A Review of Palmetto Harmony Hemp Oil

As someone who experiences frequent headaches, low energy, insomnia, and low mood, I was eager to try CBD when I first discovered it. The first brand I tried was a pure CBD vape oil from a local shop. It was synthetically created, and while it provided a brief relaxation, it was not up to snuff. Eventually, I tried Charlotte's Web, and shortly thereafter, Palmetto Harmony. I have also tried a sample of Ozia's Elevate hemp oil. By far the best product I have had is Palmetto Harmony hemp oil (see website here). I will review it briefly on the main reasons I use it:

1. Headaches & other pains - Palmetto Harmony's hemp oil by far exceeded any over the counter or even prescription (ie, oxycodone) pain medication. Having been prescribed opiods for brief amounts of time a couple of times, I can say for sure hemp oil knocks the socks off those dangerous and addictive drugs, and even if used for several days in a row for bodily aches, there's no withdrawal or anything of the sort.

2. Low energy - Palmetto Harmony's hemp oil can give a little boost of energy in the correct dose. I think by making you feel relaxed, in a good mood, and killing the aches brought on by poor sleep, it allows you to function more normally on those days.

3. Low mood - Feeling down? The hemp oil will lift your spirits. It can quell anxiety and lift a depressed mood. Simple as that.

4. Insomnia - A little bit of a larger dose of PH (about 5 ml for me) about 2-3 hrs before bedtime makes me sleep very well. I usually take a long time to fall asleep and also toss and turn a lot, or wake up in the night. When PH is taken as said here, I find I sleep normally. As a chronic insomniac, this is very helpful.

While I cannot attest personally to its efficacy in treating autism, epilepsy, and other neurological disorders since I or a close one does not have these issues, it is worth noting that in some countries a CBD rich hemp oil is already a pharmaceutical option for bad epilepsy.

How does it work?, you might wonder. While the hemp oil contains other similar molecules with a variety of slightly different mechanisms, CBD itself has a well known pharmacology.

1. CBD is a weak antagonist of the CB1 receptor. THC, the more famous chemical in marijuana, activates the CB1 receptor. CBD rich strains of marijuana are reported by smokers of marijuana to provide a more relaxing recreational experience. Source: Opposite Effects of Δ-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol and Cannabidiol on Human Brain Function and Psychopathology (2010) and A Critical Review of the Antipsychotic Effects of Cannabidiol: 30 Years of a Translational Investigation (2012)

2. CBD is an agonist at the 5-HT1A receptor like certain medications for anxiety or depression (buspirone, trazadone, vilazadone). This contributes to the relaxation of CBD. Source: Agonistic Properties of Cannabidiol at 5-HT1a Receptors (2005)

3. CBD is a weak positive modulator of opioid receptors. This means it does not have direct analgesic and potentially habit forming properties like proper opiates, but rather, that it enhances your body's response to its own endorphins. Source: Cannabidiol is an allosteric modulator at mu- and delta-opioid receptors (2006)

4. CBD inhibits the T-Type calcium channel, which likely is the main reason for its anti-epileptic properties. Source: Inhibition of Recombinant Human T-type Calcium Channels by Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol and Cannabidiol*

However, as I said before, I have had pure CBD. The whole hemp plant extract is far more effective. The other molecules in the hemp oil seem to have a synergistic effect that makes the CBD's effects both stronger and much longer lasting. The effects of Palmetto Harmony's are stronger and better than Ozia's Elevate or Charlotte's Web hemp oil. I don't know what exactly is different on a chemical level, but these are sourced from different farms. Palmetto Harmony's is the best, try it for yourself and see!

Is vinyl better than CD or digital files?

Every year, you see an article in the news about how vinyl record sales have yet again increased [1] [2] [3]. It's clear, vinyl records are on the rise. Is the rising popularity due merely to nostalgia, or is there something else to it?

It's commonly claimed that records have a "warmer" sound, especially when sourced directly from an analog master, compared to CDs, which are 16-bit 44.1 Khz pulse-code-modulation files. Vinyl records store sound as analog grooves, which are often claimed to be exact replicas (analogues) of the original sound waves. We will see that this is not quite true.

When it comes to a digital format such as CD, the original sound waves are quantized into discrete points, shown below.

This process is called sampling. The dots represent coordinate points on an x-y axis that the sound wave originally passed through. When a digital file is played back, it is processed through a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), which "connects the dots" and re-creates the analog file. In reality, there are far more coordinates than in this illustration. CDs are 16-bit, 44.1 Khz files, as mentioned before. What this means is that for 16 bit audio, there are 65,536 levels of the y axis on which a sample can lie. 44.1 Khz refers to the fact that 44,100 samples are taken each second, 22,050 in each stereo channel. This refers to how many samples are actually used out of the bit depth. 16-bit audio provides 65,536 possible levels, and a sampling rate of 44.1 Khz per second uses 22,050 of those possible levels in each stereo channel. The number of available levels double with every bit. In practice, there are 16-bit 44.1 Kz, 16-bit 48 Khz, and 24-bit files ranging from 44.1 to 88.2, up to 96 Khz and 192 Khz sampling rates. Essentially, increasing the bit-depth and sampling rate is like increasing the megapixels in a camera. It gives more pixels (samples) from which a picture (sound wave) can be reconstructed. To use the connect the dots metaphor, this gives the DAC more dots to work with to reconstruct the original sound wave. The problem is that DACs vary wildly in quality. Some cheaper ones are the equivalent of getting a drunk to play connect the dots, and result in very poor sound, while better DACs are more of a master artist carefully connecting the dots. Even after the dots are connected, the jagged waveform must be smoothed out.This is done by a process called interpolation. Depending on how well the DAC performs interpolation, it may introduce digital distortions that are quite unpleasant. 

This is where sampling rates above 44.1 Khz might be useful, although there is debate over whether or not you can hear results. It is difficult to tell in practice if 48/88.2/96/192 Khz sampling rates are really better since playback equipment varies wildly. Double blind studies suggest that the differences are inaudible to most people.

