Some of you may be aware that I also perceive of me as a literary person and try my hand at writing poetry, short stories and novellas. I have recently started a new blog called The Fool's Quest that would document my quest of coming up with novel literary pieces on a daily basis.
I strongly suggest , that though it has nothing to do with Psychology, it is bound to be a good read, so hurry up and visit that site.
There is an interesting article in Psychology Today regarding Magical Thinking and though one should read it in its entirety, I'll also post some snippets.
1. Anything can be sacred.
What makes something sacred is not its material makeup but its unique history. And whatever causes us to value essence over appearance becomes apparent at an early age. Psychologists Bruce Hood at Bristol University and Paul Bloom at Yale convinced kids ages 3 to 6 that they'd constructed a "copying machine." The kids were fine taking home a copy of a piece of precious metal produced by the machine, but not so with a clone of one of Queen Elizabeth II's spoons—they wanted the original.
2. Anything can be cursed.
Essences are not always good. In fact, people show stronger reactions to negative taint than to positive. Mother Teresa cannot fully neutralize the evil in a sweater worn by Hitler, a fact that fits the germ theory of moral contagion: A drop of sewage does more to a bucket of clean water than a drop of clean water does to a bucket of sewage. Traditional cleaning can't erase bad vibes either. Studies by Rozin and colleagues show that people have a strong aversion to wearing laundered clothes that have been worn by a murderer or even by someone who's lost a leg in an accident.3. Mind rules over matter.
Wishing is probably the most ubiquitous kind of magical spell around, the unreasonable expectation that your thoughts have force and energy to act on the world. Emily Pronin and colleagues at Princeton and Harvard convinced undergrads in a study that they had put voodoo curses on fellow subjects. While targeting their thoughts on the other students, hexers pushed pins into voodoo dolls and the "victims" feigned headaches. Some victims had been instructed to behave like jackasses during the study (the "Stupid People Shouldn't Breed" T-shirt was a nice touch), eliciting ill will from pin pushers. Those who dealt with the jerks felt much more responsible for the headaches than the control group did. If you think it, and it happens, then you did it, right? Pronin describes the results as a particular form of seeing causality in coincidence, where the "cause" is especially conspicuous because it's hard to miss what's going on in your own head.
4. Rituals bring good luck.
To witness the mindless repetition of actions with no proven causal effect, there's no better laboratory than the athletic field.
We use ritual acts most often when there is little cost to them, when an outcome is uncertain or beyond our control, and when the stakes are high—hence my communion with the fuselage. People who truly trust in their rituals exhibit a phenomenon known as "illusion of control," the belief that they have more influence over the world than they actually do. And it's not a bad delusion to have—a sense of control encourages people to work harder than they might otherwise. In fact, a fully accurate assessment of your powers, a state known as "depressive realism," haunts people with clinical depression, who in general show less magical thinking.
5. To name is to rule.
Just as thoughts and objects have power, so do names. Language's ability to dredge up associations acts as a spell over us. Piaget argued that children often confuse objects with their names, a phenomenon he labeled nominal realism. Rozin and colleagues have demonstrated nominal realism in adults. After watching sugar being poured into two glasses of water and then personally affixing a "sucrose" label to one and a "poison" label to the other, people much prefer to drink from the "sucrose" glass and will even shy away from one they label "not poison." (The subconscious doesn't process negatives.)
6. Karma's a bitch.
Belief in a just world puts our minds at ease: Even if things are beyond our control, they happen for a reason. The idea of arbitrary pain and suffering is just too much for many people to bear, and the need for moral order may help explain the popularity of religion; in fact, just-worlders are more religious than others. Faith in cosmic jurisprudence starts early. Harvard psychologists showed that kids ages 5 to 7 like a child who found $5 on the sidewalk more than one whose soccer game got rained out
7. The world is alive.
To believe that the universe is sympathetic to our wishes is to believe that it has a mind or a soul, however rudimentary. We often see inanimate objects as infused with a life force.Lindeman Marjaana, a psychologist at the University of Helsinki, defines magical thinking as treating the world as if it has mental properties (animism) or expecting the mind to exhibit the properties of the physical world. She found that people who literally endorse phrases such as, "Old furniture knows things about the past," or, "An evil thought is contaminated," also believe in things like feng shui (the idea that the arrangement of furniture can channel life energy) and astrology. They are also more likely to be religious and to believe in paranormal agents.
