What Others See.

Jack Dikian

July 2011

Here is a quick look at what others (besides us humans) who share our world see.

1. Horses have an amazing range of vision - that is, except for what is right in front of them. They literally can’t spot whatever is between their eyes and therefore directly ahead due to their binocular vision.

2. Many birds can see differently. Pigeons, for example, can see literally millions of different hues and are thought to be among the best at colour detection ability of any animal on earth.

3. Cats and dogs do not have strong vision. They rely on scent and sound primarily as their sensory detection. Cats in particular have weak vision. They are colour blind, and cats more so than dogs.

4. Snakes have two sets of eyes. One set is the normal eyes that you see, and they detect colour quite well. But they also have vision pits that detect heat and “see” living creatures like an infrared detector.

5. Insects: to the human eye the flower looks solid yellow but insects can aim for the bullseye in the centre

6. Bee: the familiar mop top Dandelion is transformed for the bees

Painful Cringe

Jack Dikian

April 2011

It seems, according to British and German researchers* people vicariously experience embarrassment when observing others' public pratfalls or etiquette violations. Or more simply, the region of the brain that we use to process pain is the same as the one used when we cringe at other people’s embarrassing actions - the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula.

Writing in the journal PLoS ONE, the researchers say watching other people’s embarrassing mishaps triggered the brain regions more usually associated with processing physical pain. It appears we are feeling their ‘social pain’ for them – or empathizing with their misfortune.

One of the researchers said: ‘Worldwide, millions of people gather in groups to watch TV shows such as Pop Idol and America’s Next Top Model and collectively enjoy witnessing plights or mishaps happening to the candidates and perceive “vicarious embarrassment” or “embarrassment by proxy”.

‘The appeal of observing others’ plights exploited via television or internet seems to be present regardless of whether the person in focus realizes the mishap or not.

They go on to write that the activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula positively correlated with individual differences in trait empathy and that the findings establish the empathic process as a fundamental prerequisite for vicarious embarrassment experiences, thus connecting affect and cognition to interpersonal processes.

Apparently the reaction in the brain was more intense for the subjects who described themselves as very empathetic. Also, that the finding suggests there are two forms of empathy. When we see someone who knows they've behaved inappropriately, we co-experience their feelings. If the person doesn't realize what they've done, we react to our evaluation of the situation.

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* Sören Krach^1,2*, Jan Christopher Cohrs³, Nicole Cruz de Echeverría Loebell⁴, Tilo Kircher¹, Jens Sommer¹, Andreas Jansen¹, Frieder Michel Paulus¹

1 Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany, 2 Department of Neurology, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany, 3 School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom, 4 Department of Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany.

Social Stress, Identify and Brain Response

Jack Dikian

March 2011

Stein, Vidich and White expressed the concern back in the 1960’s that the advent of a mass society would lead to a loss of identity and hence to widespread anxiety or stress. As well as interest in the relationship between stress or anxiety and identity, research in how the brain responds to social stressors is growing.

How brain responds to social stressors is said to influence the body's immune system resulting in a number of illnesses. George Slavich and Shelley Taylor, of the UCLA, have shown, for example, that individuals who exhibit greater neural sensitivity to social rejection also exhibit greater increases in inflammatory activity to social stress. Chronic inflammation increase the risk of a variety of disorders, including asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and depression.

The same team suggests that exposure to large amounts of social stress can make the brain respond by modifying the way the immune system responds to threats. These modifications can open the way for numerous diseases or infections to set in, which is why eliminating social stress should become a priority for most people.

Babies Can Count

Jack Dikian

February 2011

The University of Queensland study found children understood the concept of numbers and counting by the time they were 18 months old, at least six months earlier than previously thought.

Child development and milestone attainment has attracted significant research and the topic of a number of underlying models. More recent theories outline the developmental stages of children and identify the typical ages at which these growth milestones occur.

Freud's theory of psychosexual development is one of the best known, but also one of the most controversial. Freud believed that personality develops through a series of childhood stages during which the pleasure-seeking energies of the id become focused on certain erogenous areas.

The theory, put simply, psychosexual stages are either completed successfully, resulting in a healthy personality or if certain issues are not resolved at the appropriate stage, fixation can occur. A fixation is a persistent focus on an earlier psychosexual stage and until this conflict is resolved, the individual will remain "stuck" in this stage.

Piaget suggested that children learn actively through the play and developed stages of development. Piaget proposed the sensorimotor stage (birth to about age of 2) 
during which, the child learns about herself and his environment through motor and reflex actions. Thought derives from sensation and movement. The child learns that she is separate from her environment and that aspects of the environment — parents or favorite toys, objects — continue to exist even though they may be outside the reach of her senses.

His work on children’s quantitative development provided mathematics educators with crucial insights into how children learn mathematical concepts and ideas. Piaget provided tactual representations of mathematical concepts such as conservation of quantities, one-one correspondence, ordination, cardination, classification, and additive and multiplicative composition of numbers. Here he isn’t testing the child's ability to solve math problems, but her ability to solve spatial relationships that are a precursor to true understanding of mathematical operations.

