title: Are desires influenced by beliefs?

text:
# Question
Title: Are desires influenced by beliefs?
I refer it especially to what men and women look for in the partner. Of course, this is a generalized speech.

There is a correlation between the model of beauty proposed to men and what men sees as beauty. And, as well, there seems to be a strong correlation between what women search and what soap opera propose as the winning model.

**Which is the cause and which is the consequence?** Mass media propose what people already desire? Does this affect people desire? Can it be considered a loop?

I think the question can be answered by comparing different stile of life across countries and centuries. For example the desire of being slim (see the growth of speaking about liposuction) has increased when the idea of beauty has become a synonim of being very slim.

Link Ngram

Is there any element to hypothesize that a person's desire is bound to his internal dialogue? To his fears? To his beliefs? To what he perceive as needs?

# Answer
> 3 votes
This is a very big and broad question in terms of the fundamentals that underpin it, which are basically nature vs nurture based. There are some desires we have that are innate and core to our being, and then there are desires that are learned. The interaction between them is very complex, but you can give some obvious examples of how both are important. On all of these, there's heaps of research, but any research is complicated because the interaction between nurture and nature is so complicated.

The human being can rewire almost any impulse. This is what is so special about the human being, and which is why cultures vary so hugely.

An obvious example is a young girl lead to believe to be too fat, proven to be thanks to a broken capacity of seeing themselves properly, and this cancelling out her innate motive to eat. However, if you want to look at the mechanics of how that works, you'll see a hugely complex interaction of genetic, biological, and environmental factors at play, as this wiki section shows very clearly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorexia\_nervosa#Causes

To continue towards your actual question, if you take that mechanism to mass media, you have to look at the motivations of the whole industry. It is in the mass media's interest to provide you with new reasons to consume them. A human being has natural impulses to be stimulated as well as comforted, so it will be attracted to everything that does either or both. And then there are companies that make things for consumption that have long ago discovered that mass media are an efficient way to help make you want to consume their product.

In the whole sea-change of evolution and invention, things are always changing enough for people to look for new (or new-looking) solutions to (new or old) problems or the satiation of an innate desire (eating fat or sugar, finding a mate, standing out or blending in socially, etc.). The power of mass media and marketing comes from bridging the distance between what they are ready to offer that is different enough from what's already out there and the desire you want to satiate.

So yes, the loop / spiral is very likely the best way to describe the interaction. And it can lead to some pretty excessive and problematic behavior with all three parties involved.

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Tags: social-psychology
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# Question
Title: How are autistic savants able to perform certain mathematical computations so quickly?
* How do autistic savants (or other people with these abilities) compute equations like $81^{100}$ in 2.5 minutes?
* Which algorithms do they use? Is it an efficient one, or do they just have a lot of memory?
* Can non-autistic savants use these algorithms to solve equations just as quickly?

# Answer
> 10 votes
Here's the Wikipedia page on that:

> Savant syndrome is poorly understood. No widely accepted cognitive theory explains the combination of talent and deficit found in savants. It has been suggested that individuals with autism are biased towards detail-focused processing and that this cognitive style predisposes both individuals with and without autism to savant talents.
>
> Another hypothesis is that hyper-systemizing predisposes people to show talent, where hyper-systemizing is an extreme state in the empathizing–systemizing theory that classifies people based on their skills in empathizing with others versus systemizing facts about the external world, and that the attention to detail shown by many savants is a consequence of enhanced perception or sensory hypersensitivity in individuals with autism.
>
> It has also been suggested that savants operate by directly accessing low-level, less-processed information that exists in all human brains but is normally not available to conscious awareness.

# Answer
> 6 votes
How one performs quick mental calculations through tricks and shortcuts can easily be looked up on the internet. How some Savant's do it cannot because we don't know. There is some argument that some do those same tricks but others seem not to do so.

Consider that a substantial amount of computational power goes into immediately recognizing that your friend is deeply unhappy when you first see them but puts on a brave face for you and is avoiding talking about something deeply troubling them. You see that immediately while the typical savant sees nothing, or confusion. That same Savant can do amazing mathematical, or spatial computations with tremendous facility. So, perhaps the reason we don't understand it is because it's actually a different kind of a mind.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Savants apparently don't compute consciously; from what I've seen, they see numbers as shapes. When savants multiply numbers together, they see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer.

Humans can have *synesthesia*. It is a process in the brain which can associate numbers or names to certain shapes. For example, consider the two shapes:

> <sub>(source: sciencebuddies.org)</sub>

Tests like this demonstrate that people do not attach sounds to visual shapes arbitrarily. Which shape would you call "Bouba" and which "Kiki"? I would call the one on the left "kiki" and the one on the right "Bouba".

You can see this interesting video on the wonderful savant Daniel Tammet. Start from 32:16 if you want to see how a neurology team administered various tests to him to make sure he's not using some techniques. See also how he uses "Kiki-Bouba"-like shapes to do complex computations at 40:35.

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Tags: autism, problem-solving, savant-syndrome
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# Question
Title: Difference between real time and old information processing in the brain
Can we differentiate between the following two processes?

* Brain receives information via senses, such as eye, ear, nose, skin and tongue. That is, vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste.
* Brain stops receiving information via senses; but continuously keeps processing previously accumulated information from the mind: for instance, death of a loved one.

Is it possible?

# Answer
Of course. You've differentiated the two already by describing two mutually exclusive processes. If you're looking for terminological differences that delineate theory along this distinction, it seems you're looking to distinguish **perception** from **cognition** as it exists and operates independently from the direct influence of sensation. Plenty of cognition does not involve sensation or perception directly. Metacognition is a sort of self-perceptive process that operates apart from sensation in the traditional "five senses" sense, but not all cognition even involves self-perception or conscious awareness of the cognitive processes in question. This may be debatable, but I would call perception a special case of cognition – i.e., cognition is the broader domain of mental processes that subsumes perception, but does not always involve it.

One might also argue that you've only described **sensation** in your first sentence, not perception. Perception refers more directly to the processing of sensory information that the brain *has received*, whereas sensation refers to all processes leading up to sensory information processing. Thus sensation may include the process of delivering sensory information to the brain, depending on whose definition you subscribe to. Cognitive processes only enter the equation once the information has arrived, because cognition refers to the processes carried out by the brain – mostly the higher processes, so (again, maybe this is debatable) not even what happens in the rest of the central nervous system. E.g., the optic nerves feed cognitive processes, but do not carry out cognitive processes themselves.

**Summary:** If your first sentence only refers to raw sensory information being conveyed to the brain before the brain does any work to process this information, then I don't think it describes cognition at all, whereas the second sentence describes cognition directly. If you mean to include the brain's interpretive process in the "receives information" step of the first sentence, then it describes perception, which is only one kind of cognition (or maybe also distinct from cognition by some definitions).
> 2 votes

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Tags: memory
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# Question
Title: When should a percentage be written as a percentage and when should it be written x out of n?
People perceive numbers, percentages and values in different ways depending on what it is and how it is presented.

I'm looking for research on when to communicate with an actual percentage and when it is perceived better to say *n out of x*.

For example in commercials we hear,

> 9 out of 10 dentists recommend

We do not hear

> 90% of dentists recommend

I'm currently working on some marketing materials and a study has found `4 out of 5` in one instance and `12 out of 19` in the other. I believe `4 out of 5` works better than `80%` but `Over 65%` sounds better than `12 out of 19`.

