A Reliable and Replicable Hallucination

Over the last six months I have come to notice that I experience a specific hallucination more frequently if I am stressed.

The sink in my bathroom makes a high-pitched humming sound. I think it actually vibrates at more than one frequency, creating a phenomenon known in acoustics as "beats." Anytime I turn it on, the sound seems to waver back and forth between two high notes, like the siren of a cop car.

Once, after a few days of intense stress, I was absolutely sure that the sound of the sink was actually the sound of my home alarm and I ran from the bathroom to the alarm console to turn it off. Of course, the console display showed me that there was no activity and I was alarmed to realize that I had experienced a very convincing hallucination. The following days, while washing my hands, I marveled at how I could actually mistake the sound of the faucet for an alarm. They did sound similar, but when not stressed, I felt like the two were distinctly different. I wondered about the neurological state that stress must have driven me to for me to miss the clear distinction in acoustic properties.

As you might have guessed, this misperception has occured over and over during the last few months. Anytime I am stressed, I begin to make this false interpretation and feel startled and momentarily fearful. The worse the stress, the more convinced I am that I am actually hearing the alarm. This phenomenon has, for me, underscored the reliable clinical relationship between stress, dopamine dysregulation and hallucinatory and delusional experiences.

Convincing Actors Trick Lower Brain Systems into Embellishing Their Performance

I think that the best actors are able to trick themselves into becoming emotional when they say their lines. Bad actors aren't convincing because they do not have the emotional thrust to come across as genuine. When we speak freely, the words that we string together into sentences have a neurological pressure behind them. Anytime that we are motivated to do something, dopamine surging from lower brain centers helps to guide our diction and compose our nonverbals. On a neuroscientific level, heartfelt speech has momentous subliminal force behind it.  If you are only using your frontal cortex to guide speech, it will not have this quality and will appear operantly counterfeit to anyone with a trained ear.

Sometimes I will say a line that I like to little effect and wonder why it fell flat. I think that to recreate great lines effectively, you can't just try to say the line the way you have heard a good actor say it. You actually have to be emotionally impelled by the words, you have to feel motivationally compelled to say them, as if, at that moment, there is nothing else you would rather say. Reward systems such as the mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine pathways have to "think" that they are accomplishing something immediately useful for them to create the panoply of unconscious accentuations. When you act genuinely in this way, aspects of the delivery (such as the intonation, inflection and affect) emerge reflexively and unconsciously. I think that this is why it is hard to successfully and persuasively recreate another person's mannerisms, unless you are able to recreate their motives.

Acting involves coercing emotional centers of the brain to cooperate. These limbic regions were built to be turned on and off by “hot” emotional centers, not by our “cool,” conscious mind. They were never evolutionarily programmed to aid humans to manufacture premeditated action in drama or film. We have to recruit these regions deceptively - they have to believe the lines, even if we don't. Impulsive or opinionated people say exactly what they are thinking in front of others. Inhibited people, on the other hand, can come across as inauthentic because they often may not really mean what they say. They know what they are supposed to say, and they say it, but to most people it will sound like what it is - emotionally contrived and devoid of the spontaneity and sentiment that should accompany it. All my life, I have struggled to do a convincing job of being myself and I have found that the only way to do this is to premeditate less, extemporize more, and, quite simply, do what I want more often. This may be a dangerous mode of operation for a young child because a child's first reactions may be morally inexperienced or lacking in social graces. After a full childhood of experience with how to act, it seems that my disinhibited inclinations are finally socially permissible so perhaps I should finally give myself permission to operate off-the-cuff with less deliberation and more theatrics.

Radio Interview & Press Release on Autism

- Press play above to hear an interview that I did with KFWB news radio about autism.

