Huh

Yesterday I offered a brief introduction to the concept of Neuroplasticity. In this post I’ll review Schwartz’s treatment methodology for sufferers of Obssessive Compulsive Disorger (OCD). Before I go further I need to mention Schwartz’s “Brain Lock” a book I haven’t read but which purports to provide readers with enough of the methodology to allow OCD sufferers to treat themselves. For this blog it’ll suffice to give a high level description of the treatment so tomorrow we can focus on why he believes his treatment works.

Schwartz’s methodology, first designed for his OCD patients consists of: Relabel, Re-attribute, Refocus and Revalue. The underlying assumption is OCD is caused by over activity in the “OCD circuit” located in  the orbital frontal cortex, the anterior cingulate gyrus and the caudate nucleus. In effect, these areas combine to act as, in Schwartz’s words, the brain’s transmission. In OCD the transmission is jammed or locked in place and these areas continually broadcast an insistent warning (The doorknob is soiled, your hands are dirty, if you don’t count and alphabetize the cans in your pantry your mother will die…). Schwartz’s treatment is meant to weaken the blaring OCD circuit while strengthening an alternative circuit broadcasting a healthy message. If the patient is successful in leveraging the brain’s plasticity, they will eventually extinguish the OCD circuit. This is where the four “R”s come in:

Schwartz has his patients first relabel the OCD message as false signals and symptoms of their disease. Then he instructs the patient to re-attribute the signals as pathological symptoms and not representing a factual need to rewash their hands again. Once the Patient has sufficiently distanced himself from these signals, Schwartz advises them to refocus their attention on healthier thoughts. As an example, instead of washing their hands they might focus on working in the garden. Finally Schwartz would have them Revalue the OCD compulsions and obsessions, realizing they have no power or intrinsic value. For purposes of this blog I greatly simplified the process and hasten to encourage sufferers of OCD to read Schwartz’s book before deciding whether his treatment makes sense for them. It is worth noting, Schwartz claims a cure rate twice that of other approaches. I encourage people to not dismiss his claims lightly.

Up to this point in the book, Schwartz’s claims are substantiated by impressive amounts of research. When he gets into why he thinks his methodology works, the amount of supporting research is decidedly less substantial. This doesn’t mean his theory is wrong, just it is currently outside of the mainstream and somewhat unsupported by current scientific knowledge. Tomorrow I’ll outline Schwartz’s theory for how his methodology works.

I just finished “The Mind and The Brain” by Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley and I highly recommend it. The thesis is quite interesting and, at least initially, reasonably supported with research. The authors attempt to prove, not only the concept of adult neuroplasticity but also provide a mechanism for how neuroplasticity might work that leads to a potential reframing of the hard problem of consciousness and a strident rejection of scientific materialism.

Neuroplasticity describes the brain’s ability to rewire itself. Rewiring is the mechanism by which a brain both learns and forgets. Neuroplasticity is taken for granted in children. Most people are aware children go through stages of learning. If a child’s brain is monitored with fMRI and PET scans, scientists can see neuronal groups forming, reforming, strengthening and weakening. The mantra, based on the Canadian Psychologist Donald Hebb’s research, is “the neurons that fire together, wire together”. In other words, concepts are represented by groups of neurons that fire together in reaction to external or internal stimuli. The more these groupings fire together the stronger the connections and the more likely they will fire together in the future. As a child learns, neuronal groupings are formed and either strengthened or weakened depending on their success in promoting their own firing. If the concept is used often, the grouping is strengthened if it is used infrequently the grouping is weakened. Through many iterations the child’s brain, starting with relatively few and simple groupings, learns and rewires itself to account for more and more knowledge. As the wirings increase in sophistication the child’s fluency with the represented concepts is improved. For example, when a child first learns to walk she must use all her powers of concentration to succeed but, with success comes a strengthening of the neuronal groupings that provide the body with it’s directions. The brain literally wires itself to account for all the variables necessary for the child to walk and even run without having to think about the process.

