Sensation_The New Science of Physical Intelligence

by Thalma Lobel

  It is a fact that more crimes are committed at night than during the day. The same street is usually safer in daylight than in the dark. To protect ourselves, we are told not to park our cars in remote places at night, not to walk alone at night, and not to go to the ATM machine at 2:00 a.m. All these warnings assume that at night we have to take additional precautions. A simple way to decrease criminal activity and reduce fears of crime has been to increase street lighting at night. Of course, it is easier for a criminal to act in the dark, where he’s less conspicuous. But people might also be more inclined to behave immorally in the dark even when the darkness is not related to being noticed or discovered and does not facilitate the immoral behavior in any practical way. In other words, it is possible that the metaphorical association between darkness and immoral behavior affects crime statistics.

  A group of researchers invited college students to participate in an experiment examining this possibility.9 They divided the students into two groups: one group sat in a room full of light (with twelve fluorescent lights), while the other group sat in a dim room (with only four fluorescent lights). All the students received twenty matrices, and for each matrix they were asked to find two numbers that added up to 10. The students were given five minutes to complete this task and received fifty cents for each pair they found. In fact, five minutes was not long enough to solve twenty matrices; finishing the task was impossible.

  At the end of the task, the students were asked to write down on a separate piece of paper how many matrices they had solved, to drop their own performance reports into a box, and to collect the appropriate payment. Since their names were not written on the matrix sheets, the students believed there was no way to trace their actual performance and they could easily cheat. In fact, the researchers had developed a way to trace actual performance and compare it with reported performance, so they would know if the students had cheated. There was no difference in the actual performance of the two groups, but the group sitting in the dimly lit room cheated more than the group who sat in the well-lit one.

  You might dismiss this finding as insignificant, thinking that it is easier for students to cheat in a dim room, where they think they will not be caught because there is less chance of being seen. But this is not the case here, because the students in both rooms were sure that there was no way to trace their actual performance and that no one would know if they had cheated. It seems then that the association between darkness and immoral behavior and between light and moral behavior affects our actual behavior. The study suggests that even if someone is alone in a room and absolutely anonymous, darkness still promotes more cheating. Psychologically, we are more susceptible to cheating in a dim room, or, to say it differently, we are less likely to cheat in a room full of light.

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  Other behaviors might also be influenced by the amount of light in the environment. The same researchers conducted an experiment in which they investigated whether the experience of darkness is related to unfair and selfish behavior. They divided their participants into two groups: those in one group were asked to wear sunglasses, while the other group wore clear glasses. The participants were then asked to play the Dictator Game, which is often used in psychological experiments to examine fairness and morality. In this game there are two players: one is the initiator, and one is the recipient. The initiator receives a certain amount of money and decides how much of it she will give to the recipient. The recipient in turn can choose to accept or reject the money. The idea behind the Dictator Game is that the more money you give as an initiator, the less selfish you are. A “fair share” would be half of the money. For the study, however, all the participants were given the role of initiator and got to decide how much money they’d give. They interacted via computer and could not see the other players.

  Those who wore sunglasses, shading their view of the world, gave less money to the other person than those who wore clear glasses. Furthermore, those wearing sunglasses gave much less than what was fair, taking most of the money for themselves. Those with the clear glasses were fairer, giving about half of the money to the other person.

  These results are definitely not trivial. But why should something as harmless as wearing sunglasses affect our moral behavior? The participants were sitting alone in the room and interacting via computer. Wearing sunglasses simply gave them an environmental cue of darkness; they would have remained anonymous whether or not they’d worn dark glasses. Yet, seeing the world as darker degraded moral behavior, just as the metaphors suggest. Darkness, or a darker view of the world around us, can lead to “darker” impulses.

  Does It Have to Be So Black and White?

  If brightness and darkness indeed influence our judgment, behavior, and emotions, then we should give more thought to the brightness of our environment. In order to brighten up your life, think about the rooms in which you regularly spend your time: your bedroom, your office, your living room. Do you usually open the curtains or blinds? What about the kids’ rooms? Research has shown that these small details can have a great influence on your quality of life.

  When Norman E. Rosenthal, a South African physician, moved to New York in the 1980s to continue his medical training, he noticed that he became less energetic in the winter. Being accustomed to sunny Johannesburg, Rosenthal suspected that the change in his mood and energy levels was related to the decreased exposure to sunlight he experienced in wintertime New York.

  Around the same time, Rosenthal and his colleagues were doing research at the National Institute of Mental Health. In 1984 they noticed that people tend to experience depressive symptoms during certain seasons, year after year. Rosenthal called this now well-established phenomenon seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and it is known to be related to the light-dark cycles of the seasons and to affect our mental and physical processes.

