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Archive for the ‘We're Only Human’ Category

In French, that means old, healthy . . . and bilingual. I could just as well have used Google Translate to put that phrase into Finnish or Spanish or Chinese. The fact is, I don’t speak any of those languages fluently—any language except English really. Which puts me in good company: When Senator Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency back in 2008, he told a crowd in Dayton, Ohio: “I don’t speak a foreign language. It’s embarrassing.”

It is embarrassing. But worse than that, it may be unhealthy. New research suggests that bilingualism may convey previously unrecognized cognitive benefits—benefits that appear early and last a lifetime. These benefits may go well beyond language itself. Indeed, speaking two languages may shape the mind and brain in fundamental ways, creating mental reserves that help stave off the ravages of dementia.

That’s the surprising possibility emerging from an ongoing research project at York University in Ontario. Cognitive psychologist Ellen Bialystok has for years been testing and comparing people who speak one or two languages, including children, adults and the elderly. Her overall conclusion is that bilingualism enhances the brain’s “executive control.” That’s a catchall term that encompasses the ability to pay attention, to ignore distractions, to hold information in short-term memory, to do more than one task at a time. It’s mental discipline, and it typically emerges in childhood and declines in old age.

Bialystok has tested this many different ways. Here’s one example: She had 4- and 5-year-old kids do a card sorting task. The cards show circles or triangles, some red and some blue, and the kids are told to sort the deck by color. Later they are told to switch—and sort the same cards by shape. Young children usually have great difficulty making this mental switch, but when Bialystok ran the experiment, bilingual kids were much better with the rule change. This indicates heightened executive control.

This advantage appears to persist into adulthood. Bialystok (working with various colleagues) compared bilinguals and monolinguals on various lab tests that require mental discipline. The Stroop test is one such test. That’s the one where you have the word R-E-D printed in blue, and you have to rapidly name the ink color rather than read the word. It’s hard—and again the bilinguals consistently did better than subjects who only spoke one language. Or looked at another way, monolinguals had a cognitive deficit—and this deficit appears to increase as adults get older.

Right into old age. Bialystok wanted to explore whether enhanced executive control actually has a protective effect in mental aging—specifically, whether bilingualism contributes to the “cognitive reserve” that comes from stimulating social, mental and physical activity. She studied a large group of men and women with dementia, and compared the onset of their first symptoms. The age of onset for dementia was a full four years later in bilinguals than in patients who had lived their lives speaking just one language. That’s a whopping difference. Delaying dementia four years is more than any known drug can do, and could represent a huge savings in health care costs.
Is there any downside to bilingualism? Yes. As reported on-line in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Bialystok’s studies also found that bilinguals have less linguistic proficiency in either of their two languages than do those who only speak that language. They have somewhat smaller vocabularies, for example, and aren’t as rapid at retrieving word meanings. But compared to the dramatic cognitive advantages of learning a second language, that seems a small price to pay. Plus you can travel to Paris without the embarrassment of constantly thumbing through your dog-eared French for Dummies.

Wray Herbert’s “We’re Only Human” column appears regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. His book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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Louis Brandeis was already one of America’s most famous lawyers when Woodrow Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1916. He was a tireless and prescient critic of big investment banks—including bankers’ excessive bonuses—an argument he spelled out in his influential book of essays, Other People’s Money and How Bankers Use It. His solution for the problem of concentrated financial power was unfettered public scrutiny, a belief he summarized in his famous statement: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Justice Brandeis was an intuitive psychologist. When he said that the “broad light of day” would purify men’s actions, he was anticipating a field of research that is just now beginning to illuminate the intricate interplay of the mind, the body, and morality. Light, it appears, does much more than distinguish day from night; it takes away our illusion of anonymity and, in doing so, literally keeps us honest.

This seems obvious on one level. Streetlights were most likely invented to deter crime, and big power outages are almost inevitably followed by looting. But darkness in that sense is actual cover for criminals, like a mask. The new research suggests that even non-criminals may be influenced by the metaphorical meaning of light and darkness, becoming more dishonest and self-centered as light diminishes.

