Squirrel nests

For the past couple of months or so, while trees lost their leaves, the nests in them have become more visible. Fleur asked me about one on a visit to a park. I told her it was a squirrel nest. She points out others. She gets really excited about a new one.

Photo by Boys in Bristol Photography on Pexels.com

The human brain is magnificent about noting where things exist in geographical space. Our hippocampus tracks them. The more we use it, the more prominent that region of the brain. The often-referenced study is of London black cab drivers who, to get licensed, must be able to take anyone anywhere in the city without a map. We use it for more than just an internal map of how to get around by car or by foot: our home, our rooms, our computers, the Internet. The hippocampus is our biological search engine.

Fleur practices navigation quite a bit of late. She picks up on where we are by mentioning landmarks. And she asks questions about what a place is near.

Oh, my car has this feature where it notes the direction of travel with the first letter of the name. She’s been intrigued about it more of late. So, I’ve been getting her to get a feel for how the directions are related to each other.

Hypothesis is not reality

One of the reasons I think parental brains devote so much resources to their children to do with figuring out what keeps them happy.

The human brain is a cause and effect predictor. What happens if I do this? We constantly run these scenarios. Even on things not in front of us at the moment.

Fleur can be inconsistent. The thing that made her happy yesterday may not today. She might love the corn dog from one place but not another. She might have loved the in season blueberries but not the out of season imports.

We constantly chase the causes for desirable effects. Even knowing it might be futile.

And it gets tougher with adding in Fleur’s cousin and/or bestie. More kids, different preferences, finding consensus. As an example, the niece sometimes says, “OH! I’ve had this before. It has zero bearing on whether she will eat it.” For some reason my assumption was she’d say she didn’t like it if that was the case. Nope. Totally let’s you give it to her then doesn’t eat it and tells you later, oh I didn’t like it the last time either.

Shortcuts: Illusions (repost)

These are reposts of a series I did years ago on mental shortcuts.

(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking > 5. Rules)

Photo by Michel Berube on Pexels.com

We like to think only those things we experience exist. Or even can experience. What about those things we can experience that do not or never did exist? That is what illusions are. They are cases where we trick the brain into believing something happened that did not. Or tricking the brain into thinking is experiencing reality when it is missing crucially important.

Michael Bach has a nice optical illusions page to demonstrate how easily our eyes are tricked. Every sense we have can be tricked. The food industry has worked wonders in devising how to trick our senses of smell and taste. When you feel something crawling on you and look to see nothing, that is your sense of touch going haywire.

Illusions can also be dangerous. Eyewitness testimony is the worst evidence we use in the legal system. Witnesses rarely capture and retain all the details. And how they are interviewed can allow them to fill in these gaps with other evidence and skew their results to confirm that same evidence. Say the police pick up a suspect and present that photo with others to a witness. The witness picks the photo of the suspect and later out of a line up. If the suspect actually only resembles the culprit, then these two steps confirm for the witness (and the police) the suspect’s guilt even though the witness saw someone else. We attend to similarities when searching and ignore the differences. And we will go with the closest option given choices.

Inattentional blindness also falls into my illusions category. Paying too much attention to something means we have no idea about what else is happening. The train operator on his cell phone not noticing the curve for which he needed to slow down and derailed. Multitasking while operating a vehicle is dangerous because of this.

Of course, everything we experience is really the interpretation of signals to the brain. One of my favorite experiments was people wore goggles that inverted the image so everything appeared upside down. The brain just adapts to the error and interprets the picture to the desired orientation. Do not like what you see? The brain can solve that problem. Another favorite experiment was ending phantom pain in missing limbs by using mirrors to make the limb appear to exist again.

My favorite metaphor for how the brain works is Object-Oriented Programming. Different parts of the brain perform different functions. The functions adapt (are reprogrammed or reconfigured) based on the needed interpretation of the data. Of course, the adaptations are not always 100% correct. Nor do they always adapt in time not to avoid errors.

(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking > 5. Rules)

Executive Function

Photo by meo on Pexels.com

Teenagers have an under developed prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that interrupts emotional responses and considers the potential effects before acting. Teenagers look enough adult-like we want to treat them as adults, but they also have yet to grow the brain into their bodies.

Toddlers DGAF. Stimulus-response. Galahad is having to deal with the consequences of lack of planning, thinking three moves ahead, and a toddler who makes him pay the consequences.

He was in a bad mood, but he came upstairs to make a showing of his displeasure. Fleur who adores him now has made him sit and watch the same annoying video (we all hate) over and over.

She sounds so happy.

He sounds grumpier. Well, until she has worn him down.

My hope is that experiences like this will help him grow into being more mindful.

Study: The rough sound of salience enhances aversion through neural synchronisation

Why is is that children’s screams affect us so much? Crying is one thing. But, a scream gets adrenaline revved up and someone is going to die. These researchers looked at why.

They define how the physical properties of a scream differ from other similar sounds. It fits in 30–150 Hz, is loud, and has fast repetitive flicker like effects. These combine to capture attention due to the unpleasantness.

They used iEEG electrodes to measure brain activity. They looked at a small number of patients.

One of the areas that lit up is used in processing language and emotional context. While the superior temporal gyrus is in a part of the brain associated with sound, when analyzing facial expressions, we also leverage this area to understand emotions.

Arnal, LH, Kleinschmidt, A, et al. “The rough sound of salience enhances aversion through neural synchronisation” Nature Communications volume 10, Article number: 3671 (2019)

Fostering kindness

Turns out, kindness is complicated. We’re born with the wiring for both kindness and cruelty, so altruism is not inevitable. It’s a skill and a habit that we have the power — and responsibility — to foster, one good deed at a time.

I love the concept of mirror neurons. When watching someone else do something, the parts of our brain for doing that activity light up as though we are doing it. One of the reasons why I enjoy watching sports that I have played, especially the players of positions, is because I feel it when they make a play. They also have a dark side, in that when others experience pain, our brain experiences it as well.

Photo by Sebastian Voortman on Pexels.com

My first experience with seeing early empathetic distress was in helping my aunt babysit twins. When one would cry, the other hearing the cry would also start to cry. Nothing was wrong. At the time, we chalked it up to attention seeking, but I bet really it was empathetic distress. Hearing the the cry bad made the other feel bad and crying was the way to express it.

Kindness is not just about feeling bad about another’s distress, but doing something to resolve it. Fleur likes to take my glasses. Unfortunately, I have turned it into a kind of game. Lately, I have had to shift my reaction to expressing sadness about it. She is much faster about giving them back when I do. Wonder if that would work for the throwing food thing?

Being a Musician Is Good for the Brain

Highlights from an Inc article on the benefits of music on the brain caught my attention:

Headphones by Ezra Freelove

1. Musical training reorganizes neuron structures in the brain, specifically the corpus callosum which integrates the two sides plus areas involving verbal memory, spatial reasoning, and literacy.
2. It improves long-term memory, in part because it teaches the hippocampus how to store memories and recall them on demand.
3. It improves executive function, things like processing and retaining information, controlling behavior, making decisions, and problem solving
4. Musicians tend to be more mentally alert with faster reaction times.
5. They tend to have better statistical use of multisensory information, so they are better able to integrate inputs from the various senses.
6. The earlier a musician starts, the more drastic the changes.
7. Music reduces stress and improves happiness.*
8. Increases blood flow in the brain.

* Wonder if all this singing we do with Fleur plus Galahad’s piano practice is part of why she is a happy child? After all, we’ve been leveraging singing as a way to distract Miss Wriggly.