Work-a-Day Addiction

We are all addicted to the normal hormones of motivation.

I am watching the World Cup from time to time, and wonder- why? Why do we get so involved in competition, why are men particularly motivated to participate and watch, why do whole nations believe themselves to be "represented" by a sporting team, and feel emotional loss or gain by their fate? It is all very odd, from logical perspective- even a grand waste of effort, money and time, second only to that wasted on religion!

Naturally, one has to look at our biology and evolutionary history. A recent article in Salon outlined an interesting contrast between hormones that drive men to their characteristic activities- testosterone and oxytocin. Success gives us a testosterone boost, while social bonding gives us an oxytocin boost. Both are powerful drugs that give us highly conditional, precise motivation. If one's success serves the group, such as a successful hunt, (or war), both systems reinforce, and we are maximally happy. If the two systems are in conflict, such as a bar brawl, civil war, or domestic intrigue, we take our bonding resources were we can- from whichever group will have us, or do without, becoming loners or outcasts living on testosterone alone, if that. That really isn't much fun, and one gets the distinct impression that oxytocin is ultimately the more significant motivator. Winning only works if you have someone to share it with.

Another recent experience was going to a concert. It was transporting, highly socially bonding, and its happy effects lasted long, long after, surely involving something like a surge of oxytocin. One might even call it "religious", a related activity carefully engineered to bring people together to get positive hits of social bonding, though with a veneer of pompous folderol. These are in some ways the poles of our culture- the incessant competition in sports, business, and politics, which divide us, versus bonding experiences that bring us back together. The latter are getting, perhaps, pushed to the margins as live music becomes rarer, religion dies a slow death, and our arts turn into violent superhero extravaganzas. Granted, that in competitive situations, we bond with our team, our party, our religion versus their religion. But the mixture of testosterone-fueled competitiveness makes such group-i-ness a mixed blessing, easily turning to mean, if not violent ends. Just look at our political system, where civility has turned into blood sport. We need to find a more consistently positive and unifying way to be.

The drugs we abuse follow a similar pattern. Cocaine is probably a fair testosterone analog, making one feel invincible- ready to take wing. On the other hand, there are downers like alcohol and opioids- what's up with them? One can speculate that they give an oxytocin kind of buzz- the comfortable, disinhibited state of reduced social anxiety, which melts barriers to some degree, though quickly becomes destructive in excess. The opioid epidemic is, as many have observed, a direct index of social malaise and atomization. One might add that 12-step programs to treat alcoholism attempt (mostly unsuccessfully) to supply the missing social bonding with a sort of regimented friendship. Most people, with robust lives and brain chemistry, don't fall for the fake pleasures of either drug, but get their fix from actual accomplishments and actual social connections, which generate the internal rewards which are just as chemical, but much more subtly, finely, and productively regulated.

(All this is terribly reductive, of course, and misses all kinds of details of how our motivation systems work. Yet it is clear that in a broad brush way, positive and negative feelings are strongly influenced by these and other chemicals that form the internal motivation and reward systems, for which drugs of abuse and recreation are blunderbuss versions. Whether we add in serotonin, dopamine, and others, to make more accurate models of the internal workings does not alter this picture. There is also no law that cognition can not generate emotions. But it seems to make sense that our general emotional tenor is shifted in rather gross ways, over many cognitive (and bodily) systems at once, which dictates the use of hormones and hormone-like neurotransmitters to create such wide-spread regulatory effects.)

But many forces are set against our happiness and bonding, sending us toward competition instead. Traditionally, the (testosterone-addled) patriarchy has been a major culprit, as we have experienced so clearly in the traditional setting of the society of Afghanistan. Scarcity in general, of course, generates warfare and competition, to which primitive cultures are far more prone than our own, despite their otherwise idyllic nature.