When it comes to Mp3s, Mp4, WMA, and AAC files, these are called "lossy" files. They take the original digital file, called a lossless file, discussed above, and degrade it even more for the sake of hard drive space. They do this in various ways, but all involve cutting down the number of samples. When a file is played back, the samples are played back at a certain rate, define by the number of bits played back per second. A CD file has a sample rate of 1411.2 kilobits per second. That means that every second, 1,411,200 bits per second are available to be played back. To see how this is calculated, we take 44.1 (the sample rate) and multiply it by double the bit depth, which is 16. Hence, 44.1 times 32 = 1411.2. This is lossless, since during the bits played back per second, nothing is lost. However, lossy formats use various algorithms to select sound frequencies relatively less audible, or even inaudible to human ears, and deletes them. A 320 Kbps Mp3 file has 1/4.41 the data of the original lossless file! A one minute file at 16-bit 44.1 Khz audio with a lossless 1411.2 kbps bit rate will have a file size of 10.1 MB. A one minute file 16-bit 44.1 Khz at a 320 Kbps bit rate will be 2.29 MB in size. Keep in mind, 320 Kbps is the maximum bit rate across the lossy formats. 320 Kbps is usually very close to CD quality once played back to most people and on average equipment, though more intangible details such as stereo separation or immediacy seem to suffer when played back on higher quality equipment. Lower bit rates start to chop off frequencies more audible to the human ear and sound far inferior to the original file on even average playback equipment.

So, in summary, digital files can be either lossless or lossy, and exist as samples of the original sound (x-y coordinates, where y is the time variable), and are are played back by a digital-analog converter, which connects the dots, then smooths them out. Vinyl records work entirely differently.

Records contain grooves, which correspond roughly to the original sound wave. However, it is NOT an exact replica of the original sound wave. If the original sound wave were etched into the vinyl, it would be unplayable because the stylus would bounce around so much that it would jump out of the groove. The reason for this is that low frequencies cause bigger stylus vibrations. So, to compensate, a standardized equalization is applied. Bass frequencies are greatly reduced in volume, while high frequencies are greatly boosted. This allows a groove to be etched that only minimally causes the stylus to bounce back and forth in the groove. Of course, this bouncing is what produces the sound, but if it gets to the point where it bounces out of the groove it doesn't do much good! Then, once the record is played back, the resulting RIAA-equalized wave is un-equalized by boosting the bass greatly and reducing the treble in an exact inverse of the original equalization.

The result is something very near the original sound wave. In reality, perfect restoration of the original wave is impossible as the circular nature of the record causes some distortion. Just as the playback of a digital file depends on a quality DAC, the proper playback of a record depends on a proper pre-amp to unequalize the sound. Quality record playback also depends on a quality stylus and cartridge to pick up the sound to begin with. The better the pickup mechanisms, the less distortion there will be to the sound and the closer the sound wave will be to the original master once played back. Perfection is impossible, unless you have a laser pickup instead of a stylus and cartridge. This raises a very important point. Playing your records on a badly calibrated turntable or on a cheaply built Crosley, Jensen, or some other big-box-retailer brand will damage your records and produce inferior, distorted sound. They have been measured at tracking the records with anywhere from 5 to 12 grams of force, which scrapes away at the grooves with every playback (they also often spin at the wrong speed, often a bit too fast). A quality turntable will have a tracking weight adjustment to adjust to the specifications of your cartridge, as well as an anti-skate control to minimize groove distortion from the record's circular shape. A good cartridge should track from 1.5 to 3 or 4 grams. Stay as close to 2 grams as possible.  Getting quality record playback is a lot more expensive than getting quality CD or Mp3/Mp4/AAC/WMA playback. For this reason, digital formats may be preferable to you.

So, both digital and vinyl records follow the same pattern. Both are altered forms of the original sound wave, digital being sampled, and records being RIAA-equalized. Both must have the original sound wave restored, by a DAC for a digital file, and by a pre-amp for a record. So long as the equipment used to play them back is good quality, distortion should be minimized, and similar results obtained. However, this whole time, I have been assuming that the sound waves are identical going into the record and CD. In reality, CDs and records often receive different masters. Some record releases have an entirely special master done, either at the time of release or later on when an older album is re-issued. The differences can be subtle, but most often, the record has more dynamic range. Due to a phenomenon called the loudness war, since the late 1990s CDs have been mastered to have all sounds play back at rougly the same volume. This is done to enhance the perceived loudness of the recording. However, the music loses its life when this happens. When everything is played back at the same volume, there is no "room to breathe" between instruments. Everything sounds like a "wall of noise." Even older recordings before the loudness war often suffer when they have a new re-master done for CD release. Below is a comparison of the waveform for the 2011 remaster of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" compared to the Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs remaster. The 2011 remaster has a lot of digital distortion, marked with red by Audacity. The Mobile Fidelity release, mastered at a much lower volume with more dynamic range, lacks the distortion.





While at first listen, the louder master may sound more attention grabbing and "better", the lack of dynamic range makes the music have less of a "live" sound. Listening to entire albums mastered this way may cause the music to become boring. Perhaps this is part of why many now have "song ADD" and skip tracks a lot, since nearly all music is mastered like this or worse. Once the lower volume, more dynamic, recording is turned up to a louder volume, the separation between instruments is more apparent and instruments like the drum have a stronger impact. Take for example the below comparison of the Guitar Hero version of a Metallica song, which has dynamic range, to the completely brickwalled CD version.

Notice how the CD version's drums have no impact at all! The problem with everything being the same volume or close to the same volume in a recording with a lot of dynamic range compression applied is that relative impact of instruments is lost, and when the music is turned down, everything loses impact. When turning it up, nothing gains any impact, but instead the digital distortion becomes very obvious.