So far, none of this is particularly new. However, starting in the eighties scientists started to question dogma arguing once a brain reaches a given level of maturity it’s ability to rewire itself is severely limited. Scientists acknowledged adults ability to learn new concepts but it was assumed this was mostly limited to the mental realm and, even then, hampered by limited neuronal real estate taken up by previous knowledge. Schwartz and Begley show how research by maverick scientists question then eventually disprove the idea neuroplasticity is as limited in the adult brain. Starting with monkeys and eventually moving to humans, scientists show adult brains rewiring themselves, allowing people to recover from Strokes, Obssessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and a myriad of other problems. Schwartz, a research professor of psychiatry at UCLA, was faced with the challenge of designing a behavioral methodology for treating patients with OCD. By refining his methodology and thinking, Schwartz creates a novel theory of mind leading to his emphatic rejection of scientific materialism.

Tomorrow I’ll attend to Schwartz’s methodology and his underlying theory.

Free markets are the best means for efficiently allocating society’s economic resources… except when they’re not. Given the U.S.’s current economic morass I thought I’d blog a little about why a free market needs regulation.  First off, it’s worth noting an economy is a complex adaptive system. Meaning, it consists of interactions by a large number of semi-independent agents all focused on their individual goals. Via this complicated web of interactions, larger patterns, emerge, merge and perish. Alternatively one could view these patterns (read: organizations, businesses, relationships etc.) as going through evolutionary algorithmic searches for optimal solutions to their current environment.  The whole becomes greater than the sum of it’s parts. Companies get built, resources get leveraged and, overall, economic progress lurches forward.  So why is government regulation desirable? Why isn’t the libertarian view of unfettered free markets the right approach. I can think of three reasons, each residing at a different scale within society.

1) Humans can not be consistently counted on to be economically rational.

2)  The potential problem of “Increasing Returns” as identified by the economist Brian Arthur.

3) The Economy resides within a larger social political system.

Behavioral Economics is the branch of economics studying how humans make (sometimes irrational) choices. Some of the findings suggest humans are quite susceptible to heuristic biases and framing. Heuristic biases can be thought of as “rules of thumb”, an example might be, if someone I perceive as a leader does X then I should do X as well, even if I’m not sure why I should do X or if X will get me anything. Framing describes the ability for human choices to be swayed by how options are presented to them. My current favorite example (typically given regarding morality) is the oncoming train question. If there is a train track that branches into two tracks. Down track A five people are working while down track B one person is working. An out of control train is hurtling down the track, you can do nothing and the train will go down track A, killing five people or you can pull a switch and send the train down track B killing one person but saving the other five. Will you pull the switch. Most people say they would pull the switch thus, saving five people while killing one person. But, if you frame the question differently, and tell them five people are working on a train track below you. You see an out of control train hurtling down the track and you know if you push the obese person next to you, onto the train tracks, it will stop the train, save the five workers but kill the obese person. Would you push fatso onto the tracks. Most people would say no, even though, the economics of the question are exactly the same in each case.

So what’s the problem? As companies get more and more sophisticate in their marketing efforts, their ability to override an individual’s rationality becomes stronger. If people are not making choices based on maximizing their own self interest, the philosophical underpinnings for arguing the ethical advantages to free markets disappear.

A second problem can be found in the study of group psychology. As Keynes (quoted by David Ignatius) notes: “It is of the nature of organized investment markets . . . that, when disillusion falls upon an over-optimistic and over-bought market, it should fall with sudden and even catastrophic force,” he wrote. “Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.” In other words, when your mother asked you if you would jump off a bridge just because your friend did, the honest answer is: “Sometimes”.

2) Increasing Returns describes the idea of markets becoming dominated to such an extent that the winner will continue to win just because they won previously. Increasing Returns are sometimes illustrated through “the Network Effect”, the example usually given is the dominance of the PC. Once everyone starts using a specific technology, it will make sense for the individual to choose that technology not because it is necessarily superior to its competitors, but because barriers to entering the network are too costly without the “winning” technology. Now, its true that over the long term the network effect can be overcome through the introduction of a “game changing” new technology, but its also true that the system can reach a state of equilibrium where innovation is permanently stifled and the system lodges in an evolutionary cul de sac.

