Deceiving Memories

Raison d'etre for my blogging has been the infidelity of our memories (here, here). Research blogging confirms my skepticism with a new study.

"A recent study in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology tested whether showing people photos of completed actions–such as a broken pencil or an opened envelope–could influence them to believe they’d done something they had not, particularly if they were shown the photos multiple times. 

Participants were presented with a series of objects on a table, and for each object were asked to either perform an action or imagine performing an action (i.e. “crack the walnut”).  One week later, the same participants were brought back and randomly presented with a series of photos on a computer screen, each of a completed action (i.e. a cracked walnut), either one, two or three times. Other participants were not shown any photos. 

One week later, they were brought back to complete a memory test in which they were presented with action phrases (i.e. “I cracked a walnut”) and asked to answer whether they had performed the action, imagined performing it, or neither, and rate their confidence level for each answer on a scale of one to four.

The results: the more times people were exposed to a photo of a completed action, the more often they thought they’d completed the action, even though they had really only imagined doing it.  Those shown a photo of a completed action once were twice as likely to erroneously think they’d completed the action than those not shown a photo at all.   People shown a photo three times were almost three times as likely as those not shown a photo.

Two factors in this study speak to the malleability of memory. The first is duration of time. The experiment was carried out with a week between each session, enough time for the specific objects and actions to become a little cloudy in memory, but not enough time to be forgotten.  This lines up well with real-world situations, such as someone providing eye-witness testimony, in which several days if not weeks might elapse between recollections of events. 

The second factor is repeat exposure to images.  The study showed that even just one exposure to a photo of a completed action strongly influenced incorrect memory.  Multiple exposures significantly increased the errors. One real-world takeaway from this result is potentially alarming: the possibility of using images to alter someone’s memory of a face or other critical element such that his/her testimony is tainted. 

A similar study discussed here tackled the same sort of memory issues with video instead of photos, and found a similar result.  Both studies point to a realization becoming clearer with time: memory is far more changeable than most of us realize."

The fallibility of our memories tells me to soak in an ocean of skepticism but pragmatic apprehension will probably make life more conscientious.

Follow up on Frans de Waal's Age of Empathy

This post by Ed Yong is a follow on the experiment chronicled in the book Age of Empathy. Internet gives us this great privilege to follow seamlessly the stories we love.

"These new results show that capuchins react negatively to unequal rewards and are motivated neither by greed nor frustration. Capuchins hunt squirrels as a team and once food is found, they willingly share it out among the group. Their intolerance for unequal handouts would foster greater cooperation among monkey troupes by preventing any individuals from monopolising the spoils.
In other studies, pairs of capuchins who cooperate for unequal rewards do better in the long run if they swap who gets the lion's share. De Waal speculates that this need to share the spoils of a hunt could be the origin of our own disdain for inequality.
Even so, de Waal notes that the monkeys' aversion to injustice isn't on a par with humans. They don't like getting less than their peers, but they don't react to getting more. If anything, this worsens any inequality since monkeys that do badly end up shunning the task and its reward altogether, while the one that's better off continues to be rewarded.
It may be that in a more realistic situation, monkeys that were ripped off could just leave and find other social partners, but only further research would tell."

Watch Brain Slicing Live!!

This sounds gross but trust me, it doesn't look "puke-able" when I watched the video. Here is neutropia post:
"HM was an epilepsy patient who suffered horrible seizures from age 16 on. Finally, we was referred to a neurosurgeon, who localized the seizures to the medial temporal lobes, and he had them removed in 1953. The good news: new epilepsy. The bad news: no MEMORY. HM retained all of the memories from before the surgery, but until the day of his death, was unable to create new ones. He continually thought it was 1953. He was capable of doing things requiring short term memory and retained an IQ of 112, but could not remember anything new taught to him. Interestingly, he could retain motor memories, and could learn new motor procedures and remember them, though he didn't remember learning them. HM was altogether a fascinating patient, and taught neuroscientists a huge amount about the brain. Unfortunately, due to his severe amnesia, he lived the rest of his life in a care institute, dying peacefully in 2008.

