London Blog Day 53: 'Lemming Crowd Syndrome'

LeBon (1985) saw the crowd as a social structure where individual transform into the primitive, irrational state of a mass of people, characterised by loss of self control, anonymity of the individual, primitive behaviour, suggestibility and a collective mind. A dominant notion here, by analogy with a disease, was that of mental contagion or the spread of emotion. LeBon, like a number of crowd theorists who followed, was concerned with social unrest and the apparent mob-like state of agitated crowds.

I like to think about crowd more in context of ‘Lemming crowd syndrome’ ('Lemming syndrome' as a term is reserved for a cultural context, so I redefine it here slightly). It’s not that you become absolutely mindless and irrational like LeBon suggested, it’s more that you options become limited – specifically your behavioural options. For example, in a busy London street you can try to resist the urge to cross the pedestrian walk on red light when the crowd around you suddenly starts moving, but it’s likely that you will follow them anyway. The rapid movement of crowd makes the option of waiting on red much less attractive. This doesn’t work in Poland of course, where you get fined for crossing the street on red…

‘Lemming Crowd syndrome’ doesn’t only apply to simple directional aspects. You might feel uncomfortable if you act against crowd mental behaviour too. Recently I joined extremely busy train from Bath Spa to London Paddington on Sunday afternoon. The train was obviously overbooked, a mass of people crowded in the passages, lots of backpacks and baggage’s (it was Bath Festival weekend). I didn’t book a ticket in advance. You know how this advance booking works – sits which are taken have a small display that tells you from which station they are taken. There are also free sits for those who bought the ticket on the train station last minute. I had a big backpack, it was very hot, and I had a nasty cold. Normally, I would conform but this time something cracked. I started walking/crawling towards the end of the train. People were not happy, but nobody said anything. I am small enough to pass even through most ridiculous bag barrier, so I slowly progressed through 3 coaches. Not bad. But so far all sits were taken everywhere. I reached the final coach. Two guys, rugby-size, blocking the entrance. I am trying to pass, one is asking ‘do you have a sit booked there?’, I said ‘yes’ with surprised certainty, but feeling extremely uncomfortable lying and they let me pass. There was one sit in this couch booked from Bath, but not taken. I dropped my bag on the overhead, and joined the table, smiling with a certain guilt displayed on my face. Everyone at the table looked at me with suspicion, or if not – I definitely felt like they were. I was stressed for another 10 minutes until we stopped in some smaller station (Chippenham), nobody joined there, and that was it – I got a sit all the way to Paddington (almost 2 hours trip mind you).

What was interesting about this is how this massive crowd set the behavioural rules for the train, blocking passages, and even enquiring me, whether I follow some non-existent crowd ethics – that is exactly what I mean by Lemming syndrome. It was a combination of attribution bias, cognitive dissonance and blind obedience. The limited space, limited options and large crowd worked as perfect decision blocker. And how uncomfortable I felt going against it was just a final prove.

I am sure you got you own stories of ‘Lemming Crowd syndrome’. Share some if you do.

Behind Motion In Social.

About six weeks ago I started a small side project - creating website that would gradually evolve into communicating research I do in Psychology, sharing knowledge and resources related with research and creating platform for running online experiments (this part coming soon). The project debuted last week as Motion In Social. Let's do a bit of deconstruction for the reasons behind this project.

It all started when I was writing one of my current papers. I don't like writing scientific papers. I did advertising in the past, and writing papers is all that is against the rules of writing for advertising:

1. There is a stiff formal tone, rather than easy conversational one.

2. Use of big words is impressive, instead of using common terms.

3. You need to write the certain number of words to make a point, instead of writing as short as possible. 4. And finally - the format matters as much (or more) as the content, which is actually quite true for advertising too, but I think it is sometimes overloaded in the case of papers.

So I got into the point when I had a vomiting reaction the moment I saw word processor greeting screen loading my paper draft. That's where I thought -  that's wrong, what can I do to avoid it, to make it more pleasant experience for myself. That's how Motion In Social was conceived.

The reasoning is based on a simple principle from psychology - collaborative learning and presentation boosts the effects of learning. There are tones of studies showing that it is easier to learn something, when you learn it in a group, comparing to when you learn it alone. It boosts your motivation, attention, memory and generally makes learning a deeper, more meaningful experience. Speaking simply - sharing your learning resources is better both for you and others. So the primary goal of Motion In Social became sharing and communicating my research with others. Through this I knew I will gain better motivation and insight into my own research.

