The ironic effect of German PhD prestige May 7, 2013

What would happen if a culture actually believed that a PhD does confer such a great set of transferable skills and is such an important test of character that the title is a career boost? A look at Germany gives an impression but it is not the science policy heaven one might expect.

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By now she is just Schavan, ex-science minister.

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There can be no doubt that a PhD is associated with career boost in Germany. Just look at numbers like these: in 2005 in the US 6% of CEOs had a PhD, in France it was 4%. In Germany, however, the number was a full 59%. Note that this is not because more than half of the university graduates who leave German universities do so with a PhD in hand. Only 11% do. Actual pay mirrors this pattern. With merely a university diploma a female graduate gets nearly a third less pay than her PhD colleague.The message to ambitious people is clear: get that PhD no matter what career you want to pursue.

Moreover, having a German PhD is more than just a boost to one’s career. It is a boost to one’s entire social standing. Once the title is obtained it will cover one’s doorbell, one’s business card and even one’s passport. One will expect to be addressed with this title. In many respects it has become the modern equivalent of a title of nobility.

At first, this may sound like science policy heaven. There is a country where people who have earned scientific qualifications have got such a high social standing that they easily reach the highest ladders of society. The claims of transferable skills, test of character, training in critical thinking and analysis, … There is seemingly no need to convince Germans of these things, no need to do advertisements for science education, it appears. However, the opposite could be true. People who want to reach the highest ladders of society are clogging up the scientific training process. They have their career in mind, not scientific progress.

He was defense secretary and had a PhD. She is chancellor and has a PhD.

This leads to unintended consequences. A year ago, the German defense secretary (Dr) zu Guttenberg was about to lose his PhD title for plagiarism and consequently stepped down. Now, the German science minister (Prof. Dr) Schavan was forced to resign for the same reason. In between, a list of other German politicians was also found out. When prestige is more important than scientific value, the latter will obviously suffer. In this context the list of people with faulty PhDs at the highest levels of politics is hardly surprising.

What needs to change is a view that people with a PhD are somehow better people. At heart, a PhD is just a vocational qualification for science, a necessary step for pursuing a career in research or academia. It says nothing about the general quality of a person, or as Chris Chambers put it: ‘almost everyone who starts a PhD and sticks around long enough ends up getting one’. Of course you learn transferable skills while doing a PhD, but this does not mean that a PhD should be seen as a condition for having a business or politics career.

Paradoxically, everyone involved might actually benefit from less prestigious academic titles in the long run. Professors would be less bothered by PhD students who are not interested in research. The research literature would be less clogged up with easily obtained but uninteresting findings. And career minded graduates would not be required to spend years of their lives developing research skills which will perhaps not be needed in their later business or politics careers.

Now, how do you reduce the prestige of academic titles? There is no better way than to expose people in power who obtained them without actually deserving them. Thanks Dr zu Guttenberg and Prof. Dr Schavan.

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Figures:

1) via stabroeknews.com

2) By Bundeswehr-Fotos [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Are some languages easier than others? April 24, 2013

‘Long time no see’ is something I heard repeatedly in Britain even though it totally violates all the English grammar I learned at school. Clearly, Brits should correct this expression originating from Chinese Pidgin English rather than adopt it. The reason it entered common usage anyway is at the heart of why you might find English a lot easier to learn than the other British languages like Welsh or Gaelic. In a nutshell: when you learn English, it learns something from you as well.

Three years ago Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale published a (freely available) paper in which they looked at over 2,000 languages across the globe and quantified how difficult they are, e.g. by looking at their morphological complexity. Morphological complexity refers to how difficult it is to say a word in its correct form (‘went’ rather than ‘go-ed’). Its simpler counterpart is usually the use of more words to say the same thing (compare the sometimes irregular past like ‘gone’ with the always regular future ‘will go’). Using these principles Lupyan and Dale could show that languages which are spoken by more people tend to be simpler. Why?

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When languages grow big, they tend to get simple.

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Lupyan and Dale hypothesise that languages with more speakers also include more people who learned it when they were no longer children. As an adult, when you are not that good at learning a language anymore, you make yourself understood without speaking perfectly. Over time, these mistakes and simplifications are adopted by the language simply because difficult things never get learned by a new generation of learners. They are just forgotten. In some sense, the language learns what it can expect from its learners and what not. This drive towards simplification is a lot less strong when only expert language learners, i.e. children, are responsible for language transmission.

This year, a new study got published which directly looked at the proportion of adult second language learners in a given community rather than just assume it from the community size, as Lupyan and Dale did. Christian Bentz and Bodo Winter looked at case marking which is another pain to learn. In many languages around the world the Who does What to Whom pattern is not expressed through word order, like in English, but instead through case marking on words (similar to difference in roles marked by ‘he – him – his’). It turns out that on average languages which managed to retain a case system only have 16% of its speakers learn it after childhood, while the comparable number for no-case languages is 44%. Adults are bad at learning grammatical case systems, so it is forgotten if many adult learners speak the language.

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His forebearers shaped English. As does he.

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So, yes, some languages are indeed easier. Learning them is a lot simpler. The reason being that language is not an invention of a single person. Instead, it is a communication tool shaped by the people using it. When Chinese people started using English they made many mistakes, some of them got adopted like ‘Long time no see’. Notice how it uses very little morphology, i.e. the words are all like you would find them in a dictionary, and no case at all (by that time English no longer had a full case system).

