Tick Tock


Remember those days when you were little and you wanted to go out to play with your friends, but none were available until later that afternoon? How the minutes dragged by! The well-known cliché of your life flashing before your eyes when you think you’re having a near-death experience isn’t true, although a strong feeling of regret about trying to Twitter whilst driving on the freeway is likely to occur. The point here is that our emotions mess with our temporal appreciation.

How long something takes, isn't something to take lightly, indeed, we must approach it with some gravitas. As we deal more and more with machines, whether production lines or personal robotic assistants we have a real need to know (1).

However, we are human and are subject to our emotions, so we have to adjust our clock to Human Emotion Time. Or that is how the received wisdom has it. The pacemaker of our internal clock slows when we’re worked up, aka emotionally stimulated. Lui et al from National U’s of Singapore and Jhongli have tried to pin this down (2).

They carried out a series of experiments with cadres of about 15 female undergrads who were shown images of circles on a computer screen for short intervals interspersed with pictures. The pictures were either neutral scenes like plants and building or nasty, like mangled bits of bodies, assault or toilet scenes, all which would have a significant effect on the equanimity of the observer.

If our internal clock slows down in proportion to how tightly wound we are, the expected result would be for the ladies to estimate that they saw the circle images for longer after seeing the nasty pictures. The reverse was the case. The suggestion was that their attention was distracted by the previous images and that altered their time assessment.

In retrospect, not a surprising result as we know how texting or managing our Facebook wall can make even the most horrible and boring lecture seem short. But I am puzzled as to why only those of the female persuasion were tested. Were they thought to be more emotionally susceptible that we mere stiff upper-lipped males?

  1. http://james-goodwin.blogspot.com/2011/07/momentary-lapses.html
  2. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021829

Remember The Facts


Recalling facts or events with ease is a skill that is generally admired and rewarded. The reward may be small, such as winning a beer in a bet in our local hostelry or as large as passing your examinations to become a Harvard MBA with its promise of wealth beyond the dreams of your erstwhile school pals.

How your brain actually stores the mountain of trivia that we stuff into it and the details of the recall process, which usually digs out bits and puts them back together differently each time, makes for an interesting life’s work. But is there something we can do to fix the information most effectively? Was our parents advice to stop studying and get a good nights sleep before that crucial test good advice?

Yes it was, but so was the handful of cash promised if you got the answers right. Apparently, small rewards are good enough to help us remember. Of course we have to know up front what the deal is. The optimal test strategy is now clear after Tucker and his Harvard U team’s new paper (1).

The equal opportunity test team were 152 Harvard students, who at twenty years old are steeped in the learning – testing cycle. The test was recalling objects associated with a face from photographs of face/object pairs. The reward was a flat fee of $30 for half the lab rats and the other half had a fee of $10 plus a $1 bonus for each correct answer up to a maximal earning capacity of $40. The procedure was to learn either in the morning or in the evening. The tests were then conducted either 12 hours afterward or twenty four hours afterwards.

So, what is the optimal way to study for that test? The clear winners were the students who studied at 9 p.m. and had a good nights sleep for a 9 a.m. test, and these were also on the cash bonus track. Clearly, hungry Harvard undergrads will work for peanuts.

Learning in the morning and being tested in the following evening wasn’t very good. I guess too much junk, Twitter feeds and Facebook work was crowding out the important stuff.

Apparently the sleep period helps to fix the information. Testing after 24 hours was bad, but again sleep straight after learning for a test the following evening was still better than having a day to junk up your learned stuff.  So your mom was right after all – turn off your smartphone,  get your head down and remember the bonus.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021737

We Just Can't Help It!


Not only are we creatures of habit but we have a tendency to fit in by doing the same things as our neighbors or the people we are reacting with. The old saying that “imitation is the highest form of flattery” doesn’t cut it, though. Often the imitation is unconscious or automatic. Quite unconsciously we find that we all are doing the same thing. Yawning is a good example of this automatic imitation and is often given as an example of empathy (1) when the feedback mechanism is strong and the yawnee increases the yawning of the original yawner.

What happens to the automatic mimicry when there is skin in the game? Do we then get strategic about things and turn off the switch or are we just victims of our nature? Cook et al have a paper in Proc. Roy. Soc. indicating the latter.