Here’s the science. Three psychologists—Chen-Bo Zhong and Vanessa Bohns of the University of Toronto and Francesca Gino of the University of North Carolina—wanted to explore the idea that metaphorical darkness leads to illusory anonymity, and in turn to moral transgression. In one experiment, they had a group of volunteers perform a complicated mathematical task—so complicated that it was impossible to complete in the time allotted. When they ran out of time, the volunteers were told to pay themselves only for the work they were able to finish. This was all done anonymously, although secretly the scientists were monitoring the volunteers’ actions.

Half the volunteers did this sham exercise is a brightly lit room, with twelve overhead light bulbs, while the others did it in a room dimly lit by just four bulbs. The idea was to see if those in the darker room were more likely to cheat than those working in bright light. And they were, indisputably. They not only lied about their performance on the difficult task, they also paid themselves more cash for work they had failed to do. In short, they lied, cheated and stole money.

It’s important to note that, while one room was darker than the other, neither room was actually dark. That is, the lack of illumination was not enabling the cheating; and indeed, the task was (ostensibly) anonymous anyway, so there was nothing really to hide. It’s not like they were tip-toeing out of the room with cash. Yet the dim lighting gave volunteers the psychological license to behave unethically.

These findings were bizarre enough that the scientists wanted to double-check them. So in a second experiment, instead of dimming the room, they had only some of the volunteers wear sunglasses to dim their view. Then all the volunteers participated in a laboratory exercise called the dictator’s game. The dictator’s game is a test of fairness and greed; one volunteer (the initiator) has a given pot of cash, and is allowed to give away all, some or none of it to another, who can accept or reject it. In this experiment, all the volunteers were initiators; the scientists simply wanted to see how generous or stingy they were, depending on whether they were wearing sunglasses or not.

Shades corrupt. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those with a slightly darkened view of the world gave away considerably less money—less than what’s fair and less than the volunteers not wearing shades. Darkness gave them the sensation that they were more concealed, and that in turn made them greedier people.

Think about this for a minute. The researchers were not manipulating light and darkness so that some actually had more cover. They were the ones perceiving a darker world, and that perception was enough to license their transgressions. What’s going on here? Well, the researchers believe that dimming the lights or wearing sunglasses is a kind of egocentric mental “anchor”; because they see the world as somewhat darkened, they assume that others have an obscured view of them as well. They act not as if they have sunglasses on, but as if there has been a widespread power outage that has darkened everyone’s world.

Kids are notoriously egocentric in this way. They’ll close their eyes when they play hide-and-seek, thinking that they can’t be seen if they themselves can’t see. Apparently, adults don’t outgrow this egocentrism entirely. But what’s cute in a childhood game of hide-and-seek isn’t nearly so cute in grownup games with other people’s money.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog as True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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Imagine this scenario: You lost your job at the lumber yard early in 2009. Nobody is building new homes these days, and this slowdown has trickled down to suppliers all over the country. What’s worse, you’re dipping into savings just to make your own mortgage payments—on a house that has lost a big chunk of its value. In short, your American dream is in shambles.

It’s a dreary but all too familiar scenario. Now imagine further how you feel about this. Is worry your primary emotion? Are you anxious about your wife’s health, and the possibility of an expensive hospitalization? Are you fearful about depleting your kids’ college funds? Where will you all live if you lose the house?

Or are you mostly angry? After all, this situation is totally unfair, given how hard you have worked all these years. Who’s to blame? Those fat cat bankers are still drawing their obscene bonuses, while working guys like you are barely eking out a living. Someone’s got to pay for this mess.

Both fear and anger are understandable under these dire circumstances. But what are you going to do? Well, there‘s an election coming up later this year. Here’s your chance to at least take some action, to raise your citizen’s voice and be heard. How will you exercise this civic responsibility when you go to the polls in November?

We like to think that our democracy is rational, that as voters we educate ourselves on the issues and choose the candidate who best represents our views. Emotions, while natural, would seem to undermine this civic ideal, leading to cynicism and confused thinking and wrongheaded choices. But is it so simple? New research suggests that emotions can indeed skew voting behavior—but in surprising and nuanced ways.