Follow the path of other adult language learners and you will meet with less resistance.

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Bentz C, & Winter B (2013). Languages with more second language learners tend to lose case Language Dynamics and Change, in press

Lupyan G, & Dale R (2010). Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PloS one, 5 (1) PMID: 20098492

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Figures:

1) adapted from Lupyan & Dale, 2010, p. 7

2) By Eneas De Troya from Mexico City, México (Melting Pot  Uploaded by russavia) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

The biological basis of orchestra seating March 28, 2013

Many cultural conventions appear like the result of historical accidents. The QWERTY – keyboard is a typical example: the technical requirements of early typewriters still determine the computer keyboard that I write this text on, even though by now technical advances would allow for a far more efficient design. Some culturally accepted oddities, however, appear to reflect the biological requirements of human beings. The way musicians are seated in an orchestra is one such case, but the listener is, surprisingly, not the beneficiary.

When one goes to a concert one typically sees a seating somewhat like the one below: strings in the front, then woodwinds further back, then brass. What is less obvious is that, in general, higher pitched instruments are seated on the left and lower pitched instruments on the right. The strings show this pattern perfectly: from left to right one sees violins, violas, cellos and then basses. Choirs show the same pattern: higher voices (soprano and tenor) stand left of the lower voices (alt and basses). Why is that?

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An orchestra I have personally performed with.

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It turns out that this is not a historical accident but instead a biological requirement. Diana Deutsch has used a series of audio illusions which all showed a curious pattern: when you present two series of tones each to one ear, you have the illusion that the high tones are being played to your right ear and the low ones to the left ear. In case you don’t believe me, listen to this illustration of Deutsch’s scale illusion:

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Apparently, there is a right ear advantage for high tones. So, seating the higher instruments on the left side (as seen on the photo) makes complete sense as this way musicians on stage tend to hear higher tones coming from their right. However, from the point of view of the audience this is actually a really bad idea as their right ear advantage is not taken into account. It turns out that orchestra seating arrangements are not favouring the hearing of the audience or the conductor but instead the musicians!

The right ear advantage for high tones is even mirrored in musicians’ brains. We know that the right ear projects mostly to the left auditory cortex and vice versa for the left ear. So, one would expect that people who play high instruments have trained their right ear / left auditory cortex the most when they practiced their craft. These training effects should be mirrored in differences in cortex size. This would mean that people sitting on the left in an orchestra have bigger left auditory cortices. In a fascinating article Schneider and colleagues showed that by and large this is the case: professional musicians who play high instruments or instruments with a sharp attack (e.g., percussionists, piano players) tend to have greater left auditory cortices than right auditory cortices. Their figure says is all.

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How the brains are seated in an orchestra.

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The orchestra seating arrangement mirrors not only the listening biases of most human ears but on top of that the brain differences between musicians. By and large, the orchestra is organised according to biological principles. Thus, not all cultural conventions – like the seemingly arbitrary seating arrangement of orchestras – have their roots in historical accidents. Cultural oddities are sometimes merely down to biology.

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Deutsch, D. (1999). Grouping Mechanisms in Music The Psychology of Music, Second Edition, 299-348 DOI: 10.1016/B978-012213564-4/50010-X

Schneider P, Sluming V, Roberts N, Bleeck S, & Rupp A (2005). Structural, functional, and perceptual differences in Heschl’s gyrus and musical instrument preference. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1060, 387-94 PMID: 16597790

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Figures:

1) Nederlands: Symfonieorkest Nijmegen in de grote zaal van de Vereeniging, The SON photo library, via wikimedia

2) as found in Schneider et al., 2005, p. 392

What lies behind the mystery of being born with a phantom penis? January 22, 2013

This is nothing compared to what the mind does with us every day.

Like a magician our mind tricks us into believing what we see and feel. We only notice that something strange is going on when our expectations are betrayed during the prestige – when the white rabbit is drawn out of the empty hat. Psychology sometimes works in much the same way. After the mind has made us believe in the ordinary, it creates strange cases which point to something bigger going on behind the scenes. One of the most extraordinary illusions is the one of our body. At the final prestige we see people born with phantom penises which no one can see. What was going on behind the scenes?

‘Phantoms’ is what Silas Weir Mitchell called the amputated limbs that their owners could still feel. The most straight-forward explanation simply refers to re-membering. When an amputated limb lives on as a phantom arm one could say that the mind fails to realise the loss and fills in the usual feelings with memories. This re-membering may well explain why some people claim to feel a watch or even clothes on the phantom skin.

It is as if the magician had produced a rabbit out of an ‘empty’ hat and everyone suddenly noticed that the hat was high enough to house it from the start. However, the mind had another trick up its sleeve. Since the initial description of phantom limbs in 19^th century amputees, this phenomenon has also been discovered in people who had never been born with limbs to begin with. These so called congenital phantom limbs are very strange because their owners obviously have no memories of limbs. Re-membering cannot explain this.