 As mentioned before, when bass is too loud, the record stylus is likely to jump. Even with RIAA equalization, if the bass-frequencies are super loud because of dynamic range compression, the stylus risks jumping out of the groove. For this reason, a master with better dynamic range (and hence, likely less jacked-up volume on bass frequencies) is used. In some cases, it is still a 16-bit 44.1 Khz CD quality file passed through a studio quality DAC then cut to vinyl, but the better dynamic range will still make it sound better over the CD master that has dynamic range compression over-applied. Most often though if a vinyl record is made from a digital master, a 24-bit 96 Khz or 24-bit 192 Khz file is fed through the DAC before cutting to vinyl. This makes for a more accurate groove on the record. A 24-bit sourced vinyl with plenty of dynamic range can sound as good as an old fashioned analog-recorded, analog-mixed and mastered, record. In theory, CD is capable of far more dynamic range than vinyl, but in practice, vinyl often comes out ahead. This is why vinyl often sounds better than CD/digital. CD is capable of sounding just as good, if not better. Records introduce pops and clicks from dust caught in the grooves, and due to the sensitivity of the playback equipment involved, quality varies wildly on how they sound. However, vinyl records offer something tangible CDs don't. They have bigger artwork, bigger lyric sheets (when included). Digital files on a hard drive lack any of this at all. Because of the loudness war and the tangible properties of owning a record, many prefer vinyl as a format, including the author. Others may prefer the smaller storage space of CDs, or the consistent pop-and-crackle free sound CDs have. Others may prefer the convenience of a digital file on a hard drive. With this information, you can choose which music format you prefer.

Holmes' Theorem

It's been nearly a year since my last post. I've been busy. However, lately I have been working through John Kruschke's book Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, and came upon a reference to Sherlock Holmes. The reference was to the quote, "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" (from The Sign of Four). Kruschke restated it in Bayesian terms as, “How often have I said to you that when p(D|θi) = 0 for all i , j, then, no matter how small the prior p(θ j) > 0 is, the posterior p(θ j|D) must equal one." (pg. 56). Holmes said many things relevant to Bayes' theorem, so this got me thinking that it would be fun to re-tool various quotes from Sherlock Holmes stories as a dialogue where Sherlock explains Bayes' theorem to Watson. See if you can identify the stories from which I appropriated some of the dialogue!

____________________________________

"How do you do it Holmes?"

"I have my methods, Watson, how many times must I tell you this?"

"Yes yes, I know, what astonishes me is the ease and precision with which you tackle every case. Surely there is some general method you use that others could benefit from knowing."

"My methods are simply good logic. If you so desire, I will explain my methods. My methods are not truly my own, but are already available to any student of deductions."

"Get on with it, then," exclaimed Watson, impatiently waiting to understand how Sherlock Holmes has built a reputation as the cleverest detective in the world.

"When there has been a crime committed we must reason backwards from what we already know. In the every-day affairs of life it is more useful to reason forwards, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically."

"What do you mean reasoning synthetically or analytically?"

"Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically."

"Fascinating."

"Yes, Watson, but this is something well known to logicians and mathematicians. This is a special case of conditional probability called inverse probability. As I said, normally we reason forward about what will happen, but sometimes we need to invert our thinking to understand what has happened."

"How do you do this?"

"Do you recall the adventure of the cardboard box?"

"Of course, that was in 1889, or perhaps 1890."

"We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations."

"Yes yes, what of it?"

"We had no reason to prefer any particular theory about what had happened. It is a capital mistake to form conclusions before one has data.  Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

"Quite naturally, this seems intuitively obvious to not draw conclusions without having any data."

"Yes, as I always say, data, data, data! One cannot make bricks without clay! However, sometimes what we know prior to obtaining data can help nudge us in the right direction. Remember that we are reasoning backwards, that is, using inverse probability. We want to know the probability of our theory given the evidence. This is called the posterior probability. The information we use to nudge is in the right direction, that is, our hypothesis about what happened, is called the prior probability. What we want to do is look at the evidence and use that to evaluate our prior probability.  After all, when my clients come to me they lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able, by the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can't unravel the thousand and first. "

"Sounds sensible enough, but how do you know when to use prior information and what do you do if you lack any prior information?"

"This is where it becomes important to not make hasty inferences or let your own fanciful ideas influence your consideration of the evidence. It is important to use what Laplace called the principle of indifference. That is, you must be indifferent to one outcome or the other an have no theories about what happened prior to seeing the evidence. However, it is often quite clear when to use prior information. Consider your days in Afghanistan as a medical doctor. A patient comes to you displaying symptoms of abdominal distress. What do you do?"

"I inspect them for signs of various illnesses, naturally."

"Yes, but many illnesses induce stomach pains and vomiting. How do you know which illnesses to look for?"

"Well, I know that cholera is quite common. Somewhere around ten percent of soldiers contract the illness. It tends to spread quickly when soldiers are forced to live in close quarters."

"Excellent. This is your prior belief, your hypothesis, which you wish to test. You have evidence of it gathered from their symptoms, now you wish to know how likely it is that they have cholera given their symptoms. How often do patients with cholera display the symptoms?"

"Nearly all of them with the infection, 99.9 percent."

"This is important to consider, Watson. This is the likelihood of your evidence, that is the probability that they will display these symptoms given that they have cholera."

"Yes of course, but many other illnesses display these symptoms too."

"Astute observation. This is very important. One also needs to know how likely it is that the patient will display these symptoms given that they do not have cholera."

"I suppose about 25 percent of other illnesses would give similar symptoms."

"Excellent, now all you need to do is consider all of this information to reach your conclusion."

"Yes, Holmes, I very well know how to make a medical diagnosis, and have learned much about crime solving, but how do you do it so well?"

"Don't you see, Watson?! The procedure is the same! It all follows the logic of of Bayes' theorem*."

"What is Bayes' theorem?"

"I said that my methods are available to any student of logic or mathematics. There was a Presbyterian minister by the name of Reverend Thomas Bayes who had left a paper behind after his death detailing a precise formula on how to reason about the causes of events. Just as well the French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace had independently discovered the theorem, which he called the theorem of the probability of causes. This theorem is known to mathematicians studying probabilities, and I merely appropriate it for the solving of crimes."