Does anyone have information about the way humans perceive percentages and how to determine the most favorable format?

# Answer
Two comments. First: the "frequentist" format appears to be easier to understand than the normed percentages, at least if information needs to be chained as in Bayesian reasoning. On the other hand, probably normed percentages are easier to understand if two fractions are to be compared. Second, I'd say that you should only use percentages if your sample is large enough. For example, "4 out of 5 respondents" amounts to 80% but the latter figure would probably suggests higher confidence than is warranted, given that it is really only a single respondent away from 3 out of 5 (60%)…
> 1 votes

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Tags: perception, communication
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# Question
Title: What was the quantified brain volume of Albert Einstein?
I have read articles stating that Albert Einstein had an average brain volume but couldn't find a specific measurement. I'm curious because the articles are all so ambiguous. He could have been on the upper or lower side of average.

# Answer
> 4 votes
I was interested in the same question a while ago. Unfortunately, Witelson et al (1999) reported here (http://penthai.sc.mahidol.ac.th/html/articles/newsletter/paper3.pdf) that volume measurements haven't been taken at the time. Weight data is available, but weight and volume aren't correlated perfectly.

Witelson, S. F., Kigar, D. L., & Harvey, T. (1999). The exceptional brain of Albert Einstein. The Lancet, 353(9170), 2149-2153.

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Tags: neuroscience, neuroanatomy
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# Question
Title: What's the neurological basis for "practice makes perfect"?
I was reading Marvin Minsky's *The Society of Mind*:

> This (practice makes perfect) is really is quite curious. You might expect, instead, that the more you learned, the slower you would get-from having more knowledge from which to choose! How does practice speed things up?

Another related observation is that more practice also make things less effortful, to the extent that people can "autopilot" after practicing for long enough, like driving. But what makes this shift from consciousness to unconsciousness possible? What happens in the process?

# Answer
> 5 votes
The cortex and more of the higher centers are involved in a process when we first learn it. For example it has been tested that basketball players can improve by simply thinking about shooting baskets and not actually doing it. Prior to puberty a lot of neurological " pruning" takes place. This was eloquently discussed in Satinovers book " The Quantum Brain" which talks about models of machine learning based on our understanding of the human brain. Once a process has been repeated over and over again several things seem to happen and one is definitely that neural pathways are reinforced and neural connections get stronger the more we use them. This is only part of the picture however. It appears that older parts of the brain, things closer to what we would call " reflexes" can take over a process that has been rehearsed over and over again. This would be a process occurring in the cerebellum that once required the cortex to fully participate in the process before it was rehearsed over and over. My college piano teacher told me that even though i had not practiced piano a lot in my 20's it would still be easier for me to learn piano again because i studied in my teens. This is an example of the neural connections being maintained even after years of non use, though anecdotal of course, but certainly there are millions of such examples. Hope this explanation helps. Now everyone go get that 10 000 hours in and become experts. :)

# Answer
> 0 votes
There is a good book about this called The Talent Code. To sum it all up, when you are learning a skill, your entire nervous system is literally rewiring itself. Your myelin and neural pathways begin to restructure. The more a given skill is embedded in your nervous system, the more auto pilot it becomes. The more autopilot the skill becomes, the more it enables you to focus on higher level functions within the context of the skill since you have more attention freed.

# Answer
> 0 votes
When you try to learn something your brain sends signals over the same path everytime. By going over that path over and over again the connection becomes stronger and stronger. Like an engravement.

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Tags: learning, cognitive-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: How much additional sleep is required to recover from a given number of hours of sleep deprivation?
A previous question dealt with whether it is possible to catch up on lost sleep. This question is a little different.

Assume that a healthy adult has been deprived of sleep for "x" hours. **How much sleep is required to restore healthy brain function, compared to sleep lost?**

I wouldn't think the hours needed could be predicted by a linear scale.
Is there some predictable relationship between the two and what type of relationship is it?

# Answer
> -1 votes
It is funny that you ask this question. The answer is you can't. When you dont get enough sleep and you feel tired and your brain activity is lower (for example, trouble remembering what you were doing or where you left your keys) you cant catch up to it. You might take a powernap (not longer than 90 minutes) to give you a sensation of feeling awake, but the brain doesnt become more active. I dont know exactly why you cant catch up to lost hours of sleep, but you just cant. That also the reason, besides a messed up biogical clock according to light, why people working night shift experience more mental and health issues.

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Tags: performance, sleep
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# Question
Title: Is there a limit to how many skills a person can master?
Given that the different parts of our brain are constantly competing for brain real estate and learning requires brain real estate, is it the case that we can only master x amount of skills due to the limit of our brain size? If we train hard enough at something is it possible that that skill can remain with us forever? If so, how much training is required before a skill can become a permanent feature in our brain?

# Answer
> Given that the different parts of our brain are constantly competing for brain real estate and learning requires brain real estate

Nothing competes with nothing within our brain. In fact, it's a pretty harmonious machine. Literarily.

It is just a vast network of neurons where a lot of activity happens in parallel. Unfamiliar complex tasks pose greater load on the network (meaning they require activity to spread more and be sustained for longer), and such load may spread into areas that would have done other things otherwise.

> is it the case that we can only master x amount of skills due to the limit of our brain size?

Mathematically speaking:

* To learn an infinite number of skills we would need an infinitely neuron-dense brain and infinite time.
* If each neuron in our brain would serve as a skill (obviously you need more than one neuron for a skill, but let's just say), we could have only acquired around hundred billion skills.

Then the brain size is a poor indicator to abilities. Elephants has a brain more than 3 times the size of ours, yet they exhibit a highly limited set of skills compared to humans. It's more about how much stuff there is there, and how is it 'wired'.

> If we train hard enough at something is it possible that that skill can remain with us forever?

Even if you haven't or don't train at all some skills will remain with you forever (or in most people's case, until they die). Like your skill to speak.

But generally speaking, if something becomes a 'skill' it means that it is heavily integrated in our neural network in a way that makes interpretation and execution unconscious processes.

The brain has no native conscious mechanism to forget things (although in some cases and if you know how you can exercise a mild ability to forget).

> If so, how much training is required before a skill can become a permanent feature in our brain?

How long is a piece of string? It depends of what you already capable of doing, how you train, how hard the skill you try to acquire is, etc.

But if I read between the words, then basically you can master any skill you wish, so long it is realistic and you spend the time practicing it. Some people who late in their life became blind later became proficient craftsman - the brain is a wonderful machine, just waiting for you to explore and utilise it.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Given that mastering a skill is often regarded to take 10,000 hours of practice, if you assume 10 hours a day that would be of the order of three years per skill - and assuming a 75 year life span (just to keep the maths easy) would imply the answer's about 25 skills wouldn't it?
> -1 votes

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Tags: learning
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# Question
Title: Reduction of the hippocampus due to childhood neglect/abuse
A Scientific American article, "Childhood Stress Decreases Size of Brain Regions", by Christie Nicholson briefly mentions the implications of childhood neglect and abuse on brain structures. I was interested in the reduction of the hippocampus. Are there any studies that explain the reasoning behind this reduction?

Could the reduction be a coping mechanism in reducing the probability of remembering extremely negative memories (ex. physical abuse)?

# Answer
> 4 votes
In many studies scientists claim that the early exposure to stress can cause a hippocampal remodeling (or atrophy) (Andersen & Teicher, 2004). The atrophy is a disbalance in the brainpart were one part is bigger than the other. The decreased hippocampus is also associated with a decrease in dendritic branching and neurogenesis. Neurogenesis is the development and growth of neurons (in short) and these neurons are important for functioning.