Perhaps it is time to turn from psychology to neuroscience in our quest to understand this trick. The part of the human brain responsible for limb movements is a well organised bit of cortex which looks very similar across people: the primary motor cortex. When the appropriate bit of my own primary motor cortex once got stimulated with magnetic waves, my index finger twitched. Peter Brugger and colleagues did the same with a woman only known as A.Z.. She was born without arms or legs but reported feeling them nonetheless. Magnetic stimulation of her primary motor cortex made her phantom limbs move. This suggests that the action control mechanism and the brain mechanism responsible for phantom limbs are linked.

Thus, all we know about action control in the human brain can be used to explain away the phantom limb phenomenon. Firstly, the primary motor cortex is at least partly genetically determined, i.e. limb control is part of our genetic make-up whether we’ve got limbs or not.  When trying to control limbs which do not exist, the brain may create the illusion of controlling phantom limbs instead. Secondly, some researchers believe that a muscle activation command is not only sent to the muscles but a copy is also sent to the back of the brain. This allows us to react to expected action outcomes even before they have occurred. Phantom limbs may occur because expected actions get misinterpreted as real ones. Thirdly, mirror neurons code for actions seen and actions done. According to this explanation A.Z. saw many people use their limbs and this made her have the illusion that she could do the same, albeit only with phantom limbs instead of real ones.

A Greek statue depicting phantom limbs.

However, the final prestige defies all these explanations. Something else entirely must be responsible for a phenomenon reported by Vilayanur Ramachandran and Paul McGeoch in 2008: phantom penises. Like phantom limbs they can occur after amputation. Fascinatingly though, they were also reported by female-to-male transsexuals without an artifical penis. Crucially, this cannot simply be put away as ‘wishful thinking’. For one, their phantom penises were not perfect: for some they were shaped in an undesirable way, erected in embarrassing non-erotic situations, or rubbing against the jeans. But more importantly, Western society goes to great lengths to make life as a transsexual seem like an unattractive option. For example, when they were children, two phantom penis owners were taken to a psychiatrist by their puzzled parents to be treated for a penis that did not exist. Why would anyone want to go through this as a child – or indeed through life changing surgery as an adult – if it wasn’t absolutely necessary?

But if being born with a phantom penis cannot be explained by re-membering, brain mechanisms of action control (a penis is obviously not a muscle one can voluntarily control), or wishful thinking – then what lies behind this phenomenon? This final trick of the mind, seemingly the most ordinary sensation of being a man or a woman in a male or female body, defies easy solutions. Ramachandran and McGeoch speculate that hormonal factors before birth could be responsible.

Before any such speculation can be substantiated I can only conclude that this final prestige remains a mystery. Just like an audience member seeing a magician do a trick on a member of the public, I wonder whether I have been tricked as well. Phantom limbs and phantom penises show powerfully that the link between our anatomical body and our body image is a fragile one. The mind is doing all sorts of trickery behind the scenes in order to hide this difference between body felt and body seen. Like with any good magician, one wonders how this trick is actually done.

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Brugger P, Kollias SS, Müri RM, Crelier G, Hepp-Reymond MC, & Regard M (2000). Beyond re-membering: phantom sensations of congenitally absent limbs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97 (11), 6167-72 PMID: 10801982

Mitchell, W (1871). Phantom limbs Lippinscott’s Magazine, 8, 563-569

Ramachandran, VS, & McGeoch, PD (2008). Phantom Penises In Transsexuals – Evidence of an Innate Gender-Specific Body Image in the Brain Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15 (1), 5-16

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Pictures:

1) By Strobridge Litho. Co., Cincinnati & New York  Restoration by trialsanderrors and Morn via Wikimedia Commons

2) By Shawn Lipowski (Shawnlipowski) (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

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delaying dementia without pills January 7, 2013

‘What’s this? A potato?’ asked my friend’s grandfather during lunch. As always, he used his charming grin and characteristically loud voice. Even though the entire conversation was in Argentine Spanish – which I had learned only a short while before – I understood the oddity of the situation at once. Instead of a potato, the grandfather held a kiwifruit in his hands.

After only a short time of living with this family I noticed that the grandfather no longer had the mental abilities he once must have possessed in order to lead a successful business and raise an adorable family. He was undiagnosed but his behaviour reminded me of Mild Cognitive Impairment, which can progress to a more severe general cognitive impairment – Alzheimer’s Disease or more generally dementia – which usually cannot be cured. ‘What can be done?’ I was asked by my friend’s grandmother afraid of slowly losing the husband she had shared most of her life with. In broken Spanish I tried to explain to her what I would do: build up a cognitive reserve. This concept – related to the beneficial effects of, for example, high education or mentally demanding spare time activities – is perhaps the most promising strategy for delaying dementia.

A large scale analysis illustrates what a cognitive reserve can achieve. First of all, it can delay dementia. An Australian research team (Valenzuela & Sachdev, 2006) collected studies which recruited old people when they were still perfectly healthy and then tested them again after a few years to find out by how much their cognitive abilities had declined. The trend across more than 47,000 people was for higher education and more demanding leisure activities to slow down the creeping loss of mental abilities leading to dementia.

A German nun without experimental confounds.

