Free Will Absolution?

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This book review has spurred me to offer a brief follow up to a previous post on free will.

 I agree with the review author Holly Anderson,  who dismisses the idea that "emergence," or the consideration that brain functioning as a whole is more than the sum of its parts, by pointing out that any process governed by the brain is deterministic. However, focus of this post is on the issue of whether this means people shouldn't be held responsible for their actions.

The answer, in my opinion, is that in a pure abstract moral sense they can't be, but we have to assign responsibility to those who engage in externally damaging behavior anyway, for practical reasons.  We have to protect society. 

By the way, it is interesting to me that the question of whether a lack free will cancels moral responsibility is only considered with respect to negative behavior, at least in my experience.

Suicide is Adaptive(Evolutionarily)

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Update:  This post is not meant to advocate suicide.  It only speaks to evoluationary motives.

Suicide is often a natural behavior.  This is because it may help to pass genes. 

This seeming paradox is resolved when you consider the implications of inclusive fitness, or more specifically with regard to kinship selection.  This refers to the fact that close relatives have a high number of genes in common, the hence the passing on of shared genes sometimes benefits from sacrifices at the expense of one or more relatives, even leading to death.  Particularly, individuals with low access to resources needed to pass genes directly, relative to family members, become a drag on the resources of others in the family.

This idea was perhaps first put forth by Denys deCatanzaro, but the logic first appealed to me years before I found this paper and related research. 

This is not to say that all cases of suicide are related to kinship selection, but does suggest the existence of a sort of "mental program" that is activated by low moods, relative to family members.  Other causes for suicide include the metacognitive avoidance of psychical and or physical pain, the influence of psychoactive drugs, and more purely neurological causes.

6 Days and No Longer Counting

I apologize for my lack of posts over the last six days.  Everyday, I've been busier than anticipated, always thinking that finishing one or more posts I've been working on was coming the very next day or night.  Hence, I didn't post a message revealing any intention to take a break from posting.

Unfortunately, my posts sometimes take hours to complete, given the research requirements.  Sometimes searching for and/or actually obtaining relevant papers create unanticipated delays, apart from unexpected changes in my general schedule. 

I will try to post more frequently whatever my schedule, but let you know when I'm not certain about the length of a delay.  Thank you for sticking with me.

Depressed Parents Play Favorites

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The model of behavioral investment as determined by mood that I previously presented has an interesting implication for the way parents treat their children.  That is, depressed parents are more likely to succumb to favoritism.  Specifically, as mood decreases, parental investment shifts toward children deemed more reproductively fit(1).

Parental investment involves the amount of time, energy, and other resources offered each child by their parents(2), and reproductive fitness(3) can be revealed in signals related to physical attractiveness(cuteness, etc), physical fitness, intelligence, emotional robustness, susceptibility to illness, ability to make friends, and even resemblance to one or both parents, among other cues.  There is even evidence that birth weight is moderated by a mother's stress levels(lower mood), with higher stress associated with lower weights.

This is part of a larger phenomenon(first link above) in which depressed parents often unconsciously develop high quantity, low parental investment reproductive strategies in environments peceived as hostile to higher per-child investment strategies. 


1. D. Beaulieu, D. Bugental (July 2008)  Contingent parental investment: an evolutionary framework for understanding early interaction between mothers and children.
Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 29, Issue 4, Pages 249-255

2. Trivers, R.L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971 (pp. 136-179). Chicago, IL: Aldine.

3. Hamilton, W.D. 1964. The genetical evolution of social behavior. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7:1-52

No Allergies or Immunity to Learning

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This post can be considered an extension of my last one on learned tolerance to addictive substances. 

Like reactions to addictive substances, allergic and immune responses are influenced by external environments and mental states.  Both can be learned and forgotten, depending on the contexts.  I lump them together here, because they are actually both functions of the immune system.

Both types of responses can be triggered by external environments and mental states that are similar to those in which allergens(former) or pathogens(for example, latter) were previously encountered.  Likewise, learned responses can fail to occur in environments and or mental states that are subjectively dissimilar.  So, when it comes to the acquisition and extinction(unlearning) of allergies and specific immune responses, all of the principles of learning apply.

One implication is that exposure treatments, involving the gradual presentation of contexts(stimuli) previously experienced with an allergen or pathogen, sans those threats, should sometimes diminish learned allergic and immune responses.  This is similar to systematic desensitization treatments used to treat phobias and more general anxiety disorders.  Perhaps this approach can also apply to treatment for some cases of autoimmune disorders.

