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  • Piracetam – The nootropic with many uses

    Piracetam is a nootropic – a compound used to improve mental performance in some way. They’re often called (and sold as) “smart drugs.” The name derives from the Greek words nous and trepein, meaning “mind” and “to turn” respectively. Or so Wikipedia says at least. You may be familiar with the concept of smart drugs as a result of seeing Face from the A-Team taking the fictional (but highly desirable nonetheless) drug “NZT” in Limitless.

    Piractam: Intelligence in one gulp? (or two if you’re a wussy who can’t swallow tablets)

    Piracetam is a prescription drug given for a range of reasons, but it only reached true fame and stardom after people on the internet started saying it made them smarter. Observe:

    “I am not used to have this much energy and now I could do things more easily. I even started to multitask, which is close to impossible in my regular state of mind. Now, ideas are popping up spontaneously and it is no effort to execute the corresponding actions. I also feel more self-esteem, confidence and feel in The Zone: Flow. I feel attentive, centered and motivated. My eyes are more energetic, powerful, wide open and present. I have glowing blushes on my cheeks, a smile on my face and I feel happy, it IS just great!!!” (source)

    Don’t get too excited. I’m in the skeptical camp on this one, especially when it comes to spectacular reports like this. And yes this does come from experience, of this any many many other smart drugs (but more on that another time).

    Effects on cognitive disorder


    Clever marketing for the Limitless film. Sadly, it’s not actually available! (photo credit)

    A good few studies have observed beneficial effects on people with age-related cognitive disorder, such as improved performance on memory tests. It might also reduce the deterioration that people normally experience when its taken over longer periods. According to one meta-analysis, 60% of patients taking piracetam saw improvements, while only 30% of those taking placebo saw improvements.

    This is well enough, but note that you can’t simply generalise results observed on clinical populations to healthy populations and expect the same results. In other words, just because it helps people with lower than normal cognitive function see improvements, doesn’t mean it will help people with normal function get even better. This is a general rule that you can apply to any intervention or treatment – the jury is out until it has been tested empirically. Whether or not piracetam actually works in healthy individuals is worth a separate post in itself, so I’ll leave that for now. But there are reasons to be skeptical, as we’ll see.

    Other Clinical Uses

    Not that you care, but piracetam also has shown itself to be a beneficial treatment for vertigo, cortical myoclonus, dyslexia, and sickle cell anemia, to varying degrees of effectiveness.

    Dosage

    The dose given therapeutically and in research varies depending on the condition. For cognitive impairment, 2.4g and 4.8g per day are common doses used in tests. For cortical myoclonus doses up to 24g per day are reported.

    Safety

    Piracetam is often noted as being one of the least toxic compounds ever discovered, if not the least. No toxicity has been found in animal studies after administering 10g per kilogram of the stuff. Which, for the average self-experimental nootropic user, probably amounts to more than he can afford. Some side-effects have been noted, less than 2% report nervousness, weight gain, depression and other symptoms (that’s less than 2% for each one), though I’m not sure what the severity of this was.

    It is not recommended in people with renal disease, since that’s the way its excreted, and it’s not recommended for pregnant or lactating women. If you’re a pregnant or lactating man, well there’s no evidence for your particular case but if I were you I wouldn’t risk it.

    Taste

    Disgusting.

    Pharmacodynamics and other more technical stuff

    Piracetam influences a range of neurotransmitter systems (cholinergic, serotoninergic, noradrenergic and glutamatergic) and yet has no affinity for any of the receptors in these systems.

    Think of receptors as locks and neurotansmitters as keys. When enough keys go into the locks, an electrical signal is passed along the neuron until it reaches the next synapse. Piracetam’s “key” doesn’t fit any of the locks in the systems where these neurotransmitters operate, yet still seems to have an effect on them. So it somehow works indirectly to this end.

    It may be that piracetam increases the number of receptors, or how efficient they are. Your money’s on the latter though, since membrane fluidity affects receptor binding, and that’s the likely way that Piracetam works.

    As noted earlier, Piracetam may have better (or perhaps may only have) effects where there’s reduced membrane fluidity to begin with. Another example of this is its ability to decrease membrane fusion and damage, which has been observed in studies of long-term changes in the brain due to alcohol use (in rates).

