Staving off boredom by focusing on it.

You probably have a complex relationship with new things.  For example, the first time you hear a new song, it is unfamiliar, and you are not sure whether you like it.  After that first listen, the song begins to grow on you.  For a while, it may seem like you can’t get enough of the song, and you may play it repeatedly.  Eventually, though, you get bored with it, and another song captures your attention.

This same pattern comes up across many different aspects of your life, including foods, TV shows, and even friends.

The reasons for this boredom are straightforward.  Initially, you focus on the positive characteristics of the new thing.  In order to continue to experience the positive feelings that come along with that thing, you spend more time with it.  Eventually, though, your experience begins to feel repetitive.  You can predict what is going to happen.  And so, you start to feel some negative feelings in addition to the positive ones.  When those negative feelings outweigh the positive feelings, you go in search of something new.

Psychologists call this phenomenon satiation.

Can you slow down the rate of satiation?

An interesting paper by Morgan Poor, Adam Duhacheck, and Shaker Krishnam in the October, 2012 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology explored this topic.

They suggested an interesting prospect.  If you focus both on the positive experience of the object as well as the negative experience, you might actually be able to slow down the rate of satiation.  The idea is that if you acknowledge the negative feelings that occur as you start to get bored, you may engage strategies to think about the object in different ways in order to continue having a positive experience with it.  They tested this proposal in several studies.

In one experiment, participants either listened to a short snippet of music or to a longer and more repetitive part of the same piece.  Pretests showed that people who listened to the shorter piece liked it better and experienced less boredom than those who listened to the longer piece.  The participants in this study read one of two articles before listening to the music.  One group read about how important it is to distinguish among all of the emotions you are experiencing.  A second group read about how difficult it is to distinguish among emotions.  Finally, the participants listened to the long piece of music.  Every 30 seconds, they rated their overall enjoyment of the song.  Consistent with the researchers’ proposal, people who read about the importance of distinguishing among emotions enjoyed the piece throughout the listening period.  Those who read about the difficulty of distinguishing among emotions quickly got bored, and after three minutes, they were no longer enjoying the music.

Another study in this series showed a similar effect with looking at a beautiful photograph.  In this study, participants also described any strategies they used to help manage their emotions.  Participants who were encouraged to distinguish among all of the emotions they experienced often talked about trying to manage their emotions by focusing on the positive characteristics of the photo and looking for new subtleties in the picture over time.  Those who were not encouraged to distinguish among their emotions were much more likely to try to avoid the photo in order to avoid the negative experience.

Putting this together, these results suggest a novel approach to satiation.  A good way to fight boredom is to start by acknowledging that you are getting bored.  By allowing yourself to experience both the positive and the negative emotions, you can engage strategies to help you accentuate the positive characteristics of the experience to allow them to continue to outweigh the negative ones.

Shooter bias and stereotypes

Police called to the scene of a crime often face a difficult situation.  There may be one or more potential perpetrators.  There is yelling and screaming.  People are running around.  One or more people may be armed.  In this situation, the police are asked to make split-second decisions about how to proceed.  Failing to shoot an armed suspect could lead a police officer to get shot.  Shooting an unarmed or potentially innocent person can lead to tragedy.

Despite all of their training, mistakes do happen.  And when they happen, they often end up as front-page news.  The news coverage gets particularly heated when White police officers shoot an unarmed African American suspect or an innocent bystander.

Research suggests that there is a bias for White people to shoot unarmed Black suspects more often than unarmed White suspects.  These findings in laboratory studies have been obtained both with trained police officers as well as with college students role-playing as police officers.  This is called the shooter bias.

An interesting set of studies by Saul Miller, Kate Zielaskowski and Ashby Plant in the October, 2012 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explored why this happens.

One possibility is that there is a pervasive stereotype in the United States that Black men are more dangerous than White men.  One possibility is that this stereotype causes people to be more likely to make the snap decision to shoot a Black man than to shoot a White man.  A second possibility is that people are prone to shoot anyone who belongs to a different social group than they do, and that specific stereotypes about Whites and Blacks are not the primary cause of the shooter bias. 

To explore this issue, college students participated in a simulated shooting task in which they saw faces of men.  The faces were either paired with a gun or with a neutral object.  They had to press a button within 630 milliseconds of the appearance of the face to decide whether to shoot.  The task was to shoot when there was a gun and not to shoot when there was no gun.

