How your Brain Perceives Time

The passage of time is anything but settled science. Einstein said time was relative, depending on how fast you were traveling. New science suggests that our perception of time is also relative, depending on how fast your brain is working.

Humans Love Charity

For decades, economists have thought that humans are self-interested to the detriment of their fellow man. New scientific findings about the brain call that assumption into question.

Specifically, the team found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person's head, rather than the poor person's.

In the experiment, half the participants were given $50 at the beginning of the study, and half were given nothing.

"People who started out poor had a stronger brain reaction to things that gave them money, and essentially no reaction to money going to another person," Camerer says. "By itself, that wasn't too surprising."

What was surprising was the other side of the coin. "In the experiment, people who started out rich had a stronger reaction to other people getting money than to themselves getting money," Camerer explains. "In other words, their brains liked it when others got money more than they liked it when they themselves got money."

"We now know that these areas are not just self-interested," adds O'Doherty. "They don't exclusively respond to the rewards that one gets as an individual, but also respond to the prospect of other individuals obtaining a reward."

So what does this mean? It means humans are naturally predisposed to be charitable. We are evolutionarily designed to give to the poor. It also means we do not need to be forced to help the less fortunate; we are, quite literally, happy to do it.

This, O'Doherty notes, is somewhat contrary to the prevailing views about human nature. "As a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who works on reward and motivation, I very much view the brain as a device designed to maximize one's own self interest," says O'Doherty. "The fact that these basic brain structures appear to be so readily modulated in response to rewards obtained by others highlights the idea that even the basic reward structures in the human brain are not purely self-oriented."

Humans love charity - what can I say? It's science.

[Caltech via Freakonomics]

Neural Marketing [Mind Control]

Marketing and neuroscience converge at "neuromarketing," which uses scientific instruments to measure people's unconscious reactions to advertisement, and neuromarketers use that data to build better commercials.

Lindstrom is a practitioner of neuromarketing research, in which consumers are exposed to ads while hooked up to machines that monitor brain activity, pupil dilation, sweat responses and flickers in facial muscles, all of which are markers of emotion. According to his studies, 83% of all forms of advertising principally engage only one of our senses: sight. Hearing, however, can be just as powerful, though advertisers have taken only limited advantage of it. Historically, ads have relied on jingles and slogans to catch our ear, largely ignoring everyday sounds--a steak sizzling, a baby laughing and other noises our bodies can't help paying attention to. Weave this stuff into an ad campaign, and we may be powerless to resist it.

To figure out what most appeals to our ear, Lindstrom wired up his volunteers, then played them recordings of dozens of familiar sounds, from McDonald's ubiquitous "I'm Lovin' It" jingle to birds chirping and cigarettes being lit. The sound that blew the doors off all the rest--both in terms of interest and positive feelings--was a baby giggling. The other high-ranking sounds were less primal but still powerful. The hum of a vibrating cell phone was Lindstrom's second-place finisher. Others that followed were an ATM dispensing cash, a steak sizzling on a grill and a soda being popped and poured.

In all of these cases, it didn't take a Mad Man to invent the sounds, infuse them with meaning and then play them over and over until the subjects internalized them. Rather, the sounds already had meaning and thus triggered a cascade of reactions: hunger, thirst, happy anticipation.

While it might be scary to think that companies can control you using your own preconceived predilictions, it is just following the natural evolution of marketing.

What I find most appealing is that this creates a strong economic incentive for neuroscience research, which will benefit all of us.

Let's just hope this technology doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

Scientists Perfect Thought-to-Speech Algorithm

Scientists implanted electrodes inside the speech motor cortex of a paralyzed 26 year old's brain, allowing him to speak via electronic assistance.

Previous direct brain communication technology has focused on typing individual letters. The new technique translates the sounds of speech directly, allowing patients to merely think of saying the word and the computer translating it with a latency of 50ms, a speed on par with a healthy human being.

Signals collected from an electrode in the speech motor cortex are amplified and sent wirelessly across the scalp as FM radio signals. The Neuralynx System amplifies, converts, and sorts the signals. The neural decoder then translates the signals into speech commands for the speech synthesizer. Credit: Guenther, et al.

This technology is being developed by Frank Guenther of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems and the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University, as well as many more academics and firms

[PhysOrg via Gizmodo]