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JANUARY /FEBRUARY 2021 | MIND.SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM
PLUS
Stress
Survival
Guide
Tactics that everyone can
easily use to control their response
to intense life circumstances
NEUROLOGICAL
DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN
CONSERVATIVES
AND LIBERALS
PSYCHIATRIC
MEDS AT A
DEAD END?
A HISTORY
OF SCIENCE
DENIALISM
WITH COVERAGE FROM
FROM
THE
EDITOR
Your Opinion Matters!
Help shape the future
of this digital magazine.
Let us know what you
think of the stories within
these pages by emailing us:
editors@sciam.com.
Calm Yourself
If you’ve ever watched late-night TV, you’ve likely seen unfortunate advertisements for diet pills that claim to
rid you of belly fat that arose from high levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the body. The pills are bunk,
but the relation between cortisol levels in the body and chronic stress are real. Stress response is a vital
evolutionary adaptation that allows us to run from predators or catch a train. Even if we haven’t been doing
either in 2020, stress levels are still running high—blame the TV again. And the pandemic.
Chronic high stress levels mean constant inflammation and lead to illness and burnout. It turns out that
we have the power to decrease the physiological stress response by manipulating two bodily systems on the
frontlines of stress detection: the breath and our eyes. In this edition’s cover story, neuroscientist Andrew
Huberman gives simple but powerful tips for how to get a handle on your body’s stress response immediately
(see “Secrets to Surviving Stressful Times”). I can’t guarantee that the rest of the articles in this issue won’t
get your heart pounding in anger or fear, but at least you will have the tools to relax.
BONNIE TARPEY
GETTY IMAGES
LIZ TORMES
On the Cover
Andrea Gawrylewski
Senior Editor, Collections
editors@sciam.com
Tactics that everyone can
easily use to control their
response to intense life
circumstances
2
WHAT’S
INSIDE
NEWS
January–
February
2021
英文杂志首发QQ群: 1074370165
Volume 32
•
No. 1
OPINION
4.
Media Multitasking
Disrupts Memory,
Even in Young Adults
Simultaneous TV,
texting and Instagram
lead to memory-sapping
attention lapses
5.
We Learn Faster When
We Aren’t Told What
Choices to Make
The way we decide may
even give insight into
delusional thinking
8.
AI Assesses
Alzheimer’s Risk by
Analyzing Word Usage
New models used writing
samples to predict the
onset of the disease with
70 percent accuracy
10.
Our Brain Is Better
at Remembering Where
to Find Brownies Than
Cherry Tomatoes
Humans’ spatial recall
makes mental notes
about the location
of high-calorie foods
11.
Why Hatred and
“Othering” of Political
Foes Has Spiked to
Extreme Levels
The new political
polarization casts rivals
as alien, unlikable and
morally contemptible
FEATURES
RUTA LIPSKIJA
GETT Y IMAGES
14.
Secrets to Surviving Stressful Times
Stanford neurobiologist Andrew Huberman
discusses the two things we can always control,
even during a high-stress election and scary
COVID pandemic
17.
Conservative and Liberal Brains
Might Have Some Real Differences
Scanners try to watch the red-blue divide play out
underneath the skull
21.
Has the Drug-Based Approach
to Mental Illness Failed?
Journalist Robert Whitaker is more concerned
than ever that psychiatric medications do more
harm than good
28.
The Disturbing History of Research
into Transgender Identity
Research into the determinants of gender identity
may do more harm than good
31.
What
If a Pill Can
Change Your Politics
or Religious Beliefs?
A new mental health
treatment using the
psychedelic compound
psilocybin raises
questions about
medicine and values
33.
The
Denialist
Playbook
On vaccines, evolution,
and more, rejection
of science has followed
a familiar pattern
ILLUSIONS
NOLWEN CIFUENTES
GETT Y IMAGES
GETTY IMAGES
MIGUEL NAVARRO
GETT Y IMAGES
37.
Out
of the Woods
Using natural timbers
to make the
impossible tangible
3
NEWS
Media Multitasking
Disrupts Memory,
Even in Young Adults
Simultaneous TV, texting and
Instagram lead to memory-sapping
attention lapses
The bulky, modern human brain
evolved hundreds of thousands of
years ago and, for the most part, has
remained largely unchanged. That is,
it is innately tuned to analog informa-
tion—to focus on the hunt at hand
or perhaps the forage for wild plants.
Yet we now pummel our ancient
thinking organ with a daily deluge of
digital information that many scien-
tists believe may have enduring and
worrisome effects.
A new study published in October
in
Nature
supports the concern.
The research suggests that “media
multitasking”—or engaging with
multiple forms of digital or screen-
based media simultaneously,
whether they are television, texting
or Instagram—may impair attention
in young adults, worsening their
ability to later recall specific situa-
tions or experiences.