In these studies, all participants filled out a questionnaire assessing their belief about whether the world is a dangerous place.  This questionnaire has items like “There are many dangerous people in our society who will attack someone out of pure meanness, for no reason at all.”  The more that someone believes that the world is a dangerous place, the more likely they may be to have a shooter bias.

In the first study, all of the faces were White males.  Participants were given a personality quiz at the start of the experiment and on the basis of that quiz were told that they had either a “Red” or a “Green” personality.  In actuality, the color was randomly assigned to them.  They were given a sticker of their color to wear.  The faces they saw during the study appeared either on a red or a green background, and participants were told that this color reflected the personality of the individual shown. 

In this study, participants who were moderate or low in their belief that the world is dangerous showed no shooter bias.  But, people who were high in their belief that the world is dangerous were more likely to shoot an unarmed person if that individual’s personality color was different from their own than if it was the same.

This result suggests that the shooter bias can happen, even in the absence of a cultural stereotype that a person is dangerous.

In a second study, White college students saw White, Black, and Asian faces.  For this group of students, the cultural stereotype that Black men are dangerous was strong, but there was no cultural stereotype that Asian males are dangerous.  In this study, there was a broad tendency for all participants (regardless of their belief that the world is dangerous) to mistakenly shoot unarmed Black men more often than to shoot either Asian or White men.  For participants whose belief that the world is dangerous, though, they were also more likely to mistakenly shoot Asian men than to shoot White men.

What does all of this mean? 

There seem to be two sources of shooter bias.  First, there are cultural stereotypes (like the stereotype that Black men are dangerous) that influence people’s snap judgments.  On top of that, for people who are already concerned that the world is dangerous, there is a bias against anyone who is in a different group. 

This work suggests that the belief that the world is dangerous is an important factor.  People with a low level of belief that the world is dangerous are much less likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed person. 

One reason that this finding is important is that many advocates of concealed weapon laws justify the importance of these laws on the premise that the world is a dangerous place.  The idea is that if more people were carrying weapons, then that would make the world safer.  Unfortunately, promoting the belief that the world is dangerous may also promote a mindset that increases the likelihood that innocent people will get shot.  More research should explore this issue.  In addition, future studies should explore whether teaching people that the world is not as dangerous as they think it is can reduce the shooter bias.

What kinds of people take care of themselves?

A recent walk that I took through the streets of Austin was a lesson in the diversity of orientations that people take toward the future.  Passing by Lady Bird Lake downtown, there were a number of joggers, bikers, and walkers on the trail getting in their exercise.  On top of the Congress Avenue bridge, a few smokers were enjoying a cigarette and the view of the lake.  Nearby, a heavyset couple prepared to dig in to a large meal while seated in the outdoor patio of a steakhouse. 

Just on this brief walk, there was a clear cross-section of people who took different approaches to their long-term health.  The people exercising on the trail around the lake were engaged in activities that would benefit their long-term health. In contrast, the smokers and people have a large meal were doing something that felt good in the short-term, even if it had potential negative consequences in the long-run.

All else being equal, people typically prefer things that are enjoyable in the short-term to things that are beneficial in the long-term, but are less pleasant in the short-term.  That is why people continue to overeat and drink to excess even though it can be harmful in the long-run.  It is also why people may opt against healthy foods in the short-term and may opt out of regular exercise. 

The large number of people who were exercising around the lake does suggest that a number of people are willing to engage in healthy behaviors.  One thing that needs to be explained is why some people are willing to do what is best for them in the long-run while others are not.

Personality psychologists have found that there is a stable tendency for some people to be more concerned with the future consequences of their actions than others.  Indeed, there are two kinds of questions that you can ask people to assess their concern for the future.  One focuses on how much people care about what is going to happen to them in the future.  The other is the degree to which they are focused on the benefit they will get from an action right now. 

Of course, the fact that these questions predict how likely it is that someone will exercise or eat healthy food does not explain much by itself.  It just says that people who are generally concerned about the consequences of their actions for the future seem to share that concern across many aspects of their life.

A paper in the October, 2012 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Jeff Joireman, Monte Shaffer, Daniel Balliet, and Alan Strathman explored why this concern for the future influences people’s actions. 

They found that questions about people’s concern for the future predict people’s motivational outlook.  Specifically, Tory Higgins and his colleagues have distinguished between two broad motivational orientations.  A promotion focus leads people to concentrate on potential positive things in the world and on the person they would ideally like to be.  A prevention focus leads people to concentrate on potential negative things in the world and on their responsibilities. 

