17/06/2010 by admin.

I have always been a little skeptical of the use of self-motivating statements. ScienceDaily has an item on the subject. (here)

Little research exists in the area of self-talk, although we are aware of an inner voice in ourselves and in literature. …Recent research by University of Illinois Professor Dolores Albarracin and Visiting Assistant Professor Ibrahim Senay, along with Kenji Noguchi, Assistant Professor at Southern Mississippi University, has shown that those who ask themselves whether they will perform a task generally do better than those who tell themselves that they will…The participants showed more success on an anagram task, rearranging set words to create different words, when they asked themselves whether they would complete it than when they told themselves they would… in a seemingly unrelated task simply write two ostensibly unrelated sentences, either “I Will” or “Will I,” and then work on the same task. Participants did better when they wrote, “Will” followed by “I” even though they had no idea that the word writing related to the anagram task.

Why does this happen? Professor Albarracin’s team suspected that it was related to an unconscious formation of the question “Will I” and its effects on motivation. By asking themselves a question, people were more likely to build their own motivation…”The popular idea is that self-affirmations enhance people’s ability to meet their goals,” Professor Albarracin said. “It seems, however, that when it comes to performing a specific behavior, asking questions is a more promising way of achieving your objectives.”

The idea that something in consciousness is going to fool or bully the mind/brain, seems pretty weird - but posing a question and making that conscious would prompt planning and this is not trying to fool or bully oneself.

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24/04/2010 by admin.

A recent paper, Unconscious Activation of the Prefrontal No-Go Network, by S Van Gaal and others, has results that may mean that I will have to revise my thinking. Unfortunately only the abstract (here) is available to me and so I have not been able to judge what this should do to my ideas.

Cognitive control processes involving prefrontal cortex allow humans to overrule and inhibit habitual responses to optimize performance in new and challenging situations, and traditional views hold that cognitive control is tightly linked with consciousness. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate to what extent unconscious “no-go” stimuli are capable of reaching cortical areas involved in inhibitory control, particularly the inferior frontal cortex (IFC) and the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). Participants performed a go/no-go task that included conscious (weakly masked) no-go trials, unconscious (strongly masked) no-go trials, as well as go trials. Replicating typical neuroimaging findings, response inhibition on conscious no-go stimuli was associated with a (mostly right-lateralized) frontoparietal “inhibition network.” Here, we demonstrate, however, that an unconscious no-go stimulus also can activate prefrontal control networks, most prominently the IFC and the pre-SMA. Moreover, if it does so, it brings about a substantial slowdown in the speed of responding, as if participants attempted to inhibit their response but just failed to withhold it completely. Interestingly, overall activation in this “unconscious inhibition network” correlated positively with the amount of slowdown triggered by unconscious no-go stimuli. In addition, neural differences between conscious and unconscious control are revealed. These results expand our understanding of the limits and depths of unconscious information processing in the human brain and demonstrate that prefrontal cognitive control functions are not exclusively influenced by conscious information.

What the authors seem to be saying, to my understanding, is that there are two no-go systems: conscious and unconscious. The conscious one actually works to stop an action. The unconscious one only slows the action and does not actually stop it.

If by conscious control, the authors mean control that we are conscious of, I find nothing disturbing. If by conscious control, they mean control that relies on a prior conscious process to come into existence, I find that very disturbing. If they are saying that a signal that is strong enough to stop an action will also be strong enough to enter our conscious awareness, then great. But I am not sure that this is what they mean. If they are saying that there are two paths and a signal enters the one or the other (for some unknown reason) and so it can either be conscious and successful in controlling action along the one path or it can be unconscious and only slow the action down on the other path, then I find it completely unconvincing.

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21/04/2010 by admin.

In the kitchen, a burning hot but fragile dish is dropped and someone catches it and therefore suffers a burn. They did not have time to think about whether this was a smart thing to do; they did it by reflex. But if they knew ahead of time that it was likely that a burning hot dish might fall and that if they caught it they would be burnt, then they can think about whether they want to catch the dish. And reflex or no – if they do not want the burn, they will not catch the plate. We can override many reflex actions but only if we do it ahead of the event that would trigger the reflex.

There are go/no-go situations where you have to commit to an particular action knowing that a very late signal may require you to stop the action in mid flow. Again is can only be done with fair warning. In order to do this the no-go signal has to be part of the planned program for the action.

Why is it so hard to count calories? Every time we are faced with food we have to exercise restraint, do a vague calculation and then use willpower to resist temptation. But if we have a severe allergy to a range of foods, we think about the effects of eating them. Very soon the dangerous foods become non-foods in our minds and we do not bother with them; they are not appetizing and tempting; practically no willpower at all is required to avoid them. It is actually easier to avoid certain foods all together then to cut down on consuming them. Again the key is rational thought about the consequence of actions BEFOREHAND.

Suppose it is important to be on good terms with someone you do not know very well. It would be a good idea to think for a little while about the consequences of what you might regret saying if you lose your temper or what the result might be of an inappropriate joke. Forearmed you can keep anger and humour in check. You are not going to see the dangers if you are unprepared when you begin to feel angry or when a very funny remark jumps up in your mind.

If I want to do something a particular way then I should make it a plan or a habit; then I am unlikely to do it any other way. But the plan or the habit has to be a rational, thought out one that is convincing to me. This is not magic or a shortcut, this is making good decisions ahead of time when I have the time and when I can see things in perceptive. But it is work all the same. It is part of what I call mind maintenance. If you try to make a pretend decision and ‘fool yourself’, it will not work. Decisions made ahead of time must be honestly and rationally made to be ready and useful when required.

Now I could rely on my willpower and my ability to make quick decisions when they are needed. I have known people who resist mind maintenance. They are proud of their willpower and look for situations to test it. When their willpower fails, as it always occasionally does, they feel that they have failed, punish themselves, and look for another test to prove that they have regained their great willpower. Willpower is a limited resource and we should be looking for ways of conserving it for emergencies not squandering it on silly mind game with ourselves.

Also there are people who resist mind maintenance because they take pleasure in spare of the moment decisions. It seems to validate their feeling that consciously made, quick decisions are proof of their free will. This is false - a decision is a decision. It can either be made by the brain or by magic. We cannot tell the difference by introspection. We have to infer how decisions are made from evidence. We can attempt to make them carefully or sloppily. I find it odd that there are people who risk sloppy decisions in order to feel, erroneously, that their decisions break the rules of the physical world. And what happens when we make a really bad decision, what springs into our minds is not that ‘oh well - that is what happens with free decisions’, it is ‘oh my - how am I going to avoid doing that again’. All the ‘if only I had…’ thoughts crowd the mind. So even if someone wants to believe in magically free decisions, they still should use that magic in a careful, rational way and make good decisions if they can and AHEAD OF TIME if possible.

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09/04/2010 by admin.

A. Cashmore has published an article, The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system (here). His conclusion is:

I noted earlier that belief in what I refer to as the magic of the soul and Cartesian dualism has ostensibly disappeared. The emphasis that I now give to “ostensibly” reflects my belief that, in the absence of any molecular model accommodating the concept of free will, I have to conclude that the dualism of Descartes is alive and well. That is, just like Descartes, we still believe (much as we pretend otherwise) that there is a magic component to human behavior. Here I argue that the way we use the concept of free will is nonsensical. The beauty of the mind of man has nothing to do with free will or any unique hold that biology has on select laws of physics or chemistry… The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will. Some will argue that once we understand better the mechanistic details that underlie consciousness, then we will understand free will. Whatever the complexities of the molecular details of consciousness are, they are unlikely to involve any new law in physics that would break the causal laws of nature in a non-stochastic way…. any search for some new “Lucretian” law of physics, or some startlingly novel emergent principle, will not be successful.

Many believe that the consequences of a society lacking free will would be disastrous. In contrast, I argue that we do not necessarily need to be pessimistic about confronting a world lacking free will… Certainly, crime is a problem that society has much difficulty dealing with… surely it is inexcusable that in addressing these problems we continue to entertain this fallacious assumption discarded well over 100 years ago! It is my concern, that this vitalistic way of thinking about human behavior—a style of thinking that is present throughout our scientific institutions—serves only to hinder…. It is almost with a sense of pride that the authors of (biology) texts may contrast this understanding with the alternative earlier belief in vitalism—the belief that there are forces governing the biological world that are distinct from those that determine the physical world. The irony here is that in reality, a belief in free will is nothing less than a continuing belief in vitalism.

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05/02/2010 by admin.