The University of Queensland study found children understood the concept of numbers and counting by the time they were 18 months old, at least six months earlier than previously thought. The researchers showed simple videos of correct counting and incorrect counting to toddlers aged 15 months and toddlers aged 18 months, monitored their reactions and recorded the length of time the children watched each scenario.

The experiment showed that by the time children were 18 months old, they paid more attention to the correct counting video as opposed to the incorrect one.

New Year's Resolutions - brain sabotaging our efforts

Jack Dikian

Jan 2011

New Year’s Resolutions
Does our brain sabotage our efforts

We all know that habits are hard to break – specially the bad ones. It can be said that the bulk of our learning and behaviours is a consequence of earlier behaviours that we found beneficial, rewarding, and / or pleasant. And even when we want to break a habit, we are more likely to identify an alternative behaviour to replace the one we wish to avoid. Some unhealthy behaviours become ingrained and we fight against the power of immediate rewards. Think chocolates and vegetables - Chocolates will trump veggies, more generally, the immediate gratification we receive from eating a chocolate bar greatly outweighs the longer term benefits of eating all of our greens.

There is hard-wiring in our brains that preferences immediate reward as opposed to a delayed outcome. A neurotransmitter, Dopamine is involved in turning that happiness into a habit. It helps condition the brain to want that reward again and again — reinforcing the connection each time — especially when it gets the right cue from the environment. And so, we tend to overestimate our ability to resist temptations, thus undermining attempts to avoid bad habits.

In an experiment, psychologist Loran Nordgren, an assistant professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, he measured whether heavy smokers could watch a film that romanticizes the habit — called "Coffee and Cigarettes" — without taking a puff. Upping the ante, they'd be paid according to their level of temptation: Could they hold an unlit cigarette while watching? Keep the pack on the table? Or did they need to leave the pack in another room?

Smokers who'd predicted they could resist a lot of temptation tended to hold the unlit cigarette — and were more likely to light up than those who knew better than to hang onto the pack, says Nordgren. He now is beginning to study how recovering drug addicts deal with real-world temptations.

Much more insidious

But temptation is much more insidious than the closeness of the cigarettes or that irestable snack. By eating that snack whilst watching our favourite TV show - a dopamine-rich part of the brain named (the striatum) memorizes rituals and routines that are linked to getting a particular reward. Over time, those environmental cues trigger the striatum to make some behaviours (like having those snakes) almost automatic.

Women Apologise More Frequently Than Men Do

Jack Dikian

Jan 2011

Despite wide acceptance of the stereotype that women apologize more readily than men, there is little systematic evidence to support this stereotype or its supposed bases.

Researcher Karina Schumann, from the University of Waterloo, Department of Psychology, Canada confirms that women tend to apologize more frequently than men do, but there's a curious twist as to why this is the case.

In the first study of two participants self-reported offences and apologies over a 12-day period. That is, they reported on offences they committed or experienced and whether an apology had been offered. Women reported offering more apologies than men, but they also reported committing more offences.

There was no gender difference in the proportion of offenses that prompted apologies. This finding suggests that men apologize less frequently than women because they have a higher threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior. So the issue is not necessarily female over-apology.

In the second study, the researchers tested the threshold hypothesis by asking participants to evaluate both imaginary and recalled offenses (3 separate offences were rated by 120 subjects on a seven-point scale). As predicted, men rated the offenses as less severe than women did. These different ratings of severity predicted both judgments of whether an apology was deserved and actual apology behavior.

So, in fact, according to this research, women and men could easily disagree on whether or not a transgression has occurred at all.

Speed of the Human Brain

Jack Dikian

January 2011

Whilst pondering over time dilatation and relativistic effects of motion, it occurred to me to ask what if someone amongst us had a brain/mind that operates at a faster rate. I’m not talking about someone with a high IQ, or someone with a quick wit, rather, an individual whose “time base” (a clock that forms the time base for biological and physiological processes) runs at a significantly faster rate than seen in humans. My initial thought was: does this individual perceive the world to be flowing in a slower motion.

The first thing I needed to understand is what provides our time base. Sure, we have a "body clock", the "circadian rhythm" a self-regulating biological timekeeper. The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a tiny cluster of nerve cells in an area of the brain known as the hypothalamus.

This body clock helps regulate breathing and heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, hormone production, and other vital bodily functions. Our bodies know what time it is by constantly measuring the concentration of a protein called PER in the body.

Buildup of PER, it is thought, slows down a mammal's internal clock, causing it to have longer days. Next I wanted to consider the speed of the human brain compute.

This can be estimated by looking at 3 main variables

• The number of neurons,
• The speed that neurons can fire, and
• The number of how many cells it connects to.

A human being has about 100 billion brain cells. Although different neurons fire at different speeds, as a rough estimate it is reasonable to estimate that a neuron can fire about once every 5 milliseconds, or about 200 times a second. The number of cells each neuron is connected to also varies, but as a rough estimate it is reasonable to say that each neuron connects to 1000 other neurons- so every time a neuron fires, about 1000 other neurons get information about that firing. If we multiply all this out we get 100 billion neurons X 200 firings per second X 1000 connections per firing or

20 million billion calculations per second.