November 2022 Brain Snacks

In which we speak to bees, evolve culture, and rethink mental health.

Now that king and queen winter are slowly marching toward us, it is time to curl up in our sofas and let our minds wander. Grab a loved one. Or popcorn. Or both. This month we have blubbering bees, evolving culture, imaginary worlds, belief traps, and a double rethink about mental health.

How to speak bee. Most of us know the bees’ famous waggle dance. But as we look and listen closer - sometimes assisted by computers - we’re beginning to see that their language is far more complex. They even have dialects. This article in NOEMA dives into the history of deciphering bee language and the future of robotic bees.

Proponents of smart hives argue that digital technologies offer the potential to enhance environmental protection in a partnership between humans, insects and AI-enabled robots.

Hive mind-blowing.

Culture evolves fast and slow. One of the things that sets human cultures apart from those of other animals is the complexity of their cumulative evolution. We build on the shoulders of giants across the ages, accreting knowledge and art like dust that congeals into a planet. But is it a slow accretion? Or are there big and small bangs too? This modeling study finds that human cultural evolution can do both: accrete and bang. But:

The model predicts a stable rate of evolutionary change for modest degrees of popularity bias. As popularity bias grows, the transition from gradual to punctuated change occurs, with maladaptive subpopulations arising on their own. When the popularity bias gets too severe, CCE stops.

Or: if we only focus on what goes viral, creativity dies (Disclaimer: that’s my own interpretation.)

Negative speech evolves faster. Let’s stick around cultural evolution. An important part of this is, as you can imagine, language, both spoken and written. If we look specifically at how languages evolve, this hot-of-the-press chunk of research finds that negative words (especially adjectives) evolve faster than positive ones. We’re all negative Nancies. (With apologies to any actual Nancies readings this…)

Potential general mechanisms of valence-dependent mutation are that negative words elicit more attention than positive words, or that people apply more analytic and effortful processing when they evaluate negative vs. positive information, including negative language.

Got ya! Belief traps. To stick with the theme, another part of cultural evolution involves beliefs, which don’t have to be religious. We all have beliefs - things that we hold to be true. The issue with beliefs is that they are not easily given up, even in the face of counterevidence. Here is a nice open-access research article that dives into how self-amplifying feedbacks shape the inertia of beliefs.

Black-and-white thinking is a major risk factor for the formation of resilient beliefs associated with psychiatric disorders as well as prejudices and conspiracy thinking. Such dichotomous thinking is characteristic of a lack of cognitive resources, which may be exacerbated by stress. This could help explain why conspiracy thinking and psychiatric disorders tend to peak during crises. A corollary is that addressing social factors such as poverty, social cleavage, and lack of education may be the most effective way to prevent the emergence of rigid beliefs, and thus of problems ranging from psychiatric disorders to prejudices, conspiracy theories, and posttruth politics.

Imagine that! From beliefs to fiction, not too much of a stretch. Why do humans like fiction so much? This wonderful recent paper argues that it’s an evolved cognitive trait that encourages exploration. In the tweeted words of the first author:

…humans minds find imaginary worlds interesting because they evolved a cognitive adaptation the function of which is to prompt exploration. Basically, humans, just like other animals, are curious: they detect and seek new information.

If you have not yet abandoned Musk’s blue bird, I highly encourage you to check out the accompanying monster thread:

Edgar Dubourg @EdgarDubourg

Game of Thrones, Lord of the Ring, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Zelda, Avatar… Fictions set in large and rich imaginary worlds are more and more popular around the world. Why do humans tend to enjoy fictional environments that differ from the real world? A long thread ⬇️ (1/74)

Time to rethink mental illness. Let’s challenge a belief that is deeply rooted in a lot of people. We’re here to learn, after all. Mental health issues are usually framed as ‘dysfunctions’. Perhaps they shouldn’t be. This Aeon essay argues in favor of:

…the hypothesis that some mental disorders, such as depression, also have an evolved function, just as fever evolved to fight infection, or calluses evolved to protect the skin from friction.

This is not to say that phenomena such as depression can’t be maladaptive when the true cause remains unaddressed. This also doesn’t negate the usefulness of certain medications. It does, however, force us to see mental ‘illness’ in a new, perhaps kinder light.

Time to rethink care for mental illness. As we rethink mental illness, it might be time to rethink care for mental illness as well. And maybe, just maybe, the next revolution will not come from the West. A recent Vox piece zooms in on community-based mental health care, which is being pioneered by initiatives in Africa and South-East Asia. This is not something we should see as an approach that will replace established standards of care and medications, but as a potentially strong addition to them.

So the claim is not that community-based care should replace psychiatry. It’s that making mental health care primarily the business of psychiatrists, with little room for alternative approaches depending on context, is a mistake.

Of course, achieving the right balance between the two models is tricky.

As the year creeps toward its end, I hope you’re all doing well. I hope you have some time to do the things you enjoy with the people you care about. After all, time is your most valuable non-renewable resource and if you’ve read this far, thanks for spending a little bit of it with me, even if only virtually.

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