Test Subjects Needed

There is a study on word associations being conducted which is trying to develop a large database of information. Gathering data online is always somewhat dubious, but nevertheless it is an interesting project. Participation is fast and actually fairly fun, so it is well worth checking out and filling in the words that come to mind. The one caveat is that you need to be a fluent English speaker, but if you are reading my blog chances are that is the case.

Visceral Emotions

I have had a request to write about the physiological basis for emotional reactions to be felt in other parts of the body, namely the sensation of heartache and gut feelings, both of which fall under the category of visceral emotions (perhaps not officially, but within my own individual vernacular they at least do). There are several possible reasons for such sensations, so what I am going to discuss in this post is a great deal of conjecture and, though I expect it is fairly reasonable, might of course be refuted by careful scientific study.

There are three main aspects of our physiology that I think best explain the sensation of visceral emotions. The first is that our body is essentially formed segmentally (an evolutionary throwback to the days of worms) with a series of dermatomes (I've linked to the Wikipedia article on them for those that don't know what I'm talking about). While dermatomes are fairly well defined (though with some overlap) on the surface of our skin, things get somewhat less organized when it comes to our insides. Organs might form embryologically with one segment of skin but then get pushed and shifted around to end up somewhere else. Combined with the fact that many of our somatic sensations are not nearly as well localized as we sometimes assume they are (if you have ever done the test where, while blindfolded or looking away, someone simultaneously pokes you on the back or leg with a pair of pointy sticks separated by only a few centimetres you might know what I mean. It is very difficult (provided the poke comes simultaneously) to tell whether you have been poked in one spot or two), this can sometimes lead to a misallocation of sensation. One common example of this (at least for men) is the horrifying sensation in the pit of one's stomach after a blow to the testacles. Also, while I've never experienced them myself, other examples of misleadingly localized visceral pain include appendicitis and a hernia. Even heartburn is a misallocation of indigestion to pain in the heart.

The second major aspect of our physiology which leads to visceral sensation of emotions is the widespread autonomic responses we experience corresponding to shifts in our mental state. As we enter states of alertness, our sympathetic responses tend to be recruited and our heart-rate increases. The sympathetic nervous system is most famously known for its role as the 'fight or flight' response system, but it is engaged by other stimuli as well. Thus, while you have no intention of fighting a pretty girl or handsome guy whom you would like to go on a date with, the presence of your crush still elevates one's alertness and results in many of the same responses that result from stress and fear. I'm not actually sure the physiological reason, but acute action of the sympathetic nervous system can sometimes lead to vomiting and nausea (if anyone has ever been in an exam room in which a test taker was so nervous he lost his lunch, you have an idea of what I am talking about), which might help explain the (much more pleasant but similar) sensation of 'butterflies in the stomach'. A fairly cute psychology study was done a number of years ago in which an attractive lady stopped men for a survey in two different situations. In the first, she waited on a foot-bridge over a rather severe drop, and in the second she simply stopped men on the street. Part of the survey asked for takers to follow-up with a phone call to the researcher. Significantly more of the men who encountered the attractive lady over the gorge made the follow-up call. This was interpreted (debatably, of course, like a lot of psychology research) to mean that the men who encountered the lady in a dangerous situation found her more enticing due to a conflation of their physiological response to the fear (quickened heart and elevated alertness) with a similar response to an attractive member of the opposite sex. While I don't think the study was in any way conclusive, I bring it up now because I do think it provides some supporting evidence for the fact that there is not a unique set of physiological responses to every emotion. Rather, there is a messy and often confused interplay.

The third aspect of our physiology involves the setup of our reward pathways and their strong connection to our viscera. After all, when you think of people as survival and propagating machines, obtaining and consuming sustenance and having sex are pretty much the two main functions (we are, of course, slightly more complicated than that, but those are integral aspects of our species). One of the favourite "brain facts" espoused by clever people who sometimes like to repeat relatively inane facts in lieu of conversation is that eating chocolate provides some of the same pleasurable sensations as sex. While true, the statement is still rather misleading because virtually all food does (particularly when one is excessively hungry), since food and sex are both largely driven by the reward pathways of the limbic system. Chocolate just happens to be an especially rewarding food, and thus sounds better than, say, broccoli and cheese. Chocolate also seems to be a favourite with women, and thus using chocolate in the sentence has a greater chance of garnering a wry smile and snide response, "Oh, I think it's better," from a lady in the group as she gives her boyfriend obviously coy eyes, at which point everyone gets a good chuckle (except, perhaps, for the poor fellow with the slighted sexual prowess).

