Mindfulness and the mind

I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened
Attributed to Mark Twain

How much of our lives is spent ruminating on the potential misfortunes that will befall us if our luck runs out, or daydreaming of the fights we might pick with those who slighted us in the past? Mindfulness is described as a non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. Mindfulness-based approaches are becoming increasingly popular as a means of reducing stress, as well as ameliorating psychological disorders. If mindfulness can promote ways of thinking that may differ from most of our everyday streams-of-consciousness, how might this impact upon our brain and cognition?

If mindfulness can change your way of thinking, it seems it can change your performance on cognitive tests. A mindfulness-based mind fitness training program has been found to reduce attentional lapses in a military cohort. However, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) did not have a clear effect upon sustained attention in a clinical trial, although the authors suggested that different results might be apparent for vigilance (i.e. sustained attention for a rarely occurring target). Outside the lab, an interesting field study indicated that providing mindfulness training to low-income children improved reported classroom behaviour-the one positive effect of mindfulness that extra sessions seemed to enhance was improved attention. Although the evidence is not final, it certainly seems plausible that techniques aiming to help you bring your attention back to the present moment when it wanders to the past or the future could lead to greater practice of cognitive control.

A number of recent studies have looked at changes in brain structure associated with mindfulness. A lot of studies examining the effects of meditation on brain structure have compared meditators to non-meditators. However, a recent study looked at changes in brain structure within the same people, before and after mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). The findings suggest that MBSR led to higher levels of grey matter* in regions of the brain stem. These were regions associated with the production of neurochemicals that modulate mood and cognition (e.g. the locus coeruleus, which produces norepinephrine). However, the findings should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they suffer from some of the common problems with brain imaging studies (e.g. fishing for regions of activation, then labelling an observed area in the scan as corresponding to a known region in the brain, even when the use of relatively low-resolution scanners makes it difficult to know if it really is the region you specified that you were looking at). However, perhaps a more promising finding from this same group was enhanced gray matter in the hippocampus, which they had previously specified as a region of interest.

Compared to when I was a teenager, the use of the internet to flit through different sites and ideas has possibly worn down my sustained attention skills to some extent. With regard to stress, I think my levels are pretty moderate these days (perhaps I'm settling in to life as a grown-up), but there is always room for improvement**. In the interest of finding out more about mindfulness for my research (and maybe some self-improvement), I will be starting a course in mindfulness-based stress reduction shortly-should be a great chance to get a first-person view. Will let you know how I am on the far side of it!

UPDATE: It is also worth mentioning a recent review that grapples with the neuroscience of mindfulness-the senior author is Michael Posner, a major figure in the psychology of attention.

*Grey matter is made up of the cell bodies, dendrites and unmyelinated axons of neurons, the brain cells that process information. White matter, in contrast, gets its characteristic colour from the myelin that sheaths axons (allowing information to travel along the neuron more quickly).

**Note: I'm not trying to say no stress is a good thing!

A helping hand: time or money?

A poverty is sweeping the land. Fridges are full, cars are running and banks keep trucking. But an impatience grips the citizens. They are impatient with one another, flitting from task to task, constantly facing new deadlines and missing old ones. The fact that people are bad at estimating how long it will take to do things (the planning fallacy) doesn't help. Some people wondering if they should put off sleep for another hour or two to keep the show on the road.

It's the affliction of time poverty. Brother, can you spare a minute?

When someone asks for your time, you may expect them to reciprocate in future, but there's a good chance that you're giving up your time to help your fellow human. Research on the topic of altruism has tended to look at when people give up their money. Studies looking at such financial altruism may simply look at willingness-to-donate via self-report. Of course, willingness-to-donate and amount actually donated may not correspond closely, so actual helping behaviour is better to study.

A new paper describes an approach to looking at overt, altruistic behaviour, and particularly how much time people give up for an altruistic cause.

The paper initially looks not at altruistic helping but at altruistic punishment-giving of yourself in order to punish someone who violates social norms. Participants had to complete simple but time consuming tasks (like an arithmetic problem) in order to increase the size of the punishment. Although the vignettes they read were not real, it was real time the study participants were giving up. When people read an account of someone  violating a social contract (e.g. talking on mobile phone while driving) they spent longer on the puzzles, racking up a bigger punishment (e.g. bigger fine), They were more lenient (and so solved fewer puzzles) for a scenario less indicative of a social contract violation (e.g. how long you'd wait before revisiting a cinema when the programme is changed from previously advertised).