Though obviously informed consent was a little difficult, every time they asked, HM agreed to donate his brain to science, and the person with his power of attorney also agreed. Thus HM's brain is currently being SLICED into 70um (those are microns, very small) thick sections, in the hopes that we will be able to gain even more knowledge about the man and his brain following death. You can follow the slicing, which is going to take 50 hours, here and here. "

Oxytocin - Lesson 5

More on Oxytocin, this time something really a "touchy" subject, study of premature ejaculation on rats revealed a possible culprit (yes that "goody-goody" Oxytocin again).

"So what is the cause for some rats being slow and other rats being fast? It could be a matter of penile sensitivity, as human men who suffer from premature ejaculation are known to be more sensitive. But it could ALSO be oxytocin! The scientists point that oxytocin-containing neurons in the hypothalamus showed more activation in rapidly-ejaculating rats than in sluggish rats."
"So what did the scientists conclude from this? First, they concluded that "premature" ejaculation is probably just the far end of a bell curve in rats, and this may possibly be the same in humans, no psychological issues involved. They also suggest that rapid ejaculators may have higher oxytocin neuronal activity, which could have something to do with their impressive abilities."

What I've been reading

Again one of my innate weirdness, if I know I would love a book so much even before reading it, I postpone it by masquerading in procrastination. I am trying to get over that annoying habit and finally bought Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio. It's a fantastic book which was written in 1994, which basically opened up the floodgates of "alternate" view of neuroscience. Damasio builds a beautiful scientific case against Descartes famous quote "I think, therefore I am". Earlier, Thomas Willis bought brain to the center of humanness - reason, deposing heart which had occupied the center stage for centuries. Damasio fine tunes it, arguing to reason, reason needs to collaborate with emotions. The heart of the book is "Somatic Marker Hypothesis" and its one spectacular revelations especially the "card" experiment where body "senses" the bad pack even before a visceral reality emerges leave alone self-realization.

The book quotes Phillip Johnson-Laird which epitomizes beautifully the essence of the book - "In order to decide, judge; in order to judge, reason; in order to reason, decide (what to reason about)."
It doesn't mean go through an infinite loop of metacognition but practice makes it possible to poise instead of soaking in a sea of skepticism.

The essence of what neuroscience is and will be contributing to the human destiny is also beautifully written by Damasio (and a reply too those who undermine the significance of neuroscience):
"Of course, there are risks when brains and minds that came from nature decide to place sorcerer's apprentice and influence nature itself. But there are also risk in not taking the challenge and not attempting to minimize suffering. Doing just what comes naturally can only please those who are unable to imagine better worlds and better ways, those who believe they are already in the best of all possible worlds."

David Brooks interview with Damasio is worth every minute.

Agro-Imperialism or New Capitalism or ...?

New trend is in town, I read about it earlier this year on Seed and now NYT reports the same story from Gluf/Africa perspective.

"In response to the global food crisis, wealthy countries  — mostly in the Middle East and North Africa, but also China, India, and South Korea, among others  — are buying or attempting to buy farmland in the developing world. In the eastern and financial presses, these sorts of stories have been coming at a steady drip for more than a year. But somehow, with the exception of a few brief reports  — most casting it as a “win-win” scenario  — the phenomenon has fallen beneath the radar of mainstream western press. That is now likely to change as the trend gathers momentum and the international community begins to respond. On April 6, at a specially convened Manhattan forum, UN food security expert Olivier de Schutter called for a “code of conduct” to regulate the purchase of international farmland. “States, all too often, are led to make such deals because they are attracted to immediate rewards, but they should also look at the long-term consequences,” he said. On Wednesday of this week, Joachim von Braun, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute, will deliver a press conference in Washington, DC, on the controversial issues surrounding this development.
It all started just 20 months ago, when some of the world’s largest grain exporters — notably Russia, Argentina, and Vietnam — dramatically curbed exports in an effort to bring down domestic food prices. The resultant supply crunch sent prices soaring and set off the alarm bells in nations whose major food pipelines had suddenly been stanched. Some initially sought out long-term bilateral trade agreements: The Philippines, for instance, negotiated a three-year deal with Vietnam for 1.5 million tons of rice per year. Such agreements, however, are often tenuous and difficult to broker for more than a handful of years. Sensing their vulnerability, government leaders from Libya to Japan began deciding that importing food and crops would no longer suffice; it is safer, cheaper, better to own the land. And so, throughout 2008, with the world’s attention fixed on elections and Olympics and economic implosion, high-level officials quietly crossed the globe in a diplomatic hunt for arable country."

