topics: |  psychology | brain | neuro-science

winner of the 2007 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books

Excerpts

The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly diff from the things we might do if we expected it to end abruptly. rather than indulging whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, saving our money so they can enjoy retirement, jogging and flossing so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts... xv

But all this is an illusion. Why illusions are interesting is not because everyone makes a mistake - but because everyone makes the same mistake! Everyone oscillates on the Necker cube or the chalice / two-faces.

1 Looking into the future : Planning

PROSPECTION: looking forward in time or considering the future

Initial claim is that

   "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future."

The claim distinguishes the squirrel's hoarding of nuts and other such
behaviour as not "conscious" (and hence not "thinking") but what he calls
"nexting".  The above instance of prediction while reading is also a form of
nexting.

[AM: Personally I find this distinction, between something called thinking
	about the future, "prospection", say, and something called nexting -
	somewhat ill-posed.  Like the other earlier pronouncements about
	human uniqueness, perhaps it is more a continuum, hence a matter of
	degree.  Here are some actions on this continuum:
		- putting the next foot forward while walking
		- picking up the towel after a bath
		- shifting to the next note during a jazz improvization
		- making the next move in chess
	even the last, to an expert, is surprisingly habitual in a given
	class of positions - and therefore has a good bit of next-ing.
]

Illustrates its point with spikes of humour:
     Any brain raised on a steady diet of film noir and cheap detective
     novels fully expects the word night to follow the phrase It was a dark
     and stormy... It is only when your brain predicts badly that you
     suddenly feel avocado. p.7

Our brains were made for nexting.

Homo habilis to Homo sapiens 9

500 mya: first brains appeared
430 mya: first primate brains
3 mya: first proto-humans
2 mya: unprecedented growth spurt - Homo habilis brain 1 1/4 pound (0.5kg)
  to 3-3.5lb Homo sapiens brain (1.4-1.5kg).  Causes: Speculation runs from
  the weather turning chilly to the invention of cooking

Now, if you were put on a hot-fudge diet and managed to double your mass in a
very short time, not all body parts would share equally in the gain.  Belly
and buttocks wd gain more than tongue or toes.  10
[Similarly for the brain.  One region that showed lot of growth: frontal lobe]

{In terms of brain structure, the frontal brain is what gives us our sense of
future.  Otherwise, damage to the f.l. does little about our speech,
vision, memory, or other aspects of intelligence.  For much of the late 19th
and early 20th c. it was thought to be almost superfluous, largely fuelled by
the well studied case of Phineas Gage.

a neurologist in 1884: Ever since the occurrence of the famous American
    crowbar case it has been known that destruction of these lobes does not
    nec give rise to any symptoms" p.12
footnotes:
   MB Macmillan 1986: A wonderful journey through skull and Brains: the
	travels of Mr. Gage's Tamping iron, Brain and Cognition 5:67-107
   MB Macmillan 1996: Phineas Gage's contribution to brain surgery,
	J of the History of the Neurosciences, 5:56-77


[FIG: PG's skull with iron rod: "early medical sketch showing where the
tamping iron entered and exited PG's skull".  ]

(see detailed writeup on PG episode in Descartes' Error )

Calming treatment: Lobotomy of the Pre-frontal Cortex

In the 1930s the Portuguese physician Antonio Egas Moniz was looking for a
way to calm his agitated psychotic patients when he heard that frontal
lobotomy - destruction of parts of the f.l. - resulted in aggressive
monkeys (who got angry when their food was withheld), in suffering such
indignities with unruffled patience.  Egas Moniz tried the procedure on
humans and found that it had a similar calming effect.  [remarks, with a
touch of possible sarcasm, how Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for medicine
in 1949.]

In the 40s - pre-frontal lobotomy common treatment of hyper-agitation-
technique was improved - could be performed under local anesthesia w an ice
pick. 12

Although patients with f.l. damage performed on IQ tests they showed severe
impairments on even the simplest tests that involved planning.  e.g. maze or
puzzles where soln requires considering an entire series of moves before
making the first move.  Their planning deficits were also obvious in everyday
life - they could function reasonably well and make small talk about the
curtains, but they found it impossible to say what they would be doing later
that afternoon.

   "No prefrontal symptom has been reported more consistently than the
   inability to plan.... The symptom appears unique to dysfunction of the
   prefrontal cortex [and] is not associated with clinical damage to any
   other neural structure." 12
   	 - Fuster, JM, 1997 The prefrontal cortex: anatomy, physiology, and
	   Neuropsychology of the frontal lobe, Lipponcott-Raven NY p.160-61

This inability to plan + the calming effect (absence of anxiety) -->
connected to thinking about the future.  Damage to the f.l. results in being
'locked into immediate space and time', living in a 'permanent
present' [Tulving 85].