Participants also spent longer solving puzzles to give a harsher punishment to someone who deliberately violates the social contract (pushing in front to use an ATM) that someone who accidentally breaks the rules (someone rushes to train so fast they forget to buy a ticket).

The researchers found that this also works for helping behaviours. Instead of looking at the impact of social violations on altruistic punishment, they primed participants by making them watch videos of a dog shelter (empathy), a report on police shooting a dog (anger) or an instructional video on brushing a dog (neutral). Those who watched the "empathy clip" spent more time solving puzzles in order to bring about a bigger altruistic outcome (e.g. money given to pay a stray dog's vet bills).

Clearly, as the set-up in these experiments simply asked participants what they would like to happen, it would be interesting to see what would happen in a situation where giving up time led directly to real altruistic helping or punishment (or at least where participants believed as much). Nonetheless, it's quite impressive that the researchers were able to make people give up their time to punish or help a vignette character. Then again, how much time do any of us give up already fantasizing about revenge, or of being a hero, when this will not actually help/hurt those around us?

What I find interesting about time (and the authors allude to this in their discussion) is that people vary not only in terms of how much money they have, but also how much free time they have. So giving up an hour is a more onerous task for a CEO than it is for a JobBridge intern. The authors assert that there are bigger differences between people with the most and the least money than those with the most and the least free time (so perhaps there is less "time inequality" in our society??). In any case, good luck getting the CEO to take part in a study using this method...

Farrelly et al. (2015). Evidence for an alternative currency for altruism in laboratory-based experiments. Europe's Journal of Psychology, 11(1), 100-111.

Sweating rhymes: Stress and creativity

"I've lost the flow" Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no. My mouth had run dry, but more importantly so had my flow. I had agreed to take part in a "present your research in a 3-minute, engaging talk for a general audience" event, and had decided to set myself apart by rapping. After hours of practice under the spotlight I cracked through 50 seconds of rhymes before hitting a memory block. "I've lost the flow" I announced aloud to the crowd. (Thankfully I wasn't trying to play a load of savage guitar solos at the same time or no doubt I would've choked 10 seconds in).

Painted into a corner by the stagelights and the attentive audience behind them, I had to keep going, but with the rhythm gone, I spoke in prose, with the very structure of the talk coming apart as my nerves shredded the talk to sentence salad.

After having put something creative together oneself, presenting it to the world as a performance can be nerve-racking. But notwithstanding that creative performance itself can be stressful (particularly in front of the baying mob), what impact may stress have upon creativity?

Kenneth Hammond had some interesting things to say about stress and creative thought. As I was saying previously in this blog, two different types of thought (one rapid/automatic, the other slow/sequential) may be involved in creative thinking. Hammond suggested that stress may shift us from one form of thinking to another-if this shift leads us to a style of thought better suited to the task at hand, then creativity may result. He gives the example of a firefighter fleeing a fire where simply outrunning the fire (the standard procedure) wouldn't work. The firefighter used intuitive thinking by setting a small fire and putting it out, thereby leaving the burnt area without fuel for the big fire he was running away from.

Conversely, I recall Billy Corgan mentioning how some days intuitive thinking would get him nowhere, so he would try going through chords step-by-step until he found a progression that sounded a bit different or interesting. When under time pressure to release new work, such step-by-step thinking would no doubt test anyone's patience, but may prove useful when the initial approch isn't working.

A new paper has found that stressors which are perceived as challenges (e.g. long working hours) are positively related to idea generation, whereas those which are perceived as hindrances (e.g. red tape) have a negative effect. The sample is interesting; staff from R&D departments, so people who are likely to be under pressure to be creative. It's unfortunate that an actual test of creative performance wasn't used-the methods are pretty much entirely questionnaire based. It's also unfortunate that by deciding which are stressors are good and bad in advance, and then asking people which of these they have experienced, then the appraisal of a potentially stressful event is ignored, even though this could be critical to how the event will impact upon the psychology (and physiology) of stress.

But, I will admit, dropping the flow on stage is likely to be regarded as stressful by almost all people.