- This is the USC issued press release for the article:


Autism May Have Had Advantages in Human’s Hunter-Gatherer Past, Paper in Evolutionary Psychology Finds

Los Angeles, CA. A brain science researcher at the University of Southern California has concluded that the autism spectrum may represent, not disease, but an ancient way of life for a minority of ancestral humans. The article, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, proposes that some of the genes contributing to autism were selected and maintained because they facilitated solitary subsistence during prehistoric times.Individuals on the autism spectrum are described as having had the potential to be self-sufficient and capable foragers in environments marked by diminished social contact.In other words, these individuals, unlike neurotypical humans, would not have been obligately social and would have been predisposed toward taking up a relatively solitary lifestyle. In fact, certain psychological characteristics of autism are taken as a suite of cognitive adaptations that would have facilitated lone foraging.

People with autism have difficulty interacting socially, preferring to focus on narrow fields of interest. Reser speculates that, in the ancestral past, the penchant for obsessive, repetitive activities would have been focused by hunger and thirst towards the learning and refinement of hunting and gathering skills. Today, autistic children are fed by their parents and so hunger does not actuate or guide their interests and activities. Because modern children with autism are not able to forage or to watch their parents forage, and because they can obtain food free of effort, their interests are redirected toward salient, nonsocial activities; some classic examples being: stacking blocks, flipping light switches, lining toys up in rows, playing with running water, chasing vacuum cleaners, and collecting bottle tops.

A popular new perspective on autism, frequently referred to as the “autism advantage,” purports that unlike mental retardation, autism has compensating benefits including increased abilities for spatial intelligence, concentration and certain forms of attention and memory. A great deal of new research supports this line of reasoning by illustrating that although individuals have trouble with social cognition, their other cognitive abilities are largely intact. Until now though, very little attention has been given to how autism’s advantages may have played a role during human prehistory.

Reser compares the behavior of individuals on the autism spectrum with the behavior of other solitary foraging animals including orangutans and montane voles. Reser points out that like dogs, some animals are obligately social whereas others, like cats, can transition between social and solitary lifestyles. He emphasizes that individuals on the autism spectrum share a variety of behavioral traits with solitary species.  Both are low on measures of gregariousness, socialization, direct gazing, eye contact, facial expression, facial recognition, emotional engagement, affiliative need and other social behaviors. Despite the fact that solitary animals are low on these measures, they do not have difficulty learning the behaviors they need to survive. It may have been the same for individuals with autism.

In prehistoric times group size may have fluctuated greatly and inconsistencies in the ways that natural selection influenced the social abilities of humans may well be responsible for the large variation in social abilities seen in human populations.

“Conceptualizing the autism spectrum in terms of natural selection & behavioral ecology: The solitary forager hypothesis,” is published in Evolutionary Psychology and is available at:

http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP09207238.pdf

Eddie North-Hager / Associate Director of Media Relations /  University of Southern California

•••

- Below are some recent posts about the article, including one by Science Daily. The one at care2.com is very interesting to me. It is written by a doctor who is the mother of a child with autism and it makes several great points.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110603122849.htm

http://www.care2.com/causes/health-policy/blog/the-autism-advantage

http://truthdive.com/2011/06/06/Autism-may-have-played-important-role-in-human-s-hunter-gatherer-past.html

http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/newsroom/news_release.php?id=2419

IBM's Watson plays Jeopardy “Unconsciously”

The video above shows Watson, a computer system with artificial intelligence developed by IBM, participating in a televised game show against Jeopardy record holders Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. The computer uses algorithms (which have been around for a while) to parse out phrases from the jeopardy questions and match them against information in its internal memory. Watson has open access to a memory bank of 200 million pages of text including dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles, literary works and all of the encyclopedic entries of Wikipedia. This information takes up four terabytes of disk space in its RAM based memory. It is not the first computer to solve these kinds of questions but it is the first to do so in the order of a couple of seconds with very high accuracy. 

Watson parses the clues into different keywords and sentence fragments in order to find statistically related phrases. Through the simultaneous execution of thousands of language analysis algorithms, Watson comes up with a number of potential answers (mostly proper nouns or verbs), that are statistically most likely to match the cues given by Jeopardy's Alex Trebek. Watson chooses the answer that has been found most frequently by different, independently operating, algorithmic searches.  

