Brain Buys (34 page)

23
The described study was performed by Sugita and Suzuki (2003). For related studies on simultaneity perception see Fujisake et al. (2004) and Miyazaki et al. (2006).

24
When deciding whether two events are simultaneous, the brain is faced with two opposing dilemmas. On the physical side, light travels faster than sound, so the sight of the cymbals clashing arrives at the eye before the sound arrives at the ear. However, there is the complicating factor of how long the eye and ear take to relay this information to the relevant areas in the brain. It turns out that the ear is actually much quicker than the eye. While it might take more than 200 milliseconds to press a button in response to a light going on, it can take 160 milliseconds to respond to a tone. This is in large part due to the physiology of the retina, which relies on comparatively slow biochemical reactions to transduce light into bioelectrical signals, whereas sound relies on the more-rapid physical movements of specialized cilia to generate electrical signals. Thus, strictly speaking, even when we experience close-up events, and sight and sound arrive effectively simultaneously, the perception of simultaneity is still somewhat “fudged” because the auditory signal arrives in the brain first. What we judge as simultaneous is not as much about whether the physical signatures of two events arrive simultaneously in our brain, but whether through hardwiring and experience our brain opts to provide the illusion of simultaneity.

25
McDonald et al., 2005.

26
Nijhawan, 1994; Eagleman and Sejnowski, 2000. An example of this illusion can be found at
www.brainbugs.org
.

27
Maruenda, 2004; Gilis et al., 2008.

28
Ivry and Spencer, 2004.

29
Mauk and Buonomano, 2004; Buhusi and Meck, 2005; Buonomano, 2007.

30
Konopka and Benzer, 1971; Golden et al., 1998; King and Takahashi, 2000; McClung, 2001.

31
King and Takahashi, 2000; Panda et al., 2002.

32
Buonomano and Mauk, 1994; Medina et al., 2000; Buonomano and Karmarkar, 2002.

33
Goldman, 2009; Liu and Buonomano, 2009; Fiete et al., 2010.

34
Lebedev et al., 2008; Pastalkova et al., 2008; Jin et al., 2009; Long et al., 2010. Additionally, it has been shown that even in isolated cortical networks, activity patterns in neurons may establish a population clock for time (Buonomano, 2003).

35
This may be the case in some contemporary hunter-gatherer groups (Everett, 2008).

36
Mischel et al., 1989; Eigsti et al., 2006.

37
Wittmann and Paulus, 2007; Seeyave et al., 2009.

CHAPTER 5: FEAR FACTOR

1
Close to 3000 people died during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington. There were 168 fatalities in the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995. A summary of weather-related fatalities can be found at
www.weather.gov/os/hazstats.shtml
.

2
For fatal car accident deaths from 2002 through 2006 see
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810820.pdf
. For mortality rates and causes in 2005 see
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/LCWK9_2005.pdf
or
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus05.pdf
for the complete report.

3
A Gallup poll conducted in 2006 asked, “How likely is it that there will be acts of terrorism in the United States over the next several weeks?” Approximately 50 percent of the responders answered very/somewhat likely, a number that was still at 39 percent in 2009 (
http://www.gallup.com/poll/124547/Majority-Americans-Think-Near-Term-Terrorism-Unlikely.aspx
).

4
Breier et al., 1987; Sapolsky, 1994.

5
LeDoux, 1996.

6
Pinker, 1997.

7
Quote from Darwin (1839), p. 288. By the time Darwin arrived on the Galapagos Islands, humans had already visited it for over a hundred years, and he comments that according to previous accounts it appeared that the birds were even tamer in the past.

8
A bug in the early Intel Pentium chips was rarely of consequence and likely affected very few users; however, if you were a user that needed to calculate (4195835 × 3145727)/3145727, and were expecting the first number in return, you’d be in trouble.

9
Pongracz and Altbacker, 2000; McGregor et al., 2004.

10
Tinbergen, 1948. Attempts to replicate Tinbergen and Lorenz’s original reports have been mixed. Canty and Gould (1995) discusses the reasons for this, and replicates Tinbergen and Lorenz’s principal observations.

11
For papers on the effect of
Toxoplasma
infections on fear in rats see Berdoy et al. (2000); Gonzalez et al. (2007); Vyas et al. (2007). For a general discussion of neuroparasitism and behavioral manipulation see Thomas et al. (2005).

12
Katkin et al., 2001.

13
Craske and Waters, 2005; Mineka and Zinbarg, 2006.

14
For reviews of the role of the amygdala in mediating fear see LeDoux (1996); Fendt and Fanselow (1999); Kandel et al. (2000).

15
Adolphs et al., 1994; Adolphs, 2008; Kandel et al., 2000; Sabatinelli et al., 2005.

16
Fendt and Faneslow, 1999; Blair et al., 2001; Sah et al., 2008.

17
These experiments are described in McKernan and Shinnick-Gallagher (1997). For a related set of experiments see Tsvetkov et al. (2002) and Zhou et al. (2009).

18
In this case the presynaptic activity corresponds to the tone, and the postsynaptic activity corresponds to activity produced by the shock during fear conditioning. Note that the shock, an innately painful and fear-inducing experience, would naturally be able to drive neurons in the amygdala in the absence of learning.

