Brain Candy

COUNTRY MUSIC KILLS

Does country music make you want to grab a lariat and hang yourself from the nearest old elm tree? If so, you're not alone. Social psychologists Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach found that the more a city's radio stations play country music, the higher the white suicide rate.

Seriously.

Theirs was a big study, encompassing forty-nine metropolitan areas, and was careful to control for factors like Southernness, poverty, divorce, and gun availability. In other words, all else equal, country music kills. This was especially true when country music represented a city's sub- rather than its mainstream culture.

COOL NEUROSURGERY PAST AND PRESENT: TREPANATION THROUGH TIME

Today, trepanation, or drilling a hole in the head, is commonly used to release the pressure of swelling inside the skull. Throughout history, it's been used to treat epilepsy, migraines, mood disorders, and pretty much any other head condition that seemed to surgeons of the time as if it could be improved by seeing the light of day.

SELF-TREPANATION

In the autobiographical book Bore Hole, Joey Mellen describes his attempts at self-trepanation. Attempts numbers one and two are unsuccessful, resulting in hospital visits and psychiatric evaluations, but no hole. He writes the following of his third attempt: "After some time there was an ominous sounding schlurp and the sound of bubbling. I drew the trepan out and the gurgling continued. It sounded like air bubbles running under the skull as they were pressed out. I looked at the trepan and there was a bit of bone in it. At last!"

Later, Mellen filmed the self-trepanation of his girlfriend, Amanda Feilding, for a film they called Heartbeat in the Brain.

Note: While it certainly sounds fun, most doctors recommend against self-trepanation.

INTRO TO GAME THEORY: PRISONER'S DILEMMA

Game theory was developed by big-brained people attempting world domination. For their efforts, they earned Nobel Prizes and a screaming throng of teenage fans à la mid-1960s Beatles. (OK, maybe just the first, but it's worth picturing hysterical fans throwing underwear while chanting Nash! Nash! Nash!)

Basically, game theory attempts to explain how people act in competitive or collaborative situations. And, more usefully in pursuit of said world domination, it also attempts to define your best strategy in light of your opponents' likely actions.

Take, for example, this oldie but goody drawn from the hallowed halls of game theory (1950, Merrill Flood and Albert W. Tucker):

Two suspects are arrested. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated the prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full ten-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

Check the back of this book for the answer-it's as good as the puzzle itself.

SOCIAL CONTAGION: HAPPINESS AND OBESITY ARE CATCHING

Social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler followed about two-thirds of the residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, as they got happy, sad, fit, and obese, and started or quit smoking. And they asked these couple-thousand residents about their friends: who did they hang out with? Now imagine a diagram showing a huge net of people who know people. Within this net, the scientists found clusters of obesity, happiness, and smoking. In other words, if your friends are happy, you're happy, and if your friends are obese, you're likely to be too.

That's pretty intuitive: like attracts like.

But what's interesting is that Christakis and Fowler watched these patterns change: if your slender friend puts on a couple pounds, you're likely to put on a couple pounds too. And so happiness, obesity, and smoking pass through a population like a contagious virus.

What's your risk of infection? Well, the data from Framingham show that if a friend becomes obese, you're 57 percent more likely to become obese too. And you're at risk even if a friend of a friend gains weight-in fact, you're exactly 20 percent more likely to gain weight too (but only when measured against friends of the same gender). The good doctors measured alcohol consumption too, and found that a man changing his drinking habits has little effect on his friends, but that when a woman starts to drink more, both her male and female friends will drink more, themselves.

So why gamble on your friends' behaviors? Why not hole up in a cabin in Montana where your happiness is self-sufficient? It turns out that happiness is more catching than sadness. Specifically, a happy friend boots your mood by 9 percent, while an unhappy friend lowers it by 7 percent. As long as you're not specifically picking unhappy friends, the happiness gamble of extending your social network as widely as possible should pay off.

You can read much more about social contagion in the duo's very cool book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.