But our current version of modernity may be even worse. Society-wide bonding experiences, like patriotism, universal religion, and traditions in the very general sense, are all being corroded. Some of the corrosion comes from competitive market forces, which are invading every aspect of our lives with the retreat of public services, civic responsibility, and family structure. Some comes from our very prosperity, which allows us each more independence and freedom- which is to say, an escape from close, maybe suffocating, social ties. Some of it comes from sheer population growth, which makes everything more competitive, particularly space- the space to live, to not be homeless, to find a country in which one can make a future, instead of being crushed under poverty and corruption. And some of it comes from environmenal degradation, another consequence of population growth and rampant capitalism, which makes agriculture and subsistance more difficult in already-poor areas and degrades the spiritual balms of nature. The internet, which was supposed to bring us all together, has instead balkanized us into ever-smaller tribes, enabled anonymous flame-throwing and rampant bullying, including from the highest offices. And into the bargain, it has grievously wounded the music industry- that keystone of positive social bonding.

What is going to put all this together again? How will we re-establish healthy lives and communities against all these forces? Clearly, Scandinavian countries, which have followed a less strictly capitalistic model, with less testosterone and more social awareness and conscience, have succeeded in building happier societies. It takes a change in emphasis, and a renunciation of the imbalanced invasion of competition in every nook and cranny of our lives, where few win and most lose. Otherwise our only recourse is the artificial versions of social bonding reward.

• A depressing withdrawal from opioids.
• Trump is a bad drug.
• Remember that 81% of evangelicals support Trump. Because they are white and pure.
• The supreme court is the next domino to fall for our creeping Nazi-ism.
• Death of the middle class, cont.
• And the decline is gathering speed.
• Science takes a theory, and sometimes a little PR.
• Love ...

Now You See it

Rapid-fire visual processing analysis shows how things work in the brain.

We now know what Kant only deduced- that the human mind is full of patterns and templates that shape our perceptions, not to mention our conceptions, unconsciously. There is no blank slate, and questions always come before answers. Yet at the same time, there must be a method to the madness- a way to disentangle reality from our preconceptions of it, so as to distinguish the insane from the merely mad.

The most advanced model we have for perception in the brain is the visual system, which commandeers so much of it, and whose functions reside right next to the consciousness hot-spot. From this system we have learned about the step-wise process of visual scene interpretation, which starts with the simplest orientation, color, movement, and edge finding, and goes up, in ramifying and parallel processes, to identifying faces and cognition. But how and when do these systems work with retrograde patterns from other areas of the brain- focusing attention, or associating stray bits of knowlege with the visual scene?

A recent paper takes a step in this direction by developing a method to stroboscopically time-step through the visual perception process. They find that it involves a process of upwards processing prior to downwards inference / regulation. Present an image for only 17 milliseconds, and the visual system does not have a lot of conflicting information. A single wave of processing makes its way up the chain, though it has quite scant information. This gives an opportunity to look for downward chains of activity, (called "recurrent"), also with reduced interference from simlutaneous activities. The subjects were able to categorize the type of scene (barely over random chance) when presented images for this very brief time, surprisingly, enough.

The researchers used a combination of magnetoencephalography (MEG), which responds directly to electrical activity in the brain and has very high time resolution, but not so great depth or spatial resolution, with functional magentic resonance imaging (fMRI), which responds to blood flow changes in the brain, and has complementary characteristics. Their main experiments measured how accurately people categorized pictues, between faces and other objects, as the time of image presentation was reduced, down from half a second to 34, then 17 milliseconds, and as they were presented faster, with fewer breaks in between. The effect this had on task performance was, naturally, that accuracy degraded, and also that what recognition was achieved was slowed down, even while the initial sweep of visual processing came up slightly faster. The theory was that this kind of categorization needs downward information flow from the highest cognitive levels, so this experimental setup might lower the noise around other images and perception and thus provide a way to time the perception process and dissect its parts, whether feed-forward to feed-back.

Total time to categorization of images presented at different speeds. The speediest presentation (17 milliseconds) gives the last accurate discernment (Y-axis), but also the fastest processing, presumably dispensing with at least some of the complexities that come up later in the system with feedbacks, etc., which may play an important role in accuracy.

They did not just use the subject reports, though. They also used the fMRI and MEG signals to categorize what the brains were doing, separately from what they were saying. The point was to see things happening much faster- in real time- rather than to wait for the subjects to process the images, form a categorical decision, generate speech, etc. etc. They fed this MEG data through some sort of classifier, (SVM), getting reliable categorizations of what the subjects would later report- whether they saw a face or another type of object. They also focused on two key areas of the image processing stream- the early visual cortex, and the inferior temporal cortex, which is a much later part of the process, in the ventral stream, which does object classification.

