Rising road fatalities

The current rising fatalities in the U.S. are caused by what University of Utah cognitive neuroscientist David Strayer, PhD, calls the “four horsemen of death.” Together, they are speed, impairment, distraction, and fatigue, the human foibles behind more than 90% of vehicle crashes.

Being Present

Your phone has already replaced your camera, calendar, and alarm clock. 

Don't let it replace your relationships.

You Have One New Follower

The fear of chaos can invite more chaos. If you’re afraid of being mugged while walking down the street, you will become very cautious. As you become cautious, you become a target, therefore you are inviting the very thing that you’re afraid of.

Another Pint of Commotion Lotion Please...

An interesting read from Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest, titled 'My drunkenness means you did it deliberately' (2010).

With our brains gently soaked in alcohol we’re generally more sociable and relaxed – it’s a sedative after all. So why do drunk people seem so prone to aggravation and argument? One reason, say Laurent Bègue and colleagues, is that alcohol exacerbates the ‘intentionality bias‘, our natural tendency to assume that other people intended their actions. So when that guy jolts you at the bar and you’re drunk, you’re more likely to think he did it on purpose.

 

Bègue’s team recruited 92 men (aged 20 to 46) to take part in what they were told was a taste-testing study. They were given three glasses to taste, each containing a cocktail of grapefruit and grenadine cordial, mint and lemon concentrate. For half the participants, the drinks also contained alcohol – approximately the same amount found in five to six shots of vodka. To control for expectancy effects, half the participants with the alcoholic drinks and half the non-alcohol participants were told the drinks were alcoholic. Next, the participants spent 20 to 30 minutes on filler tasks, in keeping with the cover story that this was a taste-test study, and to allow the alcohol to kick-in. Finally and most importantly, the participants read 50 sentences about various actions (e.g. ‘He deleted the email’) and gave their verdict on whether the actions were intentional or not.

 

The intoxicated and sober men alike said that obviously intentionally actions (e.g. ‘she looked for her keys’) were intentional, and that blatantly unintentional actions (e.g. ‘she caught a cold’) were unintentional. But crucially, when it came to more ambiguous actions, like the email deletion example, the intoxicated men were significantly more likely (43 per cent) than the sober men (36 per cent) to say the action was intentional. Whether participants were told they’d had alcohol or not made no difference.

 

Why should alcohol have this effect? Bègue’s team think that it takes cognitive effort and control to overcome the intentionality bias, especially so as to take in all the information necessary to consider alternative explanations. Alcohol’s well-known disinhibitory and myopic (the ‘narrowing of attention’) effects would clearly undermine these faculties.

 

‘In summary,’ the researchers concluded, ‘alcohol magnifies the intentionality bias. Napoleon said, “There is no such thing as accident.” Our findings suggest that drunk people are more likely to believe Napoleon’s statement than are sober people.’

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Begue, L., Bushman, B., Giancola, P., Subra, B., and Rosset, E. (2010). “There Is No Such Thing as an Accident,” Especially When People Are Drunk. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36 (10), 1301-1304 DOI: 10.1177/0146167210383044

I'll see you when I get my new glasses...

Have a look.

 

The Explanation: 

 

Inattentional blindness, a phenomenon known as "the failure to notice an unexpected stimulus that is in one’s field of vision when other attention-demanding tasks are being performed." This phenomenon is classified as a psychological attentional error - and you'll be relieved to know -  not the result of visionary deficits. The main reason for this lack of attention is the overload of stimuli surrounding us; in order to be able to focus on the intended things, we learn to disregard many others and be unaware of the unattended stimuli. There have been a large number of experiments demonstrating that this phenomenon has a significant effect on people’s perception...and now this one with you.

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"What we see depends mainly on what we look for." ~ John Lubbock

The Default Network Mode; The Brain's Screensaver

The default mode network (DMN) is a network of brain components active when during daydreaming, self-generated thought, and when not attending to outside stimuli. Marcus Raichle, the discoverer of the DMN, has referred to it as "the orchestrator of the self". It is most active when the brain is at rest or involved in social communication.

 

The concept of brain resting-state network arose from observations made when comparing cerebral perfusion during cognitive processing to that measured during passive baseline conditions such as at rest, that is, when subjects lie in the dark and are instructed to think about nothing in particular (Mevel, 2011).

Raichle first used the term in 2001 to describe the nature of brain activity when it is not engaged in any specific, externally focused task. It's been considered quite an elaborate system, and while there are no definitive functions of the DMN as of yet, some proposed have included internal processes such as self-reflection to diffused passive attention. The DMN is generally inhibited in most cognitive tasks, however, tasks that involve episodic memory does not deactivate the DMN - suggesting a link.

