Brain & Behavior

[Michael Scally MD]

Men & Women Brains Are Different!

[A]n individual’s biological sex can be classified with extremely high accuracy by considering the brain mosaic as a whole.

To demonstrate this, we acquired T1-weighted structural MRI scans for 1,566 individuals, aged 19–35 y (57.7% female), from the freely available Brain Genomics Superstruct Project.

Classification accuracy was extremely high [accuracy: 93%, 95% confidence interval (CI) 89.5–94.9%, P < 10−16] and remained significant if head-size-related measurements were excluded [92% (CI 88.9–94.5%), P < 10−16] or regressed out [70% (CI 65.0–74.2%), P < 10−6]. To borrow the framing of Joel et al., the human brain may be a mosaic, but it is one with predictable patterns.

Chekroud AM, Ward EJ, Rosenberg MD, Holmes AJ. Patterns in the human brain mosaic discriminate males from females. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/03/15/1523888113.extract

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Men & Women Brains Are Different!

[A]n individual’s biological sex can be classified with extremely high accuracy by considering the brain mosaic as a whole.

To demonstrate this, we acquired T1-weighted structural MRI scans for 1,566 individuals, aged 19–35 y (57.7% female), from the freely available Brain Genomics Superstruct Project.

Classification accuracy was extremely high [accuracy: 93%, 95% confidence interval (CI) 89.5–94.9%, P < 10−16] and remained significant if head-size-related measurements were excluded [92% (CI 88.9–94.5%), P < 10−16] or regressed out [70% (CI 65.0–74.2%), P < 10−6]. To borrow the framing of Joel et al., the human brain may be a mosaic, but it is one with predictable patterns.

Chekroud AM, Ward EJ, Rosenberg MD, Holmes AJ. Patterns in the human brain mosaic discriminate males from females. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/03/15/1523888113.extract

Joel D, Berman Z, Tavor I, et al. Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2015;112(50):15468-73. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468.full

Whereas a categorical difference in the genitals has always been acknowledged, the question of how far these categories extend into human biology is still not resolved. Documented sex/gender differences in the brain are often taken as support of a sexually dimorphic view of human brains (“female brain” or “male brain”). However, such a distinction would be possible only if sex/gender differences in brain features were highly dimorphic (i.e., little overlap between the forms of these features in males and females) and internally consistent (i.e., a brain has only “male” or only “female” features). Here, analysis of MRIs of more than 1,400 human brains from four datasets reveals extensive overlap between the distributions of females and males for all gray matter, white matter, and connections assessed. Moreover, analyses of internal consistency reveal that brains with features that are consistently at one end of the “maleness-femaleness” continuum are rare. Rather, most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males. Our findings are robust across sample, age, type of MRI, and method of analysis. These findings are corroborated by a similar analysis of personality traits, attitudes, interests, and behaviors of more than 5,500 individuals, which reveals that internal consistency is extremely rare. Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Barcelo H, Capraro V. The Good, the Bad, and the Angry: An Experimental Study on The Heterogeneity Of People's (Dis)Honest Behavior. arXiv. [1712.10229] The Good, the Bad, and the Angry: An experimental study on the heterogeneity of people's (dis)honest behavior

[A crowdsourced psychology experiment reveals that when it comes to dishonesty, there are three kinds of people.]

Dishonesty has a negative impact on government, companies, and our personal lives. Previous experiments explored which conditions favor or disfavor the emergence of dishonesty.

However, all these studies are static: subjects are either fully aware of the consequences of all available actions, or they are uncertain, but the uncertainty cannot be cleared.

On the contrary, many real interactions are dynamic: people know that they will have a chance to lie, but they do not initially know the exact consequences of the available actions.

And they have to invest resources (e.g., time) to find them out. Here we capture the essence of this type of interactions by means of a novel decision problem.

We study the distribution of choices, the effect of response time and time pressure on dishonesty.

We report numerous findings, the most intriguing of which is that, in our setting, people can be divided in three types:
· Good people, who act honestly without even looking at the payoffs associated with lying versus telling the truth;
· Angry people, who first look at the payoff corresponding to telling the truth and then lie only if this payoff is low;
· Bad people, who maximize their payoff without even checking the payoff corresponding to telling the truth.

