Re: [time] Two minds

[Harry Veeder <eo200@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anna,
Awesome research!
I am forwarding this to an economics list, as
economic theory and policy very much depends on the science
of decision-making.

Harry Veeder

> From: "Anna Morton" <xibalba@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Reply-To: time@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Sat, 11 May 2002 17:11:16 -0700
> To: <Existence@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <time@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [time] Two minds
>
> The Science Show - ABC Radio National
> http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s545799.htm
> Broadcast Saturday 4/5/2002
>
> IN TWO MINDS - PART 1
>
> SUMMARY:
> If you've ever used the expression in two minds to describe a feeling
> of indecision there may be a physiological reason for it. Professor
> Jack Pettigrew's research gives some fascinating insights into the
> functioning of the two hemispheres of our brain.
>
> TRANSCRIPT:
> Robyn Williams: You'll recall perhaps that the left side of the
> brain does different things from the right. But did you know that the
> functions switch from side to side, one side to the other, and we
> have a rhythm that's characteristic for each person? Well, I
> didn't, nor that this rhythm may give a clue to pathologies such
> as depression or even schizophrenia. The man behind these ideas is
> Professor Jack Pettigrew from the University of Queensland and here
> he is explaining how they found this fascinating rhythm.
>
> Jack Pettigrew: Well, if you get someone to look at an ambiguous
> figure their interpretation switches backwards and forwards and in a
> very regular fashion; that's the first surprising thing. Now
> people have missed this I think, partly because everybody's a bit
> different and so if you sort of normalise across the whole population
> it looks like a mess. But the same person has a switch time which is
> always the same; you can test them years later and they're just
> exactly the same.
>
> So we were struck by this and we've done work showing that this
> particular switch is actually between the hemispheres. You've got
> a little switch down in your brain stem and it's ticking away and
> it's also subject to sensory input. So it's like the clock is
> very accurate but it can be reset by sensory input. And that's
> another reason people haven't thought it was clocklike, because
> it can be shifted around.
>
> Robyn Williams: If I'm just looking at you or you're looking
> at me can you see the switching? In other words, the way the eyes
> move or anything like that externally?
>
> Jack Pettigrew: No, I think it's very hard. You can train
> yourself and if you're a slow switcher so you've got more
> time in one state before you go to the other, I think it's
> easier. It's also possible the switches are more dramatic if you
> spend more time in one side before you go to the other, you may
> develop bigger differences between the two so it may be easier for
> that reason. But I think it's more to do with the fact, if
> you've got more time in one state before you go to the other you
> can train yourself to be aware of the differences and people will
> tell you when they're faced with a difficult decision they often
> feel  this sort of stop/go, stop/go, stop/go feeling, then they can
> be very aware of the switch.
>
> Robyn Williams: But how are you aware of it? Are you aware of
> something in your head or your mood or what?
>
> Jack Pettigrew: It's like mood. Whether you're confident and
> you want to ignore the difficulties and go forward or whether you
> want to sit tight and look at everything before you do anything.
> They're kind of the two cognitive styles if you like, of the two
> sides and if you're a fast switcher and you're happy go lucky
> you may not be aware of the difference between the two. But with
> training you can bring it out and just about everybody who sits on
> one of my tests can be aware of the difference. We get occasional
> people who seem to be either switching so fast or they visited both
> sides all the time that the switches are obvious but that's very
> rare, just you know 1% or so, like that.
>
> Robyn Williams: How do you measure it?
>
> Jack Pettigrew: Well we've got a whole set of ambiguous displays
> and some are on my website and you can actually play with them,
> they're fun to play with. So for example, I collaborate with an
> Israeli guy, Yoram Bonneh who's developed some beautiful
> displays: one of them is just a set of blue dots which are quite
> ambiguous; they're moving and it looks like a ball that's
> rolling and the ball can be rolling towards you or away from you, and
> the switch is quite dramatic: it rolls towards you and then after a
> few seconds, bang, it goes the other way - and there's nothing
> happening on the screen.