3) The Economy resides in a larger Social Political system: In order for any economy to work right it must reside within a society of laws. Contracts must be enforceable, property rights respected… For the rule of law to be respected there must be some mechanism for enforcement, punishment and redress. Mechanisms of this sort require a concentration of power. Concentrated power invites corruption and secrecy. Without mechanisms for insuring fairness and the rule of law a free market cannot hope to stay free.

Further, there must also be mechanisms in place to minimize negative externalities and the ability of larger entities to socialize costs while privatizing profits. You know, like if an industry got into trouble so everyone was forced to give money to bail out said industry without the givers getting equitable compensation for their forced largess. I’m sure there’s an example of this issue though none come immediately to mind.

In short, I do not believe, given society’s current level of technological sophistication and interconnectedness that a free market is even possible, let alone desirable. Having said that, I am quick to acknowledge economies as complex adaptive systems. Too much regulation can send the economy into a state of equilibrium, effectively killing the goose that lays the golden egg. But, that argument will be made in a future post.

Steve Grand wrote a book I just love, called Creation: Life and how to make it. Steve’s the creator of Creatures a popular computer game, kinda a cross between the Sims and Spore. In his highly readable book he posits

Dr. Frankenstein’s Creed:

“Life is not the stuff of which it is made – it is an emergent property of the aggregate arrangement of that stuff. Even the stuff itself is no more than an emergent property of a still smaller whirlpool of interactions. Living beings are high-order persistent phenomena, which endure through intelligent interaction with their environment. This intelligence is a product of multiple layers of feedback. An organism is therefore a localized network of feedback loops that ensures its own continuation.

Intelligence cannot be abstracted – we have to build a whole organism. Nether can intelligence exist in a vacuum – it has to be embedded in a self-consistent environment. Life is the sum total of all the feedback within the organism, and between the organism and it’s environment. The division between organism and environment is not a real boundary, but a convenience dreamt up by our own brains – the universe is really just a single jumble of interactions.

A computer cannot be intelligent or alive, Nor can a computer program. But a computer can be used to create a cyberspace. Inside that cyberspace we can construct first-order objects and use algorithms to emulate their behavior. These objects are not alive or intelligent either, but they can be pieced together to build a second-order assemblage that is. Our task is not to program in intelligent behavior, but to enable such behavior to emerge from simulated objects that embody the cybernetic properties from which life emerged in the natural world.

To complete the picture, we must ensure that the recipe for this emergent phenomenon is not hard-wired but is able to be passed on from generation to generation and modify itself in order to persist on longer timescales, as the environment changes. Our creature will be fully alive and intelligent only if its future lies in its own hands, and to give it this autonomy we must relinquish direct control of its design. In short, the plans for how to assemble our creatures should be coded in its genes.”

Now I know some will argue this is not formalized enough to be meaningful but to them I respond. “It’s a creed for god’s sake, get over yourself”. What blew me away, are the twin concepts of evolution and emergence in the first two paragraphs. Note: I have issues with the last sentence in the second paragraph since the issue of subjective vs. objective “reality” is not at all clear to my way of thinking. But put that aside. To think, the average human has 35K genes, you could almost look at them as lines of code and with these 35K worth of genes you get not only all the variety of the human race (this concept first struck me at my local grocery store; the same pool of genes created him, her and me? Get out of here!) But, more importantly, those genes having been and still being selected by evolutionary pressure, resulted in the human brain, perhaps the most complex entity known to, well, the human brain. Further, without evolutionary pressures there wouldn’t be intelligence, let alone the human brain. But of course, it’s not just humans that evolved, only because of competition, because the evolutionary landscape is constantly changing from the perspective of any one individual “persistent phenomenon” is there life.

So I got a myriad of questions but a couple come to mind.