In a study done by Teichera et al. (2003) they come with two explanations for the reduced volume of the hippocampus. One explanation is that the reduced hippocampus volume is associated with adolescence alcohol abuse due to the child abuse. The other explanation they have is that it is not the childhood abuse causing the reduced volume, but a risk factor for the persistence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in adulthood. So they are already born with a slightly decreased hippocampus volume, but this gets more when child abuse is involved.

<sub> Andersen, S. L. & Teicher, M. H. (2004). Delayed Effects of Early Stress on Hippocampal Development. Neuropsychopharmacology 29,1988–1993
Teichera, M. H., Andersena, S. L., Polcarib, A., Andersona, C. M., Navaltaa, C. P. & Kim, D. K. (2003). The neurobiological consequences of early stress and childhood maltreatment. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 27, 33-44 </sub>

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, memory
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# Question
Title: Is it normal for men in long term relationships to want to have sexual relationships with other women?
If a man who is married or in a long term relationship wants to have sexual relationships with other women, is this pathological, deviant, maybe even a disorder? Or is it part of normal and healthy male sexuality?

# Answer
The issue here is 'normality' - `normal` is a shifting social construct, meaning that any answer concerning `normal` will be based on culture, and thus could change depending on the culture in context. A better question would be, is it adaptive or maladaptive for the person in question.

But I don't think that's what you're asking - (I could be wrong) it seems you're asking more about satisfaction of desire and whether a single partner can accomplish that.

Let me flip the question around:

> If a woman who is married or in a long term relationship wants to have sexual relationships with other men, is this pathological, deviant, maybe even a disorder? Or is it part of normal and healthy female sexuality?

We can flip the gender pronouns - but in doing so, we notice an underlying assumption of male promiscuity in the original question (likely related to the idea of 'spreading seed' or a belief in a biological imperative to have as many children as possible (if this is actually true, why aren't all people constantly having children? I'm not saying it's *not* true; I'm saying it's much more *complicated* than that)).

Getting closer to an answer, let me pose more questions:

1. Does a happy/successful/\[insert judgment function here\] relationship require that both partners be satisfied in all of their desires?

-- or --
2. Does a happy/successful/\[insert judgment function here\] relationship require that both partners learn how to control their own desires instead of being directed by them?

But that's a false dichotomy; the answer will never just be one or the other. A successful relationship will, first and foremost, involve communication. If you can communicate your desires with each other, you can both, jointly/together, pursue a sense of satisfaction (or a sense of control over that desire).

But not being able to communicate dissatisfaction is itself a sign of underlying problems in a relationship.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Biologically speaking you could say that being in a monogamous relationship is not beneficial for men, because they can't produce enough offspring. Historically and for animals, it's more beneficial to spread your genes over multiple wives, but I have not found any scientific proof that men who want to have other sexual relationships besides their own girlfriends or spouses is "normal, deviant or a disorder". Beside that, humans have been in monogamous relationships for so long now, the question should be if we still have this instinct to spread our genes as much as we can. Maybe the person in the relationship doesn't feel attracted to him or her anymore.

Attraction is also dependent on smell. In science they call that specific smell phermonones. Each person has his own kind of pheromone chemicals. The smell of these chemicals can change, for example when a woman is pregnant, ovulates or is having her period. For men these pheromones change when they are in a long-term relationships or when they are a father. You can't "smell" these pheromones consciously. The registration of these pheromones happens unconsciously.

In my opinion, either the male doesn't feel attracted to the smell of the pheromones of the female or doesn't satisfy other needs. I don't think being attracted to another female sexually is a normal part of healthy male being.
> 0 votes

# Answer
I believe most/all men will have external desires, no matter the length of the relationship. It may prove to me more so the longer you have been with one person as we are programmed as animals to spread our seed as much as we can. It does not mean you have to act on it though. I would say it is normal and healthy as long as you are not screaming out other women's names in the heat of the moment.. that would then be very healthy and could lead to amputation of your cherished member, broken objects, and divorce..

This can also be seen by the man that land extremely hot wives and run astray and fine even less attractive women to have relations with. I cannot recall the book at this moment but when I was studying PUA (long long ago) there was a book that was pretty much dedicated to how we are mammals like all others and we have the same needs and desires as the animals. I tried doing a google search but I just cannot remember the name, I think it was the Mating Mind but I could be wrong.

I am not scientist though, I am just stating my experience from talking to other males and from what I have read in books back when I was big into the PUA stuff.

Again, it is one thing to think about and desire another person, it is a completely different thing to act upon it especially when you are in a committed relationship. I would not nor have I ever cheated on my wife.
> 0 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, psychiatry, sexuality, clinical-psychology, physical-attraction
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# Question
Title: Do beavers make dams purely by instinct?
Do beavers use cognitive moves, learning, memory or skill acquisition in their life to build better? Or do they simply repeat instinctive gestures and end up with stereotyped architecture always?

# Answer
It seems that running water triggers some sort of instinct: http://juneauempire.com/stories/050408/out\_275269543.shtml
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, animal-cognition
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# Question
Title: Verifying this statement in a movie named Oculus
I just want to verify this statement if this is a fact.

> "When people can't process something horrible. The mind creates all kinds of protections to help them cope. Once that belief's taken root, the mind takes random information and forces it to support that narrative." — Oculus

# Answer
> The mind creates all kind of protections to help them cope.

I would say that is a very simplified, narrative-oriented perception of certain extreme responses to trauma. From a cursory googling, I see the movie in question is refering to traumatic exposure to violence in childhood. Yes, in situations such as these, some children develop psychological defense mechanisms, which may confer a distorted view of reality.

**Defense mechanisms** don't really function in the extreme way generally shown in narrative, though. There are many documented defense mechanisms, all of them have their own unique characteristics, and all of them can vary in intensity. It's also vital to remember that not everyone who survives a traumatic event, no matter how violent, will develop post-traumatic symptoms.

> \[T\]he mind takes random information and forces it to support that narrative.

This is less post-trauma, and more the purview of cognitive psychology. **Cognitive distortions** exist and are quite common. How common is a matter of some controversy. This particular statement describes a kind of **confirmation bias**, which manifests as overconfidence in one's own views. It is not particularly related to trauma, as far as I know.

Overall, I would say that the kind of extreme reinterpretation of facts that is suggested by the quote you posted, is not a common thing. Reactions of a similar tenor may be usual, but as always, **reality is more ambiguous than fiction**. I would not call this statement fact so much as a directed or tendentious interpretation of facts.
> 2 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology
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# Question
Title: Are there useful applications for three channel consumer EEG?
I stumbled upon the consumer EEG Melon (at Kickstarter). It has three electrodes and is advertised as measuring how "focused" you are. In the FAQ it says:

> The Melon headband has three electrodes. Our primary electrode is on the forehead region known as FP1, where Melon can monitor brainwave activity from the prefrontal cortex.

I wonder: **What can I measure with such an EEG? What applications would be unlikely?**

* How can "focus" be quantified?
* Would it be possible to identify (different) states of sleep?
* Could it be possible to control a cursor/game (left/right movements)?

# Answer
Point by point:

> The Melon headband has three electrodes. Our primary electrode is on the forehead region known as FP1, where Melon can monitor brainwave activity from the prefrontal cortex.