Watson is not conscious. It has proven that it can best the most skilled human trivia practitioners in the world but it doesn't "understand" the questions that it answers. Watson might be able to narrow its associative search down to a single city but it cannot appreciate why it chose the city, cannot visualize what it would be like to visit this city and has no desire to do so. Although it can come up with a precise list of the most closely semantically related words and concepts, it cannot reflect on these in a creative, insightful or emotional way. In some ways though, Watson's method of processing is very much like our own. Its multiassociative approach is much like the way our unconscious mind can select a single answer when given a set of related cues.

Like Watson we have mental representations of words, perceptions and concepts organized in our head and these are associated to one another in various ways. The associations are determined by our experiences and each concept, is associated with many other concepts. To access the memory of a concept, several other closely related concepts must be activated at the same time. In fact, when a set of concepts are coactivated (like the words twinkle, distant and night sky), sometimes there is only one representation that all of these descriptions sum together to activate. Interestingly, even our brain cells, at a very fundamental level are organized for multiassociativity. Individual neurons must have messages being sent to them by many other neurons, for them to increase their firing rate. In the cognitive, neuroscientific and AI sense, representations made active by a jeopardy question send out outputs to many different dormant representations and the ones that are converged upon the most become active. In other words, multiple cues activate tons of different representations, but only the representations that best match the suite of cues - taken all together - are activated maximally to become conscious.  The important question is, are the associative links in your network of associations wired up in such a way that the representation corresponding to the correct answer will become active?

An answer on Jeopardy a few days ago was: The name of a planet, an element and a Roman god. Within three seconds, the question, "what is mercury," popped into my head. It didn't pop in within a few hundred milliseconds so I must have done some conscious thinking beforehand. But I also know that I did not go sequentially down the list of elements and planets in my head in search for a commonality. The node in my brain (which might correspond to a cluster of neurons or even of cortical minicolumns) that corresponds to the concept of mercury, was converged upon and made active by these other concepts in an automatic and unconscious way. 

Snap judgments are made, unconsciously, in this way. But humans can do more than just make blind, automatic multiassociative guesses. Given time and the motivation to deliberate, humans can contemplate questions from a variety of different perspectives. It seems to me that most Jeopardy questions offer a number of associative cues that will automatically cue up the answer in a contestant’s head if they know it. Some Jeopardy questions seem to offer cues that require additional processing and the use of inferential and deductive thinking. Interestingly, Watson seems to be able to make up for its lack of human logic, on questions like these, with processing power and extensive memory.

To me the important question is, how does one imbue a system like Watson’s with human-like consciousness beyond instantaneous multiassociation? I think that the answer lies in endowing a computing system like Watson with the equivalent of a prefrontal cortex to keep certain representations active through the span of several seconds. Of course, this form of artificial intelligence would have to have a prolonged series of developmental experiences, similar to a childhood, to learn which representations to keep active in which scenarios. By maintaining the activiation of a representation, something that happend moments ago can impact future activity. This may not help much in Jeopardy where each question is meant to stand on its own independent from the other questions. However, in my mind, extended activation is totally responsible for the creativity, insight and emotionality that is necessary for most human activities. 

Mental Disorders at the Office

I have suspected for a long time that almost every one of the characters in NBC’s TV series “The Office” has a psychological disorder - even if it is a slightly subclinical one. Each character has a flaw that causes them to consistently make the same types of misconstruals, misapprehensions or misjudgements.  Often these mistakes lead the characters to commit serious social or occupational blunders making my favourite show on television a madhouse confined within the four walls of second story, Scranton, Pennsylvania office space.  In my Mom's opinion, the writers either intentionally modelled their characters after common psychiatric or psychological disorders or else at least a few of them have an uncanny sense of how and where everyday people can go wrong. What follows is a list of the characters and the psychological disorders that I think they are supposed to represent.