These new wealthy "countries" were once malnourished (and still are) and now they repeating history albeit in a different way since now they become dominant. There are thousand ways to improve existing land by improving seed potency et al but they are opting to the old way of acquiring more lands except this time from other countries.


"Sheik Mohammed Al Amoudi, a Saudi Arabia-based oil-and-construction billionaire who was born in Ethiopia and maintains a close relationship with the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s autocratic regime. (Fear of both men led my guide to say he didn’t want to be identified by name.) Over time, Al Amoudi, one of the world’s 50 richest people, according to Forbes, has used his fortune and political ties to amass control over large portions of Ethiopia’s private sector, including mines, hotels and plantations on which he grows tea, coffee, rubber and japtropha, a plant that has enormous promise as a biofuel. Since the global price spike, he has been getting into the newly lucrative world food trade.

Ethiopia might seem an unlikely hotbed of agricultural investment. To most of the world, the country is defined by images of famine: about a million people died there during the drought of the mid-1980s, and today about four times that many depend on emergency food aid. But according to the World Bank, as much as three-quarters of Ethiopia’s arable land is not under cultivation, and agronomists say that with substantial capital expenditure, much of it could become bountiful. Since the world food crisis, Zenawi, a former Marxist rebel who has turned into a champion of private capital, has publicly said he is “very eager” to attract foreign farm investors by offering them what the government describes as “virgin land.” An Ethiopian agriculture ministry official recently told Reuters that he has identified more than seven million acres. The government plans to lease half of it before the next harvest, at the dirt-cheap annual rate of around 50 cents per acre. “We are associated with hunger, although we have enormous investment opportunities,” explained Abi Woldemeskel, director general of the Ethiopian Investment Agency. “So that negative perception has to be changed through promotion.”

The government’s pliant attitude, along with Ethiopia’s convenient location, has made it an ideal target for Middle Eastern investors like Mohammed Al Amoudi. Not long ago, a newly formed Al Amoudi company, Saudi Star Agricultural Development, announced its plans to obtain the rights to more than a million acres — a land mass the size of Delaware — in the apparent hope of capitalizing on the Saudi government’s initiative to subsidize overseas staple-crop production. At a pilot site in the west of the country, he’s already cultivating rice. Earlier this year, amid great fanfare marking the start of the program, Al Amoudi personally presented the first shipment from the farm to King Abdullah in Riyadh. Meanwhile, in the Rift Valley region, another subsidiary is starting to grow fruits and vegetables for export to the Persian Gulf.

Al Amoudi’s plans raise a recurring question surrounding investment in food production: who will reap the benefits? As we drove down to the waterside, through fields dotted with massive sycamores, a farm supervisor told me that the 2,000-acre enterprise currently produces food for the local market, but there were plans to irrigate with water from the lake, and to shift the focus to exports. In the distance, dozens of laborers were bent to the ground, planting corn and onions.

Later, when I asked a couple of workers how much they were paid, they said nine birr each day, or around 75 cents. It wasn’t much, but Al Amoudi’s defenders say that’s the going rate for farm labor in Ethiopia. They argue that his investments are creating jobs, improving the productivity of dormant land and bringing economic development to rural communities. “We have achieved what the government hasn’t done for how many years,” says Arega Worku, an Ethiopian who is an agriculture adviser to Al Amoudi. (Al Amoudi declined to be interviewed.) Ethiopian journalists and opposition figures, however, have questioned the economic benefits of the deals, as well as Al Amoudi’s cozy relationship with the ruling party."

