Finding the quiet

I've recognized for some time that I'm very sound-sensitive.  When I'm around loud, chaotic noise for too long, I get a little frantic, and if I can't get away it can bring on a full-blown anxiety attack.  What I've found interesting is how suddenly the switch can flip between "I'm okay" and "I've got to get out of here now."  In the pre-pandemic days, my wife and a few of our friends used to go to a local bar after Cornell hockey games, and like just about every bar in the world, it was noisy and crowded.  For a while, I'd be fine.  Okay, it wasn't my preferred environment even so, but I was coping.  Then, with a startling suddenness, I'd find I couldn't even hear what my friends were saying -- it was all lost in a gigantic roar of what sounded to me like white noise.

At that point, it was get out or risk a panic attack.

I've often wondered what the difference is between my brain and the brains of people who actually enjoy noisy chaos.  Along the same lines, you might be questioning how I managed to survive for 32 years as a high school teacher, because public schools are kind of inherently loud places.

As far as the latter goes, I coped by taking breaks.  I closed my classroom door during my planning period, and student contact during that time was by prior arrangement only.  I avoided the worst parts of it -- I very early on decided that rules or no rules, I wasn't attending pep assemblies or chaperoning school dances.  Most importantly, I made sure to take rests after the school day was over -- not naps, per se, but silence breaks.  Fortunately, my wife and I live in a big old house out in the country, so after school I usually had a good couple of hours after work to relax and play with my dog and, most importantly, enjoy the comparative quiet.

Turns out I'm not alone.  There are lots of people who have what neuroscientists call SPS (sensory processing sensitivity).  This phenomenon, and how people like me have coped with the extra stress of the pandemic and everything that's come with it, was the subject of a paper in the journal Neuropsychobiology by a team led by Bianca Acevedo of the University of California - Santa Barbara's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.  In "Sensory Processing Sensitivity Predicts Individual Differences in Resting-State Functional Connectivity Associated with Depth of Processing," Acevedo and her team took test subjects who had been evaluated for their proneness to SPS, and gave them an emotionally evocative task -- looking at faces of people experiencing various strong emotions (positive and negative), and either going from one photograph to the next without a break or doing the equivalent of a mental palate-cleansing in between (counting backwards from a large number by sevens).

They found some fascinating patterns.  People who scored high on the SPS scale showed greater activity during breaks between the parts of the brain called the hippocampus and the precuneus, which are known to be involved in episodic memory consolidation.  From the fMRI studies, highly sensitive people showed a progressive weakening of signals between the periaqueductal gray matter and the amygdala, two parts of the brain controlling our perceptions of anxiety and distress, especially when they weren't given breaks.  Both trends were not as pronounced in people who scored lower on the SPS scale.

"Behaviorally, we observe it as being more careful and cautious when approaching new things," Acevedo said in a press release.  "In a new situation, those with the trait are more likely to hang back and see what happens.  Another broad way of thinking about it, that biologists have been using to understand people’s individual differences in responses to different things, is that the person with high sensitivity will be more responsive, both for better and for worse.  So while people with high sensitivity might get more rattled by uncomfortable situations, they might also experience higher levels of creativity, deeper bonds with others and a heightened appreciation of beauty.  What we found was a pattern that suggested that during this rest, after doing something that was emotionally evocative, their brain showed activity that suggested depth of processing, and this depth of processing is a cardinal feature of high sensitivity."

So SPS isn't all bad.  Besides my weird reaction to loud environments, it also explains why I get overwhelmed when I spend too much time doomscrolling through social media, something that occupied way too much of my time during the Former Guy's administration.  I found that if I didn't go on periodic news fasts, it would effectively short-circuit my ability to concentrate.  So emotional noise can be as debilitating to people with SPS as actual noise is.

"Take a break," Acevedo said.  "For all of us, but especially for the highly sensitive, taking a few minutes’ break and not necessarily doing anything but relaxing can be beneficial.  We’ve seen it at the behavioral level and the level of the brain."

Good advice.  These days we all need to be more cognizant of what helps us to cope with the ramped-up emotional stress we've been exposed to.  For me, listening to a quiet piece of music, walking around outside, or going for a run has the effect of discharging a lot of the built-up anxiety.  It's all a matter of finding what kind of pressure valve works for you.  But as the Acevedo et al. study shows, if the result is a better ability to manage the chaotic world we live in, it's well worth the search.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Canine emotional therapy

I had a rather terrifying nightmare last night, and as is usual with such things, the retelling doesn't convey how absolutely awful it was.

My wife and I were in a house -- not our own, it was one of those generic tasteful split-level homes you can see in every upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood in the United States.  From the furnishings it was occupied, and the owners obviously had children because there were toys scattered about.

Then the toys began to come to life.

It wasn't like Chucky in Child's Play, where it was a possessed doll that had an evil personality; it was more that they were being controlled remotely, and only looked like toys but were actually weapons.  After a struggle we fought our way past them, and at some point (don't recall how) we were able to deactivate them.  So we're trying to find the way out of the house, stepping over all the fallen toy/weapons, and then (of course) they started to reboot.

This was the moment when I was thrashing around so much that my wife woke me up.  I didn't scream or anything (that'll be relevant in a moment) but was flailing and had awakened her.  She reassured me that it was just a dream, we didn't have evil remote-controlled toys in our room, and I was able to shake the fear pretty quickly.

I got up to get a glass of water, and when I opened my bedroom door, my dog, Guinness, was standing there looking up at me with a concerned expression.

So I got my water, and he followed me back into the bedroom, jumped on the bed, and basically smooshed himself against me, his head under my chin.  I put my arm around him and he gave a big sigh and we both fell back asleep.

Why this is weird is that this was pretty un-Guinness-like behavior.  He's never allowed on our bed at night, mostly because he weighs seventy pounds and takes up a large amount of space.  We sleep with the door closed and he always spends the night quietly snoozing on his sofa.  (Yes, he has his own personal sofa.  Yes, I know he's ridiculously spoiled.)  Whenever I get up in the middle of the night -- not that unusual, because I'm an insomniac -- he virtually never budges, much less barging in and jumping in bed with me at two AM.  

So his behavior last night was very uncharacteristic, up to and including his basically draping himself over me once we got back into bed.  I know it may sound ridiculous, especially coming from a self-proclaimed rationalist skeptic -- but I swear, it seemed very much like he sensed that I'd had a bad scare and was upset, and wanted to comfort me.

Me with my valiant protector

What makes me curious, of course, is how he knew.  As I said, I hadn't shouted out.  The conversation my wife and I had after I woke up was quiet, and given that I recovered from my fright rather quickly, not at all agitated.  And when I got up to get my glass of water, he was already at the door waiting for me, so he must have known something was wrong, enough that it woke him up, and he decided to come and see if he could help.

Any dog owner will confirm that dogs are uniquely in tune with their owners' emotional states.  We had a brilliant, and rather loony, border collie named Doolin, who could sense when my wife was going to have a migraine and would essentially glue herself to Carol's side until it was over.  The odd thing was that Doolin knew before Carol did; in fact, Carol came to look at Doolin's odd behavior as a clue that she better find her migraine meds while she could still think straight and see what she was doing.  Another of our dogs, Grendel, always knew when we'd finished dinner.  We have a strict no-begging policy at meals, but once we're done, even if we're still seated at the table, they can come up for some petting and attention.  Grendel could infallibly tell when we were done eating, and seconds later would come loping in to get an ear rub.  We tried more than once to figure out what his cue was -- whether it was the sound of putting our silverware or glasses down, or something we said like, "That was good, thanks for cooking" -- but never could really pin it down.  But his appearance was like clockwork, every single night.

There have been some preliminary studies of dogs' abilities to recognize their owners' emotions from facial cues, with (in my mind) rather equivocal results.  One back in 2016, which appeared in Biology Letters of the Royal Society, looked at "equivalent valence" between a human's expression and the emotion conveyed in a recorded utterance -- how, for example, a dog might react to an angry face combined with a playfully-toned phrase.  It found that when the facial expression and the tone of the utterance had equivalent valence, the dog spent longer looking at the photograph than either when the valence was different, or when the photograph was shown with a recording of white noise.

A second, in 2018, looked at the difference in reaction when dogs were shown faces with various emotions simultaneously on two different monitors, one to the dogs' right, the other to the left.  It's been determined that dogs, like humans, have lateralized brains, with the two cerebral hemispheres performing complementary (rather than redundant) functions, and that (again like humans) they usually have dominant left hemispheres.  Because of this, the conjecture was that more intense emotions would cause the animals to pay more attention and turn their heads to the left, while less intense emotions would either show no preference or result in a rightward turn.

Sure enough, that's what happened.  Human faces showing fear, anger, and disgust caused a preferential leftward turn; a surprised face and a neutral expression caused a rightward turn (and also a shorter time looking at the photograph).  Additionally, the intense/negative faces caused the dogs to experience an increase in heart rate and signs of canine stress -- lowered tail, pulled back ears, and so on.  A surprising result was that a happy face caused a leftward turn.  One possibility is that humans' smiles are a fairly uncommon way of expressing relaxation and happiness in the animal world; for most species, baring the teeth is a threat, not a gesture of friendship.  It's also possible that the dog was reacting because of the intensity of the expression, not its actual emotional content.  Impossible to tell.

Those experiments, though, are pretty broad-brush.  What I've found in my long years of being a dog owner is how attuned they are to the specific gestures and actions of their owners, when the same gesture or action from someone else would cause no response at all.  Our aforementioned border collie, Doolin, was a phenomenal frisbee-catcher -- but only when my wife was throwing it.  When Carol threw the frisbee, Doolin always took off in exactly the right direction, and nailed maybe 95% of the throws with a spectacular leaping catch in mid-air.  With me, she was equally likely to run pretty much any direction, and missed most of the throws.  Like with Grendel's "dinner's over" cues, we tried like hell to figure out what Doolin was picking up about my wife's body language when she threw the frisbee that I couldn't seem to duplicate, and never did figure it out.

So I'm back to where I started, which is simply an anecdotal sense that dogs are exquisitely sensitive to their owners' emotional states.  I've noted that when I'm feeling low Guinness is much more likely to spend the day snoozing at my feet rather than on His Personal Sofa, but I don't know whether that's because of his sensitivity, because of dart-thrower's bias, or simply my reading more into his behavior than what's actually there.  In any case, it's a curious phenomenon, and worthy of more study.  In the interim, I'd love to hear my readers' dog stories -- feel free to post your experiences of your dogs picking up on your feelings in the comments section.  Or, conversely, feel free to tell me I'm full of malarkey.  Don't worry, it won't bother me, Guinness will be right there to make me feel better.

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Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]