University of Massachusetts scientists Michael Parker and Linda Isbell rigged an election to explore the interplay of specific emotions and voting. Not a real election, of course, but a hypothetical Democratic primary election for the Massachusetts state senate. They created two candidates, John Clarkson and Tom Richards, each with detailed positions on a dozen important public issues. The candidates’ positions are spelled out on the candidates’ Web sites, along with general information on each aspiring senator.

The researchers recruited a large number of volunteers, all Massachusetts residents, to act as voters in this election. They were directed to the Web sites, and told to peruse as much information as they liked, in any manner they wanted—and to consider whatever they needed to make an informed voting decision. Clarkson and Richards actually agreed on most of the issues, though they stated their views differently. The general information was vague, but made clear that each candidate was well qualified.

But here’s the rub: Before the voters started researching the issues and candidates, some were primed for fear and others for anger—much like the scenarios above. The idea was to see if these two basic human emotions shaped civic behavior in different ways. That is, did angry citizens size up candidates one way, and anxious voters a different way? And did these thinking styles translate into different behavior at the polls?

The answer is a resounding yea. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the worried voters were much more deliberate and organized in their thinking than were the angry voters, spending significantly more time exploring the candidates’ Web sites. What’s more, the anxious citizens actually voted for the candidates whose positions they agreed with; in other words, democracy worked the way it’s supposed to work. This may seem obvious, but it wasn’t to the angry citizens, for whom there was no apparent connection among issues and positions and ballot-box choices.

So what was influencing the angry voters, if not the issues of the day and the candidates promises? Apparently it was the vague general information that guided their choices. In the real world, that means things like basic name recognition, party loyalty, and simplistic political labels. The angry voters didn’t take the time to really concentrate on the issues and positions, and instead let these skimpy generalities guide them. It appears their anger was switching their brain from deliberate mode to automatic mode—to gut feelings more than rational analysis. The worried citizens had too much at stake to trust their gut.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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I become misanthropic every February. I avoid social gatherings, and really just want to hole up at home. I always assumed it was the dark evenings and slippery sidewalks and general misery of venturing outside. But truth be told, I don’t want guests visiting me either. Not until the crocuses come through.

Or not until cold and flu season is over, more accurately. New research suggests that my anti-social ways may have little to do with friendliness or lack of it. Indeed, my attitudes and actions may be self-protective, part of an ancient, hard-wired psychological immune system, shaped over eons to help humans steer clear of germs.

Think of it from an evolutionary point of view. Group living conveyed many survival benefits for early humans, but it also carried risks—most notably the spread of harmful disease. The body’s immune system is very good at fighting off germs, but it’s a costly system to operate. In the parlance of immunology, people are vectors, and another way to avoid sickness is simply to avoid disease carriers in the first place. In this sense, extraversion is costly and introversion is adaptive—especially during flu season.

That’s the theory at least, which psychologist Chad Mortensen of Arizona State University has been investigating in his lab. He and his colleagues wanted to see if exposure to germs—or at least the idea of germs and illness—would change people’s basic perceptions about themselves as social beings. To test this, they showed a group of volunteers a slide show about germs and contagious disease, while control subjects watched a slide show about architecture. Afterward, all the volunteers completed a personality inventory, which includes measures of extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience. Finally, the researchers assessed each volunteer’s feelings of vulnerability to disease— basically, how much they fret about getting sick.

They anticipated that the volunteers with disease on their minds would see themselves as more reclusive. And that’s just what they found. The infection-minded volunteers saw themselves as less gregarious than did controls, and the hypochondriacs in the group also saw themselves as less open-minded about people and less cooperative. In other words, the more intense the volunteers’ worry about infection, the less they desired the company of others.