What was cool about this paper was that they also asked people about the organisational innovation climate (again, I could nitpick about the specifics, such as "sufficient resources" being a sub-group of questions on this.) What they found was that hindrance stressors had a serious negative effect on the benefits of a pro-innovation working climate, with the generation and implementation of new ideas suffering when employees were up against office politics that blocked creative output. There seems to be some conceptual overlap here, as some of the hindrance stressors themselves are part of the organisational culture-it could be that some companies hinder as much as they help. I'll let you speculate on which departments help and which departments hinder ;)

Ren, F. & Zhang, J. (2015). Job stressors, organisational innovation climate, and employee's innovative behaviour. Creativity Research Journal, 27(1), 16-23.

Book review: "Predictably irrational" by Dan Ariely

Time for some behavioural economics! It's a topic that has interested me for some time, having studied psychology and economics as my Bachelor's. Finally had a chance to catch up on Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" a very accessible book about accessible but often counter-intuitive research.

Ariely deals with a wide array of human behaviour; he discusses how arousal can alter thought processes (or at least self-presentation) by studying response to questions on sexual behaviour while masturbating v. a non-masturbation control (the latter is more typical of psychology labs, the former more typical of psychology conferences). Elsewhere our difficulty in evaluating the value of things is up for grabs, particularly when we don't have the yardstick of a similar thing with which to compare. This discussion includes not just items for purchase but also potential romantic partners, as discussed at the end of the TED talk in the link.

A lot has been written in behavioral economics about the differences in how people perceive gains and losses, but one particularly interesting point Ariely makes is how people's economic decision-making can be distorted in response to goods/services which are free (or FREE! as he invariably writes it). This is particularly the case where one has a choice where not everything is free, but one of the options has a FREE! component. He gives a lovely concrete example. Step 1: he offers kids some small chocolates and says they can exchange a small chocolate for a larger chocolate bar. Surprise surprise, they make the exchange; so far, so rational. HOWEVER, he then gives some kids the small chocolates and says they can either have a large bar for FREE! or have two large bars in exchange for one small chocolate. The latter option gets you a bigger chocolate profit, but a majority of kids just can't say no to something FREE! Tragically, undergrad students seemed to fall for this as well (ffs, I hope they were hungover/dieting).

One of the enviable aspects of Ariely's work is he seems to get to do a lot of field work. To see if ordering behaviour is affected by the choices of those around you, he acts as a waiter at a local inn. The manager gives it the green light, but says if Dan doesn't serve a customer within 30 seconds of entering the premises one of the regular staff will swoop in first, so people aren't kept waiting too long. Classic. Perhaps my envy is misplaced; even in a more lab-based environment psychology is the kind of science that fosters interesting occurrences, particularly if you do things like assess people's response to social stress.  

Like most behavioural economics, Ariely doesn't agree with the way most economists assume people are rational, disspassionate decision-makers. Indeed, he suggests that the so-called "standard" economic model is guilty of a kind of naturalistic fallacy, in that it assumes that if people don't save for their pension, or avail of better deals etc., then they must be acting in their own best interest. One might take Ariely's less rosy view of people's decision-making as advocating a more pateralistic state, and indeed some behavioral economists advising on policy have started to advocate what has been called "soft paternalism", much to the chagrin of a well-loved celebrity academic.

I think behavioural economists can go a little hard on standard economists; theories that oversimplify individuals' cognitive skill or insight into their own preferences may nonetheless explain aggregate behaviour. They can sometimes go a bit hard on human's thinking patterns too; although mental shortcuts or heuristics can be flawed (and, as Ariely points, predictably-and thus exploitably- so), Gerd Gigerenzer and others have pointed out that heuristics can serve us quite well most of the time.

Regardless of whether you agree with much of what he says, this is a research book that turns its own pages. If interested in finding out more about Dan Ariely or even participate in his research (online surveys for the win), check out his website: http://danariely.com/

Fiction review: "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing" by Eimear McBride

I was originally going to buy this at the same time I bought "Here are the Young Men" by Rob Doyle, but decided against it for whatever reason. (Maybe the counterpart names felt a little too obvious, hee hee). Doyle's book is well worth a read, putting you right in the nihilism and/or neuroses of its post-Leaving Cert Dublin characters, while still maintaining a fairly matter-of-a-fact style.

