This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they were watching the Super Bowl ads.

Introduction

Commercials are part of our lives. We watch them, we enjoy them, discuss them with our friends. Do commercials make us buy the product they advertise? Nobody really knows. The most anticipated 'ad experience' is watching the Super Bowl ads. And after the game, there is a flurry of opinions from marketing experts and focus groups on what was the most effective Super Bowl ad. This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they were watching the Super Bowl ads. The way fMRI works is relatively simple: different levels of cerebral blood oxygenation have different magnetic properties. Moreover, changes in blood oxygenation correlate with changes in neural activity. Thus, without using any contrast agent, fMRI can measure how much brain areas are activated during sensory, cognitive and motor experiences. 

This very first attempt at doing 'instant-science' is a collaborative effort between Marco Iacoboni's group — a leading group in functional neuroimaging — and FKF Applied Research, a marketing firm dedicated to conducting ethical projects and making key information publicly available. The main idea behind this project is that there is often a disconnect between what people say about what they like — and the real, underlying deeper motives that make us wanting and liking some things and some people, but not others. With fMRI, it is possible to look at unfiltered brain responses, to measure how the ads shown today elicit emotions, induce empathy, inspire liking and wanting. So, to put it bluntly:

WHO REALLY WON THE SUPER BOWL?

—JB

MARCO IACOBONI, MD PhD, is a neurologist and neuroscientist originally from Italy. Today he is at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he serves on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and is Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation laboratory of the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. Iacoboni's lab is arguably the leading lab in human mirror neuron research and he has a close relationship with Giacomo Rizzolatti in whose lab mirror neurons were originally discovered in monkeys.

Marco Iacoboni's Edge Bio page 

Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind? When the study I just described was accepted for publication, I recall asking one of my collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how he felt about having demonstrated that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to powerful external agents. He said, "I feel fine. After all, God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."

That's fair enough. Science rules out the most cartoonish versions of God by debunking specific claims about ancient civilizations in North America or the creatio ex nihilo of human life. But it cannot tell us whether there is a force or entity or idea beyond our ken that deserves to be known as God. What we can say is that the universe is a complex place, that events within it often seem to turn out for the best, and that neither of these facts requires an explanation beyond our own skins.

DANIEL GILBERT is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Director of the Social Cognition and Emotion Lab.

Daniel Gilbert 's Edge Bio Page

When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'

Introduction

"When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel,"writes the eminent situationist psychologist Philip Zimbardo, known for his famous Stanford Prison Experiment in the early 70s.

"You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior," he continued. "The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'"

About 30 years ago, Zimbardo and his colleagues began to do research on dehumanization. "What are the ways in which, instead of changing yourself and becoming the aggressor, it becomes easier to be hostile against other people by changing your psychological conception of them?". he asked. "You think of them as worthless animals. That's the killing power of stereotypes."

He connected that work the work he had done during the Stanford prison experiment. "The question there was," he says, "what happens when you put good people in an evil place? We put good, ordinary college students in a very realistic, prison-like setting in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford. We dehumanized the prisoners, gave them numbers, and took away their identity. We also deindividuated the guards, calling them Mr. Correctional Officer, putting them in khaki uniforms, and giving them silver reflecting sunglasses like in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Essentially, we translated the anonymity ofLord of the Flies into a setting where we could observe exactly what happened from moment to moment."

He found in that experiment that it is "really a study of the competition between institutional power versus the individual will to resist. The companion piece is the study by Stanley Milgram, who was my classmate at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. (Again, it is interesting that we are two situationists who came from the same neighborhood.) His study investigated the power of an individual authority: Some guy in a white lab coat tells you to continue to shock another person even though he's screaming and yelling. That's one way that evil is created as blind obedience to authority. But more often than not, somebody doesn't have to tell you to do something. You're just in a setting where you look around and everyone else is doing it. Say you're a guard and you don't want to harm the prisoners—because at some level you know they're just college students—but the two other guards on your shift are doing terrible things. They provide social models for you to follow if you are going to be a team player."

