Slashdot Mirror
Mind Scans to Map Decision Making Mechanics
rrangel writes "Newsweek is running an article on the fMRI, which tracks brain function by measuring blood flow, and using it for watching the mechanics of economics and choice. Best quote on economic choice: '... there is no quantity of juice sufficient to get a male monkey to look away from the hindquarters of a female in estrus.' H. Hefner has known that all along."
OK, so say they find out how the brain works in this way. Who is going to use it, advertisers. If they could use drungs or subliminal things they would. Now what, my girlfriend will want to shop more. Now, they will get me to buy more useless things.
Someone please tell me how this is going to help me?
Evolution or ID?
Dropping $20 into a nice, juicy retirement savings plan every two weeks is guaranteed to change your life. Take your lottery tickets, and whatever other impulse purchases you can identify, and divert the money into savings. Why bother gambling? You'll thank yourself many times over when you're older.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
now imagine TWO male monkeys who can't look away from the hindquarters of a female in estrus.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The only category of people who consistently play as game theory dictates, offering the minimum possible amount, are those who don't take into account the feelings of the other player. They are autistics.
Note that humans are thus called irrational, when in fact the game theory models is deficient, leaving out all of the factors that normal people use when making human decisions.
maybe they should have used MS marketing droids
:P
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
No, it would be used to get people to "trust" a corp. or Government, so that they buy more shit or follow mindlessly the politicians. Because, only the corps or gov'ts would have the money to afford such a procedure.
What if you had to figure out how a computer worked just by looking at how much electricity was being consumed by the various components? You would know something about the various components involved with specific tasks, but you wouldn't understand what was going on in the components themselves or how they work. Some are processing, some are storing, some are pathways, etc. I think this was the point of the original post. fMRI can tell us about what areas might be active, but we still have a long way to go to figure out how the brain works in detail.
A lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
... there is no quantity of juice sufficient to get a male monkey to look away from the hindquarters of a female
Don't offer juice, offer a chance for a First Post modded up to +5, Insightful. Trust me, I have to beat the women off with a stick to get to my keyboard in time. Slashdot is my juice and I'm swimming in an ocean of it, baby.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
One of the things that drives me nuts about evolutionary biology is the constant invocation of "when we were cave men", the supposed activities that humans undertook, and the supposed division of these roles. I would be hard pressed to believe that the minimal fossil and other records that exist over the time spans can give the kind of details necessary to validate this explanation. If I'm incorrect, please point me to these records, and I'll happily reconsider this assertion.
AFAICT, the whole business of evolutionary biology is to create a logical explanation for various perceptions about human behavior. For example, you are building a logical framework for your perception that dudes like sex more than chicks. But there are scarcely even clear records now that indicate whether on average men or women "want sex more" (or whether the mean is a properly representative statistic). A thorough explanation must obviously consider the role of reporting of desire, and to do this you must consider the long-term socialization of women to be less direct about their sexuality (which is well documented). Doesn't that go a long way in modifying or obscuring any biological phenomena that might exist? And what about the tremendously varying levels of sexual desire observed among men as well as among women (e.g., Match.com thought this important enough to include in their personality profile test for matches).
I see the researchers in the article undertaking much of this same assumption:
Leaving aside the brilliance of being able to detect a single neuron firing, he made a plot of how often the neuron fired versus some external parameter that he then varied. Great science. He then inferred a mathemetical relationship governing the relationship between the parameter and the firing of the neuron and presumably fit that plot to estimate how well the data were represented by the equation he chose. Also well done science. But to then claim that the logical conclusion is that this relationship is "hard wired" into the monkey's brain is wildly speculative, sort of like measuring the probability that I will ride my bike today versus the dollars I could make doing it, and concluding that I have an economic equation hard-wired into my brain. This negates both free will and any subtlety. What if I just don't feel like riding today?
The brain scanning stuff is obviously a young field, so it's understandable that people want to advance theories to explain all this new stuff they're seeing, but it'd be nice to see a clearer representation of what the research says and what the research think might explain it.
Which, of course explains completely why so many men stay faithful to their wives after child-bearing years even though the men are still virile.
It also completely explains why men remain faithful to barren women.
This load of crap is nothing more than the ranting of some social evolutionist who believes that humans are driven by nothing more than instinct and so tries to come up with some biological mechanism to explain why human men marry human women.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
One of the better ways to convince people of this is to take it to the extreme; say 1 million doors, and I'll open all but one other door than the one you chose.
Even then you still get some people thinking that suddenly they had a 50/50 shot of picking the right door on the first go...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Try running this experiment on people who haven't had anything to drink for 12 hours and see how it turns out :)
Yet another beautiful experiment runs headlong into the brutal facts.