[AM: if anxiety is connected to "thinking about the future" - is the claim
	also that animals do not exhibit anxiety?  Or are instances of what
	we take as "anxious" behaviour (e.g. dogs waiting for their master on
	the verandah) also a form of "nexting" and not real
	"thought"?  Gilbert does not seem to notice this point. ]

PFC damage = Inability to Plan

Prefrontal cortex: simulator - simulate possible scenarios and reject
without actually working on it.

Patient N.N.: - extensive damage to f.l. in auto accident:
   PSYCHOLOGIST: What will you be doing tomorrow?
   N.N. I don't know
   P: Do you remember the question?
   N.N. About what I'll be doing tomorrow?
   P: Yes, would you describe your state of mind when you try to think about
	it?
   N.N. Blank, I guess... It's like being asleep... like being in a room with
	nothing there and having a guy tell you to go find a chair, and
	there's nothing there ... like swimming in the middle of a lake.
	There's nothing to hold you up or do anything with. 14-15
	- [Tulving, E, 1985] Memory and consciousness, Canadian psychology

Yoga / Meditation: think only abt the present - is v. difficult.
Why?  Maybe because thinking abt the future is pleasurable.
Singer, JL 1981: Daydreaming and Fantasy, OUP
Klinger, E 1990: Daydreaming: using waking fantasy and imagery for
   self-knowledge and creativity, Tarcher, LA

Experiment: Subjects asked to imagine they are asking their heartthrob for a
date - those w the most elaborate and delicious fantasies were the least
likely to actually do so over the next few months.
   - Oetingern G, and D. Mayer, 2002: The motivating fn of thinking abt the
     future: expectations vs fantasies, J Personality and Social Psych,
     83:1198-1212

Optimism: Americans expect their futures to be an improvement on their
   parents[Brickman 78]; other nations are not quite as optimistic, but
   imagine their futures will be brighter than those of their peers. [Chang 01]
Brickman, P, D. Coates etal 1978, Lottery winners and accident victims - is
   happiness relative? J Personality Social Psych
Chang, EC, K Asakawa, LJ Sanna 2001, Cultural variations in optimistic and
   pessimistic bias, J Pers Soc Psych

WORRY: role in minimizing the effect of negative news.  If anticipated,
negative news is not as bothersome.
COGN Experiment: volunteers receive strong elec shock on right ankle.  one
	group gets a warning 20 sec before; other group - far fewer shocks,
	but no warning.  But second group hearts beat faster, perspire more,
	and consider themselves more afraid.  3 Big jolts that we cannot
	foresee are more troublesome than twenty big jolts that we can.

Fear, worry and anxiety have an useful role to play in our lives & in
motivating us.

The need to control 20

[Our need to know the future is related to our need to exercise control. ]

Q. Why do we want to have control over our future experiences?

The surprisingly "right" answer is that people find it gratifying to
exercise control - not just for the futures it buys them, but for the
exercise itself. 20

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control,
they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they
lose their ability to control things at any point, they become unhappy,
helpless, hopeless, and depressed. [Seligman, MEP, 1975: Helplessness: On
depression, development, and death. Freeman, SF] p.21

COGN Experiment:

  elderly residents of nursing home visited by student volunteers.
  Researchers created two groups:
	* high-control group : able to decide times themselves (Pls visit next
     		      Tue for an hour).
	* Low-control group were told ("I'll visit next Tue for an hour").

  after 2 months, high-control group were happier, healthier, more active
  and taking fewer medications.

  At this point, expt was ended.
  A few months later they learned that a disproportionate no of residents
  in the high-control group had died.

  Possible explanation: ending the study robbed the h-c group of this
  control.  Apparently the detrimental effects of losing control outweigh
  the positive impact of gaining control, so it may have been worse than
  not having control at all! p.21-2
   [Langer 1977: Effect of choice and enhanced personal responsibility]
   [Seligman 1975 Freeman: Helplessness]

Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so
rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the
uncontrollable - e.g. people bet more money on games of  chance when the
opponents seem incompetent - though the outcome depends only on a random
drawing of cards.

People feel more confident of winning a lottery if they can control the no on
the ticket. [FN 44 Langer 1975 Illusion of control] p.22

People will bet more money on dice not yet tossed than on dice that have been
tossed but whose outcome is hidden.
	[FN 46:Strickland et al 66, Temporal  orientation and perceived
	 control as determinants in risk taking]

To the q of why we should we want to control our futures, the answer is that
it feels good to do so - period.  Mattering makes us happy.

