Prototypical Remembrance

Your life is not as you remember it.  Neither is mine.

It's bold claim to make, I agree.  So let me elaborate:

Think about your next vacation.  How much money are you willing to spend on it?  Now, how much would you be willing to spend if, at the end of the vacation, all pictures were deleted, all souvenirs taken, and even all memories erased?  In other words, how much would you spend if you knew that you would not remember anything about the vacation?

Think about it.

I'd wager you would spend a lot less money in the no-memory case... maybe nothing at all!

But why?  If we still get to enjoy the vacation, why should it make a difference if we remember it?  Therein lies the rub!

Experiments have shown that we essentially have two selves: the experiencing self and the remembering self.  The former lives in the moment and the latter looks back and evaluates.  But the most interesting part is that the two usually disagree!   

But how could they disagree?  I mean, we are the same person in both instances.  The trick lies in how we remember.

It turns out we don't store every moment in our memory.  Instead, we store prototypes of events.  For example, think about your commute to work.  You likely don't remember every moment of every days' commute.  What you do remember is a prototypical, average commute.  If something was different today ("oh look, a Starbucks is opening") it stands out because it is different from the prototype.  So now your mind stores the prototype and the new exceptional case.  So the memory of all of our commutes is essentially a file of a prototype plus exceptional cases.      

Let's take it a step further.  There are many moments in a commute.  How does our mind determine what should make up the prototype?  If it picks the wrong moments to represent the entire event, we will have a discrepancy between the experiencing self and the remembering self.  As it turns out, this is exactly what happens.

One great experiment involved asking subjects to put their hands in bowls of cold water.  At frequent intervals, the conductor of the experiment would ask them to rate the discomfort they felt in their hands (the 'experienced' rating).  At the end, after they removed their hands, they were asked to rate how negative the overall experience was (the 'remembered' rating).  I ruined the surprise already, but: the two types of ratings almost always disagreed!

If you look at the results of this experiment, you will find that the 'remembered' rating is about equal to the average of the peak 'experienced' rating and the last 'experienced' rating.  All other 'experienced' ratings are ignored.  Interestingly, the total time of the negative event is also ignored.

From a purely mathematical standpoint, one would expect that the overall 'remembered' rating should be the integral (the area under the curve) of all of the 'experienced' ratings.  But our remembering self uses the above peak-end calculation instead.

So, the way we remember our lives is not the way we have actually experienced them.

For a much more detail explanation, please do read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637

Another Step Foward for the Knowledge Stream

Several months ago I posted about what I call the Knowledge Stream: essentially, a network of neural implants that we could use to share the world's knowledge in real-time just by thinking about it.

Well, Brown University has made some great progress with devices implanted into the motor cortex:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/149879-brown-university-creates-first-wireless-implanted-brain-computer-interface

Granted, it's still a far cry from sharing information, but the pieces are coming together...

Why Negotiations Are So Hard

Say I offer you a 50/50 chance to either win $200 or lose $150.  Would you take that chance?

Most people wouldn't.

But, from a purely mathematical standpoint, it is a good bet.  That chance has an overall value of $25 (.5*200 - .5*150).  Many experiments have been done on such gambles and the result is that people only start to take the chance when the gain is about double the loss (win $300 or lose $150).

Now, a purely rational agent would take any chance that has a value greater than 0.  So these experiments have shown that in the case of these gambles, people are not acting as rational agents.  Indeed, the conclusion is that the emotional impact of a loss is about twice that of a gain of the same amount.  

If you think back to your own experiences with gains and losses, you may recall feeling the same way.  But the implications are very interesting.

This is what makes negotiations hard.  A negotiation is, basically, one side giving up something in exchange for the other side giving up something.  But if we value losses twice as much as gains (and the other side is doing the same thing), we can understand why it's so hard to come to an agreement:

We think our giving up X has a value of $1000, but the other side only sees it as a gain of $500.  Making it worse, because it's a loss worth $1000 to us, we ask them to give up something that we think has a value of $1000, but they see it as a loss of $2000.  

The psychology of this can be seen everywhere.  In battles, the defending army fights harder than the invading army.  You can even see this in gas prices.  Back when there were discussions as to whether to allow cash and credit gas prices to be different, the credit card companies said that if there was a difference, it should be called a cash discount rather than a credit surcharge.  The reason is that people would rather forego a discount (gain) than pay a surcharge (loss).  The numbers are the same, and to a rational agent, it would be equivalent.  But to people, it makes a difference.

This is a clear case in which our emotions cloud our better judgement... as usual.  So what can we do about it?

Actually, it's not so hard to fix our thinking.  Let's go back to the gamble above.  What if, rather than giving you one chance at winning $200 or losing $150, I gave you a hundred chances?  You would likely quickly reason that the overall odds would be in your favor and its very likely you would end up with a winning (greater than 0) amount.  But, really, it's the same gamble - just repeated a hundred times in the latter case.

In other words, taking a broader view helped you realize that is a good bet.  In the grand scheme of things, the few losses here and there would be outweighed by the wins.  When faced with any decision like this, we can apply the same logic.

The negotiation situation is not terribly different.  If we can take a broad view and look holistically at everything we will be gaining and losing during the negotiation, we realize that a single loss doesn't hurt so bad.    

This is just one of the themes discussed by Daniel Kahneman in his excellent, if dry, tome: Thinking, Fast and Slow:

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637

Hippocrates' Shadow

A recent study has just revealed that mammograms actually don't reduce cancer deaths:

http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/mammograms-lead-to-overdiagnosis-have-little-impact-on-deaths-study-1.1048226

This is, of course, bad news.  However, Dr David Newman totally called this back in 2008 in his completely underrated book, Hippocrates' Shadow.  You can buy it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Hippocrates-Shadow-Secrets-House-Medicine/dp/B002BWQ4U0

Now, one may think that it would be better to err on the side of caution and get mammograms anyway.  I thought that too.  However, the doc goes on to show that, between the procedure itself and the misdiagnoses, the net result of mammograms on society is actually negative.

The book is essentially a compilation of many such problems this doctor sees with the US health system.  They are truly eye-opening to an outsider.  Here is the table of contents:

Eye-catching, no?

I thought it was a great read in 2008, and the publishing of this study made me revisit and wonder: what else is this guy right about?

The Molecule That Shaped Society

Oxytocin.  It is a hormone that performs many functions in mammals, most notably the binding of mothers to their families, particularly their children.  It looks something like this:

Given its function, we could actually call it 'the empathy molecule.'  It is what makes people feel the joy and pain of other people.  It increases trust and reduces fear.  Hence, its role in familial binding is obvious.  But the implications of this are far-reaching.

The family unit is a microcosm of society as a whole.  Society is, of course, made up of families.  And society is, just as obviously, defined by the myriad social interactions of its members.  We all have certain norms and expectations of those interactions, independent of our culture.  For example, when having a conversation, you do not expect the other person to pull out a knife and stab you.  It is oxytocin that defines these norms - mostly based on empathy.  Therefore, we could say without exaggeration that oxytocin is the molecule that shapes society.

Indeed, the inability to secrete it is linked with psychopathy and sociopathy.

Since our happiness (or any emotional state) is simply the balance of such molecules in our brains, it's important to pay attention to what they are, why they are secreted, and how they interact with each other.  Ignoring or fighting our own biochemistry is a losing battle.

Paul Zak gave a great TED talk on exactly this: