Is piracy the same as stealing?

Exactly 317 years ago, Captain William Kidd was tried and executed for piracy. Whether or not he was a pirate is debatable but what is not under dispute is that people do like to pirate. Throughout the human history, whenever there was opportunity, there was also theft. Wait…, is theft the same as piracy?

If we talk about Captain “Arrr… me mateys” sailing the high seas under the “Jolly Roger” flag, there is no legal or ethical dispute that piracy is equivalent with theft. But what about today’s digital piracy? Despite what the grieved parties may vociferously advocate, digital piracy is not theft because what is being stolen is a copy of the goodie, not the goodie itself therefore it is an infringement and not an actual theft. That’s from a legal standpoint. Ethically though…

For Eres et al. (2016), theft is theft, whether the object of thievery is tangible or not. So why are people who have no problem pirating information from the internet squeamish when it comes to shoplifting the same item?

First, is it true that people are more likely to steal intangible things than physical objects? A questionnaire involving 127 young adults revealed that yes, people of both genders are more likely to steal intangible items, regardless if they (the items) are cheap or expensive or the company that owned the item is big or small. Older people were less likely to pirate and those who already pirated were more likely to do so in the future.

In a different experiment, Eres et al. (2016) stuck 35 people in the fMRI and asked them to imagine the tangibility (e.g., CD, Book) or intangibility (e.g., .pdf, .avi) of some items (e.g., book, music, movie, software). Then they asked the participants how they would feel after they would steal or purchase these items.

People were inclined to feel more guilty if the item was illegally obtained, particularly if the object was tangible, proving that, at least from an emotional point of view, stealing and infringement are two different things. An increase in the activation the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was seen when the illegally obtained item was tangible. Lateral OFC is a brain area known for its involvement in evaluating the nature of punishment and displeasurable information. The more sensitive to punishment a person is, the more likely it is to be morally sensitive as well.

Or, as the authors put it, it is more difficult to imagine intangible things vs. physical objects and that “difficulty in representing intangible items leads to less moral sensitivity when stealing these items” (p. 374). Physical items are, well…, more physical, hence, possibly, demanding a more immediate attention, at least evolutionarily speaking.

(Divergent thought. Some studies found that religious people are less socially moral than non-religious. Could that be because for the religious the punishment for a social transgression is non-existent if they repent enough whereas for the non-religious the punishment is immediate and factual?)

Like most social neuroscience imaging studies, this one lacks ecological validity (i.e., people imagined stealing, they did not actually steal), a lacuna that the authors are gracious enough to admit. Another drawback of imaging studies is the small sample size, which is to blame, the authors believe, for failing to see a correlation between the guilt score and brain activation, which other studies apparently have shown.

A simple, interesting paper providing food for thought not only for the psychologists, but for the law makers and philosophers as well. I do not believe that stealing and infringement are the same. Legally they are not, now we know that emotionally they are not either, so shouldn’t they also be separated morally?

And if so, should we punish people more or less for stealing intangible things? Intuitively, because I too have a left OFC that’s less active when talking about transgressing social norms involving intangible things, I think that punishment for copyright infringement should be less than that for stealing physical objects of equivalent value.

But value…, well, that’s where it gets complicated, isn’t it? Because just as intangible as an .mp3 is the dignity of a fellow human, par example. What price should we put on that? What punishment should we deliver to those robbing human dignity with impunity?

Ah, intangibility… it gets you coming and going.

I got on this thieving intangibles dilemma because I’m re-re-re-re-re-reading Feet of Clay, a Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett and this quote from it stuck in my mind:

“Vimes reached behind the desk and picked up a faded copy of Twurp’s Peerage or, as he personally thought of it, the guide to the criminal classes. You wouldn’t find slum dwellers in these pages, but you would find their landlords. And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.”

REFERENCE: Eres R, Louis WR, & Molenberghs P (Epub 8 May 2016, Pub Aug 2017). Why do people pirate? A neuroimaging investigation. Social Neuroscience, 12(4):366-378. PMID: 27156807, DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2016.1179671. ARTICLE 

By Neuronicus, 23 May 2018

The superiority illusion

Following up on my promise to cover a few papers about self-deception, the second in the series is about the superiority illusion, another cognitive bias (the first was about depressive realism).

Yamada et al. (2013) sought to uncover the origins of the ubiquitous belief that oneself is “superior to average people along various dimensions, such as intelligence, cognitive ability, and possession of desirable traits” (p. 4363). The sad statistical truth is that MOST people are average; that’s the whole definitions of ‘average’, really… But most people think they are superior to others, a.k.a. the ‘above-average effect’.

Twenty-four young males underwent resting-state fMRI and PET scanning. The first scanner is of the magnetic resonance type and tracks where you have most of the blood going in the brain at any particular moment. More blood flow to a region is interpreted as that region being active at that moment.

The word ‘functional’ means that the subject is performing a task while in the scanner and the resultant brain image is correspondent to what the brain is doing at that particular moment in time. On the other hand, ‘resting-state’ means that the individual did not do any task in the scanner, s/he just sat nice and still on the warm pads listening to the various clicks, clacks, bangs & beeps of the scanner. The subjects were instructed to rest with their eyes open. Good instruction, given than many subjects fall asleep in resting state MRI studies, even in the terrible racket that the coils make that sometimes can reach 125 Db. Let me explain: an MRI is a machine that generates a huge magnetic field (60,000 times stronger than Earth’s!) by shooting rapid pulses of electricity through a coiled wire, called gradient coil. These pulses of electricity or, in other words, the rapid on-off switchings of the electrical current make the gradient coil vibrate very loudly.

A PET scanner functions on a different principle. The subject receives a shot of a radioactive substance (called tracer) and the machine tracks its movement through the subject’s body. In this experiment’s case, the tracer was raclopride, a D₂ dopamine receptor antagonist.

The behavioral data (meaning the answers to the questionnaires) showed that, curiously, the superiority illusion belief was not correlated with anxiety or self-esteem scores, but, not curiously, it was negatively correlated with helplessness, a measure of depression. Makes sense, especially from the view of depressive realism.

The imaging data suggests that dopamine binding to its striatal D₂ receptors attenuate the functional connectivity between the left sensoriomotor striatum (SMST, a.k.a postcommissural putamen) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (daCC). And this state of affairs gives rise to the superiority illusion (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. The superiority illusion arises from the suppression of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (daCC) – putamen functional connection by the dopamine coming from the substantia nigra/ ventral tegmental area complex (SN/VTA) and binding to its D2 striatal receptors. Credits: brain diagram: Wikipedia, other brain structures and connections: Neuronicus, data: Yamada et al. (2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1221681110). Overall: Public Domain

This was a frustrating paper. I cannot tell if it has methodological issues or is just poorly written. For instance, I have to assume that the dACC they’re talking about is bilateral and not ipsilateral to their SMST, meaning left. As a non-native English speaker myself I guess I should cut the authors a break for consistently misspelling ‘commissure’ or for other grammatical errors for fear of being accused of hypocrisy, but here you have it: it bugged me. Besides, mine is a blog and theirs is a published peer-reviewed paper. (Full Disclosure: I do get editorial help from native English speakers when I publish for real and, except for a few personal style quirks, I fully incorporate their suggestions). So a little editorial help would have gotten a long way to make the reading more pleasant. What else? Ah, the results are not clearly explained anywhere, it looks like the authors rely on obviousness, a bad move if you want to be understood by people slightly outside your field. From the first figure it looks like only 22 subjects out of 24 showed superiority illusion but the authors included 24 in the imaging analyses, or so it seems. The subjects were 23.5 +/- 4.4 years, meaning that not all subjects had the frontal regions of the brain fully developed: there are clear anatomical and functional differences between a 19 year old and a 27 year old.

I’m not saying it is a bad paper because I have covered bad papers; I’m saying it was frustrating to read it and it took me a while to figure out some things. Honestly, I shouldn’t even have covered it, but I spent some precious time going through it and its supplementals, what with me not being an imaging dude, so I said the hell with it, I’ll finish it; so here you have it :).