But you probably believe that the future we are steering for is
important. We are the apes that learned to look forward because doing so
enables us to shop among the many fatest that might befall us and select only
the best one.  What looks so obvious is surprisingly, the wrong answer to our
question.  23

2 Views of happiness: from in Here

Lori and Reba Schappel - twins -
    Reba is somewhat shy, teetotaller; has cut an award-winning country-music
	album.
    Lori - outgoing, drinks strawberry daiquiris; works in hospital, wants
	someday to marry and have children.
Siamese Twins:
They are siamese twins - one side of L's forehead is attached to one side of
Reba's - share some brain tissue as well.

Three kinds of happiness:
      - emotional happiness - feeling / subjective state - hard to define,
		like yellow;
      - moral happiness
      - judgmental happiness 31

But they don't want to be separated.  They say: "Why would you want to do
that?"  Medical history: "desire to remain together is so widespread among
communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal." [FN 4] 30

Negative events have far less impact on happiness than previously thought.
Conjoined siamese twins -  paraplegics - are as happy as winners of the
lottery a year down the line.
   [Brickman, P, D. Coates etal 1978, Lottery winners and accident victims
    - is happiness relative? J Personality Social Psych ]

How it feels

try explaining to an alien the experience of yellow_: point to a mustard
jar, a lemon, a rubber ducky.  Or try to explain: "Well, it's sort of
like orange, with a little less of the red."  But if the alien says that he
can't figure out what's common to the 3 objects, or that it has no idea of
red or orange, then you might as well give up.

Searle: subjective states are "irreducible" = nothing we can compare it with,
    nothing we can say about the neurological underpinnings can fully
    substitute for the experiences themselves.

Subjective states can be defined only in terms of their objective antecedents
    or other subjective states,
but same true of phys objects. e.g. marshmallow fluf : is 'soft, gooey, and
    sweet' or in terms of any other phys object : "corn syrup, sugar syrup,
    vanilla flavouring and egg whites" - we could not define it.  All
    definitions are achieved by comparing the thing we wish to define with
    things that inhabit the same ontological category or by mapping them onto
    things in a diff category.  #6 243

    Frank Zappa: writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and
    so it is with talking about yellow. 32

If alien says that there is a feeling in their planet, common to
   - dividing numbers by three
   - banging one's head lightly on a doorknob
   - releasing rhythmic bursts of nitrogen from any orifice at any time
	except Tuesday
I would never have an idea what that feeling is, I could only learn the name
and hope to use it politely in conversation.  33

Purpose of human life

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents:

	The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless
	times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps
	does not admit of one... We will therefore turn to the less ambitious
	question of what men show by their behavior to be the purpose and
	intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to
	achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive
	after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This
	endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on
	the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the
	other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. p.11

But this expln does not satisfy many
    - desire for happiness =  desire for bowel movement - nothing to be
      proud of
	- "bovine contentment" - Nozick: The examined life p.101 35
    	- John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in "On Liberty
		It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig
		satisfied - better to be Socrates diss than a fool satisfied.
		And if the fool, or pig, are of a diff opinion, it is because
		they only know their own side of the q. 34

views on happiness in
  - Greece: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, even Epicurus : happiness = virtuous
	performance of one's duty [virtuous to be interpr suitably]
  - Solon, ancient Athenian legislator - can know if you are happy only
	after death - did he reach full potential?
	  (full story in Fooled by randomness)
  - does living virtuously = happiness?  [Gita]
	[MacMahon: From the happiness of virtue to the virtue of happiness,
	Daedalus, 2004

Philosophers : have muddled emotional happiness w moral happiness

MEMORY: Plato has it at one point in the Theatetus that memory is like
a birdcage; one, as it were, reaches in and pulls out the thing
recalled:
   SOCRATES:... let us suppose that every mind contains a kind of aviary
	stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks apart, some in small
	groups, and some solitary, flying among them all.
   THEATETUS: Be it so. What follows?
   SOC: When we are babies, we must suppose this receptacle empty, and take
	the birds to stand for pieces of knowledge. Whenever a person
	acquires any piece of knowledge and shuts it up in his enclosure, we
	may say he has learned or discovered the thing of which this is the
	knowledge, and that is what "knowing" means.
   THE: Be it so.
   SOC: Now think of him hunting once more for any piece of knowledge that he
	wants, catching, holding it, and letting it go again.
(Translation from Fodor, Modularity)

from video: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html
COGN Experiment: Cognitive Dissonance - the choices we get goes up in our
  relative ranking.  [see Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol
  Tavris and Elliot Aronson].  In Gilbert's expt, he takes anteretrograde
  amnesics (korsakov's syndrome, as in Man who mistook his wife for a hat)

Adam Smith on Happiness (aside)

Adam Smith:
    The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to
    arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and
    another.  Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches:
    ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that
    between obscurity and extensive reputation.  The person under the
    influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in
    his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of
    society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires.