The question of freewill is an endless philosophical argument. Are our actions completely predetermined or completely free? Each side has painted the other into an impossible corner. I want to forget this argument and just try to understand how we actually act. When we understand how we act then both sides will say, ’see I told you so!’, and their disagreement will continue. This is because it is fairly predictable that we will find that decisions between courses of action actually are made and on the other hand those decisions have non-random causes. Thus the decisions are both freely made and causally determined.

The place to start is to get rid of dualism. We each have one brain and the functioning (perception, cognition, motor control, memory etc.) of that one brain gives us one mind. That brain creates a model of the world and a model of ourselves in that world. An edited version of that model is created for memory storage, sharing and perhaps other functions. The sharing of this version of the model is what we call consciousness. So lets suppose we have one brain, one mind, one model, one consciousness.

Next let us think about different kinds of decisions. There are decisions that are made without any part of the cognition entering consciousness. They ‘pop’ into consciousness fully decided. Then there are decisions where portions of the cognition enter consciousness. Why the difference? The decision may take longer; it may require sharing within the brain of the conscious kind; it may require memory and predictive modeling using the mental apparatus of consciousness; it may require a particular use of working memory or attention; or perhaps something else. Whatever the reason, we are not ‘making a conscious decision’, we are simply conscious of parts of the decision process as they are modeled by the mind for conscious awareness.

To the extent that our brain/mind recognizes action options, it is free to make decisions between them. To the extent that our brain/mind is a material biological system, its actions have causes. Before a decision is made it is impossible to calculate what the decision with be (just too big a calculation to accomplish in this universe). After the decision is made it is impossible to imagine it as outside causality less you want to introduce magic or the supernatural. This is simply how it is with extremely complex but material systems – you have both freedom and determinism.

The question we should ask about our decisions is not whether they are free or not. We should ask whether they are appropriate and relevant to the situation. Whether they are good decisions.

Here is the abstract from a paper by R. Baumeister, Free Will in Scientific Psychology (here):

Some actions are freer than others, and the difference is palpably important in terms of inner process, subjective perception, and social consequences. Psychology can study the difference between freer and less free actions without making dubious metaphysical commitments. Human evolution seems to have created a relatively new, more complex form of action control that corresponds to popular notions of free will. It is marked by self-control and rational choice, both of which are highly adaptive, especially for functioning within culture. The processes that create these forms of free will may be biologically costly and therefore are only used occasionally, so that people are likely to remain only incompletely self-disciplined, virtuous, and rational.

I would use different words and ideas but he is trying to get past the old and sterile argument of freewill vs determinism.

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30/01/2010 by admin.

A report in Science, Movement Intention after Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans, by M. Desnurget and others, has the following summary:

Parietal and premotor cortex regions are serious contenders for bringing motor intentions and motor responses into awareness. We used electrical stimulation in seven patients undergoing awake brain surgery. Stimulating the right inferior parietal regions triggered a strong intention and desire to move the contralateral hand, arm, or foot, whereas stimulating the left inferior parietal region provoked the intention to move the lips and to talk. When stimulation intensity was increased in parietal areas, participants believed they had really performed these movements, although no electromyographic activity was detected. Stimulation of the premotor region triggered overt mouth and contralateral limb movements. Yet, patients firmly denied that they had moved. Conscious intention and motor awareness thus arise from increased parietal activity before movement execution.

So the parietal region is involved in the conscious experience of intention and desire to move (ie the will to move) and the conscious experience of having moved. It is not involved in the movement itself. On the other hand, the premotor region is involved in the movement’s execution but not the the conscious experience of the movement.

The key here may be that the construction of conscious experience is a projection in time of that will be happening later, at the time of the experience. The construction process would therefore need to have access to motor programs that are being created (or even considered) so as to predict and project the sensory effect of the action before it has occurred.

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25/11/2009 by admin.

Anthropology.net has (here) a part of a discussion with Michael Gazzaniga. This bit is about responsibility.

“I did want to come back to the one point on the free will thing because I just think it’s a kind of a red herring. People talk about free will, you should return the question and say free from what, what are you talking about?

I mean what we all are, are information gathering organisms that have learned through a life’s experience what to do, what not to do, what’s good, what’s bad, does this payoff versus that payoff? And when a new situation presents itself we call upon our knowledge of the world from past experience to decide what to do. And that decision goes on through mechanisms of the brain, and once the brain decides, based on all your past experience, to do something, you want it to do it right. It’s not clear to me what free will means in that way of knowing that we have all these automatic processes that are going on in the brain that we’ve trained through time.