Who are WE to say the dreamers have it wrong? Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin point out that many magical beliefs have gained some element of scientific validity:
I touched on the sapir-whorf hypothesis and how Russians are better able to do better Categorical Perception (CP) of color, thanks to the fact that they have a richer color terms lexicon than English, last month.
I have also covered the research of P. Kay earlier regarding color terms and their evolution. Now a new PNAS paper by Kay et al shows that while the left hemisphere(LH) , which is involved in language, shows superior CP effect in adults, the reverse trend is shown in infants i.e.e the infants show a stronger CP of colors when the stimuli is presented to Left Visual field (LVF) and hence processed by RH.
Their hypothesis was that while the CP of colors in adults is mediated by language, the CP in infants is non-verbal and the cP in adults may or may not build on this childhood CP ability. The results go on to show that not only doers language affect the left hemisphere dominance on categorical perception of colors ; it does so by overriding an inborn RH dominance for the same task. thus, there is no doubt that the color term lexicon heavily influences how we categorize colors in the adulthood.
Here is their conclusion:
Evidence suggesting that color CP varies cross-linguistically, and that color CP is eliminated by verbal interference, has supported the hypothesis that color CP depends on access to lexical codes for color . However, the finding of color category effects in prelinguistic infants and toddlers has led others to argue that language cannot be the only origin of the effect . The current study finds evidence to support both positions. Color CP is found in 4- to 6-month-old infants, replicating previous infant studies. However, the absence of a category effect in the LH for infants, but the presence of a greater LH than RH category effect for adults, suggests that language-driven CP in adults may not build on prelinguistic CP, but that language instead imposes its categories on a LH that is not categorically prepartitioned. The current findings may therefore suggest a compromise between the two positions: there is a form of CP that is nonlinguistic and RH based (found in infancy) and a form of CP that is lexically influenced and biased to the LH (found in adulthood). Color CP is found for both infants and adults, but the contribution of the LH and RH to color CP appears to change across the life span.Sphere: Related Content
Continuing with the theme of my last post, I'll like to highlight an important review article by Happe, in which it is argued that Autism is a different cognitive style and not should not be thought in terms of underlying deficits, but that strengths be also recognized and given equal footing.
The major thesis of the article lies heavily on the 'Weak central coherence' theory of Autism, as per which the Autistics have a cognitive style dominated by local processing at the expanse of the gestalt and which claims that Autistics use too little of context in interpreting information/ percepts. There is a lot of data on which the above is based and I suggest that one read the TICS review in its entirety. For those who prefer snippets instead, here goes:
One current account of autism proposes that a different, rather than merely deficient, mind lies at the centre of autism. Frith, prompted by a strong belief that assets and deficits in autism might have one and the same origin, proposed that autism is characterized by weak ‘central coherence’. Central coherence (CC) is the term she coined for the everyday tendency to process incoming information in its context – that is, pulling information together for higher-level meaning – often at the expense of memory for detail. For example, as Bartlett’s classic work showed, the gist of a story is easily recalled, while the detail is effortful to retain and quickly lost6. Similarly, global processing predominates over local processing in at least some aspects of perception. This preference for integration and global processing also characterizes young children and individuals with (non-autistic) mental handicap who, unlike those with autism, show an advantage in recalling organized versus jumbled material. Indeed, recent research suggests that global processing might predominate even in infants as young as three months.
Frith has suggested that this feature of human information- processing is disturbed in autism, and that people with autism show detail-focused processing in which features are perceived and retained at the expense of global configuration and contextualized meaning. Clinically, children and adults with autism often show a preoccupation with details and parts, while failing to extract gist or configuration. Kanner, who named autism, commented on the tendency for fragmentary processing in relation to the children’s characteristic resistance to change; ‘...a situation, a performance, a sentence is not regarded as complete if it is not made up of exactly the same elements that were present at the time the child was first confronted with it’. Indeed, Kanner saw as a universal feature of autism the ‘inability to experience wholes without full attention to the constituent parts’, a description akin to Frith’s notion of weak CC.