    The slightest observation however might satisfy him, that, in all the
    ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally
    calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented.  Some of those situation
    may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can
    deserve to be pursued with the passionate ardour which drives us to
    violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the
    future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of
    our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.
    Whenever prudence does not direct, whenever justice does not permit, the
    attempt to change our situation, the man who does attempt it, plays at
    the most unequal of al games of hazard, and stakes every thing against
    scarce any thing.

    What the favourite of the king of Epirus said to his master, may be
    applied to men in all the ordinary situations of human life.  When the
    King had recounted to him, in their proper order, all the conquests which
    he proposed to make, and had come to the last of them; And what does your
    Majesty propose to do then? said the Favourite. — I propose then, said
    the King, to enjoy myself with my friends, and endeavour to be good
    company over a bottle. — And what hinders your Majesty from doing so now?
    replied the Favourite.

    In the most glittering and exalted situation that our idle fancy can hold
    out to us, the pleasures from which we propose to derive our real
    happiness, are almost always the same with those which, in our actual,
    though humble station, we have at all times at hand, and in our power.
    Except the friolous pleasure of vanity and superiority, we may find, in
    the most humble station, where there is only peronsal liberty, every
    other which the most exalted can afford; and the pleasure of vanity and
    superiority are seldom consistent with perfect tranquility, the principle
    and foundation of all real and satisfactory enjoyment.
		- Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)  "Turgid Truth"

There is something it is like to be a clam, but there is nothing it is like
to be a computer, and hence the computer cannot be
happy no matter ... 37
Can't say: "Sue was happy to be in a coma"

other positions on happiness, contrary to Gilbert's :
  Hudson: Happinesss and the limits of satisfaction, 1996
  Kingwell: Better living: pursuit of happiness from Plato to Prozac, 1998
  Telfer, Happiness, 1980 [FN 19, 244]

Do a pair of happinesses feel the same?  One can certainly argue that I can
never know what you feel when you see "yellow" 39

The illusion of memory

Comparisons require comparisons w "memory" (Carnap's "Remembered as Similar"
- see Quine's From Stimulus to Science) - but
memory is very elusive

Magic trick: p.40/45
Lineup of six royal cards.  You remember one.  Touch it, but don't move it.
Next I will remove the card you touched.

COGN Colour experiment:
subjects shown a colour for 5 sec.
Describers: asked to describe the colour for 30 seconds.
Non-describers: recogn 73% [--> baseline: 27% error]
 --> finding: describers are much worse - only 33% get the colours shown!
     their verbal experience overwrote their memory - they remember what they
     said [visualized while saying] and not what they saw 41
     [Schooler / Engstler-Schooler:1990 Verbal overshadowing of visual memory]
		[AM: See also Marsh 2007:
			Retelling is not the same as recalling: Implications for memory]
We store a precis of the episode, often what we said when we talked abt it
later.

Direct Perception can be illusory too

Subjects asked to read text that lOoKs LiKE tHiS.
Now whenever their saccade shifts to somewhere else, they changed the case of
every letter so it looks like: LoOkS lIke ThIs - and amazingly volunteers did
not notice that the text was alternating between styles...
	[Simons/Levin:1997: Change Blindness, TriCS]
person switched behind the interrupting door carried by workmen
	[Simons/Levin:1998: Failure to Detect changes to people in
	real-world]

if we take this research to the extreme, ... we end up as extremists
generally do: mired in absurdity and handing out pamphlets.  44

COGN Experiment: (experience irrevocably alters perception)
subjects A:
  shown questions from quiz show (e.g. What did Philo T. Farnsworth invent?
subjects B: shown answers as well.

Both groups asked abt the probability they would be able to answer the q.
A - found it difficult; B - more %age felt they could handle it. 49

Once we know the answers, we can no longer judge how diff the q was
beforehand ["of course it was the television - everyone knows that!"]
	[Fischoff:1977, Perceived informativeness of facts] 49

Discounting the Happy talk of others

Why is it that we don't believe the claims of happiness by conjoined twins
like Reba and Lori Schappell?