The main hypotheses associated with the DMN and cognitive functions are, the Internal Mentation Hypothesis, and the Sentinel Hypothesis. The Internal Mentation hypothesis holds that DMN is important in introspection and internal attention. The Sentinel Hypothesis argues that the DMN supports a low level ''exploratory'' attention that surveys for unexpected stimuli.

Although some variation occurs, the default network mostly includes medial brain structures, i.e., the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the inferior parietal lobe, the lateral temporal cortex, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, and the hippocampal formation. Probing the functional anatomy of the network in detail reveals that it is best understood as multiple interacting subsystems (Buckner, 2008).

The link between DMN and episodic memory is well established. It is now known that retrieval of episodic memories, whether internally or externally cued; relies on the DMN (Cabeza et al., 2011). Further, dysfunction of both grey matter of DMN nodes as well as white matter connections are implicated in Alzheimer's Disease, a disease with obvious prominent effects on episodic memory. People with early signs of Alzheimer's Disease have unusual resting state signatures, while in Autism; the resting-state networks can be 'hyperconnected'.

People who are depressed show an increase in DMN activity. This is likely to be precisely because what characterizes depression is a sense of constant rumination and negative self-referential mental activity – in neurological terms being stuck in the DMN. (Smith, 2015). Others researchers discovered findings that suggest increased default mode network activation during meditation (Xu et al., 2014), indicating that this activation is related to the relaxed focus of attention, which allows spontaneous thoughts, images, sensations, memories, and emotions to emerge and pass freely, accepting them as part of the meditation process (Xu et al., 2014). The DMN has also been linked with depression (Belleau et al., 2014), schizophrenia (Mingoia et al., 2012), and post traumatic stress disorder (Lanius et al., 2009).

While the functional significance of the DMN remains unknown, converging evidence suggests that the DMN might be critical for self-referential processing (e.g., introspection). Age differences in the ability to deactivate the DMN has been found between older and younger adults, which may reflect the cognitive change experienced in normal aging (Park et al, 2009). The mental activity of the DMN has still not been rigorously assessed to date. Despite the growing amount of knowledge regarding the DMN physiology and anatomy, the cognitive function of this network is still poorly understood (Mevel, 2011).

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''Whatever resting activity is doing, its existence proves one thing - the brain only rests when you're dead'' ~ Miall (2009)

Perspective

I love this story from Irvin D. Yalom.

 

One of his patient's with breast cancer who throughout adolescence had been locked in a long, bitter struggle with her naysaying father. Looking forward to some form of reconciliation, she looked forward to her father driving her to college; a time she would be alone with him for several hours. The trip turned out to be a disaster. Her father behaved true to form by grousing at length about the ugly, garbage littered creek by the side of the road. She on the other hand saw no litter whatsoever in the beautiful, rustic, unspoiled stream. She found no way to respond and eventually, lapsing into silence, they spent the remainder of the trip looking away from each other.

 

Later, she made the same trip alone and was astounded to note that there were two streams - one each side of the road. ''This time I was the driver'', she said sadly, and the stream I saw was as ugly and polluted as her father had described it. But by the time she had learned to look out her father' window, it was too late - her father was dead and buried.

 

Yalom remarks that the story remained with him, and on many occasions he has reminded himself and his patients, 'Look out the other's window'. Try to see the world from another's perspective.

 

It's so relevant to many things in life such as empathy and honing our compassion for others. I think it's just awesome, and makes me want to delve into more of Yalom's writings.

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The Chameleon Effect

According to authors Chartrand and Bargh ,"The chameleon effect refers to nonconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one's interaction partners, such that one's behavior passively and unintentionally changes to match that of others in one's current social environment." (Journal Of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999).

 
How many times have you yawned after viewing another person do it? Or noticed your tone of voice depended on the company you were in. What about meeting up with people from where you used to grow up and now realising that your homeland accent has suddenly started coming out of your mouth...

 

The chameleon effect can happen naturally and frequently because we feel a rapport with people who mimic our moves. Most of us do it automatically to varying degrees, we mimic the people around us all the time without even realizing it.

 

In one study of the chameleon effect, Chartrand and Bargh found that students who rated high on empathy were more likely to imitate others. "Those who pay more attention mimic more," says Chartrand.

 

We also mimic the facial expressions of other people. This is so hardwired that one-month old infants have been shown to smile, stick out their tongues, and open their mouths when they see someone else doing the same (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977).

Unintentional mimicry and imitation functions as a social cohesive. The chameleon effect actually becomes a warm response that facilitates social interactions. Mirroring a persons language shows that you understand your conversation partner, and that you are an empathetic listener.

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''When you are in the company of lunatics, behave like a lunatic. When you are in the company of intelligentsias, speak with brilliance...that is how a chameleon behaves, the territory changes it, and it adapts to the changes.''
                                                                                                                    ~ Michael Bassey Johnson