The researchers suggested that a focus on who people would like to be ideally might allow those people to think about their future selves more effectively than a focus on their responsibilities.  Thus, they proposed that people who express a concern for the future consequences of their actions might have a stronger promotion focus than those who tend not to be concerned about the future consequences of their actions.  These researchers also suggested that the degree to which people are focused on the present benefits of their actions should have no reliable relationship to people’s overall motivational orientation.

In two studies, groups of people filled out a scale designed to assess their concern for the future consequences of their actions.  They also measured the strength of people’s promotion and prevention focus.  Finally, they examined their attitude toward and intention to perform a healthy behavior.  In one study, that behavior was eating healthy foods, while in the other study it was exercising.

In both studies, the more that people were concerned with the consequences of their future actions, the more they tended to have a promotion focus.  This promotion focus then predicted their positive attitude toward the healthy behavior, which in turn predicted their intention to perform that behavior.  It would have been valuable to have some measure of whether people actually performed the healthy behavior, but that issue was not addressed in these studies.

Overall, these results suggest that there are people who tend to take care of themselves.  Those people are concerned about the future consequences of their actions.  That concern influences their motivational state.

There are still a number of factors that need to be explored, though, before it is clear how this research can help us take care of ourselves.  First, we need to know the true relationship between motivational state and concern for the future.  Does concern for the future cause people to take a promotion focus, or does it work the other way around?  Does viewing the world in terms of potential gains make you more concerned about the future?  Second, if you manipulate someone’s motivational state, will that really change how much they pursue activities with long-term rewards?  There are many ways to affect whether someone adopts a promotion mindset.  Would all of these methods get people to take better care of themselves?

Right now, these are tantalizing research results, but more work clearly needs to be done.

Can you be unconsciously creative?

In the movies, creativity often involves moments of insight.  A character struggles with an idea.  There is a montage of pained faces and crumpled sheets of paper.  Then, suddenly, the light comes on.  A choir sings.  A new creative moment has happened.

When you see this movie scene, or you hear about a moment of creative insight, there is an interesting question that comes up.  Where, exactly, did this new idea come from?  After all, it is pretty clear that there was a lot of hard thinking going on.  Yet, suddenly, the new idea appears from out of nowhere.

A recent set of studies has focused on the difference between conscious and unconscious thought.  Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues have pointed out that it is possible to be thinking a problem, even when you are distracted.  In this case, what seems to be happening is that the problem you are solving is having a chance to find other knowledge that relates to it and to bring that knowledge to mind.

One way to think about this is that researchers who study creativity often distinguish between two phases of creative idea generation—divergence and convergence.  In the divergent phase, you generate a lot of potential solutions to a problem.  In the convergent phase, you evaluate those ideas and focus on those that seem most promising.

The work on unconscious thought suggests that it may be most effective for the divergent phase of creative thought.

A paper by Haiyang Yang, Amitava Chattopadhyay, Kuangjie Zhang, and Darren Dahl in the 2012 volume of the Journal of Consumer Psychology explored this process in more detail.

In one study, they had people generate as many uses as possible for a paper clip.  This task has been used often as a way of getting people to think creatively.  The experimenters varied both the amount of time people spent thinking about their answers as well as whether they used conscious or unconscious thought.  Groups spent either 1, 3, or 5 minutes thinking about the uses for a paper clip.  The conscious thought group was simply told to think about the problem.  The unconscious thought group was told to think about uses for a paper clip, but then was asked to count backward by 3s.  This task made it hard for people to do any controlled thinking about the task.  After the thinking period, participants had 2 minutes to write down their answers.

For the groups that spent one minute or five minutes on the task, the conscious thought group came up with more ideas (and more novel ideas) than the unconscious thought group.  For the groups that spend 3 minutes on the task, though, the unconscious thought group came up with more ideas and more novel ideas than the conscious thought group.  A second study replicated this finding with a different creativity task and found that while unconscious thought at a medium duration could lead to more novel ideas, those ideas were not necessarily more appropriate for solving the problem.

What is going on here?

Deliberate conscious thought involves both divergent and convergent processes.  You are reminded of things you know about that might help you to solve the problem, and then you evaluate those ideas and focus on the ones you like.  In addition, as you think about the problem consciously, you are able to generate new descriptions of the problem that may help you to take a different perspective on it.  These conscious processes get better over time, so the longer you spend thinking, the more you come up with.

Unconscious thought has just the divergent component.  The description of the problem races through your memory activating things that might be useful.  At short durations, there isn’t enough time to activate much.  At longer durations, some of the initial activation of an idea dies down and it is lost.  At medium durations, though, the largest number of different ideas are active.

