The human brain is perhaps the most complicated piece of biology to ever come into existence. It gives us the ability to imagine the future and create great works of art. And both of these things go hand in hand with our amazing ability to lie our asses off.

Lies? Nope. Just misconceptions

If you live in the U.S. you may have seen a fairly new show on FOX called “Lie to me” (and if you haven’t – don’t worry, you’re not missing anything). Anyway it’s about a detective who can tell if you’re lying just by the way your “body gives you away”. Of course if you’ve seen any cop show then you’ve seen this sort of thing before, the only problem is that it’s complete garbage.

If we step into the real world, away from the stereotypical way that scriptwriters think shifty liars behave, then we’d better start our review of how to lie by dismissing some common misconceptions.

(1) Liars talk faster and talk longer in addition to showing signs of nervousness. This accurately describes just about every one in my lab with a deadline and a cup of coffee. What it doesn’t show is the mark of someone lying. These behavioral cues are so generic as to be next to useless in determining whether someone is holding back the truth.

(2) Liars fidget and either don’t make eye contact or stare at you too much. It’s a good description of many scientists, mathematicians and introverts in general. Again behavior so generic and free of context that it’s as easy to believe as it is wrong. If this one was really true then every computer geek I’ve met was lying like their life depended on it. The poor things are shy little flowers in reality.

So is that’s the end of this analysis? Are you home free to lie like a electrified lying machine on St. Fibber’s Day? If the “How to spot a liar” tips that are all over the web are actually rubbish, are there no behaviors that give you away?

Not so fast. From a neuroscience perspective lying is hard work. How much “work” it is in cognitive processing power is hard to pin down, but the catch is it’s always more work than sticking to reality.

And the hard working brain makes mistakes.

Thinking about lying

The ability to create artificial realities in our mind is pretty much what makes us humans and not goldfish. It’s our extra cognitive abilities that allow us to imagine all sorts of fictional possibilities and plan for the future. But we don’t actually use all our extra cognitive power continuously, because it’s just much easier to process reality without alteration.

It’s speculation, but passively taking it all in is cognitively simpler than creating a false reality because of evolutionary pressure to ensure that first and foremost the brain operates quickly. Think of it as a survival tactic that makes it difficult for us to confuse reality with what you’ve made up. Back in the Stone Age you don’t want to spend a long time pondering “should I run away from saber toothed tigers or are they cuddly little cereal box mascots?”

Let’s take a more modern example: You arrive at work late because of an accident on the highway. It’s not hard to explain. In fact you can just launch into casual conservation about it over lunch without even thinking about the details. Memory recall and conversation are almost so effortless they are as unnoticeable as thinking about moving your arm to scratch your behind.

But what if you are late to work because you overslept and you create a lie that you are late because of an imaginary car accident? First you have to synthesize the details of the lie, while simultaneously examining that what you’ve said is believable. Next up you have to talk and think about what you’re going to say next instead of it just flowing. Memory is now working double time – what actually happened and what you said happened and who you said it to.

This is where the cognitive load comes into play and “mistakes” appear. Since humans are self-aware and we know when we’re lying we simultaneously try to screen our facial and other physiological reactions to try and appear what we think is natural.

“What we think is natural” is key here, because it’s unlikely that you have an accurate picture of how your body behaves from someone else’s point of view. When you’re self conscious about lying you’re also thinking “Should I make eye contact? Ok a little? Whoops! That might be too much! Do I normally do stuff with my hands when I talk? Wait a second – are they on to me?”

And it’s this last thought that adds another cognitive dimension: you are trying to monitor what your audience’s reaction is “Do they normally look at me like that? Is that the same expression they normally have?”

And that’s where lies fall apart and you get busted. Not because of the behavioral myths I mentioned, but because your behavior changes from normal.

How to lie convincingly

When dealing with people who are unfamiliar with you it’s hard to tell when you’re being untruthful because they are looking for change from normal behavior. Since strangers don’t know what’s normal, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. What is actually useful is learning how to fib to people you’ve met before.

1) Monitor behavior. It’s all about planning ahead. Begin by deliberately observing what you do during a normal conversation. Do you make eye contact? What does your voice sound like? The key though is facial expressions. It’s a tough one to monitor, since you can’t see your face when you talk. Talking to a mirror isn’t natural either, so the least intrusive method for practicing is with a real web cam conversation where you can see your own feed.