If they are not lying, then we may argue that they are
 - language squishing - i.e. on a scale of 1 to 8, what is 4 to us, is 8 to
	them.  They feel the same strength as we do, but report differently
	But the fact of having had a diff experience irrevocably alters
	perspective, so we can't trust our exp to be equal to theirs 49
 - experience squishing :  L&S feel about experiences the same way we do -
	but talk about it differently, "because they don't know what they're
	missing".

all claims of happiness are from a single persons unique, privileged
perspective. 52

Shackleton, facing almost certain death, w his starving frostbitten men
preparing to cross S Georgia island:

    We passed through the narrow mouth of the cove with the ugly rocks and
    waving kelp close on either side, turned to the east, and sailed
    merrily up the bay as the sun broke through the mists and made the
    tossing waters sparkle around us.  We were a curious-looking party on
    that bright morning, but we were feeling happy.  We even broke into
    song, and, but for our Robinson Crusoe appearance, a casual observer
    might have taken us for a picnic party sailing in a Norwegian fjord or
    one of the beautiful sounds of west New Zealand. [South, 1959, p.192]

But could his happy have been our happy? 54

3 Views of happiness: from Outside

Neural organization of recognition:
identity of object comes later, decide first whether the object is
important, and one we should respond to right now 57
How can we know something is scary if we don't know what it is?
Initial preliminary data is used to determine threat -->
	instruct glands to produce hormones etc, b.p, heart beat ^: arousal

COGN Experiment: Danger arousal - conflated w sexual arousal

Subjects, young men, crossing long narrow, swaying bridge over Capilano river
rapids were approached by young woman who asked them if they minded
completing a survey.  Afterwards, woman gave her phone num, and offered to
explain the project.  The men approached while they were on bridge were much
more likely to call her in the coming days.
Were the feelings of fear in the presence of a sheer drop conflated with
lust? [58]
[Dutton/Aron 1974: Heightened sexual attraction under high anxiety]

Consciousness: Experiencing without Awareness

Graham Greene: Hatred seems to operate on the same glands as love.
[End of the affair, 1951, p.29]

Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms, p.218

   Suppose someone is given the post-hypnotic suggestion that upon awakening,
   he will have a pain in his wrist.  If the hypnosis works, is it a case
   of pain, hypnotically induced, or merely a case of a person who has been
   induced to believe he has a pain?  If one answers that the hypnosis has
   induced real pain, suppose the post-hypnotic suggestion had been: "On
   awakening, you will believe you have a pain in the wrist." If this
   suggestion works, is the circumstance similar to the prev? Isn't believing
   you are in pain tantamount to being in pain?

Consider: you are reading a paper sitting outdoors.  Suddenly you realize
that you have absolutely no idea what the story you are reading is about.
You go back, some words look familiar...
An eye-tracker may show your eyes are saccading over the text, yet you are
unaware.

Experientia: L. "knowledge gained by repeated trials,", fr experiri "to try"
Aware : Gk horan, tp see  [pan (all)+ panorama, syn (together)+ synopsis;
	thea (a view)+ theory]

When we argue whether dogs are conscious, we are muddling these two concepts
- one side is using it as "capable of experience", the other using it to mean
"capable of awareness".  The dog is of course capable of experience, there is
something it is like to be a dog before a stimulus - but the dog is probably
not aware that it is having that experience. 60
	[Schooler, 2002: Re-representing consciousness: Dissociations between
	consciousness and meta consciousness" TriCS 6:339-44 2002]

If while you are not attending to the paper, someone asks you: "how many
senators voted for the bill - can you guess?"  and you guess "41". Later, it
turns out the number is exactly right! 61

Blindsight

  damage to V1 impairs our awareness of vis experience without affecting the
  other pathways.  Such subjects feel they are blind.
COGN expt
  When a light is flashed on a wall, they have not seen it, but when urged to
  take a stab at where the light may have flashed, the 'guesses' are correct
  prob > chance.

Such subjects are seeing, if by seeing we mean experiencing the light and
acquiring knowledge abt its location - but she is blind, if by blind we
mean not being aware of having seen. 62
   	[Weiskrantz 86 OUP: Blindsight]

alexithymia: absence of words to descr emotional states
	--> lack introspective awareness of own introsp states
	    may be caused by dysfunction of anterior cingulate cortex 63
	    [Lane 1997: Alexithymia blindsight ]

Measuring happiness

What is Science?
   My father is an eminent biologist, who, after pondering the matter for
   some decades, recently revealed to me that psychology can't really be a
   science because science requires the use of electricity.  Apparently
   shocks to your ankles don't count. 64

Measurements:
1. Even an imperfect tool is better than nothing; a bad hammer is better than
	pounding nails w your teeth
2. of all the flawed measures of subjective experience, the honest, real-time
	report of the individuals is the least flawed
  better than electromyographic measurements of signals from muscles like
    - corrugator supercillia - furrows the brow - frown
    - zygomaticus major - pulls up mouth ends when we smile;
  change in electrodermal, respiratory, cardiac activity - we know these are
  related to happiness because ultimately, subjects say so. 66

[Note: this last argument seems a bit weak]

Law of large numbers

Statistical emergence is a function of scale.

subatomic particles exist in two places at once, but if we assume that
  anything composed of such particles must behave likewise, we should expect
  all cows to be in all possible barns at the same time.
FIXEDNESS is one of those properties that emerges from the interaction of a
  terribly large number of tiny particles 67... they cancel out each other's
  behaviour in large conglomerations 70

4 The blind spot of the mind's eye

REALISM: The belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind

Adolph Fischer, 1887: labour union leader, poor man who accomplished
	little, was charged w inciting the Haymarket riots, and based on
	perjured testimony (he was nowhere near the riot), hanged on the
	gallows.  His last words: "This is the happiest moment of my life."