    Mechanism of Action

    Piracetam is a GABA derivative but its mode of action is thought to be completely different. In fact, exactly how piracetam works is unknown, though if you had to bet, put your money on its ability to restore cell membrane fluidity. That’s cells in general, not any localised area, so this idea fits with piracetam’s apparent Jack-of-all-trades effects.

    The lipid bilayer of cells can vary in state from a more fluid state where the phospholipid chains are moving more, to a crystalline state where the tails of the lipids are straight, extended, and tightly packed. However, the membrane still keeps its general shape. This fluidity is important for loads of other processes, like receptor binding. When fluidity is worse, so are neurotransmission, neuroplasticity and neuroprotection. These are three things you generally want more of if you want to be Limitless.

    That said, some evidence suggests that piracetam has a greater effect on membrane fluidity at times when normal fluidity is compromised, or perhaps even only at these times. For example, during ageing. For instance one study found increases in fluidity in old mice, but not younger ones with normal fluidity to begin with. If you’re skeptical about mice studies, another study found the same thing in Alzheimer’s patients.

    Bradley Cooper definitely wasn’t taking this stuff in those oddly transparent tablets, but it does have some uses. Whether its useful as a nootropic isn’t completely clear (unlike NZT, which is completely clear). Certainly not in comparison to other methods of cognitive enhancement.

    References

    I got 90% of this from Bengt Winblad’s excellent 2005 review Piracetam: A Review of Pharmacological Properties and Clinical Uses, CNS Drug Reviews, 11(2) 169-182.

    Learn more.

  • Is minimalism a good thing?

    Yes.

  • Why are some people more driven than others???

    Some people just have that “Get up and go” don’t they??? This goes by many names – self-control, grit, motivation, drive, persistence, work-ethic. When it comes to succeeding in a particular pursuit, this thing is a pretty important factor, too. One study found that self-reported grit was more important than IQ in predicting a number of outcomes in eighth-grade students:

    Self-discipline measured in the fall accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television (inversely), and the time of day students began their homework.

    It’s a pretty common trait among successful people, too. Will Smith is a pretty successful guy by most standards. Why is that? Here’s what he has to say about success:

    Why are some people driven like this, while others are happy to tread water? Will Smith is clearly a very competitive guy with a huge work ethic. Where other people would be happy to take a day off, he keeps on working. Where other people slow down, he speeds up. Sounds exhausting! What is behind such a huge amount of effort?

    Genetics

    I don’t believe that this is a fixed trait, because different people in different cultures and environments will react differently. But I do think genetics play a role. Many traits studied by psychologists have a strong genetic component, according to studies of twins. So maybe the traits that lead to being driven also develop more easily in people with a certain set of genes. I’ve never believed the idea that “All people are created equal.” Clearly, some people are born with better aptitudes in different areas than others. We’re not all born with the same mental blank slate, onto which we can develop in different directions.

    Intrinsic Motivation

    I’ve talked before about the difference between intrinsic motivation (something you do for its own sake) versus extrinsic motivation (something you do for a reward). Could it be that lack of drive is simply a symptom of doing something for a reward, as opposed to doing it for the pure pleasure of doing it?

    Michael Jordan talks in his autobiography about how the massive amount of effort he put into training was fun. For him, getting up early every day to practice free throws was scarcely an effort. Not that it’s right to say he has no work ethic — of course not — only that what seems on the outside to be a strong work ethic and “forcing” of behaviours is sometimes less so from the inside.

    The key thing to keep in mind here is difficulty. In the video above, Will Smith mentions the idea of talent versus skill, of honing your craft for thousands of hours until you’re a master. This gels with Ericsson‘s work on deliberate practice, and the well-known (thanks to Malcolm Gladwell) idea that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to reach mastery, regardless of the starting skill level. Deliberate practice is different to just doing the activity. It is doing it at the outer limit of your ability. It’s working on those hard, frustrating aspects that actually take effort. If you find a pentatonic scale difficult but could jam along to “She Loves You” all day long, then working on the former contributes to your 10,000 hours but the latter does not.

    If your craft is something that naturally appeals to you, and you enjoy, so much the better, but you’ll still have times you don’t want to practice, or you’d rather relax, or where you’ve reached a plateau that is hard for you to progress past. Therefore, to the extent that skill level plays a role in success, it stands to reason that grit, persistence, and work ethic is going to play a role in success regardless of intrinsic motivation. As beneficial as it may be, don’t make the mistake of thinking that intrinsic motivation is necessarily synonymous with “high” motivation. I read books for intrinsic reasons, but I don’t always want to read.

