Tag: brain

What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Trump

Posted on by ajk1311@gmail.com

“it turns out that your brain on grievance looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”

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“in substance addiction, environmental cues such as being in a place where drugs are taken or meeting another person who takes drugs cause sharp surges of dopamine in crucial reward and habit regions of the brain, specifically, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum. This triggers cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through intoxication. Recent studies show that similarly, cues such as experiencing or being reminded of a perceived wrong or injustice — a grievance — activate these same reward and habit regions of the brain, triggering cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through retaliation. To be clear, the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent—an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.”

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“similar to the way people become addicted to drugs or gambling, people may also become addicted to seeking retribution against their enemies—revenge addiction. This may help explain why some people just can’t let go of their grievances long after others feel they should have moved on—and why some people resort to violence.”

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“Trump’s unrelenting efforts to retaliate against those he believes have treated him unjustly (including, now, American voters) appear to be compulsive and uncontrollable. The harm this causes to himself and others is obvious but seems to have no deterrent effect. Reports suggest he has been doing this for much of his life. He seems powerless to stop. He also seems to derive a great deal of pleasure from it.”

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“Like substance addiction, revenge addiction appears to spread from person to person. For instance, inner-city gun violence spreads in neighborhoods like a social contagion, with one person’s grievances infecting others with a desire to seek vengeance. Because of his unique position and use of the media and social networks, Trump is able to spread his grievances to thousands or millions of others through Twitter, TV and rallies. His demand for retribution becomes their demand, causing his supporters to crave retaliation—and, in a vicious cycle, this in turn causes Trump’s targets and their supporters to feel aggrieved and want to retaliate, too.”

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“Political parties and interest groups have come to rely upon inflaming grievances and stoking vindictiveness to generate donations and motivate voters. Media, entertainment and social networking giants also rely upon grievance and revenge-based content to attract viewers and users and increase advertising and sales. More people need to become savvy about how, why and for whose benefit they are being made to feel aggrieved and must decide to stop dealing in the drug of their own destruction.”

“Reality” is constructed by your brain. Here’s what that means, and why it matters.

Posted on by ajk1311@gmail.com

“Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences.

All of this can bias us. Visual illusions present clear and interesting challenges for how we live: How do we know what’s real? And once we know the extent of our brain’s limits, how do we live with more humility — and think with greater care about our perceptions?”

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“The stories our brains tell us about reality are extremely compelling, even when they are wrong.”

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““The dirty little secret about sensory systems is that they’re slow, they’re lagged, they’re not about what’s happening right now but what’s happening 50 milliseconds ago, or, in the case for vision, hundreds of milliseconds ago,” says Adam Hantman, a neuroscientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus.

If we relied solely on this outdated information, though, we wouldn’t be able to hit baseballs with bats, or swat annoying flies away from our faces. We’d be less coordinated, and possibly get hurt more often.

So the brain predicts the path of motion before it happens. It tells us a story about where the object is heading, and this story becomes our reality. That’s what’s likely happening with Cavanagh’s illusion. It happens all the time.”

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“The brain tells us a story about the motion of objects. But that’s not the only story it tells. It also tells us stories about more complicated aspects of our visual world, like color.”

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“When we think an object is being bathed in blue light, we can filter out that blue light intuitively. That’s how many of these color illusions work. We use surrounding color cues and assumptions about lighting to guess an object’s true color. Sometimes those guesses are wrong, and sometimes we make different assumptions from others.”

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“Night owls, or people who like to go to bed really late and wake up later in the morning, are more likely to see the dress as black and blue. Larks, a.k.a. early risers, are more likely to see it as white and gold. What’s going on?

Wallisch believes the correlation is rooted in the life experience of being either a lark or a night owl. Larks, he hypothesizes, spend more time in daylight than night owls. They’re more familiar with it. So when confronted with an ill-lit image like the dress, they are more likely to assume it is being bathed in bright sunlight, which has a lot of blue in it, Wallisch points out. As a result, their brains filter it out. “If you assume it’s daylight, you will see it as white and gold. Because if you subtract blue, yellow is left,” he says.”

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“The owls versus lark data seems quite compelling for explaining a large part of the individual differences,” Schwarzkopf says. But not all of it. “There are still lots of other factors that must have a strong influence here.”

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“we have no way of knowing how our experiences guide our perception. “Your brain makes a lot of unconscious inferences, and it doesn’t tell you that it’s an inference,” he explains. “You see whatever you see. Your brain doesn’t tell you, ‘I took into account how much daylight I’ve seen in my life.’””

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“Sometimes, especially when the information we’re receiving is unclear, we see what we want to see. In the past, researchers have found that even slight rewards can change the way people perceive objects.”

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“In a more complex example, Balcetis has found that when she tells study participants to pay attention to either an officer or a civilian in a video of a police altercation, it can change their perception of what happened (depending on their prior experience with law enforcement and the person in the video with whom they more closely identified). “That instruction changes what their eyes do,” Balcetis told me last summer. “And it leads them to a different understanding of the nature of the altercation.”

You can’t completely remove bias from the brain. “You can’t change the fact that we’ve all grown up in different worlds,” Balcetis said. But you can encourage people to listen to other perspectives and be curious about the veracity of their own.”

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“Just as we can look at an image and see things that aren’t really there, we can look out into the world with skewed perceptions of reality. Political scientists and psychologists have long documented how political partisans perceive the facts of current events differently depending on their political beliefs. The illusions and political thinking don’t involve the same brain processes, but they follow the similar overarching way the brain works.”