The first two classes are large, whereas only few people (less than 16%) appear to belong to the third class.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Netflix's new reality special 'The Push' is a disturbing psychological experiment that tries to push a contestant to murder
Netflix's new reality special 'The Push' is a disturbing psychological experiment that tries to push a contestant to murder

"The Push," a special that's just over an hour, shows UK mentalist, magician, and TV star Derren Brown trying to convince someone to kill another person. "Can we be manipulated by social pressure to commit murder?" Brown asks in the trailer. The special made its original debut on Channel 4 in the UK in January 2016.

Some Netflix users were disturbed by the show's premise when the trailer came out, and questioned whether it was real. But the show is very real, though the murder is not. Brown's goal with "The Push" is not to actually get people to murder someone: He wants to see if it is possible to convince someone to. And if he can convince someone, what lengths would he have to go to, and who would do it?

 

[Old]

Here is a better one:

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Free Will Is Dead, Let’s Bury It.
Backreaction: Free will is dead, let’s bury it.

by Sabine Hossenfelder - NORDITA

I wish people would stop insisting they have free will. It’s terribly annoying. Insisting that free will exists is bad science, like insisting that horoscopes tell you something about the future – it’s not compatible with our knowledge about nature.

According to our best present understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, everything that happens in our universe is due to only four different forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear force. These forces have been extremely well studied, and they don’t leave any room for free will.

There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it cannot be influenced by you, whatever you think “you” are. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no “will” – there is just some randomness sprinkled over the determinism.

In neither case do you have free will in any meaningful way.

These are the only two options, and all other elaborations on the matter are just verbose distractions. It doesn’t matter if you start talking about chaos (which is deterministic), top-down causation (which doesn’t exist), or insist that we don’t know how consciousness really works (true but irrelevant). It doesn’t change a thing about this very basic observation: there isn’t any known law of nature that lets you meaningfully speak of “free will”.

If you don’t want to believe that, I challenge you to write down any equation for any system that allows for something one could reasonably call free will. You will almost certainly fail. The only thing really you can do to hold on to free will is to wave hands, yell “magic”, and insist that there are systems which are exempt from the laws of nature. And these systems somehow have something to do with human brains.

The only known example for a law that is neither deterministic nor random comes from myself. But it’s a baroque construct meant as proof in principle, not a realistic model that I would know how to combine with the four fundamental interactions. As an aside: The paper was rejected by several journals. Not because anyone found anything wrong with it. No, the philosophy journals complained that it was too much physics, and the physics journals complained that it was too much philosophy. And you wonder why there isn’t much interaction between the two fields.

After plain denial, the somewhat more enlightened way to insist on free will is to redefine what it means. You might settle for example on speaking of free will as long as your actions cannot be predicted by anybody, possibly not even by yourself. Clearly, it is presently impossible to make such a prediction. It remains to be seen whether it will remain impossible, but right now it’s a reasonable hope. If that’s what you want to call free will, go ahead, but better not ask yourself what determined your actions.

A popular justification for this type of free will is insisting that on comparably large scales, like those between molecules responsible for chemical interactions in your brain, there are smaller components which may have a remaining influence. If you don’t keep track of these smaller components, the behavior of the larger components might not be predictable. You can then say “free will is emergent” because of “higher level indeterminism”. It’s like saying if I give you a robot and I don’t tell you what’s in the robot, then you can’t predict what the robot will do, consequently it must have free will. I haven’t managed to bring up sufficient amounts of intellectual dishonesty to buy this argument.

But really you don’t have to bother with the details of these arguments, you just have to keep in mind that “indeterminism” doesn’t mean “free will”. Indeterminism just means there’s some element of randomness, either because that’s fundamental or because you have willfully ignored information on short distances. But there is still either no “freedom” or no “will”. Just try it. Try to write down one equation that does it. Just try it.

I have written about this a few times before and according to the statistics these are some of the most-read pieces on my blog. Following these posts, I have also received a lot of emails by readers who seem seriously troubled by the claim that our best present knowledge about the laws of nature doesn’t allow for the existence of free will. To ease your existential worries, let me therefore spell out clearly what this means and doesn’t mean.

