Category Archives: Research

Arts, Psychology, Research, Science

Psychology: Choice

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

The more alternatives, the more difficult the choice.

It goes without saying, that some choice is good and that more choice is even better. The freedom to choose lies at the heart of any democratic, equal and healthy society based on a free market, ranging from choices as important as to which school our children attend, who to vote for, to choices as mundane as to what to eat from the canteen menu, what to wear and which TV programme to watch this evening. The flipside of having choice is that we also have to take responsibility for the decisions we make – consequences may arise.

Various studies suggest that feeling that we can control our destiny is vital to our psychological well-being, and that limiting personal choice reduces well-being. There is no doubt that over the past 20 or 30 years we have been seduced by the power of choice, to the point that most of us take it for granted, and don’t really give it a second thought. Choice means we have freedom. It means we can express who we are as individuals and it’s central to our identity. Denying or restricting choice is considered something to be avoided at all costs. Choice is now central in every domain of our lives.

But is having greater and greater personal choice really better for us? Some psychologists believe not, and have shown in research that increased choice makes us unable to make decisions and reduces our well-being. Barry Schwartz, acknowledged world expert on the psychology of choice, states that the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better. Schwartz refers to this as “the tyranny of choice”.

Four decades ago, sociologist Alvin Toffler described a psychological reaction to constant change and too much choice as “future shock”. He theorised that faced with too much choice – which he called “overchoice” – in too short a period of time, decisions would be harder and take longer to make as we’d have to process much more information. This would lead to slower reactions and decisions, and ultimately to psychological issues such as depression, distress and neurosis.

Recent research in psychology backs this up, suggesting that there are a number of problems associated with having too much choice. For example, in order to make a choice you’ll have to make some form of comparison between the different alternatives, which means sifting through an increasingly large amount of information about each one.

Some parts of the NHS appointments service in the UK utilises a “choose and book” system. Previously, in years gone by, patients would have gone directly to their local hospital; now there are pages of statistics from several hospitals within a 30-mile radius to wade through, including details on infection and mortality rates, car-parking availability and staff satisfaction rates. In situations like this, even if the majority of the available pieces of information are irrelevant to the choice you’re making, you still have to decide whether or not to take each one into account. It goes without saying that the volume and complexity of information you have to deal with increases the likelihood of making the “wrong” choice or making a mistake. In short, having too much choice causes you to worry, and is likely to lead to lower rather than higher well-being.

Findings from various experimental studies challenge the implicit assumption that having more options is better than having fewer. For example, shoppers are more likely to buy gourmet jams or chocolates and students are more likely to complete an optional class essay when they’re offered a limited array of six choices rather than an extensive array of 24–30 choices. What’s more, the shoppers reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections, and the students wrote better essays when their original set of choices was limited.

Psychology researchers conclude from these studies that having too much choice can have significantly demotivating effects. In relatively trivial contexts, not making a decision, such as going home without buying a pot of jam or a box of chocolates, is neither here nor there. More worryingly, choice overload may hinder decision-making in other more serious contexts, such as choosing medical treatment, especially where there are (or are perceived to be) costs associated with making the “wrong” choice, and where it takes the chooser a significant amount of time and effort to make an informed decision.

Are you a maximiser or a satisficer?

Back in the 1950s, Nobel prize-winning social scientist Herbert Simon introduced the distinction between maximising and “satisficing” as decision-making strategies. A maximiser is someone who wants to make the best possible choice, and so they complete an exhaustive study of all the available options before making their decision. A satisficer, on the other hand, is someone who is looking to make a “good enough” choice, so they keep looking at options only until they find one which meets their minimum requirements.

It’s unlikely you’re a 100 per cent maximiser or 100 per cent satisficer, although you’ll lean more towards one than the other. If you agree with statements such as “I never settle for second best,” and “Whenever I’m faced with a choice, I try to imagine what all the other possibilities are, even ones that aren’t present at the moment” you’re more likely to be a maximiser than a satisficer.

Although studies show that people who maximise tend to get better, higher-paying jobs than satisficers, at the same time they take longer to settle in and they’re more stressed, anxious and frustrated! Maximisers are also more prone than satisficers to be affected by social comparisons and have doubts about their ability compared to others.

. Science Book

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Psychology, Research, Science

Brain entropy

NEUROSCIENCE

Intro: A new research study helps to measure levels of consciousness

“OUR brains produce more entropy when we are awake than when we are asleep.” The finding from a research study could lead to better ways to measure the consciousness of people who appear to be in a coma.

Entropy is a measure of disorder, and in our universe, everything tends to move from less disorder to more over time. For instance, breaking a coffee cup increases entropy. While this breaking can happen in many ways, you never see a broken cup spontaneously reassemble itself and therefore decrease its entropy.

Electrical signals in our brains can also produce entropy as part of processing and transmitting information, such as the visual signals from our eyes. Researchers at the Paris-Saclay University in France wanted to determine whether our brains produce more entropy when we are awake or when we are asleep.

The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 15 people in different states of consciousness: while each person was awake and in three stages of sleep, from light to very deep.

To calculate entropy, the research team used a model that was previously developed from studying the pathways that electrical signals can follow inside of the brain. The different routes help reveal the different processes they can carry out, and each of those processes produces different amounts of entropy. From this, the researchers calculated entropy production for each person in each state of consciousness. The findings suggest that entropy decreases as people fall deeper into sleep. In the state of deepest sleep, people’s brains, on average, produced 25 per cent less entropy than when they were awake.