2) Avoid contact. As I mentioned the longer people know you, the better they can spot deviations from normal. Often this is quite subtle: your target processes what you’ve just said and if your behavior isn’t conforming to what they’ve seen before, even if they can’t put their finger on it, they’ll know something’s up. Again it’s all about planning ahead – keep your distance and contact to a minimum before going in for the big fib.

3) Practice. It’s not always possible to avoid having contact with people you’re trying to deceive, and the only answer is practice. Actors are liars and great actors rehearse. Unless the actor is Keanu Reeves, actors have to make behaving differently to how they normally act, believable. Since lying is differently from normal behavior so you’ll need to be acting. And good acting takes practice.

As you can see the best way to effectively lie is to prepare in advance. This takes a lot of time, and in the end, it’s often simpler just to be truthful. Of course there are many good reasons to invest in the great art of deception, and the most practical application that comes to mind? Poker.

By the way, you’re all welcome to come and play at my next game. I’m not very good, honestly.

This is no lie though, clicking on the Email or RSS updates will get you instant updates to all the articles here at Very Evolved.

original image alexindigo remixed by Patrick

Two psycologists, Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig from the University of Basel, have designed a method to mimic the wisdom of the crowd by simply polling yourself and averaging those results.

Why does the wisdom of the crowd work?

When averaged, large numbers of predictions about everything from sports results to the weight of a cow can turn out to be startlingly accurate.

A recent demonstration of the predictive power of pooling opinions manifested itself last year in the election website fivethirtyeight.com. In a nutshell, they took polling data from many sources and aggregated them to predict the final electoral collage vote better than any of the individual pundits out there. Fivethirtyeight used slightly more complex statistical methods than simple averaging, but the underlying principle remains the same – averaging data from many sources yields better results.

But why does this work? By gathering estimates from different people you are drawing on the different levels of knowledge individuals have, and most importantly – the different ways in which they are inaccurate.
Simply averaging answers eliminates any random error between people’s answers and it can greatly reduce the effect of systematic error. Systematic error is the killer here, think of it as your own personal bias: do you always under estimate how long it will take to do some task or how long it will take to walk somewhere?

Get a large enough group together and you will get enough over estimators and under estimators together to cancel out and get an answer that is close to the truth.

Poll yourself

The method Herzog and Hertwig have developed is called dialectical bootstrapping where you average your own conflicting opinions to mimic the varied opinions from a large group. But of course the crowdsourcing approach works because everybody has a slightly different amount of background knowledge they are using to get their answer, and consequently slightly different sources of error.

To get a conflicting opinion from nothing but the brain that generated the first answer requires a little mental tweaking to get us thinking about the problem in a different way.

To test if this was possible, the study asked people to identify the dates of historical events like the invention of electricity – not something that many of us would know off the top of our heads.
After making their best guess, participants were then asked to give a second estimate using a consider-the-opposite strategy:

First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply? Was the first estimate rather too high or too low? Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.

Surprisingly this worked brilliantly. The result of averaging the first answer with the second was a guess that was closer to the right date than either of the original answers alone. The key though is the introspective-dialectical framing of the second answer. When people were merely asked to make a second guess without considering why the first answer might be wrong, the average wasn’t any more accurate.

I’m in two minds

So does dialectical bootstrapping really offer us a better way to make decisions? Well, maybe.

Making any decision about something you’re not sure of requires discipline. Making a decision using dialectical bootstrapping requires that we be uncertain and “in two minds”, this of course can be incredibly frustrating. Purposely vacillating between options isn’t a natural inclination of our brain – it really prefers to keep track of one reality at a time, and so requires conscious effort to do more than that. But the benefits of second guessing yourself are real and tangible, especially when you don’t have a large crowd handy to solve your problems for you.

There is also evidence that you can make this process slightly easier by separating your two answers in time. It’s still the same principle, but with the idea that you are more likely to be using a different knowledge base at a future time than now, and hence still increasing the accuracy of the average.

