Who watches the watchers?

A nearly universal, and rather creepy, sensation is when you turn to look at a stranger -- and find that they were watching you.

This "feeling of being watched" is something we all have experienced from time to time.  I seem to notice it most when I'm driving on the freeway, and happen to glance at the car next to me.  I can remember many times when either the person in the next car was already looking at me -- or else, even creepier, they turn their head toward me at exactly the same time.

However odd this feels, I've always felt like there was a perfectly rational reason for this, and my sense was that it's yet another example of dart-thrower's bias -- the perfectly natural human tendency to pay more attention to (or overcount) the hits, and ignore (or undercount) the misses.

In this case, how many times do you glance at a car next to you on the freeway, and the person in the car is not looking at you?  We don't remember it precisely because it happens so often.  On the other hand, on those rare occasions where someone is looking at us, it stands out -- and is given more weight in our memories.

"Uhhh... did you ever have the feeling that you was bein' watched?"

There's another possible explanation, however, and it has to do with an oddity of our perceptual systems only recently discovered because of a peculiar disorder called "blindsight," in which an individual is functionally blind, but can still perceive some visual stimuli.

Blindsight occurs when a person's visual cortex is damaged, usually by a stroke, but his/her eyes and optic nerve are still intact.  In a dramatic study led by Alan J. Pegna of Geneva University Hospital (Switzerland), it was found that although they are unresponsive to most visual stimuli, people with blindsight still exhibit visual phenomena like "emotional contagion" -- the tendency of people to match the emotions of faces they're looking at.

Apparently, this happens because the information from the eyes does not just travel to the visual cortex, it goes to a variety of other places in the brain, including the limbic system, which is the seat of emotion.  So a person might be able to match the smile in a photograph of a smiling person -- while not, technically, being able to see the photograph.

Pegna's study showed that not only are people with blindsight able to detect the emotion in a face they are (not) seeing, they can also tell when someone is looking at them.  Scanning results of a patient with blindsight showed increased activity in the amygdala -- the part of the limbic system that controls anxiety and fear -- when he was being watched.

So the conjecture is that there may be something more to the sensation of being watched than simple dart-thrower's bias.  It might be that when someone in our peripheral visual field is watching us, it doesn't register in our conscious awareness (through the visual cortex), but our nervous and ever-watchful amygdala still knows what's going on.  And since the limbic system largely functions subconsciously, it feels as if we had some kind of psychic awareness of something we didn't actually see.

Meaning that once again, we have a rational explanation (two, actually) of something that seems like it must be paranormal.  In other words: science wins again.  I have to wonder if something like this might be responsible for some other perceptual oddities, such as déjà vu, about which I have been curious for years but never seen a particularly convincing explanation.

In any case, it's something to keep in mind, for next time you're in a crowded restaurant and you see someone across the room staring at you.  It could be that your amygdala just went onto red alert.  It could also be that people are looking at you because you're drop-dead sexy.  You're welcome to go with whichever explanation you prefer.

This is your brain on creativity

As a writer and a musician, I am intensely interested in the neurology of the creative process, and especially how creativity interfaces with emotion.  For me, both writing and music are about evoking emotion; even, to some extent, non-fiction writing, which in a lot of ways is supposed to be dispassionate and emotionless.  After all, why do people choose particular academic fields to pursue?  My own favored area of study -- population genetics -- I delved into for one reason: because the ideas are cool, and messing around with maps of allele frequencies makes me happy.

Okay, I know I'm a little odd.  Not that this will be a great shock to regular readers of this blog.

In any case, emotion is important, and in my opinion a writer of fiction, a musician, or an artist that fails to evoke emotion has, in large part, failed entirely.  The two parts of the generative process -- creativity and emotion -- are inextricably linked.

So I was really excited (although unsurprised) by the findings of a paper in this week's issue of Nature entitled, "Emotional Intent Modulates The Neural Substrates Of Creativity: An fMRI Study of Emotionally Targeted Improvisation in Jazz Musicians."  The paper describes a study by Malinda J. McPherson, Frederick S. Barrett, Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, Patpong Jiradejvong, and Charles J. Limb, of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, that found that there is a neurological underpinning for the expression of emotion in creative pursuits.

"The bottom line is that emotion matters," said Charles Limb, MD, senior author of the study.  "It can’t just be a binary situation in which your brain is one way when you’re being creative and another way when you’re not.  Instead, there are greater and lesser degrees of creative states, and different versions.  And emotion plays a crucially important role in these differences."

The researchers took twelve jazz pianists, and showed them photographs of individuals expressing negative, positive, and neutral emotions.  Then, they asked the pianists to improvise a piece that expressed the emotion of the photograph they were shown.

[image courtesy of photographer Zoe Caldwell and the Wikimedia Commons]

The results were fascinating.  The researchers write:

When we examined the functional neuroimaging results, we found that the creative expression of emotions through music may engage emotion-processing areas of the brain in ways that differ from the perception of emotion in music.  We also observed a functional network involved in creative performance, and the extent of activation and deactivation in this network was directly modulated by emotional intent.  Our viewing controls showed that there were few significant differences between neural activity in response to any of the visual cues, therefore the differences between improvisation conditions are the result of the creative expression of emotion through music, rather than a direct response to the visual stimuli.  These results highlight that creativity is context-dependent, and emotional context critically impacts the neural substrates of artistic creativity.

Which is incredibly cool, but (for me) unsurprising, given my sense that creativity and emotion are impossible to tease apart.  My main creative world is in writing -- I am a musician, but not a composer -- and I have found myself so emotionally involved with scenes I'm writing that I can lose myself within them.  The creative enterprise, in a lot of ways, is very primal, seated in a part of the brain not really under conscious control.  This study showed that for people who express through creating music, the process can be equally visceral:

Creativity is not a single unified set of mental processes or abilities. While some types of creativity may require intense concentration and thought, other forms of creativity, such as jazz improvisation, may be predicated on "letting go..."   [T]his study shows that the impulse to create emotionally expressive music may have a basic neural origin: emotion modulates the neural systems involved in creativity, allowing musicians to engage limbic centers of their brain and enter flow states.  The human urge to express emotions through art may derive from these widespread changes in limbic, reward, and prefrontal areas during emotional expression.  Within jazz improvisation, certain emotional states may open musicians to deeper flow states or more robust stimulation of reward centers.

So the whole thing is fascinating.  It's nice to understand a little more about what happens in the brains of creative people; until recently, the whole idea of creativity has seemed to reside outside of the realm of science.  The fact that we're now zeroing in on how creativity, emotion, and the physiology of the brain are intertwined...

... well, it just makes me happy.