Hearses, coffins and the meaning of life

In the darkly funny film classic Harold and Maude, Harold is a 19-year-old who is obsessed with death and dying. He repeatedly fakes his own suicide, drives around in a hearse, and attends strangers’ funerals as a pastime. At one of these funerals he meets Maude, a 79-year-old with the same morbid hobby, and in one of the most unlikely romances on film, the melancholy young man and the vivacious concentration camp survivor fall in love. Maude’s life ends with her suicide on her 80th birthday, but it’s not a depressing death. Indeed, the final scene shows Harold putting aside his morbid ways and embracing life anew.

Harold and Maude is one of the cleverest films to wrestle with existential themes, but the interplay of morbidity and zest for life is a recurring theme in art and literature. And in real lives as well: People who have close brushes with death often report a sharpened appetite even for the ordinary stuff of daily life. Facing one’s mortality appears to give new meaning to being alive.

But why would this be? It’s not obvious. One can imagine becoming negative and fearful when faced with life’s fragility, or reckless, but that doesn’t seem to happen. What cognitive crunching transforms morbidity into hope, mourning into joy? In other words, what was taking place in young Harold’s neurons when his soul mate’s death lifted his spirits out of the doldrums?

Some new science offers one possible explanation for this cognitive phenomenon. A team of cognitive scientists at the University of Missouri, headed by Laura King, decided to look at the death-and-zest interplay in terms of mental heuristics. Heuristic is just scientific jargon for the ancient, deep-wired rules that shape many of our thoughts and actions, and the Missouri scientists were especially interested in two of these rules. The so-called scarcity heuristic states: If something is rare, it must be valuable. This explains, for example, why we prize gold, even though steel is much more useful. The flip side of the scarcity heuristic, often called the value heuristic, states: If we desire something very much, it must be scarce.

Neither of these cognitive rules is necessarily correct or useful all the time, but they are both powerful—powerful enough to explain the common intertwining of morbidity and zest. Because scarcity and value are so tightly linked in the human mind, King and her colleagues reasoned, the mind might interpret death as a scarcity of life, which according to the theory should enhance its perceived value. They decided to test this idea in their laboratory.

The experiments were fairly straightforward. In one, for example, the researchers had a large group of volunteers complete word-find puzzles—those grids of letters with words embedded in them. For some of the volunteers, the embedded words were death-related, like tombstone and coffin, while for others—the controls—they were pain-related, like headache. Then all the volunteers completed three widely used measures of life’s meaning and purpose. The findings were simple and unambiguous: Those with death on their mind found life more meaningful and, well, simply better. They valued life more when primed by funerals and hearses.

So that’s the scarcity principle at work. But the scientists wanted to test their idea the other way around. That is, if it is indeed the heuristic mind finding meaning in death, then loving and embracing life should also enhance awareness of death’s constant presence. They tested this idea in an ingenious way. They approached strangers on the streets of Columbia, Missouri, and asked them to read a brief prose passage. Some read about how valuable the human body was if the organs were traded on the market—in the neighborhood of $45 million, the equivalent of “400 Porsches, 265 houses, or 45 luxury yachts.” The idea was to spark thoughts about life’s monetary worth. Others read about how the body was made up of common chemicals with a total value of about $4.50—the equivalent of “a Big Mac Value Meal at McDonald’s.”

Then they had all the volunteers do a different word test, this one requiring word completions like coff__ and de__. These words could be completed with either death-related words like coffin and dead, or with neutral words like coffee and deal. The idea was to see how much the two different groups of volunteers were thinking about death and dying. And the findings, reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, were again clear: As the value heuristic would predict, those who were imagining themselves as the $45 million bionic man were also focused on the inevitability of dying—much more than those primed to devalue life. Valuing life made it seem scarcer and thus more fragile.

So the reality of death does not render life meaningless. Indeed, the opposite. And what’s more, when we embrace life, death is not pushed out of awareness; it lurks just outside of consciousness, easily accessible. That’s a psychological reality that Maude knew well from experience, and 19-year-old Harold was just beginning to sense.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book on the heuristic mind will be published by Crown in fall of 2010.

Savoring the passage of time

I take part in a spinning class a couple times a week, and I always position my bike so I can’t see the wall clock. Spinning is really hard, and I know from experience that the session will seem much longer and much more arduous if I have one eye on the clock. It still drags some days, but other days I really forget about the clock. Time flies.