  Most researchers believe that SAD symptoms are caused by lack of exposure to natural light. Seasonal affective disorder occurs more often in the winter and is particularly notable in places with fewer hours of daylight, such as New England and Scandinavia. It is found less in Florida and Southern California, where people have more light hours. The most common treatment is phototherapy: exposure to artificial bright light, which mimics natural sunlight and has been shown to improve patients’ moods, most likely because light affects biological and chemical processes in our bodies.

  It is interesting that the influence of light is not restricted to clinical disorders. For example, a group of Canadian researchers10 asked forty-eight individuals to wear a light meter on their wrist for twenty days in winter and/or summer and recorded their behaviors, moods, and interactions. Participants reported better mood and more positive interactions when they were exposed to bright light. This was true regardless of the season or the time of day. In another study, a group of researchers from Finland, where there are prolonged periods of darkness, found that workers who were exposed to bright light during their normal night shifts reported an improvement in their well-being.11 The popular allure of a sunny tropical vacation during the dark winter months has to be due partly to the increased light, which improves mood and sociability.

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  After we lived in Cambridge for four years, my family and I returned to Israel, where I got my tenure-track position in the Psychology Department at Tel Aviv University. I was so thrilled to have landed the job that I didn’t ask for a window office or a big laboratory, unlike today’s young professors. My office, like the offices of all the other new professors, was a windowless room, completely dark unless you turned on the only light fixture, a fluorescent tube whose light was a far cry from natural daylight. Whenever I turned the key in the lock and stepped into my office, it was pitch-black. Even after I turned on the light, it seemed dark.

  Those first years at my job were difficult. “Publish or perish” is not just a saying. I had to publish my research work in high-quality international journals in order to receive tenure and the security that goes with
it. I was extremely stressed, with three small children and a husband who worked as a medical doctor until late at night and was not around much to help with the kids. I went to the office every day and spent my time writing articles, instructing students, and preparing lectures. I did not feel good there for a long time and remember sitting in that office as feeling overwhelmingly negative. At the time, I attributed this negativity to the situation: always working under pressure, doing my best to earn tenure, and trying to raise my kids at the same time.

  I got my tenure, and a year later I was given a nicer office, a normal room with large windows. Since the sun shines nearly all year in Israel, the office was almost always bright. Even though I knew I had this job for as long as I wanted it, I was ambitious and wanted to be promoted to associate professor and then to full professor, so I had to continue working hard and publishing in respected journals. The children were still young, my husband still did not help much, and life was still very stressful, but I definitely felt better, brighter, and much happier once I moved into my new office. Even though I had been pleased when my tenure came through, I still had negative feelings whenever I sat in that dark, windowless office—until I moved to my new, bright office.

  At the time, sitting in that dark room, experiencing the difficulties of academic life, I did not believe that the office itself was an issue. That dark office had been private and quiet, a refuge where I could sit, read, and write. It was a dream come true! Besides, in those early days of my career, there was nothing much I could do about the situation. I had been given that office, and I had to work there. But the dark definitely added to my gloomy emotional experience. I believe now that had I been sitting in a bright office, my life in the department would have seemed brighter. When I recall these days now, I still relive the stressful feelings I associate with the darkness of the room.

  In your daily life you can take many opportunities to improve your mood. Expose yourself to sunlight by opening windows or going outside—even for just a few minutes. Even if you do like to sit in a room with the blinds drawn and only the light of a single reading lamp, the studies in this chapter clearly demonstrate that if you want things to seem more positive, you should brighten up your room. When you see that your children are in a bad mood, take them outside for some activity in the sunlight. It’s a simple solution. Try to prevent your kids from sitting for hours in a semidark room, with only the dim light of the computer, video games, or a cell phone. Even if they say they like the dark, you now know that this darkness may unconsciously affect their mood and judgment and make them perceive their environment and the world around them negatively. If you have moody teens, ask yourself if they are getting enough light.

  Even though I know about the effects of darkness from my own experience, when I am down in the dumps I still prefer to sequester myself in a semidark room, but whenever I resist that urge and make myself go out into the sun instead, I feel much better. When you are in a bad mood, take a walk, get outside. Then sit in a favorite café in an open space, if possible close to a body of water. I know that my spirits are soothed and my mood is improved mainly because I am looking at the sea and listening to the waves, but I now know that it is also the bright light of the sun that helps me see things in a more positive way. It will help you too.

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  I http://persci.mit.edu/gallery/checkershadow.

  Space, the Mental Frontier: Physical and Psychological Distance

  When I talk about our position in space, I’m not talking about a grand, galactic view of the universe that requires we visit a planetarium. No doubt such a visit would be interesting, but that is not my area of expertise. Here I’m referring to our own personal space. Without our noticing it, how we occupy space—whether we sit high or low, far from or close to others, and whether we take up a lot of space or only a little—influences our judgments and behaviors in the most amazing ways.

