Theories of Meaning and Motivation

welcome to the Philoctetes Center Francis lily and I are co directors of the center just couple of announcements next Friday night in the series we've been doing with the New York psychoanalytic Institute which is the film series we will be showing Hamlet and Simon Critchley who is a philosopher and Jameson Webster who is a psychoanalyst in training will be discussing the movie afterwards on Saturday we have a poetry program called poetry scholars and poetry critics at 2:30 here and Stephen Burt Bonnie Costello Heather Dubrow Rachel had us and Erik McHenry or the people involved today's roundtable on meaning and motivation has been a difficult one to organize and I'm beginning to realize it maybe because we put meaning in front of motivation had we not put that I don't think we would have had as big a problem we also tried to get at your lodging here but we were not successful though we invited many the way we are going to do the roundtable today is that I will briefly introduce the participants then each of them will tell you where they come from visibly the subject and then they would discuss amongst them the issues that are raised following which we will have time for the audience to ask questions Emily Valdez is an assistant professor of psychology at New York University and her research interest is primarily on what is the effects of motive on visual perception and social judgement Ned block his silver professor in the Department of Philosophy and psychology and central for neuroscience neural science at NYU Lawrence Freedman is clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell and on the faculty of the NYU psychoanalytic and Edwards mate is the director of division of cognitive science at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and William be transferred professor of psychology in psychiatry at Columbia University so emily is going to start and then we'll go from there thank you what I'm told it's a very diverse group this is my first time of being here so I'm excited to see where this discussion goes one of them is where should it even start that's something that we've been talking about for a couple weeks now is what is meaning and what is motivation and I think what we're gonna find in the panel today is that we all have a very different perspective on what topics should be included with with with a header like this so I thought I would just start with giving you a few anecdotes and a taste of some of the research that I've done that illustrates what I think can be encompassed within within a header like this starting off with a few examples from the real world that illustrates why I think understanding the role of motivation and trying to glean meaning in a real world is really important and one of the what I want to start with is with examples from sports I was told when I was going through school that if you want people to care about what you study you should always try to figure out a way that sports are involved and then people will be interested I'm really at a loss because I know nothing about sports except for this example that I'm gonna share with you today this is the 19th this is a photograph from the 1966 World Cup match this is the final game of the World Cup series and in this game it's the first and only time that England has made it to the finals to the finals of the World Cup Series they were battling West Germany it was very surprising game because England wasn't supposed to be there there were 98 thousand people that came to the game another half a million that are watching it on television in 1966 and came as even more of a surprise when the two teams were tied at the end of regulation time so it went into forced overtime 11 minutes into overtime came the shot argued around the world here's what pretty video footage of the shot for a goal to be counted as a goal for a kick to be counted as a goal led us to fully cross the goal line so that's the shot what do you think should this be a goal here it is again did it fully cross the goal line well the ref on the field didn't know so he called in the linesman the Russians linesman on the side and he said oh it's very clear of course this ball fully crossed the goal line he called it as a goal for England so they went on to win their only World Cup title ever so this is a highly contentious call the Russian linesman is certain that he saw it as a goal that should be counted towards England but of course even to this day Germans via manly argue that they were robbed and that England shouldn't have gained this point so besides being an example of how Europeans care far more about soccer than Americans do I think it serves it's a good anecdote to illustrate one of the things that I'm interested in which is studying how we see the world or the ways that we see the world are really influenced by our motivations by our desires by the preconceptions that we have the psychological baggage that we have that we bring to the perceptual table so the way that we understand the world the way we glean meaning is going to be influenced by our motivations and I think this is just one anecdote from the real world that illustrates that so I wanted to share with you a couple examples of where we've tried to test this idea this phenomenon that we call motivated visual perception that our motivations can influence the way we see the world around us give you a couple tastes of some of the work that we've done in the lab that illustrates the same phenomenon so one thing that we did was just give a transcript of a couple on a first date to some participants who came into the lab we had written out the dialogue between a couple supposedly on their first date and all of our participants were reading exactly the same information this couple having a nice dinner together but what we did for half of our participants was those that were in the control condition we said just see if you can point out and find examples of this couple flirting with one another that's the control conditions the other condition that we were interested in was read the same transcripts but find examples of this couple deceiving one another so they did that for a few minutes they thought about flirting or they flat out thought about deception and then ten minutes later we showed them some images and we just said just describe what you see in these images and this is what we showed them what we were interested in was how would they describe this we showed it for a very brief amount of time just about a second so we got their first interpretation of what this was what do you see you see the light okay a liar in the face you can see both these people rotate it more so here's the Elm okay okay there's a lot more there's a lot more we can discuss in this image it's cool because you can see two possibilities and you and your neighbor might have very different interpretations of what this is and you might actually have to argue that what you're seeing isn't some hallucination and that you are in fact seeing the right thing and they're in fact seeing something that's wrong and I think that beautifully illustrates the point that we're talking about we can see the world in this particular example in very different ways depending on what we're thinking about beforehand and that's what our participants showed for us to those in our control condition Oh 30% or so saw the word liar but when they had the octave cognitive goal of trying to detect deception that doubled 60% of participants see the word liar in this case and think don't see the interesting thing is because we show this for a short period of time they don't see the other possibility these aren't participants who can recognize that there's two possibilities they see the face or they see the liar because we presented them for a fairly short time to capture how do they first interpret this image but this we won't give another example to so in this case we wanted to conditioned people's motivations conditioned what they're interested in what's desirable what they're motivated to see so in this case we just took random stimuli letters and numbers these don't really have meaning in our world they're not associated with rewards and costs in our everyday world but we can condition them to want letters or want numbers so through a conditioning process that's me sorry we associated letters random stimuli with reward and numbers with cost we did this by telling them if you see a lot of letters if the computer just happens to show you letters you'll get something desirable but if it shows you a lot of numbers there'll be something undesirable in this case we told them the desirable thing is that you can act like an American Idol judge you're gonna watch people make fools of themselves and tell us what you think it's fairly fun thing to do the undesirable task they might have to complete though is singing a karaoke tune like this stocky Italian gentleman that we said was a previous participant he they watched this video they saw him singing Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive really poorly and they thought that could be me if I see numbers this embarrassing task could be mine so they go into this task hoping to see letters or our and also not wanting to see numbers so we conditioned letters to be associated with reward that's a desirable stimulus numbers are an undesirable stimulus again like our last study we eventually show them an image that will determine their fate and this is what they see right so this the two interpretations are more obvious than this one when we show that to them for a very brief amount of time they only see about the B or the 13 they don't realize that there's another interpretation because of the quickness with which we present it and so when letters are desirable because that means they get to be the American Idol judge 70 percent see this as a B and hardly any of them see it as a 13 but when we switch the reward structure we also see no what they see has flipped you know fairly substantially when numbers are associated with reward they see this as a beat rather than a 13 so again their motivation their goal what's desirable influences the way that they make sense of a piece of visual information in their world okay so you might say like well this is really fun and great these are cute little parlor trick demonstrations but what does that really mean for the real world does this really matter and what our lab argues is that it does matter it matters because visual information the meaning that we gleam from our visual world around us serves as a foundational element for more important things like the judgments that we make the way we interact with our world if we are having to decide whether I want to go up and talk to Jerry Bruner I'd might first look and see does he seem friendly to me I have to first think it'd be smile he's smiling looks good though then I might engage in a social interaction with him so the visual information that we pick up from the world around us serves as a foundational element for more important judgments or behaviors that follow it's a foundational building blocks of our social world and so there are two important domains where our visual experiences which we argue are quite malleable and can be influenced by motivations there can be pretty dramatic consequences for more important judgments than just whether I'll be an American Idol you're not in one particular domain in which we can see that visual perception influences important judgments as in voting behavior we did a quick study where we looked at how do people see Obama Obama is an important figure in our in our world and and he's self identifies as black but we know he is that has a biracial parent he has a biracial he's coming he's a biracial political candidate but he self identifies as one wait how