It doesn’t mean that you are not making decisions or are not making choices. Free will or not, you have to do the thinking to arrive at a conclusion, the answer to which you previously didn’t know. Absence of free will doesn’t mean either that you are somehow forced to do something you didn’t want to do. There isn’t anything external imposing on you. You are whatever makes the decisions. Besides this, if you don’t have free will you’ve never had it, and if this hasn’t bothered you before, why start worrying now?

This conclusion that free will doesn’t exist is so obvious that I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t widely accepted. The reason, I am afraid, is not scientific but political. Denying free will is considered politically incorrect because of a wide-spread myth that free will skepticism erodes the foundation of human civilization.

...

Life Is a Coin With One Side [Free Will]
Life Is a Coin With One Side - This American Life

Brief Notes…

David Kestenbaum did the segment. David has been thinking about (lack of) free will for a while but finally got the courage to discuss it on the show. Explains 4 forces of physical universe that control everything. They leave no room for “free will.”

Interviews Robert Sapolsky, Stanford neuroscientist. Goal of book “Behave” was to gently lead people to conclude there’s no free will. Implications: don’t be so proud, don’t hate people for doing bad things, rethink our criminal justice system. Sapolsky says this is all he thinks about these days.

Interviews Melissa Franklin, Harvard physics professor. No evidence for free will, it’s very unlikely. People hoping for magic or God.

 

[flenser]

No evidence for free will, it’s very unlikely. People hoping for magic or God.

Free will can't be proven. By definition it has to be outside the boundaries of the (known) physical universe. If they could prove it using physics and statistics, it wouldn't be free will. A physicist and a neuroscientist should be well aware of this, so I question their motives in spreading this kind of junk science.

The way I see it is belief in free will imposes the belief one is responsible for one's actions. Real or imagined, it provides a very real deterrent (for most) against harming others. Removing that belief would also remove that deterrent.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

While we have long known that genes build our bodies — determining eye and hair colour, influencing height and body shape — there is a growing conviction that genes also sculpt the mind. As the cost of gene-sequencing technology has plunged to a few hundred dollars, millions of people have had their DNA sliced and diced by scientists seeking to quantify the genetic contribution to personality, intelligence, behaviour and mental illness.

This is the dark and difficult territory explored by three important books that embody a new zeitgeist of genetic determinism. If DNA builds the brain and mind — the puppetmasters pulling our behavioural strings — then selfhood becomes circumscribed largely by our genes. The idea that we are little more than machines driven by our biology raises a profound conundrum: if the genes we inherit at conception shape personality, behaviour, mental health and intellectual achievement, where is the space for society and social policy — even parents — to make a difference? What of free will?


Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are by Robert Plomin
Blueprint

Innate - How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are by Kevin J. Mitchell
Innate

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/300/300656/good-reasons-for-bad-feelings/9780241291085.html

 

[Old]

While we have long known that genes build our bodies — determining eye and hair colour, influencing height and body shape — there is a growing conviction that genes also sculpt the mind. As the cost of gene-sequencing technology has plunged to a few hundred dollars, millions of people have had their DNA sliced and diced by scientists seeking to quantify the genetic contribution to personality, intelligence, behaviour and mental illness.

This is the dark and difficult territory explored by three important books that embody a new zeitgeist of genetic determinism. If DNA builds the brain and mind — the puppetmasters pulling our behavioural strings — then selfhood becomes circumscribed largely by our genes. The idea that we are little more than machines driven by our biology raises a profound conundrum: if the genes we inherit at conception shape personality, behaviour, mental health and intellectual achievement, where is the space for society and social policy — even parents — to make a difference? What of free will?


Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are by Robert Plomin
Blueprint

Innate - How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are by Kevin J. Mitchell
Innate

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/300/300656/good-reasons-for-bad-feelings/9780241291085.html

You posted a good article in the Finasteride thread indicating progesterone being involved in 'left handedness'. Finasteride [5ARI] Induced/Associated Effects

 

[Michael Scally MD]

This paper has attempted to explore such issues using large-scale, nationally representative data. Focusing upon 15-year-olds from across nine Anglophone countries, we have investigated the characteristics of young people who claim to have knowledge and expertise in three mathematics concepts which are fake.

