Archive for January, 2009

Body Language

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

I’ve been learning how to read body language and how to alter my body language, and I’m wondering how much of the changes in my body language that I’m hoping to create should be considered honest communications.
Increased eye contact and mimicking a person’s body language seem to be unavoidably genuine expressions of interest. The fact that people can have bad motives for such interest doesn’t seem like it should make me hesitant when my motives for being interested in someone are good.

Posture is harder to evaluate. One function of altering my posture to look as tall as I can is to signal desirable qualities that correlate with height (e.g. good nutrition as a child, leading to good health and a well developed brain). If this led to costly status seeking, I’d feel guilty. But there’s little cost for everyone to match the degree to which I’m looking taller by paying attention to my posture, and little hope that competition for status can be reduced by people such as me ignoring my posture, so I feel negligible guilt.
Another function of posture is to indicate confidence. I’d feel guilty about artificially increasing the confidence I express about a specific factual claim. Most communication is either expressing factual claims of some sort or has no clear content. I’m unsure how to treat the confidence expressed by posture. It seems to say something about some poorly specified anticipated outcomes. Is it mostly a self-fulfilling prophecy, so that it will honestly indicate whether I’m going to be happy in the future even if I alter it in a way that seems artificial? I can’t pin down what it’s expressing well enough to say.

I often hide my hands in my pockets, and that reportedly gets interpreted as saying that I’m hiding something. I suspect this is a false signal. As far as I can recall, when I fail to communicate something that people might want to hear it’s due something like not figuring out whether someone wants to hear it or being too slow to notice a break in a conversation in which to start talking. If I can alter my hand position to better indicate when I’d like people to be more inquisitive about my thoughts, that will improve communication.
Hand movements such as scratching my head that get interpreted as nervousness are more problematic. That scratching does have some correlation with nervousness. I feel a bit dishonest when I hide increased nervousness by consciously resisting my temptation to scratch my head. But some of head scratching habits seem to reflect something other than nervousness (maybe a mild version Dermatillomania associated with obsessive tendencies that fall short of being a disorder), and are probably creating false impressions with most people. I’m unsure whether I can eliminate those false impressions without also eliminating accurate signals.

Honest Signals

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

Book review: Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World by Alex (Sandy) Pentland.
This book makes it clear that verbal communication is a recent evolutionary development in humans which has only replaced a modest amount of the communication that our pre-linguistic ancestors used. The fact that we are much more aware of our verbal communication than our other forms of communication shouldn’t cause us to underestimate those other forms.
A good deal of the studies mentioned in the book consist of measures of nonverbal communication in, say, speed dating can predict results about as reliably as I’d expect from analyzing the words. These could be criticized for not ruling out the possibility that the nonverbal signals were merely responses to information communicated by words. But at least one study avoids this – entrepreneurs pitching business plans to VCs showed nonverbal signals that were excellent predictors of whether the VCs would accept the business plans, before getting any verbal feedback from the VCs. Even more surprising, investments made by VCs with nonverbal information about the entrepreneurs did better than those evaluated on written-only presentations.
The sociometers used to measure these nonverbal signals have potential to be used in helping group decision making by automatically detecting the beginnings of groupthink or polarization, which should in principle allow leaders to stop those trends before they do much harm. But it’s not obvious whether many people will want to admit that analyzing the words of a conversation has as little importance as this research implies.
One of the more interesting methods of communication is for people to mimic each others body language. This is surprisingly effective at creating mutual interest and agreement.
The sociometer data can be of some value for information aggregators by helping to distinguish independent pieces of information from redundant information by detecting which people are likely to have correlated ideas and which are likely to have independent ideas.
I wish this book were mistaken, and that most of human interaction could be analyzed the way we analyze language. But it seems clear that unconscious parts of our minds contain a good deal of our intelligence.

Imprinted Brain Theory of Autism

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

An unusual hypothesis about autism involves Genomic imprinting (”imbalances in the outcomes of intragenomic conflict between effects of maternally vs. paternally expressed genes.”).

It’s apparently somewhat well established that some regions of the brain are influenced more by paternal genes (the paternal brain), and some by maternally genes (the maternal brain).

The Imprinted Brain theory of autism says that autism results from the paternal brain being more developed, and the maternal brain being less developed, with an increased paternal brain causing Aspergers syndrome, and a reduced maternal brain causing more severe autism.

The father’s genes want the mother to invest more resources in a child than the mother’s genes do. Maternal genes have more desire for child to empathize with her and siblings to make childcare less costly. Paternal genes have more desire for competition between siblings over resources.

I had previously been impressed by a theory in the book Shadow Syndromes that involves a less developed cerebellum causing a slowness to shift one’s attention as a child, which makes one less likely to notice facial expressions. The Imprinted Brain theory can imply this (the cerebellum is one of the maternal brain areas which is underdeveloped).

The evidence is hard to summarize, but here’s an example:

autism increases with paternal (and maternal) age (Gillberg, 1980), and assisted reproduction via intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) may increase the risk for syndromes of dysregulated imprinting, including Angelman and Beckwith-Weideman (Paoloni-Giacobino & Chaillet, 2004; Waterland & Jirtle, 2004; Maher, 2005). Both paternal age and ICSI are expected to contribute to methylated-gene defects, which may include effects on brain-imprinted genes (Waterland & Jirtle, 2004; Malaspina et al., 2005).

I recommend reading the discussion section of the paper, which contains much more information than I can summarize.

The paper also mentions evidence that paranoid schizophrenia is an opposite of autism (involving a highly developed maternal brain) – schizophrenics are more likely than most people to notice/imagine that someone is looking at them (see (Mentalism and mechanism and The eyes have it).

Here is an apparently unrelated argument for schizophrenia and autism being opposites.

A Different Kind of Boy

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Book review: A Different Kind of Boy: A Father’s Memoir on Raising a Gifted Child With Autism by Daniel Mont.
This book provides a clear and moving story of what it’s like to have a fairly autistic child. It reinforces my belief that autism (or at least some of the personalities classified as autistic) is one extreme of a range of human personalities. I was surprised at the extent to which Alex’s personality is an extreme version of the personality I had as a child.
The author demonstrates an unusual ability to treat his son as an equal for some purposes (such as logical reasoning) while simultaneously being aware that Alex finds it extremely hard to learn concepts most of us take for granted (e.g. the difference between lying and pretending).
Many of the problems people have interacting with Alex closely resemble the problems AI researchers discover when they try to translate an “obvious” concept into unambiguous language. But just when I thought the AI analogy provides a reliable guide, I noticed an exception – Alex finds long division harder than economic theory.