How can you use this to help you? 

In cases where you are stuck on a difficult problem, it can be valuable to walk away from that problem and to engage in another activity.  Take a walk.  Play a mindless video game for a few minutes.  Go to the gym.  The other activity you do should not lead you to think a lot about something new and difficult, it just occupy your conscious train of thought.  After some time away from the problem, come back to it and see what you come up with.

Kids learn about ownership early on.

Ownership is an interesting concept.  Unlike many other aspects of objects, ownership depends on the history of the object rather than its features.  If you go to a store looking at shirts, the shirts there all belong to the store.  If you purchase one (by trading money for the shirt), then it becomes yours.  You get to keep the shirt unless you transfer that ownership to someone else. 

Sometimes, this can get a little complicated.  For example, a woman went to a flea market in West Virginia in 2010 and paid $7 for a box of stuff.  Inside the box was a painting that turned out to be a Renoir.  The woman planned to sell the painting at auction.  However, the Baltimore Museum of Art provided documents suggesting that the painting was stolen from that museum in 1951.  As a result, the auction was put on hold.  So, who owns the painting? 

An nice set of studies in the October, 2012 issue of Child Development by Susan Gelman, Erika Manczak, and Nicholaus Noles explored whether children are able to use aspects of an object’s history to determine who owns it.  They tested 2- and 3-year-old children.

They examined this question in two ways.

In one study, children sat at a table with an experimenter.  On a series of trials, they were shown three toys.  The experimenter took one toy and said to the child, “This is yours, this is for you.”  That toy was placed in front of the child.  For a second toy, the experimenter said, “This is mine, this is for me.”  That toy was placed in front of the experimenter.  (The order of these two assignments of objects was varied over trials.)  A third toy was shown to the child and was placed on the table without being given to anyone.

Next, all three objects were moved to a tray in front of the child, who was asked which toy belonged to the experimenter and which toy belonged to the experimenter.

There were three versions of the sets of toys that were used in the study, and the results depended on the sets.

In one condition, each of the three toys was attractive and each toy was different.  For example, the set might contain three different toy cars.  In this case, even 2-year-olds were able to identify which car was theirs and which was the experimenters, though they were not quite as good at this as the 3-year-olds. 

In another condition, all three toys were identical.  In this case, the only way to know which toy belonged to which person was to keep track of where those toys had been on the table.  In this case, the 2-year-olds had trouble with the task, but the 3-year olds did quite well identifying which toy belonged to which person. 

In a third condition, two of the toys were attractive (toy animals, perhaps), and the third was boring (a Styrofoam block).  The boring toy was assigned to the child.  In this case, the 2-year-olds tended not to claim ownership of the boring toy, though they did know which interesting toy belonged to the experimenter.  The 3-year olds correctly recognized which toy belonged to which person.

These results suggest that by 3-years of age, children know what belongs to them even if the objects are all identical and even if they really want something else. 

Does this ownership matter?

To explore this question, the experimenters took advantage of something called the endowment effect.  Danny Kahneman and his colleagues have found that people tend to like objects that they own better than objects that they do not own, even if they have been randomly assigned to those objects.  For example, people who are given a coffee mug in an experiment value that mug more highly than people who are just shown the mug.

In a second study, children were assigned objects just as they were in the first experiment.  In this case, though, the question they were asked was which object they liked the best.  They were also asked which object the experimenter liked best.

The most interesting result in this study came from the condition in which all three toys were identical.  In this case, both 2-year-olds and 3-year-olds tended to prefer the object that was assigned to them rather than either of the other two (identical) objects.  Interestingly, even though 2-year-olds had difficulty identifying which object was theirs in this task, they still showed a preference for the one that had been given to them.

Putting this all together, then, children learn quickly that the ownership of an object is based on the history of that object.  Of course, they get a lot of feedback about that as they grow up.  Early on, we start to tell children which objects are theirs and which belong to other people.  They learn that there are things they are allowed to do with objects that belong to them that they cannot do with objects that belong to someone else. 

It is interesting, though, that even for young children this ownership also brings with it a preference.  When a child owns an object, they tend to like it better than even identical objects that belong to someone else.

What is boredom?

We have all experienced boredom.  Sitting in a class where the teacher is droning on about a topic you don’t care about, you may find yourself daydreaming or staring at a clock that doesn’t seem to be moving.  Waiting for a delayed flight to take off at the airport, you may search in vain for something to distract you. 

