Mind Hacks™: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain (45 page)

Caffeine chemically hacks the brain’s reward system, boosting the value we give not
only to the morning cuppa, but also to everything associated with it.

Neurons
[
The Neuron
]
use
neurotransmitters to chemically send their signals from one neuron to the next, across the
synapse (the gap between two neurons). There are many different neurotransmitters, and
they tend to be used by neurons together in systems that cross the brain. The neurons that
contain dopamine, the dopaminergic system, are found in systems dealing with memory,
movement, attention, and motivation. The latter two are what concern us here.

Just knowing you have a caffeine hit coming tends to perk you up. We value
more than just the chemicals here. To see this in action, find someone who is a certified
caffeine addict. It doesn’t matter if she is into tea or coffee, as long as she is
really
into it. I’d wager that she is also rather particular about
how she takes it too. Does she have a favorite mug? Does she like the milk poured in
before the tea? Is she picky about how the coffee beans should be ground?

Now, find something that doesn’t affect the taste of the drink, but that she always
does — it doesn’t really matter what. Stop her from doing it. Give her coffee to her in a
glass. Put the milk in after the tea. Do the opposite of the way she likes something
done.

She’ll freak. Or at the very least she
really
won’t like
it.

The more she’s into caffeine, the more particular she’ll be about the drink being made
and delivered in just a particular way. Weird, eh? She’s addicted to a complex molecule;
the delivery of it into her system, in any form, is enough to create the positive effects
of the drug and remove any associated withdrawal symptoms. But she insists on the precise
method of delivery. How come?

By chemically hacking the reward circuitry of the brain, caffeine gives us a stark
view of a couple of the basic animal learning mechanisms. These are called
classical conditioning
and
operant
conditioning
and are associated with the scientific school called
behaviorism
, which dominated modern psychology until the
1970s.

You’ve probably heard of Pavlov, the Russian scientist whose experiments with dogs
established the basic principles of classical conditioning. This basically says that, if
something happens at the same time as something rewarding, it comes to be associated with
the response to — and can eventually substitute for — the rewarding stimulus. In this case,
the caffeine is the intrinsically rewarding stimulus (because it hacks your reward
circuitry) and everything else (the smell, the taste, the cup, the time of day) comes to
be associated with the reward. This is why decaf can actually work wonders (particularly
if your subject doesn’t know it is decaf, thanks to the Placebo Effect
[
Fool Others into Feeling Better
]
) and why
just making a cup of coffee makes me feel more alert, even without drinking it. When I
used to write essays late at night at college, just the sound of the kettle reaching the
boil would make me feel more alert. The response (perking up) becomes associated with the
things
that normally accompany the actual cause (the caffeine)–the smell of coffee,
the sound of the kettle boiling, and so on.

The other major kind of conditioning,
operant conditioning
,
states that rewards reinforce the actions that precede them. While this sounds pretty
obvious, you can get a very long way just by looking at the world through the lens of
“What actions are rewarded? Which are punished?” In the case of our caffeine
experimentation, everything leading up to the consumption of the caffeine is rewarded. No
wonder we develop superstitions about how the caffeine should be prepared. In fact all
drugs are associated with preparation rituals: from the Japanese tea ceremony, to clinking
glasses of beer, and up to the harder drugs and things like the shooting rituals of heroin
users.

These learning mechanisms are intrinsic and are found in all complex animals. They are
deeply programmed into our brain and can operate without conscious effort or memory.
Decades of work have explored how the time scales, constraints, and interactions of these
forms of learning combine with different stimulus and response pairings and different
combinations of reward and punishment. For example, we know that rewards are often better
motivators than punishments, partly because they are more precise; you can simply reward
the behavior you want, whereas with punishment you tend to punish getting caught, rather
than accurately punishing the behavior you don’t want.

This associative form of learning is basic to human nature, and its effects are
widespread. If you reward your child by giving in after 20 minutes of nagging, is it
surprising that this habit becomes common? If your manager punishes people who make
mistakes, is it any wonder that people at work cover up their errors rather than admitting
them? And if I’ve drunk a cup of coffee on a thousand previous occasions just before
starting work, is it any wonder I feel a sense of contentment when sitting down to write
with a steaming mug of the black stuff beside me and feel distress when I’m deprived of
it? It may be arbitrary which mug I started drinking my coffee in, but now it has been
wired into my brain via the reinforcing effects of caffeine. The coffee really does taste
better when drunk from my favorite mug.

