Fascinante artículo sobre las bases científicas de la fuerza de voluntad y el autocontrol. Es cuestión de ¡azúcar!

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” … That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

John Tierney en The New York Times (no es que merezca la pena leerlo entero, es que es muy entretenido de leer). Tengo la intuición de que esto tiene que ver con la eficiencia o ineficiencia del multitasking. A lo mejor, lo que perdemos en concentración, lo ganamos en ahorro de autocontrol y de gasto de “fuerza de voluntad”. Cambiar de tarea brevemente nos evita tener que hacer un esfuerzo de autocontrol para terminar el trabajo con el que estamos. Por tanto, si sabemos que la distracción es breve, reservamos fuerza de voluntad para terminar el trabajo que hemos abandonado momentáneamente.

La inteligencia de los grupos

En Niemanlab: sobre los resultados de un grupo de trabajo en el MIT

“The average intelligence of the people in the group and the maximum intelligence of the people in the group doesn’t predict group intelligence,”

So how do you engineer groups that can problem-solve effectively? First of all, seed them with, basically, caring people. Group intelligence is correlated, Malone and his colleagues found, with the average social sensitivity — the openness, and receptiveness, to others — of a group’s constituents. The emotional intelligence of group members, in other words, serves the cognitive intelligence of the group overall. And this means that — wait for it — groups with more women tend to be smarter than groups with more men. (As Malone put it: “More females, more intelligence.”) That’s largely mediated by the researchers’ social sensitivity findings: Women tend to be more socially sensitive than men — per Science! — which means that, overall, more women = more emotional intelligence = more group intelligence.

Individual intelligence is fairly constant, and, in that, almost impossible to change. Group intelligence, though, Malone’s findings suggest, can be manipulated — and so, if you understand what makes groups smart, you can adjust their factors to make them even smarter. The age-old question in sociology is whether groups are somehow different, and greater, than the sum of their parts. And the answer, based on Malone’s and other findings, seems to be “yes.” The trick now is figuring out why that’s so, and how the mechanics of the collective may be put to productive use. Measuring group intelligence, in other words, is the first step in increasing group intelligence.

Se me ocurre que puede haber explicaciones evolutivas para esa mayor inteligencia colectiva de las mujeres si pensamos en los seres humanos como grupos de cazadores-recolectores.

Fascinante (The Economist)

Cómo las feromonas organizan el trabajo en equipo de las hormigas.

Ants solve their own version using chemical signals called pheromones. When an ant finds food, she takes it back to the nest, leaving behind a pheromone trail that will attract others. The more ants that follow the trail, the stronger it becomes. The pheromones evaporate quickly, however, so once all the food has been collected, the trail soon goes cold. Moreover, this rapid evaporation means long trails are less attractive than short ones, all else being equal. Pheromones thus amplify the limited intelligence of the individual ants into something more powerful.

Y cómo su racionalización puede hacer más eficientes las redes de distribución reduciendo los trayectos

In 1992 Dr Dorigo and his group began developing Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO), an algorithm that looks for solutions to a problem by simulating a group of ants wandering over an area and laying down pheromones. ACO proved good at solving travelling-salesman-type problems. Since then it has grown into a whole family of algorithms, which have been applied to many practical questions. Its most successful application is in logistics. Migros, a Swiss supermarket chain, and Barilla, Italy’s leading pasta-maker, both manage their daily deliveries from central warehouse to local retailers using AntRoute. This is a piece of software developed by AntOptima, a spin-off from the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Lugano (IDSIA), one of Europe’s leading centres for swarm intelligence. Every morning, the software’s “ants” calculate the best routes and delivery sequences, depending on the quantity of cargo, its destinations, delivery windows and available lorries. According to Luca Gambardella, the director of both ISDIA and AntOptima, it takes 15 minutes to produce a delivery plan for 1,200 trucks, even though the plan changes almost every day.

Neurociencias y Derecho

A través de Kedrosky, una colección de documentos breves que exponen el estado actual de las neurociencias en un lenguaje comprensible para el lego. Reproduzco algunos párrafos que relacionan estos estudios con el Derecho aunque los documentos merecen ser leídos enteros (las conexiones neuronales no se completan hasta los 20 años de vida)

Delitos de peligro cuyas penas se agravan cuando se ha actualizado el daño para el bien jurídico. ¿Por qué si no hay diferencia en cuanto a la culpabilidad?

Punishment also seems to fulfil a second function (además de la disuasoria), in satisfying the human need for justice. Legal systems do not seem to only sanction the amplitude of deviance but also the severity of the  consequences of deviant behaviour. Crossing a red light without causing an accident may lead to a temporary loss of the driver’s license. However, if the consequence is a severe accident with casualties, the punishment tends to bemuch more severe, even though the deviant behaviour, the ‘subjective guilt’, was exactly the same.

Los que cometen delitos horrorosos tienen siempre una alteración cerebral

If a person has committed what is considered to be cold blooded murder in order to obtain some benefit and a tumour is discovered in his frontal lobe, extenuating conditions may be granted. One might argue that this tumour disrupted the pathways that link the storage site of moral values with the inhibitory centres that would normally prevent the fatal action. From a neurobiological point of view, however, one might argue that any person capable of committing such a crime must always have some abnormalities in the functional architecture of his or her brain, even if this abnormality is not detectable with current technologies. Genetic dispositions could have limited the storage capacity of the networks in which moral values and imperatives get stored, or they may have led to abnormally weak control mechanisms for the inhibition of actions. The same abnormalities may have been caused by developmental mishaps, insufficient installation of moral imperatives through education, or deficient inhibitory mechanisms due to lack of training during brain maturation. If all these features of the functional architecture are actually in the normal range, then one would have to assume temporary abnormalities in the system’s dynamics, for instance caused by metabolic disturbances, or by some highly unlikely but still possible deviations of the brain’s dynamics…Thus, members of our society who had the misfortune to possess a brain which ended up at the negative end of a normal distribution should have our empathy. But does this exempt our society from its duty to protect all its members and to define what is tolerable and what is not?

No, pero sí que debería hacernos cambiar las justificaciones para la imposición de las penas.

Cómo empezamos a tener sentimientos

Consider an animal (including a human) that has started eating some rotten, fetid, disgusting food. As a result, neurons in an area of the brain called the insula will activate. Gustatory disgust. Smell the same awful food, and the insula activates as well. Think about what might count as a disgusting food (say, taking a bite out of a struggling cockroach). Same thing.

Now read in the newspaper about a saintly old widow who had her home foreclosed by a sleazy mortgage company, her medical insurance canceled on flimsy grounds, and got a lousy, exploitative offer at the pawn shop where she tried to hock her kidney dialysis machine. You sit there thinking, those bastards, those people are scum, they’re worse than maggots, they make me want to puke … and your insula activates. Think about something shameful and rotten that you once did … same thing. Not only does the insula “do” sensory disgust; it does moral disgust as well. Because the two are so viscerally similar. When we evolved the capacity to be disgusted by moral failures, we didn’t evolve a new brain region to handle it. Instead, the insula expanded its portfolio.