I know, it’s a cliché, but who hasn’t experienced a deep connection between the clock and the subjective experience of pleasure or pain? It’s what psychological scientists call “naïve physics.” We all know that time doesn’t really ever speed up or slow down; it always ticks at its own pace. But our perceptions of time vary dramatically, depending on our state of mind.

The universality of this naïve theory got scientist Aaron Sackett wondering if the opposite might also be true: If indeed time seems to tick away faster when we’re having fun, could a distorted sense of time make an experience more or less enjoyable? And why? Sackett, a professor of marketing at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, ran several experiments to look at this common perception in a variety of ways. All of them involved tinkering with the passage of time in creative ways.

In one experiment, for example, Sackett and his colleagues put a group of men and women in two rooms, each without any clocks or watches or cell phones. They had them do a timed test, in which they had to read a text and underline certain words—so not particularly fun-filled, but not particularly aversive either. The scientists told the volunteers the test would take exactly ten minutes, and made a big show of starting a stopwatch as they left the room.

But the test didn’t take exactly ten minutes. For some, the scientists reentered after just five minutes, but acted as if the full ten minutes had passed; they even left the stopwatch conspicuously in view. For others, they didn’t reenter the room until 20 minutes had passed, but again they left the volunteers with the idea that ten minutes had passed. In other words, for some ten minutes seemed surprisingly long, while for others it seemed short—the lab equivalent of making time fly.

Then all the volunteers rated the experience for enjoyment, challenge, fun, engagement, and so forth. And the results were clear: If the ten minutes passed surprisingly quickly, volunteers found the word search task more pleasurable than if time seemed to drag. This doesn’t mean they found it exhilarating, or that the others found it crushingly boring—but their subjective experiences were definitely different on the pleasure scale.

But what if the task were actually aversive—more akin to the muscle ache of a spinning class? In a second study, the scientists forced the volunteers to listen to a tape recording of a dot matrix printer for 30 seconds. Thirty seconds is not a long time, but apparently this was a really irritating noise. While they listened, they watched the elapsed time tick off on a screen-- except that, unbeknownst to the volunteers, the elapsing time was either too slow or too fast. So again, for some time flew, while for others time dragged.

And again, time perceptions shaped emotions. When time flew, the tedious listening experience seemed less tedious, more bearable. When it dragged, it was worse; these listeners said they would rather listen to an electric drill if given the option. They also ran the experiment with a pleasant audiotape—of a favorite song—and once again time distortions determined the pleasure of the listening experience. That is, a pleasant experience became more pleasant.

So what does all of this mean? As the researchers explain on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, humans are sense-making creatures. If we perceive something in the world as surprising, we automatically look for an explanation for the aberration. So if time sees distorted, we want to know why—and out intuitive physics clicks in: If time flies when we’re having fun, then flying time must signal that something fun is taking place.

In real life, we can’t slow or speed up time, of course. But we can shorten our estimates of time, and one way is not to look at clocks or other time cues. There may be other ways to make time fly as well, which suggests the possibility of making the inevitable tedium of everyday life—waiting in line, for example, or even a spinning class—just a bit more fun.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Redemption for the fast and furious?

My kids cut their video gaming teeth on Super Mario Brothers in the late 80s, and I confess I had some qualms about buying our first Nintendo. Would these seemingly pointless games be intellectually numbing, a waste of time and money? Would my kids lose interest in books? The usual parental fretting, I guess. But Mario and Luigi’s adventures with Princess Toadstool seemed benign enough, so we took the plunge. I limited their gaming time, and censored their games choices, and they seem to have emerged as undamaged adults.

I had it easy, really. The video gaming culture has become much more pervasive over the past two decades, and as we enter the holiday gift-giving season, many parents are in a deep quandary. Today’s games—especially those for teenagers and young adults—have become much more frenetic. Many reward adrenaline-pumping vigilance, rapid reactions, sharpshooting and other skills of personal combat. So parents are still left to wonder: Is there any redeeming value in the hours that teens spend transfixed by these contests?

Well, the latest psychological science provides at least a partial answer, and one that might surprise a lot of Luddites, Grinches and well-meaning moms and dads. Indeed, parents might consider putting an action video game under the tree not only for their kids, but for their aging parents as well. The weight of evidence, summarized by University of Rochester scientists in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, suggests that regular gamers are fast and accurate information processors and—more important—that this skill carries over far beyond fragging bots in Unreal Tournament.