>
> And this is something I can show to a big audience and get them to
> say, put their hand up: stop when the ball's coming towards you and
> then wave goodbye to it when it's going away, right, and you get
> the whole audience switching backwards and forwards. And you say, now
> have a look around the audience and you'll see everybody is
> different, they're all looking at the same display and some of
> them are sort of waiting for the switch and others are switching
> backwards and forwards real quick. So it's a fun thing to do in a
> demo, and it shows first of all, that there are big individual
> differences and I think that's one reason why a clock-like
> process has been put to one side. But in that person it's a very
> regular thing that you can show can be demonstrated to the second
> decimal place three years later, sort of thing.
>
> Robyn Williams: So, let's have a go or let Polly Rickard who
> produces the Science Show have a go with Caroline Campbell and
> Richard Aedy who've both taken an interest in brain physiology.
>
> Caroline Campbell: The ideas put forward by Jack Pettigrew are new
> and controversial. I wanted to know if this switching mechanism is
> going on in my own brain, what it feels like and how it affects the
> way I perceive the world. The first stop was Jack Pettigrew's
> home page to try these visual tests for myself. The screen showed a
> blue ball rolling towards me. I stared and stared. I was beginning to
> go a little cross-eyed when quite suddenly the ball was rolling
> backwards. The actual switch itself felt peculiar; it was as if I
> momentarily saw it rolling both ways at once before I registered that
> the switch had actually happened. I knew that the animation on the
> screen hadn't changed, this is all in my mind.
>
> Then I decided to try Bonneh's Illusion. The image showed three
> yellow spots in front of the blue ball. After another 50 seconds of
> staring intently at the screen the bottom spot flickered and
> disappeared, then it came back; the other two flickered and then all
> three were gone. I blinked and leaned in. No yellow spots to be seen.
> I knew the image on the screen hadn't changed, the yellow spots
> were there but for some reason my brain had now simply chosen to
> ignore their existence. It was time to call in Radio National
> colleagues Polly and Richard.
>
> This is the home page, so if you click on reversible sphere you'll
> see the blue spots form a ball which is rolling towards you. Now,
> just stare at it and I'm going to time you. (snip)
>
> Caroline Campbell: So it was true, this switching is going on in each
> one of us but with Polly switching at four seconds, myself at sixty
> seconds and Richard at over two minutes it seemed that the three of
> us are seeing the world very differently. There is another way you
> can find your inner switch. All it requires is your nose and a bit of
> time.
>
> Robyn Williams: So there is a clock mechanism, there's a timing
> mechanism, where is that based?
>
> Jack Pettigrew: Well, there's a set of clocks in your brain stem:
> so starting from the hypothalamus there's a slow one, which is the
> 24 hour clock, the circadian clock that everybody knows about, and
> since there are two circadian clocks one on either side of the
> hypothalamus, I predicted a few years ago that under some conditions
> it would be a switch between the hemispheres too, and that's just
> been shown. One of the slowest clocks, the 24 hour clock actually
> switches from side to side under some circumstances. So there's
> one behind the suprachiasmatic called the retrochiasmatic and it's
> about an hour and a half or so in normal people and you can check
> that out with your nostrils. If you just close one nostril and
> breathe out and then close the other nostril and breathe out
> you'll notice one of them is more open than the other. And if you
> plot that, say right, right, right, you'll find in about an
> hour's time it'll go left, left, left, right, right, right, left,
> left, left; so there's a cycle from side to side of your nostrils
> which you can correlate with activity in your frontal lobes.
>
> Robyn Williams: Why would the nostrils be affected?
>
> Jack Pettigrew: Well, there's a famous demo which I haven't
> seen myself but I know lots of people who've seen it; there's
> a swami in Madras and he sits down the front of a medical school
> class in his loincloth and they sprinkle anhydrous copper sulphate on
> him, which is white but it goes blue when it's wet, and he sits
> there and then half of his body goes bright blue and they wait for an
> hour or so and then the other half of his body goes bright blue. So
> that if you're able to shut out these sort of phase shifting
> sensory effects from the world, and a swami can do that, then you can
> see this oscillator shifting from side to side and all the
> meditators, all the great masters in meditation, they all know about
> this. And I met one in India and he was sitting there and he was
> checking his nostrils and I said, what are you doing? And he said,
> well I'm waiting till I'm in my right hemisphere - because
> meditation is much better, you're right hemisphere is the one
> that accepts everything, you're supposed to die in your right
> hemisphere.