    You could say therefore, that success can stem from something that you’re intrinsically motivated to do, but either doesn’t require high levels of skill, or you already have high levels of skill in. As long as it’s not something mundane like eating. If you can find something like that, you’re home free, so it’s worth considering if any activities like this exist for you.

    However, there is a trap here. If you’re looking for external success via something you’re intrinsically motivated to do, it could very easily switch to something you’re extrinsically motivated to do when you start seeing it as a path to external rewards. This is particularly dangerous, because as Dan Pink explains in his book “Drive”, motivation for activities only tends to be increased by external rewards when these are rote, boring, repetitive tasks. Ability on tasks that require creative thought or effort tends to be stunted by the promise of rewards. Maybe that’s why a musician’s second album is usually worse than the first?

    Purpose / Meaning

    Maybe some people have a greater sense of purpose behind them, and this provides the motivation for them to keep going even through difficult times. Survival is one such purpose. It’s hard to imaging Chinese factory workers doing 18 hour days in terrible conditions for any reason other than to survive. If they had a few million in the bank, that would seem like an absurd course of action.

    Being anchored to a purpose might keep people going. When they feel like they want to take a break, they remind themselves of what they are trying to do, and they suddenly feel the urge to continue. This makes sense to me. I think our bodies keep energy in reserve, even when we feel very tired, just in case something of high importance becomes salient. Many a times I’ve been walking down the street, tired and hunched, when I see a pretty girl walking the opposite way. Isn’t it funny? I suddenly find the energy to walk upright and stick my chest out a bit!

    I imagine this as a kind of evolutionary reserve power store, just in case something comes up that might influence our ability to survive our reproduce. But because our brains are adaptable, and self-programmable, we can “install” a number of rules so our brain learns other occasions it should access our reserve power. The ability to build a sense of purpose might be one such thing. Of the top of my head, I can think of one study that backs this up, where people who reviewed their core values did better in a self-control task than people who didn’t.

    The need for success itself might serve this role for some. Why would Will Smith rather die than get off a treadmill before you? You could imagine some negative motivations behind this, like not wanting to feel like a failure, or status consciousness taken to such an extreme level that people would rather try to beat everyone that simply deal with that issue. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Competition can be a tool, something that you use to motivate yourself but deep down understand is essentially meaningless. Beyond competition, the desire to contribute and to serve might provide that purpose. There are many examples of people being willing to put themselves through hell, even to die, for a purpose. This is something we’ve been reminded of in recent years but the mechanism has always existed.

    If this is correct, the action step here is to install a purpose into yourself, to find the meaning behind what you want to do. There are two ways. One is to determine your values, beliefs and convictions, and pick your direction based on them. This makes sense but is very difficult. If you ask yourself “What do I value?”, “What do I believe?”, it would be hard to know if the answer is “real,” and not something that has been pushed into your head from one of the 10 zillion sources we’re bombarded from in daily life. How “deep” do you have to go to find your true purpose, if there is such a thing, and where does it even come from?

    The other way is to take your direction, and integrate your values into it. This strikes me as a temporary solution at best since the two probably won’t fit together very well. It’s unlikely you be pursuing a path that’s in line with your core values and not know it on some level. The reverse is probably true as well, if you’re going in a “wrong” direction there’s probably a little niggling feeling that pops up occasionally (but you bash it back down with the perks of the job).

    Have I missed anything?

    What do you think about this? Why are some people more driven than others? This isn’t an extensive list, just a few ideas – what have I missed?

    Also, what do you think about the “how” side of things. How does one install a sense of purpose for instance?

    Here’s another question – can the lack of purpose, motivation and genetic propensity be overcome through “techniques?” If you set goals, go over your values, plan your time, etc., is that enough?

  • Is marriage unnatural?? – the hypothesis

    I recently read the idea that marriage is an unnatural and unfulfilling strategy for most people. On further reflection and reading, I thought, why stop at marriage? and included monogamy generally.

    I thought about this for a while and came up with a phrasing for a hypothesis:

    “Marriage/monogamy goes against our nature, and unless it is enforced externally, will end in failure except in the odd occasional case.”