The savvy reader may already notice a problem with this theory: high education is associated with a generally healthier lifestyle. Rather than cognitive reserve, we should perhaps simply be talking about healthy vs. non-healthy life styles. A Bavarian study ruled this problem out (Bickel & Kurz, 2009). They gained access to the education and dementia records of older female members of a religious order who lived as similarly as one can imagine. The 442 participants had shared a roof for more than five decades, shared meals together, had the same access to medical care. None smoked. None had any personal items. And still, 39% of sisters with low education suffered from dementia, compared to only 14% in the remaining group. Clearly, whether life style has an effect or not, the benefits of a cognitive reserve cannot be reduced to it. It delays dementia all by itself.

This beneficial effect of a cognitive reserve led me to give my advice. However, this strategy cannot stave off dementia forever or even slow it down once it kicks in. Nikolaos Scarmeas and colleagues from Columbia University (2006) found that more highly educated New Yorkers above 65 lose their memory faster around the time of an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis compared to less educated city dwellers. Apparently, the benefits of a high education are absent around the time of diagnosis.

This raises the obvious question whether my advice was perhaps too late. Once on the road to Alzheimer’s there may be no turning back and efforts to delay the inevitable could make things worse. Given what we know about how the cognitive reserve actually works, I do not believe that this is true. First of all, a cognitive reserve is no cure against dementia but merely a way to delay it. The theory goes that brain pathology progresses whether you have a cognitive reserve or not. What a high education level and demanding leisure activities actually do is to avoid the usual outcome of brain pathology – e.g., easily noticeable memory problems of the kind I have described above. This is supported by studies which compared the brains of people with equal mental function in high age. Those with higher education have more amyloid deposits – a peptide associated with Alzheimer’s disease – as if they were able to deal with their reduced brain function in a better way (Kemppainen et al., 2008; Rentz et al., 2010). At some point though, the progressively worse brain function catches up with you and the resulting cognitive decline is faster.

Charles Hall and colleagues (2007; 2009) tested this overall model in the real world. His analyses of memory test scores of over 100 Bronx residents over the years shows the predicted trend. At first, a high cognitive reserve – whether education or leisure activities – delays the point in time when mental abilities suddenly decline rapidly. Each year in education delays this moment by two and a half months. Each day of mentally stimulating leisure activities delays it by two months. Once this moment is reached, though, the decline is faster with a higher cognitive reserve – as if the aforementioned brain pathology catches up. A cognitive reserve helps you to delay dementia but not to escape it.

The higher the education the shallower the decline before a break point, the later that break point, and the steeper the decline thereafter.

My friend’s grandfather had long been out of education. But the second source of a cognitive reserve – mentally demanding leisure activities – was not beyond him. What sort of activities work? A French research team led by Tasnime Akbaraly (2009) took a better look. They found that only a certain kind of leisure activity will delay dementia onset. Watching television and other passive behaviours won’t do. Neither do physical activities like going for a walk. Nor social ones like have friends or family over. The crucial set of activities are the mentally demanding ones: doing crosswords, playing cards, attending organisations, going to the cinema/theatre, practicing an artistic activity etc.

It is a mystery to me why this knowledge is not more widely spread. Dementia is one of the central challenges facing an ageing population as well as many old couples individually. Research shows that one does not need to be a passive spectator of mental decline. If a cognitive reserve has been built up, one can enjoy more years without showing signs of an incurable disease. That’s what I tried to say in broken Spanish to my friend’s grandmother: make him use his mind.

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Akbaraly, T., Portet, F., Fustinoni, S., Dartigues, J., Artero, S., Rouaud, O., Touchon, J., Ritchie, K., & Berr, C. (2009). Leisure activities and the risk of dementia in the elderly: Results from the Three-City Study Neurology, 73 (11), 854-861 DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0b013e3181b7849b

Bickel H, & Kurz A (2009). Education, occupation, and dementia: the Bavarian school sisters study. Dementia and geriatric cognitive disorders, 27 (6), 548-56 PMID: 19590201

Hall CB, Derby C, LeValley A, Katz MJ, Verghese J, & Lipton RB (2007). Education delays accelerated decline on a memory test in persons who develop dementia. Neurology, 69 (17), 1657-64 PMID: 17954781

Hall CB, Lipton RB, Sliwinski M, Katz MJ, Derby CA, & Verghese J (2009). Cognitive activities delay onset of memory decline in persons who develop dementia. Neurology, 73 (5), 356-61 PMID: 19652139

Kemppainen NM, Aalto S, Karrasch M, Någren K, Savisto N, Oikonen V, Viitanen M, Parkkola R, & Rinne JO (2008). Cognitive reserve hypothesis: Pittsburgh Compound B and fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography in relation to education in mild Alzheimer’s disease. Annals of neurology, 63 (1), 112-8 PMID: 18023012

Rentz DM, Locascio JJ, Becker JA, Moran EK, Eng E, Buckner RL, Sperling RA, & Johnson KA (2010). Cognition, reserve, and amyloid deposition in normal aging. Annals of neurology, 67 (3), 353-64 PMID: 20373347

Scarmeas, N., Albert, S.M., Manly, J.J., & Stern, Y. (2005). Education and rates of cognitive decline in incident Alzheimer’s disease Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 77 (3), 308-316 DOI: 10.1136/jnnp.2005.072306

Valenzuela MJ, & Sachdev P (2006). Brain reserve and cognitive decline: a non-parametric systematic review. Psychological medicine, 36 (8), 1065-73 PMID: 16650343

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Figures:

1) By André Karwath aka Aka (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

2) By Doris Ulmann, 1882–1934. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

3) Hall et al., 2007, p. 1661

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How Long Should a Scientific Publication be? December 18, 2012

In one word: short. In two words: it depends.