did the part of the lay people at large Liam how to voters see him so we did some studies where we tried to get a get a handle on that do they see him as lighter skins than he really is do they see him as he really is or do they see him as a darker man than he really is and does that matter so that was talked a lot about in the news what we did for our participants here you can clearly see that these are two different photographs we photoshopped them the one on the right we artificially altered his skin tone to be slightly lighter than it really is the one on the on the Left we we altered so it's slightly darker you can clearly see that our participants couldn't because we presented them sequentially so they didn't see the same image the same stance next to each other with where the photo shopping or the coloring was different they saw them sequentially and we just simply asked them indicate which one is most representative which photograph is most representative of who Obama is they saw somewhere he was dressed more casually somewhere he's dressed more professionally that's the information they thought that they were using to make these judgments or decisions about which one is really him so then from the judgments that we got we could assess do these people see him as lighter than he really is do they see him as darker than he really is or do they see him how he really is an unaltered photograph we captured these judgments their perceptual experience is a week before the 2008 election the day after the election we followed up with these very same participants and we got a sense of who do they vote for we just asked them who'd you vote for in the last election so then we can put our participants in each of these six quadrants those who saw him is lighter and voted for Obama or those who saw me as darker and voted for McCain and we can get a sense of what what was the voting behaviors and can we predict that from the perceptual experiences that they had a week before the election so here are the percentages of people that fall into these six categories what I think is most straight is that their perceptual experience that they had predicted their voting outcomes so we see here on the participants who saw him as lighter and skin tone than he really was a week before the election 75 percent of those people actually voted for him in the election a week before the election if they saw him as darker and skin tone than he really was 89% of those people voted for McCain that who they were going to vote for after they voted they then saw the person is why they don't we we asked for their perceptual we asked we got these perceptual measures a week before the election so there is a minimum of seven to nine days of lag time in between our perceptual judgments that we collected and then when we followed up and asked would you actually vote for absolutely so it's not it's not kind of coming through quite well on this projection for you it really looks like sinister on the left on the computer screen you can it doesn't look quite as dark although the skin tone has been lightened and dark in the same percentage about 15 percent change in both cases so it's subtle when they're when they're presented sequentially when you see them side by side it's obvious but our participants didn't pick up on the fact that we had photoshopped the images okay so it matters so here's some evidence that the way that we see the perceptual experiences that we had that these participants had a week prior to the election predicted real important behaviors in the real world there was this relationship between bias perceptual experiences that we could predict which we could predict from their political ideology other motivations that they have we could predict how they are going to see him and then from the bias perceptual experiences we were able to to predict statistically who they were going to vote for yeah I think at this point those are more details probably too detailed right now then we need to get into we did ask them to indicate on a one to seven scale how representative is this photograph of who Obama really is so they gave us continuous judgements on a number of photographs that they saw so they didn't just have to pick one they indicated they could indicate that they're all the same they're all highly representative so another domain and besides voting behavior that's really important arguably is the legal decision so we know that in the legal system we're presented with evidence the evidence is there for everybody to see everyone gets presented with the same evidence and then we need to make judgments and decisions about what does this evidence mean but our legal system takes for granted that we can all see you the same evidence if it's brought to the court if a lawyer presents some evidence we'll all see it the same way but our judgments are going to be biased and that's not true that's what our lab is showing that's what a number of labs are showing is that even in the legal system the way that people see evidence is very different and then again the consequences are quite great because acting as jury members or lawyers or judges where there's a big burden of responsibility a big task at hand for the for the judgments that are made so I'm gonna give you just one last example here's the last thing I'll share with you arguing that a perceptual experiences matter and that they're malleable it goes back a few years now a couple years ago there was a civilian victor Harris who was being pulled over by a police officer officer Scott this happened in Georgia the civilian wasn't pulling over the police officer and civilian ended up in a high-speed chase through a fairly residential neighborhood and this went on for awhile and the civilian clearly wasn't stopping so here is video footage from the police officers car after the civilian wasn't stopping that police officer engage in this tactical move and we see here that that tactical move led the civilian to lose control of his car and ended up in this crash where the civilian was paralyzed so very serious consequence of this tactical move that the police officer took to end the high-speed chase the civilians sued the police officer for damages and the first court sided with the civilian and said that the police officer was in the wrong interestingly this was the main piece of evidence that was submitted to the court system the juries and the lawyers and the judges watched the same videotape taken taken from the this is just the last little bit this this chase went on for about 20 minutes this is the tactical move tape and this is video footage from she touched a car yes he rims he rams the back of the car to end the chase and so that's the move that's in question is is this move warranted is this a justifiable act on the police officers part after after they watched 20 minutes of the video that preceded it taken from the dashboard camera of the police officers car so the first courts sided with the civilian and said this this move was not warranted and and the police officer is in the wrong the police officer appealed through all the appellate courts they they sided with the original decision the original court's ruling instead of the police officers and the wrong it went all the way up to the Federal Supreme Court actually and this case was just heard a couple years ago and again submitted as evidence the primary evidence used in this case is this video footage which we all watched interestingly at the Federal Supreme Court level the justices reversed the decision and they said well we're watching this video and we see something entirely different than what all the lower order courts saw would all the jury members in all of the other cases saw we see something entirely different and no juror in their right mind would be able to see it any differently so they even questioned all of the perceptual experiences of all the jury members that preceded them so eight of the nine Supreme Court justices said based on this evidence we think that the police officer was in the right and in fact in the ruling they they implicated this phenomenom that we're talking about Justice Breyer said if I see with my eyes that that's what happened what am I supposed to do so what I think is particularly interesting about studying this phenomenon and motivated visual perception in the legal system is that all the people involved in legal decision-making are highly trained to view evidence objective evidence or with the legal decision with the legal process constitutes as objective evidence if we present it we'll see it in the same way and then we can discuss the judgments that we should make but what this is suggesting is that even people who are highly trained to see the evidence in the same way come up with very different interpretations which has extreme consequences for the more important judgments that they're that they're making so for me what I'm interested then in is studying this phenomenon of motivated visual perception the take home message that I'd like to get out there is that motivations influence the information that we extract from our environment we extract it through our perceptual faculties and this phenomenon of motivated visual perception serves as input for judgment understanding and the meaning that we glean from our world around us thank you and you want to go sure a tough act to follow I don't have any powerpoints so I'll just say a little bit about my background what I'm interested in I'm basically started in cognitive psychology and for the first half of my career I really did work on issues that were related to meaning in some sense namely the meanings of words very influenced by the philosopher Vidkun start also very influenced by Jerry Brunner who had broken open this area in the 1950s and better better so yes much better so following work that Jerry had done earlier we were interested in questions like whether word meanings really correspond to definitions or if they were more structured according to prototypes and exceptions from those prototypes and I think one way to look at what we did in in that time was we're trying to get experimental evidence for something like the victims tiny proposals then around the early 90s neuroimaging came through Pep was developed so with that I could positron emission tomography could now be used for brain imaging purposes and I thought oh my god we can look at people's brains while they do various psychological tasks and I haven't looked back since then we started we started trying to study some of the same issues about semantics but for uninteresting reasons it didn't work out well and we switched into memory particularly short-term and working memory were there was a lot of very important data that had been accumulated from monkeys and other species about the nature of working memory and so I got heavily involved in that and I did that for they up until a few years ago and a few years ago in the third half of my career I have switched into research on schizophrenia and I now split my time between Columbia a psychology department and the Medical Center uptown where i'm part of the psyche at new york state psychiatric institute and there some of my research continues to be on working memory which is of extremely important deficit in schizophrenia it appears before almost any other symptoms it's found in first-degree relatives who are not symptomatic and so on and i could talk about that but that doesn't actually make contact with either meaning or motivation but fortunately just briefly say what working memories as a short term memory just think of it as short term memory about the use of the term working memory has come about because of the idea that when you are thinking and reasoning you're doing it on the contents of what's in an active memory and so but as it turns out in the last