This now gives researchers and scientists a way to quantify consciousness. A person whose brain shows the same amount of entropy production in an fMRI study as someone who is deeply asleep is likely to have the same types of processes happening in their brain and to be at a similar level of consciousness.

This new method could potentially be used to quantify the consciousness of people in comas or eventually help to diagnose people with locked-in syndrome, who are conscious but unable to communicate with the external world.

Previous research has linked consciousness to entropy. Some fMRI studies, for example, have indicated that states of very altered consciousness, such as those induced by psychedelic substances like psilocybin, result in an increase in entropy of the brain itself – meaning that it is harder to predict its overall electrical state – and not just the entropy different signals produce.

Understanding the state of awareness of people that are minimally conscious has long been an area of scientific study. However, it isn’t yet clear that entropy production is an unambiguous mark of consciousness.

For example, dreams can happen in deep sleep – a time of low entropy – but they reflect a high level of consciousness. As such, dreams could actually increase entropy production in the brain, but the study carried out by researchers didn’t consider this.

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Environment, Research, Science

Migrating animals: How do they find their way?

ETHOLOGY

Intro: The ability by some animals to find their way when migrating over long distances intrigues and amazes us. The puzzle of how they do this is difficult to solve and we are only really just beginning to find answers

SOME of the migratory habits of animals are truly astonishing, not least because without our own navigational aids, our compasses and our GPS systems, we very easily get lost ourselves. Arctic terns leave their northern breeding grounds in and around the Arctic Circle towards the end of the summer to fly south all the way to the Antarctic coast, arriving in time for the onset of summer in the southern hemisphere, and then fly all the way back to the Arctic to breed the following spring. If the terns flew directly between their two destinations, this would involve journeys totalling over 32,000 km (20,000 miles), but they actually adopt much more convoluted routes, increasing the distances they cover by tens of thousands of miles. Yet after covering such enormous distances, the terns often return to the exact spot where they bred the previous year.

Atlantic salmon spend most of their adult lives in the ocean before returning to the same river where they were born, and usually to the same stretch of that river, to spawn. Some monarch butterflies are involved in a circular migration – which takes several generations to complete, travelling from southern Canada to overwintering sites in central Mexico while every year, millions of Christmas Island crabs travel from the forest in the interior of their Indian Ocean island to the coast to breed. Several species of frogs and toads engage in similar annual mass migrations, and sea turtles such as loggerheads and leatherbacks give the impression of being engaged in a lifelong migration, swimming for what can be thousands of kilometres between breeding grounds on beaches and feeding grounds in the distant ocean.

Navigating animals

These birds, fish, butterflies, crabs and turtles provide a few examples from among the thousands of species of animals that engage in migratory behaviour of one sort or another. Charles Darwin thought that animals, and to some extent humans as well, possessed an instinctive ability to orientate themselves in their surroundings, which they could use to navigate by dead reckoning, but he could not be any more specific about how this ability worked. Beginning in the 1910s, the Austrian animal behaviourist Karl von Frisch carried out experimental research on honeybees, which showed that their primary means of navigation involved using the position of the Sun to orientate themselves, but that they could also detect and follow the pattern of ultraviolet light in blue skies, which is caused by polarisation and is invisible to human eyes. On cloudy days, Frisch found that the bees could also make use of the Earth’s magnetic field to find their way when the Sun and polarised light were not visible. He would also be the first to describe the so-called waggle dance that the bees engaged in as a means of communicating the location of a source of nectar they had found to other bees in a hive.

Since Frisch’s work, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1973, other animals, such as sea turtles, have also been found to be able to detect the Earth’s magnetic field. Homing pigeons, which can return to their own lofts after being released hundreds of kilometres away, appear to use the magnetic field as one of a range of navigation techniques. Attempts have been made to discover how pigeons detect the magnetic field, which is actually very weak, and while we do not know for certain, one theory suggests they somehow make use of particles of magnetite, a highly magnetic mineral of iron oxide found in the upper part of their beaks. Even so, it remains a mystery how the navigational information that may be gained in this way is passed to the brain and processed.

Homing pigeons can switch between different methods of navigation as circumstances dictate, sometimes following known landmarks, such as coastlines, rivers and roads, while at others navigating by the Sun and stars. When it is too dark or cloudy for them to see the sky, they can fall back on finding their way by following the magnetic field. Researchers at the University of Texas who monitored the brain activity of pigeons while they were subjected to a moving magnetic field came to the conclusion that, as well as having compasses in their heads, the pigeons somehow constructed maps in their brains as they went along, so when they ended up in a place they had never been before they could head straight for home. We may like to think of ourselves as rather more intelligent than pigeons, but, for all our superior brainpower, we can’t do that.

Alternative theories

Research into the ability of European robins to use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate suggests that the mechanism involved may work at a subatomic, or quantum, level. If this proves to be the case, then it would go some way to explaining how animals can detect and make use of the natural magnetic field, which is far too weak to provide enough energy to power any molecular chemical reactions. Magnetoreception, as this ability is known, appears to function through the eyes of the robin, so it is possible that light provides the energy required to activate so-called radical pairs, subatomic charged particles that are small enough to be influenced by the low levels of magnetism and may create some form of navigational signal that is then passed to the robin’s brain via the optic nerve.

See also:

. Book Review – ‘Greenery: Journeys In Springtime’

. Science Book

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