It’s still early days yet for this mental tool so it’s not clear if everyone is capable of being disciplined enough to use it. It is however, not limited to guessing dates you could easily look up in Wikipedia. In principle you can use dialectical bootstrapping to predict just about anything. We have an office pool going here and now I’m asking myself “Why might my team might not win this weekend?”

Here’s hoping close enough is good enough.

Right now I’ve predicted that if you subscribe to the instant Email updates or RSS feed that you’ll get a mental kick out of all the articles published here at Very Evolved.

Ahh the good old days. The music, the sights, the sounds of a place that we can never journey back to. But why do these memories of times past feel so nostalgic? What makes these memories so different from remembering what I had for breakfast last Tuesday?

Put on the rose colored glasses and get ready to take a trip through our brain, as we examine the science of nostalgia.

What is nostalgia?

The scientific literature on nostalgia is quite thin, but there are a few fascinating studies that have attempted to pin down the essence of nostalgia, and the reasons that we feel that warm glow when recalling the past.

It’s not surprising to say nostalgia is all about memories. These recollections of our past are usually important events, people we care about, and places we’ve spent time at. What is perhaps a little surprising is that nostalgia is almost always associated with positive emotions – even when the trigger for recalling a nostalgic memory is something negative. In the study I’ve linked to the negative memory people reported was usually a bad situation that was eventually overcome – a bad memory tempered with a good outcome and association.

Smell and touch are also strong evokers of nostalgia and memories in general due to the processing of these stimuli first passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the brain.

Of course, music is also a strong trigger of nostalgia, and evidence of this is not only in scientific journals, but almost certainly in your mp3 collection.

What’s the point of feeling nostalgic?

The brain is an incredibly energy intensive organ, on average using more glucose than your muscles every day. So it goes without saying that the brain doesn’t usually do anything without a good reason. So what’s the advantage of feeling nostalgic?

The first study I referenced above, by Wildschut and colleagues, found that people who reported feeling nostalgic also experienced increased social bonding and increased positive self-regard. On the surface this doesn’t seem like a big deal. But with a brain that supports consciousness comes problems that our lesser primate cousins don’t have. Being self-aware is an issue way too big to dissect the neuroscience here, but the problems that come with it are things we’ve all experienced: depression, self doubt, lack of motivation. Not usually life threatening in this modern age, but potentially deadly to our Stone Age ancestors. If they gave up trying to make fire or struggling to find food because it was just too hard to bear, then you wouldn’t be reading this as we’d both be extinct.

In this context, nostalgia might be seen as a natural anti-depressant, something to hang onto to keep us motivated.

A note of caution here though: as I mentioned the neuroscience behind nostalgia is still in its infancy, so for now the best tools to examine it are psychological ones. Since psychology doesn’t preserve as well as a stone axe head, we can only infer what our ancestors were thinking. While this won’t always turn out to be right, it’s always fun to do.

Nostalgia is fluid and memories aren’t fixed

Our brain isn’t the hard drive of a computer, and our memories aren’t hard coded and unchangeable. Every time you recall a memory it may become subtly altered and associated with what ever it was that triggered that old memory. If this trigger happens repeatedly, then you’re adding new layer of interpretation that will be recalled automatically with the old memory next time it’s called up.

A great example of this in action that also demonstrates fluid nostalgia, is the backlash against George Lucas. A large portion of 70’s and 80’s children had grown up owning Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader figures and playing in the backyard pretending sticks were light sabers. Fond childhood memories.
When the first abysmal Star Wars Prequel was released the strong feelings against the film weren’t just those of disappointment at a bad movie. If it were that simple, we should also feel the same way about Police Academy 7.

The reaction can be partly explained by the sense of attack on our previously fond feelings. Watching the new movie automatically calls up memories from the previous series and all the pleasant childhood playtime memories associated with it. But recalling these fond memories in the context of a negative experience begins the process of re-coding, or modifying our old memories.  This is an undesirable outcome for nostalgia as it is usually such a pleasant feeling. Naturally there is some resistance and cognitive dissonance when this happens and the brain will try to avoid it like any other unpleasant experience.

That our brain actually allows this process of modifying old memories can actually be a good thing when it’s used in techniques like aversion therapy to overcome phobias. A more common example is a smoker in the midst of quitting, re-learning not to associate having a couple of drinks at a bar with a cigarette.