Why do the patterns persist? I mean wouldn’t it be easier to just not struggle. Where does that universal urge to survive come from? Becasue, without the urge to survive, to reproduce, make more of oneself, the whole damn system falls apart. Now I know, one could say, “Well, the will to persist is there because it defines success. All the other approaches (the will to not persist, the will to watch lots of television, eat cheetos and never move) didn’t do so well. Only the results of the the will to persist are around to be seen. Okay, fair enough but here we get into emergence. There seems to be a movement towards complexity throughout the Universe. This movement is not only seen in entities with “will” but in non-willfull agents. Why? Where does that come from?

I read a good article in the Nytimes on the philosopher Kelly Jolley at Auburn University. In addition to exploring the “surprising” strength of Auburn’s philosophy program (I guess surprising because Auburn is supposedly a “southern hick state school”) the article mentioned a student named Benjamin Pierce and how he surprised his logic teacher. The professor was explaining the transitive principle; stating if A is greater than B and B is greater than C than A is greater than C. “Not in Rock, Paper, Scissors”, replied Pierce.

Which got me thinking, why was that a good answer beyond or perhaps because of the chuckle factor. Then I remembered another story about philosophical humor. This story involves a deceased philosophy professor named, Sidney Morgenbesser. Sidney was quick with the quip.

A famous Oxford professor was once lecturing on linguistics, explaining that while in most languages a double negative = a positive, in no languages does a double positive = a negative to which Morgenbesser dismissively snorted, “Yeah, yeah.”

Other than the infrequently advertised idea that philosophers can have a sense of humor, what do these two anecdotes have in common? They both show the idea of dimensionality. In other words, the transitive process only works if a single dimension (greater = larger in a numerical sense) is considered. However, in Rock, Paper, Scissors the dimensions change depending on which two items are being compared. Similarly, Sidney’s “double positive” made sense only when taking into account how language is used when spoken not just how words are defined on paper.

The average human short term memory can only retain 7 +/- 2 items at any one time. Perhaps this is why we can be surprised by the existence of extra dimensions, that in retrospect, seem quite obvious.

Okay, so if you didn’t click on the Independent’s obit of Morgenbesser above, I need to share one more story as quoted in the paper.

“Another unfortunate encounter with the police occurred when he lit up his pipe on the way out of a subway station. Morgenbesser protested to the officer who tried to stop him that the rules covered smoking in the station, not outside. The cop conceded he had a point, but said: “If I let you get away with it, I’d have to let everyone get away with it.” To which Morgenbesser, in a famously misunderstood line, retorted: “Who do you think you are, Kant?” Hauled off to the precinct lock-up, Morgenbesser only won his freedom after a colleague showed up and explained the Categorical Imperative to the nonplussed boys in blue.”

Let me know if today is a day you find any good huhs.

Cheers

My friend Richard Nantel (check out his blog here) argued I have a moral duty to blog. His theory seems to be, the world is full of big problems, the only way things are going to get better is if we put our heads together and share what we know. Frankly, my gut doesn’t completely buy it but what the hell, why not give it a try? So I figured for my first post I’d offer a sense of what I’m trying to do and why.

I want to use this blog to explore things that make me say; huh? or huh! or huh. And I’ll probably even write about some things that made me say huh but now make me think, Ha! In short, I’ll throw things out there and see what sticks. I would LOVE for you to let me know what you think sticks and what you think stinks. Even better, please let me know WHY you think it sticks or stinks.

Things I intend to explore include; Complexity Theory, Emergence, Evolutionary Psychology, The craft of writing, Politics, Economics, Literature, Physics and Metaphysics. Of course I reserve the right to add any topic that makes me say Huh.

Finally, you may note above, I’ve a link for my writings. Not much there at the moment but eventually I’ll be publishing fiction that has been inspired by the above topics. I’ll sign off for now so I can actually  start writing some of this stuff. Hopefully this blog will encourage you to say, in the best possible way, “huh”.

This is a temporary post. In the event that a real post is ready, this post will disappear. Quote this post at your own peril. It won’t be here long.