Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness: topic
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Attention and the media
Haydon Mort
Wednesday, 20 February 2008 20:14 UTC
I tried to get some feedback on this subject in the Neurology group but got little response. Hopefully you guys would be able to help me. I am a geologist but find this subject fascinating. So I hope you’ll bare with me if my preamble and questions have been addressed to death already.
You know how you tend to switch off when you have done something repetitively? For example, when you have driven to work a thousand times and now you often arrive at work not remembering your journey. Or you don’t consciously select individual letters on a keyboard when you type, because your subconscious takes over after you are learnt it. Or when you have learnt a language, you don’t have to rack your brain to search for a particularly verb.
Question 1: Do all the examples I have just given call on similar neural pathways?
Question 2 (the BIG one): I remember someone saying on the radio “The thing that most shocks me is that I am not shockable anymore!” She was talking about how she couldn’t get shocked any more, looking at the news. It was this fact that shocked her the most!
In this day and age, we can see stories of tragedy unfold in the four corners of the globe simultaneously.
The question is: what impact does this torrent of negativity have on the neural pathways mentioned above and do you think this is what was desensitizing the woman? The bigger question is, are the media inadvertently contributing to a world where we are becoming increasingly polarized in our feelings?
On the one side: Mirror neurons and pathways related to empathy and pain are triggered when we see a child who has lost both her parents in civil war. But on the other side, it doesn’t shock us so much any more and we are less likely, as a society to take action. Our threshold at which we attend to a given problem has increased.
What are the moral implications of this and do scientist (specifically neuroscientists) have a role to play in the solution? (assuming there is any truth, which it by no means is).
Maybe this issue has been addressed in which case, I would be very grateful for some references. Am I right to think that is a massive problem for society and us as a species?
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Replies
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I have two comments to the above. The first is, I don’t see the connection between the two questions. The first question deals with the neural pathways of automatic behaviors and the second deals with reduced emotional response to situations that would normally elicit one. What about that sort of desensitization suggests automatic behavior?
Anyway, in all likelihood, neither of those phenomena deals with a single set of neural pathways, although maybe someone with more than my layman’s knowledge of neurology could speak to that.
My second comment is that science and morality are totally orthogonal. Science helps us develop the atomic bomb, but gives us no direction regarding whether we should use it or not. It can reveal the workings of our inner biology but not whether we should manipulate it.
If a scientist advocates a particular morality, he/she is advocating as a human being, not a scientist. The authority invested in such a person as a scientist should not be brought to bear as evidence or credibility in the appropriateness of a moral appeal.
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Dear Haydon:
The problem you addressed is more related to habituation than to attention. The classical approach to habituation was developed by Eugene Sokolov in the 1960’s. You can find references googling his name and “orienting response”. Basically, his idea was that a repetitive stimulus (e.g. the sound of the mill for the miller) causes a negative feedback from the cortex to the arousal system. In the example, the miller does not consciously perceive the sound he is habituated to, but if suddenly the mill stops working, he will percieve the silence!
Later it was discovered that this kind of negative feedback occurs also within the cortex. Excitation of a cortical column (containing e.g. pyramidal neurons) leads to the excitation of inhibitory interneurons in adjacent columns. The next step is the inhibitory action of the interneurons on the excitatory ones (the same that excited them before). This mechanism makes our brain operate dynamically, never focusing continuously in one theme. On the other hand, it may lead to desensitization to critical stimulus when it becomes repetitive, at the risk of a loss in morality!Best
Alfredo
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Hi Terren and Alfredo,
First in answer to your comments Terren. You are totally right. I didn’t make the connection very well. This is because I lazily copied and pasted the text I wrote from a different forum, without setting out the context first. Even if I had set out things more clearly, you still may not have understood me, as I am simple geologist trying to join the dots.
OK, so here is the connection (I thought existed) between the two questions. Repetitive action starts with the a persons attentive mind. Top-down attention is required to eventually learn something (see my original examples). After this is learned is becomes ‘second nature’ (habituation). In the same way, when we see something very shocking on TV, our attention is captured. But overtime, we attend less and less and less due to habituation. This creates a society which is less likely to take action as a hole, or at the very least is more polarized in its feeling (which generates its own problem).
Finally, on your last point, Terren: about there being a separation between science and morality. I would partly agree but mostly disagree. There has been decades of flourishing research into the evolutionary origin or morality and its neurological and biochemical expressions. The scientific picture of morality is still very incomplete, but one day we will understand biochemically why, for example, honor killing, is not a good strategy for survival. The very least that can said is that science emphatically does have something to say about moral and ethical foundations.
Alfredo Bom dia, tudo bem?! Eu gusto muito Portugues ;) I really liked your analogy of the mill worker. Doesn’t it seem that all stimuli are subject to a degree of desensitization. Sound (in the will work-worker example), touch (hand in water that is increasing in temperature), sight (gratuitous violence and pornography requires harder types to shock or satisfy), smell (you didn’t realize that your apartment reeked until someone came to visit and told you) and taste (acquired tastes). Does addiction have a similar pathway? Heroin addicts need higher and higher doses to get the same hit.