TOO DUMB TO KNOW IT

To be blunt, it's possible to be so dumb that you're unaware of your own idiocy (look to the left, look to the right . . . you get the point; that is, unless you're dumb). Put another way, many dumb people think they're smart. This, of course, is dumb.

How dumb are they? (Insert punch line here.)

In the classic study of overconfident idiots, Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University found that subjects scoring in the lowest quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic were also the most faulty in their self-assessments, predicting they would score in the 62nd percentile, when in fact they scored in the 12th.

Photocopy. Cut. And post this near your office watercooler.

SMARTER EVERY DAY

IQ is supposedly an objective measure of innate intelligence. It's how smart you are.

Period.

But then why is humanity's IQ increasing? Are our brains getting better? Our blossoming genius is so profound that every twenty years or so we need a new, harder IQ test just to keep up. (The average person from the year 1900 would score near 70 on today's test, or on the edge of profound mental retardation.)

People have suggested that this phenomenon is created by better diets, improved schooling, smaller families, or more liberal child-rearing techniques.

But is there something else going on here?

It turns out that only specific parts of the IQ test show significant increases: modern humans are better than our forebears at spotting abstract patterns and at reordering scrambled pictures, but we are no better than Jefferson, Washington, and Abigail Adams at memorizing sequences of numbers, and our scores for vocabulary and general knowledge are similar.

It turns out the question of increasing IQ is one of priorities and not one of intelligence. While modern humans place value on spotting abstract patterns and connecting widely disparate ideas, our ancestors thought abstract reasoning was silly, preferring a "show me the corn" focus on concrete reasoning.

And so researchers watch with interest today's shifting priorities. Specifically, we increasingly devalue the ability to store information. No longer does schooling focus on memorizing dates and places and the Declaration of Independence. To a large degree, we've off-loaded the storage function of our brains to Google. If we can so easily get information, why memorize it? (This is like a couple generations ago when we realized that machines could add, subtract, multiply, and divide . . . and lost the ability to do so ourselves.)

Are we living at the top of an IQ bubble in which we can both reason abstractly and recall concrete information? Eventually, will the devaluation of memorization lead to underperformance on the concrete knowledge sections of the IQ test, dragging our overall IQ scores down? Will our IQ bubble pop like the tech and housing bubbles?

In short, are we due to get dumber?

THE KEY TO BRAIN TRAINING

You know those books: the ones that promise to keep your brain young through a training regimen of puzzles and thought exercises (wait a minute . . . ). Well, it turns out there's one easy key to brain training: challenging new experiences.

Once you've done your nth Sudoku, your brain's as wired for it as it'll ever be. Doing more Sudoku only reinforces these existing pathways. If your goal is to remain good at Sudoku in your later years, great; if you'd like more far-reaching cognitive benefits, it's time to move on. The same is true of timed math problems, memory games, or even crosswords.

Instead, to enjoy the effects of brain training you need to present the brain with tasks that force it to create new connections between cells. If you understand immediately how you'll go about completing a puzzle, it's probably familiar enough that it's not worth doing.

GAME THEORY MAKE BRAIN BIG: COLONEL BLOTTO I

Colonel Blotto has six soldiers in his command. The opposing colonel has six as well. There are three simultaneous battles. In each battle, the colonel who sends the most troops wins. The colonel who wins the most battles wins the war. To keep things (somewhat) simple, the colonels can only choose between sending combinations of 1,1,4, or 1,2,3, or 2,2,2 troops into the battles.

What's Blotto's best strategy? (Stumped? Check the answer key at the back of the book.)

THE GUILTY PLEASURE OF SCHADENFREUDE

If you're thirsty and you drink, your brain feels pleasure. You feel this same pleasure, borne of satisfying a physical need, when someone you envy is brought low.

We call this feeling schadenfreude, but researchers at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan call it dopamine release in the ventral striatum. The thirstier or more envious we are, the more dopamine released when the need is met. Only after our cerebral cortex steps in to evaluate the reason for our pleasure does the neurological experience of schadenfreude diverge from that of quenching thirst: water stays pure, while schadenfreude brings a layer of guilt.