"What is the theorem, then?"

"It's elegantly simple. To calculate the posterior probability, one simply multiplies your prior belief in your hypothesis by the likelihood of the evidence, and divide by the total number of ways one can obtain the evidence. This in turn is found by adding to your numerator the likelihood of your evidence given other hypotheses times your prior belief in your hypothesis not being true, which is simply your prior belief in your hypothesis subtracted from 100 percent."

"That's astonishingly straightforward."

"Then use the information you gave on cholera to calculate the probability of a patient having it given the symptoms displayed."

"Well, my prior belief in the patient having cholera was ten percent, and the likelihood of them displaying those symptoms given that my hypothesis is true was 99.9 percent However, the symptoms are also typical of about 25 percent of other illnesses, in which I am 90 percent confident. So, I just multiply my prior belief in the hypothesis and the likelihood of the symptoms, giving me 9.99 percent. Then I do the same for the likelihood of the symptoms for other illnesses and my confidence in those other illnesses, meaning 25 percent and 90 percent give me 22.5 percent, and then I add the numerator to this to obtain the denominator, giving me 32.49 percent. 9.99 percent divided by this gives me about a 30 percent probability of cholera."

"See? The key is knowing what information to use. It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated. This is not as easy as it sounds. Like all other arts, the science of Bayesian inference is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it."

"You never cease to astonish me Holmes. Still, if mastering this method of reasoning requires life long study, how can the typical person reasoning by this method be certain?"

"You can't be certain, as life is long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. Always remember, any truth is better than indefinite doubt."  


_______________________________________________________________________

*Bayes' theorem is a theorem in probability that states P(θ|D) = P(D|θ)*P(θ) \ P(D) , where P(D) is equal to P(D|θ)*P(θ) + P(D|~θ)*P(~θ). This is just a formula to tell us how to update our prior beliefs in the face of new evidence. Let's break down the mathematical symbols to see what they mean. This is the P(θ|D), or posterior probability, that we want to know. The P(D|θ) is the probability of obtaining the data given that your hypothesis is true. This is called the likelihood. The P(θ) is your prior probability and last but not least, the P(D) is the total probability of the data occurring. This is referred to as the evidence. So, to further simplify Bayes theorem: Posterior probability = likelihood * prior probability \ evidence.

To work out a problem using Bayes theorem you need to identify a few things. First, you need to identify any prior information to ground your initial beliefs in. More will follow on what to do if this is not possible later. So the first step is to identify P(θ). Secondly, collect your data, and based on the prior knowledge, figure how likely it is that the data would occur. The second step, then, is to identify P(D|θ). The third step will be to calculate the evidence to identify P(D) . Recall that P(D) = P(D|θ)*P(θ) + P(D|~θ)*P(~θ). This may seem scary, but most of the work is already done. At this point, your prior and likelihood are already plugged into the numerator of Bayes' theorem, and given that the first half of the evidence formula is the same as the numerator, just plug in the result to that half. As for the second half, these are easy to figure out. P(~θ) is simply 1 - P(θ). This means you only have to identify P(D|~θ). The P(D|~θ) is just how likely your data are given OTHER hypotheses which are not θ.

An interesting application of this can be found here.

Bits of dialogue were appropriated from A Scandal in Bohemia, A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Yellow Face, The Reigate Puzzle, and The Adventure of the Cardboard Box. These stories of course are the original propery of Arthur Conan Doyle, without whom the world would lack the most interesting fictional character of all time and without whom this post would not be possible.

Personality and Skinner's Behaviorism

This post is meant as a sequel to the previous post, B.F. Skinner and Radical Behaviorism. Here I continue exploring the thought of B.F. Skinner and how it relates to modern psychology. I highly recommend reading the previous post before this one. 

We all have a unique personality, and many have a desire to understand their personality. This is evident due to the abundance of personality tests available on the internet, but is personality something that can be quantified and explained scientifically? The answer is a resounding yes, but without understanding how actual personality psychologists go about doing this, it may not be very clear.

The first question concerning personality is, what is it? Personality is generally agreed to be a consistent pattern of tendencies to behave in certain ways, to feel certain a way, and to think a certain way. A trait is a particular facet of personality. In 1931 psychologist Gordon Allport published a landmark paper titled '"What is a Trait of Personality?" In it, he outlined some of the features of what a personality trait is. To summarize, a trait is not just a label for a pattern of behavior set by the history of situations an individual has been in, but refers to something real in an individual. Traits then are not merely habits, but are more general. Traits also determine behavior. Allport wrote that, "It is not the stimulus that is the crucial determinant in behavior that expresses personality; it is the trait itself that is decisive. Once formed a trait seems to have the capacity of directing response to stimuli into characteristic channels."¹

 B.F. Skinner himself wrote about traits, stating that "A common and unchanging property of the behavior of all members of a species would not usefully be referred to as a trait at all. It is only because people differ from moment to moment or from person to person that trait-names arise."²  Skinner even acknowledged the validity of studying individual differences, writing that "Traits which can be reduced to inventories of behavior, to the relative strengths of parts of a repertoire, or to the speed with which behavioral processes take place have acceptable scientific dimensions, and their relation to a functional analysis is clear."³

Skinner also wrote of personality tests that they are, "a convenient opportunity to observe behavior—to survey or sample our dependent variable. The score may be used to predict some aspect of the larger universe of behavior from which the test is drawn. Thus a test of mechanical ability, or intelligence, or extroversion may enable us to predict success or failure in a job in which these traits are important."⁴

So far, it sounds like Skinner would accept the modern trait theorist approach, but there are a few key differences in his view on traits and that of the trait theorists. Skinner noted that we use traits to describe behavior. Taking the legend of Narcissus for example, he wrote, "we invent the adjective 'narcissistic,' and then the noun 'narcissism'; and finally we assert that the thing presumably referred to by the noun is the cause of the behavior with which we began."⁵