George Eastman, 1932: founder of Kodak - participatory management philosophy
	shorter hours, disability benefits, profit sharing etc.  Shot himself
	after leaving a short note.

why do we find Fischer's last statement, and Eastman sudden suicide,
surprising?

Harpo Marx - reaches into pocket of trench coat and pulls out a steaming cup
of coffee, a bathroom sink, or a sheep. [in most of the early Marx bros
films] 78

they hold our attention because of the surprise.

Human brain creates similar illusions - blind spot

COGN Expt:
Subj shown series of slides showing red car going towards "Yield" sign,
   turning right, and knocking over a pedestrian.
One group not asked any q
Other group asked: Did another car overtake the red car while it was stopped
   at the stop sign?

Then they are shown 2 pics w car approaching a Yield sign and a Stop sign
>90% of no-question group -> Yield
80% of questioned group -> Stop sign
[Loftus Miller 1978: Semantic integration of verbal info into visual memory]

[Schacter Basic Books 1996: Searching for memory]

brain is constantly re-weaving experience. 79

has been replicated in so many labs, that scientists are convinced that:

 - act of remembering involves "filling in" details that were not actually
	stored;
 - we can't tell when we are doing this because filling-in occurs quickly &
	unconsciously
  [Loftus 1992: when a lie becomes memory's truth; Opposing view:
  Zaragoza McCloskey 1987: Misleading postevent information and recall]

Brain stores concise patterns

COGN Expt
Read these words:

     bed
     awake
     rest
     tired
     dream
     snooze
     wake
     blanket
     drowsy
     doze
     slumber
     snore
     nap
     peace
     yawn

Now, cover the words, and see which of the following words was NOT in the
list:
     Bed, doze, sleep, gasoline?
gasoline, of course, but the other right answer is sleep.  The mind
abstracts the list as "a bunch of words about sleeping".

The gist is an economical strategy for remembering.
[Deese 1959: On the predicted occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in
     immediate recall]

Subjects vividly remember seeing the word
  [Roediger McDermott 1995 "Creating false memories: Remembering words"]
Even happens when people are warned that they are about to be tricked
beforehand.
  [McDermott Roediger 1998 "Attempting to avoid illusory memories: Robust
	  false recognition"]

In 1781 a reculsiive German professor Immanuel Kant exposed the brain as a
humbug of the highest order.  His theory of IDEALISM:
perception is a result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes
see w what we already think, feel, know, want and believe.
   "The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing.  Only
   through their union can knowledge arise."
			[Critique of Pure Reason 1781, p.93; tr NK Smith]

Will Durant's summary of Kant: The world as we know it is a construction, a
finished product, almost -- one might say - a manufactured article, to which
the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes
by its stimuli.
	[Story of Philosophy 1926]

Piaget 1920s: child does not distinguish her perception and the other's
perception -

COGN Expt: playmate of 2-yr child leaves room, experimenter moves a cookie
from a cookie jar and hides it in a drawer.  The child believes the playmate
will later look for the cookie in the drawer.
     [Gopnik Astington 1988: Chilren's understanding of representational change]
Piaget:
   "The child is a realist in its thought... its progress consists in ridding
   itself of this initial realism"
   Realism = "a spontaneous and immediate tendency to confuse the sign and
	      the thing signified"
	[Piaget: Child's conception of the w, 1929 p.166/124]

George Miller: The crowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the
	real world. 88

Yet we ignore the fact that we are "filling-in" when we plan future events
(whether we want dish X etc). 91
 [Gilbert /Wilson 20000 : Miswanting: Forecasting future affective states]
 [Dunning 1990: Overconfidence effect in social prediction]

Without the filling-in trick you would have sketchy memories, an empty
imagination and a small black hole following you wherever you went. 94

5 Perceiving absences: The hound of silence

  "Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
  "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
  "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
  "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
  	[To Colonel Ross, "Silver Blaze"]

Absences are much harder to detect than presence.

