The Apologist and the Revolutionary

A couple things: First, this is interesting and wild stuff.

Second: I seem to recall reading a bit more about the cold water in the ear thing. That it actually seems to act almost as the secret "force a hard reboot of the brain" button, and that it's actually managed to get some people out of comas.

Third: to make it work, the water has to be REALLY cold, as I understand it. Not just cold.

Fourth: IIRC, when it's actually done right, when whatever process that this triggers is, well, triggered... among other things, the recipient will vomit up everything in their stomach. Apparently this is some sort of automatic reaction. Anyone who's trying this on themselves, among other things, should probably make sure someone else is near by and make sure to be face down and stuff so they don't end up choking on their own vomit.

(Visualizes the Confessor trying to explain that to the Superhappies.)

The idea that the right hemisphere is the hypothesis-changer seems to me to be countered by the said evidence: it doesn't seem very compatible with the effects wearing off ten minutes later, and the patient denying having ever admitted to the paralysis. This seems to much more strongly fit a domain-specific ability to model certain facts, where the model substrate is sleeping, then wakened, then goes back to sleep again.

Wow, Google Scholar is awesome.

According to Wikipedia, vestibular stimulation has been used by audiologists to examine certain syndromes: depending on the temperature of the water your eyes turn in different directions.

From there it was apparently used in inquiries into vertigo. This study contains MRI results of individuals undergoing vestibular stimulation and this one is working to break down which parts of the brain are responsible for which effects of vestibular stimulation.

Looking at a few other studies' abstracts (I can't afford to buy all these studies!) leads me to suspect that a whole lot of brain parts are affected by the process of squirting water into your ear and that it may take some time to isolate which parts are responsible for which effects. There are also different types of effects: the effect of the temperature change on tissue, increased blood flow, blood flowing with modified temperature through certain areas, etc.

Is it too obvious to say one should be wary about practicing techniques drawn from neuroscience journals upon oneself?

There is one area (I found in overviewing the subject) where the cold water trick results in a specific result in a damaged brain but no related result in a functional brain: covert attention. People who have difficulty focusing attention on one side of their body are marginally corrected by the cold water trick biasing their attention toward the bad side. People who have no issues with covert attention don't become over-biased when subject to the cold water trick. The paper relates this (seemingly?) to the vertigo effect: "In particular, they argue against explanations of neglect solely in terms of a pathological misperception of body orientation within an otherwise normal neural representation of space."

Interesting related problem: Pusher Syndrome.

It may be that normal brains would experience no change in the function of rationality compared to arbitrarily damaged brains. The effects of vestibular stimulation are so varied that using it to affect some specific result sounds like the neuroscientific equivalent to hitting the TV on the side to clear static.

Wouldn't squirting cold water in the left ear of creationists (or other healthy subjects who are having trouble letting go of a belief) be an effective test of Dr Ramachandran's hypothesis? And, potentially, a genuinely useful rationality technique?

I'm now imagining sneaking up on some stubbornly irrational people in my own life, water pistol in hand...

Here's something I'm wondering about the water-squirting. If activating the right hemisphere leads to the ability to overturn current beliefs, why does the patient go back to their old beliefs after the effects wear off? Clearly the activation of the right hemisphere is doing something, but it seems like openness to new lines of reasoning, rather than an actual Kuhnian paradigm shift.

I wonder what would happen if you kept squirting the person's ear for a whole day? How long would you have to keep their right hemisphere activated for the paradigm shift in beliefs to be permanent (if that's even possible)?

This reminded me of something.

In the book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard, the author goes into detail about how mood is strongly correlated with differential activation in the two hemispheres of the brain. The left forebrain is more strongly activated than the right forebrain when a person is happy, and the right forebrain is more strongly activated when a person is sad. (Ramachandran mentions that stroke victims with left brain damage frequently become depressed, while ones with right brain damage don't.)

If the left brain interprets data through the perspective of current theories and the right brain forces theory revision, and left brain activation is associated with happiness and right brain activation is associated with unhappiness, what does that say about happiness and rationality?

I had the cold water procedure done at a GP to flush out an earwax obstruction. It was absolutely horrible, and I don't recommend it for self-testing.

The flushing took a minute or two. Then there was a minute of starting to feel more and more strange, while everyone asked, "Are you all right?" Then, for the next five or ten minutes....

Notice the reference to REM. If you've ever been so drunk as to see the room spin... you have a slight idea of what my eyes were doing. Closing them didn't help. The staff made me lie down, which made no difference -- I was still clinging desperately to the wall, disoriented and frightened out of my wits.

Eventually the vertigo went away, but I still felt wonky for the next few minutes. Best analogy: being woken from deep sleep and asked to do calculus. Only awake.

Life-changing realizations: none. Perhaps you have to be on-topic at the time. I'm not going back to find out.

Hope this at least slows people down a bit.

[Also, blindsight is an interesting tangent.]