So, what then is a trait? Is it a description of a consistent patterns of behavior as Skinner holds, or is it something with causal force as Allport maintains? Calling a trait a particular determinant of consistent patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling really only describes the effects of whatever it is that determines behavior. Everyone has a unique brain which is built by their genetic inheritance and life experiences. The brain is what thinks, feels, and makes decisions which results in behavior. If someone has a genetic predisposition for anxiety and depression, they will likely test very high in neuroticism on a scale such as the Big Five. At the same time someone may have no genetic predisposition to depression, but instead may have had traumatic life experiences causing the epigenetic regulation of genes which regulate the production of neurochemicals such as dopamine and serotonin to malfunction. In one case, the problem is in the genes. In the other, in the environment. In both cases the end result is a high level of neuroticism. It can be difficult to identify a trait with a specific aspect of an individual's neuroanatomy, but not impossible. Skinner was uninterested in wasting too much time sorting out details when variables external to an individual are easily available for analysis.

Skinner wrote that, "The process of looking inside the organism for an explanation of behavior has tended to obscure the variables which are immediately available for a scientific analysis. These variables lie outside the organism,  in its immediate environment and  in its environmental history."⁶ This describes the situationist perspective, although my many situationists put more emphasis on current demands of a situation rather than the history of reinforcment. The other perspective is the person perspective, that it is the unique qualities of an individuality which more strongly determine behavior. This particular incarnation of the nature-nurture dispute is known as the person situation debate.⁷

So, which is it? Regardless of an individual's unique characteristics, a sufficiently powerful environment may change his or her behavior to act in ways which are unusual. Perhaps one of the more dramatic examples in the history of psychology is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Phillip Zimbardo in 1971. In the experiment, volunteers played the role of prisoners or guards, and in a matter of a couple of days, the individuals had slipped into the guard or prisoner roles. Even though the participants could withdraw at any time, most did not even consider this. There was no reason to infer this would happen, as each participant had no history of mental illness, no criminal record, and had no anomalous results on the personality tests. Yet, if one reads Phillip Zimbardo's account of the experiment in The Lucifer Effect, one notices that each individual morphed into their altered personality at a different rate. Although Zimbardo seems to consider the situation the more powerful determinant of behavior in the book, the fact that each individual changed at different rates seems to confirm the idea that our individual characteristics shape our behavior. Of course you can overcome personality with enough time, but the fact that each individual is different causes that to happen at different rates and this indicates that outside of unusual circumstances such as the prison experiment, our unique characteristics strongly shape our behavior. In a sense the debate, much like the nature-nurture debate in general, is a false dichotomy because the environment and the individual interact in complex and varying ways, such as the effects the environment can have on the expression of genes.⁸ ⁹

The tools of behaviorism are immensely useful for understanding behavior, and have had many practical applications in therapy. Speech therapy techniques based on B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior have helped many autistic children learn to express themselves, while behavioral modification approaches based on the principles of operant conditioning have helped many people with behavioral disorders learn to get along in life. ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² However, acknowledging each individual's uniqueness can allow for better designed schedules of reinforcement in such therapeutic settings. In addition, understanding personality not to be some metaphysical entity or property in some supposed mental inner world, but rather as a description of neurological characteristics which drive the consistent patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling, allows for a deeper understanding of every person's uniqueness.

References:

¹ Allport, G. W. (1931). What is a trait of personality? The Jorunal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 25(4), 368-372.
² Science and Human Behavior, pg 195
³ Science and Human Behavior, pg 197
⁴ Science and Human Behavior, pg 199
⁵ Science and Human Behavior, pg 202
⁶ Science and Human Behavior, pg 31
⁷ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-situation_debate
⁸ Beach, R., Brody, G. H., Lei, M. K., Simons, R. L., Philibert, R. A., Gibbons, F. X., et al. (2013). Impact of Child Sex Abuse on Adult Psychopathology: A Genetically and Epigenetically Informed Investigation. Journal of Family Psychology, 27(1), 3-11.
⁹ Champagne, F. A., & Rissman, E. F. (2011). Behavioral Epigenetics: A new frontier in the study of hormones and behavior. Hormones and Behavior, 59, 277-278.
¹⁰ https://lighthouseautismcenter.com/what-is-verbal-behavior-therapy/
¹¹ http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/treatment/verbal-behavior-therapy
¹² http://www.spectrum-behavioral.com/WhitePapers/behavioraltherapy.aspx

Appendix:


HEXACO (Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openess to experience)

Big Five/OCEAN (Openess, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) Version 1 ; Version 2

Avoid typological tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Those tests are designed via an approach called typology which posits that there are a fixed number of personality types. The MBTI for instance posists 16 different types of personality.  Trait tests such as the ones listed above are much more precise and flexible. For example, The MBTI might say you are extraverted, but not how extraverted. In the end it fails to be as informative.  

B.F. Skinner and Radical Behaviorism

There is much incorrect information about B.F. Skinner out there on the web, and even sometimes in psychology classrooms. In my previous blog, I gave a quick overview of his views, called radical behaviorism. Some of the things I said about B.F. Skinner are not quite accurate, and although I am not a radical behaviorist, it is only right that I set the record straight. Skinner has been the subject of much criticism, including Noam Chomsky's famous review of Verbal Behavior which helped launch cognitive psychology and Steven Pinker who dismisses radical behaviorism as a "blank slate" philosophy. He has also been heavily criticized by Daniel Dennett as a "greedy reductionist" who desired to reduce everything about human behavior to conditioning (for the record, Dan Dennett is a reductionist but uses the term greedy reductionism to describe the tendency of some to try and oversimplify a phenomenon). To what extent are these claims true?