Because weak CC provides both advantages and disadvantages,it is possible to think of this balance (between preference for parts versus wholes) as akin to a cognitive style – a style that might vary in the normal population. There might perhaps be a normal distribution of cognitive style from ‘weak’ CC (preferential processing of arts – for example, good proof reading), to ‘strong’ (preferential processing of wholes – for example, good gist memory). There is existing but disparate evidence of normal individual differences in local versus global processing, from infancy, through childhood43, and in adulthood. Sex differences have been reported on tasks thought to tap local versus global processing, although studies have typically confounded type of processing (local versus global) and domain (visuospatial versus verbal). The possibility of sex differences in coherence is intriguing in relation to autism, which shows a very high male to female ratio, especially at the high ability end of the autism spectrum. Might the normal distribution of coherence in males be shifted towards weak coherence and local or featural processing? Perhaps there is an area of increased risk for autism at the extreme weak coherence end of the continuum of cognitive style – individuals who fall at this extreme end might be predisposed to develop autism if unlucky enough to suffer the additional social deficits (impaired theory of mind) apparent in this disorder.
Preliminary results suggest that parents, and especially fathers, of children with autism show significantly superior performance on tasks favouring local processing: they excel at the EFT (Embedded Figure Task), at (unsegmented) block design, and at accurately judging visual illusions. They are also more likely than fathers in the other groups to give local completions to sentence stems such as, ‘The sea tastes of salt and..?’ (‘…pepper’). In all these respects they resemble individuals with autism, but for these fathers their detail-focused cognitive style is usually an asset, not a deficit. These results fit well with work by Baron-Cohen and colleagues, which showed that fathers of children with autism are fast at the EFT, and over-represented in professions such as engineering.
There is an article in Wired Magazine arguing that autism is not a disease, but just a matter of difference and neurodiversity. It argues that the myth that almost 75% of Autistics are mentally retarded does not stand to scrutiny, but is perpetuated as we use measures of intelligence that are highly verbal in nature.
A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus.
Mike Merzenich, a professor of neuroscience at UC San Francisco, says the notion that 75 percent of autistic people are mentally retarded is "incredibly wrong and destructive." He has worked with a number of autistic children, many of whom are nonverbal and would have been plunked into the low-functioning category. "We label them as retarded because they can't express what they know," and then, as they grow older, we accept that they "can't do much beyond sit in the back of a warehouse somewhere and stuff letters in envelopes."
By the mid-1990s, Mottron was a faculty member at the University of Montreal, where he began publishing papers on "atypicalities of perception" in autistic subjects. When performing certain mental tasks — especially when tapping visual, spatial, and auditory functions — autistics have shown superior performance compared with neurotypicals. Call it the upside of autism. Dozens of studies — Mottron's and others — have demonstrated that people with autism spectrum disorder have a number of strengths: a higher prevalence of perfect pitch, enhanced ability with 3-D drawing and pattern recognition, more accurate graphic recall, and various superior memory skills.
Last summer, the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science published a study titled "The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence." The lead author was Michelle Dawson. The paper argues that autistic smarts have been underestimated because the tools for assessing intelligence depend on techniques ill-suited to autistics. The researchers administered two different intelligence tests to 51 children and adults diagnosed with autism and to 43 non-autistic children and adults.
The first test, known as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, has helped solidify the notion of peaks of ability amid otherwise pervasive mental retardation among autistics. The other test is Raven's Progressive Matrices, which requires neither a race against the clock nor a proctor breathing down your neck. The Raven is considered as reliable as the Wechsler, but the Wechsler is far more commonly used. Perhaps that's because it requires less effort for the average test taker. Raven measures abstract reasoning — "effortful" operations like spotting patterns or solving geometric puzzles. In contrast, much of the Wechsler assesses crystallized skills like acquired vocabulary, making correct change, or knowing that milk goes in the fridge and cereal in the cupboard — learned information that most people intuit or recall almost automatically.
What the researchers found was that while non-autistic subjects scored just about the same — a little above average — on both tests, the autistic group scored much better on the Raven. Two individuals' scores swung from the mentally retarded range to the 94th percentile. More significantly, the subset of autistic children in the study scored roughly 30 percentile points higher on the Raven than they did on the more language-dependent Wechsler, pulling all but a couple of them out of the range for mental retardation.
The new season of Encephalon has started at the Sharpbrains blog and this time addresses 24 questions to the US presidential candidates ala science debate 2008!
There are a variety of good posts there including discussions of free will and whether a trauma is relevant for PTSD ?