The question comes what will happen when water runs out or after few cycles of massive droughts, the "investors" who have no "emotional bond" with the land might simply pack their bags and leave, since it would make little business sense to stay. This is not the kind of food production Norman Borlaug dreamt of for Africa. When it comes to food production, we need self-sustaning countries not hitch hikers. Not everything about this new trend is negative, there are some bright spots to (yes on the self-sustaining front).

"One focus of agricultural investment in Ethiopia is the region of Gambella, near the border with Sudan. The World Bank says it has more than four million acres of irrigable land. “It’s emerald green, the whole place is fertile and they have only 200,000 people down there,” says Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, head of an Indian commercial farming company. Earlier this year, Karuturi signed an agreement with the government to lease close to 800,000 acres on which he will grow rice, wheat and sugar cane, among other crops. Karuturi told me he doesn’t have to export the food to make money; there’s plenty of profit potential in the East African market. He has flown in John Deere tractors, agricultural experts from Texas A&M and commercial farmers from Mississippi to help him get things going. He says he’s raising $100 million in capital from private equity firms for the first phase of the project, which he estimates will ultimately cost well over a billion dollars. “Recently, I saw a lot of articles . . . where they referred to me as a food pirate,” Karuturi says. “This whole thing is so elitist, it’s ridiculous. They want Africa to remain poor.”"

The current perspective is nothing worse can happen in Africa which already hasn't happen. So most are joining the bandwagon and its not right to blame them since African governments are mostly incompetent. At-least a selfish capitalist can quench their thirst and feed them for a while. This is only a short term solution. A crucial difference between say India 50 years ago and Africa today is India had knowledge capital to self-sustain with the technologies introduced to West long after they left. There is mammoth lack of knowledge capital in Africa (There is a scarcity of articles on Africa even on Wikipedia) has  and the best thing this Agro-Imperialism can bring is improve the education standards of just one generation and that will be the only game changing catalyst. One thing we can be sure of is, for better or worse the consequences of this new trend is going to have big social and economic changes. Lets hope its for better.

Neuroscience of a Psychopath

It was bound to happen one of these days, I mean a curtain-raiser for a world symbolic to "Minority Report". WSJ reports (thanks) Jim Fallon's research to find the biological/neurological traits of a psychopathic killer and the research took an interesting turn as he too had inherited the traits of a psychopath. He has to be lauded for disclosing albeit the social effect that accompanies these revelations. The culprit once again is Serotonin (antidepressant Prozac is a Serotonin inhibitor).

"Dr. Fallon looked at about 20 genetic markers linked directly or indirectly to aggression, including compulsive behavior and mood. One marker, which has become a big target for research, is MAOA, or the "warrior gene." Because of the way a high-risk variant of the gene gets inherited, more males than females have it. MAOA regulates the hormone serotonin, which affects mood. In the womb, the high-risk version of MAOA can lead to a buildup of serotonin in the brain. In later life, says Dr. Fallon, this makes the brain less responsive to the normally calming effects of serotonin. Research has suggested that people who inherit the high-risk gene and are raised in abusive environments may be more prone to violent behavior when they get older.
A paper in the journal Comprehensive Psychiatry earlier this year found that not only are boys who inherit a mutated MAOA variant more likely to be in a gang than those without the mutation, they are also more likely to be some of the most violent members. And according to a report in the journal Nature, an Italian court earlier this year reduced a convicted killer's sentence by one year because his psychiatric profile indicated he had abnormalities in brain scans and in five genes linked to violent behavior, including MAOA.
To his surprise, Dr. Fallon found that the analysis of his own brain showed he had inherited certain high-risk forms of MAOA and other various aggression-and violence-related genes.
"I'm the one who looks most like a serial killer," he says. It's disturbing."

