The Insula: recasting body sensations as emotions

From the New York Times:
"According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.

They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/health/psychology/06brain.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Virtualize the UI?

It was interesting listening to the designer comments and reading the reactions. It seems to me that the time to virtualize the UI has arrived. This mean extending the presentation adaptions for mouse/touch, keyboard/virtual kb, screen sizes, etc, right down into the presentation design. I can't see it would actually be that much more work and it would allow users to choose the presentation paradigm.

I'd been thinking of this in terms of my 82 year old mother for whom moving from Win7 to Win8 would be just too much. Just trying to get her to just shift email clients is actaully too much, let alone a complete OS paradigm shift. In a couple of years - if she's still around - it will be a case of staying with an unsupported OS or moving to something close to the old UI like Linux perhaps. There are a lot of people in similar in the same or similar floating transportation systems.

(I've also thought that there should be more emphasis on building systems that adapt to the expertise level of the user, rather than designers trying to adapt all levels of users to their one slick and sexy interface. Design treads various trade-off lines including a big one between obvious easy usability on one hand, and sexy newness on the other. This line is actually different for users, but vendors and designers want a one size that fits all product. There's even an element I-get-it-you-don't to many products that, like teenage buzzwords, exclude the uncool. Exclusivity requires exclusion.)

The alternative would be to use a CSS-like presentation approach to the whole UI. Your open applications could then appear as Win8 rectangles, start strip icons, phone popup list items, or whatever they come up with next. Notifications would be sent through the preferred notification paradigm and shake, rattle, pop or coalesce.

Competition implies value in chimps

Since most behaviour is actually driven by proxies of one kind or another - like the sight or smell of food being a proxy for nutrition - we might expect that competition itself would be a good default proxy for scarcity and value.

I am reminded of ape communities where the top male produces half of the offspring of the troop while at the top then is killed by guy who takes over because he's too dangerous to have around.  A big stakes game.  It would take a few nasty beatings to get to the top and give a few to remain there.  The risk might actually provide the physiological oomph - in the form of stress hormones - that would tell him to stick around and compete.  Competition, stress, value and risk-taking are regularly associated.

The fact that there are random scientists wandering around with undisclosed bowls of food is vaguely misleading to us because of we are trained to think abstractly about chance.  In a more natural situation with imperfect knowledge, competition itself should be a useful indicator of value.  A chimp might reasonably assume* that the hidden bowl contains more if the scientist wants to fight for it or even if there is competition in its general vicinity.

* Ok, I know chimps aren't philosophers who "reasonably assume" stuff.  What I should say is ...

Comment at http://evoanth.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/ape-risk/

Death by Sitting

Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

> A growing body of evidence is pointing to the health risks associated with sedentary behaviours, and in particular risks associated with prolonged periods of sitting, independent of other physical activities.

While the benefits of exercise are well-established it is possible that the case against sitting may be oversimplified and the biology may be more causally complex.  The evidence against sitting is largely based on observation rather than intervention studies.  However, people who tend to have lower physical health and lower metabolic rates will tend to end up in sitting jobs and will also tend to die earlier.

See, eg:

 "Are people dying early because they sit too long, or are they sitting so long because they'll die earlier?"
http://drlutz.blogspot.de/2012/07/how-media-monkeys-get-you-panicked.html

Disclaimer: I try to avoid sitting for long periods.  I run a background application "Eyeleo" (in Windows) that tells me to take 8 second eye breaks every 15 minutes and 3 minute get-up-and-move breaks every hour.  It greys the screen during the long breaks and even has a no skip option is available for the recalcitrant.  I try to take the lift to the ground floor and walk up the five floors back to my desk job on four of the long breaks each day.  While the the sitting effect may be overstated, lots of good intervention studies indicate a strong link between improved fitness with improved health.  Some current research efforts are finding that short bursts of intense exercise improves physiological markers as much several times longer gentle exercise. So hit it!
 
Jim

[Link crosspost]

Conservatives can't get science

Are conservatives hostile to science because science is hostile to their causes or is the problem actually a lot worse:

Tim Dean:

I’d like to advance a fourth hypothesis: the same psychological proclivities that predispose individuals towards conservatism and the Republican party are the same psychological proclivities that predispose those individuals to not have a strong interest in science.

Contrary to the popular view that political attitudes and ideological commitments are the product of environmental factors, such as family upbringing, socio-economic conditions, or rational reflection, in fact it’s psychology that plays a dominant role in influencing an individual’s political leanings. And career choices.

Some of these key psychological features are:

    Openness to experience (Mondak, 2010)
    Integrative Complexity (Tetlock, 1983)
    Tolerance of Ambiguity (Jost et al., 2007)
    Uncertainty Avoidance (Jost et al., 2003)

http://ockhamsbeard.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/science-and-politics/

Competitiveness of solar PV power improves

http://www.bnef.com/WhitePapers/download/82  

• Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels is now much closer to competitiveness with conventional electricity generation than many policy-makers and commentators have realised.
• Average PV module prices have fallen by nearly 75% in the past three years, to the point where solar power is now competitive with daytime retail power prices in a number of countries.
• The metrics generally used to measure the economics of solar power against alternative power generating technologies are often inadequate, and may introduce bias against the deployment of PV technology.

