Is Sadder Really Wiser?

Wray Herbert has an excellent new piece at The Huffington Post about research testing whether sadness has a  beneficial or negative effect on decision making. From the piece:

Nobody likes to feel bad. Sadness saps our energy and motivation. Melancholy wrecks our health and invites disease. Misery leaves us -- well, miserable. Yet many experts believe that these negative emotions have an upside, that they clarify our thinking and foster more deliberate and careful decision making. Some even say that sadness is a reality check on unwarranted optimism and self-regard.

That's the so-called "sadder but wiser" theory. But is it true? Isn't it equally as plausible that sadness and melancholy sabotage some kinds of thinking, and lead to questionable choices and judgments? A team of psychological scientists -- Jennifer Lerner of Harvard and Ye Li and Elke Weber of Columbia -- call this the "myopic misery" theory. Since sadness arises from a sense of loss, they reason, isn't it possible that it triggers an unconscious need to replace what's been lost, and that this need leads in turn to a sense of urgency and impatience -- and thus to rushed decisions? They decided to pit the two competing theories against each other in the laboratory.   

Read the entire piece at The Huffington Post. 

How You See Others' Emotional Lives Affects Your Own

The blog Neuroskeptic discusses new research suggesting that how we perceive the emotional lives of others significantly affects how depressed or anxious we feel.  From the post:

In the first experiment, the authors quizzed people how many days per month they felt “depressed, sad, blue, tearful” or had “excessive anxiety about a number of events or activities.” They then asked them a series of questions designed to work out how they thought other people would answer than question. So they could work out where each individual thought they ranked within the general population, in terms of depression or anxiety symptoms.

Take a look. The top panel shows someone who felt depressed on 5 days a month, but believed this put him in the most depressed 70% of people. The second person felt depressed twice as often, but she thought she was below average.

 

They found that perceived rank was strongly correlated with whether people thought they "had depression" or "had anxiety" - much more strongly than actual frequency of symptoms. "Having depression" meant "being more depressed than other people".

Read the entire post at Neuroskeptic. 

Talking About the Future with Dr. Michio Kaku

You never know who is going to sit next to you on an airplane. Usually it’s just someone who wants to read his newspaper and sip ginger ale in peace. But then there’s the rare instance when you happen to be seated next to one of the world's best known living scientists.

Such was my luck a few weeks ago on a flight back from New York, when I was stunned to see Dr. Michio Kaku stowing his carry-on over my head before taking his window seat.

If you don’t know who Michio Kaku is, all you have to do is turn on almost any Science Channel or Discovery show about space exploration, black holes, worm holes, or technologies of the future. Or you could pick up one of his seven bestselling books, like his latest New York Times Bestseller, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. Or tune into his weekly national radio programs, Science Fantastic and Explorations in Science.

If you want to know what makes a science writer off-the-chain happy, it’s chatting with a world class scientist for two hours and change, with drinks and snacks to boot. Aside from being a brilliant theoretical physicist, Dr. Kaku is also a heck of a nice guy. He graciously gave me more ideas than my pen could catch, any of which would be a substantial article on its own. I'll just run the highlight reel for now.

One of the most intriguing items he mentioned is the research effort underway in Japan to photograph dreams.  Dr. Kaku described this as “doable” and thinks it’ll eventually happen. The idea is that brain activity in the visual center of the brain can be read and captured as pixels on a screen. In dream state, the brain’s visual center is excited, producing an abundance of images that are theoretically ripe for the capturing.

Dr. Kaku explained that it's already possible to translate simple images this way. Say, for example, you envision the letter U. The brain activity associated with holding this image in mind can be captured via nodes attached to your scalp and translated into individual pixels that will eventually resemble a U.  The technology is still a bit clunky at this stage, but the underlying science is sound. One day we will hear of the first photographed dream and we’ll have an entirely new wrinkle in the privacy debate to iron out.

Dr. Kaku also discussed a recent step forward in brain-interface technology. For the first time, a sub-cranial interface is enabling epileptic patients to pick out individual words on a screen simply by thinking about them.  Previously it was possible to move a cursor around the screen this way, but never before has the technology enabled precise selection of words. This advance brings us one step closer to a brain prosthetic for instantly communicating by merely thinking.

Stephen Hawking, a colleague of Dr. Kaku's, uses a single-channel brain interface device called iBrain to communicate via brain waves, though it isn't sub-cranial.  Lou Gehrig's disease has rendered Hawking almost completely unable to move any part of his body. Brain interfaces could one day change the lives of those with similar medical conditions.

We also chatted about judicial decisions on whether fMRI should be allowed as a lie-detection technology in court. This to me is truly scary, because the technology is not nearly far enough along to be used this way. If it’s allowed, brain imaging would become a legal crowbar for prosecutors and defense attorneys – an exceptionally bad outcome considering that neuroscientists themselves are still debating the usefulness of the technology.

For more with Dr. Kaku, check 0ut a great interview he recently did with The Wall Street Journal here. And his latest book is well worth your time.

John Cleese on Creativity

John Cleese of Monty Python fame isn't only a brilliant comedian, he's also a brilliant intuitive psychologist. This video from a talk he gave at a conference on creativity is excellent. 

The Comforting Power of Nostalgia

Psychologist Christian Jarrett has written a nice piece on recent nostalgia research at the BPS Research Digest. From the piece:

Over recent years a body of research has accumulated showing the psychological benefits of nostalgia. For example, reminiscing about the past can combat loneliness and off-set the discomfort of thinking about death. Now a team led by Xinyue Zhou has shown that nostalgia brings physical comforts too, making us feel warmer and increasing our tolerance to cold.

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Based on their findings, Zhou and her colleagues suggested that nostalgia serves a homeostatic function, allowing the mind to return to previously enjoyed states, including states of bodily comfort. Anecdotally, Zhou's team said this fits with reports from concentration camp survivors, that they coped with starvation by recalling delicious meals from the past. This homeostatic account is also complemented by neuroimaging evidence showing that the same brain region - the anterior insular cortex - is involved in representing the physiological condition of the body and in emotional awareness.

Read the entire piece at the BPS Research Digest.