  The notion that the orientation of objects and people in space is significant is not new. Practitioners of feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of harmonious architecture and interior decoration, believe that we can improve our lives by optimally positioning people, objects, and buildings in our environment. Exactly where we choose to sit in a room is considered of utmost importance in determining our success and well-being. For example, it is believed that it is better to sit with one’s back to the wall, facing as much of the room as possible; and if many people occupy the room, it is best for everyone to be able to see everyone else. Although these suggestions are rooted in traditional Chinese beliefs about the universe rather than in experimental evidence, the practice of feng shui has been adopted by many Western designers and architects to good effect and to their clients’ satisfaction.

  The relationship of physical distance to psychological distance was suggested more than sixty years ago in a now classic study by Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back, who examined how physical proximity affects friendships.1 Specifically, they investigated how physical closeness between the rooms in MIT dorms influenced residents’ feelings about each other and found that friendship was related to physical closeness. Residents in the dorms more often categorized residents who lived close to them as friends.

  The fact that we often befriend our neighbors is not really big news. All other things being equal, it makes perfect sense that the nearer two people are physically, the greater the chance they will be friends. It is simply easier to get to know each other and to interact when we live or work nearby. Although we would like to believe that we choose friends on the basis of their values and characteristics, we can admit that proximity plays a major role. Physical distance matters, and people become friends with their next-door neighbors more often than with those who live one block away. People often become long-term friends with those who slept in the bunk next to them at summer camp or in the army. The reverse is also true, as many of us experience the drifting apart of long-distance relationships and friendships.

  However, the question I want to raise in this chapter is more complicated: Can physical distance activate the abstract concepts of emotional distance? Do metaphors such as close relations, emotional distance, and we grew apart suggest that emotional distance is rooted in physical distance?

  In an episode of Seinfeld, Elaine has a new boyfriend whom Jerry calls a “close talker”—that is, a person who stands too close to others when speaking with them. Jerry hates this man’s behavior and suggests that everyone should know what a proper conversational distance is. Seinfeld expresses a common reaction: we don’t usually like “close talkers” who invade our personal space, and we all have an optimal distance from others that we maintain, a personal space in which we feel comfortable. This personal space has many layers or zones. The closest layer, or intimate zone, is reserved for people who are very close to us, like our partners and children. The next layer, or personal zone, is the distance we keep when talking with good friends. Then there is the social zone, or the distance we keep from people we don’t know, such as salespeople or strangers who approach us to ask a question.

  I was sitting in a small falafel place the other day when a stranger leaned in until his face was very close to mine to ask me how the falafel was. I was very uncomfortable, to the point of feeling threatened by his invasion of my personal space. On the other hand, if my granddaughter had done the same thing, I would have been completely comfortable.

  Scientists have long believed that the discomfort we feel when our personal space is violated is an evolutionary adaptation designed to alert us when another person is close enough to do bodily harm. Recently, however, neurologists have located the part of our brain that apparently controls this response: the amygdala, which is located in the temporal lobes. Researchers at Caltech had the rare opportunity to study the role of the amygdala in governing the notion of personal space when they encountered a woman, referred to in the study as S.M., with extensive amygdala lesions.2 The researchers put the woman through a series of tests and found tha
t S.M.’s idea of “too close” is far closer than that of her average peers. The Caltech scientists then conducted a series of tests on subjects whose amygdalas were not impaired and, using MRI scanning, found that normal amygdalas lit up when researchers stood too close, even when the subjects could not see the offending parties.

  Another group of researchers found that people whose personal space is invaded want to assert their individuality and to separate themselves from others.3 In one study, students were divided into two groups: those in one group sat in the front part of the room and relatively far from one another; those in the other group sat in the rear, crowded together. All participants were given a task that was unrelated to the study, after which those who sat in the rear of the room were asked to move to the front for the next experiment, ostensibly because the computers at the back of the room were not working. Participants in the crowded group from the rear of the room were asked to sit very close to their new neighbors in the front. Once everyone was reseated, the researchers measured the participants’ willingness to stand out from others by asking them to imagine that they were shopping online and to choose among four T-shirts that were identical in all aspects except for the color of the logos printed on the shirts. Three T-shirts had a blue logo that differed somewhat in hue, and one T-shirt had a distinctive orange logo.

  After choosing their T-shirts, participants were asked three questions that measured their feelings about their neighbors: Did they feel close to them, comfortable sitting with them, and similar to them? The students who had not moved but who were joined by those who came from the rear of the room felt more negatively about their neighbors now that they were crowded together than they had when they were not crowded. However, this was not true of those who had moved from the rear to the front. They did not feel that their space had been invaded since they had had to relocate, and had more positive feelings about their neighbors.