Taking these three physiological aspects together, I think we may now make a reasonable conjecture as to the nature of both heartache and gut feelings. I will start with heartache, which I am interpreting for the purposes of this post to mean a deep ache felt in the lower chest following a break-up, loss of a loved one, or some other sense of emotional loss. This sensation, I believe, mainly combines aspects of the first two physiological facts discussed. Emotional loss can be deeply distressing, thereby vastly increasing a person's stress levels and forcing a powerful response from the sympathetic nervous system. Unlike in the case of the attractive lady on the bridge discussed above, there is no positive stimulus upon which one can distract and project their feelings, and thus they are interpreted as wholly unpleasant. With an increase in heart rate and mild nausea from increased stress, I surmise that the brain interprets the sensation as an ache centred upon the heart.

A gut feeling, on the other hand, seems to involve the third aspect more than the other two. For me, at least, gut feelings are not particularly localized in the gut, but are rather a sensation that something feels like the right solution from the core of one's being. One thing which many people do not realise about the brain is that the emotional parts of the brain (which tend to be concentrated around the limbic system) actually do quite a bit of information processing and decision making (it is not all rational thought processing and planning from our frontal cortex). This is actually one of the favourite topics discussed by Jonah Lehrer, particularly since it is the subject of his latest book. I plan to write a post about it myself going into more detail, but I hope the aspects of our physiology I discussed in this post can at least give one a general idea for a possible physiological basis for gut feelings and viscerally felt emotions in general.

Follow-up Discussion

In my most recent post, I discussed both religion and suicide bombings. Both are subjects on which many people have quite strong opinions, so there were some responses to my post which I thought warranted some expansion. First and foremost is my discussion with Cornucrapia (conducted behind the internet's version of closed doors - a private chat. Therefore, if I make any mistakes in representing what he said, I apologize and hope he will set me straight). He made several points, the first of which was that he did not think my conclusion was as different from the article's as it appeared that I thought it was. Thus, I believe it is worth trying to more clearly elucidate just what conclusions I understood the article to have, and what my interpretation of the data entailed given my understanding and outlook on religion.

As Cornucrapia understood the article, it was saying that devotion to a religious institution is more indicative of suicide bombings than devotion to any particular god. In essence, I agree with that statement, but I interpreted the article more as saying that attendance and integration with a religious community was more indicative of suicide bombings than fervour of religious belief. Essentially, that is the same thing, just with a different emphasis. The way I read the article it seemed to be focusing on the community aspect irrespective of the beliefs held by the religion, whereas I thought that was an erroneous conclusion. To me, the dangers inherent in devotion to a religious community rest in the genuflection shown to those in charge of the community regardless of what they say or ask. As I tried to relate through my rambling discussion, in the vast majority of circumstances suicide bombings are a matter of manipulation, and religious organizations seem to be perfectly suited for recruitment into behavioural manipulation. Though I might have intellectual quibbles with personal spiritual beliefs, it is rare for an individually spiritual person to have drastic social ramifications for those around them. It is only when that person has others willing to rally to his call in some sort of organized religious opposition that one person's spiritual beliefs begin to have massive social ramifications. What I am basically trying to say is I think the increased support for suicide attacks following place of worship attendance rests primarily not in the increased social bonds, as the article seemed to suggest, but rather in the increased subservience to a small group of religious officials.

Which leads me to the second point which Cornucrapia mentioned which I full cede to him and should have mentioned myself. A far more powerful indicator of support for suicide bombings rests not in any test for religiosity, but rather in whether or not a region is occupied by a foreign military force. This then leads me to the other comment I wanted to address, which was Regan's. He thought my use of the words 'mentally unbalanced' was an unjustified value judgement, pointing out that the people who perform suicide attacks have usually led lives of terrible suffering.

