Slate has an article detailing how women are more likely to cave under pressure than men. The evidence is that women make more unforced errors when playing tennis as the score gets tight; men do not show this effect.

Other interesting evidence: men perform better when competing against anyone, but women only perform better when competing against women. In competition with men, women perform the same as if doing the task alone.

The article does not address whether this is due to innate sexual differences, cultural training or something unique to professional tennis players.

Jake Mandell is my hero. This guy is into neuroimaging and writes electronic music. It would be hard for me to think of a more intriguing resume. Check out his blog, his music and (especially) his tone-deaf test!

People modify the amount of calories they consume based on who they are around and how many calories they believe they are eating.

Women choose clothing that advertises their menstrual cycle; men catch the drift.

Fat people are stupider.

Averaging ugly girls together result in an ugly girl. Averaging attractive girls together result in attractive girls. Symmetry is not an important part of beauty. People assume attractive people are busier, more fun and everything else good.

Color strongly alters the potency of a placebo.

Psychologists show their respect for life by by turning lab rats into LED arrays.

Mind Hacks found out about a study that shows women seem to become physically stimulated unconsciously, whether or not they are mentally aroused.

This is unique to women; physical and mental sexual excitement go hand-in-hand for men.

Why could this be? What are the social implications of this? Are there biological and/or evolutionary factors behinds this?

In addition to the Philosopher’s Zone, ABC radio national has another great psychology-related program: All in the Mind. Recently they discussed pain.

Understanding pain requires us to think about the different way we feel things. Many things we feel on our body, like temperature and touch. Each temperature and touch sensation is associated with a physical location. We generally say things like: my feet are cold; you are touching my back; the coffee is warming my hands.

Other feelings do not have any clear physical location. When we feel an emotion it modifies our entire state of mind. We do not associate the emotion with any specific part of our body. How often has someone told you, “My foot is very angry today, but my thumb is ecstatic!”? Never. Because I am angry, not just my foot.

Emotions are also different because we cannot objectively measure them. Brainless tools will measure the heat in a nail or how hard a hammer presses on it. However, we have no tools that measure how angry a given nail is. The nail’s brain must make that judgement. For that matter, we do not have any precise machine that measures pain or pleasure on a scale from 1-10.

The brain decides what emotions to feel in part based on what physical sensations the body reports. The brain interprets them and then feels an emotion. This is what we mean when we say things like, “it feels good when you scratch there”.

Pain is special because it plays both roles. It is clearly physical. I say that my thumb specifically hurts. And you can generally see the cut, bruise or some other physical feature causing the pain. But the physical aggravation does not always cause pain. Athletes will often not experience pain until long after the cause. Probably you have cut or bruised yourself without knowing how too. Even after noticing, you may still not have experienced any pain.

Pain is not a simple sense in the same way that touch is. The body tells the mind things like something is torn and warm stuff is around it. The mind can then make the startling realization — “Oh my god! I’m bleeding!” — or just ignore it and go about its business — “whatever”.

So clearly a large aspect of pain is mental. No brain, no pain. For example, we do not waste time asking bent nails how bad the pain is and whether to call a doctor. However most considerate people stop to check up on someone they just banged with a hammer (or just skip straight to the apologizing).

In fact, some people continue to have pain long after the physical phenomenon is over. Little is known about why this happens, but All in the Mind interviewed people with such chronic pain. Pain attached itself to these people’s identity; they must now live with it every day of their lives.

The show talks about how difficult life is for these people. Since there is no longer any physical basis for the pain, standard medicine has no effect. The only recourse people have is to accept the presence of the pain but slowly teach themselves it doesn’t bother them. Amazingly this treatment can work. Although the pain never does go away, they can go off their medication and revert back to leading normal lives.

The holy grail of psychology is discovering the key to consciousness. Consciousness is what takes a bunch of external influences and organizes them into a stream of experience around a unified identity; it is how we experience things personally, the birthplace of the “I”. Unfortunately we know next to nothing about it.

We know consciousness does not rely on the majority of the physical body. I can cut off your arm or leg — even gouge out an eye or two. You will have little trouble considering yourself the same person. You can also destroy significant parts of your brain through surgery, seizure, injury or any other means without sacrificing your sense of self. I can call out your name: you will still answer (assuming you are capable of both hearing and responding to my call).

However damaging other parts of the brain — parts that are often physically small — is catastrophic. Without these functioning areas of the brain, you cease to be. Your body may well remain alive — and your mind active — but you no longer experience the world through your body from a first person perspective. The ghost no longer inhabits the shell.

