| Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years. It’s 1989. Madonna is topping the pop charts, and TV sets are tuned to “Cheers” and “Murphy Brown.” Widespread Internet use is just a pipe dream, and Sugar Ray Leonard and Joe Montana are on recent covers of Sports Illustrated. |
But most important, you’re 20 years younger. How do you feel? Well, if you’re at all like the subjects in a provocative experiment by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, you actually feel as if your body clock has been turned back two decades. Langer did a study like this with a group of elderly men some years ago, retrofitting an isolated old New England hotel so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men—in their late 70s and early 80s—were told not to reminisce about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time. The idea was to see if changing the men’s mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes in health and fitness. Read more at www.newsweek.com |
Many effects of antidepressants seem to be due to the placebo effect. And the published trials are only the tip of the iceberg of material that normally doesn’t see the light of day. There are also clinical trials that have not been published. These are studies that have failed to show a significant benefit from taking the drug.
When all of the data sets are combined – published and unpublished – the inescapable conclusion is that antidepressants may be little more than active placebos, drugs with very little specific therapeutic benefit, but with serious side effects.
Not only this, but antidepressants are liberaly prescribed to treat very mild symthoms that rarely stand to the criteria of clinical depression. This does not make the drugs’ effectiveness clearer. Antidepressants have been heralded as miracle drugs that have changed the lives of millions of people. Depression, we are told, is an illness – a disease of the brain that can be cured by medication. But what exactly is the evidence for this? Could it be that we’ve been misled? |
According to drug companies, more than 80% of depressed patients can be treated successfully. Claims like this have made antidepressants such as Prozac among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, with sales that top US$12 billion a year in the United States alone. |
The companies claim that the effectiveness of antidepressants has been proven in published clinical trials showing that the drugs are significantly better than placebos. |
But a closer look at the data tells a different story. Many depressed patients improve when given medication, but so do many given a placebo. The difference between the drug response and the placebo response is not all that great. Read more at www.cosmosmagazine.com |
The intriguing title hides an interesting application of mathematical tools used in quantum mechanics to model decision making under condition of uncertainty.
Pothos and Busemeyer hope that further research on quantum probability models of human cognition could help answer fundamental questions about the nature of how we think. For example, what does it mean to be rational? Another example is Schrodinger’s equation, which predicts a periodic oscillation between choices after a minimum length of time. This oscillation matches with electroencephalography signals and may explain why the longer you debate on a decision, the more you fluctuate. Overall, if our brains use quantum principles, and quantum computation is known to be fundamentally faster than classical computation in computers, then perhaps quantum principles can even help explain the success of human cognition. | Humans don’t always make the most rational decisions. |
| As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply “wishful thinking.” |
| This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. |
| scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making |
| While in the classical model an individual is committed to exactly one preference at any given time, in the quantum model an individual experiences a superposition of these preferences |
| While classical probability theory is too restrictive to fully describe human decision-making, this study shows that quantum theory provides a promising framework for modeling human cognition.Read more at www.physorg.com |
Interesting research. A point not mentioned in the article is that near misses represent a bias towards ‘analog perception’ over ‘discrete perception’. In many cases we process discrete information as if it is analog, as it is apparent from this research, even if we are fully aware that the relevant outcomes depend only on discrete values such as win no-win. | very casino game is a game of odds, but not always in the way you think. Work published this month in the journal Neuron shows that almost winning actually increases the odds - that we’ll keep playing. |
Gambling is a widespread cultural phenomena that has spanned thousands of years and almost every civilization that’s appeared on the face of the planet. And as long as gambling has been around the odds have always favored the house to win. Logically it has to be this way; otherwise casinos would have gone out of business millennia ago. But with the odds stacked against us and our rational brain aware of this, why do we bother to gamble at all? |
In the current study, researchers from Cambridge examined the brains of 15 people with a fMRI machine while they gambled on a slot machine. What they found was that brain activity for winning spins was greatly increased in the ventral striatum and anterior insula; part of a neuronal circuit that is well known as the reward system. |
In a nutshell the way our brain processes our feelings of reward and success at a job well done is: trigger > reward > reinforcement. In gambling the trigger is of course money, and this fires up the reward systems in your brain, which are largely governed by release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This feels great, you are rewarded and you want to do it again and the trigger is reinforced as something that’s good. |
This process isn’t limited to gambling or money of course; it’s also the same thing that happens when you eat delicious chocolate, or why I turn into a slobbering canine when I smell bacon. You might also have guessed that this is part of the mechanism behind addiction to heroin and other drugs of abuse, which we can define as uncontrolled reward and reinforcement. |
Close enough is good enough |
That gambling activates the reward system isn’t a surprise. But the astonishing observation from this study comes when we look at brain activity when the subjects “almost win”.
In this case “almost wining” was when the slot machine dials stopped tumbling and 2 out of the three symbols lined up on the payout line and the third matching symbol appeared just above the “win line”. When this happened, the pattern of activity was in the same brain areas as when they actually won. |
It seems that a near-miss is enough to trigger the reward > reinforcement cascade, and is effectively encouraging us to continue gambling. |
As if to drive the point home the brain pattern of near-miss activity was also very different from the patterns observed when the slot machine spin was still a losing spin but where none of the symbols were anywhere near close to matching - despite the economic result being the same: zero dollars won. |
While it wasn’t previously clear how it worked, the near-miss phenomena has been known for some time. What is perhaps more insidious though is that the optimum rate of near-misses to keep people gambling has been calculated at 30% and subsequently implemented into the programming of many slot machines.*** Read more at veryevolved.com |
A very interesting article A story has a beginning, a middle, and a cleanly wrapped-up ending. Whether told around a campfire, read from a book, or played on a DVD, a story goes from point A to B and then C. It follows a trajectory, a Freytag Pyramid—perhaps the line of a human life or the stages of the hero’s journey. A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that’s what a story used to be, and that’s how a story used to be told. Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow. Read more at connect.educause.edu |
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