The study used the ultimate decision making game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” that we learnt in school and is played with the hands by we lesser mortals, but with much more sophisticated tools by the rich and powerful of the world. Groups of students were paid $8 to play the game and the skin was put in by paying a $4 bonus to the winner of each multiple game round with an additional $4 bonus for the largest number of correct choices. The latter was essential to eliminate any desire for draws. Some rounds were played with both players blindfolded and some with only one player blindfolded.

When both players were blindfolded the results were nicely described by the stats for random chance. But the exciting result is that when one player was blindfolded, their opponent lost slightly more often. To be more explicit, draws also occurred more frequently with the blindfolded–sighted combination. So, on balance, being blindfolded meant more $$$ in this experiment.

The explanation lies in automatic mimicry – we are victims of our nature, or our mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons were identified in macaques in the ‘90s.  They pick up the start of a motion in a fraction of a second. The hungry student competitors were filmed and their reaction times plotted. All the sighted ones showed at tail toward long reaction times. Which means that on those slow reacting occasions, their mirror neurons would start the action cascade to produce a draw and leave them out of the running for the bonus.

I am left pondering does this result mean that, on balance in a competitive world, it is better to act first so that you opponent will only try and match you, giving you more opportunities to win or should we try for empathic feedback and cooperate?

  1. http://james-goodwin.blogspot.com/2011/05/tiring-day.html
  2. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/07/12/rspb.2011.1024.full

Asexual Revolution


In the chaparral and old growth Douglas fir on the west coast of the US, live the Timema, a little stick insect which has several distinct lines who have all sworn off sex for the past million years. There have been no signed pledges here. They are all female and prefer to clone themselves rather than have any males cluttering up the place. This curious behavior has been brought into the daylight by Schwander et al of Simon Frazer U in a recent report (1,2).

The received wisdom is that cloning is not a good strategy for the long-term survival of a species and that sex is the more rewarding way to go. However, two of these female-only lines have been going happily on with virgin birth after virgin birth for a million or more generations and at least three others for half a million.

Their mitochondrial DNA is a good indicator of their parentage and it is interesting that chunks of their nuclear DNA (alleles) showed greater divergence in individual lines than that found with related species who rely on a regular sexual preference for continuation of the species. So all this wild making out that we see in most species leads to a more standardized DNA with less drift than occurs with an asexual approach to life.

The puzzling question is why did they end up this way. They are a complicated animal species and it is a fair bet that somewhere on their development path their ancestors were sexually active. Did they “decide” at some point that producing males was just too darned expensive.

Digging around, I read that a parasitic bacteria can cause parthenogenesis with some insect species and honey bees do a bit of both, as do some crayfish. Sharks in aquariums have been observed to resort to it and turkeys can, apparently, be bred to it. In 2004 and 2007, stem cell lines from human embryos which were produced by parthenogenesis. If too much of this catches on, our chances of getting lucky on a night out will drop to that of winning the lottery!

T. Schwander, L. Henry & B.J. Crisp, Current Biol., 21, 1129, (2011).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14122050

Thank You!

Being polite is, or so I thought, something that we were taught by our parents when we were young. The rules of etiquette have been reduced in number and severity over the years but they still lurk deep in our psyche. One action that we often encounter many times a day is going through a door in front or after someone whom we don’t know.

When someone lets the door slam in our face, we say “how rude” and mutter dark thoughts about the person’s parentage. We, of course, would never do such a thing, but I’ll bet that you’ve been caught while a string of people walk through while you are keeping hold of the handle. We grin and mutter for a few moments, but we get over it. Clearly, door behavior is a major is a question of etiquette, but the real question is what is the reason that we all do it.

This is clearly something that needs a study. Santamaria and Rosebaum rose to the challenge (1). They started with two working hypotheses.
  1.         The first was that a person would hold open the door for a follower if the follower was within a critical distance from the door opener.
  2.    .     The second was that the door opener calculated the total effort expended by both people and if it was less by holding the door open, it would be held.
  3.       There is a third, but it falls outside the rules of etiquette. It is that the opener finds the follower attractive and is initiating their catch and release procedure.