few years last two years I've been working on issues also been working on issues of motivation in schizophrenia in particular and a starting a drop in depression and in schizophrenia there is a phenomena akin to what you see in depression of anhedonia where the people who have this disorder have difficulties getting enjoyment or pleasure out of some activities actually that itself as a matter of debate what seems to be more a consensus belief is that people who have schizophrenia lack motivation to do much they like kind of in sent of the elect the ability to anticipate pleasure and we try and study this by brain imaging one of the reasons this seems to us to be a fertile area is one of the limited number of topics that has really produced consistent results in brain imaging in time after time and experiment after experiment has to do with what people find rewarding that they're really I think one of the important breakthroughs of neural imaging is that it has found something that looks like reward circuitry in the brain so we can actually be focusing on those regions while we ask questions about our patients with schizophrenia less able to get excited or anticipate something positive what happens if it's negative does that have different kinds of consequences and so on so that my connection to meaning is quite old my connection to motivation is very new so I'm a sort of mind and one of the things I'm really quite interested in is perception so I find the line of work that emily is doing following on the work of Jeri Bruner to be extremely fascinating one of the I'll say just very briefly something that I'm working on now and then actually I'll make a comment some of the things that Emily was saying so one of the things that I'm interested in now is the difference between conscious perception and unconscious perception and I don't know of how many people in the psychiatric world are in here but I'm actually quite curious whether the study of unconscious perception has anything to tell us about any other aspects of the unconscious the thing is we can really get very detailed hard evidence in the case of unconscious perception and of a kind that I don't think it's that easy to get when it comes to other unconscious phenomena so maybe the unconscious perception can serve as something of a model one very interesting phenomena phenomenon but with a couple of different kinds is that in unconscious perception is that we actually have an interaction between conscious perception and unconference unconscious perception sometimes involving the very same object the one I'll just give you a few examples I wish I'd brought my computer I thought oh maybe I should bring it but because I have but I'm sure everybody's familiar with the muller-lyer illusion you know it's a line and you either see this bracket or this bracket and then there's a similar one called the Jud illusion where you either see it you can see it like like this it's two different facing once ok so fixed so put that on your push down storage there's an another interesting phenomenon known as visual spatial neglect that's where people can to tend to the left side of space and many patients the effect of this is they just don't see what's on the left side they don't see consciously what's on the left side so one patient was studied actually by a guy at CUNY named Tony Rowe and when he he showed this patient a number of Buller liar and jud illusion figures and asked whether they were the same or different and what he found was that they categorized them entirely in the base of the right side thus far as the left side goes they just didn't see it they were fixating in the middle and so it was the left side of their visual space then he decided to see whether the unseen left side actually had an effect on where they thought the midpoint of the line was and what he discovered was something well first of all in all cases of neglect if you ask people to bisect the line they are always a little off to the right but what we's able to do is to factor that out and to show that the unseen left side produced the normal illusion effect just as if they had seen it consciously so there we have a single object so in other words just to be clear they would have two figures with with different with the same right side but different left sides as far as the subject was concerned consciously those two figures are identical but the bisect the place where they bisect the line is different because of the unconsciously seen left side so here we have a case of a single representation in the you know people who study perception believe we have perceptual representations in the brain we have subjects with a single represent perceptual representation part of which is unconscious part of which is conscious and those two aspects of it interact now that's really an interesting phenomenon I think and and maybe and there are many different kinds of programs different versions of it so one case some of you may be familiar with is if you take this is work done by Marlene Barrowman if you take two circles when put a line between them so that they seem to form a single object and you ask the subject to fixate in the middle many subjects won't see consciously see the thing on the left but then if you rotate the whole thing so that the seen right side one is now on the left they see the one on the left so they they have a visual percept of the whole object and the the force of that consciously seen part can drive away some of the neglect another quite different kind of example is where there are ways of inducing unconscious perception it and I kind of wish I brought my because I could actually actually show you this but many of you may have heard of a phenomenon known as binocular rivalry so this is you you can do this at home you you can take a tube from a paper towel holder you put it on one eye and then you you you have you show so you show one eye one thing and then you show the other eye another thing if you're getting very different contrasts teeth got the contrast in the two eyes what you will find is there will be in just a little initial period of kind of mixed together and then what you're seeing is first one of them than the other and the other they alternate it might every two to three seconds now incredibly fascinating phenomenon is if you give a a very actively moving colored object which have been they have these have been have been very finely tuned Jeremy wolf first discovered that a very actively moving object could would can binocular rival impression and then now so gia showed an even better one where you can get somebody to be looking at this thing and they'll see the actively moving thing and there can be some other thing in the other ion and for a minute or two at a time that thing will be unconsciously seen and you could you know it's on you know it's seen because it has all kinds of effects in your later behavior but it's unconsciously seen so here's something they did which is that it was noticed in this that very emotional stimuli could break through the cloak of invisibility and so they decided to actually do a little test of how what emotional what emotionality would lead to what and the results are kind of interesting but the very simplest result is that a fearful face breaks through invisibility faster than a man upside down fearful face or a neutral face and I would go into the whole detail of how they did this but they used a very controlled experiment where they could just time with any and with individual subjects so what we have here again is it's this one representation is first unconscious and then conscious so you can do a controlled experiment in which you have an unconscious representation that in a minute or two will become conscious so you know I don't know much about the psychiatric end of things but gosh we now have these facilities for doing for putting together conscious sort of for seeing the conscious and unconscious side of percepts it's got to be useful and for some purposes that have some due to its psychodynamics I'm not sure how but it really would be nice I think if people who are in the kind of psychiatric end of things would you know do some joint projects with people who do perception it's really quite interesting so I guess I well you know I think I was thinking while you were saying this layout these last comments that you would want to know what the effect of attention is yeah on retrieving or merging or whatever the unconscious perception with this is through through an attentional phenomenon so what that fast-moving thing does is it attracts your attention and then what the fearful face does is it attracts your attention back to the other eye so I think but from what you say it sounds like this might have very good applicability to what practitioners do in psychotherapy even though they're dealing with different sorts of stimuli in different ways that will try to orient the tension although many of them may be similar in the sense that they may be alarming or or were extremely worrisome I mean the analyst or the therapist may well I guess oh let me talk would you want to take this topic and move all of it well that topic anything well I mean I'd like to learn about this but I mean I guess if I'm supposed to take my turn I ought to say I'm Larry Friedman that I I don't have a technology or to offer and then the thing that strikes me about my role or my position that's different here is that I represent practitioners as well as a practitioners somebody who has one foot you might say in in the real world in the very real sense of real world in that it's a world where you can be hurt I guess that's as real as you can get for a world it's not the practitioner and that's and the patient are always sort of on the edge there so one foot in the in the real world and the other foot and kind of speculation and anything that's added from the hard sciences to the speculation is always useful but the analyst does our our analytic therapist has a different problem than a researcher although it when you Walter you're variables you're doing something a little simpler in that white obviously the analyst is trying to change something they may talk about it in different ways and more sort of postmodern ways or something like that Bob Michaels would say he's just trying to create more interesting ways of looking at things there's something about it it's still a change but generally speaking that he has to change something so he's got a practical challenge even though I may not be feeling that at every moment and and that challenge makes him gives him a a hands-on operation and he tends to think of that operation my guess we think of everybody's wondering what is whether these top of meaning and motivation how they come together this is really a psychoanalytic to connect pair I mean this is what psyche one else is concerned about because in a sense what he's trying to do is he's reacting he's focus himself focused on meaning and he's trying to read out of it motivation what he'll do with that is something else from the patient's standpoint so he in a sense inside himself is trying to in some ways separate them and it's a it's a challenge that is somebody will present something to him first speak about the the therapists side of the no-sleep of it somebody who presents something to him and he'll see it as an effort to do something and most many schools to do something to end and also report or a communication of something and it is and he will operate on it not in a laboratory sense the ways that he operates on it in brief for Freudian analytic types is that he will take evil remove as much as he can of the context which the patient is depending on to to define his meaning that's one thing that he'll do take it away and therefore leave the meet try to make the meaning bearer since it won't