A neuroscience expert faces the challenge of 100 new neuroscience articles being published on a daily basis. S/he will never be able to read all that. So, what can be done to get your own publication known to the community?

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1) Know the reader and his/her lack of time

Science reading has become shorter as more and more articles get read per year but less time is spent per article. Within the last 30 years the articles read nearly doubled whereas the time spent per article nearly halved. Renear and colleagues (2009) call this a trend towards ‘literature surfing’ at the expense of careful reading.

Mind that this change in reading behaviour is not enough to compensate for the increase in scientific output. Over the same time span, while the number of read articles nearly doubled, the number of new science publications per year more than doubled. In a new and edgy field like neuroscience this trend is even more pronounced. Here, the output nearly quadrupled (see my earlier post).

Scientists read more (orange) in less time (blue). This is efficient but is it good?

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2) Follow publication trends

Perhaps as a result of the reduction in time spent reading each article, scientific publications have become shorter. To give an example, below I plot all reviews and review-like articles published in a well known neuroscience journal (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, as of April 2012). As can be seen easily, there is a significant trend to keep the reference sections shorter and shorter.

References in Nature Reviews Neuroscience: less and less and less

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3) Decide between efficiency and effectiveness

Efficiency: how much more do I get out of a long cumbersome article compared to a short one?

In terms of citations per page, the answer is nothing. Stanek posted a semi-humorous paper on arXiv reporting citations per publication page in the field of Astronomy. Between six and 50 pages there is not much influence of page count. One may call these papers normal articles. However, anything longer will reduce the citations added with each additional page. Curiously, anything shorter will actually increase it. The most efficient paper is 4 pages long and gathers around 16 citations, i.e. 4 citations per page.

Haslam (2010) did a similar analysis in Psychology. He compared short report formats with longer article formats and found reports to usually have a higher per page citation count than their longer cousins.

Effectiveness: how do I maximize the citations my publication can get?

Go for long articles. Stanek found articles around 50 pages long to receive the most citations. Haslam found longer article formats to have significantly higher mean citation counts.

If you strive for efficiency, go for a short report. They receive more impact per page. If you strive for effect, go for a long article. They receive more impact per publication.

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4) A cautionary note: consider scientific progress

While shorter articles do allow for the faster dissemination of interesting findings, they offer less space to include replications of experimental effects and this can lead to more false positives making it into the field.

Furthermore, the field as such, i.e. some sort of accumulated understanding of what is known in different areas, can disintegrate if articles are not cross-linked through references. Ledgerwood & Sherman (2012) warn of an increased risk to rediscover what we already know because of a trend towards bite-size publications: science as a repetitive rather than cumulative process.

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In a career sense the most worthwhile publications are the short ones. At least they will get read and cited efficiently. However, later in your career – if you haven’t succumbed to cynicism – you may actually care about science or be hopeful to make it in an academic career requiring a few highly cited articles. In this phase longer, more integrative articles are probably worth it.

Like with so many other phenomena, fast career-minded science is not necessarily good science.

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Haslam, N. (2010). Bite-Size Science: Relative Impact of Short Article Formats Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5 (3), 263-264 DOI: 10.1177/1745691610369466

Ledgerwood, A., & Sherman, J. (2012). Short, Sweet, and Problematic? The Rise of the Short Report in Psychological Science Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7 (1), 60-66 DOI: 10.1177/1745691611427304

Renear AH, & Palmer CL (2009). Strategic reading, ontologies, and the future of scientific publishing. Science (New York, N.Y.), 325 (5942), 828-32 PMID: 19679805

Krzysztof Zbigniew Stanek (2008). How long should an astronomical paper be to increase its Impact? arXiv arXiv: 0809.0692v1

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Neuroscience is forgetting.

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Figures:

1) from Renear & Palmer, 2009, p. 829

2) self-generated

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When to switch on background music December 9, 2012

Some things of our daily lives have become so common, we hardly notice them anymore. Background music is one such thing. Whether you are in a supermarket, a gym or a molecular biology laboratory, you can constantly hear it. More than that, even in quiet environments like the office or the library people get out their mp3-players and play background music. Is this a form of boosting one’s productivity or are people enjoying music at the cost of getting things done? Research on the effect of background music can give an answer.

A German research team led by Juliane Kämpfe did a meta-analysis of nearly 100 studies on this topic. It turns out that certain tasks benefit from background music. They are noticeably mindless tasks: mundane behaviours like eating or driving as well as sports. Below you can hear how Arnold Schwarzenegger uses this finding to great effect.

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Music also has a positive effect on mood regulation like controlling your nervousness before a job interview. (I have discussed similar stuff before when looking into why people willingly listen to sad music.)

However, music can also have a detrimental effect. It can draw your attention away from the things you should be focussing on. As a result a negative influence tends to be seen in situations which require concentration: memorising and text understanding. In other words: don’t play it in a university library as these students did.