COGN expt:
Pigeons can easily learn to press an illuminated lever to get food.  Despite
much longer training, can never learn to press the non-illuminated lever.
 [Jenkins 1965: Feature-positive effect in discrimination learning]

COGN expt:
subj shown trigrams SXY GTR BCG EVX etc.  Experimenter pointed out some
"special" ones.  After some time subj could guess that spl ones were those
with "T".  But never were able to guess when they were the ones without a
letter.
  [Newman 1980: Feature-positive effect in adult human subjects]

Sir Francis Bacon:
   By far the greatest impediment and aberration of the human understanding
   arises from [the fact that]... those things which strike the sense
   outweigh things which, although they may be more important, do not strike
   it directly.  Hence, contemplation usually ceases with seeing, so much so
   that little or no attention is paid to things invisible.
	    [Novum organum 1620]

Inability to think about absences results in irrationality:
	  Ceylon, Nepal, West Germany and East Germany
  Out of the four countries above, which two countries were most similar to
  each other?
     Most US subj answer E & W Germany
  Which are the most dissimilar?
     Gain most answer E & W Germany.
Subjects tend to look for presence of dissim / sim; and ignore absences.
  [A. Tversky 1977: Features of similarity]

While going on holiday, you can go to Extremia [fantastic beaches, great
weather, bad hotels, no nightlife] or Moderata [avg weather, beaches hotels &
nightlife).
   Ordinarily, most prefer Extremia.  But if they have booked both and have
to cancel one, they also prefer to cancel Extremia.  For both acceptance and
rejection, we look for the pluses, and then the minuses - both are stronger
for Extremia.  100
  [Shafir 1993: Choosing vs Rejecting: why some options are both better and
  worse]

Absence in the Future

What our imagination fills in for the future, we consider only that, and fail
to consider the absences.

COGN:
U.Va coll students - how would they feel a few days after their school's
football team won or lost a upcoming big game.
Before making pred,
  group 1 asked to describe the events of a typical day
  group 2 non-describers
a few days after teh game, they were asked about their happiness, and it was
found that the non-describers had "drastically overestimated" the impact.
  -> because non-describers left out more of the details - and tended to
     ignore situations like drunken parties or chemistry exams. 102
  [Wilson+ 2000 : Focalism: durability bias in affective forecasting]

Effect of perspective: Near versus Far futures

A pygmy from Congo named Kenge, accompanied Colin Turnbull out of the dense
tropical forests.  On the open plains, they saw a tribe of buffalo as small
specks in the distance, and Kenge wanted to know what kind of insects they
were.  "When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo, he roared w laughter
and told me not to tell such stupid lies." 104
   [Turnbull 1961: The Forest people, p.222]

Similarly, near events appear more detailed than far ones.
Couples getting married the next day imagine concrete aspects - wearing
outfits, photography, etc.; couples getting married a month later look at it
in abstract terms - 'making a serious commitment', 'making a mistake' 105

Near events: more how
Far events:  more why

Seeing in time is like seeing in space 105
But when we see faraway events in time, we don't remember that we are not
seeing the details. 105

We often make commitments that you deeply regret as the moment comes
near. 106

Plato:
  do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and
  smaller when at a distance? ... Now suppose happiness to consist in doing
  or choosing the greater, and not doing or in avoiding the less, what would
  be the saving principle of human life?  Would not the act of measuring be
  the saving principle; or would the power of appearance?  Is not the latter
  that deceiving art which makes us wander up and down and take the things
  one at a time of which we repent at another... [Protagoras, tr. Jowett]

COGN:
When volunteers are asked to imagine "a good day" - they imagine a greater
variety of good events if it is tomorrow, than if it is a year off.
   Because of the greater detail, they also remember some -ves "but I guess
I'll also have to rake the stupid leaves" - but if it is an year off, it
doesn't have this lumpiness. 106
 [Liberman+ 2002: Effect of temporal distance  mental construal]

COGN:
Most people would rather receive $19 today than $20 tomorrow.  But if the
money is coming in a year, they would rather receive $20 after 365 days than
$19 after 364.
  [Loewenstein 1987: Anticipation and the valuation of delayed consumption]
why do delayed rewards feel less valuable?
   regions in brain get excited imagining an award soon, but not in faraway
   future. 107
can lead to many errors

6 Imagining the Future: Future is now

Futurist books from the 1950s "Into the atomic age" or "The world of
Tomorrow" --> future : housewife w Donna Reed hairdo and poodle skirt
flitting about her atomic kitchen, waiting for her husband's rocket car.
City under glass dome, nuclear trains, antigrav cars, conveyor sidewalks.
But men don't carry babies, women don't have briefcases, no Wal-marts,
and all the Africans and Asian people are missing. 111
  [says more about that era than the future]

Lord Kelvin:
  Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible - 112
  [also patent officer - computers]

Even Wilbur Wright, in 1901 (2 years before) told his brother:
  Man would not fly for fifty years.