Few of the characters deserve a full blown diagnosis, rather most have tendencies or habits that are characteristic of a specific disorder. Further, some of the characters' patterns of behavior don’t map onto a true disorder but to a personality trait. A person usually only receives a diagnosis if their disorder consistently and adversely affects their well-being, their social life, their economic status or the people around them. On these criteria, you be the judge. Characters are listed in an order that reflects the severity of their disorder, with the first being the most severe. Most of the descriptors below are symptom criteria coming straight out of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

Michael Scott:
ADD: Inattentive, impulsive, inattention to detail, careless mistakes, does not follow through, difficulty organizing tasks and activities, forgetful, easily distracted by extraneous stimuli

Dwight Schrute:
Aspergers Syndrome: Impaired social and emotional interaction, impaired empathy and sympathy, forced to compensate for deficit of empathy by memorizing social patterns, idiosyncratic communication, make-believe inappropriate to developmental level, intense asocial preoccupations, obsessed with details that have no social consequences, other symptoms of autism

Creed Bratton:
Schizophrenia or Schizotypy: Disturbance of consciousness, poor clarity of awareness of the environment, reduced ability to sustain or shift attention, disorientation, memory impairment, frequent derailment of thought, incoherent, odd, eccentric or peculiar,

Angela Martin:
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: recurrent and persistent thoughts about maintaining structure and order despite anxiety and stress that they may cause, preoccupied with lists, details and organization, feels driven to behaviors that are subject to rigid rules, overconscientious, scrupulous and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics or values. Hyperfrontality: habits pertaining to hygiene or social conventions are clearly excessive

Ryan Howard:
Narcissism: grandiose sense of self and inflated ego, arrogant and egoistic, is interpersonally exploitative and opportunistic, takes advantage of others, exaggerates achievements and talents, preoccupied with fantasies of success and power, has a sense of entitlement, lacks empathy

Erin Hannon:
Avoidant: avoids interpersonal activities that involve social contact in an effort to avoid criticism, disapproval or rejection, unwilling to become involved unless certain of being liked, shows restraint within intimate relationships for fear of shame, ridicule, inadequacy or embarrassment

Kevin Malone:
Mental Retardation: Does not meet the standards of his age group for pragmatics, communication, or self direction.

Kelly Kapoor:
Dependent Personality Disorder: pervasive and excessive fear of separation leading to clinging behavior, necessitates advice and reassurance from others, false veil of openness, extraversion and sociability.

Mr. Mifflin:
Alzheimer’s Disease: Significant memory impairment and advanced cognitive deficit, forgetfulness, disorientation

Toby Flenderson:
Depression: depressed mood throughout the day, feels sad or empty, low self esteem, feelings of hopelessness or melancholy, diminished interest or pleasure in most activities

Meredith Palmer:
Alcohol Dependence, Substance Abuse, Addictive Personality, Hyperactive Sexual Desire

Jan Levinson:
Neurotic: Impelled by distressed, anxious or angry energy

Stanley Hudson:
Antisocial / Psychoticism: failure to be apprehensive of aggressive acts, irritability, lack of remorse, indifference

Andy Bernard:
Intermittent Explosive Disorder: several episodes of failure to resist aggressive impulses that result in harm or destruction of property. Degree of aggressiveness is out of proportion to the precipitating psychosocial stressor, age inappropriate displays of anger

Jo Bennett:
Histrionic: uncomfortable in situations in which she is not the center of attention, uses physical appearance to draw attention, inflated ego, has a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic

Phyllis Lapin-Vance:
Eating Disorder

Oscar Martinez:
Conscientious

Pam Halpert:
Low Self-esteem, but she is much better now

Jim Halpert:
Procrastination, Sarcasm, Competitiveness

Darryl Philbin:
Surgency

Holly Flax:
I guess she is just a bit nerdy