When I posted a few days ago about new books on the reading list, I said I’d have more to say about evolutionary psychology. So here’s an interview with one of the authors of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, a new book on evolutionary psychology by Alan S. Miller, Satoshi Kanazawa, and Stephen Hoye. I’m sure the book is entertaining and thought-provoking, but I have some doubts about its content nonetheless.

The basic idea is that our brain evolved in a different environment than the one we live in now, and that long-vanished environment has left its traces in our behavior, which is often at odds with the world we really live in. Evolutionary psychology (EP) aims to figure out the ways our current behavior has been shaped by the pressure of selection in the past. EP can offer some fascinating analyses of how we got to be the way we are, and why we do things that don’t necessarily make sense now (the reason is often that those things used to make sense).

However, it’s worth noting that another recent book about EP, Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology by Robert C. Richardson, analyzes the explanatory power of EP and concludes that on the whole, EP doesn’t provide the kind of evidence that would be expected of arguments in other areas of evolutionary biology. I’m deeply interested in understanding how our brains and our behavior evolved, and I’m as intrigued as anyone by the kind of explanations evolutionary psychologists come up with, but a lot of the time I have to wonder how on earth they can prove their claims.

I haven’t read the Beautiful People book, but from what Satoshi Kanazawa says in this interview, it sounds like it may place a bit too much emphasis on the ways we’re “prisoner[s] to our hard-wiring”, as the interviewer puts it. This appears most glaringly to me in the two unanswered questions in EP that Kanazawa mentions at the end of the interview: Why do middle-class people in developed nations who have the resources to feed and raise larger families so often limit themselves to only two children? And why do people from big families not have small families themselves (since they have more siblings to share the load of passing genes along) and why do people from small families, or only children, have many children themselves (since they must make sure to get their parents’ genes into the next generation)?

Maybe there’s something I’m missing, but these questions seem to totally ignore cultural evolution, which is another strong force that influences our behavior. We’re more than just machines for passing along genes, and we are well able to control our behavior so that we act in the best interests of something other than blind reproduction. (In fact, some people consider that one of the most promising things about us.) Culture is of course constrained by our evolved capacities and limitations, but it does have a hand in shaping our behavior.

Another thing that bugged me about this interview is Kanazawa’s explanation of the history of evolutionary psychology. It’s not just that in 1992 a group of people decided to apply evolutionary ideas to human behavior; the roots of the field go back further than that (perhaps to E.O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology—maybe sociobiology and EP are not really the same thing, but they’re certainly closely related—or to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene). I know, this is just a short interview and we can’t expect a whole lot of detail or nuance, and maybe the book is more carefully written and rigorous than the interview would lead one to expect. But I have to admit that I’m not optimistic.

Maybe you remember the scene from The Big Chill where one of the characters praises the importance of a good rationalization. (Can you get through a day without one?) Rationalization, the art of justifying behavior that may not really be easily justifiable, is explained as a way for us to live comfortably with our decisions even in the face of evidence that they might have been flawed.

Being aware of facts that undermine the wisdom of a decision we’ve made—noticing a house in your price range in a better location, for example, right after you’ve closed on what you thought was your dream house—gives rise to cognitive dissonance, the effects of trying to hold onto two competing ideas about what we’ve done. So we banish the evidence against our decision, and decide to be happy with what we’ve got.

The assumption has been that this is a fairly complicated cognitive process that we’re more or less aware of, but this article from the New York Times describes some recent research that indicates we share the process with very young children and capuchin monkeys. Rather than assume more complicated mental gyrations in these less mentally sophisticated thinkers, the conclusion seems to be that perhaps our own acts of rationalization are less conscious and more automatic than we realized. Incidentally, I really like the graphic at the top of the article.

Those of you who know me personally have already heard my diatribes against Daylight Saving Time (DST), which luckily I have been able to avoid for the most part, until recently. I grew up mostly in Arizona, and then moved to Indiana, both of which are (or have usually been) sane enough to understand that for a given location, you get as much daylight as you get, no matter what you do, and it is up to individuals to decide how to make use of it. (A friend once described DST as being like cutting a foot off of one end of a piece of rope and tying it onto the other end, and thinking you’ve made the rope longer.)