    Which group are you in? (Credit: GEEKSTATS)

    Now first, let me define the terms:

    • Marriage/lifelong monogamy – When I use these terms I’m talking about life long/long term commitment to a single partner. So if one partner cheats, then by my definition, that’s not monogamy (see failure, below). I’m not sure how serial or short-term monogamy fits in, that might be a kind of exception. But certainly, this idea of “The one”, “true love” and all that, is what I’m referring to here, the very kind we’re brainwashed with in movies and songs all year round. And don’t think the old “There are lots of ‘ones‘” argument counts, because even if you accept that there are many compatible people out there, that line still implies lifelong commitment to one of them.
    • Unnatural – Unnatural, against our nature; these are slippery terms, and it’s not necessarily safe to talk about human nature outside of a cultural context. For instance, it’s in our nature to gorge on fat and sugar when it’s available. For a tribal culture in the Savannah, this is excellent; it helps you get those crucial calories. But in a society with easy access to junk food, people get fat. Likewise, what I’m proposing is that it’s in our nature to seek multiple sexual and/or romantic partners, and that this causes problems in a society that puts monogamy and “true love” on a pedestal.
    • Enforced externally – Through law, superstition, social stigma, or other forces.
    • Failure – As you know, mono means one. With poly we have two terms – polygamous (multiple marriages), and polyamory (multiple partners, no marriage). If someone in a marriage cheats, that’s polyamory, and a point in favour of the hypothesis. Divorces generally are a point in favour, but that’s a pretty deep topic for just now. Also, I say marriages may work if enforced, but if an enforced marriage is not a fulfilling one for both parties, I’m also classing that as failure, because if it wasn’t enforced it probably would end (and if enforced marriages are unsatisfying, that’s a point in favour of the unnatural argument above).

    Answers to some expected questions you might have:

    Mongamy, polygamy, marriage, blah blab blah. Aren’t you just splitting hairs/arguing over semantics?

    No. I’ll explain why later.

    My parents/grandparents/friends/pet albatrosses have been in a committed relationship for all their lives monogamously and harmoniously. Ha! Take that mister! You’re wrong!

    Firstly, if you know of someone who has been in a committed, loving, lifelong, monogamous relationship (that is, no affair by either party), GREAT. I’m NOT saying it never happens, nor am I saying it’s not a beautiful thing when it does happen. I’m just saying, these cases are outliers, and the cases where there wasn’t some external enforcement of the relationship are rarer still.

    Secondly, I could be wrong, which is why I’m going to look into it and write about it on the blog as I do.

    Finally, I’m NOT saying marriages that aren’t monogamous can’t work, nor that a marriage in which one partner cheats is unsuccessful by definition. Quite the opposite in fact, as you’ll see…

    You asshole. You have threatened my belief system and I am deeply offended. What gives you the right to question the status quo like this?

    If you’re offended or upset by what you’re read so far, I strongly suggest you don’t read this blog from now on; I might turn out to be right!

    I have data/opinions/a story in support of/refuting this hypothesis, would you like me to share it with you?

    Yes please, either email me or leave a comment.

  • Sex and Death

    Sex and death; these aren’t topics that tend to appear in the same article, I grant you. But you’ll be pleased to know it’s not actual death we’re concerned with here; but it is actual sex, which I presume you’ll also be pleased to know.

    Mortality salience means the extent to which you are aware that life is finite and someday you will die. Obviously this is a fluid concept, and it can be increased just by bringing up the topic, such as I have just done – your mortality salience has now increased. You’re welcome.

    Mortality salience has an interesting effect on people. When reminded of death, people tend to deepen their identification with cultural symbols, as though they are trying to latch on to things that are more permanent than they are. It’s called Terror Management Theory, and some interesting results have come up; when reminded of death, people are less likely to deface flags and crosses, and people in capitalistic societies become more materialistic. But what’s the relationship between sex and death?


    Credit: Micky the pixel

    Well clearly it would depend on the relevance and meaning that sex (and death, presumably) holds for people. Tests of this would be expected to come out differently in different cultures and for different people.

    In one test, researchers reminded participants of their mortality, and then asked them if they would – hypothetically – be likely to have a casual fling with someone. The men said they would, the women said they wouldn’t, on average. Then a second test was done, with different people. This time, the participants were asked if they would want sex following a romantic date, and both genders were up for it.