The authors of the new paper used
electroencephalography—a technique
that measures brain activity—and
eye tracking to assess attention in 80
young adults between the ages of 18
and 26. The study participants were
first presented with images of objects
on a computer screen and asked to
classify the pleasantness or size of
each one. After a 10-minute break,
the subjects were then shown
additional objects and asked whether
they were already classified or new.
By analyzing these individuals’ brain
and eye responses as they were
tasked with remembering, the re-
searchers could identify the number
of lapses in their attention. These
findings were then compared to the
results of a questionnaire the partici-
pants were asked to fill out that
quantified everyday attention, mind
wandering and media multitasking.
Higher reported media multitasking
correlated with a tendency toward
attentional lapses and decreased pupil
diameter, a known marker of reduced
attention. And attention gaps just prior
to remembering were linked with
forgetting the earlier images and
reduced brain-signal patterns known
to be associated with episodic memo-
ry—the recall of particular events.
Previous work had shown a
connection between media multitask-
ing and poorer episodic memory. The
new findings offer clues as to why
GETTY IMAGES
4
NEWS
this might be the case. “We found
evidence that one’s ability to sustain
attention helps to explain the relation-
ship between heavier media multi-
tasking and worse memory,” says the
paper’s lead author Kevin Madore,
a postdoctoral fellow in the depart-
ment of psychology at Stanford
University. “Individuals who are
heavier media multitaskers may also
show worse memory because they
have lower sustained attention ability.”
“This is an impressive study,”
comments Daphne Bavelier, a
professor of psychology at the
University of Geneva in Switzerland,
who was not involved in the new
research. “The work is important as
it identifies a source of interindividual
variability when one is cued to remem-
ber information”—the differences in
attention among the study partici-
pants. “These findings are novel and
tell us something important about the
relationship between attention and
memory, and their link to everyday
behavior . . . , [something] we did not
know before,” adds Harvard University
psychologist Daniel L. Schacter, who
was also not involved in the study.
Madore points out that the new
findings are, for now, correlational.
They do not indicate if media multi-
tasking leads to impaired attention
or if people with worse attention and
memory are just more prone to
digital distractions. They also do not
necessarily implicate any specific
media source as detrimental to the
brain. As work by Bavelier found,
action video games in particular
harbor plenty of potential for improv-
ing brain function.
But Madore and his colleagues,
including senior author of the paper
and Stanford psychologist Anthony
D. Wagner, hope to clarify these
unknowns in future studies. They
also hope to pursue attention-training
interventions that could help improve
attention and memory in people
prone to distraction.
With winter looming and the
COVID-19 pandemic keeping us
indoors, Madore feels the new study
stresses the need to be mindful of
how we engage with media. “I think
our data point to the importance of
being consciously aware of attentive-
ness,” he says, whether that aware-
ness means resisting media multi-
tasking during school lectures or
work Zoom sessions or making sure
not to idly flip through your Face-
book feed while half watching the
new
Borat
movie.
—Bret Stetka
Stefano Palminteri of the French
National Institute for Health and
We Learn Faster
Medical Research (INSERM), who
When We Aren’t
conducted a study published in
Told What Choices
Nature Human Behaviour
in August
that examines this tendency. “In a
to Make
sense we have been perfecting our
The way we decide may even give
understanding of this bias,” he says.
insight into delusional thinking
Using disarmingly simple tasks,
Palminteri’s team found choice had a
In a perfect world, we would learn
clear influence on decision-making.
from success and failure alike. Both
Participants in the study observed two
hold instructive lessons and provide
symbols on a screen and then
needed reality checks that may
selected one with the press of a key
safeguard our decisions from bad
to learn, through trial and error, which
information or biased advice.
image gave the most points. At the
But, alas, our brain doesn’t work
end of the experiment, the subjects
this way. Unlike an impartial out-
cashed in their points for money. By
come-weighing machine an engineer careful design, the results ruled out
might design, it learns more from
competing interpretations. For
some experiences than others. A few example, when freely choosing
of these biases may already sound
between the two options, people
familiar: A positivity bias causes us to learned more quickly from the sym-
weigh rewards more heavily than pun- bols associated with greater reward
ishments. And a confirmation bias
than those associated with punish-
makes us take to heart outcomes that ment, which removed points. Though
confirm what we thought was true
that finding resembled a positivity bias,
to begin with but discount those that this interpretation was ruled out by
show we were wrong. A new study,
trials that demonstrated participants
however, peels away these biases to could also learn from negative
find a role for choice at their core.
outcomes. In trials that showed the
A bias related to the choices we
outcomes for both symbols after a
make explains all the others, says
choice was made, subjects learned
5

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