Last year Indiana adopted DST, and this year the US as a whole extended DST, much to my irritation. The economic effects of the extension are still to be determined, but the effects on human circadian rhythms have not been very extensively studied. However, a recent European study addressed this question, examining how people’s sleep/wake cycles adjust to DST.

The conclusion was that circadian rhythms do not necessarily adapt well. People who are night owls are apt to have the most difficulty, in particular with the leap ahead by one hour in the spring. (I’m definitely a night owl and I do not at all like the onset of DST in the spring, so this made me feel a bit better. Maybe I’m not just a crank with a bee in my bonnet.) This article from Science Daily has more information. I especially like the description of the fall transition as the “release” from DST. That’s exactly what it feels like.

Altruism toward community members who are not related to you, with its implications of kindness and generosity, may be intertwined in human history with hostility toward members of other communities. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have used game theory and computer simulations to demonstrate that under the conditions our late Pleistocene and early Holocene human ancestors probably faced, neither agression toward outsiders and generosity toward unrelated people (parochial altruism) are likely to have been viable strategies by themselves, but they could have been successful together. Each strategy is in some sense costly (benefitting others who don’t carry your genes, in the case of parochial altruism, and taking time and energy and risking death in the case of aggression toward outsiders). But if parochial altruism bound a community closely enough together that it was more likely to succeed in its attacks against outsiders, then the two strategies could work hand in hand. You can read more about the research in this press release from Science Daily.

Note that this is talking about the past, and not about conditions today. This dynamic may be alive and well in the human psyche today; to anyone who’s been on the outside of a close-knit community, this link between solidarity and hostility is not as counterintuitive as it may sound. Being in, being “one of us”, is full of benefits, but if in some way you don’t fit the mold, you can in some cases quite easily become “one of them” and be ostracized or worse. But that doesn’t mean we have to live out this dynamic over and over. Not only do we have the power to understand and change our behavior, I think we may also find it imperative to do so in order to survive, in an age of nuclear and biological weapons and global problems that urgently require us to cooperate.

When I was younger, I could bounce back more easily from sleep deprivation; as I get older, it’s becoming harder to deal with a short night or worse yet, a series of short nights. My mind becomes muddy and my body feels sluggish. Studies have investigated the physical and cognitive effects of sleep deprivation, but not as much has been done to examine the emotional effects of sleep loss.

A recent study looked at 26 healthy volunteers, some of whom kept a normal sleep/wake schedule and some of whom had to stay awake for 35 hours. Then, while their brains were scanned with fMRI, both groups were exposed to images that started out bland and became increasingly emotionally disturbing. The sleep-deprived group showed much more activity in areas of the brain involved in processing emotions (the press release doesn’t say specifically which areas) compared to the group who slept normally. The press release also doesn’t say if the people were monitored in any other way for the strength of the emotion they were feeling (self-reporting, respiration or heart rate, etc.). (I’d be particularly interested in correlations with what people reported they were feeling.) At this point there’s no telling why this should be the case or how sleep might buffer the effects of emotional stimuli, but this is an interesting start. This press release from EurekAlert has more information.

A couple of recent news stories describe recent work on how children learn language. One study looked at bilingual babies and monolingual babies and found somewhat different learning sequences in each case. In a laboratory setting, the monolingual babies who were learning English were able to distinguish two similar-sounding words a few months earlier than bilingual babies who were learning English and another language. Bilingual babies tend to reach the major milestones in language learning at about the same age as monolingual babies, so the relative delay evidently doesn’t slow them down. In fact, researchers think it’s helpful for the bilingual babies to focus for longer on associating words with the right objects without worrying about the finer details of how the words sound, because they’ve got twice as many words to associate with objects. This article from Science Daily has the details.

Another study examined the way that toddlers learn to tune out speech sounds that don’t occur in the language they’re learning. Babies are born with the ability to distinguish the finer phonological distinctions found in any human language, but as they grow up they retain only a sensitivity toward the sounds found in their own language. They must know the sounds of their native language so well that they can hear them pronounced in markedly different accents without thinking they are different sounds–for example, to know that a short sharp “Hey!” from a person you accidentally bump into is the same as the delighted, drawn-out “Heeeeyyyy!” from a friend who’s happy to see you.