be that patient won't find that he can assume a reaction or assume a reception of the meaning of a certain sort so he'll have to try harder that's one thing that he does and that's not a comfortable thing for either party by the way and that's in fact it's a dreadful thing because it interferes with ordinary the ordinary social way of keeping meaning minimizing the how much emotion or how much motivation is present at the moment you don't want your partner to know at any one moment all the motivations you may have I think that's clear I don't think I'd have to explain that you wouldn't want everyone to know what's in the back your mind as you're looking at I wouldn't want you to know what you're thinking I'll tell you that I really would not in this context so so ordinary ordinary socialization allows us to sort of communicate or express certain things while in effect leaving leaving the motivations for it either obscure or leaving them standardized and then in the individual motivations obscure and the analyst is trying to to to bear the motivation or our compound of motivations because that's it's not so he's operating and that's it's an experiment if you like in that that respect that it's trying to find out it has to register what the meaning is he has to think of it also as a way of affecting him in ways that the person may not know and certainly wouldn't want him to know and so on and try to separate them try to say is conceptual problem insofar as not as he's not just in in the moment of treating if he goes home and he's trying to figure it out is to try to figure out like what the top of this this thing that we're discussing is what is the relationship between meaning and motivation and he has when he stops to think about that it's not just a philosophical question for him because a challenge is the nature of his whole job in his life in his career and we get them to get pretty invested in it so if for example as we've seen and this is I think this is a cardinal example Cardinal wait this is one of the cardinal Agony's I'm thinking about treat psychotherapy sorry going to therapy well it may not put it that way you saw that that motivation effects perception now we're not even talking here being worse if it was question motive motivation surely affects how you understand somebody walking because you will you will wonder what are they trying to get across to you what position do they have with regard to what sass not but if it's even vision as Emily says you know even vision if motivation affects vision how is somebody who is envisioned so to speak write to the analyst want to change any kind of motivation obviously they have any control at all and that's you know like the Cardinal problem of psychodynamic therapy psychoanalytic therapy and the way it's phrased I'm sure you know this is a common common common knowledge that that analysts consider that the way the patient sees them is that is often or always and some always a transfer depending on what school you come from there's always a transference that is it's a motivated misperception which may accidentally be appropriate and draws in reality and we were going to know that but it insofar as there's something some trouble and living that's it's likely it will be expressed in some way this way and insofar as that's a paradigm that's something that in some way you want to change either by having alternatives or being able to look at it or stand apart from it or something now if you're the person that's supposed to do the changing and you're perceived by the thing that's up to say the state that is supposed to change that determines who you are where how will you ever what what reason do you think you would ever have to be able to change anything that people perceive or the way they are the way they see the world or anything you are going to be assimilated into it and that is sort of in a large exact exaggeration the consequence of this if you want to put it that way and it's not something that analysts have in if they really in some ways kick the ball down the road that the ways that they've usually tried to get around the story is really and this is something I hope will be discussed because I'm I'm talking about change and and this kind of misperception is one of the things that's being spoken about but if that the analysts who it since it's so hard to answer they'll say there's such a thing I think we all think there is as an observing ego and it may be you know a peon Shetty and decentered a lighthouse which surveys oneself something that's object and that seems very doubtful once you look at you know at the at this study you know you're looking with all the observing ego you could possibly have I don't know what would happen if somebody said I am going to try to get a deliberately I'm going to try to get rid of all the influences of my biases and now look at give me the test again or something I don't know what that difference is one of the questions I want to ask is that because all that an analyst can ever do in a way is to alter attention either directly by talking or by the way he is or something like that and if attention can alter the way you perceive there's some kind of chance one chance one small chance that things can change if you find the trick or if there's a way of doing it but they in theory they're messed a well there's this this observing ego that stands aside from motivation very unlikable analytic idea but it's stuck in there you know because how it goes in order to get a more filipok has to be something there that's on my side something that isn't seeing it the way the patient wants and the only other thing I'll say really is I'm talking from the standpoint of the analyst trying to change but you know the thing from the from the patient's standpoint of course they're they're seeing a reality just like these people are saying a reality this has been a cause of great dissension great I don't know modern controversy and analytic circles where analysts are inclined to say used to call all these things transference but who are you to say I mean we are first of all you can't see yourself as a therapist what makes you think that when the patient says you said this you look that way that you're noticing it's transference because I never did it I'm not that way you are in no way a judge of that any more than patient is so from the patient's standpoint that that's there they're often frustrated on the standpoint that you know the analyst may especially in the older day say on the judge of that and this is less a great descent of dissension but then you get into the question of whether there is any reality at all and and there you know when when you think about that and then people nowadays you know more advanced one of what ones of us the field with people who are really emancipated say no there isn't really what we make it up as we go along and there isn't right I mean if that's now you'd be much you're much safer to say that now nobody will laugh at you if you say something else they're really gonna but you know it does when I when I think about this in this matter I try to get a handle on it it doesn't seem to me though I and what I'm saying now has already refuted in the sense by your work that there is a difference between vision and a storyline I mean I can see that there's many more different items are I hayden white I think is a guy to think about and many more different decisions go in automatically and do you're processing a storyline even though the primitive image of something of a story happening as almost their form was from birth are vary greatly so you know there it seems much more variable what kind of reading you give you know if somebody says you've been doing this with me as a narrative it seems a lot harder to say oh no there's only one way of saying what I've been doing with you and that's a little different from no I don't have a mustache it's your transference you know I mean it seems different I don't know quite how to get okay yes it can comment quickly with regard to your question about whether these things can be changed I think psychologists would distinguish between well and and probably never will distinguish between multiple different kinds of levels they talked about this muller-lyer illusion will it help you to break that illusion by really trying hard the answer's no we really it looks like we've got the goods on that I mean if I pay you more money to break the illusion will that help no it really seems to be something that the philosophers have referred to as cognitively impenetrable on the other hand if you're asking about a facial expression and will it can you change your reaction to that emotional look that emotional expression on the face absolutely yes and that we can you can tell people if the face looks like it's frowning to you unhappy or something think of it as if it were encased in a frame as if it were a picture and you will can see not only will people find it then less emotional you will see the emotional reactivity in the brain decrease so the question your question clearly depends on the level there are some cases where we can't do it and there were some cases where it's easy enough to train people to do it and I would think that a lot of the situation's you're talking about yes you could do it I love the device the Jews there I think I may use it myself the frame put it in the frame think of it as a picture number of different kinds of cases so Emily and her talk mentioned three kinds of cases and then a heads actually just mentioned another one so they'll take the one that Edie mentioned so I would guess that this is a case where the subjects who are thinking of something is in a frame are combining mental imagery with vision which we know can be done there are experimental proof that you can superimpose as a guy in Scotland whose name I can't remember has shown that you can superimpose a grid of dots that you see that you that you can take show people one take it away and then they can superimpose that amount of grid of dots on the screen and find the missing dot if they're so so we can people can superimpose images on percepts and my guess is it's that so there are certain effects of belief and motivation on perceptual experience that we can demonstrate in a lab I can say to that person don't worry about the expression it's a professional actor and you get a reduction in the brain you get the reduction in behavior okay so this leads me to another point so if you think of this oh that fits is one of the points so if you I saw three different kinds of cases and the ones that Emily mentioned one is a kind of interpretation and I think this fits with that right it may not change how it looks but it changes how you interpret it okay a second and and I would say that that video is that I'm not sure that the the difference in whatever people were bringing to that change literally changed the way look to change their interpret but I don't know the full details of that okay a second kind of case is where you've got an ambiguous stimulus like the the 13 and the B now there we have another case we have experimental proof I think that I think it should persuade anybody that the categories you bring can determine which way you see a of stimulus another case that Emily didn't mention explicitly but you mentioned is the case where how you attend influences of what you see and we actually have a colleague Marissa Carrasco who has explored this in great detail and shown give an extremely strong experimental proof that attention changes a number different things and in particular attending makes a look higher in contrast it makes something look bigger then it would be if you didn't attend to it it makes something look faster then if you then if you hadn't attend to it if you see two simultaneous flashes the one you're attending