So, this is just another example of how psychology can touch upon elements of the functioning of our bodies in what may be unexpected ways for many.

Drug Tolerance in Context(Really)

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Drug tolerance is contextual.  It can vary, depending on the external environment and even the thoughts of the user.  The key idea is that tolerance-related drug potency increases in unfamilar environments or mental states. 

There is much research that bears this out, with experiments going back to at least 1975. Overdoses are even thought to have occurred as a result.  This suggests that tolerance often has a strong element of learning, despite what many students in my substance abuse classes inititally think.  You should see their faces. 

This obviously has implications for addiction, as the higher the tolerance to an addictive drug, the lower the pleasure of using, but the more severe the negative consequences for abstaining.  And of course, many  seemingly hold the idea that familiar environments in which drug use occurs tempt addicted users.  Hence, the encouragement given to many substance abuse patients is to avoid such environments, along with changing some of the ways they think about their addictions and any related problems.  Perhaps the danger of patients using in novel contexts with increased enjoyment is often overlooked as a risk for relapse. 

Any "highs" addicted users enjoy are not the only experiential aspects that suffer tolerance.  There are many other physiological effects that are also context-dependent.  For example, take the antinociceptive(pain relief) effects of opiates. 

Interestingly, there is a flip side of learned tolerance.  This involves the use of cues for drug consumption to elicit feelings of intoxication.  There are many experiments in which participants are given alcohol placebos and report and otherwise display evidence of intoxication.  There is also a humorous video here.

Finally, I offer a hypothesis.  Since learned drug tolerance fails to transfer to the degree that a context is novel, it should hence diminish during laughter.  Given that laughter involves gain/loss-independent expectancy violations, this would seem a safe bet(1).  I'm still looking for a study to address this question.  If any of you find one, please let me know.

1. Nerhardt, G. Humor and inclinations of humor: Emotional reactions to stimuli of different divergence from a range of expectancy. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. 1970, 11, 185-195.

Does Depression Cause Neurons to Commit Suicide?

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Sandeep Gautam has a nice post on his blog about the effects of depression on hippocampal cells. 

The story is that chronically high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, kills these neurons.  Depression leads to elevated average cortisol levels, as lower moods make negative emotional responses, such as anger and anxiety, more severe.  Worse, the hippocampus is also responsible for down-regulating stress levels, the shrinking mass thereof creating an inertia with respect to increases in mood, both short and long term.  So, climbing out of depression is harder, the more severe the depression and the longer its duration.  Fortunately, hippocampal cells are born anew with increased average mood levels over a sufficient period of time, increasing the brain's ability to downregulate stress.

I interpret this as representing the physiological mechanism by which low average mood levels demand higher net levels of reinforcement over the longer term to reduce depression-related risk aversion, in the risk averse.  This serves the behavioral economic purpose of requiring more evidence that an environment long seen as hostile to the goal of secure reproduction has become more hospitable.  This is the equivalent of not trusting someone who is long seen as a jerk, but acts somewhat nicer on a given day.  The trust in the change doesn't come overnight, and nor should a trust in what is normally an inhospitable enviornment.

Coming Soon: Auditory Posts

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I am in the process of converting my blog posts into audio and am proceeding as quickly as time allows.  There will be a link at the top of most posts allowing you to listen instead of read, or do both.  Feel free to let me know what you think!

Neural Utility Paper with a Great Chart

I just found a great chart in a fascinating Shizgal paper on the neural basis for utility.  The paper is available for free.

The chart takes one from neural stimulation to behavior(click to enlarge):

Notice the matching law equation I refer to and reinterpret in my first post on this blog.

No Free Lunch, or Will for that Matter

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I was in a conversation the other night and was asked whether I believe in free will.  I don't, and haven't for sometime.  I have many reasons, including the fact that I see no reason why we can't explain all of human action and cognitiion without it.  But last night, I thought of a new reason that should be obvious. 

As long as we have needs and resources are scarce, there can't be anything like free will, at least in the either/or sense.  We will always ultimately be controlled by such needs, toward the goal of passing on our genes.  But, what of people who claim free will exists in a limited sense, like my interlocutor?

I've never bought this concept.  At best, they can say that we sometimes have free will to a degree.  But, assuming that "free will" refers to a conscious decision process, the processes by which conscious and unconscious decisions are made are mostly the same.  The same needs exist, along with the same laws of learning.  The latter just in a metacognitive sense with respect to consciousness.