Month: August 2013

The Mind Never Stops

Some unsurprising news about the mind: “even when people stayed asleep, the noise of planes taking off and landing caused blood pressure spikes, increased pulse rates and set off vasoconstriction and the release of stress hormones. Worse, these harmful cardiovascular responses continued to affect individuals for many hours after they had awakened and gone on with their days.”

We may go to sleep and find rest, but our brains never stop responding to stimuli. In the service of our evolutionary struggle for survival, they never stop working. But there is also a price to pay.

As reported in The New York Times: “Dr. Wolfgang Babisch, a lead researcher in the field, went on to say, there is no physiological habituation to noise. The stress of audible assault affects us psychologically even when we don’t consciously register noise.”

Our conscious minds, on the other hand, do get habituated. We gradually stop paying attention to repeated sounds. Those of us who live in cities screen out the background noise of traffic, the underground rumbling of subways, the hubbub of sidewalk conversation. Sometimes we don’t even hear the sirens that try to cut through the normal cacophony of city life. But, Dr. Babisch, is saying, our unconscious is always alert and that always affects our psychological well-being.

And so too are our bodies, and that’s what causes stress. As George Prochnick reported in The New York Times, “Indeed, our capacity to tune out noises — a relatively recent adaptation — may itself pose a danger, since it allows us to neglect the physical damage that noise invariably wreaks.”

He cites a report of the World Health Organization that “conservatively estimates . . . Western Europeans lose more than one million healthy life years annually as a consequence of noise-related disability and disease. Among environmental hazards, only air pollution causes more damage.” (See, “I’m Thinking. Please. Be Quiet.”)

Many cities already have regulations concerning acceptable noise levels, and this new research when it is replicated and publicized will no doubt intensify the pressure to legislate noise levels more thoroughly. It is quite common to see “No Horn Blowing” signs or noise barriers erected when Interstates pass through residential communities. But what to do about airports, jackhammers, bulldozers, lawnmowers – the accumulated and now seemingly indispensible accompaniments of modern life?

People have known about the potential damage to their ears from excessive noise; they cover them up when a train screeches past them in an underground station or when they walk past a construction site. But how do you protect yourself from the physiological stress? The loss of concentration? The disruptions and distractions now built into contemporary life?

It looks as if that will be up to us as individuals. Having this research lends support to out intuitive understanding of the stress that noise forces us to cope with. But as The Times pointed out: “In American culture, we tend to regard sensitivity to noise as a sign of weakness or killjoy prudery.”

It will take a while to change that.

Visions of Frankenstein

There has been a lot of excitement about neuro-scientists at M.I.T managing to plant a false memory in the brain of a mouse. The New York Times suggested that this provided “detailed clues to how such memories may form in human brains.”

Dr. Tonegawa, head of the research team, went on to ask: “Why is our brain made in such a way that we form false memories?” He noted the importance of making people “realize even more than before how unreliable human memory is,” particularly in criminal cases when so much is at stake. He speculated that it might have “to do with the creativity that allows humans to envision possible events and combinations of real and imagined events in great detail.” (See “Scientists Trace Memories of Things That Never Happened.”)

The Guardian’s more sober account of this new research, made it clear to their readers how complex memory actually is. Chris French, the head of a Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, said: “Memory researchers have always recognised that memory does not, as is often assumed, work like a video camera.” It is “a reconstructive process,” built out of recalled incidents, images and emotions newly put together in the brain each time we remember something. As a result, every memory is different. The same events will be recalled differently at different times.

Yes, one could say, it is a “creative” process, but it’s more useful to think of it as adaptive. Each time we remember an incident from the past, we are drawing on associations that are relevant to our particular context in the present moment. The memory changes because what we need to remember at any given moment is also changing.

In other words, what the researchers did was not so much “create” a memory as insert an additional association, caused by an electrical shock, to an existing memory. That is not insignificant, as the precision in mapping the brain and the technology of inserting stimuli are remarkable achievements.

But as the researcher at Goldsmith’s cautioned: this is “far simpler than the complex false memories that have generated controversy within psychology and psychiatry, for example false memories of childhood sexual abuse, or even memories for bizarre ritualised satanic abuse, abduction by aliens, or ‘past lives’.” (See “False Memory Implanted in Mouse’s Brain.”)

The accounts of this research in the news, however, conjured up just those kinds of associations. Partly, of course, it’s just hard to grasp the meaning of a real scientific advance. But it also speaks to our continuing anxiety about what science is capable of doing to us, the Frankensteins it creates, or the surveillance and control it enables others to exert over our lives.

We crave the miracle cures that extend our lives, the technological breakthroughs that extend time and space, the virtual worlds that entertain us. But we also fear the weapons of mass destruction, “Frankenfoods” and other genetic improvements to our lives, implants, chemicals, the invasion of our bodies and minds. Our popular culture is haunted by Zombies and robots, vampires and aliens. Dystopian visions play at our multiplexes.

If our memories can be tampered with, we fear, what will be left that can’t be taken away?

Have We Learned Anything From 2007?

The financial analysts who rank public offerings for the ratings agencies, such as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, like to think they can be objective.