Anecdotal evidence has long hinted that players who spend a lot of hours on a game get faster—at least faster at that game. That’s not surprising, but cognitive scientists Matthew Dye, Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier wanted to look beyond the obvious. They gathered together all the existing studies of video gaming that they could find, and crunched them together in what’s called a “meta-analysis”—to see what general conclusions they could extract. They found some surprising insights in the mounds of data.

For example, they found that avid players got faster not only on their game of choice, but on a variety of unrelated laboratory tests of reaction time: finding a particular letter in a field of letters, that kind of thing. They also found evidence that gamers don’t lose accuracy as they get faster. This is important, because skeptics have claimed that avid gamers are simply “trigger happy”—that is, fast but impulsive, and prone to errors. It appears they’re fast and accurate—just as accurate as cautious players. Perhaps most important, they found that all avid players’ share a common underlying cognitive change that explains their generalized quickness and sharpness.

That’s the most important finding. When they examined the gamers’ speed-plus-accuracy boost more closely, they found that the common underlying ingredient is improved visual cognition. Playing video games enhances performance on things like mental rotation skills, visual and spatial memory, and tasks requiring divided attention. What’s more, it’s not just that kids with these skills are drawn to video games. Scientists have trained novices with no particular interest in gaming, and with enough hours, they too become both faster and more visually sharp.

These enhanced visual skills are beginning to sound like talents that might be helpful to an airline pilot, not just a Call to Duty2 champion. But there’s more to recommend these games, the Rochester scientists conclude: Studies have already indicated that training might reduce gender differences in visual and spatial processing, and there is good reason to believe such training might stem the cognitive declines that come with aging as well. Indeed, one theory is that all the decrements that come with aging are related to a generalized slowing of the ability to process information—the exact opposite of the generalized cognitive gain that comes from gaming.

But hold up. There are obviously many other considerations before parents run out and buy the latest first-person assassin game for the whole family. Many of the action-oriented video games are unsuitable for children, and granddad might lack the manual dexterity and eyesight to play these games anyway. But perhaps in a Christmas future, there will be an intergenerational face-off on an educational toy for all ages.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Remembering who's the grown-up

As a child, I used to drive my mother to distraction. It was my job. And my mother, for her part, would regularly threaten to wring my neck. It was kind of a family ritual. But as often as she threatened, she never actually did it. My neck is fine.

I had friends growing up whose necks didn’t fare so well. The difference between normal parenting and abusive parenting is the difference between wanting to throttle your children—and really doing it. All children can be maddening at times, but why do some parents react with harshness while others do not? Harsh parenting has been linked to everything from poverty to lack of education, but those explanations really beg the more intriguing question: What’s going on in the heads of harsh and abusive parents? What specific cognitive deficit makes it so difficult for some parents to regulate their frustration with their kids?

New research is suggesting a somewhat surprising answer to this question. Kirby Deater-Deckard, a professor of psychological science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, argues in a just-published study that inadequate working memory may be the culprit. Working memory is the ability to hold information in mind and manipulate it for a short period of time: For example, try doing this simple addition problem in your head: 888 + 333. It’s not complex, but it does require remembering the numbers you’re carrying for a few seconds, remembering the sum of each column, and so forth. Some people are better at this than others.

Here’s how Deater-Deckard and his colleagues demonstrated the link between memory and patience—or lack of it. They recruited more than 200 mothers with same-sex twins, all about six years old. They visited their homes, where they videotaped the mothers working with each of the twins separately on difficult cooperative tasks. On one task, for example, mother and child had to draw a picture on an Etch-A-Sketch, each manipulating one of the toy’s two handles. The task was meant to frustrate both child and mother, to test their patience and self-control.

And it did, to varying degrees. The researchers had independent judges score both the child’s and the mother’s behavior. The children were rated for overt anger and frustration, for disobedience, giving up on the Etch-A-Sketch task, and so forth. The mothers were similarly rated, but in their case for their negative reactions to their children’s challenging behavior—including annoyance and anger, taking over the game in frustration, criticizing the child’s errors.

