Transparent Eye

It aims to get at people’s unconscious views

EmSense was founded in California in 2004 by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop videogame controllers that could be operated by brain activity. It has since moved into market research, testing people’s subconscious reactions to video games and TV commercials. Earlier this year the company began running studies on presidential debates and presidential campaign ads in a bid to expand into politics.

Last Sunday at a San Francisco hotel ballroom, EmSense researchers fitted five volunteers, all undecided Republicans, with battery-powered headsets made of elastic and lined with bits of copper. As they watched the debate on a big screen, the wireless units, which the company calls “EmGear,” collected data on their skin temperature, heart rate, eye-blinking and brain activity and beamed them to a bank of computers. The data were run through a formula created by EmSense to identify whether a response was positive or negative.

Congratulations to Sam Harris on what may be his first professional publication as a neuroscientist, Functional neuroimaging of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty, in Annals of Neurology. The link requires authenticate, and may only work if you access it from, say, inside a university library.

(UPDATE: A reader has provided a link to a page on Sam Harris’ Web site where you can click on the pdf link, and it does not require authentication.)

Here are the results of Harris, the first author, and his co-authors, which touch on the part of the brain I’m most interested in, the anterior cingulate cortex, which is responsible for error detection and the unpleasantness of pain.

The states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty differentially activated distinct regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as the basal ganglia.

Belief and disbelief differ from uncertainty in that both provide information that can subsequently inform behavior and emotion. The mechanism underlying this difference appears to involve the anterior cingulate cortex and the caudate. Although many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as true or its rejection as false appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions may actually disgust us.

These results seem consistent, and no doubt extend, the findings of Antonio Damasio on how emotions constrain decision-making.

Update: Time Magazine has a good take of Harris’ results.

I came across Drew Westen’s The Political Brain at Barnes and Noble today. I’m going to request it at my library. This review seems pretty solid, and quotes a point about Democrats that could also apply to Humanists.

They do so, I believe, because of an irrational emotional commitment to rationality–one that renders them, ironically, impervious to both scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain work and to an accurate diagnosis of why their campaigns repeatedly fail.

Westen refers to Damasio’s work about the limits of rationality, and how all of us use emotion to frame the narrow window within which we think rationally.