to appears to occur 40 milliseconds earlier and they're this the method of showing that is very simple which is that if you as if you give people two dials and ask them to adjust the events so that their simultaneous but then you get them to attend to one side they they they adjust the one side they're Italian to 240 milliseconds later so you can show that attention is worth 40 milliseconds and perception of an event so we can show that attention affects perception in a pretty rigorous way now the the remaining case that I think is still controversial is the Obama color kind of case does your do police and motivation actually effect what color the person's skin looks to you does it affect the way it literally looks to you and I would say the jury is still out in that I know Emily would disagree with me on this but so now there are a number of experimental paradigms so let me just mention one that looks and the out goes sort of in the other direction and Emily knows about this is the work of Keith Payne so you've probably read about his experiments in the entire that was you know he's been in the press a lot so he did these experiments where you show a person a black face or a white face and then a gun or a wrench and you look at the misperceptions of a gun as a wrench and misperceptions of a wrench is a gun and and of course you know people see the black face they're much more likely to miss perceive the wrench as a gun or sorry that they say they saw a gun now but now we can ask did it really look like a gun so he did an interesting he did it he's done many different versions of this but one suggests that it doesn't look like a gun and here's how he did it he he got people he gave them very brief stimuli and then he got them to say after they gave their response one of three categories did you see the details the visual details like the you know the you know the the handle or things like that or did you just know it was a gun or did you just know it was a wrench or were you just guessing and what he found was that most of the bias where if you see blackface you see the wrench is a gun came in there I just knew but I didn't see any details suggesting but actually the black face white face did not affect people's perception it affected something else that you might call the interpretation of their perception or something like that so so there are kind of mixed with and another actually the mixed result that maybe Jerry can tell us something about so I know you found in surgery did some of these experiments in the 1940s that really were the beginning of this experimental paradigm but he found that if you if you induce vigilance many of the effects decrease or go away so that leads one I mean I don't know quite what the right interpretation of that is but at least one possibility is that what you're doing is you're not offense it's not affecting the way things really look but it's your the the vigilance is making it more careful about your interpretation you know many person there's a lot of evidence and Ed mentioned a mole or lie or illusion you cannot make it go away and most visual illusions are like that right there and the word that people he use the cognitive impenetrable 'ti well in other words people use is modularity a lot of things in our perceptual systems work automatically and the only way you can affect them is by attention or or perception or if you get an ambiguous result perceptual categorization and knowing something about the category can change things ability well that some things should be really hardwired so you shouldn't have to figure them out all the time we want some things to be automatic as automatic as possible perhaps that's what we want for the low levels of vision a very famous kind of another example of that is you you can't not understand a word in your own language alright if you hear it you've understood it you can't kind of stop that you can't stop the access of meaning of a word in your own language that is an obvious benefit that's right we're very very good at language understanding the benefits of this of the muller-lyer illusion I would guess and we have people who are more knowledgeable about perception than I I mean you have no idea how much of this Jerry did in the 40s or 50s but I would guess that it muller-lyer illusion is probably hinging on things like perceiving horizontal lines which is just done at the very first just at the moment that visual information enters the brain and and so again that's probably not going to be the kinds of things that are malleable in emily's kinds of paradigms it's not going to be the kind of thing that's open to interpretation you don't want everything open to interpretation I just want to get this one thing interesting issue to talk about how strong is the effect is this a trick that happens because because our memory kicks in or it flashes up on the screen and we wait a little bit and then we have to say what we saw so there's room for us to have error but so one of the big questions then is is it really how strong is this effect how strong is this effect of our motivations on our perceptual experience we can use where it's impenetrable or malleable or or modular but really the question is how strong is this effect is it really is it just a trick is it a fluke or is it a real thing are we really seeing something a very different way based on the motivations that we have and then is it good or bad that's the second issue that I think is on the table now with what we've brought up so here's the really cool stuff that I want to share with you that's hot off the presses that I think suggest maybe Ned will still disagree with me that this really is affecting some level but is questionably at the level of attention i don't think this is I think this is a real perceptual phenomenon that shows that this is a good thing actually so this is some work that one of my graduate students has just been wrapping up this semester it's very cool she brought in she brought in people in relationships she brought in undergraduates between 18 25 years old some of them are in strong relationships been together for three months that's a very long time for strong committed relationships and then she also brought in same demographic our NYU undergraduates who aren't dating somebody all of these participants get basically the same experience we're gonna have to meet a new person in the lab get to know each other have a fun conversation and just see what you think of each other everyone's coming in to meet a new person some of them are in relationships some of them are not in relationships and they fill out some information kind of like match.com or some online dating site kind of like that describing what they're like what their personality is and just a little bit about who they are we take their photographs and then we say we're gonna pass this information along to the person who's sitting in the room next to you there's no in the room next to them they don't know that but we have a staged profile of somebody it makes them seem interesting not too interesting just kind of a likeable person and there's also photographs supposedly of this person they're gonna meet what we manipulate though is the availability of the target of this other person are they in a relationship are they single and we also manipulate how hot are they is this a photograph of someone who looks really attractive where is it mumbly our version of who somebody that they could meet so there's two qualities about this other person that they're going to interact with are either single or in a relationship they're either hot or they're not we did extensive pre testing with all of our subjects gave them up an array of photographs who are the hot people we chose the hot ones and books so that's what they see are all of our participants come in they see this little description seems nice they see a hot or not hot photograph of somebody who's either single or who's already in a relationship and then we just um we have them read the information and then we say all right now tell us we're gonna show you another photograph and tell us which is the photograph that we showed you but just so that this is easier here's the verbage photograph that we showed you here's the person you're gonna meet and that's on their screen next to them right next to that photograph is an array of other photographs where we've slightly tweaked it again they see eleven I think photographs that are all the same person but we morphed them with a really hot superstar model or with a really ugly person they see eleven photographs that isn't the same person but slightly tweaked to be a little hotter a little hotter a little water a little uglier little uglier little uglier and I just told them which is the photograph for the person that you're gonna meet oh and by the way here's the original so they can see original and then just choose which one matches up so what we find in this is that the participants own relationship status matters if they're in a relationship they see the person basically as they are they're able to pick out the original photograph sometimes they even pick out slightly uglier versions of the hot person but if they're single everyone looks hot so when they see that photograph and then there even hotter when that person is single when the person that could meet is single themselves so when they're an available person somebody else that maybe I'm gonna get to know maybe I'm gonna like we argue that they are seeing that photograph is a more attractive version of the person that they're gonna meet because that person is available to them and they seem interesting however come on let me land this point so when they're in a relationship that they tell us that they're committed to what we argue is that they see these attractive alternatives the single person who's hot they see them as less attractive we argue and we conjecture that that's to mitigate the tempting nests of the alternative in order to help them sustain their committed relationship I mean that's the conjecture that's the story that we hope to tell what I'm telling you now is hot off the presses as of last week this perceptual bias that's how the original is on point they're seeing it simultaneously is which of these eleven matches this and there is an exact match up there they're the right option is up there and then five that are more attractive and five that are uglier and we just look to see how are they seeing this person that they're gonna meet in the company no sex difference no we don't see a sex difference I'm a sequential we mix them all up no we mix them all up so that they can't really tell like what is different when we ask them we would try to they can tell that's something all that photographs a little offer that ones oh that's like clearer or something they can't really explicitly tell us what you've done is morph this with a hotter and uglier person they don't have that conscious awareness of that's the difference between these eleven photographs because they're all just slightly tweaked but we know how they're tweaked I mean it doesn't want a general level it's that rings a bell because I think most practitioners tend to feel that we're where patients have where a kind of hope is resurrected for some reason and it can start really right in the immediate relationship but it could go on that the perception also shifts shifts towards amenability as to the shifts toward a more beatific view or whatever you want to call it more generally as a matter of fact there was an analyst who's very much neglected on I don't know why I dunno why but did some wonderful work named Thomas French who was I guess it was because he was associated with Franz Alexander was associated with a corrective emotional experience but he he would track and this is only only indirectly relevant but