That’s striking in itself. But attitudes and self-perceptions are only an effective defense if they change people’s actual behavior. So in a second experiment, the scientists came up with an ingenious way to measure actual avoidance. As before, they primed only some of the volunteers with worries about infection and illness. Then they exposed all the volunteers to pictures of faces, while measuring their arm movements. Very subtle pushing away is an indicator of social avoidance, as when we push away something undesirable; flexing similarly indicates acceptance. As expected and reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those primed to fret about germs were more avoidant; and the chronic hypochondriacs were the most avoidant by far.

So that’s a pretty nifty defense mechanism. Or at least it was a one time. But these evolved tendencies are often blunt instruments, and this hard-wired bias against germs may go awry in the modern world. For example, sensitivity to disease threats can be indiscriminate, causing people to judge and avoid not only sick people but also obese people and people with disabilities. And because people who are unfamiliar pose an especially potent threat of unknown diseases, the psychological immune system might also foster xenophobia toward foreigners, anti-gay attitudes, and right-wing authoritarianism. That’s a big price to pay, just to dodge a sore throat and sniffles.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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Our household is a rolling Alfred Hitchcock festival. We almost always have at least one of the celebrated director’s films on DVD, and over the years we have watched most of our favorites—Suspicion, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps—time and time again. It’s a tribute to the master’s skills and sensibility that his films have such enduring appeal, because many films from the same time period have a distinctly “old” feel to them. It’s not just the primitive cameras and films. There is something about the rhythm and texture of early cinema that has a very different “feel” than modern films. But it’s hard to put one’s finger on just what that something is.

New research may help explain this elusive quality. Cognitive psychologist and film buff James Cutting of Cornell University decided to use the sophisticated tools of modern perception research to deconstruct 70 years of film, shot by shot. He measured the duration of every single shot in every scene of 150 of the most popular films released from 1935 to 2005. The films represented five major genres—action, adventure, animation, comedy and drama. Using a complex mathematical formula, Cutting translated these sequences of shot lengths into “waves” for each film.

What Cutting was looking for were patterns of attention. Specifically, he was looking for a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation. The 1/f fluctuation is a concept from chaos theory, and it means a pattern of attention that occurs naturally in the human mind. Indeed, it’s a rhythm that appears throughout nature, in music, in engineering, economics, and elsewhere. In short, it’s a constant in the universe, though it’s often undetectable in the apparent chaos.

Cutting found that modern films—those made after 1980—were much more likely than earlier films to approach this universal constant. That is, the sequences of shots selected by director, cinematographer and film editor have gradually merged over the years with the natural pattern of human attention. This explains the more natural feel of newer films—and the “old” feel of earlier ones. Modern movies may be more engrossing—we get “lost” in them more readily—because the universe’s natural rhythm is driving the mind.

What does this mean? Cutting doesn’t believe that filmmakers have deliberately crafted their movies to match this pattern in nature. Instead, he believes the relatively young art form has gone through a kind of natural selection, as the edited rhythms of shot sequences were either successful or unsuccessful in producing more coherent and gripping films. The most engaging—and successful—films were subsequently imitated by other filmmakers, so that over time the industry as a whole evolved toward an imitation of this natural cognitive pattern.

Over all, action movies are the genre that most closely approximates the 1/f pattern, followed by adventure, animation, comedy and drama. But as Cutting reports on-line in the journal Psychological Science, individual films from every genre have almost perfect 1/f rhythms. The Perfect Storm, released in 2000, is one of them, as is Rebel Without a Cause, though it was made in 1955. So too is The 39 Steps, Hitchcock’s masterpiece from way back in 1935.

For more insights into the quirks of the human mind, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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The calorie war is heating up. It’s actually been simmering for some time, sparked by an alarming obesity rate among young Americans and related spikes in diabetes and other health problems. Nobody really disputes this sorry trend anymore, but there is a lot of disagreement over what to do about it. Public health advocates are clamoring for everything from warning labels on junk food to aggressive television marketing campaigns, even for outright prohibitions. Just last week, the Obama administration entered the fray, calling for a total ban on candy and soda in the nation’s schools.

