Progress Daily

Zindel Segal, Helen Mayberg, etc., had 14 depressed adults undergo cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), which teaches patients to view their own thoughts differently — to see a failed date, for instance, not as proof that “I will never be loved” but as a minor thing that didn’t work out. Thirteen other patients received paroxetine (generic Paxil). All experienced comparable improvement after treatment. Brain scans showed that the patients responded differently to the 2 kinds of treatment: CBT muted overactivity in the frontal cortex, the seat of reasoning, logic and higher thought (as well as of endless rumination). Paroxetine, by contrast, raised activity there. On the other hand, CBT raised activity in the hippocampus of the limbic system, the brain’s emotion center. Paroxetine lowered activity there. As Mayberg explains, “Cognitive therapy targets the cortex, the thinking brain, reshaping how you process information and changing your thinking pattern. It decreases rumination, and trains the brain to adopt different thinking circuits.”

Greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex than in the right correlates with a higher baseline level of contentment. The relative left/right activity is seen as a marker for the happiness set point, since people tend to return to this level no matter whether they win the lottery or lose their spouse.

Richard J. Davidson wondered if mental training could produce changes that underlie enduring happiness. To find out he (with the help of the Dalai Lama) recruited Buddhist monks to meditate inside his functional magnetic resonance imaging tube while he measured their brain activity during various mental states. For comparison, he used undergraduates who had had no experience with meditation but got a crash course in the basic techniques. During the generation of pure compassion, a standard Buddhist meditation technique, brain regions that keep track of what is self and what is other became quieter.

The monks showed a significantly greater activation in a brain network linked to empathy and maternal love. Connections from the frontal regions to the brain’s emotional regions seemed to become stronger with more years of meditation practice, as if the brain had forged more robust connections between thinking and feeling.

While the monks were generating feelings of compassion, activity in the left prefrontal (the site of activity that marks happiness) swamped activity in the right prefrontal (associated with negative moods) to a degree never before seen from purely mental activity. The undergraduate controls showed no such differences between the left and right prefrontal cortex. This suggests that the positive state is a skill that can be trained.

“How The Brain Rewires Itself,” by Sharon Begley

Meditators sometimes identify the negative emotions they are feeling in order to free themselves of them, and brain scans have recently shown that this process calms the part of the brain associated with emotional processing.

Matthew Lieberman hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, & asked them to look at pictures of faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion — such as “angry” or “fearful” — or 2 possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one female name.

When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region — an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences — became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.

By contrast, when the subjects picked appropriate names for the faces, the brain scans revealed none of these changes — indicating that only emotional labeling makes a difference.

“In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses,” Lieberman said.

In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference — the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.

“Brain Scans Show Meditation’s Effects,” by Melinda Wenner

Correspondent inference theory: people tend to infer the motives of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors.

This makes evolutionary sense. In a world of simple actions and base motivations, it allows a creature to rapidly infer the motivations of another creature. (He’s attacking me because he wants to kill me.)

One place it fails is in our response to terrorism. Because terrorism often results in the horrific deaths of innocents, we mistakenly infer that the horrific deaths of innocents is the primary motivation of the terrorist, and not the means to a different end.

Max Abrahms (”Why Terrorism Does Not Work” — .PDF file here) analyzes the political motivations of 28 terrorist groups: the complete list of “foreign terrorist organizations” designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. He lists 42 policy objectives of those groups, and found that they only achieved them 7% of the time.

According to the data, terrorism is more likely to work if 1) the terrorists attack military targets more often than civilian ones, and 2) if they have minimalist goals like evicting a foreign power from their country or winning control of a piece of territory, rather than maximalist objectives like establishing a new political system in the country or annihilating another nation. But even so, terrorism is a pretty ineffective means of influencing policy.

“Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavorable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty. Rather, target countries infer the short-term consequences of terrorism — the deaths of innocent civilians, mass fear, loss of confidence in the government to offer protection, economic contraction, and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties — (are) the objects of the terrorist groups. In short, target countries view the negative consequences of terrorist attacks on their societies and political systems as evidence that the terrorists want them destroyed.”

In other words, terrorism doesn’t work, because it makes people less likely to acquiesce to the terrorists’ demands, no matter how limited they might be: people don’t believe those limited demands are the actual demands.

“The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail,” by Bruce Schneier

Alan B Krueger examined 781 terrorist incidents the US state department deemed “significant,” & found that the attackers were from countries with political oppression, not poverty. Some 15 of the 19 hijackers on 11 September 2001 came from wealthy families in a prosperous country - Saudi Arabia. Osama Bin Laden’s background was opulent; Ayman al-Zawahiri is an affluent paediatrician.

The poorest countries, such as Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Liberia, have experienced vicious conflict, but little terrorism.

“Don’t blame the poor,” by Salil Tripathi

Roughly half the world’s people live in makeshift homes in squatter settlements and work in shadow economies. In many countries, more than 80% of all homes and businesses are unregistered; in the Philippines, the figure is 65% and in Tanzania, 90%. More than one-third of the developing world’s GDP is generated in the underground economy, a figure that has increased steadily over the past decade.