Arthur C Clarke:
When an distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible
he is almost certainly right.  When he states that sth is impossible, he is
very probably wrong.  112 [Profiles of the future 1963 Rand House p.14]

COGN:
when college students recall speeches that demonstrably changed their
political opinions, they tend to remember that they always felt as they
currently feel.
  [5 Goenthals+ 1973 perception of consistency in attitudes]

Dating couples try to recall what they thought about their partners 2 months
  ago, they tend to remember them as they feel now. 113
  [6 mcfarland+ 1987: elation between current impression and memories...]
Students getting grades remember being as anxious before the exam as
afterwards.
  [7 Safer 2002+: Distortion in memory for emotions ]
When patients are asked about their headaches, the amount of pain they are
feeling now determines their memory of yesterday's pain
  [8 Eich+ 1985: Memory for pain: past and present intensity]
Widows and widower's grief when spouse died 5 years ago is remembered in
terms of their present grief 113
  [10 Safer+ 2001 It was never that bad]
  [Ross 1989 : Implicit theories to the construction of personal histories]
  [Levine Safer 2002: Sources of Bias in Memory for emotions]

Ross Perot candidacy - ups and downs:
  Supporters who abandoned him understimated their earlier support; those who
  kept w him underestimated their sorrow. [Levine 1997]

Difficult to imagine that we will ever think, feel, or want differently than
we do now. 114
  [Loewenstein 1996: Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior]

VOCAB: "tryptophan coma" 115

Supermarket shopping:
people who have recently eaten understimate food needs
  [Nisbett Canouse 1998: Obesity, food deprivation and supermarket shopping]

Also holds for sated vs hungry minds:

COGN:
Subjects asked 5 geography q's.  At end given either chocolate, or the right
answers.  Those who chose before always took the chocolate; those after
preferred the answers.
  [Loewenstein 1994: Psychology of curiosity (cites unpub ms)]

When you arrive at the end of a book and find some pages missing, people are
willing to give a lot for the end. 116

Pre-ceiving: imagined perceptions

If I were to ask you whether a penguin's flippers are longer or shorter than
its feet --> most can conjure up image of penguin and inspect the
flipper. 117
Which is the highest note in "Happy Birthday"? [auditory recall] 117

Not just imagined - activity in brain also supports this
  [Kosslyn 1999 science: role of area 17 in visual imagery]
  [McGuire+ Lancet 1993: Blood flow in Broca's area during auditory
	hallucinations]

Brain enlists sensory areas when it wants to imagine sensory aspects of the
world.

Same also for emotions. Use the same emotional areas to pre-feel.

The power of Prefeel

Just as the imagination uses visual memory to preceive visual experiences,
so also most of our decision making facility consults emotional memory to
prefeel (construct) emotional judgments.

COGN:
Researchers offered subjects an impressionist painting or a humorous Garfield
poster.  One group were asked to ponder the decision logically, the other
were asked to decide quickly, going with gut feel.
   Later, they were phoned up.  The thinkers were least satisfied.  The
pre-feelers had rightly predicted their feelings. 121
  [Wilson+ 1993: Introspecting about reasons can reduce satisfaction]
  [Atance+ 2001: Episodic future thinking, TriCS]

Mixing these up is one of the world's most popular sports:
  * Feeling: from direct experience
  * Prefeeling: from memory (imagined) 123

COGN:
Phone calls to subjects in diff cities.  Q. How happy is your life?
Respondants in cities w good weather --> more were rel. happy.
Bad weather - more were rel. sad. 25
  [Schwartz+ 1983 Mood misattribution and Judgments.. Affective state]

COGN:
ask people at gym: if they were lost in the woods for 24 hrs w no food or
water, wd they be more thirsty or hungry?
  - those who had just tread-milled (thirsty group) - 92% thirsty; only 61%
    of others wd be thirsty. 123
  [van Boven+ 2003 Projection of transient drive states]
prefeelings freq get confused w feelings of the moment

If one is not feeling good, then future events (e.g card game w buddies
tomorrow) also look less appealing (Nick always ticks me off) 124

Can't feel happy abt an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad abt the
present.
One of the reasons for depressed people not being able to imagine happy
events. 124 [MacLeod 1996]

Cartoon:
A sponge is being asked to imagine being anything.  The best it can do is
imagine being a barnacle.
We too are trapped in our imagination by our present. 125

[humour]
When we have an experience . . . on successive occasions, we quickly begin
to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time.
Psychologists calls this habituation, economists call it
declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. 130