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Brain-heart connection hijacks perception + Why is the brain prone to confabulation?

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C C Offline
The brain-heart dialogue shows how racism hijacks perception
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-brain-heart-di...perception

EXCERPT: [...] Seeing a black face might automatically activate the stereotype that black men are more dangerous, leading to activity in brain areas implicated in fear responses. But this automatic response, which could trigger a fight-or-flight reaction, should be suppressed when the fear is irrational. Yet the tensions between automatic and control processes are not always readily resolved, and result in errors.

New strands of work [...] challenge this brain-centric orthodoxy. Researchers of ‘embodied cognition’ focus instead on the brain’s interdependence on physiological processes that allow an organism to sustain itself. From this point of view, the mind must be understood as embedded in a body, and the body as embedded in a physical, social and cultural environment. [...] As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in Phenomenology of Perception (1945): ‘The body is our general medium for having a world.’

Among neuroscientists, it’s increasingly popular to think of the brain not as a passive organ that receives and reacts to stimuli, but as more of an inference machine [...] But the body isn’t simply controlled top-down. Rather, its signals are constantly combining with the brain’s inferences to generate our perception of the world.[...] We still know very little about exactly how these processes might relate to the phenomenon of racism, but now we have some idea of where to look.

[...] In our experiment, we used what’s known as the ‘first-person shooter’s task’, which simulates the snap judgments police officers make. [...] But we timed the stimuli to occur either between or on a heartbeat. Remarkably, the majority of misidentifications occurred when black individuals appeared at the same time as a heartbeat. Here, the number of false positives in which phones were perceived as weapons rose by 10 per cent compared with the average. In a different version of the test, we used what’s known as the ‘weapons identification task’, where participants see a white or black face, followed by an image of a gun or tool, and must classify the object as quickly as possible. When the innocuous items were presented following a black face, and on a heartbeat, errors rose by 20 per cent.

Yet in both instances, when the judgment happened between heartbeats, we observed no differences in people’s accuracy, irrespective of whether they were responding to white or black faces. It seems that the combination of the firing of signals from the heart to the brain, along with the presentation of a stereotypical threat, increased the chances that even something benign will be perceived as dangerous....



Why is the brain prone to florid forms of confabulation?
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-is-the-brain-p...fabulation

EXCERPT: [...] In its most extreme form, confabulation emerges from brain damage caused by encephalitis, strokes, trauma, or thiamine deficiency caused by chronic alcohol dependence. Some confabulators with these conditions produce bizarre fabrications: they recount past lives as spaceship captains or report aliens on UFOs. Confabulators with an underlying brain injury often try to act upon fantastical tales – insisting on reaching a celebrity mansion with a sewing machine. Remote memories and perceptions drift into the present; conflated, scrambled, and irrelevant to the here and now.

[...] It’s not just those with brain injury who are susceptible to confabulation. Younger children often confabulate, likely because of a developing prefrontal cortex. And recently, researchers [...] persuaded a group of healthy undergraduate students that they had a criminal history. [...] This seems to be especially true when memories and perceptions are encouraged or suggested to us, or when pressure is applied. [...] Strong emotions associated with a memory or perception can also override our doubt tags; emotion enhances how vivid a memory seems to us, increases our unmerited confidence in its accuracy, and adds to that profound sense of reliving the event.

[...] There is a beautiful evolutionary advantage to the doubt deficit: is the howling animal in front of you truly a wolf? It looks like a wolf. Don’t spend a second applying doubt. Run, just run. Still, drawbacks exist – a vulnerability to deception, for one. [...] Being tricked into confabulation and hence into a doubt deficit, even without brain injury, has moral and ethical consequences....
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