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Superstitions evolved to help us survive

Superstitions evolved to help us survive according to this New Scientist article.

Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense.

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

For instance, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but “if a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around,” Foster says.

Foster and colleague Hanna Kokko, of the University of Helsinki, Finland, sought to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off.
Simplified behaviour

Rather than author just-so stories for every possible superstition – from lucky rabbit’s feet to Mayan numerology – Foster and Kokko worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition that includes animals and even bacteria.

The pair modelled the situations in which superstition is adaptive. As long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favoured.

Read the full article.

Men are from mars, women are crybabies

Howstuffworks has an interesting article on the biological and psychological differences between men and women. Some interesting excerpts:

Women’s tear ducts are also shaped a little differently from men’s, which could be either a cause or an effect of increased crying [Source: New York Times]. In addition, people who are depressed may cry four times as much as people who are not, and two-thirds of people diagnosed with depression are women [Psychology Today].

but things are more complicated, and in general there’s a good reason why women and hormones have such a bad relationship:

Studies show that, in addition to worrying more often, women may be physiologically prone to experiencing more stress. For example, the amygdala of the brain processes emotions like fear and anxiety. In men, the amygdala communicates with organs that take in and process visual information, like the visual cortex. In women, though, it communicates with parts of the brain that regulate hormones and digestion. This may mean that stress responses are more likely to cause physical symptoms in women than in men [Source: Live Science].

and to top it all off:

In addition, women’s bodies produce more stress hormones than men’s bodies do. Once a stressful event is over, women’s bodies also take longer to stop producing the hormones. This may be a cause or an effect of women’s tendency to replay stressful events in their minds and think about upsetting situations [Source: Psychology Today].

But the most interesting part is this:

In one German study, researchers showed participants images of several scenarios. The participants used a computer to describe which of the scenarios would be more upsetting. The results suggest that, across cultures, women find emotional infidelity more upsetting than sexual infidelity. Men’s responses varied across cultures, but in general they were jealous of sexual infidelity [Source: Human Nature].

Sounds like it should be OK to have sex with other women as long as you continue bringing flowers to your wife.

Why all religions have bizarre/stupid beliefs

Paul Graham has an  essay on the “Lies we tell kids”. The whole essay is pretty interesting, but one of the sections contains this startling insight (a little long, but worth it):

Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious group and want their kids to feel it too. This usually requires two different kinds of lying: the first is to tell the child that he or she is an X, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing.

Telling a child they have a particular ethnic or religious identity is one of the stickiest things you can tell them. Almost anything else you tell a kid, they can change their mind about later when they start to think for themselves. But if you tell a kid they’re a member of a certain group, that seems nearly impossible to shake.

This despite the fact that it can be one of the most premeditated lies parents tell. When parents are of different religions, they’ll often agree between themselves that their children will be “raised as Xes.” And it works. The kids obligingly grow up considering themselves as Xes, despite the fact that if their parents had chosen the other way, they’d have grown up considering themselves as Ys.

One reason this works so well is the second kind of lie involved. The truth is common property. You can’t distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by “outsiders” on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous. If they aren’t an X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary beliefs and customs? If they aren’t an X, why do all the non-Xes call them one?

This form of lie is not without its uses. You can use it to carry a payload of beneficial beliefs, and they will also become part of the child’s identity. You can tell the child that in addition to never wearing the color yellow, believing the world was created by a giant rabbit, and always snapping their fingers before eating fish, Xes are also particularly honest and industrious. Then X children will grow up feeling it’s part of their identity to be honest and industrious.

This probably accounts for a lot of the spread of modern religions, and explains why their doctrines are a combination of the useful and the bizarre. The bizarre half is what makes the religion stick, and the useful half is the payload.

I am not sure I buy the whole logic of the argument. But it certainly made me think and possibly view religion in a different way.

I spent a lot of my teenage years thinking of religion as a load of crap for weaker minds. Later, I read about how Tilak used Ganesh Chaturthi very effectively to bring people together. That got me thinking about the social value of religion. Here I am using “social” in the “making friends” sense of the word (not the “charity” sense of the word). Religion is the mother of all social networks.

In grad school, I would have arguments with my friend Frank, who used to go ga-ga over religion. He pointed out to me how many major artistic and architectural achievements over the centuries have been achieved because of the backing of religion.

And now Paul’s idea of separating religion into things that make it stick and the payload resonates with my view of religion. Basically, instead of focusing on the silly rituals that are the most visible aspects of any religion or specific religious activity, think instead about the payload. Think about what substantial things can be (is being) achieved (intentionally, or unintentionally).

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Wired an interesting article on a guy who, after a detailed study of how human memory works, has developed SuperMemo, a software program that will allow you to remember many more things than you currently can:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

While initially I found myself tempted by the idea of trying this software, or at least the techniques used in it, I soon decided that in my current situation in life, I don’t really want to memorize anything so desperately. More generally, if I read something, and then I forget it later because I did not encounter it again in my readings soon enough, I believe that it was not important enough to remember in the first place. I only want to memorize the things that keep showing up in my readings.

Your mileage may vary. And even if it doesn’t, you should still read the full article. It’s rather long, but parts of it are quite interesting.

Catch-22 in real life

The book Philosophical Psychopathology reports on the case of a man who got into a real-life Catch-22 situation. He was brought to psychiatrists because he was suffering from mental delusions. He was afraid that he was going to be “locked up”. And the psychiatrists said that this was a delusion without any basis in reality. In fact, his delusion was so strong, that to avoid being locked up, he tried to kill himself. Based on this, the psychiatrists decided that he should be …… you guessed it …… locked up.