Let's put that spontaneous disclaiming litany on hold for a moment, since Dr. Fallon's story has a beautiful dichotomy to it. It's obvious he is not a psychopath and does that mean all his findings are mere hogwash? No, what we inherit (by all means not our fault) is part of what makes "who we are and what we become" and there are so many other nuances like nurturing, family, social and culture which completes (and that's an ongoing process) who were are and what we become. (Blank Slate theory has been long-debunked and so far it looks like the slate is almost half full)

"Dr. Fallon's brain scans are revealing, too. The orbital cortex of the brain, which lies just above the eye sockets, is involved in social adjustment, aggression and impulsivity. It talks to the anterior temporal lobe, which is involved in the processing and memory of emotional reactions. In most people, when they're making certain decisions, both areas are switched on and are roughly in balance. When Dr. Fallon was tested and his brain was scanned, both areas were turned off.
"I'm still in balance, but I seem to have low emotional engagement," says Dr. Fallon, noting that the brains of many cold-blooded murderers reveal a similar picture.
Dr. Fallon thinks that one vital factor may have prevented him from becoming a killer. "I had a charmed childhood," he says. "But if I'd been mistreated as a child, who knows what might have happened?"

The importance of upbringing and nurture of a child is long known and we don't need neuroscience to vindicate that established fact. Where do Dr. Fallon's findings are gonna lead us? Science is a tool that tells the truth and the onus is on the society to utilize it in a pragmatic way. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite (Nitroglycerin, the remorse of which lead to establishing "Nobel Prize"), which lead to the excesses of Nitrogen produced for bomb during WWII, which mushroomed the fertilizer industries, which increased agriculture productivity and eventually to the dawn of "Green Revolution" (and "high fructose corn syrup" as well. Lets for the sake of convenience skip that "ingredient" for now).
History does teach us humans are capable of turning evil into good and that's the only reason we have come this far as a civilization.

Perpetual Education

Another fantastic column by David Brooks - "The Other Education" on how Bruce Springsteen (yes, the rock star) educated him!!

"Like many of you, I went to elementary school, high school and college. I took such and such classes, earned such and such grades, and amassed such and such degrees.
But on the night of Feb. 2, 1975, I turned on WMMR in Philadelphia and became mesmerized by a concert the radio station was broadcasting. The concert was by a group I’d never heard of — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Thus began a part of my second education.
We don’t usually think of this second education. For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.
In any case, over the next few decades Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education. In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.
This second education doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works. In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.
The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.
From that first night in the winter of 1975, I wanted the thrill that Springsteen was offering. His manager, Jon Landau, says that each style of music elicits its own set of responses. Rock, when done right, is jolting and exhilarating.
Once I got a taste of that emotional uplift, I was hooked. The uplifting experiences alone were bound to open the mind for learning."

The power of emotional education is immense and it is what drives us, thrives the intellect in us and makes us what we are. Social sciences is all about these knowledge epidemic diverging according to the culture and geography, in-turn shaping our morals and values.
I personally sucked at the higher education but came out unscathed on both fronts. The spell outside the classroom during the college days taught me more about life and assembled me better to face the vagaries of life. Knowledge oozes all around us from unlikely sources - music, books, nature, witty lines from movies, TV shows, a cabbie, chit chat with a friend, a stranger and of-course there are always going to people who despise us but we still can learn a lesson from them on why not to despise or probably how not to live. These list can go on and on. Universe has been offering us a perpetual education, its up to us to heed for our own good and the society. If not completely, we are partly self-centered creatures and the benefits of this "other" education must be blatantly self-evident. The other education in the "air" helps create "Somatic Markers" and fine tune the existing ones (in the process improve our rationale). In others words, a reductionist statement - fine tunes our gut feelings. The phenomena of neuroplasticity is a toddler nurtured by this education.

The story of Ekalavya in the Indian epic Mahabharata juxtaposes the importance of a third kind of education, self-education. A prefect amalgam of these three education will quench the thirst of our soul.