    That ties in pretty nicely with the socially accepted sexual behaviours of the genders (the double standard whereby being promiscuous is acceptable in men, but shamed in women), and also evolutionary ideas of the different mating strategies for men and women.

    But there is a big criticism here, which I’ll be returning to again and again with the research on dating, sex, relationships and attraction in psychology – the test was not a real situation! Scientifically speaking, the study says nothing about what people would actually do, only what they say they would do. This limitation has particularly strong ramifications in this particular design.

    Think about this for a moment. Terror management theory predicts that people will fall into their cultural roles when people are reminded of their own mortality. So how do we know that, for example, women are not falling into the cultural role of not talking about having one nights stands, especially with someone who is stood there with a clipboard, recording it for all eternity? The very theory being tested seems to deepen the response biases of the participants, particularly the women.

    So is there a link between sex and death salience? Although these results are consistent with that, I think it’s premature that start using “You’re going to die!” as your new chat up line!

    Ref:
    BIRNBAUM, G., HIRSCHBERGER, G., and GOLDENBERG, J. (2011). Desire in the face of death: Terror management, attachment, and sexual motivation.

  • Mindfulness helps people with substance use disorders

    Cravings are funny things. If you’ve ever tried to abstain from chocolate, fizzy drinks, or burgers you’ll know that it’s not a simple matter of not doing it. As I explain here, the brain is designed for an age when sugar and fat were scarce. Check out the guy below, climbing up a 40 metre tree and getting stung by bees just to get some honey. If that’s the length we’ll go to get sugar when it’s scarce, it’s easy to see why people binge when it’s just a few pennies and a short walk away.

    That craving multiplied several times is what people addicted to drugs must contend with. Addictive drugs hack into this very system that gives us cravings, and sends it into overdrive while people are taking the drugs. This creates a strong urge to return to this behaviour – just like the junk food, the brain thinks it’s very important.

    That’s the point of cravings, in a sense. In a world without junk food and drugs, they are generally useful things, helping you to survive and pass your genes on. But we don’t live in that world; we live in one where the playing field is uneven, where it’s hard to identify a craving as something that should not be acted upon – doing so goes against our nature.

    Yet we also possess our coveted higher cognitive functions – the ability to observe and reflect on the way our mind works, and override the brain’s suggested course of action. Thus anything that helps in this process should also help us deal with cravings, be they for chocolate or for drugs.

    Mindfulness meditation is one of those things. The process of meditation can involve the observation of thought – watching thoughts as they arise, and noticing how the thought is separate from the observer. If the thought and observer are separate, identification with the content of the thought weakens, and with it, potentially, the control that compulsive thoughts have over the individual.

    North Rehabilitation Facility is a low-security jail in Seattle. In 2006, a paper by Sarah Bowen and colleagues reports an interesting test conducted here – mindfulness meditation (a 10 day Vipassana course) versus ‘treatment as usual’ (substance abuse education, among other things). The Vipassana course involves complete silence, no outside contact and intense 10+ hour schedules of meditation training each day.


    Swapping bud for Buddha – Mindfulness meditation for substance abuse is being tested in various prisons. (Credit: zendotstudio)

    Substance use was recorded from the participants in both groups, at baseline and at a three-month follow-up. At the three month point, all participants had been released. Comparing Vipassana to treatment as usual, the authors report reduced alcohol, marijuana and crack cocaine use in the meditation group! There were also decreases in various negative psychiatric symptoms, and increases in some positive psychosocial outcomes. These latter results are consistent with previous studies.

    While the results here are quite encouraging, but note that we’re relying on self-report, and that group selection was not random. So it’s possible, even if unlikely, that participants more prone to lie would self-select for the meditation program. However, the substance use reports at baseline were not significantly different between groups, so it seems it was the program that produced the changes at follow up.

    So the question becomes, what about the program had this effect? I’ve already noted that it’s difficult to separate the effects of the actual meditation with other things that go along with it – in this case, the authors note that perhaps separation, vegetarian meals, silence, relaxation, or lack of tobacco might have played a role. My money’s on the meditation itself, but these results don’t separate that from the confounding factors.

    Although these results are consistent with the explanation I gave above, then, it’s hard to say whether the increased detachment of self from thoughts specifically caused the effects. Future studies will have to investigate this — but these results are definitely promising.

