LIke That Tune? You'll Love What's Next.

Is there really no accounting for taste? A group of British researchers just published a paper in PNAS proposing that popular music is a product of evolution -- the survival of the fittest melodies, harmonies and rhythms according to natural selection by thousands upon thousands of music consumers stating their preferences.


To make their point, they computer-generated 100 musical loops, each 8 seconds long, that were posted online at Darwin Tunes. Thousands of people then logged in to rate them on a five-point scale from "I can't stand it" to "I love it." The most popular loops were, in the words of one researcher, then allowed to "have sex and make baby loops" (i.e. new loops with bits from each parent loop mingled together). The new "generation" of loops replaced the old ones, and then visitors rated these, and so on.

You can listen to one of the researchers explain it, here:



The paper covered the evolution of this music over more than 2,500 generations (during which time more than 50,000 new musical loops were generated). In a separate experiment, they asked people to rate loops randomly selected from different generation, and people consistently preferred more recently "born" musical loops). What starts off as audio chaos does turn into something more melodious via this "natural" selection. Give it a listen. Remind you of anything?

Here's to You, New Jersey

The following arrived in my inbox today from the American Association of Wine Economists, announcing the results of a blind wine taste test they set up at their annual conference in Princeton, NJ pitting the best French reds and whites against Jersey wines. I've highlighted the summary of their results below:

Think Young!

Today, at the first International Conference on Social Identity and Health, researchers from the University of Exeter (UK) presented a study showing that the way older adults think about their age can ward off (or invite) cognitive cobwebs.

Several dozen research participants between 60 and 70 years old were put in one of two groups -- the "older" group was primed to think of themselves as older by being told that the study enrolled people aged 40 to 70, while the "younger" group was told that the participants ranged in age from 60 to 90. Then, subjects read one of two articles, either one focusing on aging and memory loss or one on aging and general cognitive ability. Finally, everybody took a series of standard clinical tests, including one used to screen for dementia. The scores of 70 percent of the "older" subjects who read that aging was associated with general cognitive decline indicated likely dementia, compared to an average of just 14 percent in the other groups. 

No Cash Only?

The cover story in IEEE Spectrum magazine is about the demise of cash money. It's a measured piece -- the end of cash is nigh, but not too nigh. Rather than a cashless society, the article envisions a "less-cash society." OK. What's most interesting to me is that the idea of a cashless society seems momentous and even fantastical -- like a world without walls or laws (cue John Lennon).  It's just trading in one abstraction (currency) for another (or several others), right? Maybe. Maybe not.

Bogus Brain Boosters

There's a big, front-page story in the New York Times today about how high school students are increasingly following college kids into the risky practice of taking drugs off-label as cognitive enhancers. The headline drug in this class is Adderall, an amphetamine that's meant for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It's a real problem, but unmentioned in the lengthy story is the fact that studies have repeatedly shown that placebo cognitive enhancers also give students an edge in memory and attention, including R273, a dummy performance booster that was just lime-flavored baking soda. Other examples are here and here.

Gaydar

     In the early 1960s, the Canadian government tried to purge gays and lesbians from government service. At a time when far fewer people were openly gay, the task of outing civil servants fell to a special unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a contraption developed by psychologists at Carleton University in Ottawa that was known in top-secret Canadian code as, “The Special Pro-ject.” The Mounties had a less cryptic name for the device. They called it “the fruit machine.” 

(Below is a 2005 short documentary on it by the CBC):





The "fruit machine" could supposedly detected homosexuality by measuring patterns of pupil dilation when people looked at pictures of naked men and women. The fruit machine was never actually used, mainly because it didn’t work.

However, more recent “gaydar” studies led by psychologists Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady show that people are quite good at guessing sexual orientation based solely on a face. Even when a still photo of the face flashes by for just 33 milliseconds, these judgments are significantly more accurate than chance, and accuracy doesn’t diminish when the hair is cropped out, or when the photos shown nothing but the eyes (not even any eyebrows).

“People don’t think they’ll be able to do this,” says Rule. “They have no idea how they’re making these judgments, but we go and look at their data, and they’re doing great.”

The latest gaydar study, which gets into what exactly it is about a face that leads to these judgments, was published in PLoS ONE in May, 2012, and was described briefly last week in the New York Times by the study's co-authors.

Oreo Expectations

Japanese researcher's have designed special goggles that can make our snacks look bigger, so we eat less. It's a techno-take on the idea of "expected satiety." Here's the Colbert Report send-up on the story:

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Cyberchondria: Are you infected?

Wondering what that rash is? Anxious about that persistent pain or sudden fatigue? Increasingly, our first visit is to Dr. Google. The wealth of medical information online can be extremely helpful, but it can also induce Web-based hypochondria, or cyberchondria. A study in the April 12 issue of Psychological Science gives some insights into the causes.

Two New Takes on Placebo Ethics

The latest Hastings Center Report has two interesting commentaries on the American Medical Association's Code of Ethics regarding use of placebos by clinicians. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read the commentaries in full. But, here's a sneak peek:

I might call it a placebo workout...

....but that's just me (from "32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow," NYT Magazine 6/1/12).

What’s the new psychological trick for improving performance? Strategic lying. When amateur golfers were told, falsely, that a club belonged to the professional golfer Ben Curtis, they putted better than other golfers using the same club. For a study published in March, human cyclists were pitted against a computer-generated opponent moving at, supposedly, the exact speed the cyclist had achieved in an earlier time trial. In fact, the avatars were moving 2 percent faster, and the human cyclists matched them, reaching new levels of speed. Lying is obviously not a long-term strategy — once you realize what’s going on, the effects may evaporate. It works as long as your trainer can keep the secret. Gretchen Reynolds

OK, let's get started.

For a journalist, having too much to write about is a good problem to have. But, it's still a problem. When I began the reporting for Mind Over Mind two years ago, it didn't take long to realize that the science of expectations would be hard to corral into a book. I gave it my best shot, but that meant sacrificing some great material. That was my dilemma. This blog is my remedy.