Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label brains. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brains. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

My Stupid Brain


Respondents of all sorts —
young and old,
liberal and conservative,
white and black —
consistently agreed:
The golden age of human kindness
is long gone.


Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse

Perhaps no political promise is more potent or universal than the vow to restore a golden age. From Caesar Augustus to the Medicis and Adolf Hitler, from President Xi Jinping of China and President “Bongbong” Marcos of the Philippines to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America Is Back,” leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days.

What these political myths have in common is an understanding that the golden age is definitely not right now. Maybe we’ve been changing from angels into demons for centuries, and people have only now noticed the horns sprouting on their neighbors’ foreheads.

But I believe there’s a bug — a set of cognitive biases — in people’s brains that causes them to perceive a fall from grace even when it hasn’t happened. I and my colleague Daniel Gilbert at Harvard have found evidence for that bug, which we recently published in the journal Nature. While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.

We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.

We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline.
We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitable cause?”,“How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.

Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and a recent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate that change, they mistakenly thought cooperation rates had decreased by 9 percentage points. Others have documented the increasing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, like genocide and child abuse.

Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations.

Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.

When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad.
When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.

That explanation fits well with two more of our surprising findings. First, people exempt their own social circles from decline; in fact, they think the people they know are nicer than ever. This might be because people primarily encounter positive information about people they know, which our model predicts can create an illusion of improvement.

Second, people believe that moral decline began only after they arrived on Earth; they see humanity as stably virtuous in the decades before their birth. This especially suggests that biased memory plays a role in producing the illusion.

If these cognitive biases are working in tandem, our susceptibility to golden age myths makes a lot more sense. Our biased attention means we’ll always feel we’re living in dark times, and our biased memory means we’ll always think the past was brighter.

Seventy-six percent of Americans believe, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, that “addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be one of the government’s priorities. The good news is that the breakdown hasn’t happened. The bad news is that people believe it has.

As long as we believe in this illusion, we are susceptible to the promises of aspiring autocrats who claim they can return us to a golden age that exists in the only place a golden age has ever existed: our imaginations.

Monday, July 13, 2020

Walk A Mile

Ever wonder what dyslexia looks like?

Try this website

Here's a screen cap:


The "animation" of the website is very illustrative.

My particular version isn't quite that. For me, sometimes words trade places. Or they disappear. Or they repeat. It's just always pretty fucking weird.

Very interesting that somebody can come up with something that seems so simple to illustrate something so complicated.

Monday, June 22, 2020

Well There's Your Problem

So how do we get from, "holy fuck that was fuckin' awful" to "hey, let's build a monument to the guy who made it so fuckin' awful"?

Here's part of it - Northwestern (2012):

Remember the telephone game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It’s been altered with each retelling. 


Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.

Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. The Northwestern study is the first to show this.

“A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event -- it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it,” said Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. “Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.”

The fog effect over time is something of a blessing when we're talking about a PTSD kinda thing for an individual.

But when it becomes a mass delusion, then we've set our selves up to repeat the thing that was so fuckin' awful.

Memory Studies

Collective and Individual Memory

Memory operates on the individual as well as the collective level. "Memory nonetheless captures simultaneously the individual, embodied, and lived side and the collective, social, and constructed side of our relations to the past”. It allows for individuals, groups and societies to be creative as its “anachronistic quality—its bringing together of now and then, here and there—is actually the source of its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones”.

Memory aids in the formation of identity. This alignment, however, is not a direct one as “our relationship with the past only partially determine who we are in the present, but never straightforwardly and directly, and never without unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other”. Our identities are therefore formed based on personal memories but also the interactions with other memories.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Today's Cheapshot

Dr Gail Saltz:


Because my great big Anterior Cingulate Gyrus can beat up your puny little Right Amygdala.


Please note: the ACG is kind of an upper brain thingie (suggesting higher evolutionary status) while the amygdala is in the lower brain - the part that hasn't changed much since we were living in trees and sifting thru buffalo shit looking for a few undigested seeds to eat.

Just sayin'.

And if you watched that whole video, you know most of what you just read is bullshit.

But if you've been to my little blog with any frequency - well, you knew that goin' in.

Anyway, good to have new information on how to get those idiot conservatives to stop being such bullheaded whiny-butt Proto-Apes and listen to my perfectly-reasoned and superior arguments.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Closer To The Borg

Science be scary sometimes.






BTW - next year will mark the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Irreducibly Subjective

That's what Sam's main point is regarding "Consciousness". Everything after that main point usually makes my brain hurt - about the same as There's No Such Thing As Free Will, so yeah - ow, dammit.

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

And This Is Your Brain

...on a podcast

via You Are Not So Smart




Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist who lectures at Cardiff University and writes about brain stuff over at his blog, Brain Flapping hosted by The Guardian.
  • What's new with motion sickness?
  • Why does it feel so bad to break up?
  • What about Dunning-Kruger?
  • Is it paranoia that drives Anti-Intellectualism?

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Suck It Up And Listen

Time for a little homework now, kids:



ha tips: Facebook buddy LM-M and MoJo
There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.

Saturday, April 19, 2014

It's All In Your Head

Here's a podcast about neuroscience(?) stuff, relating humans and chimps and how we develop etc - and right about the 7 minute mark, the woman says something about how the hippocampus helps convert short-term memory to long-term memory, and that kinda popped a flashbulb in my brain.

It's a close variation on the Orwell thing about if you control the past you control the future.

(paraphrasing) "If you can't remember the past, you can't imagine a future".

I flashed on how propaganda is supposed to work - and it occurs to me that maybe we're seeing that concept playing out.  So, if I can disconnect you from your own history; if I can make you believe the history you were taught is all wrong; and knowing that you'd then be unable to come up with a coherent vision of your future for yourself, it would be pretty easy for me just to hand you a tidy little package of everything I want you to do and to think and to be.  Sometimes I hate my brain.

Anyway, it's an interesting discussion about other things as well.



hat tip = FB friend DR