Theodore Sturgeon once wrote a short story (entitled "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff") about aliens conducting a research study on humans, trying to understand why they don't seem to possess a specific neural circuit that every other sentient lifeform known possesses.

They discover that humans do have this circuit, it merely remains inactive most of the time, even when it's needed. Their experiments on what conditions DO activate the circuit end up improving the lives of a group of people in a boarding house - or more accurately, getting the people to improve their own lives once the active circuit makes them realize what's wrong.

The metaphor he uses to explain the functioning of this circuit is suddenly losing your balance and instinctively reaching out to steady yourself... which is what his hypothetical circuit does, only when your life (for lack of a better term) is out-of-balance.

Sturgeon might have intuitively grasped something important, there.

A friend of mine recommends writing with the non-dominant hand to access alternative brain functions. I have done this, and found myself disagreeing with myself.

First of all: Hi all.

I've been thinking about Ramachandran's theory a lot since reading first about it. One of the things it does very neatly, is offer a possible explanation of why psychedelics work the way they do.

Let me explain what I mean. One of the things that has always baffled me about psychedelics such as LSD, LSA or psilocybin (the active ingredient of "magic mushrooms") is that their actions seem far too specific to be caused by a simple substance.

The effect I am referring to is that for some people and in some contexts, they cause what is often called a spiritual experience, i.e., experience that is deeply meaningful to the user and possibly long-term world-view (and behaviour) altering.

Look for example at this study

There's also this active study which is the object of a 12 minute report available on Youtube

From my limited experience, and from what I observed in friends, I would say that psychedelics can be used to increase rationality, specifically by eliminating those sources of irrationality stemming from self-deception. They seem to allow the reexamination of deeply ingrained beliefs about the self and the world, that are beyond everyday reach.

I've always wondered about how the actions of such drugs could be so specific. Of course, this specific action is less suprising when you take for granted that simple "ear-flushing" can have similar effects, even if this applies only in connection with brain damage. The main idea of my post can be summed up as follows:

Maybe psychedelics tap into the same mechanisms that are involved in Anosognosia.

Did anybody else follow this train of thought? Or maybe a related idea concerning meditation (which is associated with a similar realm of experience as psychedelics)?

A recent study examined the effects of vestibular stimulation in 31 healthy right-handed adults. They asked the participants to estimate the likelihood that they will contract a series of diseases relative to their peers in 3 conditions (vestibular stimulation in left ear, right ear or no vestibular stimulation). The participants were overly optimistic across all conditions (they thought they are less likely to contract a disease than they actually were) but when the procedure was performed to their left ear, they were less optimistic and more realistic! (presumably because of activation of the pars opercularis of inferior frontal gyrus)

A thing I am horrified not to have thought of when I first read this, or at any time in the ~11 years since (and, looking through the comments, it doesn't seem like anyone else did, which is also a bit horrifying):

If reality matches fairly closely with Ramachandran's metaphor and there's an actual brain subsystem localized somewhere in the left hemipshere that acts as "apologist" and another actual brain subsystem localized somewhere in the right hemisphere that acts as "revolutionary", we should expect left-hemisphere damage sometimes to have a sort of anti-anosognosic effect by suppressing the "apologist". Since this sort of apologism is a thing most of us do all the time about everything, anapologetic syndrome should have clearly discernible effects: the patient would lose the ability to confabulate nice explanations for not-so-nice things, in a way that ought to be noticeable since if we didn't need that ability to function effectively in society it seems like it'd be evolutionarily advantageous to lose it.

This might show up to some extent as depression, which Scott mentions is not uncommon in victims of left-hemisphere brain damage, but it seems much more specific.

You might think: no, this won't happen, because apologism is just how the brain works; so you have a revolutionary-module and the whole rest of your brain is the apologist. Or you might think: no, this won't happen, because the relevant module isn't really an "apologist" but an "explainer" that happens to work in a positively-biased way, so if that module went offline then you'd just completely lost the ability to make sense of the world. BUT both of these seem hard to square with the cold-water trick, which sure does seem as if it's briefly disabling or shaking up a localized apologism module. Maaaaaybe the apologist is the whole left hemisphere, and damaging bits of it doesn't do much, but cold-water-squirting somehow changes the state of the whole hemisphere?

(Could it instead be briefly waking up the damaged revolutionary module? No, because it's right-hemisphere damage that causes anosognosia. The damaged bit is not in the same part of the brain as you're squirting cold water near to.)

I notice that I am confused. Anyone got good suggestions?

Fulltext for the cold water experiment: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2005-bottini.pdf

The method, for would-be experimenters:

CVS was performed by pouring 20 mL of iced water for 1 minute in the external ear canal. Left-brain-damaged patients received both left and right stimulations (in different occasions, with a time interval of at least 24 hours). In right-brain-damaged patients, only the left external ear was irrigated for ethical reasons, as right cold CVS may induce a worsening of neglect-related symptoms in these patients.3 CVS produced a brisk nystagmus in all patients, with the slow phase toward the side ipsilateral to the irrigation.