This shared pathway of physical and emotional need suggests that complex emotions like schadenfreude are no less deeply ingrained in our neural systems than basic desires for things like food and water.

GAME THEORY MAKE BRAIN BIG: COLONEL BLOTTO II

This time Colonel Blotto has twelve soldiers to split across three battlefields. The opposing colonel has the same. Again, the number of troops they use for each battle must stay even or increase (1,3,8 is allowed while 8,3,1 and 1,8,3 are not).

What's Blotto's best strategy? (Stumped? Check the answer key at the back of the book.)

MIRROR NEURONS: YOUR ACTIONS IN MY HEAD

It's easy to imagine the benefit of being able to predict others' intentions: is Thog throwing spear at mastodon, or is Thog throwing spear at me? Is wife approaching with large holiday fruitcake as food gift or as weapon?

To answer these questions, we try out the actions we see in our own brains and then interpret what our intentions would be if we were doing the same thing. (Brain to self: If I were wearing that sadistically gleeful expression while approaching with holiday fruitcake, the aproachee would be wise to flee . . . )

Makes sense, right? The interesting thing is, it turns out we have special cells that do only this. They're called mirror neurons.

Most think that mirror neurons are also the basis of empathy. In his very good book, Mirroring People, UCLA researcher Marco Iacoboni points out that when we watch movie stars kissing on the big screen, mirror neurons create in our brains the partial sensation that we're the ones doing the smooching; when we see someone in pain, mirror neurons make us feel a muted version of this pain too.

And the power of mirror neurons extends beyond interpreting large- scale, physical actions. Iacoboni showed this with his now-famous teacup experiment, in which subjects watched three videotaped scenes of a hand lifting a teacup: one in which there was no context (only a disembodied hand holding a cup with no background), one that the brain quickly interpreted as showing someone in the act of cleaning up, and one that the brain saw as lifting the cup to drink. Mirror neurons didn't have much to say about the simple holding scene. They didn't much care for the cleaning scene, either. But gol-darn if they didn't like the drinking! They fired just as they would in a person about to actually drink tea.

In emotionally flat scenes, no mirror neurons; but in the scene of anticipation, mirror neurons go boom, providing in viewers a partial version of the tea drinker's visceral experience.

We feel what others feel.

Mirror neurons may also be responsible for our desire to imitate people. When a person you're speaking with leans in, smiles, and brushes back her hair, you do the same. In a more scientific study of this "social mirroring," subjects who were shown frowning faces frowned, and subjects who were shown smiling faces smiled.

Researchers blame this on mirror neurons: we feel another person's actions inside our head and so are able to mimic them. And the more we mimic, the more our conversation partner experiences our empathy and the more we bond. And so mirror neurons create social connection.

And check this out: when we can't mimic, we can't understand. Researcher Paula Niedenthal forced viewers of smiling and frowning faces to hold a pencil between their teeth, removing their ability to mimic by moving their own mouths. Thus restricted, they were much worse at determining who was frowning and who was smiling.

Either way, mirror neurons allow us to know what others are thinking, feeling, and planning. They're empathy sticks and by forcing us to feel the effects of our behavior, may also form the basis of morality.

Whether they can create world peace and bring every little girl a pony is yet to be seen.

WILD KINGDOM: SENTIENT ELEPHANTS

When you drop a mirror into a fish bowl or parakeet cage, house pets attack. They mistake the reflected image of themselves for an intruder and decide it must die (or at least be massively intimidated by puffed feathers or flexed gills). Humans, in the presence of a mirror, recognize our own reflections and quickly begin to groom. This is self- awareness.

What about elephants?

Researchers at the Bronx Zoo decided to find out. They smudged elephants with paint and held mirrors in front of the soiled elephants. Sure enough, the elephants recognized themselves and began exploring the smudge marks with their trunks.

So far, the only other nonhumans that pass the mirror self-recognition test are apes and dolphins. Researchers attribute ape, dolphin, elephant, and human self-awareness to our similarly complex social structures.