We have dedicated neural machinery for recognizing faces from just a few basic
features arranged in the right configuration.

Take a look at the two pictures in
Figure 10-1
.

Figure 10-1. Two upside-down faces, but you should have no problem recognizing who it is
¹

While you might detect some sort of difference between them, the odds are that both
will look like pretty normal upside-down pictures of a face (and you might well be able to
identify who it is, too). Now turn the book upside down. The face on the right is a
grotesque: its eyes and mouth have been
inverted. But you probably didn’t notice this (and it certainly is not as
striking as when the faces are the right way up). This is a neat demonstration of the fact
that faces are normally processed
holistically
. When they are the
right way up, we “understand” faces as a whole based on their internal components; turning
them upside down disrupts this ability. We then have to rely on componential encoding
instead and judge the face simply in terms of the individual items that make it up. This
makes it much harder to detect that something is “wrong” than when we are able to use
holistic processing. While, of course, we rely on differences in hairstyle and color and
other factors when identifying people in the real world, experiments have shown that we
rely most on the central features of faces.

Another example of the way in which we are “primed” for the ability to recognize faces
is how difficult it feels to look at the face shown in
Figure 10-2
.

Figure 10-2. It’s difficult to look at this double face

This is because the two sets of internal features are competing with each other to
allow us to make sense of the face. Neither set can win, so our visual system can’t settle
on the stimuli and make sense of it the way it would with a normal face.

So how does the brain recognize faces? It turns out that there is a section of the
brain that is specialized for recognizing facelike stimuli. In imaging studies,
²
it has been shown that a section of the
fusiform
gyrus
, which borders
the temporal and occipital lobes, is more active when participants view images
of faces than when they view other pictures. This area is now termed the
fusiform facial area
. It is specialized for viewing faces in an
upright orientation, suggesting that faces as they are normally seen are treated as a
specialized type of object by the brain. It is easy to recognize partial or degraded
images, though, such as with low-quality CCTV images.
³
Again, this would make sense in allowing us to identify people in low
lighting or among other objects such as trees.

When looking at faces, our eyes dart most around the mouth and eyes
[
To See, Act
]
, the two features that are
absolutely essential to depict a face in a cartoon. Although other features — particularly
hair — are used to recognize individuals, it is the mouth and eyes that define a face.
Experiments with subliminal stimuli have shown that faces, especially emotional faces, can
be processed by the brain at exposures too quick for conscious appreciation. Even a face
shown to you too fast to be consciously seen influences your feeling of familiarity with
it; mere exposure
[
Subliminal Messages Are Weak and Simple
]
is good enough. This
is another sign of specialized neural networks for face processing in the brain.

There is some debate concerning whether this “face recognition” system is actually
specialized for this purpose or is a general categorization system, with categorizing
faces just one ability we’ve picked up through experience. For example, people who are
expert at recognizing species of birds or types of cars show activation of the fusiform
facial area when shown pictures of their specialist subjects.
⁴
Another type of evidence comes from studies of people who have developed
prosopagnosia
, an inability to discriminate faces, even though the
ability to discriminate other types of objects seems intact. Interestingly, some people
who are experts with some category of object — sheep, for instance — have been known to retain
the ability to discriminate between the specialty objects even when they lose the ability
with faces.
⁵

Whether or not the fusiform facial area is specialized for faces, it is clear that we
are very good at identifying faces. Most researchers agree that by 3 or 4 months of age
babies are skilled at facial discrimination.
⁶

We are so good at identifying faces that our brains are primed to see them everywhere.
We see them in clouds (where they aren’t) and in smileys (where they are). Our ability to
perceive faces so readily from a relatively small amount of information in the smileys or
emoticons used in text and online messaging — the fact that we can readily understand that
:-) is intended to represent a happy face and ;-) a wink — is a legacy of how important face
recognition has been to us evolutionarily.

— Andrew Brown

Emotions are powerful on the inside but often displayed in subtle ways on the outside.
Are these displays culturally dependent or universal?

Take a stroll down an imaginary lane in a distant, foreign land. You’ve no knowledge
of the language spoken and no idea of the local customs and practices. Before you is a
fork in the road with no clear sign of which direction leads to where. Thankfully, you spy
a local working the land. Hungry for information to guide you, you point to the first
path. His mouth broadens until his teeth are visible. After taking this in, you point to
the second.