19
In some cases blocking the NMDA receptors can also alter the expression of fear, presumably because the NMDA receptors also play a role in driving neuronal activity. But at least two studies show that NMDA blockers primarily affect learning and not expression of previously learned fear-conditioned responses (Rodrigues et al., 2001; Goosens and Maren, 2004).

20
Han et al., 2009.

21
Quirk et al., 2006; Herry et al., 2008.

22
Milekic and Alberini, 2002; Dudai, 2006.

23
Monfils et al., 2009; Schiller et al., 2010.

24
Darwin, 1871, p. 73.

25
Cook and Mineka, 1990; Ohman and Mineka, 2001; Nelson et al., 2003.

26
Askew and Field, 2007; Dubi et al., 2008.

27
Esteves et al., 1994; Katkin et al., 2001.

28
Williams et al., 2004; Watts et al., 2006.

29
De Waal, 2005, p. 139.

30
For a brief discussion of fear of strangers in animal and human infants see Menzies and Clark (1995).

31
Manson et al., 1991.

32
De Waal, 2005.

33
Darwin, 1871; Bowles, 2009.

34
Olsson and Phelps, 2004; Olsson and Phelps, 2007. Even mice can learn to fear certain places by observing other mice receiving shocks within that context. Even more surprisingly, the magnitude of learning is higher if the demonstrator mouse is related to or the partner of the observer mouse (Jeon et al., 2010).

35
Seligman, 1971; Mineka and Zinbarg, 2006.

36
Machiavelli, 1532/1910.

37
Gore, 2007.

38
Gore, 2004.

39
Wise, 2008.

40
LeDoux, 1996, p. 303.

41
Slovic, 1987; Glassner, 1999.

42
Enserink, 2008. See also S. Shane, “F.B.I., laying out evidence, closes anthrax letters case,”
The New York Times
, February 20, 2010. Bruce Ivins, the primary suspect, committed suicide shortly before the FBI officially charged him.

43
F. Zakaria, “America needs a war president,”
Newsweek
, July 21, 2008.

44
Preston, 1998; Gladwell, 2001.

45
The GAO reports that the total Department of Defense budget was $760 billion, and that the Department of Homeland Security had a budget of $60 billion in 2008 (
http://www.gao.gov/financial/fy2008/08stmt.pdf
). See also T. Shanker and C. Drew, “Pentagon faces intensifying pressures to trim budget,”
The New York Times
, July 22, 2010, and
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941
.

46
http://report.nih.gov/rcdc/categories
.

47
A valid counterargument is, of course, that the United States’ military spending functions as a deterrent and that we have had so few attacks on American soil precisely because of our military might. This argument, however, does not seem to hold, as the number of casualties as a result of international war or terrorism of both our neighbors Mexico and Canada, on their respective soil, has also been very low over the past 100 years, despite the fact that their military budgets are a small fraction of that of the United States’.

48
Glassner, 2004.

CHAPTER 6: UNREASONABLE REASONING

1
Hellman, 2001, p. 37.

2
The following references provide excellent discussions of the history of puerperal fever: Weissmann, 1997; Hellman, 2001.

3
Kingdom et al., 2007.

4
Bornstein, 1989.

5
Cognitive biases have been reviewed in a number of popular science books (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1994; Ariely, 2008; Brafman and Brafman, 2008; Thaler and Sunstein, 2008) and some more technical accounts (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Gilovich et al., 2002; Gigerenzer, 2008).

6
Tversky and Kahneman, 1981.

7
De Martino et al., 2006. Note that this example of framing is also an example of loss aversion.

8
Tversky and Kahneman, 1981.

9
Kahneman et al., 1991. Although not enough studies have been performed to determine whether people spend more when paying by credit card versus cash (Prelec and Simester, 2000; Hafalir and Loewenstein, 2010), it is possible that any trend to spend more when paying with a credit card could tap into loss aversion: when we pay with cash we materially give up something of value that was in our possession, whereas the physical credit card remains in our possession.

10
Tversky and Kahneman, 1974. Anchoring bias holds even when the anchors represent the same physical quantity. For instance, in another study one group of subjects was asked if they thought the length of an airport runway was shorter or longer than 7.3 km, while another group was asked if they thought the same runway was shorter or longer than 7300 m; both groups were next asked how much they thought an air-conditioned bus cost. The estimates of the first group were significantly lower than that of the second (Wong and Kwong, 2000).

11
At the time of the study Brad Pitt was 45 and Joseph Biden was 66. Unpaired
t
-test value for Joe Biden’s age:
t
₂₄
= 2.71,
p
= .009 (a significant value also after correction for multiple comparisons). For Brad Pitt’s age: t
₂₄
= 1.06,
p
= .29.

12
D. Wilson, “Ex-smoker wins against Philip Morris,”
The New York Times
, November 20, 2009 (
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202435734408
).

13
Chapman and Bornstein, 1996; Kristensen and Garling, 1996.

14
Kahneman et al., 1991.

15
Knutson et al., 2008.

16
Brafman and Brafman, 2008.

17
Tom et al., 2007.

18
The perceived value of money, or its utility, is also less than linear: the difference between $10 and $20 seems to be much more than the difference between $1010 and $1020. But in terms of its actual value, the services and goods it can acquire, it is a linear resource.