Pupil's Bigger Pupils


Apparently we spend a great deal of our day with thoughts that are unrelated to the task that we are performing. Of course, this gets worse when we are doing something boring or of little importance to us.

Once our psychologist/neuroscience friends get going, they can set up tasks in the lab that would bore the socks off most of us. Smallwood et al set 9 healthy 20-year old guys to watching computer monitors flashing numbers at them every couple of seconds for about 20 minutes (1). Interspersed with the numbers were X’s and the guys had to hit a button so their reaction times could be measured.

At the same time their pupils were monitored as an indicator of the level of Norepinephrine sloshing about in their brains. Bigger pupils correspond to larger amounts apparently. Now norepinephrine levels affect cognition and decision-making – low levels have been indicated as being connected to ADHD.

After their rather boring 20 minutes, the participants were grilled about their inner thoughts and their dilated pupils corresponded to their having more task unrelated thoughts, that is they were starting to daydream. Their slower reaction times also correlated with their larger pupil diameters and hence their daydreaming.

Of course there is a theory – an Adaptive Gain Theory, which suggests that at higher levels of norepinephrine the attention becomes defocused so that alternative possibilities to the current goal may be explored.  This apparently is  a good thing for both non-human and human primates as they can become mentally disengaged from something boring and easy so as to get some new bright idea.

Perhaps in the future, when we have more and more teaching at our computer screens, the face-time cameras will be monitoring our pupil’s pupils to make sure that they don’t start to dilate and bring them back to reality as soon as they do. Of course, if they nod off, we’re stuck.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033706


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Best Birthday Month?


With Spring well under way, at least by the calendar if not by the weather, many of us are beginning to feel more optimistic. It is a classic time for young people to get married too.

There are consequences to young people turning towards thoughts of love and there is a good chance that we’ll start to see these next January. We know from Gladwell’s study that January is a good month to be born if you plan to be a professional hockey or soccer player (1). But apparently there is a downside.

There has been a murmuring around the psychiatric fraternity that it is a bad month to make your entrance as you may be more prone to psychiatric problems like schizophrenia. Disanto et al have gone after this with a large study of almost 60k patients and 30k controls in the UK database (2).

The results quoted are that January is a poor choice for your birthday if you wish to avoid schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. July through September are rather better choices. May appears to be slightly iffy for a propensity for recurrent depression with November being the best choice.

The seasonal nature leads the authors towards the suggestion that vitamin D or lack thereof might have something to do with it, although, as the data is from England, big seasonal differences in sunshine would seem to be a little tenuous as an explanation, but I may be taking an overly gloomy view.

Before we all get too bent out of shape though, I should point out that the peak to trough differences are about 17% with a uncertainty of ±5%, which isn’t going to give anybody a free pass if they target the best birthday month for their future offspring.

  1. http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html
  2. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034866t


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Greener Grass On The Other Side


Our wild friends, whether they are herbivores or even rodents, have to forage for a living. What happens when their foraging range vanishes? This could be due to weather, invasion by another species, including the most greedy – man.

They have to move to a new range, but what are the processes and what is the best frame of mind for the foragers? Should they be pessimistic or optimistic about their chances? Berger-Tal and Avgar have had a go at modeling the problem and report out in the Public Library of Science (1).

The classic model is based on the idea that the foragers should stick in a new area until the forage quality drops to a certain threshold and then move on. Their new model compares that pessimistic model (i.e. hang on to what you’ve got) to an optimistic model that expects that greener grass is to be found on the other side of the hill.

The simulation shows that a good amount of optimism wins out. They explore more and hence find more forage so that over the experimental lifetime, they consume more forage.

Of course, like everything in life, one might overdo it. Too much wandering might not give enough munching time, but generally a good deal of optimism is a winning strategy. The initial exploration may cost in munching, but the long-term knowledge gain will always pay off in the end.

Maybe we should all learn to stay optimistic as our forage comes under pressure?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034578


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Hot Tub Or Videos?


Macaca fuscata                                                    photo credit Yosemite


Isolation is hard for most of us primates; whether we are human or other we are mostly social species. The Orang is perhaps the exception. The Japanese Macaque is certainly social to the extent of sharing a warm bath in the winter.

If we put these creatures in a small cell, we find that their behavior becomes erratic and is classified as abnormal by the animal psychologists. Given the choice of a social hot tub and a small cage, most of us would probably be drawn towards the hot tub.

Of course, a good selection of movies would be welcomed and our friends Macaca fuscata is no exception according to the recent study by Ogua and Matsuzawa in the latest issue of J. Applied Animal welfare Science (1).

Their study group of macaques were spending about a third of their time in abnormal behavior until they were awarded privileges. These were videos and the macaques could turn these on themselves. They showed distinct preferences for movies with people or in animated movies, there being a world shortage of movie stars from the Macaca fuscata population.

Their attention span lasted for most of the movies – nearly two-thirds and it could probably have been more if the subject matter had been better tailored.  Their bad behavior dropped during movie time and even afterwards it had fallen to only spending a quarter of their time being abnormal.