The problem with this is that electricity doesn't work like that. Current always flows between two points, and our electrodes measure the potential between two locations. After its discovery by Tönnies somewhere in 1938, most EEG amplifiers have been of the differential amplifier design. That means every electrode recording is made up of 3 different sites: the Ground electrode, the Reference, and the target site. What is being reported as activity at FPz is truly ((FPz-Ground) - (Reference-Ground)).
What this entails is that our measurement at the so-called active electrode is not an isolated measure of the activity directly under that electrode alone, but a mix of the activity underlying multiple sites. So what you observe in such a setup is highly dependent on where your Reference is located. I couldn't find where the Melon's Reference sits, but it has to be somewhere on the headband. The headband encircles the skull, and all of the positions allowed by the headband are over cortical areas.
Typical locations for Reference are Cz, Nose or the average, neither of which are possible or meaningful in a 3-electrode headband context. Possibly, the reference is located over the temporal or occipital lobes.

So what the Melon will report as activity at FPz will in truth be a mix between activity at FPz, and activity at some further site also above the cortex. (It is possible they placed their Ground very close to the Reference, which is a very unusual setup ...)

Furthermore, individual electrodes never pick up isolated brain sites. Electrical fields, as those projected by cortical clusters firing in synchrony, are propagated field-like. Every recording site therefore picks up a distinct mix of all of the brain. The activity of sites closer to the electrode will be somewhat stronger since field strength falls off with the square of distance, but the part of the cortex directly under the electrode will still be overwhelmed by the summed activity of everything next to and below it.
All the more so as the strongest activity patterns of the cortex come from the occipital lobes - the so-called alpha rhythm. Alpha usually dominates the cortical activity, as it is a simple synchronized firing.

Moreover, alpha will most likely be artificially reenforced on the Melon by the site of reference, since depending on where the reference is placed, it will necessarily be closer to the occipital lobe than FPz, FPz receives alpha with the inverted polarity of most of the scalp, and subtracting from the residual inverted alpha at FPz the alpha from the reference will lead to substantial alpha effects.

Both of these problems are well known since basically the beginning of the EEG, since Hans Berger himself, discoverer of the EEG, already stumbled on the phenomenon that regardless of where he put his two electrodes (Berger never really got around to appreciating Tönnies' proposal), he'd see very similar activity. Berger's interpretation was that all of the brain partially does basically the same thing, everything in the brain is partially united by one huge common shared oscillatory pattern - alpha.
The activity associated specifically with frontal sites, especially the theta rhythm, is much weaker. Extracting just prefrontal theta activity can be a very hard task, as one can tell from the elaborate methods employed by papers trying to isolate just that, such as this and this.

What especially the second paper will show you however is the most dominant activity at FPz: eye blinks. Here I'm showing you activity from FPz in an experiment of mine.

What you mostly see in the top right image are the red dots. Each of these is a blink by our subject. You see that the dots totally overwhelm the overall activity. The spectrum below gives the same information: it's a simple power-law spectrum with almost all power in very low frequencies, without a specific peak in a frequency range such as theta or alpha.

> I wonder: What can I measure with such an EEG? What applications would be unlikely? How can "focus" be quantified?

Interestingly, this might even be possible, since one of the best EEG predictors of focus is alpha amplitude. The distinct prefrontal cortex signals however are not very important here. Rather, the alpha signal is.
Alpha is a very rough indicator of attentiveness, and you'll always get less information out of a single sensor than by simple introspection ("do I feel droopy?"). But you might get a rough correlate of current awareness from looking at alpha power, assuming you position the thing so you get as much alpha out of it as possible (ie., not over FPz). The research in this regard is still in the explorative stage, much before you'd rely on the systems. See for a few examples: a three-channel system like the Melon; a 4-channel system; 14 electrodes.
When I say "it is possible" to do that using a 3-channel system, I do not mean it is possible *right now*. Nobody has that technology yet. Rather, it might become possible in the future. Although even then I'd rather hope for a larger sensor array. Note also that these are still very rough guesses - they can tell you if you're drowsy or not, if you are currently falling asleep or not. They won't be able to distinguish more subtle states.

> Would it be possible to identify (different) states of sleep?

I'll have to pass on this one. I'm not a sleep expert. I think the location of the Melon is wrong though.

> Could it be possible to control a cursor/game (left/right movements)?

Possibly - if you place it so that your eye movements reflect as strong positive and negative currents. From brain activity? No. Movement decoding requires much more sensors over very different sites. Motor areas are closer to the middle of the brain, roughly speaking, and that's where you'd need very dense electrode coverage to see anything.

Postscript edit: a few references for decoding movement intentions using (multichannel) EEG. As you see, even with multichannel, high-quality EEG, performance is not especially good. http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnins.2014.00222/abstract http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00124/full
> 4 votes

# Answer
This type of sensor is hardly revolutionary, it seems that the integration and miniaturization are the key differences between say Melon, or this, or a 7-point sensor such as Muse, which supposedly monitors alpha and beta waves, and is already in production. Note that the 10/20 System is as old as I am: 30+ years. Additionally, it is an analog, dumb device, without interpretation or adaptive algorithms.

The most obvious non-listed application for this device is to train yourself to be a better video gamer. Seriously, the pre-frontal cortex, real time executive function, and a "focused state" would have all kinds of useful applications, especially for real-time activities involving executive function: video games, race car driving, piloting under extreme weather, or 1-on-1 sports such as tennis. This may be considered the "future" in some neuroscience textbook like the one copied and pasted above. However, this is very much reality, as the military, MIT, and other serious research institutions have been using this tech for many years for that exact purpose.

I am not a neuroscientist; I have a background in computing and liberal arts/research. However, according to: http://www.brainm.com/help/Positions\_and\_brain\_function.htm Fp1 controls:

* Logical Attention
* Orchestrate network
* Interactions planning
* Decision making
* Task completion
* Working memory

It appears that they are attempting to integrate a tilt sensor, which could be used to control the left-right axis, such as in a video game. The documentation and specifications are lacking or vague.
> 2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, measurement, eeg
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# Question
Title: What causes an inability to recall a melody, beat, or music?
**Background**: I have never been able to recall melodies to songs. I can play a song over and over again but the moment it stops, I cannot remember what it sounds like. I am referring to the music/beat/melody and not the lyrics. Even when I memorize the lyrics and try to sing a song out loud or even in my head, I simply cannot recall the music.

I like Adele but as I type this, I have no idea what her songs sound like. If I play one of her songs, I will recognize it. So it is not as if I have lost all memory of the song.

Over the years I have come up with certain tricks to remember some very rudimentary melodies. I know what Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the happy birthday song, Jingle Bells sound like but it took work. For Jingle Bells, I would knock on a table as it played. And I was able to get the rhythm. The lyrics to Twinkle Twinkle and the birthday song flow like a poem and so the melody strives from that (at least that's how it seems to me).

Even though I have no idea what my favorite songs sound like, I do know what emotions they evoke. When songs move me, it is as if something flows in me. I have heard stories from my mom about how I used to close my eyes and sway when listening to music. I learned not to do that in public after the teasing at school :)

I have tried to research this on my own and have come up with nothing. Any insight is greatly appreciated.

### Question

What causes an inability (or difficulty) to recall a melody, music, or beat?

# Answer
> 4 votes
The following answer is based on my own experience learning music combined with general principles of cognitive psychology related to skill acquisition.

I think that learning music would help a person recall a melody, a beat, and music in general. Formal training would be particularly helpful, but informal training would also often have a similar result.