EDIT: After reading the paper, I resolved to try it myself; my results: http://lesswrong.com/lw/20/the_apologist_and_the_revolutionary/5xgn

This article should be promoted to overcomingbias.com

After having read a few GPT-3 generated texts, its type of pattern-matching babbling really reminds me of what is here described as apologist. Maybe the apologist part of the mind just does not do sufficiently model-based thinking to catch mistakes that are obvious to an explicitly model-based way of thinking ("revolutionary")?

It seems very plausible to me that there are both high-level model-based and model-free parts in the human mind. This would also match the seemingly obvious mistakes in the apologists reasoning and explain why it is effectively impossible to get someone's apologist to realise their mistakes by talking to them (I would assume that for healthy people, the model-based thinking does inform/override the model-free thinking to a degree)

Do anosognosiacs demonstrate the same pathological inability to change their mind on issues other than their disabilities?

This seems like such an obvious gaping question that absence of evidence seems a lot like evidence of abscence. Surely any scientist who hypothesized a general effect on rationality would have thought to test other delusions, or mention that the patient displayed an inability to change her mind in other respects? This would be the difference between an intriguing oddity and a groundbreaking discovery. The patients arm is the least generalizable experiment he could have done - people are known to specifically develop delusions about their bodies that don't translate into general cognitive inflexibility (at least, I've never heard of it doing so, which I realize is flawed). I am extremely skeptical.

Some commenters said that in fact theory revision sessions such as brainstorming, etc. were actually pleasant to most rationalists and don't necessarily induce sadness. Indeed, I really enjoy arguing and learning new things, or else I wouldn't continue to do them. However, there is a difference between the loose juggling of ideas that we aren't very attached to and the type of continual self-checking of core beliefs that strict rationalists try to do. In order to operate effectively in the world and achieve goals, we need a solid belief foundation to pick goals to achieve and then choose strategies to achieve them. If you are continually attacking your core beliefs or at least remaining open to changing them, you never have a very solid model to base actions upon. The sine qua non of depression is an inability to function, you don't move towards goals, you can't even pick the goals in the first place. Contrast that with the stereotypical 'go-getter', the ambitious overachievers, who report higher happiness levels. They remain consistent in their beliefs and world-views for the most part. Your brain wants to move towards goals, and continually reassessing the foundation you base goals on is bound to cause problems. It's cliche' to mention the quintessential exemplar of this scenario, the depressed person struggling with existential angst. In her case, she is constantly assessing her most basic models: "Who am I? What's my purpose? etc."

It gets weirder. For some reason, squirting cold water into the left ear canal wakes up the revolutionary.

This link gets me "page not found", both here and on the oldest saved copy on the internet archive. That said, some papers are available here, here, here if you're at a university that pays for this sort of stuff, and generally linked to from this page. I'll be adding these links to the wayback machine, unfortunately when I go to archive.is I get caught in some sort of weird loop of captchas and am unable to actually get to the site.

Associate Justice of the US supreme court William O. Douglas was a famous case of anosognosia.

I should carry a bottle of water and squirt it at anyone who disagrees with me. I will be invincible.

Oliver Sacks wrote a book called "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", which is all about right-brained anosognosia. It was first published in 1970, so it may be outdated, but it is relevant.

he linked book on confabulation suggests that those with confabulation conditions tended to display milder forms of the behavior in their pre-morbid states, i.e. that this is a trait with normal variation that could be studied. A study of people with false memories of alien abduction found that tests of hypnotic suggestibility, schizotypy, and depressive symptoms were all related to false-memory formation.

Strong tests of confabulation tendency, matched with brain-scan and biochemical/genomic information in populations of normals, extreme 'believers,' and comparative rationalists, could be very interesting indeed.

The linked book on confabulation suggests that those with confabulation conditions tended to display milder forms of the behavior in their pre-morbid states, i.e. that this is a trait with normal variation that could be studied. A study study of people with false memories of alien abduction found that tests of hypnotic suggestibility, schizotypy, and depressive symptoms were all related to false-memory formation.

Strong tests of confabulation tendency, matched with brain-scan and biochemical/genomic information in populations of normals, extreme 'believers,' and comparative rationalists, could be very interesting indeed.

Now I want a cold-water-in-the-ear squirt, to see what it does to me. What am I habitually acting the apologist for? Is this the secret key to unlocking the next level of rationality and personal honesty?

Third: to make it work, the water has to be REALLY cold, as I understand it. Not just cold.

What do I need to do to do the clod water thing right?

I was just casually returning to continue reading this, took a bite of my muffin, instantly read the "I have this fantasy --" part and i blew crumbs over my desk. What a mess..

This subject is just fascinating. That's the only way i can really express myself right now. The oddities of a human mind makes for great puzzles and curious situations, and an understanding of how it works when it actually does things right