Boredom is unpleasant and physically painful.  It can make you angry and frustrated.  Boredom can also influence your actions in negative ways.  Bored people are prone to overeat for example, 

So how does boredom work?

An interesting paper by John Eastwood, Alexandra Frischen, Mark Fenske, and Daniel Smilek in the September, 2012 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science. 

These authors suggest that attention plays an important role in creating boredom.  In particular, there are a few conditions that need to be met for people to feel bored.  First, people need to have a reasonable level of psychological energy or arousal to feel bored.  When people have low arousal and there is not much happening in the world, then they often feel relaxed.  When they have high arousal, though, they have energy they would like to devote to something, but they cannot find anything engaging.

Second, boredom typically occurs when people have trouble focusing their attention and they believe the reason for this difficulty is in the environment.  When sitting in the airport, for example, there is probably a lot going on.  There are people having conversations that you could listen to.  You probably have something to read.  There may be televisions showing the news.  But, the stress of waiting for a delayed flight often makes it hard to concentrate, and so your mind jumps from one thing to another.  You assume that this is caused by the environment, and so you feel boredom.

The authors of this paper point to an interesting study by Robin Damrad-Frye and James Laird in the August, 1989 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  In this study, participants had to listen to a tape of a person reading a Psychology Today article.  In the next room, there was a television soundtrack from a soap opera playing.  For some groups listening to the article, the TV was very loud and distracting, for others it was barely noticeable, and for some it was not playing at all.  After listening to the article, people rated their boredom during the study. 

The people who heard the barely noticeable TV rated themselves as more bored than either the ones who heard the loud TV or heard no soundtrack.  The idea is that both the loud TV and the soft TV were distracting, but for those who heard the loud TV it was clear why they were distracted from the article.  Thus, they may have been frustrated with the noise, but they were not bored.  Those who heard the soft soundtrack had difficulty concentrating, but they were not sure why, and so they attributed the difficulty concentrating to boredom.

This example leads to another key aspect of boredom.  As Eastwood, Frischen, Fenske, and Smilek point out, bored people become aware of their difficulty concentrating.  As a result, bored people often try to amuse themselves by daydreaming and letting their mind wander.  Interestingly, while mind wandering helps people to keep their minds occupied, studies suggest that the more your mind wanders, the more bored you feel.  The idea is that you recognize that this daydreaming is meant to occupy your mind, and so you realize that the situation is boring.

One more key element of boredom is control.  Boredom often occurs when you have little control over your situation.  Waiting rooms, lectures, and airline gates are all places where you have little control over your situation.  Normally, we react to unpleasant situations by changing the situation.  If you don’t like a book you are reading, for example, you close it and do something else.  Boredom happens when you are unable to change the situation.  

Finally, a real problem caused by boredom is that it leads you to dislike the things that are the object of boredom.  In my senior year of high school, for example, I was forced to read Moby Dick.  I struggled to get interested in it and spent long hours staring at the pages trying to lose myself in it.  To this day, I really do not like Moby Dick.  The negative feelings that came with the boredom have stuck to the book.

As the authors of the review point out, these negative feelings can actually impair later performance.  Stress can decrease people’s ability to pay attention and can narrow people’s working memory capacity.  These effects can be a particular problem in school settings.  Students need to be able to work at peak capacity to get the most out of school.  So, boredom can create long-term difficulties for students.

What can you do about boredom?  Obviously, there are times when you are stuck.  If you are listening to a lecture that you cannot leave, then you just need to find a way to get through it.  When you have some control, though, use your understanding of boredom to help you out.  If you can, try to do a meditation exercise to lower your arousal level.  If you can lower your arousal, it will help you to feel less bored.  Also, keep some music handy.  Music you enjoy can crowd out distractions in the environment.  It can also influence your mood in positive ways to counteract the pain of being bored.  

What does the brain reveal about you?

As a cognitive scientist, I like the brain.  Over the years, the field has learned a lot from the study of brain damage as well as from brain imaging of normally functioning brains.  For example, the surgery on the famous patient HM that removed the hippocampus from both sides of our brain taught us a lot about the influence of that brain structure on our ability to learn new things as well as the kinds of learning that can be done without awareness. 

Like a number of my colleagues, I have been concerned about the growing desire to capitalize on our understanding of the brain for financial gain.  Over the past several years, neuromarketing firms have cropped up that aim to use brain imaging to help companies do a better job of understanding their consumers.  Neural approaches to lie detection aim to help us get directly at the source of lies to determine who is telling the truth.