Well, after a deal of measuring distances and timing, the conclusion was that the critical distance was not the key. We are apparently doing complex calculations to minimize communal effort, but empathy will also produce a response. That is, the followers will speed up to lessen the effort of the door opener and the total communal effort is apparently reduced. 

Not everyone is great on empathy though and some people will stroll through like they are royalty and you are an adoring subject. Luckily, that doesn’t occur very often and the concept of some of the underlying reasons for etiquette being the minimizing our joint effort remains intact. Other etiquette requirements, such as what you do with your pinkie when sipping Earl Grey with lemon from your bone china teacup, remain for the moment one of life’s great mysteries.

  1. J.P. Santamaria, & D.A. Rosenbaum, Psychological Science, 22, 584, (2011).

Our Communal Memory


The old fogies amongst us, that is, anyone over 30, will recall examinations that required that we remember all sorts of stuff. Such things as open book exams were dangled on the horizons of our desires. Those classmates who did well and remembered all that stuff were deemed to be clever. Now things are very different. There is no need to store all that general information and tie up those synapses with trivia. Google, Wikipedia and their lesser brethren are a few thumb taps away.

Now that we no longer have to try and remember things, we have to get organized with our bookmarks and favorites. Re-searching the whole of the collective memory would take too long if we had to do it afresh every time. Instant gratification is already taking too long. So now we have to remember where to find things in our transactive memory.

Sparrow et al have been testing students (not old fogies) on their interaction with computers and if they try and remember what they were doing (1). There were a series of tests, but the interesting one was where they had to type in lots of trivia statements that they were given and the computer told them that it had stored it in a file or had erased it. Half of the students in each of these groups were also asked to remember the statements.

Well, no one did very well remembering many of the statements. The ones that were told that the data would be erased did better, though. They also did better when shown the statements, many of which had been slightly altered. Being told to remember did nothing for them. It was the knowledge that it would be erased so they wouldn’t be able to look it up that worked. When students were told that the information would be stored in one of a series of folders, they were much better at remembering the name of the folder than the details of the information.

The tendency, then, is to remember where you put things rather than exactly what they are, even when the trivia was a memorable as “The international dialing code for Antarctica is 672,” “Bluebirds can’t see the color blue” or “A quarter has 119 grooves around the edge.” Any of these gems must be worth a beer in any bar room discussion.

The downside is, of course that knowing a fact is not the same as understanding it. We still have to learn to ask why or else we’ll stagnate. So it will be interesting to see if we become smarter now that we  have our huge transactive communal memory in addition to our personal one, thus freeing up our little grey cells for creativity and leaving parroting to the parrots.

  1. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745

Shocking Behavior

One of the characteristics that many of us are proud of as humans, and would say that it is an essential prerequisite for a civilized society, is our predisposition for empathy or emotional contagion. So if we witness something unpleasant happening to someone else we have an emotional response. The level, of course, may depend on exactly what is happening to whom. This characteristic is important for such things as bringing up our children, interacting with customers and most of our social interactions.

We learn as babies to cry if we hear others cry and we carry on with this emotional contagion when, as kids, we scare each other with ghost stories or, as adults, when we panic buy when he hear that there is a shortage of some commodity.

Genuine empathy, though, goes somewhat deeper so that we understand the causes of our emotion and prosocial behavior results. Currently, the neuroscientists are still at the guessing stage in understanding how these responses are differentiating in the brain.

But before we become too smug about the proclivities of our species, we should be aware that mice and rats are also empathic beings. Atsak et al have presented a study showing this with rats (1).

If a rat wandering about in a cage gets an electric shock to its feet, it does two things. It gives an ultrasonic squeak and it freezes waiting to see what will happen next. Now, a rat witness to this event will also freeze if they have had a foot shock in their past lives. Ones who haven’t, wonder what all the fuss is about.

Things become more interesting. Once the victim sees its neighbor freezing with it, it freezes for longer. Just as we make more of an event when someone shows lots of sympathy. With the rats the squeaking didn’t do much. Experienced witnesses took no notice when recorded squeaks were played back, indicating that they were being empathic when they vicariously froze and weren’t showing emotional contagion.

We should keep this understanding of empathy in mind with our dealings with other animals as it’s a safe bet that empathy goes broader than people, rats and mice.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021855