Some see the past tobacco war as the proper model for this public health campaign. Indeed, one idea that has gotten traction recently is another “sin tax”—this one a fat and sugar tax—to dissuade people from eating junk food. Yale University psychologist and diet expert Kelly Brownell, writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine last spring, called for a penny-per-ounce tax on soda sweetened with sugar or corn syrup. Only such a tax, he believes—and not lectures about nutrition and exercise—will make people eat more sensibly, and what’s more, the revenue could be used to promote healthier foods and habits.

Not everyone agrees. Pricing strategies may well be a key to changing behavior, but others favor subsidies over punitive taxes, as a way to encourage people to eat fruits and vegetables and whole grains. The problem is that both these market approaches—taxes and subsidies—are founded on the belief that people make rational economic decisions: Make it cheaper and people will eat more of it, more expensive and people will eat less. But decades of behavioral economics research argues that consumers are not always so rational. And the two strategies have never been tested head to head, to see which one most effectively alters calorie consumption.

Until now. Leonard Epstein, a clinical psychologist at the University of Buffalo, decided to explore the persuasiveness of sin taxes and subsidies in the laboratory, and he did so in an innovative way. He and his colleagues turned their lab into a simulated grocery store, “stocked” with images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper and nachos. A group of volunteers—all mothers—were given laboratory “money” to shop for a week’s groceries for the family. Each food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby, and each food came with basic nutritional information.

The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is, they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5 %, and then by 25%; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then they watched what the mothers purchased.

It’s important to know how the scientists defined healthy and unhealthy foods. They used an index called calorie-for-nutrition value, of CFN, which simply means the number of calories one must eat to get the same nutritional payoff. So for example, nonfat cottage cheese has a very low CFN, because it is packed with nutrition but not with calories; chocolate chip cookies have a much higher CFN. The most sinful food in the store was commercial iced tea, with a whopping CFN equivalent to ten times that of chocolate chip cookies. The researchers also measured the energy density—basically calories—in every food.

Then they crunched all the data together, and the findings were striking. To put it bluntly, taxes worked and subsidies did not. Specifically, taxing unhealthy foods reduced overall calorie intake, while cutting the proportion of fat and carbs and upping the proportion of protein in a typical week’s groceries. By contrast, subsidizing the prices of healthy food increased overall calorie consumption without changing the nutritional value at all. Why? As reported on-line last week in the journal Psychological Science, it appears that mothers took the money they saved on subsidized fruits and vegetables and treated the family to some chips and soda pop. Taxes had basically the opposite effect, shifting spending from junk to healthier choices.

The scientists conclude that subsidizing broccoli and yogurt—as appealing as that idea might be to some—is unlikely to bring about the massive weight loss the nation now requires.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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Male homosexuality doesn’t make complete sense from an evolutionary point of view. It appears that the trait is heritable, but since homosexual men are much less likely to produce offspring than heterosexual men, shouldn’t the genes for this trait have been extinguished long ago? What value could this sexual orientation have, that it has persisted for eons even without any discernible reproductive advantage?

One possible explanation is what evolutionary psychologists call the “kin selection hypothesis.” What that means is that homosexuality may convey an indirect benefit by enhancing the survival prospects of close relatives. Specifically, the theory holds that homosexual men might enhance their own prospects by being “helpers in the nest.” By acting altruistically toward nieces and nephews, homosexual men—bachelor uncles in effect—would perpetuate the family genes, including their own.

Two evolutionary psychologists have been testing this idea for the past several years on the Pacific island of Samoa. Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan of Lethbridge University, Canada, chose Samoa because male homosexuals there—called fa’afafine—are widely recognized and accepted as a distinct gender category, neither man nor woman. The fa’afafine tend to be effeminate, and to be exclusively homosexual. This clear demarcation makes it easier to identify a sample for study.

The researchers have shown in past research that the fa’afafine behave much more altruistically toward their nieces and nephews than do either Samoan women or heterosexual men. They babysit a lot, tutor the kids in art and music, and help out financially—paying for medical care and education and so forth. That’s interesting in itself, but it’s unclear just why they behave this way. What’s going on cognitively that supports such avuncular acts. In their most recent study, the scientists set out to unravel the psychology of the fa’afafine, to see if their altruism is targeted specifically at kin rather than kids in general.

