Good post from Jonah Lehrer at the Frontal Cortex about Obama’s use of personal narrative in the health care debate.
I think research is compelling that we have an easier time dealing with moral issues on a personal level than on a mass level. But will it help? There is equally compelling evidence that once people have made a moral decision, they are very good at giving post-hoc rationalizations for their moral intuitions.
When I teach students about the brain, I usually start with visual illusions. After really exploring a illusions it easy to help students reach and understanding that we see with both our brain not just with our eyes.
That’s why I love this study about how vision affects cognition. The study takes a bunch of snooty, very well trained wine tasters. These guys are paid to write long poetic reviews about the way a wine smells. As WinePro.org tells us
The nose can sometimes even beat the eyes in the race for setting up the tasting expectations. An aroma can carry from one room to another, beyond the line of sight. Of the five senses, smell is the most acute, approximately 1,000 times more sensitive than the sense of taste. As a result, what is termed flavor is influenced by roughly 75% smell (olfaction) and 25% taste (gustation) in healthy individuals.
To sum up: the nose knows. Now, apparently there is a very specialized vocabulary regarding the smells (aromas? ) of wine. The smell of red wines and white wines are often described in different languages. In fact if you want to sound snooty when describing your wine you can even order a wine aroma wheel and use it to construct sentences like “”Intense aromas of ginger, citrus, candied berry and multigrain bread turn to honey, roasted almonds and graphite on the palate.” To sum up, the nose of a wine taster, knows more then your nose.
So what happens when researchers used am oderless, tasteless liquid to change the color of white wine red?
It turns out that the experts use the red-wine language to describe the fake red-wine. All those years of gently quaffing their glasses, inhaling deeply and donning mysterious looks of profound insight, meant little in the face of a couple drops of food coloring. The information from the eyes, in this case, simply overruled the information from the nose.
It’s just another subtle and amusing case of the brain adjudicating reality for us.
A fascinating short blog post from Brain Blogger. More kids are receiving psychotropic drugs. What role, if any, should teachers play in this? This is the quote that jumped out at me:
more than half the parents seeking medication treatment for their child’s externalizing behavior in one pediatric setting were doing so as the result of recommendations from school personnel.” Yet, the teachers in their study responded that they had “none or limited” (88.9% and 100% respectively) training on children’s mental health problems or the medications prescribed to treat them.
Teachers make recommendations that lead parents to seek medication. It seems to me we must do a better job of training teachers to think about behavior from a bio-psycho-social perspective.