Have a look and contribute to further editions!!
Alvaro, at the Sharpbrains , has taken over the ownership of the brain sciences blog carnival Encephalon, and would be opening the second innings on the 18th of feb. He has just posted an announcement on Sharpbrains as to how to contribute. The rules and procedure remain the same. You need to send a mail to encephalonDOThostATgmailDOTcom (convert CAPS to special chars ).
I'm hopeful that we are going to see some interesting posts via this carnival. If you have written a neurosciences/ psychology related post in the past few weeks , do send them to the carnival.
I recently came across an article in the Walrus Magazine on the Rat Park. Basically a rat park is providing an enriched environment to the rats (both physical and social) as compared to the skinner box and then letting them self-administer the drugs of abuse like morphine. It was found that rats were not prone to addiction to these habit forming drugs , if they lived in an enriched environment.
The problem with the Skinner box experiments, Alexander and his co-researchers suspected, was the box itself. To test that hypothesis, Alexander built an Eden for rats. Rat Park was a plywood enclosure the size of 200 standard cages. There were cedar shavings, boxes, tin cans for hiding and nesting, poles for climbing, and plenty of food. Most important, because rats live in colonies, Rat Park housed sixteen to twenty animals of both sexes.
Rats in Rat Park and control animals in standard laboratory cages had access to two water bottles, one filled with plain water and the other with morphine-laced water. The denizens of Rat Park overwhelmingly preferred plain water to morphine (the test produced statistical confidence levels of over 99.9 percent). Even when Alexander tried to seduce his rats by sweetening the morphine, the ones in Rat Park drank far less than the ones in cages. Only when he added naloxone, which eliminates morphine’s narcotic effects, did the rats in Rat Park start drinking from the water-sugar-morphine bottle. They wanted the sweet water, but not if it made them high.
In a variation he calls “Kicking the Habit,” Alexander gave rats in both environments nothing but morphine-laced water for fifty-seven days, until they were physically dependent on the drug. But as soon as they had a choice between plain water and morphine, the animals in Rat Park switched to plain water more often than the caged rats did, voluntarily putting themselves through the discomfort of withdrawal to do so.
Rat Park showed that a rat’s environment, not the availability of drugs, leads to dependence. In a normal setting, a narcotic is an impediment to what rats typically do: fight, play, forage, mate. But a caged rat can’t do those things. It’s no surprise that a distressed animal with access to narcotics would use them to seek relief.
Unable to secure funding, Alexander conducted most of his research in the library, where he gathered a mountain of evidence. A survey of Ontario households in 1987, for example, suggested that 95 percent of those who had ever tried cocaine were using it less than once a month. A 1990 survey conducted in the US found that crack cocaine, “the most addictive drug on earth,” was addicting only one user in a hundred. “Naturally, because scholars are scrupulous, I’ve had to try it [morphine] myself,” Alexander says. “It’s no big deal. You’re visibly lightened of pain and anxiety, and that’s mildly pleasant.” But he didn’t experience any urge to try it again. “I just wasn’t interested, and that’s the typical response.”
Then there are the thousands of American soldiers who became heroin addicts during the Vietnam War. In an unrivalled demonstration of the effect of setting, a 1975 survey found that 88 percent of them simply stopped using the drug when they left the war zone. Their experience has been recreated by millions of hospital patients who have received (and become physically dependent on) morphine for severe pain. If opioids are all they’re reputed to be, this practice should have produced legions of addicts. Instead, as researchers have discovered, once patients are no longer in physical distress, they can’t wait to quit the drug, go through the withdrawal period, and get on with their lives. It’s Rat Park’s “Kicking the Habit” experiment carried out on humans, with the same result.
Dominant animals had more D2 [dopamine receptor] activity than subordinates, but that was a consequence of their dominance, and not its cause [emphasis added]. Regardless of their D2 activity when kept individually, monkeys that became subordinate showed little change in their PET responses after they had been put into company. In the animals that became dominant, by contrast, D2 activity increased significantly… Like D2 activity, cocaine use was related to social status. Dominant animals found a preferred level, then stuck to it. Subordinates, though, seemed to need bigger and bigger fixes as time went on. That is a classic symptom of addiction… Propensity to addiction, in other words, is not a predisposition of the individual, but the result of social context.
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