They recruited a large sample of fa’afafine, and comparable samples of women and heterosexual men. They gave them all a series of questionnaires, measuring their willingness to help their nieces and nephews in various ways—caretaking, gifts, teaching—and also their willingness to do these things for other, unrelated kids. The findings, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, lend strong support to the kin selection idea. Compared to Samoan women and heterosexual men, the fa’afafine showed a much weaker link between their avuncular behavior and their altruism toward kids generally. This cognitive disconnect, the scientists argue, allows the fa’afafine to allocate their resources more efficiently and precisely to their kin—and thus enhance their own evolutionary prospects.

But these aren’t your garden variety uncles. From an evolutionary perspective, you can’t make up for not having any offspring just by giving a toy to your nephew, or tossing a football with your niece once in a while. Indeed, to compensate for being childless, each fa’afafine would have to somehow support the survival of two additional nieces or nephews who would otherwise not have existed. In short, the fa’afafine must be “super uncles” to earn their evolutionary keep.

Do these findings have any meaning outside of Samoa? Yes and no. Samoan culture is very different from most Western cultures. Samoan culture is very localized, and centered on tight-knit extended families, whereas Western societies tend to be highly individualistic and homophobic. Families are also much more geographically dispersed in Western cultures, diminishing the role that bachelor uncles can play in the extended family, even if they choose to. But in this sense, the researchers say, Samoa’s communitarian culture may be more—not less—representative of the environment in which male homosexuality evolved eons ago. In that sense, it’s not the bachelor uncle who is poorly adapted to the world, but rather the modern Western world that has evolved into an unwelcoming place.

For more insights into human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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Say you are traveling in a foreign country, trying to find your way through the bustling capital city. Not Paris or London, some place a bit edgier. Bangkok. You don’t speak the language, and you’re a little frazzled. You walk into a café for some respite, and to your surprise to see a fellow you know from back home sitting at a corner table, sipping coffee. He’s hardly a friend, but you know him to say hello. How do you feel? Well, after the initial surprise, you probably feel a warm glow as you walk up and greet him. You’re genuinely happy to see his familiar face in this strange place. He’s like an old friend.

Now, simply switch cities. You’re back at home and the same basic scenario takes place: You walk into a café, and there’s the same acquaintance, sitting at a corner table sipping coffee. How do you feel today? Well, if you’re like most people, you don’t feel much of anything. You recognize him, but no smile comes to your face. You might nod hello, but you’re really more focused on getting your morning coffee.

Same face, similar scenario. So what’s going on here? Are you a couple of hypocrites? Well, don’t feel bad. First of all, he’s probably not feeling all that warmly toward you either. And what’s more, your own mixed feelings are probably beyond your control. That warm glow of recognition may be hard-wired into your neurons, but it’s also tightly entwined with other emotions, notably fears about personal peril and a yearning for safety.

At least that’s a theory, which a team of cognitive psychologists have recently been testing in the laboratory. According to Marieke de Vries of Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, people naturally feel good when they see something recognizable and familiar. That’s because things that are familiar are—generally speaking—less risky. This is the same impulse that makes us buy the same soap or automobile over and over again: It’s worked in the past, so it’s likely a safe bet again today. With recognizable people, that positive feeling, that sense of comfort, often feels like a warm glow.

But it may not be quite that straightforward. De Vries and her colleagues wondered: Wouldn’t the power of familiarity depend somewhat on the context? Specifically, isn’t it possible that mood might modify and shape the mind’s response to familiar and unfamiliar things? Is that what’s occurring when you feel a warm glow in Bangkok and a big yawn back home? They decided to explore this idea experimentally.

Instead of using people’s faces, the scientists used abstract patterns of dots. Basically what they did is familiarize volunteers with some patterns and not others; then they measured their responses when they saw the familiar patterns later. But they didn’t simply ask them which ones they liked and which ones they didn’t; in addition to doing that, they attached electrodes to their faces to detect subtle physiological signs of smiling. In other words, they measured the body’s visceral response to familiarity and novelty.