McBride's book makes an interesting contrast; the writing in "A Girl..." is like a character from Joyce's Ulysses telling a Patrick McCabe story. The stream of consciousness breaks off sentences and races through thoughts like Leo Bloom and the gang, coming close to the fighting-with-sentences seen in Finnegans Wake during one particularly tough scene towards the end. Adapting it for the stage couldn't have been easy. Unlike Joyce, however, literary allusions, puns and linguistic games are not so frequent in this place (save a prayer or two); we're straight to the guts here.

Whereas Doyle's protagonists (teens doing their Leaving Certificate around 2003) are almost exactly my contemporaries, Eimear McBride's protagonist is a little bit older (maybe 5-10 years), one for whom the old guard of Catholicism were still getting their final dig in. Although this broader cultural context hangs heavy over the book, the main incident in the plot revolves around two major interpersonal "issues": the double trauma of a terminally ill brother and an abusive uncle. As terrible as the former may be, the latter part of her story will probably trouble more readers for longer, obviously because of the manner of their relationship, but also because from a first person perspective we aren't offered a passive victim's voice. More broadly, if fiction can alter our social cognition, the unpredictability of the central character gave me pause for thought.

Indeed, I can't remember having such a strong emotional reaction to a book in some time. It's telling of the author's power and/or the easy life I've had that the petty cruelty of sibling and stranger, parent and grandparent seemed to rattle around the mind for a while after the book is put down, almost as much as the heavier stuff. One scene in particular, where the grandfather berates the protagonist's mother for the children's (and her own) perceived lack of religiosity, and the mother's subsequent acting out against her kids, was a time to put the book down and do something else for me.

Given its depth, it's the kind of book one would read again a few years down the road, probably wincing at how one interpreted certain aspects the first time around.

Where does the mind begin and end?

The following is a (very slightly) edited version of an essay I wrote 6 or 7 years ago. If you find the ecological mind of interest (it goes quite a bit beyond social questions, which I address here), the work of Andy Clark is well worth checking out.

"Where does the mind begin and end?"

Daughter:     Daddy, why do things have outlines?

Father:         Do they? I don’t know. What sort of things do you mean?

D:                 I mean when I draw things, why do they have outlines?

F:                 Well, what about other sorts of things-a flock of sheep? or a conversation? Do they have outlines?

D:                 Don’t be silly. I can’t draw a conversation. I mean things.

(Bateson, 1972, p. 27)

Introduction

By taking a functionalist view of the mind, this essay aims to challenge the limitation of mind to individual humans. The phrase “boundaries of the mind” could be interpreted as suggesting the question of whether or not we should draw the line at individual people, or perhaps families or groups. Psychology has certainly been accused of individualism (e.g. Tuffin, 2005). However, if the debate is framed thus it still assumes that the study of mind should be restricted to humans, when mental phenomena can actually be studied in other species and even non-organisms.

Through the history of psychology, thinkers and trends (in psychology as well as other disciplines and society at large) have facilitated the narrowing or broadening of the study of the mind.

The Mind

Pinker defined the mind simply, calling it “a system of organs of computation” (1997, p. xx). Reber & Reber (2001) pointed out that treating the concept of “mind” as being interchangeable with concepts like the soul, the self or identity only compounds the confusion.  But defining the mind is difficult, and various concepts have been conflated with the mind over time. The mind should be viewed as a set of processes, not a given process that is somehow separate from its various constituent processes (Ryle, 1949).

Wilson (2004) suggested that for something to have a mind, or at least a minimal mind, it must possess one psychological property. Furthermore, there should be some physical structure that realises this property.

Functionalism

William James, in his Principles of Psychology, espoused a functionalist approach to the mind:

The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon (1950, p.8).

James was influenced by evolutionary theory, and functionalism is concerned with what’s adaptive about the mind, i.e. how the mind helps thinkers adapt to and exploit their environment (Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2003). Functionalism can be contrasted with structuralism. Structuralism is concerned with the how the constituent elements of experience in the mind. While structuralism relied heavily on introspection and focused on the study of “normal” humans, functionalism would use other methodologies and study the behaviour of animals and the mentally ill (Hergenhahn, 1997).

