neuroscience – RJ Plant

Welcome back! Good to see ya, nice to meet’cha, let’s dive right in! Today’s topic is solely focused on suspicion and how it can affect your social and business life and mental processes. Of course, it’s only reasonable that I explain how this topic popped into my head.

You see, kiddies, I get extremely suspicious when certain people ask me questions. Whether it’s a stranger or an acquaintance, there are just some people I feel should not be asking me things—no matter how innocent the question. Take this conversation, for instance:

I’m in a break room, heating up food in a microwave. (OP=other person)
OP: Heating up your lunch?
Me: Yes.
OP: What are you having?
Me: …Soup
OP: What kind of soup?
Me: Homemade soup.
OP: Well, what’s in it?
Me: ::shrugs:: Vegetables and broth.

It was almost as discomforting as this image.

Yes, I knew what she wanted when asking what kind of soup. And, yes, I knew exactly what was in it. Yes, Dave, seriously. I can put edible things together in a bowl and pour broth over it. Anyway, the problem was this: I didn’t want to answer. Similarly, I don’t want to answer when asked about my prior weekend or my plans for the upcoming weekend. I don’t know why. My only reasoning is: It’s none of this person’s business. The next minute, I’ll turn around and tell the withheld information to a different person. And, I’m not the only one who does this. If some of you have picked this up as unconscious bias, well done. That definitely has an underlying role here.

We are all prone to unconscious bias, and I believe the type of guarded suspicion some of us have when asked questions by certain people is a symptom of this. So, why are some people more prone to suspicion, and why do certain people seem to rub us the wrong way?

Shown here: Not the wrong kind of rub.

Looking at the Science Behind Suspicion

Understanding suspicion through science is a ideal “where” to start with our conundrum. In order to figure out how people assess the credibility of others, scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute (VTC) investigated the parts of the brain that function in suspicion: the amygdala and the parahippocampal gyrus. The amygdala “plays a central role in processing fear and emotional memories and the parahippocampal gyrus […] is associated with declarative memory and the recognition of scenes,” according to an article featured on VTC’s website. The study went like this:

76 pairs of players, each with a buyer and a seller, competed in 60 rounds of a simple bargaining game while having their brains scanned [using an fMRI]. At the beginning of each round, the buyer would learn the value of a hypothetical widget and suggest a price to the seller. The seller would then set the price. If the seller’s price fell below the widget’s given value, the trade would go through, with the seller receiving the selling price and the buyer receiving any difference between the selling price and the actual value. If the seller’s price exceeded the value, though, the trade would not execute, and neither party would receive cash.

The outcome? According to Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at VTC, and the leader of the study, “The more uncertain a seller was about a buyer’s credibility […] the more active his or her parahippocampal gyrus became.”

Knowing what parts of the brain are most active during a state of suspicion is the first step in understanding the emotion, as well as where the suspicion is based. Heightened activity in the amygdala would, theoretically, signify fear-based suspicion, while heightened activity in the parahippocampal gyrus would signify suspicion based on mistrust. Montague suggests the parahypocampal gyrus acts “like an inborn lie detector.”

“So, what?” you demand. “How is this actionable information and why should I care?” Good question! It just so happens that…

Not caring could make you turn out like Dave.

Suspicion can Cost You Profit… and Worse

First of all, not everything is about you. So, let’s look at the bigger picture. Like most things, suspicion in moderation can be quite good. There is a line, though. Being overly suspicious—either from fear or mistrust—can have negative consequences on financial success. According to Meghana Bhatt, one of the study’s authors:

People [taking part in the study] with a high baseline suspicion were often interacting with fairly trustworthy buyers, so in ignoring the information those buyers provided, they were giving up potential profits. The ability to recognize credible information in a competitive environment can be just as important as detecting untrustworthy behavior.

Not only can individuals with high baseline suspicion have a harder time achieving financial success, they can have a harder time achieving success in their careers. This can lead to a host of new problems, including an increase in stress and anxiety, as well as depression.

Speaking of the mental aspects, studies in suspicion can have implications for psychiatric disorders. “The fact that increased amygdala activation corresponds with an inability to detect trustworthy behavior may provide insight into the social interactions of people with anxiety disorders, who often have increased activity in this area of the brain,” explains Montague.

In short, studies such as these can help pinpoint sources of certain psychiatric disorders, which can better help scientists nail down proper treatments. But, these types of studies could also help to create a treatment or healthy way in which to promote balance for those with high baseline suspicion. Perhaps a better question is: When my internal lie detector goes off, who should I trust?

Here’s an anxious kitten. You’re welcome.

In 2005, an article regarding the importance of visual input vs auditory input in relation to spatial information gathering came out of Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Neurobiology. I hope that sentence was as fun to read as it was to write. To get us started on this topic, I want to throw a vocabulary term at you: visual capture. In the aforementioned article, visual capture is described as what happens when “our localization of a stimulus based on nonvisual information is ambiguous or conflicts with visual localization of the same stimulus, [leading] our nonvisual percept of location to sometimes draw to the visually identified location.”

Maybe the longer she looks at it, the more it will make sense.

Break it Down

This article that I keep blabbing about is called “Why Seeing Is Believing: Merging Auditory and Visual Worlds.” In it, the authors state that scientists traditionally attribute the dominance of visual capture as reflecting an inherent advantage. The article argues this: “Visual capture occurs not because of any inherent advantage of visual circuitry, but because the brain integrates information optimally, and the spatial information provided by the visual system happens to be the most reliable.”

That’s not to say visual input is always dominant. Optimization is the key point the authors are trying to make, so while visual input is optimal for spatial information, auditory input is optimal for temporal processing.

The authors give a simple, explanatory description of visual capture of auditory space. The short paraphrasing of it is this: If you’re sitting in front of the TV watching a poorly dubbed movie, it’s likely that by the end of the movie you will perceive a synchronization of what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing. The longer this auditory misalignment goes on, the greater the chances that your brain will sync the audio to the visuals for you. So, why are we syncing information by what’s on the TV screen instead of what’s coming from the speakers?

“The reason that visual information should dominate space perception,” the authors explain, “can be appreciated intuitively: visual spatial information is exceptionally reliable and precise.” I just want to note that this is likely less true for the visually impaired. Because visual input is generally more reliable where spatial information is concerned, it becomes the favored (and overriding) input format.

The authors of this article conclude that there are two possibilities for visual dominance in spatial information:

The brain could have evolved to depend more heavily on visual stimuli than on auditory stimuli, regardless of the stimulus conditions, or the brain might weigh information in proportion to its reliability and integrate it in a statistically optimal manner. Results from psychophysical studies support the idea that perception, at least, uses the latter strategy.

Speaking of perception…

It really depends on what was in the glass to begin with.

Our Sensations may Seem Accurate; Our Perceptions are not

In a special edition of Scientific American, Sharon Guynup wrote an introduction about how illusion distorts our sense of perception. After learning how vital visual input is, this seems pretty acceptable. Guynup explains that, “Our brain—not our eyes—is the final arbiter of ‘truth.’ We are wired to analyze the constant flood of information from our senses and organize that input into a rational interpretation of our world.”

Illusion disrupt this process. Two of the contributors to the special Scientific American issue, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik explain: “It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination.”

Nope, I can’t see you.

So, if we perceive truth from the optimal stimulus input mechanism, but our perceptions are not accurate, on what do we rely? What is an illusion, and what is simply misaligned information?

Tag: neuroscience