The paper was written by 10 authors with exceptional insight into the economics of solar power.

Sex and Housework

From a biological perspective, the primary reason for anyone to have sex is to procreate. Sex does have some additional value in social bonding but if procreation wasn't driving the show there would be zero sex. Your own or anyone else's interest in sex is a structural expression of biological requirement for procreation. Of course, this isn't the feeling or narrative interpretation we put on sex but why would it be? We are built by evolution not to understand ourselves and the world but to have capabilities and impulses that work - or, more accurately worked on the plains of Africa 100.000 years ago.

The biological value proposition of sex for males is quite different for males and females. At the minimum inputs, a male contributes a teaspoon of semen to "produce" a child while a female (human) contributes contributes 10+ years of physiological expenditure: gestation, birth, lactation, care, food sharing, protection, etc.  This is actually more or less the way things work in chimpanzee society. The males spend a lot of time fighting over the females in order to have sex and the females look after the kids. A female chimp won't let her child out of her sight for it's first six years or so; apart from external predators, other chimp mothers may treat it as a protein supply for their kids. She is the quintessential obsessive mother.

How far have we evolved from this chimp model? Obviously, co-parenting is adaptive or we wouldn't have taken it up. On the other hand, the (new) cost of co-parenting falls mainly on the males so the females had to make it attractive to males.  How? The obvious candidate here is the male obsession with sex. Human females have evolved continuous sexual receptivity and hidden fecundity - features which are AFAIK otherwise unknown in megafauna.  It's a pretty good guess that this evolved to facilitate a deal: coparenting for sex. To augment the deal, we can expect layers of domestication. As the dog that protects the family but doesn't bite the kids was selected, so women selected men who demonstrated personalities compatible with reliable parenting, and in the other direction, men may have selected fidelity and enhanced sexuality. The permutations of these qualities, and the ensuing cultural constructions provide serious entertainment for us, both as observers and participants.

Like all deals, the prospects for cheating and backsliding are ever present: men will skip the housework or the home and women will skip the sex. I'm not proposing any particular solution to this but I do recommend that we acknowledge the basic biological deal, and it's problematical nature. From an evolutionary perspective men are newcomers to childrearing as women are newcomers to recreational sex. It's a deal that kinda works but it's going to require our ongoing efforts to make it work well. If Evolution has Intent, it surely isn't to ensure that every man gets his desired frequency of sex or that women get their toilets cleaned at their preferred frequency. This may require some conscious effort and even a little guile.

(Originally posted as a comment on this article http://wheelercentre.com/dailies/post/d6d50e247f8b/)

Avoiding negatives you're stuck with

System justification theory is a scientific theory within social psychology that proposes people have a motivation to defend and bolster the status quo, that is, to see it as good, legitimate, and desirable.

According to system justification theory, people not only want to hold favourable attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and their own groups (group-justification), but they also want to hold favourable attitudes about the overarching social order (system-justification). A consequence of this tendency is that existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives to the status quo are disparaged.
[Wikipedia]

Johnson and Fujita took this a step further to investigate whether people's willingness to see negative information about a system was related to their perception of the systems changeability.  The idea being that if a system was believed to be unalterable people wouldn't want to know about its downside - so avoid a locked-in feeling - but if the system was perceived to be changeable, then they wouldn't avoid negative information.

Result: Yes.  People avoid negative information about systems they believe cannot be changed.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/23/2/133

Zoom everything

This is pretty cool: how big stuff is zoom from the biggest to smallest:

http://htwins.net/scale2/

Testosterone promotes abstract thought

Testosterone levels during development has been associated with increased risk taking, various physical abilities, and digit length ratios.  This new research also find it also correlates with capacity for abstract thought (measured with Raven's Progressive Matrices).

Organizing Effects of Testosterone and Economic Behavior: Not Just Risk Taking
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0029842

Danger and Creativity

Mueller et al demonstrate in a couple of experiments that

People often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal.

This makes sense.  According to Read Montague, brain scans of our reactions to familiar things have the same signal as when we react to actually good things. In a risky environment this seems powerfully adaptive to me. On the other hand, a capacity take unnecessary risks indicates a biological surplus so should be a plus in the sexual selection stakes provided it doesn't happen to kill you.

For example, this lad is demonstrating a biological surplus.  Of course, he may not describe it like that.  

Sex and personality, methodological error alert

In conclusion, we believe we made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated [due to deficient methodologies and sloppy statistics.]

The primary problem is a poor multivariate distance measure.


The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029265