the work but that what you tell me regards maybe he would track a patient's dreams through an analysis and he would see how old hopes our Reeve reopened and a person's dreaming then has that kind there's a kite there dreaming a more successful in some way approach to the successively to the for the long ago buried wishes that they had and it seems to me that that yeah that when we think about what are the variables that an analyst would have an altering perception one of the some of them the more one even mentioned one of them his attention and the other was well in the ways that you can focus attention there was something else too but the the idea of of hopefulness actually altering the appearance then this case actual appearance and really distinctly you know measurable it would certainly be true in a more general scale of vision of people the universe what I've always been intrigued not as a therapist but just as a person but also its illustrator in the circles the vicious circle and otherwise what is a virtuous circle the way that that everybody knows that when people are I have a friend for example who assumes that he'll be liked by everybody and the consequence is that he is liked by everybody I mean it never enters his mind the kind of thing that would that somebody would ordinarily react to and say oh you know I guess that person felt offended or they don't like me because it doesn't even occur to you you know it's a hypothesis whereas we know people who are at the polar opposite and we know what consequences that has so I you know it's very it seems very plausible to me what you say even on the basic level of vision you're going to say something else I think I think we keep coming back to some of the same issues there's a lot of malleability in interpretation there's an enormous malleability due to attention it's probably the most one of the most importance of loss psychological constructs it's absolutely real if you tell someone to tend to a particular position in space and there's nothing there you get activation in exactly that part of the visual cortex that encodes exactly about location all you have to do is attend so there can be very low level effects of attention and interpretation and I guess the kind of questions raised by Emily studies can her results be explained in terms of interpretation rather than that there's something has actually changed visually but believe it till the study comes out so are you ready to take questions from the audience sure sure you'll have to come to the microphone otherwise you won't be I wonder if before we have a question - what if Jerry would like Jer - Jerry certainly dairies that they brought the microphone up for him so the way we go about studying perception is instantaneous so to speak as I go back to my own career I remember the days when we got the engineers at MIT we got the engineers at MIT to design us something which is called it - kiss - scope which can present the world at one one thousandth of a second and we would show them a picture and say tell us what it was the fact of the matter is I become increasingly aware of the fact that the notion of instantaneous perception is a total make-believe invented by psychologists the fact is that you you look at they you look at things in terms of how they fit into a kind of a sequential about a point that emily has been making a good deal but when when you ask what it is that determines it the picture that you get is a little piece out of a longer sequence which is better described as some kind of a narrative or something of the sort and we know we know the overall story but when you take when you take and I think of those poor undergraduates that I used to take into my lab and show them these flashes at one thousandth of a second on my ticket Cisco what in the hell kind of a world could they have thought this was it relates again to a point that you were making so I want to say that we that the basic way of studying perception goes back to the ancient ways of studying what used to be called sensation sort of flash we don't see the world in flashes we don't understand it that way we see it in sequences and this is a hunk out of the sequence so I don't know I don't not exactly sure how to do it but I can see someone's getting some of the things that Joe is showing before how you interpret so that's that's the kind of thing and that's the thing that led me increasingly to move away from my to Kista scope and move eventually over to the area of studying the nature of narrative and now I'm deeply involved in the question of the way in which narratives affect cat testimony in courts of law I'm a law professor also and if somebody said it's to ask me what happened instantaneously I would raise my hand I object your honor it's not meaningful what we're constantly dealing with our sequences which doesn't mean that the instantaneous thing is not symptomatic of the sequence a point that that was making them along the way like that but that's the general point of the artificiality of the way in which we've rendered the concept of precision the Rodney King case which centered on the the police beat Rodney King do they throw the first punch is what are they beating him biermann's was overwhelming if you look at the film what the defense did is slow down the film so slowly that you couldn't tell whose punch came first and the completely whole notion of the sequence of perception that makes a kind of narrative was totally destroyed and I believe they won the case my name is Alice LaBrie and I'm former u.s. Department of State Foreign Service I'm also a Republican who lives in Harlem and I would like to address myself to miss ball C doesn't happen first of all you were dead right about the last segment about how they will self-censor if they're in a relay dead-on and I've been divorced single and widowed I've seen y'all my question I'm fascinated I'm totally Republican law-and-order hear the comment about you know the federal judges overrule I wondered how much our political background influences because I would have voted for the policeman right off you know so do you know what the eight judges who overruled what was their political leanings the Supreme Court Supreme Court right but of those judges on the federal I can't address their political the only voice of dissent who ruled in favor with the lower courts saying that the police the wrong the other eight Supreme Court justices said that the police officer was in the right right but I didn't know what those eight political anyway they're mostly Republican that's what my point thanks Stuart damn bright physiological psychologists three quick points first in terms of the attention versus perception discussion have there been or are any experiments planned to take place that address unmedicated ADHD patients in terms there are their deficit in attention relative to modulated perception well so that's one the second is in terms of what we're talking about about cognitive effects and cognitive processes in the modulation of perception but it brought to mind from very long time ago glasses that invert the visual field and after a couple of days the visual cortex accommodates and when they removed the world is seemed inverted for a couple days until the visual cortex RIA comma dates so that is not a cognitive bias that's a neocortical process unto itself which indicates a kind of almost a motivation ascribed to some form of PSA Lighthouse if you will as homeless and lastly when you were talking about the real world have you been influenced at all by Gibson's ecological psychology or Barker's environmental psychology the last question is the easiest I got my PhD at Cornell so where Jimmy Gibson and Eleanor Gibson spent their most of their career so whether I wanted to or not I was influenced by the Gibson's it was not my choice it was by first I guess and the whole point of studying Gibson is that we're immersed in a much greater environment and that we need to take the more the more global environment into account when we study any kind of phenomenon Gibson would not like my perspective I think of how hard I'm arguing that it affects visual perception but the more global point about ecological validity and taking science outside of the lab and taking it out of context and looking at the environment and the surrounding context as Larry was saying the context matters that is certainly influencing I think a lot of our discussion well we might persuade him to consider that as part of his own theory of the eagle the eagle aaja class pecked also involves evolutionary attunement two invariant features of the perceptual environment and as such it takes into account not only reticular activating formation and limbic system activity and its effect on visual perception but the actual meaning that is extracted as you put it from the visual field so yeah the second issue about the converting lenses so I've read the original papers innocence the the description you gave is the one that a lot of people think is what happened but actually it's a complete myth so what happened was at the lecture what happened was the people could ride a bike they could read the the inverted writing but that doesn't mean it looked the same I actually had a detailed conversation with one of the subjects Seymour Papert who explained nothing's never really looked the way they use in fact he said that some things looked right-side up and other things looked upside down even if they were next to one another he said it would may in fact he said it made him dizzy to even talk about it however that being said there the visual system and all our perceptual systems are enormous lis plastic and there are certain there are other you know there are for example prism adaptation the things make everything move to the left and you do adapt to that very very quickly and things do look normal and you know someone who wears a blindfold for a week the whole visual cortex can be taken over for reading Braille and then you take the blindfold off and in a few hours it goes back so certainly our perceptual systems are very very plastic but that doesn't challenge modularity module so the modules can be rewired over time but these and are constantly but the idea is there's still modules that still work in an automatic way thank you so much anyone else yes my let me quickly just say that that actually this study of ADHD and perceptual or attentional biases is quite understudied in fact I read a lot of this literature and I don't know anything and my graduate student is right here and she just looked it up and she also says that there hasn't been any work done that she's aware ever that she could find right now it's it's mostly studied within anxiety the role of attentional biases and perceptual experiences and anxiety and that work is just very fascinating and also when we're trying to figure out well what are the strategies to help people then how can we help if it's happening at the level of perception you could say oh that's so early what could you possibly do it seems fruitless except if you allow it to be at the level of attention and how can we redirect their attention have them take in a more global environment so that they see that what causes them anxiety that that face in the audience the one face that's scowling well that's one if you look in the home or the bigger audience everyone else is smiling can we shape attention can we direct attention in ways to help mitigate the anxiety producing elements of the environment there's a lot of work done on that and the answer is yes there is there's a lot of room for therapeutic intervention within the role of attention and anxiety : Kurtis psychoanalyst and a researcher got a PhD in social psych originally actually having reviewed the research on the anxiety there isn't any needless to say experimentally where