These concerns are laid out in the book Brainwashed: The seductive appeal of mindless neuroscience by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld.  I think these authors make some nice points, though the book itself is not as effective as it could have been.  My concern is that anyone who is not already well-versed in brain imaging research will have a hard time following the specifics of the arguments they make. 

That said, I think it is worthwhile saying a few words about why the current advances in neuroscience are not easy to translate into broad practical applications.  There are three broad problems.  First, the technologies we use to image the brain have limitations that limit their practical application.  Second, our understanding of psychology limits what we can learn from the brain.  Third, our theories of neuroscience are not advanced enough to create broad practical applications.

Limitations of Imaging.  It is absolutely amazing that we are able to get a view into what brains are doing while they are doing it.  Using EEG, we can measure electrical activity that comes through the scalp.  It is hard to know where that activity comes from, but we can measure it with a high level of precision in time.  Functional MRI examines changes in blood flow to regions of the brain.  This technique allows us to measure where these changes are happening, though the changes happen over a period of seconds, which is an eternity in the brain. 

Not only do these techniques have limitations in what they can measure, they are very noisy.  That is, there is a lot of variability in the data, so it takes a lot of observations in order to separate the valuable signal from all of this variability.

Practically speaking, then, these brain imaging techniques are not like an x-ray.  If you get injured, you take one picture (or perhaps a couple), and you can see whether a bone is broken.  With brain imaging, you may need to take 30 observations or more before you have some sense of what is happening in a person’s brain. 

Think about what this means for using brain imaging to understand what is happening in a person’s brain.  Consider lie detection.  What we want to know is whether a person is lying if we ask them a question (or perhaps 2 or 3).  If we have to ask the same question 30 or more times in order to be able to get a reading, then there is a good chance that person is adopting some other strategy that is different from what they would do when answering a question.

This is only one example, but it is important to realize that the technologies that we use to measure brains limit what we can tell about individual people from the results of these techniques.

Limitations of Psychology.  The psychologist and skeptic William Uttal wrote a great book in 2001 called The New Phrenology, in which he explored limitations in brain imaging techniques.  Phrenology is a 19^th century theory that specific regions of the brain are specialized for particular functions and that the size of those regions determined people’s behavior.  The phrenologists used bumps on the head as a brain imaging technique.  The larger the bumps, the larger the region of the brain beneath. 

As Uttal points out, the problem with phrenology was not so much the assumption that the brain has regions that are specialized for different functions.  The brain does have distinct circuits in it.  One big problem with phrenology was the labels.  The phrenologists would like for brain areas that were associated with high-level concepts like gratitude or caution.  Based on our modern view of psychology, those labels seem quaint.

But, modern psychology has not completely cracked the code for behavior either.  We use terms like attention, memory, and even lying, but these behaviors all reflect many different psychological processes.  Hal Pashler’s classic book on attention, for example, makes clear that the term attention refers to many different things, and that we are just beginning to understand all of them.

Until we have a well worked-out theory of the psychology of areas like consumer behavior and lying, it will not be possible to develop brain imaging techniques that will give insight into specific aspects of people’s behavior.  The reason is that there is a temptation to look for a single neural signature related to particular aspects of behavior, even though a particular behavior may arise from many different underlying sources.  In their book, Satel and Lilienfeld point out that there are many different things someone might be doing when they are lying, so there is no reason to believe that all of them would lead to a clear pattern of brain activity.

Limitations of neuroscience.  A final hurdle to using neuroscience in practical applications is limitations in our understanding of what the brain is doing.  Obviously, neuroscience is a young field, and there is still a lot for us to learn.  But, there are still some fundamental questions that remain to be answered.

One key question surrounds the organization of the brain across different people for high-level thinking.  We know from studies of humans and other animals that there is a fair amount of similarity in the organization of the brain across individuals for functions like vision and hearing.  That makes sense.  We all grow up in a similar visual environment, for example.  The physics of light have not changed in billions of years, and so neural systems have been able to adapt to the way light bounces off surfaces on earth. 

When it comes to high-level reasoning, though, it is much less clear that different people’s brains have to act in the same way.  Even though we all form similar categories, we have very different experiences to create those categories.  We all learn similar reasoning skills through our years of education, but that does not mean that every person’s brain organized itself in the same way to serve those functions.  Until we resolve that question, it is hard to know how well we will be able to predict people’s behavior from what their brains are doing.

All this is to say that it is worth having a healthy skepticism for anyone who wants to sell you something that purports to predict what people are doing from some measure of their brains.  That said, the next decades are going to reveal a lot more about brain and behavior.  It is a great time to be in the field.