It is true that B.F. Skinner did not consider emotions as something necessary for explaining behavior. Emotions are merely a byproduct of conditioning, and in order to understand the cause of someone's seemingly emotional behavior what we really must understand are the contingencies which led to the behavior in a situation. This was most eloquently put when he wrote that:

 As long as we conceive of the problem of emotion as one of inner states, we are not likely to advance a practical technology. It does not help in the solution of a practical problem to be told that some feature of a man's behavior is due to frustration or anxiety; we also need to be told how the frustration or anxiety has been induced and how it may be altered.¹

Skinner did concede that sometimes emotion could be used as an explanation for something, with the example he gave being the development of ulcers under stress. He wrote that:

A chronic emotional condition sometimes leads to certain forms of illness. For example, a man whose business is failing may be subject to a long series of circumstances which generate a chronic condition of frustration or anxiety. Part of the total emotion may be reflex responses in the alimentary tract, as a result of which the man may become physically ill—he may develop ulcers, for example. Here it is legitimate to attribute the illness to an "emotion" as a cause, because we define the emotion as a pattern of behavior. We might in the same way attribute a cracked skull to emotion if the injury was suffered as the result of reckless behavior. But this is very different from arguing that emotional behavior is due to an emotion. A man does not neglect his business because of anxiety or worry.²

This is actually a very important point that he makes about the scientific analysis of emotions. To what does the term "emotion" actually refer? In order to study anything, an operational definition must be provided for the abstract concept. Skinner is defining emotion as the byproduct of the stimulus-response contingencies which control behavior. So, when Skinner stated that ,"We don't say that the human subject gambles to punish himself as the Freudians might say or gambles because it feels exciting when he does so, nothing of the sort, people gamble because of the schedule of reinforcement that follows³," he did not mean that the gambler does not feel excitement from the gambling, but rather that the excitement is a byproduct of the reinforcement.

It may sound strange, but operational definitions can be rather specific. A neuroscientist might operationally define emotions as certain neurochemical and physiological states. Skinner conceived of psychology as being a separate science from neuroscience however, not to mention that in his life time advanced methods for studying the brain such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging had not yet been developed. He optimistically wrote that, "Eventually a science of the nervous system based upon direct observation rather than inference will describe the neural states and events which immediately precede instances of behavior.⁴"

So, it seems that Skinner's lack of much use for neuroscience stemmed more from the fact that it was so new as to not offer much insight about behavior, while the methods of behavioral analysis could show what environmental factors interact with whatever mediating neural processes there which result in behavior. However, those neurological facts are mere details. What is important are those environmental factors. He wrote that, "we do not have and may never have this sort of neurological information at the moment it is needed in order to predict a specific instance of behavior.⁵" He also praised Ivan Pavlov, saying that his greatest "achievement was the discovery, not of neural processes, but of important quantitative relations which permit us, regardless of neurological hypotheses, to give a direct account of behavior in the field of the conditioned reflex.⁶" Skinner was a practical man who wanted to understand how behavior originates and how it could be changed without having to wait around for the brain to be understood in order to do so.

Skinner has also sometimes been accused of ignoring the rest of biology and has been strongly associated with the concept of "the blank slate." Skinner was the subject of much criticism by Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate (which entirely misrepresents behaviorism and mostly serves to perpetuate myths about behaviorism; an analysis of this can be read here) for this reason. Skinner did not believe that we (or animals for that matter) lacked innate behaviors. One example is when Skinner referred to innate navigational instincts in animals; "But the journey of the eel from the Nile River to the Sargasso Sea, a quarter of the way around the earth, is a much more complex example of innate behavior and is much harder to explain in "cognitive" terms.⁷" Nor did Skinner deny how powerful evolution was in shaping our behavior, stating that "Anyone who has seen a slip of a plant grow into a complete plant will have no difficulty in accepting the role of natural selection in the origin of behavior, no matter how complex.⁸"  Skinner also stated from observing the offspring of rats who were good at navigating mazes being particularly talented at maze navigation, "from the observed facts alone, it was impossible to tell whether the difference was due to operant conditioning, following some such procedure as just described, or whether it was genetic.⁹" It is true that Skinner preferred explaining things in terms of operant learning due to the fact that such hypotheses are more readily testable. He stated that "Contingencies of reinforcement which shape ontogenic behavior can be arranged and studied in the laboratory. Most of the contingencies of survival responsible for phylogenic behavior observed in the field are merely inferred.¹⁰"

It is likely that Skinner would be critical of the modern field of evolutionary psychology were he currently alive, but mostly because of its strong association with computational theories in cognitive psychology. There is no clash between the study of operant conditioning and other forms of stimulus learning and sociobiological studies of phylogenetic behavior.

So, if Radical Behaviorism is not the dogmatic embrace of the blank slate, the attempt to reduce all human behavior to operant conditioning, or the denial of emotions, then what is it? Radical behaviorism is simply the systematic attempt to explain all behavior with the principles of conditioning that can be explained this way without using neurological or mentalistic terms. Radical behaviorism differs from the methodological behaviorism of John Watson because Watson's behaviorism treated the mind as an entity unreachable to science. Implicit in this is dualism, the thesis that the mind is fundamentally of a different substance and class of existence of the body, whereas Skinner was a materialist and thought that what we call thinking cannot be something unreachable to science. Skinner goes into detail about the differences between his and Watson's behaviorism in About Behaviorism. Skinner also differs from the proto-cognitivism of Edward Tolman, or the "drive theories" of Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence in that these forms of behaviorism posited hypothetical mediating structures that shaped behavior, whereas Radical Behaviorism sought to avoid them and focus only on the ways the environment shaped the behavior.

from other applications of behaviorist methods in that it is very strict about not referring to mentalistic terms, unlike the theories of other behaviorists like Clark Spence and Kenneth Hull, or the early cognitive theories of Edward Tolman. It also was unconcerned with neurology, unlike the behaviorist and neuroscientist Karl Lashley. In truth, radical behaviorism is not all that radical, but is just a pragmatic program for analyzing behavior without having to wait around for the nervous system to be figured out.