But before doing this, they manipulated each volunteer’s mood. They asked some to think of sad events in their lives, and others joyous events; and then they played mood-appropriate music to maintain the gloom or happiness. The idea was that mood “tunes” the mind toward safety concerns. That is, if our mood is good, we assume we must be in a safe place; if we’re feeling edgy or down, that must be because we’re threatened in some way. The researchers predicted that feeling blue (and therefore unsafe) would make familiarity an especially potent cue; feeling happy (and therefore safe) would make that cue much less significant.

And that’s precisely what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers who were melancholy smiled much more at the familiar patterns than did those who were upbeat. Think about that: Familiarity wasn’t all that important to people who were already feeling secure; they already had the safety of their local coffee shop. But people who were feeling uneasy and threatened experienced familiarity as very comforting—even when the familiar stimuli were nothing more than meaningless abstract patterns of dots. No wonder the face of an “old friend” can seem so welcoming in a Bangkok café.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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Imagine this hypothetical scenario: You’re at a cocktail party and the host introduces you to a stranger, whose name is Jeremy. It’s a crowded party, and as you chat with Jeremy, you’re also picking up snippets of another conversation nearby. Something about a big football game on Sunday. It doesn’t concern you, so you try to tune it out. You have a short but pleasant conversation with Jeremy, then go on to mingle with other guests.

What do you remember when you run into Jeremy the next day? Well, if you’re young, you will probably recognize Jeremy’s face and associate his face with his name. That’s normal social memory. But if you’re older, you may have a very different kind of association: You may inexplicably link Jeremy with the upcoming football game. That overheard chatter about football is an irrelevant piece of information—you don’t even like football much. But your mind has been distracted by it, and it has connected that unimportant tidbit with your newly forged memory of Jeremy.

This is just a theory, which scientists call “hyper-binding.” That’s really just a jargony way of saying that the elderly remember a lot of useless information by attaching it to important new learning. But according to new research from the University of Toronto, such seemingly haphazard learning might be a blessing in disguise for the elderly. Psychological scientists Karen Campbell, Lynn Hasher and Ruthann Thomas recently ran a laboratory version of the cocktail party conversation to see if the phenomenon is indeed unique to the elderly—and to explore its possible benefits.

The experiments were fairly technical, but here’s the gist: The researchers recruited two groups of volunteers, the first about 19 years old and the second in the mid-60s. They showed all of them a string of pictures that were superimposed with irrelevant words. That’s like meeting Jeremy and hearing sports chatter at the same time. The volunteers were told to ignore the irrelevant words, and later on they were given a memory test for pictures and words in different combinations. They wanted to compare the older and younger minds at work.

The results were dramatic. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the older volunteers were clearly unable to ignore the distracting information even when they were instructed to. They stored away the irrelevant words by linking them tightly with their corresponding pictures in memory. What this suggests is that the elderly have weaker mental regulation and a broader “bandwidth,” taking in important and unimportant information indiscriminately. They store this new knowledge for later use and what’s more, they do this without even being aware of it.

Wouldn’t such distractibility be a terrible hindrance? Wouldn’t it just clutter up the mind with a lot of junk information? Not so, say the Toronto scientists. In fact, it may well be an advantage for the elderly. Aging often brings with it some mild cognitive declines—and indeed the elderly were slower and less accurate in some parts of these memory experiments. But awareness of how events connect in everyday life—even seemingly irrelevant events—may play a critical role in certain kinds of reasoning and judgment. In this way, distractibility may surreptitiously bolster everyday problem-solving.

The fact is, we never really know for sure what information in our world is important or useless—not when we’re first encountering it. The elderly mind may not be as fleet as it once was, but by being unfiltered, it perhaps is making connections that aren’t literal or obvious, and can be insightful. It might even be the foundation of a novel kind of intuition that comes with aging, or perhaps even what we call wisdom.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought, will be published by Crown in September.

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