If they lock him up, then his belief was true, and he wasn’t really deluded, was he? So they shouldn’t be able to lock up him. But then his belief would turn out to be false. And they can lock him up after all. Somewhere, Alfred Tarski is getting uncomfortable in his grave.

See full article (via boingboing.

Why I cannot resist surfing the web

Apparently, scientists are doing research into why I spend so much time surfing the web (and indeed why you are reading this). New information, or information that needs to be analyzed gives us a high. Wall Street Journal has an article about this research:

Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.

When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ ”

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

Apparently, this is hardwired into our brain due to evolutionary forces. Just like cats and laser pointers:

Many cat owners know that the lasers are the easiest way to keep the pet amused. The cats will ceaselessly, maniacally chase it as it’s beamed about the room, literally climbing the walls to capture what they surely regard as some form of ultimate prey.

Obviously, cats are hard-wired to hunt down small, bright objects, like birds. But since nothing in nature is as bright as a laser, they are powerless to resist its charms.

[...]

Watching a cat play with a laser, you realize the cat never learns there is no real “prey” there. You can show the cat the pointer, clicking it off and on, and it will remain transfixed.

But we can hope that:

People presumably are smarter than cats, and as we become more familiar with the Web and its torrent of information, maybe we’ll do a better job learning what is useful and what isn’t.

Then again, maybe not.

See full article.

Bloggers are happier - feel bloggers

ABCnews is reporting on a study which says that after a couple of months of regular blogging bloggers feel they have a better social life than non-bloggers. Excerpt:

The research, from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found after two months of regular blogging, people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog.

[...]

Bloggers reported a greater sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people and feeling more confident they could rely on others for help.

All respondents, whether or not they blogged, reported feeling less anxious, depressed and stressed after two months of online social networking.

Blogging is good for your (perceived?) social life. And online social networks are good for your mental health. Cool. (Looks like the bloggers in question hadn’t started receiving comments from users yet!)

See full article (via techcrunch)

The Nocebo Effect: Placebo’s Evil Twin

The Washington Post has an interesting article about the nocebo effect:

Ten years ago, researchers stumbled onto a striking finding: Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn’t hold such fatalistic views.

The higher risk of death, in other words, had nothing to with the usual heart disease culprits — age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight. Instead, it tracked closely with belief. Think sick, be sick.
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That study is a classic in the annals of research on the “nocebo” phenomenon, the evil twin of the placebo effect. While the placebo effect refers to health benefits produced by a treatment that should have no effect, patients experiencing the nocebo effect experience the opposite. They presume the worst, health-wise, and that’s just what they get.

Another example:

Fifteen years ago, researchers at three medical centers undertook a study of aspirin and another blood thinner in heart patients and came up with an unexpected result that said little about the heart and much about the brain. At two locations, patients were warned of possible gastrointestinal problems, one of the most common side effects of repeated use of aspirin. At the other location, patients received no such caution.

When researchers reviewed the data, they found a striking result: Those warned about the gastrointestinal problems were almost three times as likely to have the side effect. Though the evidence of actual stomach damage such as ulcers was the same for all three groups, those with the most information about the prospect of minor problems were the most likely to experience the pain.

So why haven’t you heard of this nocebo effect before? Here’s why:

Despite the smattering of doctors’ anecdotal reports and a few modest clinical studies, research on the phenomenon has not been robust, mostly for ethical reasons: Doctors ought not to induce illness in patients who are not sick.

See full article (found via A.Word.A.Day).

Why is beauty?

I know the title does not make grammatical sense. But think about it. Normally we focus a lot on who is beautiful. Not so much on the why. I’ve alluded in the past to the evolutionary reasons behind beauty. This idea is expounded in detail by Nancy Etcoff in her book Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, which makes the case that “looking good has survival value, and that sensitivity to beauty is a biological adaptation governed by brain circuits shaped by natural selection”.

This is what boing-boing has to say about the idea:

Why do we think that certain things are beautiful? Because our ancestors did; it connotes an advantage to survival and reproduction.

When people are asked to describe a beautiful landscape they say the same thing: lake, river, mountain trees. We evolved to think it is beautiful becuase it is safe with escape routes.

When asked to describe beautiful people: clear skin, bright eyes, shiny hair — all of these things connote health fertility, protection.

There is interesting research backing up these claims:

Psychologists find that babies stare significantly longer at the faces adults find appealing, while the mothers of “attractive” babies display more intense bonding behaviors. The symmetrical face of average proportions may have become the optimal design because of evolutionary pressures operating against population extremes. Gentlemen may prefer blondes not so much for their hair color as for the fairness of their skin–which makes it easier to detect the flush of sexual excitement.

(source: Amazon’s review of the book.)

While looking into the background of these claims, I stumbled onto a bunch of fascinating facts about beauty and related aspects (like the handicap principle) that I plan to cover in future posts. Stay tuned.

Why Don’t The French Get As Fat As Americans?

This article reports on new research that has the answer:

Because they use internal cues — such as no longer feeling hungry — to stop eating, reports a new Cornell study. Americans, on the other hand, tend to use external cues — such as whether their plate is clean, they have run out of their beverage or the TV show they’re watching is over.

See full article. (Found via boing-boing.)