So I went online and looked for examples of good academic research websites. I quickly realised that internet is full of dead websites from academics, with outdated information that was copied-and-pasted from paper abstracts, badly positioned graphics and horrible psychedelic layout. I quickly realised that 90% of academic websites are really bad.

The first thing I noticed there - too much text that was too complex to understand. That's how I came out with 66 words rule - ANY paragraph written in my website would be no longer than 66 words. This is on average about 10 seconds of reading time. All the difficult words would be explained in separate section or referenced to relevant Wikipedia links. Every project described would be accompanied by results figures, sample movies and images.

Than I knew I need to get it out to the people. I could have created forum, but isn't just better to stand on the shoulder of giants and connect Motion In Social with every possible social network out there? That's how Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and Mendeley channels were created, together with RSS feeds. Upcoming soon is YouTube channel for movies and maybe Flicker as well to share photos, but I need to think how to creatively use those two options.

At this point, I feel like I have achieved my goal with Motion In Social. I now have a different perspective on the projects I am doing, they are more alive, and somehow I feel more responsible for their content. Writing is suddenly more exciting because I immediately think "how could I tell this story to people online?". But the project is not finish, it will evolve more gradually as I progress with my work. One thing is to find a way to get people involve more, so Motion In Social will be launch platform for discussion. It's also about making things easier and better to navigate, and there is a still long way to go to achieve ( I am not a web designer ;). The amazing thing is that we have all the necessary information and resources available online to create amazing things, and it's such a great opportunity, that we can't ignore it.

Coming Back via Information Overload

We are currently spending around 23% of our online time on social network sites (Nielsen Internet, 2010). It's a 7% increase since last year this time. As such, social networking sites jump to the top of the list of online activities. Second most popular activity is playing online games (10%) and third - checking e-mail (8.3%). People spend more time on Facebook and Twitter and playing FarmVille, than browsing Google or searching videos online. It's a biggest shift of online trends in years. 

We have on average 22 apps on our phones, from which 33% know our location, and 14% access our contacts (App Genome Project, 2010).  

Browsing internet on iPad is better for your cognitive system (here defined as 'level of disorientation' and 'cognitive load') than browsing internet on your desktop computer. Demirbilek found that subject using the tiled-windows (tablet) interface were significantly less disoriented than subjects using an overlapping-windows interface. He also found that participants working with overlapping windows were substantially more likely to experience cognitive overload than those working with tiled windows (Demirbilek et al., 2010).

FDA has approved bionic telescopic eye implant (photo above). In clinical testing from VisionCare Ophthalmic  70% of over 200 patients "had their vision improve from severe or profound impairment to moderate impairment" (VisionCare, 2010).

Apple released their worst iPhone ever (see also Antenna-gate), and Amazon released their best Kindle so far. Both companies sold out within day or two.

Nintendo will release 3D version of their handheld console that won't require any special glasses, potentially starting a new revolution in 3D entertainment. Or bringing it down.

Violent dreams may indicate developing brain disease (Boeve et al., 2010).

Medical use of marihuana is having it's momentum, with research wide-spreading from multiple sklerosis and cancer to inflammation and anxiety (Seppa et al., 2010).

And the information chaos just keeps flowing through my mind... 

[photo credit: VisionCare]

Size of your brain striatum predicts computer game skills.

In the fresh paper from January issue of Cerebral Cortex, authors argue that the size of your striatal volume (indicated in procedural learning and cognitive flexibility) predicts video game skill acquisition. They asked participants with different levels of gaming experience to play Space Fortress and their measured their brain volumetry using MRI. They've found that people with bigger dorsal striatum were overall better in performance and their performance improved with learning quicker than people with smaller striatum. Additionally, hippocampal areas (implicated in declarative memory) didn't predict learning improvement, suggesting lack of experience effect (interesting...). Those results suggest that there might be some major brain size effect for procedural learning and cognitive flexibility in general. I'm just wondering if there is any task specific effect related with playing computer games, so it would be nice to test participants with different other cognitive tasks (like some IQ test) to see if there is any correlation in such cases as well. You can read the paper here. Discuss ;-)

You brain can process only 150 Facebook friends.