Fake nostalgia

Things used to be better in the “Good old days”. But were things really better in the past than they are now? How do we reconcile nostalgia for our high school days and the horribly awkward, pimply teenage angst that goes with it?

As I wrote this, ELO’s “Don’t bring me down” shuffled onto my playlist and my thoughts were immediately cast back to my formative decade, the cheesy 80’s.

But oddly enough, I never listened to ELO in the 80’s.

In fact I can’t consciously recall hearing any of their music other than the theme to the movie Xanadu. While I was always aware of their existence, I only recently “discovered” them through using Pandora. So why is it possible to feel nostalgic about something that we didn’t even experience?

One study has hinted that in some cases the positive feelings of nostalgia are actually just the positive sensation at having recalled an old memory correctly, rather than any emotional impact the original memory may have had. In my case, ELO’s music was instantly recognizable as sounding like the 80’s, while not being specifically tied to a particular event in my life. But while this nostalgia was a new creation, there are examples of more specific, neutral, memories becoming nostalgic with time.

I heard a lot of Duran Duran on the radio growing up. But I didn’t like them. I never bought their albums and if I thought of them at all, I thought they were just more disposable pop garbage. And yet, when I’m lazing back and indulging in VH1’s “I love the 80’s” marathon, I feel all reflective and pleasantly nostalgic when I hear “Hungry like the Wolf”.

This, like ELO is intimately tied to the era I grew up in, so while I had no personal connection to either of them, they do get me to successfully recall the mid 80’s vividly. It’s nostalgia by association.

Exploiting nostalgia

The most prominent example of this kind of fake nostalgia is actually all around us – advertising.

Marketing experts tell us again and again that the key to sales is to make a connection to the customer. Clearly it’s easier and faster to co-opt our fond memories than create a brand new positive association with your product. Two giants of advertising, Pepsi and Coke, appear to be masters at tapping into our fake nostalgia with many of their commercials vividly displaying their generational history. At its heart, their message is “Remember way back when you were young? Well, we were there with you”.

In a less overtly corporate money-making way, this artificial nostalgia may also explain delightful retro-silliness like the band The Darkness who released some very 80′s inspired tracks in 2003 (see video below), which I can’t listen to without also fondly thinking of Spinal Tap.

Let’s remember the good times

There’s not a lot of scientific literature studying nostalgia, but the consensus is clear.

Nostalgia is exceptionally good at making us feel better when times are tough. It’s a little mental pick-me-up that reminds us of good times, good friends and a why it’s great to be alive.

Certainly, with the economy in the toilet I’m feeling more nostalgic than ever. But knowing that this feeling is actually a tool our brain uses to keep us on track is just amazing. And that by itself is enough to make this neuroscientist happy. That, and the happiest song in ELO’s discography:

(RSS & Email readers may need to click through to access player)

Thinking about nostalgia so much has left me sitting here with a big stupid grin on my face and a new 80’s playlist on my iPod. Join me on future sciencey trips down memory lane by getting instant updates by RSS or Email.

I’m also wondering who will be the first to name all the figures from the “Nostalgic Supper” in the comments.

original image by Leonardo da Vinci remixed by Patrick

Body language is the language of love – well, it’s the language of attraction anyway. With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, let’s flirt with a little of the science behind body language and the lures we use in our dance with the opposite sex.

From across the room, the approach and the point of first contact, nonverbal communication is all you have. Eyes meeting, pupils dilating and that little prickle running across your skin are the first words in this silent conversation. Then even after the small talk begins your body is still speaking volumes about your thoughts and emotions. And the person you just met is reading you like a book. But do you even know how to read? More to the point: do you know what you’re saying?

Because reading and using body language is splashed across every gossip magazine in the check out isle you know all about it already right? Well not so fast. Let’s examine some of the “common knowledge” mythology first.

More than 90% of communication is nonverbal. Sorry but this one is just rubbish. It falls into the category of “this statement has been around so long and repeated so many times it must be true”. If you’re making first contact across the room, looking for the love of your life (or the love of your night) then of course then it all begins with a little nonverbal banter. But once you’re actually engaged in conversation with someone the tone and pitch of your voice coupled with the timing of your words carries far more information than some ambiguous arm crossing and rising eyebrows.