As I don’t have a communal hot tub handy, I’m looking forward to the good weather so that I can be social and get away from videos with people and animations. I’m sure my abnormal behavior rate will drop in proportion.


T. Ogura & T. Matsuzawa, J. Appl. Animal Welfare Sci., 9, 221, (2012).

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Being Socially Contagious


Contagion, apart from being a recent movie title, is something we all shy away from, especially when it is attached to ’flu via the name of an animal such as a pig or a chicken. The usual idea is that it (the contagion) will spread faster, the more contacts that people have who are harboring it.

The assumption that it is best to avoid contact is a sound one, but other factors come into play as every contact is not the same as every other one. The modeling of contagion has become a fertile ground and it is easy to see why this is important in the prediction of a disease pandemic.

But it is not only disease that can spread like wildfire through a population. Fashions do too, whether they are based on style, the latest gadget and now being a member of the right social network.

All this adds to the pressure to understand the contagion model that is going to be a robust predictor of the spread via contact. Ugander et al in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science have data-mined the registration of new Facebook users for the year 2010 (1). Anonymity was maintained as the users were just nodes in the network, so any one of us was just one of almost a billion users on the day chosen that year.

The focus was sharpened to 10M users with a variety of friend numbers after a week and an interesting result emerged. The numbers of contacts wasn’t the driver for being socially contagious, rather the diversity of the contacts was more important.

This has some interesting implications as it seems that we like to connect with people coming from diverse backgrounds, points of view etc., although the usual concept was that we tended to stick in our own type of group. It seems that the Internet is a bigger force for democratization than we’d realized.


  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/27/1116502109.full.pdf  


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Teaching Culture


A large number of the species on the planet invest heavily in the future by caring for their young. Protection is part of that, but teaching life skills is a major part of the investment. Play is often a major activity, which is centered around the learning process.

Not all learning is around survival skills. Cultural aspects are imbued at the same time. We are very aware of the wide diversity in human culture and these traits are robustly passed on from one generation to another.

The question of does culture get passed on at an early age and what is the process was the question addressed by Nielsen et al from the U of Queensland last week (1). Their approach was to study groups of 4 to 5-year olds in Australia and Sri Lanka after they had been taught to open a box and then passed on that knowledge to other children who passed it on further.

The experiment took two basic forms. In the first the adult went through a formal teaching operation to open a box using many useless/redundant steps and then let the teaching chain of one child to another take over. In the second set-up the teacher made it a game and then allowed a play chain to take place.

The result showed that the result of the formal teaching was a poor route for passing on the redundant/useless steps and by the third child; most of those actions had fallen away. In contrast, when a play mode was employed many more of those redundant steps were retained.

The redundant steps were taken as a surrogate for cultural ritual, which was not necessary for success of the task. The conclusion drawn was that culture is better learned through play rather than being formally taught.

If this is correct, we can shrug off our cultural differences in three generations as long as they are not being formally taught anew to each generation. When we look at youth pop culture, it is easy to believe that is so, but when we look at the antagonism to multiculturalism, we had better stop formally teaching culture.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034066


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Logo Power Rules


Retail therapy is a valuable way of cheering many of us up. It may or may not be an expensive acquisition, and it may not have to be new, but we do like it to be of a well-known brand. Indeed, some people are more obsessed with acquiring the right brand than the particular object.

Clearly, if this is a piece of artwork by a famous artist this makes sense, but if it is your shoes or phone, it is not quite so easy to understand. Of course, the enthusiasts for that brand will eulogize endlessly over many glasses of wine or beer on the merits of that manufacturer’s product.

Now it seems that our love for a brand can lead us to make decisions that are completely unrelated. Murawski et al have shown how our decision-making is affected by looking at a brand’s logo just prior to making an unrelated investment decision (1).  The team formed a scary alliance between psychologists, neuroscientists and management/marketing people to tempt 18 young students with offers of cash.

Of course the big magnet was in play for fMRI studies and the human lab-rats were flashed either a picture of a teacup (it was in Australia, so it wouldn’t have been a coffee cup) or Apple Inc’s logo. They then had to make a choice between getting $20 immediately, or a larger sum at a later date. The larger sums could be quite large, but the wait for those could be up to 3 months.

Well, nobody was very keen on jam tomorrow when tomorrow was many weeks away. I guess at 22-years old your pecuniary needs are rather immediate. The big result though, was that after seeing Apple’s logo, even short waits were too long and they favored immediate gratification.

Clearly, the Apple logo is very powerful as seen by the queues in Oz for the new iPad with 4G even when the network is not fully developed there. But it is indeed interesting to see that the must have, can’t wait emotion is generated for some deal that has nothing to do with electronics, let alone an Apple product. The prefrontal cortices of the lab-rats were lighting up in a wild display of decision making.

Will we see our marketing gurus fitting out personnel in stores with branded items to ensure that customers will buy more potatoes because the store staff are wearing fancy Nike-logoed shoes and shirts and using iPads? It seems that logo power rules indeed.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034155


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