By Neuronicus, 13 December 2017

REFERENCE: Yamada M, Uddin LQ, Takahashi H, Kimura Y, Takahata K, Kousa R, Ikoma Y, Eguchi Y, Takano H, Ito H, Higuchi M, Suhara T (12 Mar 2013). Superiority illusion arises from resting-state brain networks modulated by dopamine. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(11):4363-4367. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1221681110. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF 

Can you tickle yourself?

As I said before, with so many science outlets out there, it’s hard to find something new and interesting to cover that hasn’t been covered already. Admittedly, sometimes some new paper comes out that is so funny or interesting that I too fall in line with the rest of them and cover it. But, most of the time, I try to bring you something that you won’t find it reported by other science journalists. So, I’m sacrificing the novelty for originality by choosing something from my absolutely huge article folder (about 20 000 papers).

And here is the gem for today, titled enticingly “Why can’t you tickle yourself?”. Blakemore, Wolpert & Frith (2000) review several papers on the subject, including some of their own, and arrive to the conclusion that the reason you can’t tickle yourself is because you expect it. Let me explain: when you do a movement that results in a sensation, you have a pretty accurate expectation of how that’s going to feel. This expectation then dampens the sensation, a process probably evolved to let you focus on more relevant things in the environment that on what you’re doing to yourself (don’t let your mind go all dirty now, ok?).

Mechanistically speaking, it goes like this: when you move your arm to tickle your foot, a copy of the motor command you gave to the arm (the authors call this “efference copy”) goes to a ‘predictor’ region of the brain (the authors believe this is the cerebellum) that generates an expectation (See Fig. 1). Once the movement has been completed, the actual sensation is compared to the expected one. If there is a discrepancy, you get tickled, if not, not so much. But, you might say, even when someone else is going to tickle me I have a pretty good idea what to expect, so where’s the discrepancy? Why do I still get tickled when I expect it? Because you can’t fool your brain that easily. The brain then says; “Alright, alright, we expect tickling. But do tell me this, where is that motor command? Hm? I didn’t get any!” So here is your discrepancy: when someone tickles you, there is the sensation, but no motor command, signals 1 and 2 from the diagram are missing.

Fig. 1. My take on the tickling mechanism after Blakemore, Wolpert & Frith (2000). Credits. Picture: Sobotta 1909, Diagram: Neuronicus 2016. Data: Blakemore, Wolpert & Frith (2002). Overall: Public Domain

Likewise, when someone tickles you with your own hand, there is an attenuation of sensation, but is not completely disappeared, because there is some registration in the brain regarding the movement of your own arm, even if it was not a motor command initiated by you. So you get tickled just a little bit. The brain is no fool: is aware of who had done what and with whose hands (your dirty mind thought that, I didn’t say it!) .

This mechanism of comparing sensation with movement of self and others appears to be impaired in schizophrenia. So when these patients say that “I hear some voices and I can’t shut them up” or ” My hand moved of its own accord, I had no control over it”, it may be that they are not aware of initiating those movements, the self-monitoring mechanism is all wacky. Supporting this hypothesis, the authors conducted an fMRI experiment (Reference 2) where they showed that that the somatosensory and the anterior cingulate cortices show reduced activation when attempting to self-tickle as opposed to being tickled by the experimenter (please, stop that line of thinking…). Correspondingly, the behavioral portion of the experiment showed that the schizophrenics can tickle themselves. Go figure!

Reference 1: Blakemore SJ, Wolpert D, & Frith C (3 Aug 2000). Why can’t you tickle yourself? Neuroreport, 11(11):R11-6. PMID: 10943682. ARTICLE  |  FULLTEXT

Reference 2: Blakemore SJ, Smith J, Steel R, Johnstone CE, & Frith CD (Sep 2000, Epub 17 October 2000). The perception of self-produced sensory stimuli in patients with auditory hallucinations and passivity experiences: evidence for a breakdown in self-monitoring. Psychological Medicine, 30(5):1131-1139. PMID: 12027049. ARTICLE

By Neuronicus, 7 August 2016

Stressed out? Blame your amygdalae

Clipart: Royalty free from http://www.cliparthut.com. Text: Neuronicus.