The key finding was that, once all the imaging and correlation was done, the early visual cortex recorded a "rebound" bit of electrical activity as a distinct peak from the initial processing activity. The brevity of picture presentation (34 ms and 17 ms) allowed them to see (see figure below) what longer presentation of images hides in a clutter of other activity. The second peak in the early visual cortex corresponds quite tightly to one just slightly prior in the inferior temporal cortex. While this is all very low signal data and the product of a great deal of processing and massaging, it suggests that decisions about what something is not only happen in the inferior temporal cortex, but impinge right back on the earlier parts of the processing stream to change perceptions at an earlier stage. The point of this is not entirely clear, really, but perhaps the most basic aspects of object recognition can be improved and tuned by altering early aspects of scene perception. This is another step in our increasingly networked models of how the brain works- the difference between a reality modeling engine and a video camera.

Echoes of categorization. The red trace is from the early visual processing system, and the green is from the much later inferior temporal cortex (IT), known to be involved in object categorization / identification. The method of very brief image presentation (center) allows an echo signal that is evidently a feedback (recession) from the IT to come back into the early visual cortex- to what purpose is not really known. Note that overall, it takes about 100 milliseconds for forward processing to happen in the visual system, before anything else can be seen.

• Yes, someone got shafted by the FBI.
• We are becoming an economy of feudal monoliths.
• Annals of feudalism, cont. Workers are now serfs.
• Promoting truth, not lies.
• At the court: better cowardly and right wing, than bold and right wing.
• Coal needs to be banned.
• Trickle down not working... the poor are getting poorer.

Hitler and Donald Trump

With apologies to "God and Donald Trump". An authoritarian comparison.

Hitler did not pounce on Germany suddenly and unannounced. His rise was a lengthy story of norms broken, lies told, prejudices nurtured, institutions destroyed, brilliant propaganda, judicious bullying, and the age-old scapegoating alchemy of victimization and hate. We are in the midst of a similar process, with the worser angels of our natures being seduced and exemplified by the current president. Trump loves authoritarian leaders, pines for authoritarian methods, (reads authoritarian speeches), and, overall, seems to use a playbook from one of the greatest authoritarians of all time. Maybe it is worth counting up the similarities. One of the best books on this remains William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Propaganda
Trump had a few difficulties with FOX at first, as they had a few components still beholden to the old GOP, or with principles otherwise. But nothing succeeds like success, and FOX could not deny the beast they themselves had created through years of alternative reality and hate-filled programming. It is now a fully consumated marriage, with daily hate, direct policy integration, and personnel going back and forth. Joseph Goebbels would have been proud, though he would have criticized us for still allowing free media to exist. Trump has been doing his best to discredit all responsible media, and is getting a sympathetic hearing from those in his camp. Whether this infection of corrupt media values spreads into the rest of the culture is one of the biggest questions of our time.

Novel modes of communication
The Nazis used film, radio, graphics, and other media in very innovative ways, still admired today in some instances. Mass communication was still young, and they made great use of it for their propaganda. Now we have the first twitter president, marrying his lack of self-control and need to bully and  lash out at every source of anxiety with the new media of our time which narrow-casts and broadcasts simultaneously and instantly. These new media themselves are not the problem, rather it is the content, obviously. The issue is whether we neglect to take a longer view and are able to maintain our intellects and moral values while marinating involuntarily in this cesspool of Newspeak.

Scapegoats and concentration camps
Immigrants are the current administration's scapegoats and objects of hatred. No insult is too vile, no policy too harsh. Walls are to be built, detention centers filled, children ruined. Germany never had organized and nation-wide resistance to the antisemitism of the Nazis, so we are slightly ahead there. But in Germany too, the concentration camp system started slowly, first only holding communists and political opponents, and only gradually developing into the slaughterhouses found by the allies in the end. Immigrants are right now an easy target, not being citizens, with nebulous rights, if any.