In conclusion, many of the claims about B.F. Skinner are exaggerated or a inaccurate. This is true for some of the statements in the previous blog post. It has been shown that Skinner did not deny the existence of emotions, innate or "phylogenic" behavior, or that the brain was important for the execution of behavior. Although it is impossible to know for sure, if Skinner were alive today, it is possible that he would have ended up embracing neuroscience, while being an active critic of the computational theory of mind and concepts such as the language of thought associated with it. He might even go so far as to welcome the lines of research known as embodied and embodied cognitive science (while likely rejecting the cognitive label).


Postscript note:

While modern psychology has moved past this paradigm, there is much to be learned from the approach that seems to have been forgotten. One thing that is not a myth is that it IS true that he thought the principles of operant conditioning could be used to create a modern utopia, which was expressed in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. At root, the book defends the idea that the principles of conditioning are so powerful that in order to make the world a better place you cannot merely express ideas in an eloquent speech to "change the minds and hearts of men and women rather than the world in which they live. ¹¹" Perhaps he does take it to a bit of an absurd extreme, but hey, no one is perfect. The biggest flaw in Skinner's approach is that it seems ill equipped to explain phenomena of a more cognitive nature, such as hallucinations for Schizophrenics. While the psychiatric models based on behaviorism for therapy are extremely effective, there's nothing you can do to condition away hallucinating pink elephants. It is only through studying neuroscience that we will learn the causes of such problems and learn ways to treat them, but given what I presented in this blog, I don't think Skinner would necessarily disagree. A neuroscientific understanding of behavior and "the mind" is a natural step forward from behaviorism that avoids the mentalism that Skinner critiqued. Just as well, while I share some of Skinner's concerns about cognitive psychology, I would not go so far as to say that “Cognitive science is the creation science of psychology.¹²" Traditional cognitive psychology treats mental functions as software which can be studied separately from the hardware of the brain, but as Patricia Churchland has put it, "The hardware-software distinction as applied to the brain is dualism in yet another disguise.¹³" Of course, many cognitive psychologists are not dualists, but nevertheless, it is doubtful that such methodological dualism will be helpful in the long run as, "the respective sciences of behavior and physiology will move forward most rapidly if their domains are correctly defined and analyzed.¹⁴" The black box has been opened, and there's no turning back now, but we must make sure our theories are truly scientific.

Bibliography and Notes:

¹ Science and Human Behavior, pg 167
²ibid, pg 168
³ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acDLluyl3tE
⁴ Science and Human Behavior, pg 28
⁵ ibid
⁶ ibid, pg 64
⁷  Skinner, B.F. (1984). The evolution of behavior. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of behavior, 41(2), 217-221.
⁸  ibid
⁹ Skinner, B. (1975). The shaping of phylogenic behavior. Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, 35, 409-415.
¹⁰ ibid
 ¹¹ Skinner, B. (1977). Why I am not a cognitive psychologist. Behaviorism, 5(2), 1-10.
¹² Skinner, B. (1990). Can psychology be a science of mind?. American Psychologist, 45(11), 1206-1210.
¹³ Neurophilosophy, pg 408
¹⁴ Skinner, B. (1977). Why I am not a cognitive psychologist. Behaviorism, 5(2), 1-10

An update and a look back.

Hello all,

I'm almost done with my bachelor degree, which will be a bachelors in science with a major in experimental psychology and minor in philosophy. I am hoping to move onto graduate school to get a doctorate in neuroscience. I'm in my last full semester of undergrad school, and only need two classes in the summer and I am done. I wanted to take the time to look back on all that I have learned. I want to look at the things which have shaped my opinions, and walk my readers through my journey. This will be lengthy, but if you read my blog, you likely are used to long posts by now.

When I first got into psychology, I spent some time exploring the major perspectives in the field. At first, I was very fond of behaviorism as a methodology and to an extent, even the radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. I also was rather fond of evolutionary psychology. To me, even though evolutionary psychology referred to innate and internal states, it could be reconciled with a behavioristic point of view in that an "instinct" could be thought of as merely a predisposition to respond to certain discriminative stimuli in a particular way. In retrospect, such thinking made me most similar to the ideas of Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence.

For those not in the know, behaviorism is both a methodology and a perspective in psychology. It started in the 1910s with John B. Watson (who by the way was born not far from where I live) when he published an article titled "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It". It set forth a strict and rigorous methodology for psychology that focused only on the relationship between an organism and the environment. Watson argued that we cannot ever be in contact with another person's internal mental states, but we can figure out how a person or animal behaves. This point of view was in stark contrast to the psychoanalytic point of view popularized by Freud and Jung which focused on the mind. The psychoanalytic point of view also was not a scientific theory. That is, it was not in the business of finding things out about the mind, but rather, Freud conceived of it based on his patients and introspection about himself. Critics of Freudian psychology such as philosopher of science Karl Popper rightly point out that it is untestable. So, unlike psychoanalysis and introspective schools of psychology, the behaviorsit methodology was very consistent, strong, and worked wonderfully. This was known as methodological behaviorism. B.F. Skinner later formulated a philosophy of psychology known as radical behaviorism. It is called radical because it makes the startling assertion that there are no internal mediating states between the organism and the environment. That is, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and so forth, play no role in behavior. They have been eliminated. This will figure in later when I discuss the views of certain philosophers of mind. This was summarized best when B.F. Skinner stated, "We don't say that the human subject gambles to punish himself as the Freudians might say or gambles because it feels exciting when he does so, nothing of the sort, people gamble because of the schedule of reinforcement that follows." (this can be heard around 2:28 of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acDLluyl3tE)

But back to my views. I wouldn't call myself a behaviorist anymore, although there are still psychologists in the field of applied behavioral analysis that would, but I owe a lot to my previous commitment to behaviorism. It equipped me with rigorous expectations for what a psychological theory should be, which keeps me from really preferring cognitivist models of thought. Behaviorism largely was overturned after the cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 60s, so that by the 80s and 90s cognitivism had become the dominant approach to experimental psychology. The revolution occurred due to the influence of information theory and linguistics on psychology. The linguist Noam Chomsky argued strongly against Skinner's theory of language (I won't go into detail, but you can read of it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Psychology). To the cognitivists, the mind was conceived of as information processing. It was software which ran on the hardware of the brain. As such, psychology as a whole shifted from focusing on the relation between the organism and environment to conceiving of models of information processing which accurately describe and predict behavior. It is worth noting two things. First of all, most behaviorists were not radical behaviorists, and most even did not perfectly abstain from incorporating internal drives, states, etc, into their explanations (such as Hull and Spence as well as Edward Tolman, who was a precursor thinker to cognitivist theories). Secondly, as one might expect, B.F. Skinner rejected cognitivism as nonsense, writing that "cognitive science is the creation science of psychology."