Having derived and established the comparability of our bullshit scale via measurement invariance procedures, we go on to find that young men are more likely to bullshit than young women, and that bullshitting is somewhat more prevalent amongst those from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.

Compared to other countries, young people in North America are found to be bigger bullshitters than young people in England, Australia and New Zealand, while those in Ireland and Scotland are the least likely to exaggerate their mathematical knowledge and abilities.

Strong evidence also emerges that bullshitters also display overconfidence in their academic prowess and problem-solving skills, while also reporting higher levels of perseverance when faced with challenges and providing more socially desirable responses than more truthful groups.

Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?
http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf

‘Bullshitters’ are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. Despite this being a well-known and widespread social phenomenon, relatively few large-scale empirical studies have been conducted into this issue.

This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining teenagers’ propensity to claim expertise in three mathematics constructs that do not really exist.

Using Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from nine Anglophone countries and over 40,000 young people, we find substantial differences in young people’s tendency to bullshit across countries, genders and socio-economic groups.

Bullshitters are also found to exhibit high levels of overconfidence and believe they work hard, persevere at tasks, and are popular amongst their peers. Together this provides important new insight into who bullshitters are and the type of survey responses that they provide.

 

[Old]

Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?

They are politicians and their lives are rife with scandal.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

He says his brain was coded to kill.

Anthony Blas Yepez didn’t deny beating an elderly man to death in Santa Fe, New Mexico, six years ago in a fit of rage. But after learning that he had a rare genetic abnormality linked to sudden violent outbursts, he argued for leniency, saying he wasn’t fully in control of himself when he committed the crime.

The claim seemed like a stretch to the judge, prosecutors and some scientists. But Yepez took it to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which agreed to consider it.

The court’s decision — still months away — could accelerate a trend in the criminal justice system: the use of behavioral genetics and other neuroscience research, including the analysis of tumors and chemical imbalances, to explain why criminals break the law. The rapidly developing field is forcing officials to confront new questions about how changes in the brain influence behavior — leading some to rethink notions about guilt and punishment.

This cutting-edge evidence, collected through brain scans, psychological exams and genetic sequencing, has been deployed in a range of ways: to challenge whether a defendant was capable of premeditated murder, whether a defendant was competent to stand trial, whether a defendant should be put to death. Most of those attempts to use neuroscience as a defense have failed, researchers say. But some — about 20 percent, according to one study — have worked, winning defendants new hearings or reversals.

That is troubling to researchers who fear some of the tactics push the boundaries of science.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

He says his brain was coded to kill.

Anthony Blas Yepez didn’t deny beating an elderly man to death in Santa Fe, New Mexico, six years ago in a fit of rage. But after learning that he had a rare genetic abnormality linked to sudden violent outbursts, he argued for leniency, saying he wasn’t fully in control of himself when he committed the crime.

The claim seemed like a stretch to the judge, prosecutors and some scientists. But Yepez took it to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which agreed to consider it.

The court’s decision — still months away — could accelerate a trend in the criminal justice system: the use of behavioral genetics and other neuroscience research, including the analysis of tumors and chemical imbalances, to explain why criminals break the law. The rapidly developing field is forcing officials to confront new questions about how changes in the brain influence behavior — leading some to rethink notions about guilt and punishment.

This cutting-edge evidence, collected through brain scans, psychological exams and genetic sequencing, has been deployed in a range of ways: to challenge whether a defendant was capable of premeditated murder, whether a defendant was competent to stand trial, whether a defendant should be put to death. Most of those attempts to use neuroscience as a defense have failed, researchers say. But some — about 20 percent, according to one study — have worked, winning defendants new hearings or reversals.

That is troubling to researchers who fear some of the tactics push the boundaries of science.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

[OA] Does Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increase Cheating? Reconsidering the Value of Believing in Free Will

One of the key sources of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is a classic study by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior among study participants.

In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work.

Over a series of four high-powered studies (three preregistered) we tested the relationship between
(1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and
(2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior.

Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful.

We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may be similarly tenuous.