Biophilia helps change our values

I cannot stress enough, I am so glad to be in this country which is rich in wilderness. Max and I spend hours in woods (he loves it but rather prefers socializing). I never been able to meditate but walking in woods has been my meditation. Scientific American feeds my confirmation bias here (more here and here) :

"The benefits of spending time in nature have been well-documented. Psychological research has shown that natural experiences help to reduce stress, improve mood, and promote an overall increase in physical and psychological well-being. There is even evidence that hospital patients with a view of nature recover faster than do hospital patients without such a view. This line of research provides clear evidence that people are drawn to nature with good reason. It has restorative properties.

But a recent article by researchers at the University of Rochester shows that experiences with nature can affect more than our mood. In a series of studies, Netta Weinstein, Andrew Przybylski, and Richard Ryan, University of Rochester, show that exposure to nature can affect our priorities and alter what we think is important in life. In short, we become less self-focused and more other-focused. Our value priorities shift from personal gain, to a broader focus on community and connection with others. 

To demonstrate this effect, they ran a series of studies. In their first study, the researchers randomly assigned individuals to view a slide show that either depicted scenes of human-made or natural environments. The slides were matched across a variety of characteristics, to eliminate the possibility that the results were due to things like color, complexity, or brightness of the images. The participants were instructed to try to immerse themselves in the images—to notice the colors and textures and imagine the sounds and smells. After watching the slide show (which took about 8 minutes), the participants completed a series of questions about their life aspirations.

Of particular interest were responses to extrinsic life aspirations , like being financially successful or admired by many people; as contrasted with intrinsic life aspirations , like deep and enduring relationships, or working toward the betterment of society. The results showed that people who watched the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations. The effect was particularly strong for participants who reported being “immersed” in the images. This basic effect was further explored in three subsequent studies. The later studies showed the same effect for true nature experiences: being in a small room with plants, for example.

These results are part of a growing body of evidence showing the powerful effect of natural experiences. And, for people like me who enjoy spending time in nature, the results are encouraging. However, when viewed within a larger societal context, the results also provide an intriguing perspective on some noted shifts in the values and priorities or Americans over the past 40 years.

People living in the United States are spending much less time outdoors today than ever before. Data from a variety of sources show that on average, Americans are spending less time outdoors today than they did 30 or even 20 years ago. Children tend to spend more time outside than do adults, but that number too is declining. With the growth of Internet, social networking, on-demand programming, and computer games, there is more to keep us inside than there is to draw us out into the natural environment (or at least, it feels that way).

These trends have not gone unnoticed, of course, and there is a growing concern about the “sedentary lifestyle,” and our loss of connectedness with nature. But the results from Weinstein et al. suggest something else—that this reduction in our exposure to the natural world could drive large-scale shifts in societal values. As their results show, experiences with strictly built environments lead to life aspirations that are more self-focused. These results may help explain the increase in aspirations for fame, wealth, power, achievement, and other self-enhancing values in Western society and predict that this trend is likely to continue.

So the next time you feel like you have lost sight of what is important, take a walk outside. Immerse yourself in the experience. Clear your head by listening to the sounds of the birds, the smell of the sage, and the touch of the breeze. These are the experiences that open our mind and help us to realize that we are part of a larger community."

Mr.Borlaug, thank you for my life and good bye

Norman Borlaug, passed away on 9/12/2009 and I wasn't aware of it for 4 days. I was furious about the little coverage of his demise but that is what this man would have wanted. I am tempted to call him hero, a noble soul, father earth etc after all he has saved more lives in the history of the world than anyone else ever did. I refrain from using these words since this humble man eschews the demigod status he rightly deserves. Its going to hard to find someone like him  for a long long time.

If you don't know who Norman Borlaug is (there is no scarcity on this front), check out here, here , here , here and here. Of course that search engine based in Pal Alto, CA might help you uncover the dichotomous "legacy" (not the personality) of this man.

Direct results  of his noble efforts made sure my life would be comfortable even before I was born. Yes, life could have taken many turns without him but the fact remains the turn it took for good was because of him. I waited for two months to write about his demise but I figured no words could do justice and so instead I inherit a life long obligation of pursuing good deeds.

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert F Kennedy speech in South Africa.