Why might I not care for cognitivism? First of all, while I agree that thought is information processing, I do not conceive of it as being information processing in the sense of symbolic operations in a computer. The brain is giant meta-network of neural networks, each running in parallel to each other. So, when it comes to modeling cognition, I prefer theoretical models that mirror the architecture of the brain on a neural level. For this, connectionist models, particularly parallel distributed processing, come in handy. These simply model thought and memory as being the activation of various model neurons in a network. While still theoretical, at least they resemble the brain. Detailed information can be found here and here.

I also rather like the theory of embodied simulation. Traditional Chomskyian linguistics and cognitive psychology based on the symbolic computational theory of mind have long struggled to integrate semantics. One solution has been to abandon this strict computational approach which posits a "language of thought" and instead look at what the brain is doing when it is comprehending a sentence. As discussed in the book Louder than Words: How the Mind Makes Meaning by Benjamin Bergen, it has been found that when the brain is comprehending language, it is simulating sentences. That is, if you were told "I was playing baseball", the brain would run a simulation of that person playing baseball. The theory has its limits since it likely cannot explain more abstract semantics such as the things being discussed here, but the evidence shows that "embodied simulation" is something that the brain does. Perhaps for more abstract semantics connectionist theories would be better able to explain it.

As I mentioned earlier, I want to go into the field of neuroscience. I want to understand how the brain carries out all those intermediate processes Skinner thought did not exist. The behaviorists conceived of the mind as a black box, but we now have wonderful technology such as fMRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging that let us see exactly where certain mental processes are happening. There are also advanced mathematical techniques that allow EEG data to be localized to certain parts of the brain. But that begs the question, is the mind really the same thing as the brain? I've explored this issue in a previous post, although I do not necessarily commit myself to functionalism anymore (mainly due to the limited conception of mental states as being the intermediate between stimulus and response; not all thought is in response to a stimulus and not all thought results in a response).  So, I will henceforth presume that the mind and brain are identical. This is the metaphysical position known as physicalism or materialism, that matter is all that exists. I want to touch on a particular brand of materialism known as eliminative materialism, or eliminativism for short. This is the viewpoint, largely defended by Patricia and Paul Churchland but also by Richard Rorty and Paul Feyrabend, that intentional states such as beliefs and desires do not exist. The idea is that once we have a complete understanding of neuroscience we might find that our "folk psychology" concepts of beliefs and desires and things like that may have no role in our neuropsychological explanations. This means that they will not reduce neatly down to certain brain states, but will be eliminated entirely. Sound familiar? It's because it's a redux of radical behaviorism. This time, instead of focusing on the relationship between the organism and the environment (known as a stimulus response model) it focuses on the brain. This point of view has been most clearly and fully expressed in the book Neurophilosophy by Patricia Churchland. Another motivation for her advocating eliminativism is that she criticizes the symbolic computational theory of mind, which she calls functionalist psychology in the book, which would posit that a belief might be represented in the brain as a sentence in a symbolic language of thought. She and I both reject the language of thought hypothesis and the computational approach to psychology, and as it happens, she is a supporter of connectionism. Hence, if sentential representations of beliefs do not exist, perhaps they do not at all. However, I cannot really say that I am an eliminativist, even though she and I have much in common and she is one of my favorite philosophers of mind, mostly for the reason that she is actively involved in neuroscience. Just because we cannot explain how a belief or intention exists in the brain now doesn't mean we never will. We likely just do not have a clear definition compatible with modern neuroscience yet. Neuroscience is young, so making long term predictions like beliefs and intentional states will be eliminated, seems a bit presumptuous to me.

I also am rather interested in behavioral genetics and neuro-epigenetics. One thing outside of cognitive topics that I am immensely interested in is personality. In fact, I am currently doing research in the field of personality psychology. I'm interested in what it is that makes people unique. The old nature vs. nurture debate is settled, we know it's both. But how does the environment interact with the mind-brain? How does the way the body is innately wired up by genes determine how it interacts with the environment? These are questions fundamental to the study of personality, so understanding not just how the brain works and behavioral principles but the cellular mechanisms which enable all of this to happen is also important.

Since I am listing all the things I am interested in, I may as well add that I am a voracious reader on the topic of evolution. Some of my favorite books which tie in evolutionary biology to behavioral studies are Moral Origins by Christopher Boehm and Good Natured by Frans De Waal. I think it is important to place all of this neuroscience and psychology in the grander perspective of evolution, which is after all how all of this came about in the first place.

In summary, as I look back on the last few years of my life, I can see how much I have learned. I first entered psychology after leaving my computer technology major, and came to it with an open mind and a lot of interest. I latched onto behaviorism  but have since moved onto a more neuroscientific perspective. I've studied philosophy of mind intensely  and often think about the relationship between philosophy of mind and neuropsychology. I'm interested in big questions, such as what the mind is and what personality is, which are things I could not have begun to think about in any serious detail just a couple of years ago. There is much yet to be learned, and new findings happen every day. Psychology has become ever more intertwined with neuroscience, cellular biology, and evolutionary biology. I hope for a successful future, and while I have to credit myself for my dedication, I have had wonderful professors who have given me guidance and encouragement and a wonderful education. I'm forever in their debt.

An Update

It has been a while since I have posted, mostly because I have been busy with schooling. This semester I am tutoring research methods as well as conducting research as a research assistant.


Stay tuned, I will update more when I have the time.