Evidently children start learning these things at a very young age. An experiment with 18-month-old toddlers compared English learners and Dutch learners as they were taught made-up names for toys. The English learners didn’t distinguish between two names that differed only in the length of the vowel sound (as in the “Hey” example above), because they’ve figured out that in English, a vowel can differ in that respect without signifying something different. The Dutch babies, on the other hand, noted the difference and learned the two distinct words; in Dutch, the length of the vowel does affect meaning. The English learners were able to distinguish two words with vowels that differed in a way that conveys meaning in English (“hey” versus “who”, to follow up on my example above, although the babies were actually learning nonsense words). You can read more about it in this story from Science Daily.

Seems like it’s all about music this week at the Thinking Meat Project, which is a nice coincidence because the Lotus World Music Festival is in town (one of the high points of my year) and I’m enjoying a lot of great music this weekend.

Oliver Sacks has a new book out (Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain) that I’m eager to read. Several of his recent New Yorker essays have described people who also figure in the book (these include a profile of musicologist Clive Wearing, whose story I mentioned the other day). Wired has published an enjoyable report of its interview with Sacks.

I was very interested in what Sacks had to say about psychoactive substances and music. He describes an experience he had at the peak of a “a sort of pharmacological mountain” he had ascended, and a similar experience that was mediated solely by music rather than by drugs. I’ve never even smoked pot, much less experimented with anything more intense, so I can’t know what I’d feel if I ever did. However, music and some types of natural surroundings can evoke moments of insight and connectedness and profound spiritual emotion in me that seem to resemble the kind of thing people say they experience when they’re high. Since Sacks was able to compare his own experiences in the two different sets of circumstances, that lends some credence to my idea that maybe what I feel really is similar to some types of drug-induced emotions.

I was also struck by what he had to say about mystical experiences, mostly I suppose because I agree so strongly with it:

I intensely dislike any reference to supernaturalism, but I think there can be profound mystical feelings which do not have to call on fictitious agencies like angels and demons and deities. The whole natural world is bathed in wonder and beauty and mystery. The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological, and is conveyed very powerfully in music.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has written a haunting essay for the New Yorker about musician and musicologist Clive Wearing, a man who suffered a brain infection over 20 years ago and ever since has struggled with the worst known case of amnesia. It’s a terrifying story, because Wearing’s life sounds hellishly difficult: he can neither remember his past nor form new memories. He has developed some coping mechanisms to get himself from moment to moment, but after his illness he kept reliving an endless present of apparently just-regained consciousness. Even now it sounds like he is surrounded by a mental darkness that is liable to engulf him.

Two lights shine in the darkness, though: his love for his wife, whom he still recognizes and who still loves and cares for him, and his ability to perform and conduct music. Sacks explains how these attachments and accomplishments, which rely on memory, can persist in the absence of other kinds of memory. He talks about the difference between episodic memory (recalling the day your child was born, or remembering that you went out for pizza yesterday for lunch) and semantic or procedural memory (remembering how to brush your teeth or find and use the can opener in your kitchen). Amnesia typically destroys the former to one degree or another, but leaves the latter intact. Wearing, unable to remember from minute to minute who he is talking to, has learned through physical repetition how to get to the coffee cups in the kitchen, even though he couldn’t tell you where they are. He can also play the piano, sing, and conduct a chorus, apparently with a great deal of sensitivity and intellect.

Musical performance presents fascinating questions about the memories involved. The memory of how to play or conduct a piece is similar to the memory of how to ride a bicycle or perform any other physical task, but musical performance seems to call on capabilities beyond the automatic following of physical procedures. Sacks gives a very moving description of the kind of creativity and engagement with life that Wearing finds in following a piece of music and letting it organize his perception of consciousness with its logic and shape his reality for as long as it lasts.

In Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination, Robert Jourdain attributes the magic of music to exactly this type of shaping and organizing of conscious experience. Music presents us with an artificial world where we can grasp the subtle structure and relationships embodied in the music, and “…our brains are able to piece together larger understandings than they can in the wokaday external world…”.

“It’s for this reason that music can be transcendent. For a few moments it makes us larger than we really are, and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and that the world is more than it seems. That is cause enough for ecstasy.”

It’s happiness enough that music can do all that for ordinary people with ordinary lives, but it’s a great wonder that it can also do that for someone whose life has been deeply changed by such fundamental losses. When I first started reading the article it seemed like a story of unrelieved sadness, so as I continued reading it was good to see that love and music can still offer sustenance even in very difficult circumstances.