I had no idea that ‘inhibitory interneurons’ even existed! That’s amazing!!
In summary
I really do believe that if the media is contributing to global problems by unwittingly creating a society of people unwilling to take action in the face of urgency, then it really falls to science to propose and demonstrate this link. People value evidence and they will listen. At a minimum is could help them think a bit more deeply about what it means to be human and what inner problems we face when addressing some of the biggest problems in the world. -
Hi Haydon,
I disagree that habituation is the best way to characterize what’s going on with automatic behaviors. Yes, behaviors like driving that are done repetitively involve habituation, but I think it’s better to say that such behaviors become abstracted. When you learn to brush your teeth, you learn a surprisingly complicated sequence of movements, and each movement must be attended to. Once it becomes automatic, the attending thought is “I have to brush my teeth”, not “I have to remove my toothbrush from the holder, place toothpaste on it, and thrash it around my teeth for a while”. Brushing one’s teeth can itself become part of the larger abstraction of “getting ready for bed”, for example. So I’d say abstraction is the best way to think of that, because it involves an encapsulation of a learned sequence of events, rather than a mere desensitization to some sort of stimulus.
Regarding morals. Science may have things to say about morals, such as why we have them, how they’ve arisen from an evolutionary standpoint, and so on. Going in the other direction, morals may have things to say about science – we shouldn’t perform certain experiments on humans and animals, for example.
But those are very different things then asking how science can inform the content of our morality. In other words, science answers questions of “how” and “why”. But it can never answer questions of “should”. That was my point, because it seemed as if you were asking if science can tell us what we “should” do about media saturation.
Terren
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Dear Terren:
You are right about the involvement of other mechanisms besides habituation in automatized tasks. However, these are not attentional mechanisms. The learned automatic sequence that you describe is a case of procedural memory reactivation. It is based on the potentiation of a neuronal circuit located at the motor system. Only the first step in the activation of the circuit requires a voluntary (conscious) act, involving the activation of the motor cortex. The “abstraction” is the thought that guides the voluntary act. It is followed by unconscious sequential activation of the previously potentiated circuit – involving other parts of the motor system, as the striatum, thalamus and cerebellum.
Best
Alfredo
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I don’t know about the neural pathways involved, but I’d like to add a bit more to the analogy of the miller. I think a similar thing happens with all our perceptions. The brain seems to work out a ‘blank state’, or background normality, and anything different to that is noticed.
Like with light – visible light from the sun is perceived as ‘white’, which is the ‘normal’ background light. Our brains see this literally as ‘blank’. Other languages use words like ‘blanc’ and ‘branco’ for white, recognising the similarity in concept. If you walk at night under coloured streetlights and you happen to be wearing a coat of the same colour as the light, then in a short time that colour will become the ‘blank’ and your coat will appear to be white – the brain has re-set it’s ‘blank state.’
If you take videos with a video camera, the first job is to ‘set the white balance’ by pointing the camera at a white object so it can make allowances for any colour variation in the light. When we are exposed to the same light, our brains do it automatically, but if we watch an un-corrected video, the ‘whites’ can appear very un-white.
The same with background noise (within certain limits) like with the miller, and any young woman who remembers having to wear her first bra will remember feeling like she was in a vice being squeezed half to death, but in a few weeks it feels normal.
I also remember something about temperature regulation in animals – the mechanisms for adjusting it up or down were well known, but there seemed to be nothing known about how the body knew what the ‘correct’ temperature was. I’m sure the ‘correct temperature’ must be set long before birth when the foetus is kept at the temperature of the mother’s body.
In short, the ‘torrent of negativity’ we are subjected to on the news is in some way re-setting our view of what is normal. If we accept it as normal, we will only notice a change in the level of negativity.
As to what role science can play in a solution to this, I’m not sure. I think that if the media gave a more balanced approach to such things, maybe devoting far more time to showing ‘normal’ things so we could understand different cultures as they normally are, then perhaps it would help us to ‘reset our white balance’ somewhere a bit closer to normal. Personally, I doubt that anything science says or does will have any impact on the media, but who knows?
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Dear Esther:
I am in agreement with your analysis of how the brain works (not about your statement on the role of science in our society, but will not comment on this issue here).
In physiology, this ‘blank’ state is called the “baseline” state. My colleague Gene Johnson developed an approach to consciousness based on the idea of deviation from baseline. Also Walter Freeman has assumed such a relativity of conscious perception. There are interesting visual illusions that operate on this principle (e.g. search for the Adelson MIT Lab site).
The visual illusion area has brought impotant contributions for consciousness science. For instance, Susana Martinez-Conde from ASSC has organized an annual competition “The Best Visual Illusion” (the site is easy to find by Google).
Do you remember the Gregory Bateson concept of information in anthropology? “Difference that makes a difference”.Best
Alfredo
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