-JB

PHILIP ZIMBARDO is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. He is a founder of the National Center for the Psychology of Terrorism, and creator and co-director of The Shyness Clinic.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO's Edge Bio Page

The problem lies in how we imagine our future hedonic states. We are the only animals that can peer deeply into our futures—the only animal that can travel mentally through time, preview a variety of futures, and choose the one that will bring us the greatest pleasure and/or the least pain. This is a remarkable adaptation—which, incidentally, is directly tied to the evolution of the frontal lobe—because it means that we can learn from mistakes before we make them. We don't have to actually have gallbladder surgery or lounge around on a Caribbean beach to know that one of these is better than another. We may do this better than any other animal, but our research suggests that we don't do it perfectly. Our ability to simulate the future and to forecast our hedonic reactions to it is seriously flawed, and that people are rarely as happy or unhappy as they expect to be.

Introduction by John Brockman

In 1968, I was sitting at the back of a seedy Sunset Strip night club in Hollywood having a few drinks a friend, an actor, who, in the blink of an eye, had unexpectedly become an overnight sensation. An actor's actor, highly regarded by his peers, he was now in the middle of the actor's dream fantasy...on the covers of national news magazines, women, acclaim, and...work.

Or was it an actor's nightmare?

" The big wombassa", he said quitely.

"What?", I asked. "The big what?"

"It's 'the big wombassa' ", Johnny, "what you think you're going to get, and what you don't get, when you get what you want."

~~~

The Big Wombassa.

Indeed, over the years I've thought a lot about this highly intuitive formulation but it wasn't until I met Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert that I found out that syndromes such as "The Big Wombassa" had become a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry, and at no less a place than Harvard's Social Cognition and Emotion Lab, which is bringing scientific rigor to the study of subjective experiences such as satisfaction and happiness.

Gilbert is well-known for his work on what he and his long-time collaborator, Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia, call "affective forecasting", which is "the ability to predict one's hedonic reactions to future events."

He points out that "many economists believe that affective forecasting errors are impediments to rational action and hence should be eliminated—just as we would all agree that illiteracy or innumeracy are bad things that deserve to be eradicated. But cognitive errors may be more like optical illusions than they are like illiteracy. The human visual system is susceptible to a variety of optical illusions, but if someone offered to surgically restructure your eyes and your visual cortex so that parallel lines no longer appeared to converge on the horizon, you should run as far and fast as possible."

Gilbert approaches these issues as a scientist, not a clinician. He is "interested in learning how people can become better affective forecasters, but not because I believe that people should become better affective forecasters. My job as a scientist is to find and explain these errors and illusions, and it is up to each individual to decide how they want to use our findings."

— JB

DANIEL GILBERT is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Daniel Gilbert's Edge Bio Page

In the domain of bodies, most of us accept that common sense is wrong. We concede that apparently solid objects are actually mostly empty space, consisting of tiny particles and fields of energy. Perhaps the same sort of reconciliation will happen in the domain of souls, and it will come to be broadly recognized that our dualist belief system, though intuitively appealing, is factually mistaken. Perhaps we will all come to agree with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and join the side of the "brights": those who reject the supernatural and endorse the world-view established by science.

But I am skeptical. The notion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling to many, as it clashes with religion. Dualism and religion are not the same: You can be dualist without holding any other religious beliefs, and you can hold religious beliefs without being dualist. But they almost always go together. And some very popular religious views rest on a dualist foundation, such as the belief that people survive the destruction of their bodies. If you give up on dualism, this is what you lose.

This is not small potatoes.

Introduction

As a teenager, Paul Bloom worked extensively with autistic children, and when he majored in psychology at McGill University, he expected to end up as a clinical child psychologist. His interests shifted when he met John Macnamara, a professor who studied the interface between psychology and philosophy. Bloom worked with Macnamara as an undergraduate, and then did his graduate work at MIT with Susan Carey, on cognitive development and language acquisition.

As a professor—first at University of Arizona, and then at Yale—Bloom explores how children learn the meanings of words, and he developed a theory of word learning that has social cognition (also known as "theory of mind" or "mindreading") at its core. More recently, Bloom and his students have started to explore a set of related puzzles having to do with the nature and development of art, religion, humor, and morality.

PAUL BLOOM is a professor of psychology at Yale University who works on language and development, and with Steven Pinker coauthored one of the seminal papers in the field. He is co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and the author of several books, the most recent of which is Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.

Paul Bloom's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Responses by Jesse Bering, Marvin Minsky, Jaron Lanier, Paul Harris, Pascal Boyer, Paul Bloom replies; Mark Mirsky