Their reliability is what they sell, really, along with expertise in puzzling out balance sheets. And no doubt they are acutely embarrassed by the role they played in the credit bubble that led up to the 2007 crash, when it turned out that they gave AAA ratings to many bonds based on worthless mortgages.

In retrospect, it has become clear that their mistakes were largely based on the fact that few analysts really understood the complex derivatives they were being paid to rate. Those new financial products ingeniously repackaged countless mortgages, slicing and dicing them, so that it became virtually impossible to grasp the risks.

But there was another factor that contributed to their failure: they were not fully motivated to puzzle it out. The very banks issuing the bonds paid their fees and wanted the best ratings for their products. The agencies, for their part, wanted the banks’ business. Moreover, the competitive frenzy that drove the market left little room for reflection and investigation. The virtually insatiable demand for the bonds, as money poured into America seeking safe returns, allowed so little time to study the risk that whatever reservations or qualms the analysts might have had about them were brushed aside.

Today, no doubt, with a better grasp of the financial complexity of these bonds, the analysts are in a better position to assess their risk. But do they grasp the psychological risk of their own complicity? Do they overvalue their ability to be objective?

The New York Times reported recently that the pressure of competition in the financial industry seems to be pushing the largest of the agencies, S. & P., to repeat the pattern: “industry participants say it has once again been moving to capture business by offering Wall Street underwriters higher ratings than other agencies will offer. And it has apparently worked. Banks have shown a new willingness to hire S. & P. to rate their bonds, tripling its market share in the first half of 2013. Its biggest rivals have been much less likely to give higher ratings.”

The return of the “ratings game,” as The Times called it, suggests that S. & P. doesn’t grasp the more insidious risk to its own credibility – not to mention to investors – of ignoring its vulnerability to unconscious collusion.

“In its response to the government lawsuit, the company said that its ratings had always been ‘uninfluenced by conflicts of interest.’” (See, “Banks Find S. & P. More Favorable in Bond Ratings.”) That is a particularly strong and unequivocal statement to make, especially in the light of its past failures.

No doubt, their statement was crafted by lawyers mindful of the on-going investigations into its behavior, up to and including 2007. But it is also likely that S. & P. proud of its new sophistication in analyzing risk, post 2007, is beginning once again to ignore the dangers posed by their own unconscious motivation. They place their faith entirely in numbers.

Psychologists know that it is impossible to be “uninfluenced by conflicts of interest,” especially when you keep denying it. Countless studies have shown how the mind unconsciously adjusts its perceptions to accommodate its interests and needs.

The best one can do is to acknowledge the conflicts and try to correct for them. In the long run, that will make the ratings agencies more credible, investors safer, and help protect the economy from new bubbles.

Awkward News

Obviously we are all part of one economic system, but to look at the news it seems as if there are at least two different constituencies out there – if not two realities or two classes.

“MarketBeat,” The Wall Street Journal’s column on market news noted: “Yes, it’s that time again, folks. It’s the first Friday of the month, when for one ever-so-brief moment the interests of Wall Street, Washington and Main Street are all aligned on one thing: Jobs.”

The breezy tone tries to minimize the obvious fact that most of the time everyone’s interests are not aligned. To be sure, more jobs can mean more cash in the hands of consumers and that, in turn, can mean eventually more profit for business, which ultimately can lead to profits for investors – but the link is not direct. In fact, just as often, cutting jobs leads to greater immediate profits for business and gains for investors.

Moreover, the kinds of jobs being filled affect the economy as well. As The Huffington Post reported: “we have become a nation of hamburger flippers, Wal-Mart sales associates, barmaids, checkout people and other people working at very low wages,” quoting a managing partner of a New York investment bank. That’s why job growth is “not increasing consumption or the ability to go out and buy stuff.” (See, “July Jobs Report Masks Real Problems In U.S. Labor Market.”)

One has to dig down into the data to get a better idea of how things really are. The Wall Street Journal did note: “Friday’s report also said that average earnings fell by 2 cents to $23.98 an hour, while the average workweek decreased 0.1 hour to 34.4 hours.” The Journal drew the obvious conclusion: “Lower wages and fewer hours mean less money in consumers’ pockets.” (See, “U.S. Adds 162,000 Jobs, Continuing a Tepid Run.”)

Clearly there is a great deal of anxiety in our system over these trends, as stock prices are reaching record levels. Sometimes the jobs news is trumpeted as a sign of continuing recovery, sometimes as disappointingly slow. And the fragmentary nature of the overall economic news keeps us confused.

We now are all aware of out growing income disparity and the risk we run of becoming an unequal nation, without the chances for advancement that have been the hallmark of “the land of opportunity.” But reading the press and scanning the media it seems as if we don’t really want to know. An occasional OpEd article tries to put the pieces together. The President refers to the problem. But we are avoiding some obvious conclusions.

One might be that nothing can actually done to change these trends. Another might be that we could actually do something about it but our system lacks the capacity to make any significant changes. Finally, there is the threat of looming class warfare. The rich exert unequal influence over the political process as election campaigns become more and more costly. But in the end it is the poor who have more votes.

America has a rich history of populism, and it is not impossible to imagine a movement arising in response to these trends. But could it be repressive and authoritarian? Could the threat of terrorism be invoked to clamp down on popular discontent? Or could we actually become a more equal society?