I think how you think about it is that personal responsibility, which is a key concept in our culture, is alive and well because it really isn’t in your brain, it’s in the social rules of a group. So think of it this way, if you’re the only person in the world, the concept of personal responsibility means nothing. Who are you responsible to? If there are two people to six billion, all of a sudden the rules develop. If we are going to socially interact, which is crucial for the human condition, we are going to have these rules. Almost everybody—you’d have to be extremely neurologically compromised—almost everybody can follow a rule.”

What excellent good sense!! Stop worrying about whether our decisions are free and start worrying about whether they are appropriate.

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04/11/2009 by admin.

E. Morsella’s theory (here) continued from the last post:

…it is no longer useful to claim that conscious processes are simply more complex, controllable, planned, decision-like, or action-like than unconscious ones. Nor is it useful to propose, as suggested by the integration hypothesis, that unconscious processes are incapable of integrating different kinds of information, for … various kinds of interactions can occur unconsciously. Why can interactions occur unconsciously for the ventriloquism effect, binocular rivalry, the McGurk effect, and the other phenomena … but not for conflicts involving tissue damage, air intake, or consummatory behavior? As explained in the theory presented below, it is because the latter conflicts require information-processing structures having different, high-level concerns, an anthropomorphic term that warrants a precise definition.

…what distinguishes conscious from unconscious concerns reflects not the nature of the sensory afference, predictive capacity, or memory demands involved, but rather the nature of the effectors involved: A common property of the response tendencies presented is that they can all be realized in terms of skeletal muscles plans… supramodular response systems are unique in that their outputs may potentially conflict with each other regarding skeletal muscle plans. …phenomenal states cull simultaneously activated response tendencies to yeild a single, adaptive skeleomotor action… in evolutionary terms, conscious processes served to mediate large-scale skeletomotor conflicts caused by structures in the brain with different agendas, behavioral tendencies and phylogenetic origins… This view is consistent with Lashley’s provocative statement that ‘no activity of mind is ever conscious’ meaning that one is aware only of the products of cognitive processes, not of the processes themselves.

Consciousness in this theory is the way that those ‘products of cognitive processes’ can be melded together into single actions rather than competing ones. Although the predictive nature of consciousness is not mentioned by Morsella, it fits nicely with his theory.

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17/10/2009 by admin.

I have been confused by the way or ways the brain has to make value judgments. Mindblog (here) has pointed to the abstract of a paper by de Brujin and others:

For social beings like humans, detecting one’s own and others’ errors is essential for efficient goal-directed behavior. Although one’s own errors are always negative events, errors from other persons may be negative or positive depending on the social context. We used neuroimaging to disentangle brain activations related to error and reward processing, by manipulating the social context (cooperation or competition). Activation in posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) was increased for all errors, independent of who made the error or the reward outcome. Conversely, activity in striatum was modulated by reward, independent of whether the action was erroneous or not. The results demonstrate a clear distinction between error and reward processing in the human brain. Importantly, the current study indicates that error detection in pMFC is independent of reward and generalizes beyond our own actions, highlighting its role in optimizing performance in both individual and joint action.

That is a lot less confusing.

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08/10/2009 by admin.

ScienceDaily reported (here) on a study by E. Morsella, The Essence of Conscious Conflict: Subjective Effects of Sustaining Incompatible Intentions.

“The results demonstrated that merely preparing to perform an incompatible action, for example preparing to move simultaneously left and right, triggered stronger changes in awareness than preparing to perform a compatible action or experiencing a conflict that does not engage the muscles that move our bodies.”

Projecting our actions into the near future would be a good way to identify impossible combinations of actions. Heightened awareness of these conflicts would highlight the problems. Morsella proposes a theory which predicts that the primary role of consciousness is to bring together competing demands on skeletal muscle.

“If the brain is like a set of computers that control different tasks, consciousness is the Wi-Fi network that allows different parts of the brain to talk to each other and decide which action ‘wins’ and is carried out… The study finds that we are only aware of competing actions that involve skeletal muscles that voluntarily move parts of the body, the bicep for example, rather than the muscles in the digestive tract or the iris of the eye….The results give credence to an interesting idea that ‘thinking is for doing,’ a framework psychologists are using to explore the link among consciousness, perception and action.”

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