    Reference

  • Valentine’s day romance research round-up

    Happy Valentine’s day all! Here’s some romantic research for you:

    Sternberg’s triangular theory of love – A popular psychological theory on the different forms of love (and a big indication of how much work the word ‘love’ has to do!)
    A neuroscientific look at love – Love. Disney magic or neurochemical explosion? You decide…
    Is love blind? – Positive illusions in relationships
    Casual sex in college – Probably the opposite of love, but try telling them that…
    What is beauty? – The maiden in the love story is always ‘fair’. But what is beauty anyway?

  • Even brief meditation improves cognitive function – Mindfulness vs. The Hobbit

    In a previous post, I explained how meditation practice is associated with increased cortical thickness. As interesting as that is, it does leave a couple of questions open:

    • These were experienced meditators (7 years practice on average). What about beginners? How long does it take to make a difference?
    • OK, so the brain changes. Good, great, but what does this equate to? What difference does it make in what the brain can do?

    This is where Zeidan et al come in. A group of people with no prior experience in meditation were split into two groups. One would get four sessions of mindfulness training, the other would get four sets of listening to The Hobbit on audiobook.

    Buddha vs. Gandalf

    What happened? Well, in terms of self-reported mood, both groups showed improvements – reduced negative moods, reduced symptoms of depression, reduced anxiety when comparing before and after measurements. However, there were no differences between groups. So, either mindfulness training and The Hobbit are equally effective in this regard, or some other factor was effecting both groups equally (participants were all students, so that’s not too implausible).

    This is similar to another study, which compared mindfulness to relaxation and found no difference between them in terms of their effect on mood. Also echoing that study, Zeidan and colleagues report that the mindfulness group had the upper hand in things other than mood – this time it was performance on the following cognitive tasks:

    • The Digit Modalities Test – A test of visual tracking and working memory
    • Verbal fluency – A word association test asking people to think of as many words beginning with F, A, and S, or, C, F and L within one minute.
    • The n-back test – A test of processing speed, working memory and attention.

    So although there were no mood benefits over the control group, meditating for four days, for just 20 minutes per day, can increase cognitive function in these areas!  So get your tush on the cush, as Jon Kabat-Zinn would say.

    Reference

  • Awareness of the body is related to intuition – but can sometimes lead to the wrong decisions!

    A few months ago I did a little experiment. For a month, I tried to make all my decisions based on intuition and gut feeling, rather than logically thinking things through. This proved harder than it sounds, and some interesting things happened. It was quite a freaky experience, in the sense that many things worked out pretty well, even though I had no idea where all these decisions were going to end up. Some pretty big changes happened that month, including decisions about how I earn a living and where I live, so if you wanted to do something similar, think hard about that. Or trust your gut, whatever.

    During this month I looked for ways to improve intuitive decision making. Most of what I found related to psychic intuitions, and I tried some of these exercises. Unfortunately the scientific literature is pretty sparse on this topic, so I was pretty interested to hear about Barney Dunn and colleagues’ (2010) recent paper looking into how interoception influences intuitive decision making.

    If you’re wondering, interoception is not a hit film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It refers to the amount that people are aware of their own bodily sensations. Surprisingly, I found that there’s a little controversy in psychology over when bodily responses occur in the decision making process. The debate is over whether bodily signals influence decision making, or whether they are simply a product of it. This is what the paper was looking into, through two tests of whether accuracy in a cognitive processing task is related to the ability to perceive the feelings in the body.

    In the first test, participants were shown a set of images, which evoke different emotions (e.g, fear, neutral, positive). For each image, they self-rated the images for valence (positive to negative) and arousal (whether it makes you feel more alert or more sleepy/dull). At the same time, they were hooked up to an ECG machine, measuring their heartbeat. Next everyone had to count their heartbeats over various time frames, while an ECG measured their actual number of heartbeats. This tests their interoceptive skills.

    What they are doing here, is comparing the bodily response to the pictures with the actual response indicated by the ECG. The hypothesis is that in people with high interoceptive sensitivity (as measured in the heartbeat counting task), the difference between actual and reported arousal would be closer than that of less interoceptive individuals. And this is what the results showed, for the arousal ratings but not the valence ratings.

