Posts tagged Psych
Women take significantly longer than men to decide whether they find something funny, though that doesn’t seem to spoil their enjoyment of the joke. Indeed, women show a greater response in the limbic system than men, suggesting they feel a greater sense of reward.
Cool article on the science of humor.
While this was the most universally interesting quote in the piece, I liked the notion that humor stimulates the anterior cingulate cortex and the frontoinsular cortex, which only humans and apes have. It goes onto talk about how much of our humor is based on “theory of mind”, missing in many animals, and secondary “theory of mind” which is unique to humans.
I guess this explains why you rarely see pets doing stand-up.
The Science Behind Failed Resolutions
Here’s a month old WSJ article that I just got around to reading. I wish I remembered how I originally found it, but I don’t. It was probably from GiveMeSomethingToRead.com.
The article makes the case that the portion of your brain that controls willpower behaves like a muscle. This means both that it can tire in the short run, and that it can be strengthened over time.
I put this in the category of concepts so profound that, once you hear it, you feel like you always knew it. It makes sense, but it’s not obvious.
Why dolphins are deep thinkers
One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.
Wait a minute: Dolphins understand the concept of investing?!?!?
Some species have a signature whistle, which, like a name, is a unique sound that allows other dolphins to identify it.
I wonder if all dolphins claim to be terrible at remembering signature whistles.
Diana Reiss and her researchers installed mirrors inside New York Aquarium to test whether two bottlenose dolphins were self-aware enough to recognise their reflections. They placed markings in non-toxic black ink on various places of the dolphins’ bodies. The dolphins swam to the mirror and exposed the black mark to check it out. They spent more time in front of the mirror after being marked than when they were not marked.
They should have offered “skinny mirrors” and “fat mirrors” and tested for a preference to see if the dolphins have body image issues.
The logic that dogs use
I’ve been reading up lately on databases and the logic that makes them work. I came across this expression in a SQL tutorial book this morning that cracked me up:
Most of the better DBMSs will not even evaluate the second condition of an OR WHERE clause if the first condition has already been met.
It’s a reference to the logic rule called “disjunctive syllogism” that I learned about when I was briefly a logic major in college. Simply put:
“A” or “B”
Not “A”
Therefore “B”
What made me laugh was that I remember my professor saying this reasoning was so innate to existence, that even dogs employ this rule when hunting. I clicked around a little, and found a 500 year-old observation of this phenomenon. When tracking prey by scent, if the trail forks, and the dog doesn’t immediately get the scent when testing one side, he sprints down the other path without bothering to sniff for the scent.
I guess we’ve finally taught computers to do what any dog can do easily.
Malcolm Gladwell: What the Dog Saw
A week ago, I posted a couple times about my new fascination with animal psychology.
In looking for more info on the topic, I came across this fantastic three year old piece by Malcolm Gladwell. I initially assumed he’d simply found a way to shoehorn his liberal agenda into an otherwise interesting topic, but it was actually, refreshingly apolitical.
It’s commonly said that dogs can “sense fear.” This piece does a great job of breaking down exactly what that means, without getting into mysticism. The primary subject is Cesar Millan, television’s Dog Whisperer.
The contrast I particularly enjoy in the article is Millan, a man who’s surprisingly physical with animals, telling owners that he doesn’t believe their claim that they love their pets.
This piece is a bit of an investment (it prints to 11 pages), so if you don’t have one already, you should get an Instapaper account and chip away at it on your iPhone, Kindle, or computer when you have the time.
Cetaceans are probably self-aware. When a mark is stuck on the body of a dolphin such that it can’t see the mark, it will position itself in front of a mirror so that it can.
It’s not unreasonable to think that whales would do the same — but finding a mirror big enough to reflect the body of a whale has stopped biologists from doing the experiment.
A large mirror has been found for elephants. When a mark is stuck on their heads, elephants given a mirror will touch their trunks to the mark, passing the same test for self-awareness. When presented with a mirror, most animals — such as cats, dogs and birds — do not realize that they are seeing their own reflection. Even “lesser” apes such as gibbons are not self-aware by this measure.
The animals that pass the mirror test have in common the fact that they live in groups. They all have complex methods of communication, they form cooperative units, transmit information culturally — and several species use tools.
Neat 3 year old piece from the Japan Times. I stumbled across it while looking to learn more about my new favorite bit of science, spindle cells. I thought I remembered hearing that elephants also mourned their dead.
As someone with a recently discovered love of pets, I’ve been asking smart people about what makes pets tick, and I’d been told that dogs and cats lack the portion of the brain that enabled “complex emotions”. The fantastic book “It’s a Cat’s World, You Just Live In It” taught me that cats don’t poop on your bed after a prolonged absence because they’re frustrated, mad, or jealous. They do so as a primal response to stress. (Side note: every cat lover should read this book. It’s a hysterical page-turner, and extremely informative)
The better I understand the differences between our brains, the easier my interactions have become with Furio. His behavior is almost entirely determined by 2 factors: instinct and stress. With this knowledge, I don’t waste time interpreting his actions. He likes to smell things, so I open up spice jars for him to experience different sniffs. He likes to hunt, so rather than handing him a treat, I launch it across the room for him to track down. He’s weary of significant changes to his environment, so I’ve tried to ease him into our cross-country move, surrounding him with familiar items and activities.
As interested as I am to learn more about spindle cells, I’m equally interested to improve my understanding of the extent to which stress, and not consciousness, dictates our behavior. For anyone interested in this topic, there’s a terrific lecture from Stanford’s Professor Sapolsky titled “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” available for free on iTunes. It borders on stand up comedy at times, but his message is clear that stress plays a massive role in the human condition, and that evolution has left us ill-equipped to cope properly with persistent stress.
Watching Whales Watch Us
Incredible (if extremely long) article in the NYT about whales.
A few highlights:
A list of items from the article that impressed me:
Whales, we now know, teach and learn. They scheme. They cooperate, and they grieve. They recognize themselves and their friends. They know and fight back against their enemies.”
- Scientists don’t really know why whales jump up out of the ocean, roll in the air.
- Whales hunt in teams and use tools. For example, they blow bubbles around cod to form a crude net.
- They’ve learned to steal the fish that human fishermen have already caught, right off their rods, and some fishermen are losing 10% or more of their yield.
- Gray whales live 100+ years. Hunting them was banned in 1937. Many whales today still have scars from harpoons.
- They tend to form extremely complicated social hierarchies, with leaders, assistants, followers, friends, rivals, etc.
- They mourn their dead.
- Many whales have spindle cells. These cells are linked to higher cognitive functions like self-awareness, a sense of compassion and linguistic expression”. It is believed that they make love possible. They were supposed to be the difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, but it looks like whales evolved them in parallel. Considering that their brains weigh 5-6 times what ours do, it’s no wonder they’re thinking is so advanced.
- The thesis of the article, is that, considering how smart whales are, and how well they’d learned to avoid humans, the recent friendly behavior by a small group of gray whales near Baja may be a sign that they’ve forgiven us.
- Scientists generally frown upon anthropomorphizing animal activity, but it looks like humans are the best proxy through which to understand a lot of whale activity.
- Whale sightings for humans are usually accompanied by a feeling of euphoria. It’s not uncommon for people to break into song. Last year, while sailing in St. Lucia, several dolphins swam along with our sailing crew for ~5 minutes, playfully performing tricks. I didn’t start busting out show tunes, but I have to admit I was a little giggly :-)