Sooner or later, everyone is exposed to high amounts of stress, whether it is in the form losing someone dear, financial insecurity, or health problems and so on. Most of us manage to bounce right up and continue with our lives, but there is a considerable segment of the population who do not and develop all sorts of problems, from autoimmune disorders to severe depression and anxiety. What makes those people more susceptible to stress? And, more importantly, can we do something about it (yeah, besides making the world a less stressful place)?

Swartz et al. (2015) scanned the brain of 753 healthy young adults (18-22 yrs) while performing a widely used paradigm that elicits amygdalar activation (brain structure, see pic): the subjects had to match a face appearing in the upper part of the screen with one of the faces in the lower part of the screen. The faces looked fearful, angry, surprised, or neutral and amygdalae are robustly activated when matching the fearful face. Then the authors had the participants fill out questionnaires regarding their life events and perceived stress level every 3 months over a period of 2 years (they say 4 years everywhere else in the paper minus Methods & Results, which are the sections that count if one wants to replicate; maybe this is only half of the study and they intend to follow-up to 4 years?).

The higher your baseline amygdalar activation, the higher the risk to develop anxiety disorders later on if expossed to life stressors. Yellow = amygdala. Photo credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD44PbAOTy8, presumably copyrighted to Duke University.

The finding of the study is this: baseline amygdalar activation can predict who will develop anxiety later on. In other words, if your natural, healthy, non-stressed self has a an overactive amygdala, you will develop some anxiety disorder later on if exposed to stressors (and who isn’t?). The good news is that knowing this, the owner of the super-sensitive amygdalae, even if s/he may not be able to protect her/himself from stressors, at least can engage in some preventative therapy or counseling to be better equipped with adaptive coping mechanisms when the bad things come. Probably we could all benefit from being “better equipped with adaptive coping mechanisms”, feisty amygdalae or not. Oh, well…

Reference: Swartz, J.R., Knodt, A.R., Radtke, S.R., & Hariri, A.R. (2015). A neural biomarker of psychological vulnerability to future life stress. Neuron, 85, 505-511. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.12.055. Article | PDF | Video

By Neuronicus, 12 October 2015

It’s what I like or what you like? I don’t know anymore…

The plasticity in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) underlies the changes in self preferences to match another’s, through learning. Modified from Fig. 2B from Garvert et al. (2015), which is an open access article under the CC BY license.

One obvious consequence of being a social mammal is that each individual wants to be accepted. Nobody likes rejection, be it from a family member, a friend or colleague, a job application, or even a stranger. So we try to mould our beliefs and behaviors to fit the social norms, a process called social conformity. But how does that happen?

Garvert et al. (2015) shed some light on the mechanism(s) underlying the malleability of personal preferences in response to information about other people preferences. Twenty-seven people had 48 chances to make a choice on whether gain a small amount of money now or more money later, with “later” meaning from 1 day to 3 months later. Then the subjects were taught another partner choices, no strings attached, just so they know. Then they were made to chose again. Then they got into the fMRI and there things got complicated, as the subjects had to choose as they themselves would choose, as their partner would choose, or as an unknown person would choose. I skipped a few steps, the procedure is complicated and the paper is full of cumbersome verbiage (e.g. “We designed a contrast that measured the change in repetition suppression between self and novel other from block 1 to block 3, controlled for by the change in repetition suppression between self and familiar other over the same blocks” p. 422).

Anyway, long story short, the behavioral results showed that the subjects tended to alter their preferences to match their partner’s (although not told to do so, it had no impact on their own money gain, there were not time constraints, and sometimes were told that the “partner” was a computer).

These behavioral changes were matched by the changes in the activation pattern of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), in the sense that learning of the preferences of another, which you can imagine as a specific neural pattern in your brain, changes the way your own preferences are encoded in the same neural pattern.

Reference: Garvert MM, Moutoussis M, Kurth-Nelson Z, Behrens TE, & Dolan RJ (21 January 2015). Learning-induced plasticity in medial prefrontal cortex predicts preference malleability. Neuron, 85(2):418-28. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.12.033. Article + FREE PDF

By Neuronicus, 11 October 2015