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So far, so unsurprising. However, one positive effect stands out from the picture I painted above. The German meta-analysis mentions a curious, positive effect of music on simple math tests. This is in line with a recent study by Avila and colleagues who found a positive effect of music on logical reasoning. Could it be that the negative effect of background music on concentration tasks is found because these tasks are nearly always language based? Music and language have been claimed to share a lot of mental resources. This special link between the two modalities could perhaps explain the negative effect. It is too early to tell, but there may be a set of intellectual tasks which benefit from music: the abstract, mathematical or logical ones.

The conclusion is clear. If you want to get things done, choose carefully whether music will aid you or hold you back. Think Arnie or Gangnam Style.

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Avila, C., Furnham, A., & McClelland, A. (2012). The influence of distracting familiar vocal music on cognitive performance of introverts and extraverts Psychology of Music, 40 (1), 84-93 DOI: 10.1177/0305735611422672

Kampfe, J., Sedlmeier, P., & Renkewitz, F. (2011). The impact of background music on adult listeners: A meta-analysis Psychology of Music, 39 (4), 424-448 DOI: 10.1177/0305735610376261
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Obama should pray for sun – Psycho-meteorological effects on government approval October 25, 2012

Romney should pray for rain because rain improves a conservative’s chances of getting elected. Having covered this ‘Republican rain advantage’ in my last post, I will turn to a second reason why the presidential candidates should monitor the election day weather in this post. It turns out that the weather influences how well the government is perceived. Could this be exploited by the candidates?

Bush finding approval under the sun.

The weather has got a curious effect on the government’s approval ratings. Alex Cohen looked at Bush’s approval ratings of the year 2005. He found that they were significantly better when the sun was out at the respondent’s location compared to ambiguous weather. Note that this is opposite to the ‘Republican rain advantage’ covered in the last post suggesting that a different explanation needs to be found to explain this one.

The easiest explanation would be this: it is a simple coincidence. However, German researchers Michael Mutz and Sylvia Kämpfer did a similar analysis for German polling data gathered in 2008. Just like Cohen they found sunshine to increase government satisfaction. Going beyond this ‘incumbent sunshine advantage’, they found that a rainy day actually reduced government satisfaction. It should be noted that in 2008 Germany was ruled by a so called grand coalition formed by the two main centre-right and centre-left parties. Therefore, the Republican rain advantage cannot account for this effect either. So, given a replication in a different year and a completely different democratic system, there must be a reason for this effect other than coincidence.

But is it worth our time to dwell on this issue? Yes it is. Compared to what sort of things political candidates – and the media – usually focus on, the weather effect is substantial. In Germany it was found to be stronger than the effect of gender and appeared comparable to the effect of education. In the US study it was, depending on season, stronger than the effect of age, unemployment or income. In other words, if it is worth worrying about ‘the female vote’ or the ‘pensioner vote’ it is also worth looking at the weather effect.

Obama during a time of high approval.

The reason given for this ‘incumbent sun advantage’ mirror to some degree what I suggested to be the reason for the ‘Republican rain advantage’. The effect of weather on mood is the key link. By and large, sunshine improves mood. Whether it does so directly by increasing the availability of the neurotransmitter serotonin or indirectly by facilitating outdoor events with friends does not matter. Once the weather has changed your mood there are three ways it can cloud your judgement. First, the information we take in tends to conform to our mood – mood-congruent attention. Second, the more a memory agrees with our mood the more likely it is to be remembered – mood-congruent memory. Third, when faced with complex, vague or unimportant decisions people tend to be guided by their gut feeling, i.e. they use their mood as explicit information for their judgement.

In sum, when you are asked to evaluate the government and the sun is shining, you are more likely to attend to something good, remember something good and have your assessment clouded by your good gut feeling. No wonder you tend to evaluate the government as better even though it is not responsible for the weather.

However, this effect has no obvious application for the candidates. Obama appears to benefit from the political climate as much as from the actual weather. Romney, though, will have to pray for rain – or hope that the good feelings not just lead to a better assessment of the incumbent but also of the challenger.

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Cohen, A. (2011). The photosynthetic President: Converting sunshine into popularity The Social Science Journal, 48 (2), 295-304 DOI: 10.1016/j.soscij.2010.11.007

Mutz, M., & Kämpfer, S. (2011). …und nun zum Wetter: Beeinflusst die Wetterlage die Einschätzung von politischen und wirtschaftlichen Sachverhalten? Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 40 (4), 208-226

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If you liked this post, you may also like its sister post:

Romney should pray for rain – psycho-meteorological effects on GOP vote share

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Pictures:

1) By White House photo by Eric Draper [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

2) By Pete Souza for The Official White House Photostream (P042409PS-0122) via Wikimedia Commons

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Romney should pray for rain – psycho-meteorological effects on GOP vote share October 21, 2012

I would not be surprised if Mitt Romney was going through the weather forecast for November 6^th, the date of the next US presidential election. As the Republican candidate, he will know that his chances of being elected are higher if people are faced with pouring rain upon leaving for the ballot box. Research supports this opinion but the underlying reasons could give the Obama campaign a strategy to undo this Republican rain advantage.

Must have been raining outside. Good for him.

The media love covering election day weather under the assumption that it somehow matters for the political outcome. Is that true? Research by Brad Gomez and colleagues indeed supports this notion. They looked at all US presidential elections since 1948 and found that Republican candidates tended to benefit from rain and snow. In 1960 this effect may have helped Kennedy to win the election due to dry weather. Moreover, in 2000 it may have affected the infamous Florida vote in Bush’s favour due to higher than usual rain in many counties.

