Showing posts with label Politicians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politicians. Show all posts

Dodgy Decision-Making


Many team games, one on one sports or just catching lunch involve us and our carnivorous animal friends trying to out dodge a dodger. One participant will feint and then move in a different direction so that the opponent is deceived and moves in the wrong direction.

So what is involved in this “dance”? Brault et al decided to use rugby as the definitive dodgy game and selected 14 top professionals and 14 non-players as test bunnies (1). 8 professional players from the French league were filmed running towards the camera and making feints to side step the viewer. The movies were turned into virtual reality images.

Two experiments were run with the test bunny defenders wearing virtual reality gear. In the first the movie was stopped just prior to the actual side step so the “defender” had to say which way the “attacker” was going to go. In the second, the action was carried through and the defender had to move to intercept the virtual attacker.

The professionals were much better at blocking than the non-players. The longer the defender could watch before they made their move improved the scores and the experts pushed that as much as possible, but basically it came down to reading the signs.

The dodger artfully moves his body (there are no female players in the French national league) to indicate the direction that he might be going. This is termed “deceptive movement”. However, the dodger is moving fast and his center of mass has to be under control for his intended direction. The center of mass movement is termed the “honest movement” in the paper.

So with practice, the defenders pick up the honest signals and see the deceptive signals for what they are which help their dodgy decision-making. The conclusion is that wearing distracting kit such as fluorescent boots or shoulder flashes would distract the catcher’s eye from the body’s center of mass.

Of course this is the trick well known to conjurors and politicians who do and say things to distract us from what is really going on. And, in spite of our skeptical natures, we fall for it time and again.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037494


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And Yet Another Oscar?


The activity in our brains is yielding more and more to magnetic resonance imaging and reading the genes. In this context, the BBC acted as a catalyst for a rather nice study suggested by Colin Firth while he was doing a bit of guest editing on the current affairs program, ‘Today,’ during the run up to Christmas. He had the bright idea that politicians should have their heads examined. The combined power of the Beeb and Mr. Firth resulted in a labor Member and a conservative Member of Parliament having their brains looked at.

The exciting results were too good to ignore and a study of 90 students at U College London, who are soon to be released into the arms of the unsuspecting public, was started and has now been published (1,2). After the Blair-Brown disaster and UCL being moderately upmarket, no student was asked to admit to being of the Labor persuasion.  They had to rate their political views on a five-point scale between very liberal to very conservative.

The big magnet then teased out their gray matter variations in three parts of the brain. These were the amygdala where your fear factor lurks, the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps you dither and the left insula where feelings of disgust start seeping out from.

The more liberal leaning had more gray matter to dither with in their cingulate cortex. That is, they can tolerate more uncertainty. A fatter amygdala and insula correlated with being conservative and means you have more to get worried about things with and feel disgusted.

Your lifestyle and brain activity do cause changes in your brain so it is interesting to speculate about what they have been teaching these guys at UCL, or have they all been watching too much television, and which channels?

If these gray matter features don’t change much with age and experience, we could save money on elections and just give everybody brain scans as an 18th birthday present and then juggle the parliamentary composition on the basis of a running average. Clearly, the selection of politicians should include information on how plump their amygdalas and cingulate cortexes are. We voters have a need to know.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13661538
  2. R. Kanal, T. Fellden, C. Firth, & G. Rees, Current Biology, 21, 677, (2011).