Roughly one decade ago chaos theory was all the rage. You know, the butterfly in Africa causing a hurricane to hit Finland and all that.
Oops. Scratch that. Could never happen. The hurricane might hit Florida.
Anyway, the point is that small perturbations can precipitate and/or influence large/complex systems. Like the weather.
Thanks to new research, it now seems our inner “brain storms” can likewise be derailed by butterflies. So to speak. In ‘Butterfly Effect’ in the Brain Makes the Brain Intrinsically Unreliable I learned . . .
[A]ccording to new research by UCL scientists published June 30 in the journal Nature, the brain is intrinsically unreliable.
Damn. My brain is unreliable?! Is that why I’m always exaggerating things?!
Here’s the actual, less glorious, science:
The perturbation was a single extra ‘spike’, or nerve impulse, introduced to a single neuron in the brain of a rat. That single extra spike caused about thirty new extra spikes in nearby neurons in the brain, most of which caused another thirty extra spikes, and so on. This may not seem like much, given that the brain produces millions of spikes every second. However, the researchers estimated that eventually, that one extra spike affected millions of neurons in the brain. [emphasis mine]
Estimated that eventually. . . Indeed.
If you ask me, “brain unreliability” is a glass one one-millionth full. Maybe. At least until demonstrated otherwise.
Older phrenology -
Phrenology (from Greek: ????, phre-n, “mind”; and ?????, logos, “knowledge”) is a hypothesis stating that the personality traits of a person can be derived from the shape of the skull. It is now considered a pseudoscience. [Wikipedia]
Newer? -
Brain structure corresponds to personality
Personalities come in all kinds. Now psychological scientists have found that the size of different parts of people’s brains correspond to their personalities; for example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior. [Eurekalert]
Certainly, this newer hypothesis is off to a much better start. Consider the methods for the study.
For the study, 116 volunteers answered a questionnaire to describe their personality, then had a brain imaging test that measured the relative size of different parts of the brain. A computer program was used to warp each brain image so that the relative sizes of different structures could be compared. Several links were found between the size of certain brain regions and personality. The research appears in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Is there really something to it? Certainly seems plausible. But I wouldn’t jump to a conclusion, pro or con, just yet.
There is something from the article I would like to jump all over, however. This statement got me grunting:
Psychologists have worked out that all personality traits can be divided into five factors, commonly called the Big Five: conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness/intellect.
Psychologists have worked this out? Costa & McCrae’s trait model is certainly the most tested, most used personality inventory. And yes, it has been found to be a useful tool for this or that. But I strongly doubt it stands the test of time.
My greatest beef with the model are the traits themselves. Particularly neuroticism. My study and interest in evolution tells me this trait and others are at least somewhat off-the-mark. Human animals are highly adaptive, and our personalities are multi-dimensional and varied for likely many reasons. I suspect that a future, better trait model will have characteristics that more accurately reflect real-world social dynamics.
But that’s just the guess of a conscientious, somewhat neurotic intellectual.
A fascinating bit of psychological science can be found at this ScienceDaily article: Is Your Left Hand More Motivated Than Your Right Hand?
First, the background research -
Mathias Pessiglione, of the Brain & Spine Institute in Paris, and his colleagues showed that motivation could be subconscious; when people saw subliminal pictures of a reward, even if they didn’t know what they’d seen, they would try harder for a bigger reward. In the earlier study, volunteers were shown pictures of either a one-euro coin or a one-cent coin for a tiny fraction of a second. Then they were told to squeeze a pressure-sensing handgrip; the harder they squeezed it, the more of the coin they would get. The image was subliminal, so volunteers didn’t know how big a coin they were squeezing for, but they would still squeeze harder for one euro than one cent. That result showed that motivation didn’t have to be conscious. [all emphases mine]
For the newer research, Pessiglione and his team looked into whether one hemisphere of the brain can be “motivated” while the other is not. The short answer – it seems so. (The saying “off two minds” just got more interesting.)