At present, we understanding almost nothing about our high consciousness came to be, how it works, or where it resides.

For their part, philosophers attempt to elaborate on why consciousness is so special. There is a great example around 16 minutes into the September 30th, 2006 episode of the Philosopher’s Zone. Here the speaker contrasts how a camera experiences vision versus you or I.

Both you and the camera start with the same information. You receive the same input of light waves. You are both capable of distinguishing red light from blue, dark from light. But from here we do vastly different things with than information than will a camera.

There are millions of photoelectric diodes inside a camera. They roughly correspond to the many rods and cones in our retina. While the individual diodes are equally capable to our rods and cones, the individual inputs never become part of a unified whole. The camera gathers the data into a serialized summation. Every picture looks like this one. The camera never sees anything more than millions of colors.

We are unique because we experience the image personally. Instead of colors, we see objects. And the objects we see — including how prominently we see them — vary from person to person. If you have recently pierced your nose or want a nose job, you will likely see a very different version (this is why you see your car everywhere after you bought it; why a 65 pound anorexic adult looks in the mirror and sees a horribly fat person).

We take our experiences in the world and live out a personalized version in our own mind. A camera will only see the world at face value.

Freud is a powerful figure in Psychology, but today most Psychologists dismiss his work as neither useful nor scientific. However, there is no shortage of work for a Freudian psychoanalyst.

The Philosopher’s Zone has an interesting debate between one such psychoanalist and a psychologist. The subject of dreams — what they mean, where they come from.

We generally assume we dream while we are in REM sleep. An interesting point made by the psychoanalyst: the brain stem is responsible for creating REM sleep. But people with damaged brain stems can still dream — even though they never enter REM sleep. On the other hand, people who have damaged their frontal lobes cannot dream, even though they enter REM sleep. This seems like very good evidence that REM sleep and dreams are not related.

While reading rather interesting stuff at Mind Hacks, I ran across a link to Philosopher’s Zone. Podcasts about Philosophy and Psychology? Cool!

Awhile back Robert Wright interviewed Lorenzo Albacete, an ex-Physicist turned Theologist and Catholic University president. He makes an amazing point: while science can explain how things work the way they do, science does nothing to answer the question of why. Science — at least in its present form — is not capable of addressing these problems.

Science explains things in a completely different way to the way we personally experience them. The last chapter in Phantoms of the Brain — Do Martians See Red? — addresses this conundrum. Science can explain how we see things — the cells in our eyes that respond to specific frequencies of light that then enter our brain and excite other cells that activate other cells that have stored the concept of red. But this is categorically different to how we actually see red; Science explains everything from bee dancing to color vision the way a deaf person would explain the experience of listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

Some people suffer strokes that make them blind. They say they cannot “see” anything. Ask them to put a paper into a slot that is either horizontal or vertical, studies show that a few will succeed every time. These people “see” in one sense of the term, but they damaged enough of their brain to render them incapable of experiencing seeing. These people are visual automatons.

Why do we not do everything in this automaton fashion? Why do we stand resolute, insisting against all evidence: “I exist. I am. Cogito ergo sum“?

Science cannot answer these questions. Science is not interested in these questions. Science simply concludes, “because”. Things exist; we exist; we see red; we love; this is how the world works; end of question; lets stick to answering how does all this work, how did things come to be…

But I am not here just because.

Yes, my body is here because of my parent’s DNA, the laws of Physics, the need for life to beget life.

Yes, my mind is here because of the endorphins, electrons and chemicals swirling around my brain and body.

But I am not my body.

I am not mind.

I am me. Myself.

My soul.

No one can take this away from me. No one can give this to me. It is completely personal. I created it for myself. It is made by me, for me, of me. Simply,

me.

Look at an object within arm’s reach, a pencil for instance. Now close your eyes and reach for that object. Chances are you have no difficulty grabbing the pencil.

This is a remarkable feat. Your brain continually updates where it believes you are in the world, including where your hand is in relation to the rest of you. It holds the same understanding of where the pencil is. When you grab the pencil, the brain compares the start location (where it thinks your hand is now) with the goal location (where the pencil is), and uses that comparison to activate the correct muscles that move your arm to the desired location next to the pencil.

If you do not stand in awe of this simple ability, watch a baby feed itself with a spoon. A baby does not fully understand where anything is: his food, his mouth, the spoon. As a result, most of the meal winds up on the floor (or his face).

