Speaking as Misunderstanding

December 20, 2007 Chuck Metz Leave a comment

Of all the many ways that we can misunderstand one another, how about the McGurk effect? This is what happens when a person’s voice says one thing but the mouth says another. As Uri Hassan of the University of Chicago’s Human Neuroscience Laboratory says –

“As an example, what would happen if a person’s voice says ‘pa,’ but the person’s lips mouth the word ‘ka”‘ One would think you might hear ‘pa’ because that is what was said. But in fact, with the conflicting verbal and visual signals, the brain is far more likely to hear ‘ta,’ an entirely new sound.”

So while we recognize words from the sounds that we hear, there is a more abstract process occurring in which the brain interprets speech using both sight and sounds.

Hassan’s study demonstrates that the Broca’s area of the brain is the region that is responsible for this type of abstract speech processing. This speech production center of the ventroposterior region of the frontal lobe has long been known but this study adds a new dimension to that understanding.

From another perspective, it offers additional insight into why we so commonly misunderstand one another in our casual everyday conversations, evidencing yet again the complexity underlying our communications.

Link: New Brain Mechanism Identified For Interpreting Speech

brain, Mental Models, Science & Worldview, Worldviews and Ethics

Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty

December 12, 2007 Chuck Metz Leave a comment

Three distinct responses to new information. Do I accept it or throw it out? Or am I unsure? Our cumulative responses together build our mental models – our worldviews of everything around us.

A study conducted by Mark Cohen, Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Sam Harris, a graduate student in his lab, and Sameer Sheth of the Massachusetts General Hospital, suggests that physiological differences in processing belief and disbelief are independent of content or emotional associations. It appears that different physiological portions of the brain process belief and disbelief as well as uncertainty.

Taken together, these data offer insight into the way in which our brains work to form beliefs about the world. “What I find most interesting about our results,” said Harris, “is the suggestion that our view of the world must pass through a bottle-neck in regions of the brain generally understood to govern emotion, reward, and primal feelings like pain and disgust. While evaluating mathematical, ethical, or factual statements requires very different kinds of processing, accepting or rejecting these statements seems to rely upon a more primitive process that may be content-neutral. I think that it has long been assumed that believing that “two plus two equals four” and believing that “George Bush is President of the United States” have almost nothing in common as cognitive operations. But what they clearly have in common is that both representations of the world satisfy some process of truth-testing that we continually perform. I think this is yet another result, in a long line of results, that calls the popular opposition between reason and emotion into question.”

Of many items of interest in this study is the association of emotion with our truth-discerning processes and our personal convictions.

Link: Study Shows Brain Responds Differently to Belief and Disbelief

brain, Emotion Management, Stress Management

Stress as Pain Relief

December 9, 2007 Chuck Metz Leave a comment

Stress can alleviate pain – perhaps the only good thing about it most would suppose. This “stress-induced analgesia” shields the body from pain after a serious injury and acts as a protective mechanism. Long known to operate through a mechanism in which the body releases its own naturally occurring cannabinoids, recent research indicates the action of the stress hormone noradrenaline as an additional mechanism.

Processes that mediate the emotional and stress-related aspects of pain originate in the amygdala and are controlled by neurons that originate in the brainstem and are regulated by noradrenaline. Noradrenaline appears to modulate pain inputs in the amygdala by limiting neuro transmissions (the mechanism by which one neuron triggers a nerve impulse in another) from the brainstem.

This protective response is akin to other amygdala and brainstem-mediated survival responses – sleep deprivation and increase in emotional response, handling surprise, and the focus of attention on emotion among many. It is useful.

To reiterate a point – understanding of our brain’s physiological processes allows us to manage behaviours without reducing their protective effectiveness. For example, anger has survival benefits. Yet anger also flairs at inappropriate times and in inappropriate ways. A mistaken run up the ladder of inference produces a threat response where none is warranted. It is times like these when the brain’s physiological responses are appropriate but the situation that prompted them is not. And it is this cognitive management without the loss of emotional richness and survival protection that is one ongoing aspect of coaching TED.

Link: How Stress Alleviates Pain