Searle (1992) challenged functionalism by arguing that the study of the mind is always and everywhere concerned with consciousness (though few studies may explicitly refer to it), and that a functional role is unnecessary for consciousness. While the study of consciousness is a worthwhile endeavour, Searle’s focus on the non-functional aspects of consciousness (which may not exist anywhere else but within our personal “selves”-note the risk of solipsism) positions the individual human as the sole owner of a mind.

The Individual

The roots of Western individuality, as in the focus on the individual, can be traced back as far as the Renaissance, the introduction of private property in the 13^th century or even Ancient Greek philosophy. However, the emergence of psychology as an autonomous discipline coincided with a great increase in Western society’s emphasis on the individual (Jansz, 2004). The belief that the “inner self” was truer than the public self became popular between 1500 and 1800, as increasing mobility made it harder to ascertain the identity of individuals just by looking at them (Tice & Baumeister, 2001).

Wundt is often portrayed as a founding father of psychology, given his establishment of the laboratory at Leipzig (e.g. Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2003). For a long time Wundt’s “Physiological Psychology” was emphasised to the point of ignoring his “Psychology of the People”.  The latter work discussed the importance of social and cultural phenomena that were not suitable for laboratory study, and thus did nothing to further psychology’s status as a natural science (Jones & Elcock, 2001). The lack of attention paid to “Psychology of the People” helped to position the individual as the central subject of psychology.

As a discipline, psychology’s treatment of the research participant as an isolated individual (as opposed to an individual in a particular situation) has been a methodological symptom of an individualised society, but has also in turn lent empirical credibility to this individualism (Danziger, 1990).

Mind, Body and Soul, Man and Beast

For the ancient Hebrews, the soul was whatever it was that made the body alive. The Pythagoreans argued that the soul could move from its original body to other bodies following death. Plato granted the soul further autonomy by suggesting it could exist in a disembodied state (c.f. Shaffer, 1968).

Robert Whytt, with his discovery of spinal reflexes in the middle of the eighteenth century, suggested that the soul or mind was located in the spine as well as the brain. For many philosophers, this implied that the soul and the body were closely enmeshed, and implied that simpler animals could also possessed minds/souls (Reed, 1997). William James took this idea further with his proposal that the psychological realm evolves as part of the natural world (Reed, 1997).   

Descartes, an early proponent of dualism, is sometimes portrayed as viewing animals as lifeless machines. The Cartesian evidence for having a mind is not just communication (which many species are capable of), but communication that is based “pure” thought, i.e. thought which is based on abstract symbols (Alanen, 2003). However, while Descartes argued that only humans were capable of pure thought, he was willing to admit that clocks can keep time better than humans, and other species may outwit us on occasion (Clarke, 2003). This seems to suggest that Descartes supported the non-existence of minds in non-humans only inasmuch as he took a relatively structural approach to the mind.

Nonetheless, animals and even early humans have been described quite recently as zombies, as they apparently lack(ed) language and culture (Malik, 2000). Animals may not have cultures, but animal behaviour can be predicted by noticing what an animal notices and finding out what the animal wants (Dennet, 1998).

Indeed, as the cognitive revolution in human psychology took place, there was also a renewal of interest in the study of cognitive phenomena in other species (although a strong emphasis on behaviour understandably remained) (Roberts, 1998). Although there is a lack of evidence that any other species can use language in the recursive way that humans can, the cognitive abilities of chimpanzees and young children are not very different (Harley, 2001). Where there are differences, it is worth thinking the observation of Reed (1996), who argued that philosophers frequently compare humans to other animals in terms of internal properties, when they should instead be comparing how our environments differ.

The Ecological and Social Mind

In defining the boundaries of something, it seems like common sense to ask what is inside and outside the object of study. What is inside or outside the mind? If we take away what is outside the mind, then it has nothing to act on and no subject matter for its thoughts (Gergen, 1999). From a functionalist perspective, this would negate the mind’s very existence.

Gergen (1999) argues that the mind is inseparable from relationships if we firstly treat psychological discourse as performative and secondly embed performance in relationships. From this point of view thinking is just a public act carried out in private. Like Malik (2000), Gergen implies that thought is a linguistic act, and that mental activity is driven by interpersonal relationships.