In particular, learning music teaches you how music is structured. This training teaches you a whole range of skills. You learn to isolate instruments. You learn about the structure of songs (e.g., bars, beats, sections, repetition). You learn about melody (e.g., scales, intervals, chords, progressions, etc.). You learn about rhythm. There is a theoretical aspect to this knowledge whereby you conceptually understand the ideas. However, there is also a large procedural component whereby you train your ear to identify different sequences, and you also learn to produce such sequences with a suitable instrument.

Learning to sing can be particularly helpful in training your ability to reproduce melody without the song present. Singing trains you to be able to reproduce intervals, scales, and so on without an external source.

All this declarative and procedural knowledge of music simplifies and enables the mental recall of music. For example, instead of seeing a pop-song as a 3 minute stream of sound, You start to see the simplicity of for example, 3 chords, and 2 major melodic elements. You see the similarities with other songs in terms of the chord progressions, scales, and rhythm. It's similar to the way that language becomes simpler once you appreciate the basic principles of vocabulary and grammar.

Beyond musical skill, actual repetition and spending time seriously thinking about the song should also help in the recall a that specific song.

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Tags: memory, music
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# Question
Title: Are there first person accounts of monothematic delusions?
Monothematic delusions are delusions that concern a single topic (Davies et al. 2001). They are often the result of acquired brain damage and include the Delusional Misidentification Syndromes, such as Capgras delusion (which involves the conviction that a close relative or spouse has been replaced by an impostor), as well as Cotard delusion (which may involve the conviction that one is dead) and somatoparaphrenia (which involves the conviction that a limb or an entire side of one's body is not one's own).

While there are untold numbers of first person (experiential) accounts of schizophrenia and, therefore, schizophrenic delusions (which usually present as polythematic), from Daniel Paul Schreber's *Memoirs of My Nervous Illness* (1903) to Elyn Saks's *The Center Cannot Hold* (2007) and various accounts published in *Schizophrenia Bulletin*, I have not come across first person accounts of any monothematic delusions so far.

# Answer
Since asking the question, I was able to locate a first-person account of monothematic delusion, namely, of denial of ownership of one's own limbs (somatoparaphrenia/asomatognosia). It is due to the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, who in his fourth book *A Leg to Stand On* (1984) described his recovery after a fall in a remote region of Norway in which he injured his leg. Following surgery to reattach his quadriceps muscle, he experienced an emotional period in which his leg no longer felt a part of his body. He describes his confusion, seeing the “disowned” plastered limb (Sacks 1984: 45,49, 49–50):

> I had felt the leg in front of me . . . but now I could see it wasn’t there at all but had got shifted and rotated. . . . I had a sudden sense of mismatch, of profound incongruity – between what I imagined I felt and what I actually saw, between what I had “thought” and what I now found. I felt, for a dizzying, vertiginous moment, that I have been profoundly deceived. . . .

The experience of touching the leg was “inconceivably shocking and uncanny”:

> I seemed to have lost “my leg” – which was absurd, for there it was, inside the case, safe and sound – a “fact.” How could there be any doubt in the matter? And yet there was. On this very matter of “having” or “possessing” a leg, I was profoundly doubtful, fundamentally unsure.

This alarming state of uncertainty later resolves itself into what seems closer to a fully delusional state:

> \[the leg\] became a foreign, inconceivable thing, which I looked at, and touched, without any sense whatever of recognition or relation. It was only then that I gazed at it, and felt I don’t know you, you’re not part of me, and, further, I don’t know this “thing,” it’s not part of anything. I had lost my leg. Again and again I came back to these five words: words which expressed a central truth for me, however preposterous they might sound to anyone else. In some sense, then, I had lost my leg. It had vanished; it had gone; it had been cut off at the top. I was now an amputee.

**EDIT**: I have found a first-person account of Cotard delusion in this blog post, thanks to Vaughan Bell who found it through Keith Frankish (both authors working extensively with delusions).
> 2 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, reference-request, psychiatry, schizophrenia, psychosis
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# Question
Title: What causes words repeated in your head to start fading away from consciousness?
**Background:** I tried to do a self-control exercise that involved doing something boring like folding clothes while the exercise part involved repeatedly saying "focus" in my head, to stop daydreaming. However, after 15 minutes, my internal voice suddenly became weaker and weaker until it stopped to echo in my head. I tried to scream "focus" inside my head and it felt like moving a hand while in sleep paralysis, nothing echoed, while my front head (not forehead) felt weird. I am confused as knowing nothing about what actually happened and why.

Off-Question Notes: I have ADD, that sometimes something feels so boring I can't focus on it (The purpose of the exercise), but it doesn't seem to be the case, because I couldn't say anything else in my head nor think.

### Question

What is the cause of the phenomena whereby repeating words inside your head begin to fade from consciousness?

# Answer
> 3 votes
As @Steven Jeuris has said, the phenomena is best known as **semantic satiation**. It's not as popular a topic of study as it used to be (most references I can find for it come from the 1960s), but, to the best of my memory, the actual *cause* of the phenomena is down to how meaning is represented in the brain.

I'll explain this by loosely paraphrasing an account of the phenomena in Michael Spivey's book, The Continuity of Mind, but there are some (interesting) theoretical claims in that book which I won't bother with for the scope of this answer.

The general consensus on neural representations of meaning is that semantic information (i.e. the meaning of a word, although this can include much more than that) is encoded as a pattern of activation across many neurons. Exposure any given word (let's use `giraffe` as our example, following Spivey) causes that specific pattern to become partially activated, and so we experience the "meaning" of the word - the more accurately the pattern is recreated, the more intense our conscious experience of the meaning.

However, individual neurons are subject to **adaptation**, or *fatigue* (Wikipedia): if a particular neuron has been firing for a prolonged period of time, it begins to weaken, and it's firing rate slows, until it has time to recover (think of a drummer's arm muscles, performing the same action repeatedly until he tires out). When you repeat a specific word (`giraffe`), the neurons used in the corresponding pattern become fatigued in this way, and so the corresponding meaning ("long-necked African mammal") fades, or is replaced by other, possibly related meanings.

<sub> Spivey, M. (2007). The continuity of mind. Oxford University Press. </sub>

# Answer
> 3 votes
If you use a slightly different (and to my own experience more common) phrasing of this phenomenon to look for information you find immediate relevant results on Google. Rather than referring to words *fading from consciousness* I've usually heard it being stated as **repeating a word often makes it lose its meaning**.

The first hit is a Wikipedia article on **semantic satiation**.

> Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, consciousness
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# Question
Title: Is there evidence that listening to music can aid/hinder concentration or performance?
I, like many computer programmers, love to listen to music while I work. I have always believed that music helps me stay focused and motivated, and improves my performance on many types of tasks, espescially "busywork". However my company's CEO disagrees with me, and believes that music is a distraction and leads to reduced productivity. Have any studies been done on whether listening to music while performing a task improves or hinders one's ability to perform that task? Is there a consensus in the cognitive science community regarding this?

# Answer
It basically depends on how the particular musical performance is perceived by the listener. Cognitive process of listening seems to be comprise several layers, which follows a bottom-up direction.