You said it as a joke, but it is significant. There is a percentage of humans who find playboy or hustler offensive and will NOT look at it for whatever reason (offense at exploitation of women, religious morality, etc.)
The point is that human beings can consciously choose to restrain their sexual impulses which makes humans unique in the animal kingdom. And which also makes this study pretty much irrelevant. You may be able to find ways to exploit people who have totally given in to their sexual desires, but you will be completely ineffective against people who choose to control or restrain their sexual appetites.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Incidentally, this is why it is a wise dating technique, when sitting down at a restaurant, to try to choose the seat that faces the wall, not the one that allows you to ogle the other women...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Although explained in the context of consciously made decisions, the poster is not implying that these decisions are actually meticulously calculated.
;)
Men remain faithful to women because they like (love?) that woman or because they are in some way dependent on them...NOT because they've figured it is the best way to ensure the proliferation of their genes.
That's what our brains buy us.
However, there are things beyond our control. A man might be in love with one woman, with absolutely no intention or desire to ever be unfaithful to her. But if this man sees a beautiful, young, scantily clad woman dancing provocatively on TV, he's very likely going to be affected by that.
It's that impulse that the poster is talking about. All of this talk about calculations...those are possible explanations for why those impulses exist. We KNOW the impulses are there, but we don't know why they evolved. So we speculate. We find out what triggers these natural responses, then try to figure out how this could be an advantage.
Of course, if you think the concept of "human evolution" is a load of crap, this will mean nothing to you. Oh, well
But if you're interested, Richard Dawkins talks a lot about this sort of thing in "The Selfish Gene".
Actually it was a well thought out and a well written post. You are the one who is ranting a load of crap. You find the theory repellent so you attack it and the poster rather than argue against it. Not surprising as this is /. after all.
Steven Pinker discusses similar problems in his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Suggesting that nature can be an important factor (even if only a little) gets you labelled a extremist nutter. Yet those who say mans instincts are unimportant are considered moderate and acceptable. Robert Winston in his BBC programme also had to deal with similar attacks after his show aired.
It is clear, to me at least, that a large portion of human behaviour has an instinctive aspect to it. Some reinforced by culture and others reigned in by the same. No one is denying upbringing and culture have an affect on how someone behaves or that people are unable to contain the animal within. (Which I presume is your beef with the post). Just that human evolution has also provided some instinct mechanisms that also affect how someone behaves. I don't recall the 'crap' spouting poster suggesting otherwise.
Actually, it does explain why so many men stay faithful to their wives after child-bearing years. It states that there was an evolutionary advantage for men to stick around women even if he wasn't sure she was fertile. Sexual attraction and emotional bonding evolved to keep the man around. It grew to such strength that it can keep a man around even if the woman is no longer fertile. You can't deny that men have a tendency to be attracted to young, fertile appearing women. But it is because of evolution that all men aren't dumping their women after menopause.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Y'know, the one thing that I could never understand about research of this type (trying to figure out what a consumer/person wants) is that the same people performing the research are consumers themselves. If they all just sat down and discussed their buying wants and habits, they'd have a huge body of work to publish from. I guess this is just further proof of my belief that man will always look to the outside to try to understand himself.
Sex, coccaine, and money all affect the same centre of the brain: the pleasure centre. This is primarily mediated by the dopamine system (see e.g., Schultz, Dayan, & Montague, 1997). If a choice is made to restrain one pleasure-inducing action, the shift is to another pleasure-inducing framework/perspective (e.g., moral purity). Until we recognize this in our models, our predictions regarding subjectively rational behaviour will collapse in bubbles of irrationality.
The brain is involved, irrespective of the "freely-taken" choice. Naturally-occuring drugs, such as dopamine, are thus also involved. Understanding both will lead to a greater understanding of "real world" behaviour. Yet -- counter to the interests of behavioural science researchers -- such an understanding will also increase individual freedom, especially since we will be able to take the contrarian perspective and act counter to the "rational" predictions of whatever neuro-predicated model is developed to predict our behaviour. But, to do this, one must learn the model (explicitly is more robust, but implicitly is good too).
There is no freedom to choose without either complete ignorance or complate awareness of the context framing the situation (and thereby imposing a system of meaning and value). These two paths branch, leading to diverging qualities of life: in experiments examining the former, monkeys learn helplessness and suffer what looks like depression; under the latter, however, you can often choose which future contexts you will occupy, leading to "flow" experiences as the dopamine system is activated as the world constantly realigns itself to your perspective (cf. Csikzentmihalyi). You can thus choose to become free, but -- until you do -- you are blind. Without attempts at freedom, therefore, actions can be considered "mad" (cf. Foucault).
There are lecture slides about this on my website, along with some interesting additional readings from various journals. Enjoy!
(Note: The opinions expressed are mine, and may or may not reflect those of the Department.)