There are two aspects to my response. The first is I just wanted to point out that though the way I said 'mentally unbalanced' was perhaps dismissive and marginalizing as it was within the bounds of a parentheses like an afterthought thrown out there, in that context it was not actually directed at suicide bombers in general. Instead, it was directed at those people who compose and enact suicide attacks on their own (sometimes with a friend, but the difference here is that they receive no external training or direct impetus driving them to perform their attack), for example the Columbine shooting. Despite the intention of the comment, however, I think that it is worth pointing out that anyone who perpetrates a suicide attack is mentally unbalanced. They might have good reason for being mentally unbalanced (such as having lived a horrifyingly awful life), but they are still deranged. A person driven insane by torture is still insane, and it should not be considered marginalizing to say so. It just happens that said person's insanity has a direct and understandable cause, but that does not mean that person does not most likely belongs in a mental health hospital. Regan makes an important point that is all too often unacknowledged in that one should be careful of falling into the trap of blaming the victim, but I think he oversteps the bounds of that point by objecting to any sort of assessment of suicide attackers' mental health based on the degree to which they have suffered prior to the attack. Much like war veterans who find they have difficulty returning to a nonviolent civilian existence and, as a result of their previous experiences, often end up commiting violent crimes against their fellow citizens, it is a messy issue. The people whose lives have been tragically and irrevocably disrupted by intense horror should not be dismissed out of hand, but so too should people not fear to assess their mental states. To deny that a person who is willing to blow himself up in order to kill others is mentally unbalanced out of pity for his past is dangerous both to him and those around him. To label him as mentally unbalanced should in no way be an attempt to marginalize him (though, like with all psychological problems, it will serve to do so for some people), but rather it should serve to acknowledge the horror of his prior experience and lead to future attempts to rectify that damage as much as possible.

Wrestling, but with my own worldview or with questionable science?

I followed a link to this article on religion and suicide bombings. It is an interesting article, but I find myself waffling on my thoughts. I suppose that is a good thing, as it is clearly challenging some of my notions, but it is still a difficult thing. Basically, the study which the article is about investigated the link between religion and suicide bombings and found the following general trends:

• Prayer correlated more strongly with religious devotion than attendance of church/temple/mosque/synagogue (and any other place of worship I happened to miss).
• Approval of and predisposition to perform suicide bombings was more strongly related to attendance of religious services than religious devotion.

The study therefore drew the conclusion that it was actually the social aspect of religion that led to suicide bombings rather than religious fervour and belief in rewards of the afterlife. Now, before I continue, I think I should air some of my own thoughts on religion. I hold no religious beliefs and attend no religious services (I think most of my readers are aware of this). I also have a number of qualms with religion, perhaps most importantly being what I see as a disastrous emphasis on orthodoxy over evidence and faith over reason. The trouble with making these statements is it not only strikes some people too close to home for them to continue rationally listening to what you are saying, but it also often leads to the retort "I don't know what religion you're talking about, but that's not my religion." And, to a certain extent, that is sometimes true. The deism of men like Thomas Jefferson is a pretty benign form of religious belief which I have a hard time finding a quarrel with. Likewise, in terms of organized religion, I do not find that I have the same quarrel with an organization like the United Church of Canada as I do with the Catholic church or, to an even greater extent, fundamentalist mega-churches in the United States. While I am a supporter of the idea of freedom of religion, as I have discussed elsewhere the idea of freedom of religion becomes fundamentally untenable when no limits are placed upon what protected religious belief entails. It should not be possible to justify any action as an expression of religious belief if it infringes upon the fundamental rights of others, but that is exactly what happens with honour killings and other forms of religious subjugation. The extraordinary difficulty that results in attempting to correct such gross violations of human rights, either due to the blanket cover of the argument for religious expression used to counter an external dialogue or the resistance to internal reform stemming from the elevation of unquestioning deference to religious teachings, is central to my antipathy toward organized religion. What hostility I have toward religion, therefore, does not rest upon the social aspects of support and community (I had actually generally regarded these as somewhat positive side effects). Of course, the social aspects of religion can easily be manipulated to help produce in-group/out-group animosity, but I still concluded that its edge in this matter fundamentally rested upon its profound advantage in producing dogmatic and unquestioning zealots.

I wanted to explain my outlook, because I am not sure if it is the reason (combined with my general wariness for the conclusions of psychology studies) I seemed to be looking for holes in the study's conclusions, or if the study itself rests upon shaky ground. One of the things which perked my ears up was the following paragraph:

This effect remained even after accounting for the different demographics and economics of the six countries, but it did vary from group to group. It was only statistically significant (unlikely to be a fluke result) for Indian Hindus, Russian Orthodox Christians and Israeli Jews. However, Ginges warns against overinterpreting these differences - obviously the six samples differed in many ways. The important point was that all of them showed a similar trend.

It is quite misleading to say that the effect remained when it did not remain in a statistically significant manner in 3/6 of the groups investigated (this is one of those things which seems to happen far too often in psychology. I don't understand why it is not stressed more that psychology is a statistical science. If I had control over the psychology curriculum, I would cram it so full of statistics courses that it was second only to actuarial science and statistics specialists). To then warn against over interpreting the differences due to the many obvious ways in which the samples themselves differed is clearly a line thrown in to mollify those who would use this study to justify varying value judgements on the religions involved in the study. In making such a blanket statement, however, one also skips over the determination of what those differences might be which led to some groups expressing the expected trend and others not (well, not statistically at least, which is what really matters).

Another aspect that also strikes me as somewhat misleading is the fact that frequency of prayer is used as a surrogate for religious devotion throughout the article, though the applicability of such a conflation is unlikely to be the same across religious and cultural groups. I would think that the efficacy of prayer as a measure of devotion, rather, is highly dependent upon the belief structure of the given religion.

Using my arm-chair psychology, I am tempted to reinterpret the results. To me, the evidence which ties religious attendance to approval of suicide bombings is not independent of the belief structure or level of devotion, but rather is evidence of the vulnerability of religious belief to manipulation. Suicide bombers are rarely religious officials, instead usually being trained and pushed into action by those who have no intention of blowing themselves up (the aforementioned religious officials). Likewise, most people have both a strong empathic streak for others as well as a survival instinct in themselves, and it would be very unusual for an individual on his own to devise and enact a suicide bombing (of course, when I say it is unusual, I don't mean impossible. There are all sorts of mentally unbalanced people out there). Thus, the role of religious service would seem, to me, to serve primarily to prevent individual senses of spirituality from straying too far from the collective path. High frequency of attendance, therefore, would indicate greater influence from the religious officials and other well-regarded members of the congregation who are most likely to put someone up to the act of performing a suicide bombing, but the act itself still depends upon a measure of devotion, if not to the religion itself but to the word of the person organizing the attack. This appears most readily achievable with the aid of unquestioning credulity from a religious follower (but is not limited to that, as political suicide bombers have historically shown).

In a sense, I suppose, this is a social aspect of religion, but not in the way I interpreted the study to mean. I am not entirely sure if I have made the distinction clear, but I hope I have (essentially, I see it as not being a result of the sense of community created but rather a result of the inordinate level of power and trust given to the religious officials). However, I, of course, do not have any experimental evidence (or even an experiment design) to back up my argument, so I open the discussion up to my readers. Do my qualms with the study make sense, or is it just my antipathy for organized religion rearing its ugly head?

Free Will

I have been given a request for a topic. Since that is an exciting occurrence that I don't want to discourage, I figure I should try to attend to the request (it has taken me a long time, but hopefully that won't count against me too greatly). The subject I am going to discuss, therefore, is free will. It is a topic that I am not a great fan of, but it is virtually impossible to study the brain and intelligence in any manner without having the question of free will pop up from time to time and leer at you. The reason I am not a fan of it is that I think it is a subject that has been marred over the centuries by association with a great deal of analysis that is not reality based. From Plato's conception of the soul in three parts to Descarte's conclusion that humans have souls and all other animals are simple automatons, there is a huge amount of crap unloaded by people who are largely unchallenged due to their eminent names. I don't actually have a name (hopefully it is appropriate to insert a yet here), nor have I taken any courses in philosophy of the mind or anything like that. I just thought it was appropriate to point that out.

Free will is one of those loaded subjects that everyone seems to have an opinion about. Most people seem to accept that we do have free will based on the fact that they feel like they have free will. However, without invoking a magical or paranormal exception for the mind (like a soul), it is difficult to reconcile the idea of free will with deterministic physical laws. Some people have tried to squirm their way around this by appealing to the craziness that is quantum mechanics, but those are usually fairly shaky and tenuous attempts. The fundamental problem is that people intuitively think in terms of whole entities - it is hard not to visualize functions of the brain as a tiny homunculus moving switches and making decisions. Of course, no such little fellow has been found, as well as that sort of visualization begs the question of how his brain works.

The way I tend to think of the subject of free will is in the context of a dynamical system. The brain as a network of little computational units is a physical entity and therefore must follow physical laws in the same way that everything else does, so in that way it is as deterministic as anything. However, it also an exceptionally complex system that feeds much of its own output back into itself (sometimes in round-about manners), making the analogy to an iterative mathematical function somewhat appropriate. Though most of the dynamics I have studied is based on simple functions (like the quadratic function), even those very simple functions can exhibit chaotic behaviour that is virtually impossible to predict. When systems become even more complex, you can have a deterministic system that still follows all physical laws, but requires a system at least as complicated as itself to predict the exact outcome. An example of such a system is the weather. We can make probabilistic claims about the future weather, but we cannot completely predict its behaviour (and beyond a week, most predictions about the weather are fairly useless other than the very general ones like "as it gets closer to winter, it is going to get colder"). Similarly, we can make probabilistic predictions about a person's behaviour (most people, when presented with a sudden loud noise, will jump and look about in a startled fashion). As we get to know a person better, we get better at our predictions (when my girlfriend and I are out for a walk and we see a person walking a dog, I can very closely predict the degree to which she will get excited about seeing the dog based on its breed and age (puppies have a clear advantage over older dogs)). Likewise, after living in an area for a while, most people get much better at predicting what the weather is going to be like. Exact prediction, however, is still impossible, especially as one moves farther into the future.