Bullying
Trump's bullying is instinctive, relentless, and always personal. (Just ask Stormy Daniels!) If there is policy involved, it is decades out of date, and uninformed. The Nazis were obviously bullies as well, with far more lattitude, given their paramilitary organizations and eventual totalitarian control. Hitler's temper tantrums were evidently very Trumpian. But in foreign policy, they directed their bullying more sensibly- against their enemies rather than their friends. First Austria, then Czechoslovakia, were crushed by propaganda and threats. England was cowed from interfering, Russia was subborned and bribed, before being turned on later. There was method to the madness, where with Trump, we have daily lashing out without much sense let alone long term strategy. China is our friend, then our enemy. Russia is complemented on one hand, and sanctioned with the other. Canada is turned from our best friend to a bitter spouse. The authoritarian instinct is obviously the same, but with Trump, the point gets lost in personal narcissim, short attention span, and poor judgement.

Narcissism
Was Hitler a narcissist? Perhaps not as flagrantly as Trump, but anyone who starts a world war and ends up incinerating his own country in the pyre of his ambition probably gets the nod. There was also the personality cult, Führer, etc. So yes, he and Trump are cut from the same cloth there. Trump has tried mightily to identify himself with the nation and its wounds and salvation- just listen to his clunky inauguration speech. He is the only one who can fix what is wrong with the nation! The instincts are there, and the charismatic connection to at least some of his base. But he is far, far, from closing the deal with the country at large, and also has such appalling lack of judgement, intellect, and self-control that the whole project simply falls flat on purely operational grounds.

Economic policy
Here we get to a big constrast between the two. Trump has talked alot about infrastructure spending and beautiful airports and roads. But he has not lifted a finger to get there. His version of deficit spending is to give a lot more money to the rich- he's no national socialist! Hitler, on the other hand, really built the autobahn, the Beetle and other infrastructure. His Keynesian policies put everyone to work, as well as re-arming the nation. Of course all this led to tears, but it illustrates the difference between someone who really wants to rebuild the nation, and someone who only wants to get a feeling from a crowd of believers, while selling them down the river to his rich friends.

Crony capitalism
Yes, Hitler's economics put the big companies in control. But the program was obviously derigiste- under the state, and secondly, with the ultimate goals, successfully achieved, of rebuilding both the economy and the armed forces. Trump, in contrast, is spending all his efforts in strightforward Republican projects of favoring the corporate class generally over the wroking class. The tarriffs, the death of consumer protection, the death of the EPA, the corporate tax cuts- none of that is making America as a whole better let alone great. The nationalist rhetoric expresses Trump's authoritarian instincts, but his heart and whatever else passes for his head is with his corporate cronies, not with workers, or the nation at large.

Tastelessness
Here, Trump is almost in a class of his own. Hitler was a notoriously bad painter, but not entirely talent-less, and led a party that innovated in media, graphics, public displays, and architecture (if of an oppressively bombastic and brutalist style). Trump's style is more classic mobster and nouveau-riche. Both cases betray a lack of empathy and human feeling. As the Greeks and many after them maintained, aethetics are moral. We express ourselves and our vision of humanity through the art we make, support, and appreciate. It is a window into the soul or lack thereof of our leaders to see what they are capable of appreciating. Trump's case is one of edifice complex with a slather of gilt.

Fighting the last war
Hitler took a great deal of his ultimate program from America. We shamelessly swept Native Americans from our fertile prairies. We had slavery. We supported eugenics. He thought that the Ukrainian and Russian breadbasket could be the great fertile frontier for Germany. Too bad that the people already living there had airplanes and tanks! In this case, Hitler was several decades, if not centuries out of date, and paid grievously for it. For all his prowess in harnessing modern technology and economics to a program of national rebuilding and totalitarian control, Hitler was additionally obsessed with the the defeat by France in World War 1. It was all very backward-looking. Trump's errors of history are smaller-bore, but analogous, in that his conceptions, such as they are, are generally decades out of date. Is coal going to come back? That is absurd, not to mention environmentally suicidal. Is manufacturing coming back? Only with robots. He is harping on the nefarious trade policies of China (and Canada!). Well, that ship has mostly sailed. China has developed with our implicit help and support (not to mention funding our prodigious deficits). The remaking of a poverty-stricken communist basket case into a prosperous capitalist nation over the recent decades is the strongest possible compliment to our ideology and generous guidance of the international system. (Though further work remains to make our democracy functional and attractive as an alternative to China and Russia's new model of authoritarian capitalism). We should concentrate on fostering an increasingly rule-based and legitimate international system that keeps China on a responsible and lawful path, rather than introducing instability that only diminishes our current and future standing.

