Searching for sense on the surface, and going beyond it

WhatsApp forwards, phrenology, and our reliance on contexts to make sense of what we hear

Nov 17, 2020

Hey friends,

Today’s e-mail begins with an activity. A characteristic image identification forward. So, as per protocol, which animal do you see first?

A friend sent this to me a few days back, and I saw only the monkey for a long time. It took a whole minute for me to see there’s a tiger in the picture too. The rest of the message had a bunch of personality traits depending on which animal was seen first. It was meant to go along with which part of the brain was ‘used’ in the process. Now, I seemed to have all the traits I’d been dreaming about, so it hurt that the message was a WhatsApp forward.

There’s no evidence (yet) for an area of the brain to be linked to a personality type. The area of the brain that probably fits closest to personality is one that deals with emotions, the amygdala. Then again, how much can a bunch of emotions reveal about your personality, isn’t it? For the most part, emotions have a layer of context behind them. Personality on the other hand, by popular measure, is static, unchanging.

Image from wikimediacommons.

Imagine a scientist examining a shaved head of a person for bumps, and predicting personality on its basis. Yeah, the 1800s were a weird time. ‘Your brain is a muscle’ metaphor was taken a little too literally. So much so that it was assumed areas of the brain would grow in size the longer they were used.

Now, you could ask how would you know for sure. Maybe bumps really do correlate to personality. Well testing methods, sample size and statistics matter too. Gall, the scientist who developed phrenology did not have a good basis to make those claims. Read more about it here. Besides intent matters too. Now, more than ever. And science hasn’t been great at assessing intent historically. Something like phrenology, that seems innocent at the surface (pun intended) has implications on injustices like Nazism, racism and many others.

Alright now that it’s out of the way, here comes the juice. Do we know anything as two why two people might see different things from in the same image though? Possibly.

In her World Wide Neuro Seminar, Dr. Yaara Yeshurun discusses the difference context makes to understanding what a person hears. I’m past the half-way point of listening to the talk and I’m noting the important concepts covered thus far here.

I would have initially assumed all stimulus processing occurs in the higher-order regions. It’s far from the case though. Instead, processing occurs at different levels everywhere. When it comes to hearing, the sensory regions also perform the task of identifying different sounds/syllables. Given that each word has a bunch of sounds, the process is super fast. Information from here moves to an area higher up (or a bunch of different areas higher up) to process the meaning of words, and to areas much higher up to decode sentences or paragraphs. These areas, contrary to what we learnt in 12th grade, are present at different places around the brain. You could draw maps on the brain representing the areas of activation, just as an fMRI does, digitally of course.

Dr. Yeshurun and team didn’t stop there though. They observed individuals still had differences while listening to the same paragraph, although the overall pattern of the areas that activated was largely the same. When individuals were exposed to a different paragraph, in contrast, the patterns of activation changed significantly.

These experiments not only cemented early understanding of the process but also set the basis of the experiments done in the later stages.

In a different experiment, with a different team, Dr. Yaara identified the role of context in hearing. Here two groups of participants made to hear the same short narration, with one difference. They were given two different contexts to understand the narration. A questionnaire later, it was clear that the context did make a difference in understanding. What’s more interesting, the fMRI told a similar story too. Confirming the importance of context.

Well, there’s more to the talk, and I could only watch so much before zoning out for good. Turns out, not surprisingly, there’s a tonne we don’t know about. Another thing that this seminar re-iterated is ‘a lot of interesting science happens at the intersections of fields’, shockingly contrary to how methods of education work.

(B)Linking

p.p.s. All of these are Twitter finds. Thanks to everyone I follow for sharing, and in a sense, bringing all this to me. Lou <3