How your brain makes decisions - by voting!

Exploration - 10.11.10 by Melanie Moran

We know that casting a ballot in the voting booth involves politics, values and personalities. But before you ever push the button for your candidate, your brain has already carried out an election of its own to make that action possible. New research from Vanderbilt University reveals that our brain accumulates evidence when faced with a choice and triggers an action once that evidence reaches a tipping point.

The research was published in the October issue of Psychological Review.

"Psychological models of decision-making explain that humans gradually accumulate evidence for a particular choice over time, and execute that choice when evidence reaches a critical level. However, until recently there was little understanding of how this might actually be implemented in the brain,” a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the new study, says. "We found that certain seem to represent the accumulation of evidence to a threshold and others represent the evidence itself, and that these two types of neurons interact to drive decision-making.”

The researchers presented monkeys with a simple visual task of finding a target on a screen that also included distracting items. The researchers found that neurons processing visual information from the screen fed that information to the neurons responsible for movement. These movement neurons served as gatekeepers, suppressing action until the information they received from the visual neurons was sufficiently clear. When that occurred, the movement neurons then proceeded to trigger the chosen movement.

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Inside Your Head - Who's really in charge?

Time - 7.27.10 by Eben Harrell

Laughing Stock / Corbis

Studies have found that upon entering an office, people behave more competitively when they see a sharp leather briefcase on the desk, they talk more softly when there is a picture of a library on the wall, and they keep their desk tidier when there is a vague scent of cleaning agent in the air. But none of them are consciously aware of the influence of their environment.

There may be few things more fundamental to human identity than the belief that people are rational individuals whose behavior is determined by conscious choices. But recently psychologists have compiled an impressive body of research that shows how deeply our decisions and behavior are influenced by unconscious thought, and how greatly those thoughts are swayed by stimuli beyond our immediate comprehension.

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Here's looking at you, kid - Eye Robot Aims to Crack Secret of Nonverbal Communication

Technology Review - April 16, 2009

Social referencing is the ability to communicate with nonverbal signals. Children, in particular, learn much from the expressions of adults in new situations-whether to be frightened, happy sad etc. Nonverbal communication is important for everybody but in its purest form, perfected by many a primary school teacher, it is possible to control young children with eyebrow movements alone (a skill sadly lacking in many workplaces).

Now nonverbal communication is being roboticised by Yoichi Yamazaki and his pals at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The team has built an "eye robot" consisting of nothing more than a pair of eyeballs capable of conveying a wide range of nonverbal signals. "The proposed system provides a user friendly interface so that humans and robots communicate in natural fashion," say the team

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Brain too simple to understand itself? - Cryptic Consciousness

Conscious Entities - March 21, 2009

I was thinking about the New Mysterian position the other day, and it occurred to me that there are some scary implications which I, at any rate, had never noticed before.

As you may know, the New Mysterian position, cogently set out by Colin McGinn, is that our minds may simply not be equipped to understand consciousness. Not because it is in itself magic or inexplicable, but because our brains just don’t work in the necessary way. We suffer from cognitive closure. Closure here means that we have a limited repertoire of mental operations; using them in sequence or combination will take us to all sorts of conceptual places, but only within a certain closed domain. Outside that domain there are perfectly valid and straightforward ideas which we can simply never reach, and unfortunately one or more of these unreachable ideas is required in order to understand consciousness.

I don’t think that is actually the case, but the possibility is undeniable; I must admit that personally there’s a certain element of optimistic faith involved in my rejection of Mysterianism. I just don’t want to give up on the possibility of a satisfying answer.

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Another warning - Humans May Be Losers If Technological Nature Replaces The Real Thing, Psychologists Warn

ScienceDaily - April 5, 2009

There are Web cams focused on falcons, ferrets and fish, virtual tours of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, and robotic dogs, seals and even dinosaurs. But what about the real deal: observing animals in their natural habitat, hiking the John Muir Trail or a playing with a live pet?

Modern technology increasingly is encroaching into human connections with the natural world and University of Washington psychologists believe this intrusion may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our times.

"We are a technological species, but we also need a deep connection with nature in our lives," said Peter Kahn, a UW developmental psychologist and lead author of a new study exploring how humans connect with nature and technological nature.

Writing in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Kahn and two of his UW graduate students, Rachel Severson and Jolina Ruckert, look at the psychological effects of interacting with various forms of technological nature and explore humanity's growing estrangement from nature.

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