Love for fellow authoritarians
Whether there is a compromising Russian dossier on Trump or not, his love for Putin is unfeigned. G. W. Bush looking into Putin's eyes was bad enough, but this is revolting. Whether Duterte, Jinping, bin Salman, or Jong Un, Trump seems to love them all. Naked power is his elixir and dream. How sad that America's power has been built over the last century on more subtle foundations- the attractiveness of a properous, lawful, and respectful system that other peoples and nations can aspire to rather than cow before. Making America great used to involve opposing dictatorships rather then trying to emulate them.

• A linguistic emergency.
• State of the border. 
• Turning the international order upside down.. on Putin's orders?
• Mental illness.
• Remember the dust bowl? 
• Empathy is not weakness.

Why no Russian Renaissance?

Russia was much closer to Byzantium than Western Europe. So why didn't it feed from the scholarship of the East on the fall of Constantinople, as the West did? Books by John Lawrence and Martin Sixsmith.

OK, this is an unfair question. But if one's closeness to the learning and culture of Byzantium is supposed to be related to one's ability to assimilate it and recover the riches of antiquity that supposedly fed so much of the Western European Renaissance, then Russia was far better positioned than Florence. Russia had long-standing trade relationships and routes to Constantinople, and shared the same Orthodox Christianity. Indeed it still sees itself as the last inheritor of Byzantine culture. Some of the largest cities in Europe in 1000's were Novgorod and Kiev, of the early Rus period after Viking/Varangian invasion of the nascent Slavic areas.

But there were countless hindrances. When the scholars of Byzantium fled the Muslim takeover in the 1400's, did they want to go to Russia? Not likely. Western Europe had already gone through a mini-renaissance in the 1200's, and was incomparably more diverse, academically advanced, and wealthy than Russia at the time. Also, the Mongols invaded Russia in 1237, ruling with a slowly loosening grip till 1480. This would obviously put a serious crimp into any renaissance.

Poland, next-door, had its own mini-renaissance, roughly through the 1500's. Even in this most distant province of Europe, Italian architecture, arts, and science penetrated, and yielded the brilliant response of Copernicus, among others. It turned out that exposure to Byzantium was only a small part of the recipe- a spark, but far from the most important ingredient. Poland's great period was based on riches from trade with the Baltics, and dominion over a great deal of what is Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia today, plus quite a bit of travel to Italy. Prosperity and its consequent cosmopolitanism was perhaps more imporant than contact with Byzantium alone.

Holy investiture

One could also imagine getting too much of a good thing. Byzantium itself was Orthodox Christian, and inheritor of Greek and Roman learning, but had itself nothing we would call a renaissance. There was something about Greek Orthodox Christianity that seems to have been, and still is, stultifying to free thought and scholarship.

Was Islam an influence? In the West, Islam was a transmitter of ancient texts and a source of independent scholarship, via the lengthy occupation of al-Andalus, as well as trade throughout the Mediterranian. This was at least as influential as the recovered treasures of Byzantium. But, being present at the very gates of Constantinople, and as a significant part of the Mongol empire, the Islamic influences must have been at least as strong in Byzantium itself as well as in Russia- but to little avail.

It is not a big point, but the historical irony is that Russia inherited the strong ruler model, the love of ornate ceremony, iconography, architecture, and the deeply entwined church-state model of Byzantium- some of which were rather retrograde characteristics- leaving the West to gain from some of its other, more positive achievements, or perhaps rather, transmissions from a deeper past.

• Taliban poised for success. Despite hearts and minds operation... while the American military seems delusional, like in Vietnam.
• Librarians- on the front lines of homelessness and drug addiction, and community.
• Lawless organization ... our border system.
• Fake news / warfare from Russia. Or Trump. Or Fox.
• Some problems with Bill Clinton.
• "As much as 54% of present high-seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable without large government subsidies."
• Who really owns the jobs issue?