Many critical social psychologists argue that identity is context-dependent. They reject the essentialist view and advance the idea that identity is not possessed but rather negotiated, and should be studied by investigating discourse (Tuffin, 2005). What sets the (relatively new) practice of discursive psychology apart from psychology as natural science is that it does not treat the individual “subject” as being representative of universal human truths (Tuffin, 2005). Psychology as natural science implicitly assumes that the mind is located within the individual, and that findings on the mind of an individual can be generalised to the minds of other individuals.

Discursive psychology focuses on how language and speech acts behave, and does not offer a window onto the workings of the mind (Parker, 2002). A comparison could be drawn with Behaviourism, in that both practices avoid the use of cognitive concepts in describing human interaction. Thus, an ecology of identity does not necessarily support an ecology of mind, but rather can undermine examination of the mind altogether.

Mind may extend to our ecological environments, but what about our social groups? Emphasising the needs or importance of groups is not the same thing as saying that they have minds.

Wilson (2004) suggests that the group mind hypothesis, as he calls it, can either be taken as the literal proposition that groups can have minds or as a cognitive metaphor. The cognitive metaphor stance suggests that although groups don’t actually have minds, they act sufficiently like individuals to be treated as though they did. (Note that this framework still treats individuals as the paradigmatic boundary of the mind).

Communities of insects are considered to be “super-organisms”. The individual organisms do not understand the aims of the group. The term “super-organism” cannot easily be applied to human groups, however: the individuals within the group are typically aware of the aims of the group, even though they may only play a minute role in achieving such aims (Wilson, 2004).

In other disciplines one can see the concern with the validity of reducing the decisions etc. of the group to the aggregate of those of the individuals who make up the group. In macroeconomics, for example, the Keynesian School argues that investors are prone to “herd behaviour”, with the herd acting as a metaphorical group mind. In contrast, the New Classical School proposes that people react to the prevailing economic conditions as autonomous individuals, so the unemployment rate, G.D.P. etc. can be explained solely in terms of the thoughts and actions of individuals (Snowden & Vane, 2005).

The Artificial Mind

The “mind as computer” metaphor has pervaded psychology for at least four centuries (Reed, 1996). Conversely, do computer have minds? Functionalism argues that functionally identical acts can be carried out by different physical entities (Bem & de Jong, 1997), so theoretically there is no reason why silicon can’t do the work of flesh and blood.

Strong artificial intelligence is the hypothesis that a computer which carries out a cognitive task is, in fact, thinking (Kukla & Walmsley, 2006). Structurally, the brain is in many ways different from an artificial computer (c.f. Jaki, 1969). However, the Turing machine demonstrates that thought can be carried out computationally (Pinker, 1997).

Kukla et al. (2006) argue that, from a functionalist perspective, strong artificial intelligence is supported if a computer can perfectly simulate human cognition. This argument is quite anthropocentric, in that it assumes that the carrying out of a cognitive task is an insufficient demonstration of mind unless it is done in exactly the same way as a human would. Surely a truly functionalist approach should support the existence of some kind of mind in anything that can carry out a given cognitive task, regardless of how it goes about it? Turing machines do not have the same structure as the brain (Dawson, 1998). Turing’s point was not to demonstrate that a machine can think in exactly the same way humans do. Rather, it was that if the machine can fool a human into thinking it’s a human mind in a blind test, then it has mind (Dennet, 1998).

Indeed, if we are concerned with what is adaptive about mind, we should focus on what constitutes adaptiveness for beings with artificial intelligence. Meyer (1996) argues that a behaviour is adaptive for a robot if it allows the robot to continue performing the function for which it was designed. The workings of swarms of social insects have influenced robot designers to produce systems of robots that work together without centralised control or explicit communication (Kube & Zhang, 1993).

A classic argument against strong artificial intelligence is attributed to Lady Lovelace, who complained that Charles Babbage’s “analytical engine” could only generate ideas that it was programmed to. Turing (1950) refuted this view with two points. Firstly, humans require teaching in order to produce “novel” ideas, so it is inconsistent to set a higher criterion for mind in computers, given that it is assumed that humans have minds. Secondly, according to Turing, producing novel ideas is simply a matter of engineering to make a computer produce more than one idea for a given input. This may be setting the bar somewhat low, as the programmer may be able to predict the two or more outputs perfectly, but it is does require a great stretch of imagination to see how a computer can generate random outputs but be programmed with somewhat “wooly” criteria for which of these outputs to select as most aesthetically appealing.