This effect is not spurious. It has recently been replicated in a completely different electoral system: the Netherlands. Rob Eisinga and colleagues have shown that various left parties benefit from dry election days and that various right or liberal parties benefit from pouring rain. The conservative advantage on rainy days seems to be real.

 The rationality in weather effects

The usual reason given for this bizarre effect is a rational one. The story goes a bit like this. Bad weather increases the cost – i.e. effort or reluctance – of going to the polling booth. Such cost-considerations may not affect conservative voters that much because they are more politically committed, more used to working outdoors (farming) or have got a higher chance of owning a car. The typical left voter, on the other hand, could be imagined as being urban, without car, possibly old and, thus, unwilling to wait for the bus in the rain in order to get to the polling station.

Does this story work? Is the Republican rain advantage really due to people behaving like rational actors? The data don’t really support this story. Consider that every inch of rain above normal reduces the voter turn-out by only 0.9% whereas it changes the election outcome by 2.5%. Simple Democratic voter abstention cannot account for the full effect. Many voters must be influenced by the weather in terms of their actual voting decision – rather than just whether to vote or not.

 The irrationality in weather effects

Obama with help from above.

Given that the rational actor model fails a more sophisticated psychological theory is needed. The relation between mood and helping behaviour may be the key link between the weather and election outcomes. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that the most persistent difference between right and left wing parties is captured in a ‘each for his own’ vs ‘help where help is needed’ dichotomy. Whether it comes to civil rights, health care or the tax system, right wing parties tend to favour individual responsibility and opportunity over collective responsibility and protection. The effect of the weather on voting decisions may be related to changing a feeling of responsibility for one another.

There is some suggestive evidence for this proposal. Psychological studies carried out by Matthew Keller and colleagues have shown that mood is positively influenced by going out and experiencing good weather (at least in the spring). Next, good mood is associated with more helping behaviour – clearly established in a review by Carlson and colleagues. So, a causal chain linking the weather to voting could look like this: weather –> mood –> helping.

One should not trust such causal chains too much without a direct test of the first cause affecting the last effect. Michael Cunningham has provided just that. He looked at helping behaviour through people’s readiness to participate in a lengthy questionnaire. People approached outside were more likely to stop to hear the experimenter’s request on a sunny day. Once stopped they were ready to answer more questions if the sun was out. Clearly, randomly chosen members of the public are more ready to help during good weather – as predicted by the causal chain ‘weather –> mood –> helping’. By changing voters’ readiness to provide concrete help the weather may also influence how people think the government should treat its citizens – whether to leave them alone or whether to assist them.

 What can Obama do?

Given the role of the ‘mood –> helping’ effect in explaining the ‘weather –> vote’ effect, what strategy should the Obama administration adopt to counter-act the Republican rain advantage? Following this model, I suggest that they should emphasize health care and minority/women rights if key states are predicted to show good weather. Military successes like the bin Laden raid in Pakistan should be focussed on with bad weather. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, should catch up in the polls within the next few weeks and then pray for rain.

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Carlson M, Charlin V, & Miller N (1988). Positive mood and helping behavior: a test of six hypotheses. Journal of personality and social psychology, 55 (2), 211-29 PMID: 3050025

Cunningham, M. (1979). Weather, mood, and helping behavior: Quasi experiments with the sunshine samaritan. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37 (11), 1947-1956 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.37.11.1947

Keller MC, Fredrickson BL, Ybarra O, Côté S, Johnson K, Mikels J, Conway A, & Wager T (2005). A warm heart and a clear head. The contingent effects of weather on mood and cognition. Psychological science, 16 (9), 724-31 PMID: 16137259

Eisinga R, Te Grotenhuis M, & Pelzer B (2012). Weather conditions and political party vote share in Dutch national parliament elections, 1971-2010. International journal of biometeorology, 56 (6), 1161-5 PMID: 22065127

Gomez, B., Hansford, T., & Krause, G. (2007). The Republicans Should Pray for Rain: Weather, Turnout, and Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections The Journal of Politics, 69 (03), 649-663 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00565.x
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If you liked this post, you may also like its sister post:

Obama should pray for sun – Psycho-meteorological effects on approval ratings

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Pictures:

1) By Brian Rawson-Ketchum via Wikimedia Commons

2) By Fogster (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

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The mysterious appeal of too loud music October 16, 2012

What would your next step have been?

At 39km above planet earth, would you have made Felix Baumgartner’s step off the platform? It was very dangerous, no doubt. But is this the reason why you wouldn’t have? People engage in many dangerous things. And I am not talking about skydiving. I mean the ordinary, every day kind of danger. Surely, some dangers can hardly be avoided, say road traffic (which is the leading cause of death for people in my age group). For others there is no obvious non-dangerous equivalent. But what if there was an activity with no practical value, which could easily be carried out without danger, but which nonetheless millions of people worldwide engage in? Listening to too loud music is such an activity.

