Columbia University professor and neuroscientist Jacqueline Gottlieb studies the mechanisms underneath the brain’s higher cognitive functions like decision making, memory and attention.
She’s the featured scientist at tomorrow’s Growing Up in Science seminar series at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute. Before the seminar, we caught up with Jacqueline to ask her about her research in neuroscience, how we can survive in the attention economy, and what to do about confirmation bias…
Your seminar this Thursday is part of Columbia’s Growing Up in Science series where speakers reveal the human side of being a scientist. What’s the most frustrating misconception people have about what being a scientist is?
One misperception is that scientists, in contrast with artists, are very rigid people who are not very creative. In truth, creativity is as crucial in science as it is in art. Scientists venture into the unknown and must explain phenomena that no one has explained or even observed before. These explanations are essentially stories we build up based on what we know. These stories must follow certain rules – most importantly, they must specify how the story can be confirmed or falsified. But apart from that, a scientist is only as good as the stories that they can imagine – so they are very much like artists in this regard.
One of your main areas of research is attention. What are your thoughts on how our obsession with digital devices are impacting our brains and cognitive function overall? What should we do to survive this attention economy?
Having access to much more information than we can process is, really, nothing new. It has always been a fundamental feature of humans and many other animals. Imagine being in a field of grass that you can see for miles with no other structure in it. Even there, you have a potentially infinite amount of information – much more than you can process or learn about in your lifetime: the endless shades of the grass blades or the clouds, the many different types of grass that may or may not be used for food, etc. In that regard, the added digital information of recent decades is really nothing new: infinity plus a lot is still infinity.
But there is one important difference. The information in the field of grass is somehow “quiet”, in the sense that it does not push itself on our attention and can be easily ignored. But digital information is man-made – meaning that it can be deceiving (accidentally or on purpose) and it can be designed to grab our attention. Many parts of the web aggressively compete for our attention by increasing the visual, motivational, emotional or social salience of their messages. Because of this, dealing with this type of information does require more of our mental capacities.
I think that the deluge of digital information we now have is, in essence, a wonderful thing – just as it is a very good thing that our wealthy societies provide us with a lot of choices in every domain (from food, to clothing, to jobs, to areas of study, to cures for diseases). But this abundance also means that our decisions become more complex, and this includes decisions about what information we consume. We must exert more self-control over what we click on – just as we must exert self-control on what we eat or how we spend our time. And we must think carefully about the quality of a source of information, just as we need to think carefully about what insurance to purchase or whether to buy a house. To cope with this increasing complexity, education becomes more important than ever.
I created CoolNYCEvents.com after my VIA Character Strengths Survey results revealed that my number 1 strength was Love of Learning, and my number 3 was Curiosity. The test distinguishes the two by degrees: love of learning is when you seek mastery over a subject matter, whereas curiosity is when you pursue a more superficial understanding of it. Does your research also distinguish between different forms of curiosity? And why do you think some people are more intellectually curious than others?
This is an excellent question. In some ways, curiosity and interest are related – as they both refer to some type of attempt to reduce uncertainty and learn. But, while curiosity can be a fleeting emotion, interest entails a sustained, effortful process, and an increasingly sophisticated search for answers about a specific domain. This distinction is very important in educational psychology. My friends Suzanne Hidi and Anne Reninger are two psychologists who emphasized the fact that what educators need are ways to enhance interest and not just “idle”, fleeting curiosity, and they developed behavioral models of how interest develops. At this point, neuroscience lacks studies of interest. But in my lab we are considering several ways of approaching this question and I am sure that other labs do too, so I am hopeful that the appropriate studies will come soon.
You also study the neuroscience behind decision making. The AI-powered algorithms that shape the information we consume feeds our confirmation bias. Facts don’t seem to sway people to think differently about hot-button issues like climate change or gun control. So what can we do to change someone’s mind about something that seems so deeply ingrained in their brain?
Our cognition has a very hierarchical structure. Early on in our lives (probably much before we become aware of it) we start to form fundamental beliefs, which then guide the other actions we take – what we aspire to, what we are interested in, what we end up doing every day. The more fundamental a belief is the harder it is to change, because changing it would require us to change our views on a lot of small questions. This, I think, is a universal aspect of all of us, regardless of which side of hot-button debates we are on. It boils down to the fact that we have access to much more information than we can actually process. And being selective about the information we consider – choosing that information based on our prior beliefs – is a necessity for survival and allows us to do good things (such as develop interests in specific topics and act efficiently in the world).
Of course, the flip side of this is stubbornness and lack of flexibility in our ideas. Only education, I believe, can combat this – and specifically an education that stresses the uncertainty that surrounds every topic and the need to remain always open to learning (always curious or interested).
Another important result that we find in our studies is that people do not seek information only based on accuracy, but are powerfully drawn to information that makes them feel good. This emotional aspect of information processing is very important, and we are still learning how it plays out in natural behavior. One way in which this may play out is that the mode of delivery of the information matters a lot. Information that is delivered in a friendly manner by someone we care about will be much more influential (in terms of changing one’s mind) than “objective” information that we read in the paper or that is shouted at us in an angry political rally. If your friendly neighbor down the street has asthma due to pollution, this may be more influential for you than ten articles on greenhouse effects.
What unsolved mystery about the brain still keeps you up at night?
There is a saying that goes something like this: “A million deaths is a statistic. A single death is a tragedy”. I would apply this to this question. Thinking about “the brain” writ large is a big question that does not interfere with my sleep very much. But the little questions about this amazing organ do interfere with my sleep – and wonderfully so.
The kinks and twists of results that I get in the lab, puzzling aspects of someone’s behavior, patterns of neural activity that are not what I expected or seem to conflict with other results – these can keep me up for hours, as I turn the facts any which way and try to arrange them into a coherent picture. And when these sleepless bouts happen – especially when I do figure something out, but also if I don’t, and I only have the questions – they are the best adventures!
You can meet Jacqueline Gottlieb on Thursday, December 5, 2019, at 4pm at the Columbia Zuckerman Institute for the Growing Up in Science seminar. Details here.