First step is to decode relevant signal(s), among a complex package of sound. This is where the irrelevant noise is eliminated. Can music be eliminated in this level? Highly unlikely, but still possible. I do not know of a particular experiment but when the music is being played in a far destination, or with a low volume, or if the participant is highly concentrated to the task; then it may be eliminated in this step. But the key point in this step is that the term "noise" refers to aperiodic background sounds. Therefore, my first impression is that music, being periodical, must decrease the task performance. Cutler and Clifton (1999) gives an overview on the entire listening process. Second step is the grouping of different sound sources. There is also modelling studies that aims to explain this phenomenon (Bregman, 1990). Steps in listening continues further, but those steps are beyond the scope of this question.

But there are other studies also. Ylias and Heaven (2003) showed that the background noise negatively effects reading comprehension. So far so good. Cassidy and MacDonald (2007) showed that task performance on silence is greater than in low arousal music, and that is greater than noise, and that is even greater than high arousal music conditions. This is interesting, because it now introduces the affective state of the listener into the equation, which makes it a lot more difficult to handle. Another result is that the effect of the noise here is comparable to the effect of background music. But we have to note that the details of the noise in this experiment is not given in detail, only commented as "the everyday noise". It would be more conclusive if we just know whether it is the background sound of a television (periodic) or a traffic noise (aperiodic).

Combining these references, I cannot easily conclude that music is taken as a "noise". It seems that music reduces the task performance, by negatively affecting a later step in the listening process.

Ending note: There are several semiformal-informal studies on the web also. They study directly the "work/office performance", therefore I must say that they lack a little bit of a controlled environment. In such environments we can even confidently say that music improves our performance in particular situations. But what we miss is that office environments comprise several unhandled parameters that makes it hard for scientific experimental setup (i.e. listening music may improve the performance if your office mates chit chat next to you).

Ending note 2: I was interested in this topic a time ago. So I welcome more recent references or comments.

<sub> Cutler, A., & Clifton, C. (1999). Comprehending spoken language: A blueprint of the listener. The neurocognition of language, 123-166.
Bregman, A. S. (1984, July). Auditory scene analysis. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 168-175).
Ylias, G., & Heaven, P. C. (2003). The influence of distraction on reading comprehension: a Big Five analysis. Personality and individual differences, 34(6), 1069-1079.
Cassidy, G., & MacDonald, R. A. (2007). The effect of background music and background noise on the task performance of introverts and extraverts. Psychology of Music, 35(3), 517-537. </sub>
> 22 votes

# Answer
As mentioned in a recent study by Thompson et al. (2012), there are two perspectives which account for the effects of background music on reading comprehension specifically (but as I argue later, these seem generalizable): the *Cognitive-Capacity* hypothesis and the *Arousal-Mood* hypothesis.

> In short, the potential *cost* of background music listening for reading comprehension is that it places demands on attention. The potential *benefit* of background music listening is that it can enhance arousal levels and mood. The overall effect of background music on task performance may be a balance between these costs and benefits.

Drawing from multitasking literature, one would expect that depending on the cognitive requirements of the task you are performing, it might be possible that certain music is either appropriate or not. The ACT-R architecture (Anderson. J. R., 2007) assumes *"the human cognitive architecture consists of a set of largely independent modules associated with different brain regions"*. E.g. vision, audition, manual control and speech. Although all modules can operate in parallel, each module can only serve one task at a time. Some music (e.g. vocal) may cause more *capacity interference* when tasks compete for limited resources.

Thompson et al. (2012) investigate specifically the effect of tempo and intensity of background music on a reading comprehension task, but provide a nice review of earlier studies. Check out the full paper (PDF). Their findings indicate ...

> \[...\] that **listening to background instrumental music is most likely to disrupt reading comprehension when the music is fast and loud**. Music listening may consume more of listeners’ finite attentional resources when it comprises a greater number of auditory events per unit time that are difficult to ignore because of greater intensity. \[...\] **Music that was slow and/or soft had no significant detrimental effects on reading comprehension**, \[...\]

Although reporting on an overall null effect, an older meta-analysis by Kämpfe et al. (2010) had a conflicting conclusion:

> \[...\] **a comparison of studies that examined background music compared to no music indicates that background music disturbs the reading process**, has some small detrimental effects on memory, but has a positive impact on emotional reactions and improves achievements in sports. A comparison of different types of background music reveals that the tempo of the music influences the tempo of activities that are performed while being exposed to background music.

As proposed by Kämpfe et al. (2010), and indicated by the results of Thompson et al., such interference effects are dependent on the structural characteristics of the music.

Overall it seems not all music has been shown to be detrimental as background music, but fast and loud music is more likely to disrupt ongoing tasks. To my knowledge no more detailed studies have been done which incorporate both type of tasks and different types of music. The question also arises to which degree these studies capture longitudinal effects in a real world environment with more complex tasks.

<sub> Thompson, W. F., Schellenberg, E. G., & Letnic, A. K. (2012). Fast and loud background music disrupts reading comprehension. Psychology of Music, 40(6), 700-708.
Anderson, J. R. (2007). How can the human mind occur in the physical universe?. Oxford University Press.
Kämpfe, J., Sedlmeier, P., & Renkewitz, F. (2010). The impact of background music on adult listeners: A meta-analysis. Psychology of Music, 0305735610376261. </sub>
> 7 votes

# Answer
I realise this is anecdotal, but the answer to this does vary between people. My wife likes to have nothing to listen to while studying or concentrating. I like to have the TV on normally, or Chill Radio, whereas by youngest son has metal music on - not what most people would consider conducive the thought of any sort.

I understand that my wife finds that music or sounds are distracting - she needs to put effort into focussing. I, OTOH, find that the sounds help my focus, but eliminating other distractions - becasue I am in control of the sounds, they are not distracting. Youngest son enjoys the music, so for him it is just pleasant background to studying. Incidentally, my wife and I differ on having a tickign clock in the bedrooom too - she cannot stand it, whereas I fid it soothing and calming, and helps me get to sleep.

I am sure that I have seem studies that back up these sorts of differences, and that they are about differences in the way we think and process information. Cannot find anythig ATM though.
> -2 votes

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Tags: performance, concentration, music
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# Question
Title: How actively does your brain physically prune connections?
Is pruning defined as neural apoptosis or are connections (neural synapses) simply separated?

At what rate, if known, does this occur in individuals (ages 18+)?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Apoptosis is the programmed death of a cell. This is not required for pruning of connections.

During development, axons and dendrites of neurons undergo extensive lengthening, branching and also retraction. Simultaneous with this process, many many synapses are being constructed and deconstructed between axons and nearby dendrites. Also during adulthood, synapses are constructed, strengthened, weakened and deconstructed.

Hard numbers: Between the ages of 20-90, a 10% reduction in number of neurons occurred. On average, neurons make around 7000 synapses per neuron. Under the assumption that the number of synapses per neuron doesn't change, there will be around a 10% reduction of synapses between ages 20-90. The paper referenced below states that estimates of numbers of synapses over different ages is in progress, but I couldn't find a follow-up publication.

Source: Pakkenberg, B., Pelvig, D., Marner, L., Bundgaard, M. J., Gundersen, H. J. G., Nyengaard, J. R., & Regeur, L. (2003). Aging and the human neocortex. Experimental Gerontology, 38(1-2), 95-99. doi:10.1016/S0531-5565(02)00151-1

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Tags: neuroscience, memory, neurology
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# Question
Title: Are sensations of turbulence after flights proprioceptive hallucinations?
I noticed on several occasions after long-haul flights (greater than eight hours) that I would still feel a sensation of turbulence or movement as if I were still in the aircraft. These would be persistent for approximately a day and occur periodically every minute or so.

