The first point has to do with the brevity of spoken digits in Chinese and the nature of memory (example comes from Dehaene’s “Number Sense“):

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6. Read them out loud. Now look away and spend 20 seconds memorising that sequence before saying them out loud again. If you speak English, you have about a 50 per cent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorise whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers – 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 – right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

The second point has to do with the structure of the number system (contrasting Chinese languages with Western ones):

It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen…The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.

Put together, these two factors mean, so the argument goes, that Asian children learn to count faster, can count higher (before their Western counterparts), and are more facile with mathematical computations:

Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to 40. American children at that age can count only to 15, and most don’t reach 40 until they’re five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: it’s five-tens-nine.

For fractions, we say three-fifths. The Chinese is literally ‘out of five parts, take three. That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.

What’s fascinating about all of this is that something as fundamentally simple as the word we choose to use to represent certain concepts in language (numbers in this case) can have a profound impact on cognition. For the most part, words have not been explicitly chosen by cultures—so you might say that by happenstance of a culture, the people of that culture are better (or worse) off than a neighboring culture in some domain. In this case, we’re talking about the impact of language and memory on math skills; Jared Diamond has looked at the impact of culture and environment on the rise and fall of civilizations (in “Gun, Germs, and Steel” and “Collapse”). As Gladwell concludes, you’ve got to wonder: “how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our 21st-century intellectual tasks.”

Their Method:
These researchers implanted tiny electrodes into the brains of epilepsy patients (specifically in the hippocampus, which is known for its role in memory formation and recall). This process sounds horrific, but has become largely standard procedure for patients undergoing surgery for epilepsy. As a result, experimenters have a small window before surgery where they are able to perform unprecedented research on human subjects. In this case, they had patients watch short video clips, pause to think about them for a minute, and report which clips they recalled.

Their Finding:
Nearly everyone remembered the clips, but more surprising was that brain cells that were active while the clip was playing became active again during recall! “In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come.” (Source: NYTimes)

Their Conclusion:

From the New York Times article:

Though it did not address this longer-term process, the new study suggests that at least some of the neurons that fire when a distant memory comes to mind are those that were most active back when it
happened, however long ago that was.

“The exciting thing about this,” said Dr. Kahana, the University of Pennsylvania professor, “is that it gives us direct biological evidence of what before was almost entirely theoretical.”

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals’ experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

The separate processing of color and form information has a parallel in artists’ idea that color and luminance play very different roles in art (Livingstone, Vision and Art, Abrams Press, 2002). The elusive quality of the Mona Lisa’s smile can be explained by the fact that her smile is almost entirely in low spatial frequencies, and so is seen best by your peripheral vision (Science, 290, 1299). These three images show her face filtered to show selectively lowest (left) low (middle) and high (right) spatial frequencies.

So when you look at her eyes or the background, you see a smile like the one on the left, or in the middle, and you think she is smiling. But when you look directly at her mouth, it looks more like the panel on the right, and her smile seems to vanish. The fact that the degree of her smile varies so much with gaze angle makes her expression dynamic, and the fact that her smile vanishes when you look directly at it, makes it seem elusive.

Consider the following:

Wine connoisseurs get duped by (red colored) white wine!

In 2002, for instance, a French wine researcher named Frédéric Brochet gave 54 experts an array of red wines to evaluate. Some of the glasses contained white wine that Mr. Brochet had doctored to look red, by adding a tasteless, odorless additive. Not a single taster noticed the switch.

When expecting strawberry, even chocolate yogurt tastes like fruit.

In one recent test, psychologists asked 32 volunteers to sample strawberry yogurt. To make sure the testers made their judgments purely on the basis of taste, the researchers said, they needed to turn out the lights. Then they gave their subjects chocolate yogurt. Nineteen of the 32 praised the strawberry flavor. One said that strawberry was her favorite flavor and she planned to switch to this new brand.

What’s happening is that people’s expectations are overriding their perceptions! Red food coloring didn’t change the taste of the white wine, and the chocolate yogurt was very much chocolately. But our expectations, possibly leading to ignorance, carelessness, or overconfidence, created the illusion of something else. Literally mind over matter.

As the article points out, this is nothing new. But it can be shocking when the forgery takes place under your nose and you are the victim! With the Great Fish Fraud, those students discovered that this has happened yet again. Sushi chefs in New York City (and surely elsewhere), have been substituting cheap fish for luxury fish, charging for the luxury, and no one can tell the difference!

What to do about this? Don’t fret it. True, our minds are a powerful, but they must have evolved that way for a reason. Instead, focus on the positive and enjoy the moment! If you think you have strawberry but you really have chocolate, just be glad that you have anything at all

In addition to self-recognition, some birds like Cockatoos may have a “sense of rhythm [that] help[s] explain how the [human] brain relates to music”: Snowball’s Chance.

Two things struck me about this story: one is that Snowball, the dancing Cockatoo, had become Internet famous on YouTube well before these researchers discovered him! The second is that a friend in my department, Micah Bregman, was one of the researchers on this study!

[from SignOnSanDiego: Snowball's Chance by Adam Loberstein]

Moving rhythmically to a musical beat is a behavior found in every human culture, but it is not commonly seen in other animals, according to Patel. “It is a remarkable fact that despite decades of research in psychology and neuroscience in which animals have been trained to do elaborate tasks, there is not a single report of an animal that was trained to tap, peck or move in synchronicity with an auditory beat,” he wrote in a 2006 journal article.

Patel theorized that only certain types of brains can achieve musical beat perception and synchronization – those that are capable of complex vocal learning.

According to that hypothesis, nonhuman primates, our closest relatives, are likely to be incapable of moving in time to music, while species that exhibit vocal learning – songbirds, parrots or dolphins, for instance – would be better candidates to display this type of synchronized movement.

Patel and John Iversen, an associate fellow at The Neurosciences Institute who is an expert on rhythm processing, designed a set of experiments in which recordings of Snowball’s favorite song were played at 11 different tempos, and the bird’s response was videotaped.

Then Patel and Iversen, along with Micah Bregman, a graduate student in cognitive science at the University of California San Diego, and Joanne Jao, a UCSD undergrad, analyzed the videos to see if Snowball truly stayed with the beat.

“The bottom line is that he does,” Patel said. “He’s not as good as an adult, but we think he’s a bit like a human child. He has his own preferences – he likes to dance to faster tempos, not so much the slower ones. That’s actually something you see in children as well.”

“One thing that I think is quite interesting is that this connection between music and movement is very powerful in humans, and not well understood,” he said.

Patel noted that the neurologist Oliver Sacks, in his book “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain,” writes about how music “can sometimes help people with Parkinson’s disease to move, and to keep moving as long as the music is on and has a good beat.”

Added Patel, “We don’t understand why that works, but there’s clearly a connection between their auditory system and their motor system.”

He’s closer to understanding, though, thanks to Snowball.