Nadelhoffer, Thomas, Jason Shepard, Damien Crone, Jim A. C. Everett, Brian D. Earp, and Neil Levy. 2019. “Does Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increase Cheating? Reconsidering the Value of Believing in Free Will.” OSF Preprints. May 3. https://osf.io/bhpe5/

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Chiang, T. What's expected of us. Nature 436, 150 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/436150a

This is a warning. Please read carefully.

By now you've probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you're reading this. For those who haven't seen one, it's a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they're playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it's easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can't. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There's no way to fool a Predictor.

The heart of each Predictor is a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time. The full implications of the technology will become apparent later, when negative delays of greater than a second are achieved, but that's not what this warning is about. The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there's no such thing as free will.

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that's what a Predictor provides.

Typically, a person plays with a Predictor compulsively for several days, showing it to friends, trying various schemes to outwit the device. The person may appear to lose interest in it, but no one can forget what it means — over the following weeks, the implications of an immutable future sink in. Some people, realizing that their choices don't matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the Scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action. Eventually, a third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won't feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma. They'll track motion with their eyes, and change position occasionally, but nothing more. The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.

Before people started playing with Predictors, akinetic mutism was very rare, a result of damage to the anterior cingulate region of the brain. Now it spreads like a cognitive plague. People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we've all encountered: the idea that free will doesn't exist. It just wasn't harmful until you believed it.

Doctors try arguing with the patients while they still respond to conversation. We had all been living happy, active lives before, they reason, and we hadn't had free will then either. Why should anything change? “No action you took last month was any more freely chosen than one you take today,” a doctor might say. “You can still behave that way now.” The patients invariably respond, “But now I know.” And some of them never say anything again.

Some will argue that the fact the Predictor causes this change in behaviour means that we do have free will. An automaton cannot become discouraged, only a free-thinking entity can. The fact that some individuals descend into akinetic mutism whereas others do not just highlights the importance of making a choice.

Unfortunately, such reasoning is faulty: every form of behaviour is compatible with determinism. One dynamic system might fall into a basin of attraction and wind up at a fixed point, whereas another exhibits chaotic behaviour indefinitely, but both are completely deterministic.

I'm transmitting this warning to you from just over a year in your future: it's the first lengthy message received when circuits with negative delays in the megasecond range are used to build communication devices. Other messages will follow, addressing other issues. My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know that they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

And yet I know that, because free will is an illusion, it's all predetermined who will descend into akinetic mutism and who won't. There's nothing anyone can do about it — you can't choose the effect the Predictor has on you. Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my sending this warning won't alter those proportions. So why did I do it?

Because I had no choice.

 

[Old]

The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there's no such thing as free will.

They proved this with potato chips decades ago ...

So rapists and politicians can't be imprisoned since they had no choice. Neither did those who stood around and took it.

Now the post ends 'cause gotta go get some chips ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

If you want your mind read, there are two options. You can visit a psychic or head to a lab and get strapped into a room-size, expensive machine that’ll examine the electrical impulses and blood moving through the brain. Either way, true insights are hard to come by, and for now, the quest to know thyself remains as elusive as ever.

Kernel, a startup based in Culver City, Calif., says it aims to transform brain science from an esoteric art to a big business. It’s found a way to shrink the machines used by researchers and make them cheaper. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Kernel unveiled for the first time a pair of devices—basically helmets—that can see and record brain activity, enabling scientists to more easily analyze neurons as they fire and reveal more about how the mind works. “This triggers a new era of access to the mind and the ability to ask all sorts of new questions about ourselves,” says Bryan Johnson, the company’s founder and chief executive officer. (Kernel will not reveal the helmets to the public until later this year.)

...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

This is Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on May 29, 2020. I’m Steve Mirsky. On this episode: Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky talks about human behavior, the penal system and the question of free will.

That’s Robert Sapolsky. He’s a professor of biology, neurology and neurosurgery at Stanford University. He’s also a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya. In the lab, he’s a neurobiologist who studies the effects of stress. In the field, he’s a primatologist who looks at individual differences in stress, behavior and health among wild baboons living in a national park. He’s the author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and A Primate’s Memoir. And his most recent book is Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]