>
> So I said, well why don't you just shift it over, you're a
> master why don't you just shift it over. And he said, Oh, no, you
> can't to that. So he was aware that there's an intrinsic
> oscillation that switches backwards and forwards and he had to wait
> until he was in the right phase and then he did his thing.
>
> Robyn Williams: Well, why should this be happening at all, what's
> the point?
>
> Jack Pettigrew: Now we're getting to some you know, deep
> philosophy, but we tend to think the world is fairly easy to figure
> out but actually the world is very ambiguous and the quantum guys
> would say well, you know, it's fundamentally ambiguous. Dale
> Purves in the States has got some beautiful illusions which are based
> on his thesis that there are inescapable ambiguities. A lot of the
> things we take for granted are actually intrinsically ambiguous and
> the only way to resolve the ambiguity is to resort to past
> experience, that what's his thesis, and my addition to that is
> perhaps the brain oscillates so we don't get stuck if the world's
> ambiguous the brain is built so it oscillates backwards and forwards
> and that sort of brings we round to Richard Feynman's conjecture.
> When I was at Caltec he used to come into the lab. In the last decade
> of his life he got very interested in the brain, and he said Jack, do
> you think it's possible there's a clock in the brain that
> co-ordinates everything just like the clock in the computer. And
> there weren't very many people in those days who were brave
> enough to suggest that.
>
> I think they've got good evidence that in fact there is a clock,
> because these different clocks I've just talked about, the
> suprachiasmatic, which is 24 hours and the retrochaismatic, which is
> one and a half hours, and as you come back they get faster and faster
> and then the ventral tegmental mid brain clock is about a second. The
> remarkable thing is that they are coupled together, this is amazing
> to most people, but if you study someone you can show that the
> rivalry clock that I've just mentioned, the one that's one to
> two seconds, is longer in some people, like in me it's a bit
> longer than usual but if I check out my other cycles they are also
> longer. So you can show that there's what we call genetic
> coupling and it's been shown in Drosophila and C elegans where
> they've got very good genetic models, that if you mutate one of
> these clock genes it doesn't just affect one rhythm, the 24 hour
> rhythm, but it affects all rhythms in the same direction.
>
> Robyn Williams: Apart from the worms and the fruit flies, if these
> rhythms are not as they should be in us are there pathological side
> effects, you know like mental illness, or dysfunction or whatever?
>
> Jack Pettigrew: Well, I think for humans to get out of the Equator
> into the high latitudes he probably had to be very good at handling
> these time things, and if he was too clock-like, if he wasn't
> very sensitive to external cues we might not have been so successful.
> And so I think that genes for having funny rhythms are hanging around
> in the population and one of the side effects is that if your clock
> is slow you seem to be very, very sensitive and very much more likely
> to get the clock stuck in one phase. So I think, manic depression at
> one end clock to slow and schizophrenia is probably a clock that's
> too fast, because we've got evidence that in schizophrenics the
> clock is ticking too fast and it'll sort of with you know, a bit
> of stress get pushed over into the psychotic state where the clock is
> extremely fast and uncontrolled.
>
> So yes, I think that the work we are doing suggests that these
> oscillators can be deranged but it may be good to have an oscillator
> that's sitting on the edge of the normal range. For example, I
> think about Virginia Wolfe who was clearly a slow switcher, manic
> depressive, she was so sensitive she could feel Hitler, you know,
> stomping around hundreds of miles away and I think that's one of
> the messages that we get: the clock is too slow or on the slow end of
> the range and there's increase in sensitivity as well. You can
> show that all of the singling pathways that normally synchronise the
> clock and phace-shift it, they're all up-regulated maybe to try
> and compensate for the fact that the rhythm isn't quite right and
> one side effect of that is that extreme sensitivity that was so great
> in her case that she you know, put stones in the pockets of the coat
> and drowned herself.
>
> Robyn Williams: Killed herself, yes, committed suicide. Finally, do
> many people disagree with you in science?
>
> Jack Pettigrew: Well, I don't know how to answer that Robyn. No,
> no everybody doesn't agree with me. I have almost made a
> profession out of being controversial, that's just my nature. And
> I think that's just because I'm ahead of the pack. You know,
> all of my big discoveries took about 18 to 20 years before they were
> fully accepted.
>
> Further information:
> Jack Pettigrew's Homepage
> http://www.uq.edu.au/nuq/jack/jack.html
>
>
>
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