How Big is Your Working Memory?

Evanescent working memory may be defined by gamma brain waves, whose number is limited by the capacity of theta waves containing them.

Human working memory is sadly minuscule. We can keep only a handful of things in immediate mind at a time, like a new telephone number. How luxurious it is, in comparison, to program a computer with its gigabytes of ram, which can be consulted instantaneously! Humans have lots of intermediate and long-term memory, which are accessible quite rapidly. But working memory is a special class, happening (as far as we know) without any neural cell alterations, rather purely on the electro-chemical level. A recent paper pursued the theory that working memory is mechanistically constituted by the encoding of gamma electrochemical rhythms within the theta rhythm cycle, a bit like AM radio carries sound amplitudes encoded in its carrier wave.

This theory (more generally reviewed here) would imply that gamma waves individually mark different bits of content, which is somewhat difficult to understand, really. Neural oscillations have come to be seen as entraining selected networks across the brain, allowing attentive synchronization and binding of content from various anatomical regions. The waves do not carry the content, rather the anatomy does. But each network actuated by separate peaks of the gamma oscillation could be different, thus "carrying" different information, though the wave is simply a timing and separation device. This mechanism of enclosing a set of distinct gamma patterns (typically running at roughly 40 Hz) within a theta wave (typically running at a much slower 5 Hz, but ranging from 3 to 8 Hz) is already understood in the case of place cell firing/encoding in the hippocampus, so it is not a stretch to think, as many seem to, that it is also responsible for working memory in many different subsytems of the brain. In that place cell system, the encoding is not only differentiated by gamma cycle, but time-compressed, such that a physical traversal of a space that takes a second may be encoded by gamma peaks only tens of milliseconds apart. So there is true encoding of information going on here.

Experimental protocol. Subjects where asked to memorize a pattern of colored dots for roughly a second. They were randomly directed to memorize the left side set (experiment) or the right side set (control). The number of dots that they successfully recalled as staying the same or changing was the measured outcome.

A recent paper (review) sought to support this hypothesis by using transcranial AC current stimulation (TACS) to entrain the theta rhythm in the visual cortex to faster or slower pace than normal, and asking subjects to memorize visual features. TACS is a very interesting technique, different from the transcranial magnetic stimulation you may have heard of before. These AC currents are specifically designed to alter neural oscillations, not general activity. The authors found that slowing down the theta rhythm allowed for a slightly increased memory capacity, consistent with the theory that the slower theta wave could fit in more gamma waves. Conversely, speeding up the theta rhythm significantly cut the subject's memory capacity. Amazing! Control experiments that sent the TACS current over a more superficial path from the left visual field, or, even better, which asked for memorization in the right visual field rather the left one that was being stimulated, showed no significant effect.

Theory of the experiment. If the theta rhythm is slowed down (left), more gamma waves, and thus distinct working memory engrams, could be enclosed within each theta wave, increasing effective memory capacity.

The authors mention that the difference in induced theta rates (between 4 and 7 Hz), would have theoretically have allowed two more or less gamma cycles to be enclosed, thus two more items memorized in working memory at 4 Hz than at 7 Hz. The effect size was very small, (about 0.8 items more or less were memorizable), but the experimental intervention was rather diffuse and blunt as well. This kind of work helps gives specific shape to our models of what oscillations do- how they can organize information transfer and binding within the brain, while not themselves really carrying anything in their waves/waveforms.

Data. Memory retention (in terms of items remembered, vs average) is plotted on the right vs the induced theta current. See the paper for controls.

• Yes, to a job guarantee. And a detractor, making as though GDP growth were the point.
• Science? Not broken.
• Bernie on foreign policy.
• The meritocracy that devours itself. By not sharing the wealth.
• Millennials are depressed, and no wonder.
• Mainstream, supply-side economics remains wrong. We need to go back to the Keynesian model.
• The ECB saves the day, but Europe's reckoning will come nevertheless.
• More on Europe's enormous imbalances.
• Down syndrome, or no Down syndrome?
• When California's primary is too much of a good thing.
• We are seeing obstruction of justice in public, on a daily basis.