In Hobbes' Leviathan, he spends the opening chapters arguing that the thoughts of man are entirely dependent on his previous experiences. Humans cannot come up with anything entirely novel that is not some sort of derivative of earlier sensory perceptions. Even things like mythological creatures (like centaurs) are still a combination of known things (in this case, a man and a horse). While this is not entirely true (many neurons in your brain generate signals on their own, especially before birth and during infancy), it is quite close to the truth, in that our thoughts are linked to our environment and experiences. Some of those factors are beyond our control and also unpredictable (making the complexity of the system even greater).

Putting all of these points together, my basic conclusion about free will is that it is one of those things that largely depends upon definition, but for all practical purposes it does and ought to be treated like it exists. Saying that an absence of free will makes us deterministic automatons is an oversimplification, because determinism does not mean machine-like lack of behavioural options.

A Case for Inter-field Knowledge...

They say that the time of the generalist has come and gone, but to me that is a sad thing. Of course, every so often some new "hot" field develops from the merging of several other fields, and the buzz word "interdisciplinary" gets thrown around a lot these days. However, it really shouldn't be just a buzz word, and I have two short anecdotes that I think make that case.

The first is a horrifying tale from my first year psychology course last summer (which I had to take so I would be able to take some of the neuroscience courses I wanted to this year). Since it was a summer course it was not actually being taught by a professor, but rather by a PhD student in developmental psychology. The first couple lectures were devoted to neuropsychology, the quaint name given to the "branch of psychology" devoted to studying the actual physical make-up of the human brain (as opposed to several of the other branches, which is basically just making stuff up that sounds vaguely plausible. That, however, is a rant for another day). Anyway, now I had spent the previous four months realising that intelligence was what I wanted to spend the rest of my life studying, so I had done some modest reading about the brain. It was nothing fancy; I think the least pop-science style book I had read pertaining to the brain was Oxford Press's A Very Short Introduction to the Brain. Anyway, I make this clear because I want to point out how absolutely rudimentary my knowledge of neurophysiology was at this point. Imagine my surprise, then, when this young lady gets up in the front of the class and proceeds to dazzle everyone with several blatantly false statements. While I was a little disgruntled when she told a student that withdrawal of a limb from a painful stimulus was not a reflex, but rather the turning and oral searching of a baby was what was meant by the term reflex (granted, she was a developmental psychologist, so she dealt with infant reflexes more than the withdrawal reflex, but she should still know the definition of the reflex arc and some of the common examples), I was far more horrified when she answered another student's question as to how the myelin sheath helped make signals travel down the axon faster by saying it was "superconducting". Leaving out the blatant misunderstanding of what is meant by superconductivity, she clearly had no clue how myelin works. And this was the lady standing at the front of a class of several hundred students answering questions like she knew what she was talking about, because she was planning to get her PhD in a field that at least tangentially claims to study the brain.

How can a person possibly hope to bring insight to the question of how the brain develops and mediates thought without at least a rudimentary understanding of the underlying hardware? There is a reason they make computer science and software engineering students study digital electronics and lower level languages than Java or Python, because if you don't understand the underlying architecture of a system you are left writing all your MatLab scripts with for loops and uninitialized matrices rather than matrix algebra and left wondering why your program takes hours or even days to run.

Anyway, I had planned originally to also mention how my neuroscience textbook prompted this entire post because of its blatant reference to species selection at the beginning of the chapter on sexual selection, and I was going to spend some time dwelling on the importance of understanding evolution in all its brilliantly nuanced glory when doing anything in the life sciences (including neuroscience), but instead I seemed to have gone on a little too long with my rant about the lack of knowledge of my psychology lecturer. Clearly, I still bore an intellectual grudge.

Perhaps, though, I am being a little too harsh, since this very weekend an intellectual travesty far worse than what I have just described is going to be gracing selected theatres across this continent.

Also, please note that the majority of my "scientific" links were to various Wikipedia pages. I recognise that Wikipedia most certainly is not a scientific source, but the point I was making was how non-specialized this knowledge really is.