you threaten people with their lives or with their whole meaning systems and so that research doesn't actually apply so well the clinical situations what I wanted to throw out was a simple rubric and here what you think of it really comes more from the anthropologist Ernst Becker this is in a book I published last year unifying science and psychoanalysis that you can think of a major motivations as being related to both survival sort of animalistic type things and survival of the meaning system obviously there are some people for whom the way they make meaning in the world is more important than physical survival and if you start out with that differentiation and you think about people as both experiencing the sort of animal self vision would be included there and then you have the meaning making parts and indeed the preservation of the meaning making part staying sane you can then think about the change that occurs and let me just say that William James commented that I don't I can't give this exact quote but we're motivation is is affecting everything that we attend to and remember he says that selects all the while so everything is selective attention and an attention that goes on with organisms but then if you apply that to the change process you've got two different ways that change takes place it changed in humans I'm focusing on it it takes place in terms there of their actual experiences behaviorists do a lot of this and then you've got the meanings of experiences which cognitive therapist and psychoanalyst have been looking at and you can you can go at it by both routes now just add one more thing I did publish a study which is exactly what you said Larry it's an Journal of Personality and Social Psychology behaviors making the beliefs come true so anyway any comments on that yes I think it's very interesting as I mentioned earlier that we know something about the neural circuitry underlying reward and this is the circuitry that's critical for example learning where food is learning where sexual partners are and going and getting it and this we share not just with other mammals but probably with reptiles and so this you would think would be fairly fairly hard to change but as you are override better yet very hard to override but I'm fascinated to by hunger strikers people like Bobby Sands from the IRA and Gandhi and all of these people who were able to override it what about the narrative and I'll get there right well well I'm talking particularly about starving yourself to death which shouldn't happen it can't it doesn't happen in the reptilian and mammalian world I don't know if huh me or Stryker mice things like that that just doesn't happen all right I think I kind of heard and I don't know what to make of that but in any event in the human brain a difference between the human brain tumor mailing brain the main difference has to do with an extension of the frontal lobe okay and in that extension part of what that extension does seems to mediate what some people call cognitive control or executive processes and there are direct connections from those most highly developed levels down to the reward circuitry to kind of control the reward circuitry so it's got to be something like that when you get someone who is in literally in a hunger strike okay that's what I think anorexia I think it's different and I think there's evidence now to suggest it's different in anorexia the food starts to lose its taste and the reward system is no longer telling you go get it it doesn't taste that great but it's gonna oh our best I think it takes time for it to get to that point yes take time how does it happen until it gets to that point once it gets to that point and right but but was that a long period before well there is I mean the obvious thing to say is one one cause of anorexia that people report mostly women has to do with changes in the perception of their body and that their perceptions this goes back to our perceptual stories the perception is way way off the bias is incredible and so that part of what's driving the initial loss of weight might be something like that presumably acting through the cognitive control mechanism and the prefrontal cortex and then the reward system gets screwed up it actually it loses its positivity about the taste and the reward system then becomes screwed up because the skinniness or so on becomes the source of the or even then not eating becomes the reward well it wouldn't be the not eating it would be you seeing yourself the image of yourself in a mirror or something like that it could be rewarding I I don't know if that's the case or you literally stop we're actually looking into doing something about this whether you actually show that food is less appetitive taste less good as determined by activity and certain critical parts of this reward region what I'd like to just add one comment that once you start talking about the perception of oneself you're in a much more complicated realm than we've been hi I'm Ellie actually a PhD in biology sorry yes I'm I I'm a biologist and I do fairly basic research now but I have a long-term interest in psychology and actually that have an undergraduate degree and did some work with Marni Seligmann when I was an undergraduate at Penn in any case I came here today with the kind of underlying motive that I might take away something more general in my own thinking Oh about something that I struggle with and I'm sure all of you struggle with in in your own lifes and that is how to motivate others in work mostly you were flow and other things as well and I'm wondering to what extent any of you can give me some words of wisdom about what you think about that and how your perceptions from your work have influenced how you think about I have a colleague at Columbia and psychology named Tori Higgins who's writing a book about that and he makes a basic distinction between two kinds of motivational systems is kind of like approach and avoid so in one kind of motivational system is concerned with accumulating gains your it's sort of like the positive outlook it's kind of an approach system because it a promotion system because you're looking to obtain things you're looking to get gains and so on and the other system is a prevention system you're trying to avoid losses and not make mistakes and and everybody has both but we differ we vary in which system can dominate and his idea about how to motivate people is I think it's very good different jobs require different kinds of motivation so there can be jobs one would hope for example that the surgeons are somewhat prevention focused whereas startup companies might be more promotion focused so you really want to consider what are the actual what will constitute success in this particular job and whether you want it to you know whether you're gonna have someone who's more prevention focused or promotion focused I didn't say that that well you want to fit the job to the person or fit the person to the job in terms of their motivational systems thing I'm Fritz Kenzel I'm a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst I'm working on a theory of multiple unconscious development unconscious motivational tracks that we did we developed a long I defined 16 such tracks so I think we're full of unconscious intentions somewhere between the unconsciousness a biological drive and conscious intention so there's this host I've defined 37 unconscious destructive intentions just look at that for the moment it's just this fire unconsciously concocting the events whereas the jury the other juries did not is your each subject unconsciously could consciously intending idealization to see the male as hot whereas the one that's not available is not going to see the middle as hot that is that trigger that on choked unconscious idealization is not working so I guess what I just want to just share with you always I think these unconscious constructed intentions which is how we develop and then a destructive and conscious intentions which hold back or normal and make us biologically stuck in earlier development I think they're very definitely do influence those I'd like it reflect on unconscious concocting do people start concocting weapons of mass destruction is there is there a process of making stuff up that's what I see whereas most of the jury is no they're not concocting so that's what they see is order so I think the answer is yes that exactly this role of the unconscious and a concoction or storytelling or narrative as jerry studies it is very important when you take any one real-world phenomenon we in the lab try to boil it down to one explanation that we're going to see as a possible explanation it's not going to be the whole story so there's never one phenomenon or one mechanism that's going to produce the phenomenon when you study something in the real world so of course unconscious concocting happens you can take an event that's happened and then ask people to reflect upon it and make decisions and that's Jerry's that's Jerry's work with legal decision making is the idea of narrative we already have a story about how do african-americans interact when they're with a police officer when they live in this neighborhood and we are we have these stories that are told by society or that are told in the courtroom when a lawyer presents one case one side of the story and another lawyer presents another and all of that at shapes how we think about the evidence and shapes how we watch it when we're shown it on the screen so the idea of narrative that can come from just living a life and developing it at an unconscious level or a narrative that's established because somebody is telling you the story that shapes your perceptual experience your understanding at that point they all matter they all matter they would have got that one which it it's impossible to perceive of the way we think without political speak absolutely necessary which in the walking time these things exist in time man they provide the context and we don't know very much about them yet so maybe study my name is Peter Irwin I've been involved in clinical development of drugs for treating brain illnesses I thought that perhaps in this discussion we were going to understand the relationship between meaning and motivation in a kind of a sequential process where we first unsorted break out what we how we arrived where we first brought thank you very much mass right where we first break out how we arrived at meaning and then that kind of reaches to motivation and I thought perhaps you might comment then on in terms of how we arrived at meaning there are a couple things that sort of come to my mind right away one I've got a new grandchild so I pay attention right I spend a little time looking at her and trying to imagine what's going on in her mind and how she's trying to organize all that she's perceiving and then another very brief anecdote when I was a young man and research one of the first things I sort of got interested in was imagining how a blind person was perceiving the world and there was a attractive young lady in the lab and I said he was would you try and experiment with me and she met me at a local place and and put a blindfold on me and then took me back to her apartment and we visited a couple of times and when I was trying to do this see whether or not I could perceive like I could do a transition in my mind instead of having a visual understanding of the apartment whether her apartment would then be then a cattle space and whether or not meaning and my understanding of the whole space in which I was in within some way transitioning to tactile meaning because clearly all your visual perceptions for a person to be blind they would have to have meanings and things exactly I was never very successful because I presume that a lot of the meanings we have are over learned and