As there is no sensory input from reality which could cause these sensations, are they technically proprioceptive hallucinations? If so, why do they occur? (I am assuming the abnormality or cause lies in the brain and central nervous system as my inner ear is not infected or altered.)

# Answer
> 3 votes
> As there is no sensory input from reality which could cause these sensations, are they technically proprioceptive hallucinations?

Not really, although I think it wouldn't be *completely* inaccurate to think of them that way. A hallucination has no basis in reality (e.g. auditory hallucinations); what you're describing has a physical basis in reality. It is based on a physical disconnect between your previous reality (a mildly turbulent flight of significant hours duration) and the removal of such stimuli (your disembarkation) while your sensitized vestibulo-occular mechanism continues to function as if you were on board. First noticed on ships, but expanded to flights and other stimuli, it's been called *landsickness* \[1\] when of short duration, and Mal de Debarquement if it lasts longer much longer than 1-2 days.\[2\]

To understand this, a bit of basic physiology is in order. First, there are three semicircular canals located in little pockets of bone called the inner ear, one on each side. The three canals are oriented at (basically) 90° angles to each other so that we can maintain our balance no matter which position our head is in. These are also connected to one's ocular reflexes. Together they're called the vestibolo-occular system, which functions as a reflex (VOR).\[3\] Because the connections are excitatory, increased firing from a canal afferent leads to contralateral movement of the eyes (which is how spinning ice skaters can keep track of / focus on where they are visually). Normally all this occurs without our notice.

The latency of action of the rotational vestibulo-ocular reflex (r-VOR) is 7-15 milliseconds, which is the time required for the eyes to respond in an equal, but opposite, manner to the motion of the head. This time is remarkably fast compared with the latency for visually mediated eye movements, which is longer than 75 milliseconds.\[4\]

What happens is that with excitation (say, spinning in one plane), the cilia of the hair cells (see @Chuck Sherrington's diagram here) are displaced, and remain displaced as long as one is spinning with the same velocity and direction. Once the spinning suddenly stops, the cilia proceed to move to their default position, tricking the VOR into moving the eyes in the opposite direction repeatedly until the cilia come to a complete stop.\[3\] You can observe this phenomenon by looking into the person's eyes immediately after they stop spinning (make sure they are safe from falling.) Once things settle down in the inner ear, the vertigo (perception of spinning) stops shortly thereafter as well.

Flying or being on a ship causes multiple VOR inputs and adjustments (by our brains) to this movement. As the flight continues and you experience choppy motions, your VOR "adjusts" to these frequent shifts and you don't feel them as much. When you disembark, however, there is an adjustment period to go through; we are still receiving mixed signals until we are completely sensitized to the new "normal". It is of varying intensity and duration, and can appear suddenly (maybe on head movement or rapid eye movement) and be persistent or transient.

If you can relax, you can enjoy these tricks the brain is playing on your mind, and marvel at how well we are adaptable. I had my first truly noticeable episodes of this phenomenon while traveling on the vaporetti in Venice for a few days. If you feel it's worse that what I describe, I would start my search with *sea legs*, landsickness, and MDDS (though the latter is highly unlikely).

\[1\] landsickness
\[2\] Mal de Debarquement Syndrome
\[3\] Anatomy and Physiology of the Vestibular System Gizzi, et. al.
\[4\] Vestibuloocular Reflex Testing - Amin, et. al.
\[5\] Baloh and Honrubia's Clinical Neurophysiology of the Vestibular System By Robert William Baloh, Kevin Kerber, MD

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Tags: perception, hallucinations
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# Question
Title: Is there a name for a scientist's resistance to disconfirmation of his or her theories?
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses. And some results illustrate that people set higher standards of evidence for hypotheses that go against their current expectations, an effect sometimes referred to as "disconfirmation bias". However, I would like to know if there is a specific name (and literature) related to the tendency among scientists to *resist disconfirmation* of their theories.

# Answer
> 5 votes
I understand confirmation bias as including this. The Wikipedia page you link has a section on "persistence of discredited beliefs" that corroborates my perspective:

> Confirmation biases can be used to explain why some beliefs persist when the initial evidence for them is removed.\[45\] This belief perseverance effect has been shown by a series of experiments using what is called the "debriefing paradigm": participants read fake evidence for a hypothesis, their attitude change is measured, then the fakery is exposed in detail. Their attitudes are then measured once more to see if their belief returns to its previous level.\[44\]
>
> A common finding is that at least some of the initial belief remains even after a full debrief.\[46\] In one experiment, participants had to distinguish between real and fake suicide notes. The feedback was random: some were told they had done well while others were told they had performed badly. Even after being fully debriefed, participants were still influenced by the feedback. They still thought they were better or worse than average at that kind of task, depending on what they had initially been told.\[47\]
>
> In another study, participants read job performance ratings of two firefighters, along with their responses to a risk aversion test.\[44\] This fictional data was arranged to show either a negative or positive association: some participants were told that a risk-taking firefighter did better, while others were told they did less well than a risk-averse colleague.\[48\] Even if these two case studies were true, they would have been scientifically poor evidence for a conclusion about firefighters in general. However, the participants found them subjectively persuasive.\[48\] When the case studies were shown to be fictional, participants' belief in a link diminished, but around half of the original effect remained.\[44\] Follow-up interviews established that the participants had understood the debriefing and taken it seriously. Participants seemed to trust the debriefing, but regarded the discredited information as irrelevant to their personal belief.\[48\]
>
> ---
>
> **References**
> 44. Ross, Lee; Anderson, Craig A. (1982), "Shortcomings in the attribution process: On the origins and maintenance of erroneous social assessments", in Kahneman, Daniel; Slovic, Paul; Tversky, Amos, Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases, Cambridge University Press, pp. 129–152, ISBN 978-0-521-28414-1, OCLC 7578020
> 45. Nickerson, Raymond S. (1998), "Confirmation Bias; A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises", Review of General Psychology (Educational Publishing Foundation) 2 (2): 175–220, doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175, ISSN 1089-2680, p. 187 46. Kunda, Ziva (1999), Social Cognition: Making Sense of People, MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-61143-5, OCLC 40618974, p. 99
> 47. Ross, Lee; Lepper, Mark R.; Hubbard, Michael (1975), "Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (American Psychological Association) 32 (5): 880–892, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.32.5.880, ISSN 0022-3514, PMID 1185517 via Kunda 1999, p. 99
> 48. Anderson, Craig A.; Lepper, Mark R.; Ross, Lee (1980), "Perseverance of Social Theories: The Role of Explanation in the Persistence of Discredited Information", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (American Psychological Association) 39 (6): 1037–1049, doi:10.1037/h0077720, ISSN 0022-3514

# Answer
> 5 votes
This isn't quite what you are looking for, but it's close enough that it might help you find additional information.

Munro (2010) found evidence that people tend to discount the scientific possibility of studying something when presented with scientific evidence that goes against their current beliefs. In other words, if people were shown a result that went against their beliefs, then people were more likely to conclude that it was not possible to conduct rigorous scientific experimentation on the topic. He called this **the scientific impotence excuse**. In the experiment, subjects were shown an (artificial) abstract that claimed there was either a link between homosexuality and mental illness or claimed there was no link. A control group saw the same abstracts, but instead of a link between homosexuality and mental illness, the link was between a made-up group like *Zavs*. After reading the abstract, subjects were asked to indicate whether or not it was possible to investigate such links with scientific methods. If the results of the abstract were contradictory towards a subject's prior beliefs (as measured by a questionnaire at the start of the experiment), then the subject was more likely to say that the question cannot be investigated in a scientific manner.