The Man with Two Brains

Perhaps the human brain contains more than one mind. While one feels a cohesive state of consciousness at any given time, there is no one brain structure that is responsible for consciousness (Dennett, 1991, Greenfield, 1999). It is possible that there is no central organiser within the brain that creates a “unified” mind, but rather individual subsystems acting together as a sort of superorganism. As the environment impinges on one, a “majority” view is reached among the subsystems, and this view is expressed in overt behaviour (Dennett & Humphries, 1998). This is perhaps a more structuralist argument against the idea of one person, one mind. 

Following corpus colostomy, split-brain patients can only articulate pictures shown to the right eye, as the left hemisphere controls speech (Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2003). It would appear that the two halves of the brain have thoughts of their own. For the split-brain patient, the brain does not produce a mind, but two minds!

Of course, one should try to avoid excessive reductionism. An individual neuron either fires or doesn’t, and so lacks psychological properties in the sense of Wilson’s (2004) “minimal mindedness” criterion. Nonetheless, it has been argued that the neuron should be considered a computer, given the variety of inputs it may have to process (Jaki, 1969).

Discussion

The discipline of psychology has emerged and developed beside other emerging and established disciplines such as computing, theology, philosophy, economics and ethology, and these disciplines have influenced one another. In the Western world, individualism in society as well as its sciences and philosophies has risked restricting the location of mind.

Although thinkers such as Block (1978) have suggested that functionalism may lead us to too liberal a view of mind, I believe that most people’s definition of mind is excessively illiberal. Functionalism cannot give a complete account of the human mind, or one that will satisfy our desire for an account of consciousness. However, if one accepts that pursuing some aim is a sign of mind, then it becomes clear that restricting the concept of mind to individuals, humans or even organisms is misguided.

References

1.      Alanen, L. (2003). Descartes’s Concept of Mind, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

2.      Bateson, G. (1972).  Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Aylesbury: International Textbook Company Limited.

3.      Bem, S. & de Jong, H.L. (1997) Theoretical Issues in Psychology, London: Sage.

4.      Block, N. (1978). Troubles with functionalism. In Savage, C.W. (Ed.) Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

5.      Burge, T. (1986). Individualism and psychology. Philosophical Review, 95 (1), 3-45.

6.      Clarke, D.M. (2003). Descartes’s Theory of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7.      Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the Subject, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8.      Dawson, M.R.W. (1998). Understanding Cognitive Science, Malden: Blackwell.

9.      Dennet, D.C. (1991). Consciousness explained.

10.  Dennet, D.C. (1998). Brainchildren, London: Penguin.

11.  Dennet, D.C. & Humphries, N. (1998). Speaking for our selves. In Dennet, D.C. (Ed.) Brainchildren, London: Penguin.

12.  Gazzaniga, M.S. & Heatherton, T.F. (2003). Psychological Science: Mind, Brain and Behaviour. New York: W.W. Norton.

13.  Gergen, K.J. (1999). An Invitation to Social Construction, London: Sage.

14.  Greenfield, S. (1999). Soul, brain and mind. In M.J.C. Crabbe (Ed.) From Soul to Self (pp.108-125). London: Routledge.

15.  Harley, T. (2001). The Psychology of Language, Psychology Press: Sussex.

16.  Hergenhahn, B.R. (1997). An Introduction to the History of Psychology (3^rd Edition), California: Brooks/Cole.

17.  Jaki, S.L. (1969). Brain, Mind and Computers, Indiana: Gateway Editions.

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Chewing gum update

A new article has carried out a systematic review of the research looking a chewing gum and attention. The review indicates that a modest majority (14/22) of papers found a positive effect of chewing gum on attention, while a handful of others showed both positive and negative effects (5/22), while a minority showed no significant effect (2/22) or just a negative effect (1/22). The article also points out that the exact mechanism underlying such an effect remains somewhat mysterious, even though numerous theories have been put forward. The literature is not perfect (there could be more positive controls to help untangle mechanisms and effect sizes), but it does seem to suggest a positive effect.

It's an open access article, so it's freely available to anyone who wants to read it.

On a less positive note, I've encountered a recent paper suggesting that excessive chewing gum consumption amongst adolescents could be linked to headaches, so everything in moderation...


P.S. Note also that I've learnt my lesson about pics after the sexism accusation debacle (see previous post on sexism).