    The second study is much more interesting. Participants play a simulated gambling game. Four decks of cards are presented, two of which are profitable on average, two of which aren’t. Over time, participants should get a feel for which decks help them win and which help them lose. And so they did – overall. people showed a preference for the profitable decks, and this got stronger as the game went on. Just like in the last study, this intuitive decision making was related to the degree of interoceptive sensitivity the participants had.

    These results support the idea that interoception can improve intuitive decision making, at least in the conditions these things were measured and tested in here. Perhaps improving interoception in people might also improve their decision making in this task? It would be interesting to compare some experienced meditators to novices.

    Be warned, however, that interoception can be a mixed blessing, depending on whether the intuitions are leading you to good or bad decisions. For 27% of people in the second study, their intuition was leading them to the unprofitable decks!

    That’s a pretty tough one to explain. Why would your intuition lead you to a negative outcome? Perhaps there’s some interplay between the intuitions and your beliefs about what’s good and bad. Maybe you’re a shy person who doesn’t want to get excited in public, and your intuition leads you to decision that prevent you having to jump for joy in front of other people.

    I emailed Barney Dunn to ask about this, thinking low self-esteem might explain this effect. He said “While we didn’t directly control for self esteem, the effects still hold when controlling for depression and anxiety. You might expect depression in particular to be a proxy for low self esteem.” So maybe I’m wrong, but either way it doesn’t seem to be a simple intuition = good, no intuition = bad formula. It might be more complex than that.

    Ref:

    Dunn, B. D., Galton, H., Morgan, R., Evans, D., Oliver, C., Meyer, M., Cusack, R., Lawrence, A. D., Dalgleish, T. (2010). Listening to your heart: How interoception shapes emotion experience and intuitive decision-making. Psychological Science, 21, 1835-1844

  • Meditation is associated with changes in the physical structure of the brain

    In this post, I mentioned some interesting studies where neuroscientists put Buddhist monks into brain scanners, trying to find out what effect meditation has on the brain. They found some interesting results in terms of brain activity. If you throw neuroplasticity into the mix too, you’d expect some structural differences too. A study led by Sara Lazar looked into just that.

    I’ve mentioned my thoughts on neuroscience and positive psychology previously. My key point is that, since neuroplasticity is a given these days, it’s not all that impressive to demonstrate changes in the brain as a result of consistent practice of a given activity. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an important study to do. The key questions are: what changes, how much, and does this fit in with other results and theory?

    Twenty experienced meditators (had been one at least one retreat, practice 4 hours a week on average), were compared to a matched control group (by age, sex, race, and years of education). So note here that we don’t have random assignment, but we’ve got the next best thing if we want to study experienced meditators right now.

    What happened?

    Cortical thickness was compared between the two groups. Over the whole brain, there was no difference, meaning the changes were limited to a specific area. The areas were related to somatosensory, auditory, and interoceptive processing. If you want the specific brain regions, here they are:

    • A region of the right anterior insula
    • The right middle and superior frontal sulci (Brodmann areas 9 and 10, roughly)
    • The left superior temporal gyrus (auditory cortex)
    • A small region in the central sulcus

    Also, normal age-related decreases in Brodmann areas 9/10 were seen in the control group but not the meditation group. In other words, meditation potentially helps prevent age-related deterioration in the brain!

    Of course, this is a correlation study, and when two things are measured at the same time, it’s impossible to say what is the cause and what is the effect. Maybe people with enhanced cortical thickness tend to be drawn to meditation, rather than the other way around? It’s certainly possible, but as the authors note, if that were true you might expect greater cortical thickness overall, which wasn’t found here.

    Meditation gives a double-whammy when it comes to making structural changes in the brain. Firstly, there is the control of attention during a consistent practice schedule. Secondly, the relaxed state of the body appears to facilitate cortical plasticity, at least in the auditory areas according to one study. This is comparable to the idea that sleep aids learning, study breaks aid recall, and so on.

    That the structural changes were consistent with the brain areas associated with the techniques being practised, and that these changes may stave off age-related cortical decline, is encouraging. Presumably, different types of mental exercise would have effects on the brain areas related to them, and you could devise a routine aimed at the faculties you expect you’ll most need in your old age.

    Ref:

    Lazar SW, Kerr C, Wasserman RH, Gray JR, Greve D, Treadway MT, McGarvey M, Quinn BT, Dusek JA, Benson H, Rauch SL, Moore CI, Fischl B. Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness. NeuroReport, 2005; 16: 1893-1897.