Attention and the media
Haydon Mort
Saturday, 16 February 2008 10:04 UTC
The topic before this one (called Neurology of Attention) contains an analogy of 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 in what I have said).
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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Haydon Mort wrote:
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!
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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?The question about driving and typing relates (as far as I know) to how a process becomes automatic. I don’t know all that much about automaticity (other than the four criteria) so I’ll stay out of that one.
Your other question, relating to a continuous presentation of negative information leading to a lack of sensation, sounds to me like habituation.
Habituation is merely the adaptation of an animal to repeated stimulation. What happens in habituation is that the organism begins to display reduced reactivity as a consequence of the repeated stimulation.
Let’s take aplysia (aplysia californica) as an example of habituation. If you threated aplysia, lets say by touching, it will react by releasing a spray of ink. Now, if you touch it systematically every minute (the torrent of negative stimulation), aplysia will eventually learn that the stimulation is meaningless and stop acting defensively.
Similarly, if you live in an environment that is highly dangerous and violent, in order to survive you will need to adapt. If you react hysterically to every violent event, you will not be as adapt as someone who reacts hysterically the first few times but then has reduced reactivity to further acts of violence.
Habituation is extremely common and is often outside of awareness. It is the reason you don’t feel your underwear (or other clothes) on your body.
The important thing to remember about habituation is that it is specific to that stimuli. If you change the type of stimulation that the aplysia is exposed to, it will react defensively. Similarly, if you start wearing something you usually don’t (i.e., go from briefs to boxers or from loose fitting to tight fitting shirts), you will feel the difference and it will take time to habituate to the new stimuli.
Similarly, if the woman was exposed to a new stimuli (something bad/great happening to someone close to her), she would most likely be shocked.
As for the mirror neuron system. Don’t forget that no mirror neurons have yet (as far as I know) been discovered in the human brain. Any conclusions regarding this system are therefore still highly speculative (and in my opinion spurious, but that’s just me).
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Hi Daniel. Thanks for your valuable thoughts. I would also like you thoughts on the media aspect of my question.
As I understand, mirror neurons are not really a particular class of neurons as such. They are only similar neural patterns that are replicated by the brain when they see/hear something or someone.
For example, you are watching an athlete in the final 1 km of a marathon, wincing as he fights back the cramp and extreme fatigue. Some part of you feels for him and you may wince a bit too. That is because feelings of empathy are built around the activation of similar regions of the brain to which are being activated in the observed subject. Physical discomfort/pain is not felt as you are not literally starving you muscles of oxygen. However the sense of discomfort can be felt simple by seeing his facial expressions.
‘Smile and the world smiles with you’, is more true than most people realize, I would guess. Smiling cause a sense of well-being in others by activating a there smile region, which itself causes happy biochemical molecules to be released.
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I agree with Daniel regarding the habituation assessment. He provides excellent analogies to the situation described by the radio announcer.
Habituation, assisted along by the media’s bias for “fantastic” or “traumatic” stories, is definitely a problem in our society. But frankly, I don’t see what role the scientist would play in fixing this as opposed to the editorial heads at news corporations calling for a drastic change in content coverage. So too, if the public can demonstrate to the corporations that they have an appetite for coverage that is a bit “lighter”, the change would be easier.
The simplest answer to the rest of the questions you ask in your initial post and in your reply is – we don’t know. The only way to get a good sense of circuits and what they encode, and how that activity relates to cognition is to understand the electrophysiology, which can also be addressed in many animal models, as well as the psychophysics of reaction, which can really only be done in humans. The closest thing that we have to doing both is fMRI, in which human subjects can report their feelings while scientists read brain activity. However, fMRI has many drawbacks and problems, including low spatial and temporal resolution, interpreting blood flow changes as neuronal activity, etc… Just because one portion of the brain lights up when we see a violent story on the news, it does not mean that we have found the “violent news story gyrus”.
Since you like resources, check these reviews for more information on fMRI triumphs and limitations, here, here and here.
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Hi Noah. Thanks for the links!
You said I don’t see what role the scientist would play in fixing this as opposed to the editorial heads at news corporations calling for a drastic change in content coverage.
I am not sure so sure. Granted it’s such a big issue, its difficult to know were to begin. Publishing in academic journals would be a start. Then I think, being open and discussing this publicly. Making it into story using the media and in government. Generating public debate and introspection. These are the small changes that can lead to paradigm shifts in the socio-economic concious of a society.
Scientists the would be critical to helping this happen. The inevitable accusations from industry about their being no evidence for a desensitization and that all this is based on junk science etc; would need to be counted by the decades of research that has been carried out on the brain. Neurology and cognitive brain science, are popular, but would need to become more so.
I’m doing lots of broad arm waving here as I don’t know the answer myself. Your thoughts, however, would be welcome.
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Answer to the Question No2:
There is a theory behind the behavioral response to a stimulus that is called dual-process theory . It was first developed by Groves & Thompson (1970) and suggests that this behavioral response to repetitive stimulus is caused by the activation and consequently combination of two separate pathways one for sensitization and one for habituation. Later on this theory evolved (a nice review by Poon & Young 2006).
The effect of a shock is an emotional response. But to an event that we are familiar with in some way. I can’t be sure if the inability of this woman to be socked again is because of a desensitization process or a habituation, but is strongly affected by the valence of the stimulus. So while a repetitive stimulus that activates the limbic system, and specifically pathways involving VTA, will lead to a sensitization, a repetitive stimulus with no valence will lead to habituation.
In the other case, children watching TV and playing specific video games, will habituate to any kind of stimulus like violence, war, death, poverty, injustice and many more.Answer to the moral question:
What is our ethical duty as scientists? I would say do what we know well. Through scientific reasoning, produce significant results that prove these points right. If the results become accepted by the society is not in our hands, since media have that role. Now how can media help us fight their own tactics is something that I have no solution. -
Pointing to Habituation is all very well but that really does not help much. Sure Habituation occurs, but no explanation of why it is so has been given. You have simply provided a name for a generalization of the question. No explanation has been provided. So essentially the response to the original question of vacuous.
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Steven Ericsson-Zenith wrote:
Pointing to Habituation is all very well but that really does not help much. Sure Habituation occurs, but no explanation of why it is so has been given. You have simply provided a name for a generalization of the question. No explanation has been provided. So essentially the response to the original question of vacuous.You are right Steven, I, and the others, gave no explanation of what changes occurred in the brain of the hypothetical woman. I took Haydon’s question as a hypothetical one and provided an answer which I think best describes the phenomena occurring in the story.
Based on the information given, I do not see how there is anything else that can be provided.
As for the responses being a mere generalisation, I do not agree with that. Habituation is not just a word assigned to a series of behaviours that allows us to wave aside what is happening and never bother explaining it. Habituation is not merely reification. A lot is known about how habituation comes about and how it is represented in the brain (and there is plenty that is not known, but that’s for another time). Have a read through this article for a very good study of the neural changes involved in habituation.
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I should have added that it is very likely that I am wrong about the things I say, fallibility is one of man’s greatest traits :)
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