The test started with having the subject focus on a cross in the middle of the computer screen. Then the motivational coin — one euro or one cent — was shown on one side of the visual field. People were only subliminally motivated when the coin appeared on the same side of the visual field as the squeezing hand. For example, if the coin was on the right and they were squeezing with the right hand, they would squeeze harder for a euro than for a cent. But if the subliminal coin appeared on the left and they were squeezing on the right, they wouldn’t squeeze any harder for a euro.
Cool. Darn cool even.
I wonder if that explains why every-so-often I get the urge to simultaneously pat myself on the head with one hand while slapping my cheek with another? (Kidding.)
Brace yourself now, here comes a flight of intellectual fancy. Imagine a person silently “saying” to herself about her own thoughts and feelings: Hey, who’s in charge here? An educated answer might be, A whole lot of stuff.
Well, except for the “stuff” part. The educated answer would likely be a little more specific.
Learning is a biological process. As is thinking.
Whenever you learn something, there has been a change to your brain — the organ of learning and thought. Psychologists have described the fundamental element as a change to a neuron’s threshold for firing (more likely group of neurons). But there is more to it than that.
Inject the right chemicals into a person’s brain and he/she will be incapable of forming new memories, of learning anything new. A stroke that damages particular areas of the brain will accomplish the same.
Want to alter a person’s thought processes? Mess up the biology of their brain.
More and more research is confirming the conclusion that “mind” and “body” (which includes the fleshy, wrinkled organ in the skull) are not two separate things.
One recent example went by this title: Experience Shapes the Brain’s Circuitry Throughout Adulthood
My initial response was Well . . . yah. Of course. Still, the study provides yet more information about how animal brains work. In this case, mouse brains.
[N]eurons responsible for receiving input from a mouse’s whiskers shift their relationships with one another after single whiskers are removed. The experiments explain how the circuitry of a region of the mouse brain called the somatosensory cortex, which processes input from the various systems in the body that respond to the sense of touch, can change.
It seems to me that to assume mind and body are two separate and separable things is akin to assuming that what happens to/in a computer’s circuitry and what happens on the screen are simply parallel phenomena.
Your thinking — it’s physical.
No, there is no solitary homunculi of reason that sits in the captain’s chair of our conscious mind, controlling everything we do. So, so much goes on “out of sight” — beyond/beneath our awareness.
Consider this recent psychological finding: Touch: How a hard chair creates a hard heart
In a series of six experiments documented in the June 25 issue of the journal Science, a Yale-led team of psychologists demonstrated how dramatically our sense of touch affects how we view the world.
Interviewers holding a heavy clipboard, compared to a light one, thought job applicants took their work more seriously. Subjects who read a passage about an interaction between two people were more likely to characterize it as adversarial if they had first handled rough jigsaw puzzle pieces, compared to smooth ones. And people sitting in hard, cushionless chairs were less willing to compromise in price negotiations than people who sat in soft, comfortable chairs. [emphasis added]
A co-author of the study, John A. Bargh, went a little “meta” with this comment:
“The old concepts of mind-body dualism are turning out not to be true at all,” Bargh said. “Our minds are deeply and organically linked to our bodies.”
But I wonder. Rather than being linked, could we say that mind is something the body does?
[Recycled post: First appeared here]
This is your brain.
These are your brain chemicals.
This is your brain high on brain chemicals:
Of course results may differ depending on the unique cocktail each brain cooks up. Okay, more seriously now, a new study has re-discovered what I thought had already been discovered. The human brain makes its own marijuana-like substance. Endocannabinoids, I believe they are called. Which makes sense, because for exo-cannabinoids to work — i.e., why smoking marijuana does more than irritate the lungs — they need receptors to bind to. And certainly Gawd didn’t diabolically create us so that modern generations would get stoned in a new and different way. Of the article I liked this sentence the best -
Now, we see that our brain has been making proteins that act directly on the marijuana receptors in our head.
“In our head?” Why not go with noggin? And “marijuana receptors”? Isn’t this a bit like calling an ear canal a Q-tip receptor?