I am back to my geek space for a moment after busy week of massive literature search/review I am doing. So today - some science stuff for change.

First - something for Facebook freaks - a theory by Professor Robin Dunbar from Oxford Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology. The thing is about to get publish so I can't give you the full paper reference, but the idea goes like this: we have in the brain area called neocortex, responsible for processing complex thought and language (probably). However, the volume of neocortex is limited, and therefore we are only able to actively manage social circles of about 150 friends.

Social circle is defined by Dunbar as "relationships where a person knows how each friend relates to every other friend". Dunbar calculated this number when he surveyed such social circles as Neolithic farming villages, unit sizes in Roman armies and even non-primates groups. It seem that when the circles go larger than 150, then some part of links deteriorate and stagnate. Now, he is arguing that the same rule ('Dunbar number') works for online social groups like Facebook. He showed that you can have as much as 1000 friends, but you actively manage only about 150 of them anyway. There is a gender difference here: females communicate more via Facebook and manage their circles more than males (surprise?).

I am reluctant to agree, there are so many other factors that could determine our social circle management skills (e.g. personality traits like 'openness' or 'extraversion', level of anxiety). But I acknowledge the fact that we have a limited cognitive capacity which could effect managing our social circles. What do you think?

[image credit: Geek On Acid with shitty and broken camera]

Record Your Unconscious Mind with 'The Psychosqope'

A device that every respected psychodynamic therapist dreamt about has now became a reality.

A device that is an answer to Freud's and Jung's search for unconscious diagnosis emerged from the calculation power of the vacuum lamp.

The Psychosqope - a machine for recording the unconscious mind.

The Psychosqope consists of two parts - the Vacuum-Sonic Unconsciousness Sampler (VSUS) and the Subprojective Nonperception Test (SNT).

The VSUS is highly advanced device designed to detect Rorschach Waves' emitted by any unconscious mind/monad. Rorschach Waves were normally difficult to read, due to interference with electrical brain waves and some external frequencies. However, by using combination of subsonic reading of sound waves generated by unconscious monad and combing it with the calculation power of vaccum lamp processor, the VSUS is able to extract Rorschach Waves from the spectral chaos of energy and combine this information into a meaningful diagnosis.


The VSUS is used only with specially designed Subprojective Nonperception Test (SNT). SNT is heavily based on the Rorschach Test and Alcohol Stimulation Theory. SNT can't be described here due to make sure it doesn't leak into the collective unconsciousness, biasing the results of the diagnosis.


The Psychosqope has been fully attested to apply in psychological diagnosis and research.


The first global presentation of 'The Psychosqope' will take place in this year Steampunk Conference 'Nordcon' by its creator - Psychomechanikus Piveq.

[photo credit: geek on acid]

Woman Addicted to Brain Implant

I have been organizing my papers over the weekend and I found this 1986 paper from Pain journal which describes the first ever case recorded of a woman addicted to deep brain stimulation implant.

The described patient (48 years old) has been suffering from chronic pain for over 15 years, with a recorded history of heavy addiction to opium-based painkillers and alcohol. It was established by psychiatrists that the best course of treatment for the pain would be to use an implant located in thalamus. Indeed, during the self-stimulation the pain has been removed, but as a unexpected side effect, she has been also experiencing an erotic sensation (although without orgasm).

As a result, she started stimulating herself throughout the day, neglecting family commitments and personal hygiene. She also developed ulceration on the top of her finger used to adjust the amplitude dial for brain implant. Over the two years after the implant was installed, her compulsive use of the stimulation dial has been associated with 'frequent attacks of anxiety, depersonalization, periods of psychogenic polydipsia and virtually complete inactivity' [1]. She also developed a heart disturbance (paroxysmal atrial tachycardia).

I read this paper thinking about those experiments with rats who pressed button every second to produce the pleasant stimulation via brain implant, until they died from exhaustion. How closely related we are all in the animal kingdom...

[1] Potenoy, R. K., Jarden, J. O., Sidtis, J. J., Lipton, R. B., Foley K. M., Rottenberg, D. A. (1986) Compulsive Thalamic Self-Stimulation: a Case with Metabolic, Electrophysical and Behavioral Correlates. Pain 27: 277-290. [you can access this paper for free here]