that becomes a problem I think when we talk about even like things like cognitive impenetrability because we've over learned things and ottoman sizin so much it may be very difficult to demonstrate that it is penetrable although some of the perceptual things probably are occurring in the eye and it's for that reason the eye the brain part of the eye and for that reason it may be impenetrable and in may if you could just sort of comment on how we get from meaning greater than to motivation so on your blindfold experiment that was a bit like picking up technique really interesting date so one thing about a vision and touch is they share a huge neural substrate largely in the so called visual cortex which turns out to be largely multi-sensory it has a big multi-sensory spatial component and this is a much detailed in a really quite interesting book called the handbook of multi sensory perception and there are a couple of articles in that book that gives interesting you know information about multi sensory perception one of the most interesting bodies of experiments comes from a guy named Seth Ian who was at Emory and he did just to give you one experiment that he did which shows he he took normal people and blindfolded them and then put their finger on a grid that had both a direction you know could be going this way or that way and a texture so they could feel both the texture and the direction and then he used a device that's often used in in cognitive neuroscience called transcranial magnetic stimulation which is it's a coil that you put on the Serkis of that on the scalp and you can zap areas and and temporarily cost cause temporary brain damage well that's repetitive that's repetitive transcranial magnetic student used in this is very brief I think that I would not submit to repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation but anyone maybe once well of course once you've done it once you have no judgment so but anyway what they found was that if they zapped the somatosensory cortex there's a band of somatosensory cortex going across the brain like this then these people could not feel either the direction or the texture but if they snapped the visual cortex these blindfolded people could feel the texture but not the orientation so the visual cortex was controlling their perception of the orientation the tactile orientation of these lines so it is interesting a bit of number one many bits of evidence that there is some multi there are multi sensory areas so that we classify as visual but are actually better classified as spacial using perception of music you know this is I've been interested in this but I have that I have done no reading on it so I'm sure somebody knows about this but I don't yes hi I'm Jerry Horowitz on the psychiatrist I am I really enjoyed the discussion today I thought was a fantastic guy I wonder a little bit about this whether we're making a little bit of a sort of a homunculus sort of error in separating meaning from motivation perhaps as much as we do and maybe there are certain perceptions maybe the ones that are so cognitively impenetrable etc which are let's say purely perceptual but I'm I'm wondering you know when there's this discussion of the the illusions these unconscious illusions that the the persistence of unconscious illusions when these figures are manipulated and why not that what we really can say about those people is that they're disposed to let's say bisect the line in a different place not so much that they have a perception of it that's of the sort and therefore they you know dot bisecting we can't really say with it ever perception because they can't report that to us so now I wonder whether these two different systems at least for certain types of phenomena certain types of experiences are really into whoa that is motivation and perception what I'm also thinking of here is this notion of anhedonia and the lack of motivation and reward systems and individuals we typically think of this sort of the big sort of sexy things that are motivating like sex of course food for some of us food yeah for all of us but you know really when we get down to it in our normal conscious experience everything in our perceptual field has some motivating fat was a there's a valence of motivation valence to everything in our visual field in our experience you see a glass of water I'm thirsty right now I have a certain feeling about that picture now that might be different than if I wasn't was not thirsty or if I had an hey Dona it the world will look very very different I put for it so again what about this idea this at some point these two systems it's not so much that motivation affects perceptions but motivation is part of perception that we have we evaluate everything we see you know this was actually discovered in terms of language many many years ago by Charles Osgood who was able to show he constructed something he called the semantic differential and one of them one of the dimensions what was positivity or negativity every word in the language is one that we that has a positive or a negative dimension I think you're up I agree with your intuitions and observations about how so many different things can have a motivational salience and I think it's there's quite a bit of evidence for that in the kinds of cognitive and behavior of studies that have been done for over a hundred years and that's now a real issue at the level of brain work of how that comes to be given what the reward circuitry must start off with so one example that you gave of the wrench gun she's no I'm sorry she's there are you often three commented on I believe but the idea of what was that person who answered that question actually saying because the idea of it being her perception was totally vague was it even a perception that caused me to respond the way I did I had a disposition and I kind of had a perception or a perceptual experience that was involved but really it was a gestalt well I think that fits with kind of the spirit of Emily's work can I just add one correction to my different net transcranial magnetic stimulation does not cause temporary brain damage it's a metaphor it changes the functioning not the structural aspects you can give it to him as much as he let me give you an example okay so Rebecca Saxe has identified this area she calls the extra body yeah no sorry it's a different around thinking this she's identified a area that a brain area that she found with fMRI so let me sir let me start a game so she gave people three kinds of stories one kind of story described the physical appearance another kind of story described perceptions of people and a third story described people's thoughts and beliefs and she found in a brain area that lit up only for the thoughts and beliefs not for the perceptions and not for the physical so this area seems to seems to be have something very much to do with attributing thoughts and beliefs to other people he then used transcranial magnetic stimulation upon this area repetitive the kind that Emily was talking about that puts this you know 20 minutes puts this puts this area to sleep and what she found was that the so she gave subjects moral evaluation tests and the moral evaluation tests involved things where somebody produced a good or a bad result either intentionally or accidentally for example there's a coffee cup there's some white powder you put the white powder in the coffee cup the person drinks it it turns out it's poison and he dies or the person drinks it it's sugar and he tastes good and they what was varied was did the person know it was poison and did he put it in the coffee cup in order to poison the person and what she found was if you put that area to sleep all people and they're judging whether the person is guilty or innocent it's just the consequences they lose all sense that's fine they don't have brain damage juice but they had but that is exactly as people do in those when that area is is damaged so this is a temporary brain damages it's Jax just like but what's happened is you've changed the functioning of the area and not the structure brain damage refers to tissue damage okay okay okay okay not functioning as fairness leader okay good the very last question how unconscious visual stimuli can be can be assimilated and effect perception I was wondering if the same thing applies to auditory stimuli if for example a person who's under s anesthesia things are said in his presence or even in the course of normal sleep can that affect normal perception this I think I think it's been shown that conversations can be a matter of concern in surgical departments that all kinds of if any of you know surgeons personally you know they're not believable highly refined in their conversation with my experience as an overworked intern and some of the raw conversation that goes on while a patient is under anesthesia can have a definite effect and and not a good effect and it's a concern that's been shown and who's being worked on the area and the problem with that anesthesia work there was a study some years ago by John Kallstrom which pointed out the problem which is that in real-life operations where people are under anesthesia the anesthesiologist is highly motivated to make the anesthesia as light as can as you can get away with because it's damaging heavy anesthesia is damaging so you never know how light the Annesley not asleep well but let me just accept the thing about visual perception is we have a highly controlled method of making of creating unconscious perception this this this thing I mentioned called continues flash depression there is no such method for auditory perception so we don't know how to produce unconscious auditory perception well there is a sorry with what there is an exception but we don't quite know as well what it's doing let me mention one quickly and then I'll stop 20-30 years ago I remember there was a series of motivational tapes that were sold and I assumed at the time that they were bogus yes they were anything about anesthesia but I do know about these motivational tapes and that was the question in the 70s it was really big can we expect big behavioral changes with absolutely no work at all can we get people to lose 20 pounds in their sleep if they listen to these motivational tapes so there was Tony Greenwald's did this study he looked at the tapes he got email ordered the infomercial whatever the version was in the 70s but by mail order got these tapes two types of tapes one for weight loss and one for being smarter and academic achievement or something like that in a double-blind experiment so the participants didn't really know what tapes they were getting and the experimenter didn't really know what they were giving but a third person did they mixed up the labels of the tapes right so it's a double-blind experiment people are supposed to put the headphones on every night for two weeks they listen to the content of the tapes there's a little bit 15 minutes 20 minutes I'm not sure of lag time at the beginning so people people fall asleep and then when they're asleep they hear either messages that are supposed to help them with meet their weight loss goals or improve their academic performance the tapes were labeled the only thing that had an effect was the label of the tapes so whether people thought they were supposed to be losing weight or thought they were supposed to be getting smarter with the tapes produced weight loss or produced change in math and math testing scores the the DBS that they use but the content of the tapes had absolutely no effect thank you everybody

Channel: philoctetesctr

Views: 17,260

Rating: 4.8032789 out of 5

Keywords: Philoctetes, Philosophy, Emily Balcetis, Ned Block, Lawrence Friedman, Edward Smith

Id: EQbrWaUm0P4

Length: 110min 31sec (6631 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2011