Is this an exaggeration? Surely, if loud music was really dangerous, people would avoid it. Make no mistake, the scientific consensus clearly lays out the danger. Round about half the people exposed to music professionally show some hearing loss. Researchers have found worrying hearing impairments in classical musicians, rock/pop musicians, and music bar tenders. And the danger is not limited to professionals. The majority of rock concert attendees experience temporary auditory problems such as tinnitus or being hard of hearing. You are actually a daredevil when you listen to too loud music.

But this behaviour is not limited to your typical daredevil characters à la Felix Baumgartner. People flock to very loud concerts. Even toddlers prefer fast and loud music over slow and quiet music. Perhaps the clearest example for loudness’s paradoxical appeal is the band Sun 0))). Their music is without discernible rhythm, harmony or melody. Pure loudness. And still, they are successful. Hear for yourself:

The Sun 0))) concert is a good example of the mysterious attraction of too loud music but it may also offer clues for understanding why people subject themselves to it. Actually, not just this band’s concerts are too loud. Most concerts are. And so are night clubs. This is not the place to go to for a quiet night out. This is where you want energy, fun and excitement. It turns out that this is exactly what loud music is associated with. An Australian research team led by Roger Dean showed that the perceived arousal of music – whether a classical piece or Sun 0))) like noise – followed its loudness profile. Sweet melody or not, when people go out they want energetic music. And this music happens to be loud.

Beyond going out – why listen to too loud music when sitting still?

However, such an explanation can only be part of the answer. We have all seen the person on the bus with his headphones in or were annoyed by the colleague on the next desk with his music choice permeating the office through his headphones. These people are not out dancing. They look pretty low energy, if anything. And still they put their hearing at risk.

Neil Todd and Frederick Cody from the University of Manchester may offer a solution to the puzzle. They found that loud tones not only activate our sense of hearing but also our sense of balance. This happens because the nice distinction between these two modalities does not work for a structure in the ear called the saccule. It responds to head movements as well as rather low sounds. Through this structure muscles automatically react, explaining why deaf people’s muscles can nonetheless react to loud clicks whereas vestibularly impaired people’s can’t. Todd and Cody found the saccule to start reacting around the so called ‘rock’n’roll’-threshold of 105 dB. Is it just a coincidence that the beat of club music is typically in the tonal range and at the loudness level of the saccule? Could it be that the enjoyment of too loud music works through the same mechanism as the pleasure derived from baby swings, roller coasters and head banging? If so, the fun of skydiving and too loud music listening may have more in common than generally thought.

Yellow: Hearing. Brown: Balance. The saccule is neither.

The greatest mystery surrounding too loud music, though, are not people seeking it in quiet environments such as the bus or the office. The strangest thing is the appeal of too loud environments even when one plugs the ears. It has become more and more common to go to rock concerts with ear plugs. The obvious question is why people don’t just refrain from going to rock concerts all together and wait until concert organisers realise that they overdid it with the decibel levels.

Seeking intimacy through loudness

The final piece of the puzzle could be an idea exemplified in research done by Russo and colleagues from Ryerson University. They found that ordinary people could successfully distinguish piano, cello and trombone tones which they never heard but instead only felt on their backs. Even deaf people were able to do this. This research suggests that, yet again, the involvement of a second modality explains too loud music seeking. Hearing and vision are often grouped together because they reveal distant information. Smell, taste and touch, on the other hand, are intimate sensations only available when directly interacting with an object or person. If someone sees or hears your fiancé(e) you may not mind. But imagine if someone tried to touch or even taste him/her? There is something intimate about touch and perhaps we seek this intimacy when trying to immerse ourselves in music. Incidentally, this is also what was advertised as the novelty of Felix Baumgartner’s jump. For the first time someone can say what it felt like to break the sound barrier. Previously, people only knew what it sounded and looked like. Somehow, this was not enough. We are curious about what he will report because we attach so much importance to the immediacy of touch. For ‘touching’ music, we need loud music as our skin is a poor substitute for the sensitive ears. Through the sense of touch music can cease to be felt at a distance and, instead, become a much more personal full body experience.

Has the mystery been solved? It seems as if modern psychology offers a range of explanations for why a perfectly avoidable but harmful activity is pursued by millions of people. Loud music offers a level of energy, fun and intimacy which soft music just can’t match. If you listen to too loud music, you have more in common with daredevils like Baumgartner than you thought.

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Dean, R.T., Bailes, F., & Schubert, E. (2011). Acoustic intensity causes perceived changes in arousal levels in music: an experimental investigation. PloS one, 6 (4) PMID: 21533095

Lamont, A. (2003). Toddlers’ musical preferences: musical preference and musical memory in the early years. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 999, 518-9 PMID: 14681176

Russo, F.A., Ammirante, P., & Fels, D.I. (2012). Vibrotactile discrimination of musical timbre. Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 38 (4), 822-6 PMID: 22708743

Todd, N.P. McAngus, & Cody, F.W. (2000). Vestibular responses to loud dance music: A physiological basis of the ‘rock and roll threshold’? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 107 (1), 496-500 DOI: 10.1121/1.428317

Zhao, F., Manchaiah, VK., French, D., & Price, S.M. (2010). Music exposure and hearing disorders: an overview. International journal of audiology, 49 (1), 54-64 PMID: 20001447

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Images:

1) Photograph by: Felix Baumgartner, Twitter via the Vancouver Sun

2) The Vestibular System by Thomas Haslwanter via Wikimedia

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