The twins were necessary for statistical purposes. By observing each interaction separately and subtracting one score from the other, the scientists were able to zero in on a purer measure of each parent’s overall tendency to react negatively to their kids, rather than to a particular child's personality. Then they gave each mother a battery of standard tests, including measures of verbal skills, spatial reasoning and working memory. They crunched all the data together for analysis.

The results clearly implicated working memory deficits (and only working memory deficits) as a cause of harsh parenting. But why? The link between poor memory and harsh impatience may not be intuitively obvious, but the scientists have an explanation. In those few seconds between experiencing frustration and reacting, a mother must appraise the situation. That is, she must say to herself something like this: Remember now, you’re the grown-up here; children are a challenge, but they don’t mean to be. And so forth and so forth. This kind of appraisal happens again and again, and each time it requires the powers of working memory. It may not seem like the same skill as that needed to add 888 and 333, but essentially it is. One must keep the facts of a situation in mind in order to rapidly and accurately appraise one’s emotions and arrive at an appropriate reaction.

These findings, published on-line in the journal Psychological Science this week, almost certainly apply to fathers as well, and they offer some small good news for both parents and kids. It’s commonly said that harsh and abusive parents lack good parenting skills, but that’s both obvious and unhelpful. These findings implicate a much more specific cognitive skill, and what’s more, one that evidence suggests can be enhanced with practice. Working memory training will not solve the problem of child maltreatment, but it’s a concrete intervention that might help some parents and children at risk.

For more insights into human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

The Perils of Willpower

The coming holiday season looms as a nightmare of temptation for many, whether the lure is fruitcake or martinis. Most dieters and abstainers think of willpower as the key to success. Bite the bullet; just say no. Yet paradoxically, the cornerstone of most addiction recovery programs is the exact opposite of willpower: It’s admitting powerlessness over drugs or sweets or booze.

This is a difficult concept for many, especially for those who have grown up in a culture that celebrates self-reliance. How can weakness be the way to success? Whatever happened to personal responsibility and self-discipline? It’s not entirely clear why or how this principle works, but some new research may help illuminate the dynamic.

Northwestern University psychologist Loran Nordgren and colleagues wanted to explore how our beliefs about our own powers of restraint might shape our behavior in the face of temptation. They suspected that people who believe they are powerless would be less likely to put themselves in risky situations—holiday parties, for example—and would therefore be less likely to give into temptation. Similarly, people who believe in their own powers of restraint would be less vigilant about temptation—and thus at heightened risk for a slip. They were especially interested in one puzzling question about addiction and recovery: Why do so many people relapse even after the physical symptoms of addiction subside?

They decided to study smokers. They contacted about 50 smokers who were trying to quit through a smoking cessation program. All had gone without a smoke for at least three weeks, which means that their physical withdrawal cravings were past. The researchers began by giving the smokers a questionnaire to gauge their beliefs about their ability to control their impulses and withstand temptation. Then they asked them a series of questions about the steps they took to avoid being around cigarettes: Do you avoid people who smoke? Ask people not to smoke? Sneak an occasional drag? And so forth.

Four months later, they contacted the recovering smokers again to see how they were doing with their effort to quit. They expected that their beliefs would shape their risky behavior, which would in turn influence success or failure. And that’s precisely what they found. As reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, quitters who were confident in their powers of self-restraint were more apt to hang around smokers and keep cigarettes around—and were also more likely to relapse. Those who felt weak and vulnerable had a higher rate of success.

But what makes one person believe in willpower, while another sees himself as powerless? According to the researchers, beliefs are not fixed. They fluctuate depending on our circumstances and psychological state. People in a “hot” state are feeling the full force of their visceral impulses—hunger and craving—and therefore “believe” in the potency of addiction and in their vulnerability. But people in a “cold” state—who aren’t having cravings at the moment—have a great deal of trouble remembering what those impulses feel like, and as a result tend to believe more in their personal willpower. This disconnect is what the psychologists call the “empathy gap.”

The problem is that we spend most of our time in a cold state, so we tend to overestimate our powers of control and restraint. When we overestimate these powers, we are more likely to act recklessly. This would help explain why people relapse long after their physical compulsions are gone: They feel confident in their abstinence, and let their guard down, only to find themselves in a hot state—and at a holiday party. It would also explain another cornerstone of recovery programs: Going to meetings. Spending time around other recovering addicts, listening to stories of temptation and struggle and relapse is a way to prevent a hot state from going cold.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.