Nor does this ability come from our vision. Perform the same experiment (with your eyes closed again), but move somewhere new before grabbing the pencil. Relative to your body, the pencil is now in a totally different location, requiring a totally new motion from your hand. But chances are your mind still has little difficulty determining the location of the pencil. Or, if a friend snaps his fingers with your eyes closed, you can reach out and grab his hand straight away.

Granted, our mind does the input we receive from our eyes to construct an understanding of the world. Still, what our eyes “see” is only superficially related to what our mind “sees”. The bulk of what we experience is a personal holodeck or virtual-reality that our mind has created for us to live inside. When you close your eyes right now, you can still see the keyboard, monitor and mouse before you — although far less vividly for most people than with open eyes.

Should you or someone else move the mouse, your mind does not receive a new picture of the world projected onto a screen inside your mind like a movie camera does. Instead you see a mouse, and you see that it is moving at a certain speed. Your mind then updates the mouse object inside your virtual reality so that it moves at the correct speed. This is the same way programmers give life to objects with a game or animation engine.

This is how you can watch a moving car disappear behind a building, follow it along behind the building and know exactly when and where it will reappear, even though your eyes see none of this. The car object continues to exist and move inside your head even after your eyes stop seeing it.

Infants are not born with this ability. If you hide an object under one of three cups and ask him where it is, he will simply guess. In fact, a young enough infant will lose track of an object as soon as it is partially obscured. It magically “reappears” when the obstruction is cleared; the infant will giggle with surprise and delight. In America we generally call this game “peek-a-boo”.

It is not an abstraction to say your mind dedicates specific areas of the brain to motion detection and processing. People have strokes in this area. These people see the world just fine — they can close their eyes and describe the contents of their surrounding just as well as we can — but everything they see remains still. If they look at a street, the parked cars look the same as the ones rumbling down the road. They cannot pour coffee: the cup is empty one moment, overflowing with coffee the next. If you have ever played a 3D game on an old computer that can only render one or two frames per second, you can begin to understand the everyday conditions they must endure.

You do not see or experience any true reality. You create a fictitious world (with varying amounts of input from the things you experience) and live inside this.

The implications of this are profound. There is no difference — Psychologists and Neurologists have yet to find one anyway — between dreaming or imaging something from happening and it “actually” happening. When you close your eyes and imagine moving the mouse, your brain responds in exactly the same way it would if you actually did so. The only way your mind knows the difference is that normally you wake up from or snap out of your dreams. The mind reconnects to your eyes, ears and other senses, realizes the mouse never really did move and creates a new “reality” with this updated information.

People with amputated limbs will sometimes fail to update this reality. Even though we can see the person no longer has an arm, when he looks, he sees his arm and hands the same as ever. Ask him to wiggle his fingers and he will do so. These people are not simply lying. Their brains really believe they are wiggling their fingers; they activate the same parts of their brain that a person with fingers we can see do. If these people are holding a coffee cup and you quickly grab the cup out of their non-existent hands, they will experience the same real pain anyone else would in that situation.

What is going on is that these people’s minds do not update their inner-reality. Like most of us, they created and live in a reality where they have two arms and two legs. They close their eyes and — like us — know exactly where their hand is. For their whole lives, they have opened their eyes and their hand right was right where it should. Suddenly, this no longer happens. They open their eyes; their eyes fail to find the hand. They face a dilemma: either their eyes or mind is lying, despite both having a history of being right.

Most people choose to believe their eyes. Their mind abandons its old reality and constructs a new one to replace it. These people close their eyes and (generally) no longer see their missing hand.

A few people refuse to give in. They see their hand as healthy as ever, whether their eyes are open or closed. They know exactly where it is, whether it is waving or holding cup. They simply ignore what their eyes tell them.

Before you think this sounds weird, realize that we do the same thing. We hear screams that our mind decides is “just the wind” and monsters that turn into “just shadows of the trees”. But before we made that the decision, the screams and monsters were as real as anything inside our mind.

When people claim to see space ships or big-foot, I agree with what Ramachandran says in his book, Phantoms in the Brain: they saw a space ship as clearly as they saw the person next to them. Whether their mind gave in to their eyes, their eyes gave into their mind, or the space ship really existed is irrelevant. The space ship is real in their mind.

Question: can people with damaged motion cortexes dream or imagine motion?

Question: if you show someone who sees a phantom limb a photograph of himself, does he still still see his missing-limb in the photograph?