron gets enough of these sorts of signals it will fire an electrical signal and send its own signals to other neurons down the line. Thus, “Connectome” argues, if we can map out all these synaptic connection points we can basically map out a personality. (There’s more to it than that but that’s the big picture.)

This opens up an interesting sci-fi concept. Could we get to a point where we could perform a kind of synaptic re-calibration – going into the brain and strengthening or removing synaptic connections to create more desirable personalities? Perhaps this would be done under court order – pedophiles would be calibrated to lose their dark urges, for example. Or perhaps we could chose to do so – introverts could become less shy.

Dream girls

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I had an interesting dream last night in which I was talking to a girl I used to know. It was definitely her, even though she didn’t exactly look like her. One difference was that the dream girl had this weird bent tooth which the real girl does not have. She did have, however, the large breasts that I so fondly remember.

I woke up and was thinking about the dream. It struck me that I have another female friend who has large breasts and also has that weird bent tooth. My dream factory sort of borrowed this trait from one friend and glued it onto another.

This ties into my earlier post about the discovery of a neuron that only fires when people see pictures of Jennifer Anniston. I’ve seen this explained as follows: the Jennifer Anniston neuron is at the end of a long chain of neural “units” that individually recognize certain traits. Maybe one unit recognizes blue/grey eyes, another a pointy chin, another a diminutive physique, another tan skin etc. When all these units are active they end up firing off this neuron at the end of the chain which says, “Yay! Jennifer Anniston!”

So what happened in my dream? It seems like some wires got crossed and neural units from Girl B (big tits, funny tooth) got fired while thinking about Girl A (big tits, no funny tooth.)

The mind is fascinating.

Here’s some pictures of Jennifer Anniston.

Eternal life via Connectomics

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As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been reading a book called “Connectome” which argues that the essence of a human being can be understood to be the way their billions of neurons hook up to each other. The idea presumes that if you can map someone’s neural structure and recreate it (in a biological or electronic model), you would essentially be creating a clone of their mind.

With this idea in mind, we can contemplate ways of living forever. If we can maintain the map of our connectome after we die, we (conceivably) could be re-animated in some form via future technology and be the same person. The problem is that it’s hard to maintain the connectome after death – cellular damage can destroy the map. One way to get around this might be to “freeze” our brains in plastic soon after death – so soon that we would have to do it in a controlled situation; essentially we would have to choose to kill ourselves to have a chance at living forever.

That’s what Kenneth Hayward, a futurist with impressive science credentials, would like to do.

That case is deeply speculative. Here’s how Hayworth envisions his own brain-preservation procedure. Before becoming “very sick or very old,” he’ll opt for an “early ‘retirement’ to the future,” he writes. There will be a send-off party with friends and family, followed by a trip to the hospital. “I’m not going in for some back-alley situation. We need to get the science right to convince the medical community. It’s a very clear dividing line: I will not advocate any technique until we have good proof that it works.”

After Hayworth is placed under anesthesia, a cocktail of toxic chemicals will be perfused through his still-functioning vascular system, fixing every protein and lipid in his brain into place, preventing decay, and killing him instantly. Then he will be injected with heavy-metal staining solutions to make his cell membranes visible under a microscope. All of the water will then be drained from his brain and spinal cord, replaced by pure plastic resin. Every neuron and synapse in his central nervous system will be protected down to the nanometer level, Hayworth says, “the most perfectly preserved fossil imaginable.”

His plastic-embedded brain will eventually be cut into strips, perhaps using a machine like the one he invented, and then imaged in an electron microscope. His physical brain will be destroyed, but in its place will be a precise map of his connectome. In 100 years or so, he says, scientists will be able to determine the function of each neuron and synapse and build a computer simulation of his mind. And because the plastination process will have preserved his spinal nerves, he’s hopeful that his computer-generated mind can be connected to a robot body.

Easy as pie.

Facing up to Facebook

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Sky News reports: Facebook Linked To Unhappiness

The number one social networking site is strongly associated with declines in well-being, psychologists claim.

Scientists found the more time people spent on Facebook over a two-week period, the worse they subsequently felt.

In contrast, talking to friends on the phone or meeting them in person led to greater levels of happiness.

Study leader Dr Ethan Kross, from the University of Michigan in the US, said: “On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection.

“But rather than enhance well-being, we found that Facebook use predicts the opposite result – it undermines it.”

In think we’ve all felt this. You get on Facebook and view a flurry of posts from people telling you how great their lives are, how their dreams are being fulfilled, how they’ve found love and respect. As a result, you are forced to contemplate your disappointments and lack of fulfillment. You begin screaming at the screen: “Fuck you whores! You cocksuckers! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you all…!” and they drag you out of the Starbucks.

But there’s an interesting point in this study I’d like to contemplate. Hearing your friends blather on Facebook about their achievement is depressing but it appears this is not case when hearing the same on the phone or in person. Why would this be?

I’d suspect it has something to do with the one way communication that Facebook offers. Essentially it’s a virtual soapbox – I get up and yell my point at those beneath me. (They can, of course, reply in comments, but those comments are not on equal footing as the original post.) Facebook is about talking down to people. In person, or even on the phone, you are on more equal footing; there’s much more give and take. As result, I suspect we feel like we can better take vicarious pleasure in someone’s good news. When our conversational partner talks about a “win” (say, they just got a new job) we feel connected to that win, part of the team. On Facebook there’s a great distance between us, because that person is not really talking to us specifically but all of their Facebook friends.

Frankly, I think phone and in-person communication have their own flaws – especially when they involve one person blathering on about their own thoughts while paying little attention to the other people involved (e.g. a lot like Facebook.) But they’re certainly more equal forms of communication.

I like the word “blather.”