In many countries, laws established under colonial rule have never been translated into local languages. Would-be entrepreneurs face a mass of bureaucratic red tape and costly fees. In Egypt, for example, starting a bakery takes 500 days, compliance with 315 laws, visits to 29 agencies and the financial equivalent of 27 times the monthly minimum wage. A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank in 12 Latin American countries found that only 8% of all enterprises are legally registered and that close to 23 million businesses operate in the shadow economy. The proprietors of these businesses cannot get loans, enforce contracts or expand beyond a personal network of familiar customers and partners.

In San Francisco Solano, a barrio outside Buenos Aires, Argentine economists studied the experience of two communities– one that received title to its land in the early 1980s, another that did not. The group of neighbors that had received legal title to its land surpassed the group without title in a range of social indicators, including quality of house construction, education levels and rates of teen pregnancy.

“Giving the Poor Their Rights,” by Madeleine Albright and Hernando de Soto

In the ultimatum game, one player divides a pot of money between himself and another. The other then chooses whether to accept the offer. If he rejects it, neither player benefits. A stingy offer (one that is less than about a quarter of the total) is, indeed, usually rejected.

One explanation of the rejectionist strategy is that human psychology is adapted for repeated interactions rather than one-off trades. In this case, taking a tough, if self-sacrificial, line at the beginning pays dividends in future rounds of the game. (When one-off ultimatum games are played by trained economists they do tend to accept stingy offers more often than other people would.) Terence Burnham recently gathered a group of male students of microeconomics and asked them to play the ultimatum game.

Dr Burnham’s research budget ran to a bunch of $40 games. When there are many rounds in the ultimatum game, players learn to split the money more or less equally. He also ran a game of one round only, in which proposers could choose only between offering the other player $25 (ie, more than half the total) or $5. Responders could accept or reject the offer. Dr Burnham took saliva samples from all the students and compared the testosterone levels assessed from those samples with decisions made in the one-round game.

The responders who rejected a low final offer had an average testosterone level more than 50% higher than the average of those who accepted. Five of the 7 men with the highest testosterone levels in the study rejected a $5 ultimate offer but only one of the 19 others made the same decision.

A high testosterone level is correlated with social dominance in many species.

“Money isn’t everything,” The Economist

In every society at all historical times, men’s tendency to commit crimes and other risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off in middle age.

The same age profile characterizes every quantifiable human behavior that is public (i.e., perceived by many potential mates) and costly (i.e., not affordable by all sexual competitors). The relationship between age and productivity among male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, and male scientists is essentially the same as the age-crime curve. Their productivity quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then equally quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.

Both crime and genius are expressions of young men’s competitive desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral environment would have been to increase reproductive success.

“Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature,” by Alan S. Miller Ph.D., Satoshi Kanazawa Ph.D.

In a study of East Asians, Europeans and Africans, Jonathan Pritchard found 700 regions of the genome where genes (some of which are active in the brain) appear to have been reshaped by natural selection in recent times.

In East Asians, the average date of these selection events is 6,600 years ago.

The genetic changes occurred around the same time as the beginning of the Neolithic revolution, when societies switched from wild to cultivated foods, such as rice.

“Since it looks like there has been significant evolutionary change over historical time, we’re going to have to rewrite every history book ever written,” said Gregory Cochran. “The distribution of genes influencing relevant psychological traits must have been different in Rome than it is today. The past is not just another country but an entirely different kind of people.” 

John McNeill said that “human nature is not a constant” and that selective pressures have probably been stronger in the last 10,000 years than during any other epoch.

Oxytocin increases a person’s level of trust, at least in psychological experiments, & these levels are known to be under genetic control in other mammals.

In societies where trust pays off, generation after generation, the more trusting individuals should have more progeny and the oxytocin-promoting genes would become more common. If conditions should then change, and the society be engulfed by strife and civil warfare for generations, oxytocin levels might fall as the paranoid produced more progeny.

Napoleon Chagnon for many decades studied the Yanomamo, a warlike people who live in the forests of Brazil and Venezuela. He found that men who had killed in battle had 3 times as many children as those who had not. Since personality is heritable, this would be a mechanism for Yanomamo nature to evolve and become fiercer than usual.

“The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA,” by Nicholas Wade

According to Paul Collier, 70% of the “bottom billion” (BB) — the world’s poorest 980 million people — live in Africa.

Nearly 3/4 of the people in the BB have recently been through, or are still in the midst of, a civil war. And the poorer a country becomes, the more likely it is to succumb to civil war (”halve the income of the country and you double the risk of civil war”). And once you’ve had one civil war, you’re likely to have more: “Half of all civil wars are postconflict relapses.”

“The Bottom Billion,” by Niall Ferguson

According to the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World 2005 Annual Report (1.96MB .pdf file here — 255KB .pdf file of Executive Summary here), primarily written by James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, and Erik Gartzke:

Economic freedom is about 50 times more effective than democracy in diminishing violent conflict.

The impact of economic freedom on whether states fight or have a military dispute is highly significant (at the 1% level) while democracy is not a statistically significant predictor of conflict.

Nations with a low score for economic freedom (below 2 out of 10) are 14 times more prone to conflict than states with a high score (over eight).

The overall pattern of results does not shift when additional variables, such as membership in the EU, nuclear capability, and regional factors, are added.

“Is Economic Freedom the Key to Peace?,” Political Calculations