His brow furrows as his mouth becomes small and tight. Lo and behold, despite any
language and cultural barriers, you most likely have enough information to know that the
first is probably a better bet.

Try it yourself. Consider the photo in
Figure 10-3
.

Figure 10-3. What emotion is this face signaling?
¹

I’m sure there is no doubt in your mind what is being expressed here. At the very
least, it’s a very different face from that shown in
Figure 10-4
.

Figure 10-4. What emotion is this second face signaling?
²

It’s clear that the first face is happy and the second is in a less than positive
mood.

Obvious, you say?

It might feel so, but before you dismiss this disambiguation out of hand, you
should know that many of the cues are fairly subtle and there’s a lot more going on behind
the scenes than you might realize. In fact, these cues can slip by brain-damaged patients
entirely, even those whose perception is otherwise fairly good. Let’s dig a little
deeper.

We may take it for granted, but the existence of a universal emotion expression system
is an impressive feat. Masses of evidence show that our brains are wired to distinguish
and respond to expressions of a number of emotional states. The
basic
emotions
, a concept born of lauded psychologist Sylvan Tomkins, are anger,
fear, disgust, sadness, surprise, and happiness. We can be confident that these are really
universal thanks to the cross-cultural work of Paul Ekman, the leading proponent of basic
emotion theory, whose work with tribes in New Guinea confirm what our example asserts:
despite some cultural nuances, a smile is a smile worldwide.

Furthermore, it turns out that this capacity is not only universal, but also innate.
The ubiquity of our expressions is not purely a consequence of convergence by imitation,
as they are present to some extent even when there is no input.
³
German ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt conducted research in the 1960s
that showed that congenitally blind children still produced emotional expressions via the
face, even those who were also severely cognitively-impaired. This preserved ability of
the sensory impaired has been noted often, including Charles Darwin’s comment that blind
children can “blush with shame.”

Basic emotions are distinct categories, and each appears to be distinctly localized
within the brain, as evidenced by both imaging studies
[
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: The State of the Art
]
and observation of
brain-damaged patients. While the amygdala, a part of the limbic system
[
Get Acquainted with the Central Nervous System
]
, is
traditionally considered the emotion area, it is tied most closely to fear. Meanwhile,
disgust appears to be instantiated in the basal ganglia and insula and quite unrelated to
the amygdala. Other emotions also show distinct neural patterns of activation
[
The Neuron
]
. This may imply that the emotions
arose for distinct functional needs, arguably independently. Many see fear as essentially
a response to external threat. Disgust has been characterized as a complementary system
that deals with internal threat — an eject response that seeks to rid the body of toxins.
The disgust face itself is really just an extension of the gagging reflex. Stories can be
told (although with less confidence) for the other emotions.

The basic emotions produce expressions that are hard to fake given the genuine
physiological changes that accompany them. There are subtle cues, such as a flush or
tightening of muscles. These are handy for others to spot — as a source of useful
information — but they can also benefit the one expressing the emotion, as when an angry
face says “Don’t try and take this from me; I’m willing to die to protect it.”
Discriminating the real Mr. Angry from a faker is therefore highly important, so we
evolved to detect ever more subtle signs and distinguish real emotion from mere
pantomime.

For a social animal such as humans, it pays to be adept at deciphering genuine and
subtle signs — as well as at giving them out — in order to quickly communicate within a group
and coordinate emotions (group communication is discussed in
Make Yourself Happy
). Coordinated emotions are essential for cooperative
responses to situations, and recent work has been looking at how coordination can occur
over longer distances — after all, using facial expression as a group communication tool is
limited to face-to-face interaction. Voice is one possibility, and there has been
investigation into whether vocal behaviors, such as crying and laughing, accompany certain
emotions in the same way that facial expressions do. Maybe research into the vocal
component of emotion will resolve the mystery of why only one of the six basic emotions is
positive. As Ekman has suggested, there may be many more, but expressed via the voice
rather than the face.

Because emotional expressions are the automatic outcomes of emotion, they are hard to
totally suppress; likewise, they are hard to fake. What this means is that practice and
attention to the features of expressions on others’ faces can allow us to divine the true
intentions and feelings of those around us. While we’re all pretty good at this sort of
“mind reading,” some take this ability further; just think how important these cues are to
police detectives, security operatives, psychologists, and high-stakes gamblers.

— Alex Fradera and Disa Sauter