Copying posture. There are times when you’re chatting with someone and you’ll find yourself crossing your legs or leaning on one elbow and realize that your partner is doing the same. Who did it first? Are you dominant, or are you the one that’s following? This is a good sign that you’re both making a connection, but if you’re trying to mimic posture of someone on purpose then it’s not so easy to fake. The reasons why will become obvious shortly.

Copying gestures. A gently tapping of your finger on the table, caressing your drink or moving your hands when you talk. Mimicking these motions is a lot like replicating your partners’ posture. Adopting the same idiosyncrasies and movements of those around you is also largely unconscious when the conversation is flowing and there is a good connection. However like posture there’s more to it than just robotically following along like a pimply teenager learning to waltz.

So the landscape of nonverbal behavior is more complicated than it first appears, but there has been some recent work that sheds some light onto the different ways body language works in social situations, particularly attraction.

Body language predicts how attractive you are

In a typically scientifically stoic manner, a study titled “Patterns of Nonverbal Synchronization in Opposite-Sex Encounters” the researchers found indeed that people meeting for the first time tended to find partners more attractive if they we’re mirroring their own actions. But the attractiveness wasn’t based on a simple repetition of each other, instead it was discovered that it was the synchronization of movements between the two that accurately predicted attractiveness.

This brings into play the missing element from using body language effectively: Timing.

The nuances of mimicry carry more signals than just acting like a mirror. Like the spoken word the key to effective body language should also incorporate the analogues of tone, pitch and timing. Also like speaking it takes practice and forethought to deliver an effective message – especially one that comes across as sincere. It’s the absence of good timing in mimicry that all the body language and flirting advice out there is missing. A robotic copying of pose is a red flag that you’re lying as much as if you had said “Yes, that IS interesting” or “I’ve been a fan of the Dixie Chicks for years too!”

The best way to think when trying to connect to others with nonverbal communication is not a simple mimicking, but a rhythmic copying that flows over time. The conversation between your bodies is much more like a ballet than a chess game. It’s the time between mirroring and the movement. It’s motion and timing of changing your pose from A to B that’s important.

This can be a very complicated, choreographed dance between two people, with postures and gestures changing constantly and each partner responding and copying in time, in smooth natural motions. This isn’t all one-way either: one copies the other and back and forth in infinite variations. There is no magic formula like the glossy magazines would like to peddle; it’s a personal concerto that plays out for each of us.

How to speak like a native

It sounds like an insurmountable task then to change our body language consciously, but you only need to do two things.

1. Observe. This nonverbal chatter is going on all the time, all around. Watch how people are behaving when they interact and see the behavior bounce back and forth between them. See how it changes between people of different social statures and between one person obviously attracted to the other but not vice-versa. Watch not only what happens but when. Remember timing is everything here.
2. Practice. You can’t get good at anything instantly or by reading a ton of literature. The greatest benefit of practice is that it results in the calming your nerves, allowing you greater control over your body language. Let’s face facts, it’s very intimidating approaching a beautiful woman or man for the first time. Practice on your friends by consciously monitoring and changing your body language to try and mimic them first. Remember timing is everything here.

Romance is in the air, or at least on the airwaves if you watch a lot of TV commercials in the lead up to Valentine’s Day. So become literate in this other language, talk smoothly and time it right and you may find a valentine that hears what you have to say. Once you open your mouth though, you are on your own.

Need an interpreter? Well body language doesn’t transmit so well over the web, which is why I have a handy RSS and Email feeds available for you to subscribe to, in plain old English.

original image by Glenn remixed by Patrick

The human brain has an awesome ability to generate and comprehend abstract concepts. It’s why the comic xkcd can take five crude lines and a circle and make us understand that this stick figure represents a person with passions and desires, while simultaneously being very funny. It’s this same abstract creative ability that occurs in your brain every time we have a new idea.

While inspiration might seem to occur at random times there are some things we can do to make our brains more likely to smash together unrelated concepts and give birth to a brand spanking new idea.

Welcome to the the idea factory right here in your head.

How to generate new ideas

Since we know a bit about how the brain handles new information and process our senses, we can shortcut some of these and jump start the creative process. There’s a thousand brain storming guides out there, but really there is only one thing you have to do – stimulate the parts of your brain that are active when you’re being creative. Lucky for us it’s the same regions of the brain that fire up when you experience something new.