This study was done with college students, who are not trained scientists, so it's unclear whether the result would generalize to scientists or not.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I think this is more related to the **Observer-expectancy effect**, where the researchers, looking for a certain result in an experiment, may inadvertently manipulate or interpret the results to reveal their expectations. That's what you a looking for, I suppose.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, reference-request, bias
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title: How do humans learn to combine tasks?

text:
# Question
Title: How do humans learn to combine tasks?
I've been reading about hierarchical learning (a variant of reinforcement learning from what I understand) and how it is shown to allow learning of a higher-level task (the main example is assembly). I made the mistake of assuming that since the paper shows how a set of sequential actions are learned more quickly when the individual tasks are learned beforehand, that the same could be accomplished with a set of tasks to be combined.

For example, imagine learning to play hockey. First, you have to learn how to skate effectively. Secondly, you learn how to handle the puck with a stick. Thirdly, you have to learn to be aware of the other players and their movement. Finally, you combine all of these and sometimes have to spend time refining the lower end skills to become an effective hockey player.

Is there a name for this type of learning and a model associated to it? Is this type of learning encompassed in hierarchical learning?

# Answer
> 4 votes
The term I was looking for is "concurrent activities". Some research in the domain of hierarchical learning has been done in this domain by Rohanimanesh and Mahadevan.

According to this literature review on hierarchical learning, basically what they did was determine how multiple tasks can be managed without interfering with one another and how they should be scheduled.

I couldn't find any cognitive models of this concurrency, so there appears to be quite a bit of work done on the idea of multi-tasking, which might be synonymous. Unfortunately, most of this seems to be quite firmly in the camp of the Classical Cognitive Science Paradigm (such as the work by Niels Taatgen which interestingly rejects hierarchy) with not a lot of thought put into neurobiological plausibility. Additional answers pointing to fMRI experimental data similar to the one found here for hierarchical learning would be greatly appreciated.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I think that humans initially understand all of life as a "oneness" and learn to differentiate and mentally "un-integrate" things according to what each individual considers pertinent characteristics.

I think another question that will have the same answer as the answer you seek for your question is "How do humans so effectively reduce complicated processes to their constituent tasks?"

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Tags: learning, cognitive-modeling, theoretical-neuroscience, reinforcement-learning
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# Question
Title: How does subjective experience arise from matter?
Forgive me for lacking rigor, but if what I know is correct, it is established that consciousness and other higher functions characteristic of humans are a consequence of our cortex, specifically neocortex. However, what has always puzzled me is the neurobiological basis that gives rise to the phenomenon that we associate our bodies with ourselves – i.e., why does my brain think of my physical body as "me" and make me care for it? In other words, why is me me at this particular point in time and not some other body living e.g. centuries ago? Why do I not associate "me" with multiple bodies living at the same time, or have identity at all?

A naive, materialist answer would perhaps be that given our nervous system etc., "me" is only a sort of an illusion created by the brain which acts as a kind of "least thinkable unit" that has no neural connections to other physical bodies. Still, **what is the process that "picks" precisely my brain and my body to become "me"** – why have I not sensed reality from the viewpoint of e.g. Albert Einstein or Brad Pitt?

I wonder if any empirical answers to such questions can be given, or at least if these questions have been reformulated to a set of more well-defined questions in the light of modern neuroscience.

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**UPDATE:** A better way to form this question would be: if two bodies come to exist at the same time, and consciousness is an emergent, materialistic phenomenon of the body, why do I experience the emergence of consciousness in one specific body (i.e. the one I call my own) and not in another?

# Answer
> 7 votes
This is partially an aspect of the binding problem.

> Sensory information arrives in parallel as a variety of heterogeneous hints, (shapes, colors, motions, smells and sounds) encoded in partly modular systems. Typically many objects are present at once. The result is an urgent case of what has been labelled the binding problem. We must collect the hints, bind them into the right spatial and temporal bundles, and then interpret them to specify their real world origins. (2003, 97)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/

The bottom line is that our senses are integrated and some of our most important senses (smell, sight, hearing) all have their organs located very close together. Spatial perception is (at least partially) stored in the parietal lobes. The parietal lobes integrate information from somatosensors like muscle spindles to relay the body's position in space as well as the eyes (and ears), which help form a perspective of the environment.

You might also consider Tononi's framework for consciousness: integrated information theory which presumes:

> (i) the quantity of consciousness corresponds to the amount of integrated information generated by a complex of elements; (ii) the quality of experience is specified by the set of informational relationships generated within that complex. Integrated information (Phi) is defined as the amount of information generated by a complex of elements, above and beyond the information generated by its parts. Qualia space (Q) is a space where each axis represents a possible state of the complex, each point is a probability distribution of its states, and arrows between points represent the informational relationships among its elements generated by causal mechanisms (connections). Together, the set of informational relationships within a complex constitute a shape in Q that completely and univocally specifies a particular experience.

I think the deeper question we need answered before we get to your specific question is "how does a subjective experience arise from matter in the first place?". Other than that, your question is no different than "why did that rock not get this rock's blemish?". It was mostly likely just a matter of chance in initial conditions.

# Answer
> 6 votes
> what has always puzzled me is the neurobiological basis that gives rise to the phenomenon that we associate our bodies with ourselves – i.e., why does my brain think of my physical body as "me" and make me care for it? In other words, why is me me at this particular point in time and not some other body living e.g. centuries ago? Why do I not associate "me" with multiple bodies living at the same time, or have identity at all?

Because your brain is connected, via nerves, to your body, in both directions, sensory and motor. Every time your body's sensory apparati sense something, only your brain is alerted to this, and no other. Every time your brain activates its motor centers, it observes only your body moving as a result, and no other. And it constantly receives reinforcement of this tight mapping every waking moment of your life.

> What is the process that "picks" precisely my brain and my body to become "me" – why have I not sensed reality from the viewpoint of e.g. Albert Einstein or Brad Pitt?

Because your brain is not wired to the bodies of those people. If it were, you would. You would see through their eyes, like in *Being John Malkovich*.

> I wonder if any empirical answers to such questions can be given, or at least if these questions have been reformulated to a set of more well-defined questions in the light of modern neuroscience.

People have reported that their sense of the extent of their bodies can change depending on if they are using tools. The tips of the tools can seem to be part of them. For example:

> Neurophysiological evidence indicates that after repeatedly using a tool, changes in the body representation (of humans and trained monkeys) occur, and over time the tool is perceived as if being an integral part of the body. The phenomenon describing the extension of the body representation to include non-corporeal objects in the peripersonal space, such as tools or prosthetic devices, has been extensively reported in the literature (PDF of "Adaptive Body Schema for Robotic Tool-Use" found here.)

The point is, one's body schema is flexible based on the nature of the inputs the brain receives. The map is plastic. But it also may shed light on your question, since it suggests that correlation of brain activity and body function is what gives rise to the matching between your body consciousness and your particular body.

> UPDATE: A better way to form this question would be: if two bodies come to exist at the same time, and consciousness is an emergent, materialistic phenomenon of the body, why do I experience the emergence of consciousness in one specific body (i.e. the one I call my own) and not in another?

Because consciousness of the body is not divorced from facts about the body; it is conscious *of* some body schema, and that requires "facts" in the cortex that register *your* body as the one it is conscious about.

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Tags: neuroscience, perception, consciousness, philosophy-of-mind
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