Expose yourself to new things

Go out of your way to see something or experience something you’ve never done before. Eat something different, read some classic literature you wouldn’t normally consider, go out and visit a part of the city you’ve never been to. From a biological perspective, your hippocampus and cortex are forced to work harder to understand something you’ve never seen before. Now this new information you’ve just presented to your brain needs sorting and categorizing. It does this by shuffling through all the senses and concepts you’re already familiar with to try and decide how they relate to this new thing and then it decides if you will remember this new experience or discard it as irrelevant.

As part of this process your brain is drawing on your previous memories and experiences to make sense of what it’s seeing. In a way, the brain is pulling up old ideas and incorporating them into new concepts. And it’s not a one-way street; the new experience you’ve just encountered affects your old memories and experiences too – and then bingo! You’ve just created a new idea. A synthesis of old and new. This often manifests itself as a ‘flash’ of inspiration where an idea seemingly pops fully formed into your head from out of nowhere. But as we’ve just seen, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, it just seems like it’s out of nowhere.

You might not consciously be aware of it, but you are already generating new ideas all the time, just by walking around and experiencing new things – the failure to recognize this is because you’re either not looking for a new idea and not receptive to it, or more often – it evaporates. Fast.

This is a very volatile time here. If it’s one thing the hippocampus is really strict on it’s new experiences. If you want to form a new memory then the hippocampus is the gatekeeper, and it wants to make damn sure it’s worth the effort.

Just as important as generating a new idea is actually recording it. If you don’t put a piece of paper in front of your inspiration, then it will fade away like the memory of what color shirt you wore on Monday last week.

How to capture ideas

It’s not real until it’s manifested. Words spoken, sentences written, pictures drawn. The key to all of these is to get your idea out of your head fast. Only then should you start to work on the concepts and ideas and try to refine them.

Though inaccurate, let’s use the analogy of an old computer that has run out of memory – it goes slower and slower as it can only hold so many discreet pieces of information at once. It constantly writes information about what it’s working on to a page file stored on the hard drive. It’s slower than holding all the data in active memory but it’s an efficient way to expand the memory it has to work with. And that’s what that piece of paper in front of you is.

You need to use this bit of paper because new experiences and new sensations help you generate the new ideas but with one major drawback. New experiences and sensations demand a lot of attention from your brain to process them. Hence once you have your idea the original inspiration becomes a distraction.

If you think of something brilliant while watching TV and you don’t take action to record it, then the TV is still there, demanding attention from your frontal cortex and your brief thought will lose the attention race. Capture these brief flashes, single words, poorly spelt sentences, bad stick figure drawings. Speed is essential here lest the heart of your idea fade or worse still – change due to your over analysis before you put pen to paper.

Don’t censor yourself

I can’t stress this enough. Just get it out there. You can destroy it, or erase it later before anyone’s ever seen it if you’re embarrassed. If you try to take your idea and over analyze it in your mind before you’ve written it down, then the odds are that you’ll think of more reasons why it won’t work than you will on how to improve your idea. With this attitude you won’t write it down and you won’t remember it later on when you might have second flash of inspiration on how to make it work brilliantly.

Let me leave you with an example of a stupid idea I had.

I send text messages from my phone. It costs me 11 cents every time I do it and I’m limited to 160 characters. What if you could offer almost the same service for free but have the texts sent it over the web rather than to phones? But really stop to think about it some more before you bother to write it down. Why on earth would anyone use that?

Firstly you have to have Internet access to use it, and so does everyone you want to send the text message to.

If I have access to the web I why would I limit myself to 140 or 160 characters? I could send a 12 page email, photos, pictures, video or better yet, post them all to my web page.

And why should I even type anything – why not just use Skype or MSN messenger or Google chat to communicate instantly?

Free text messaging over the web? Ludicrous. It’s a waste of time even thinking about it, and I certainly wouldn’t write it down.

And that’s why I didn’t invent Twitter.

If you want to be exposed to some inspiring new stimuli then you should subscribe to our RSS or Email updates. If inspiration is hitting you right now though, you’d better write it down in the comments section. Quick before it fades!

Original image by kaibara87 remixed by Patrick