Author: Leonardo Christov-Moore

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Can Aesthetic Chills Make Us More Generous? A Dictator Game Study

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E4001, Musings

For one of our recent studies, we brought participants to the lab where they were presented with a series of auditory stimuli proven to cause chills in over 2/3 of the population while we recorded their neural and physiological data. Participants then completed tasks examining their post-intervention feelings, perspective-taking, and reactions to moral dilemmas, as well as ecologically valid tests of their non-strategic generosity (measured by costly sharing with real members of the LA community).

Prior to the study, all participants underwent an extensive battery of measures including:

These measures helped replicate prior findings in a single on-site study and assess both the independent effects of our intervention and the mediating effects of individual trait differences, which will help us better personalize future interventions and studies.

On the day of the study, participants were exposed to three chills-inducing stimuli that we have shown in over 7,000 diverse subjects across multiple countries to cause chills in approximately 75% of participants. Half of the participants additionally received a chills-augmenting intervention delivered by our patented frisson device strapped to their back, which delivers a cold stimulus along the spine timed to precise points where our previous studies showed chills were most likely to occur.

During the intervention, we recorded participants’ heart rate, skin conductance, and neural signals via scalp electrodes. While analysis of these signals is ongoing, our main hypothesis is that signal changes associated with psychedelic states of self-transcendence should be present in response to chills and should mediate the intervention’s transformative effects.

Post-intervention, participants reported their levels of self-transcendence and mood, were tested again on their maladaptive schemas, and engaged in two tasks designed to assess their actual helping decisions:

  1. Moral dilemmas task: Participants made difficult choices about moral situations where the welfare of the few was weighed against the welfare of many. Through process dissociation, we extracted two independent measures of moral decision-making: deontological inclination (the drive to avoid harm regardless of circumstances) and utilitarian inclination (the drive to maximize welfare for the maximum number of people).
  2. Dictator game: This task measured non-strategic generosity by having participants share money at their discretion with real community members, anonymously and without supervision. The task was designed so participants knew their decisions would affect real people using real money, but that no one involved with the experiment would review their decisions or know their choices.

We administered the dictator game two weeks before the on-site visit and again after the chills task to examine:

  • Whether the chills-augmenting intervention causes more chills
  • Whether chills augmentation leads to greater downstream self-transcendence and generosity
  • Whether getting chills causes increases in self-transcendence and generosity independently of augmentation
  • Whether getting chills mediates the intervention’s effect

While detailed analysis of these behavioral measures and their relationships is ongoing, we can report our primary findings:

  1. Those in the frisson-augmented condition showed greater aversion to harming others in moral dilemmas, and showed less maladaptive beliefs related to emotional deprivation. 
  2. Those who experienced chills behaved more generously toward high income avatars (toward whom participants are generally less generous), in other words, they were more generally egalitarian across conditions.
  3. The more chills participants experienced, the more connected they felt to others, and the more motivated they felt to help others and live in a virtuous way. 

Our task over the next several months is to qualify, situate, and disentangle the reasons for these main effects. We’ll determine who was more prone to respond to our intervention and what other downstream beliefs and states were changed that might explain increased generosity after these extraordinary experiences.

This will inform ongoing studies to better personalize interventions, as well as complex systems-based simulations to help us understand how democratizing such experiences could change society and culture.

Stay tuned!

*As described to our participants, we have calculated the amount of money shared with each LA community member, and they are being compensated as this post is being drafted.

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Aesthetic Chills and Self-Transcendence: Another step toward the democratization of mystical experience

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E4001, Manuscript, Proceedings

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Self-transcendence accompanies aesthetic chills

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Christov-Moore, L., Schoeller, F., Lynch, C., Sacchet, M., & Reggente, N. (2024). Self-transcendence accompanies aesthetic chills. PLOS Mental Health, 1(5), e0000125. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000125

Christov-Moore, Leonardo, et al. “Self-transcendence accompanies aesthetic chills.” PLOS Mental Health, vol. 1, no. 5, Oct. 2024, p. e0000125. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000125.

@article{Christov-Moore_Schoeller_Lynch_Sacchet_Reggente_2024, title={Self-transcendence accompanies aesthetic chills}, volume={1}, url={https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000125}, DOI={10.1371/journal.pmen.0000125}, number={5}, journal={PLOS Mental Health}, author={Christov-Moore, Leonardo and Schoeller, Felix and Lynch, Caitlin and Sacchet, Matthew and Reggente, Nicco}, year={2024}, month=oct, pages={e0000125}, language={en} }


Some of the smallest things are the most important. These small, important things and events can escape our notice and study for a long time. They are special precisely because they are small and, paradoxically, everywhere. An incredibly important and heretofore unknown component of the human circulatory system went unnoticed until just the last decade, despite thousands of years of studying human anatomy, because it was wispy, small, and everywhere. Such is the case with the aesthetic chills phenomenon, which few people even think to name or pay attention to, yet which all of us experience. In our search to democratize non-ordinary, mystical, transformative experiences, it may prove to be a key ally—a living biological demonstration of the fact that aesthetics began not in commerce, but in religion and our encounter with the transcendent.

Over the last year, our lab has found that aesthetic chills can not only be reliably evoked, but they also show many of the classical properties of transformative psychedelic experiences. They seem to alleviate depressive symptoms, maybe even reverse maladaptive, deep-seated beliefs, and seem deeply tied to our deepest beliefs and insights. In this study, we sought to examine whether the experience of aesthetic chills could, in fact, bear the characteristics of a tiny, self-transcendent, mystical experience.

To investigate this, we exposed 3,000 people from all over California to a series of songs, videos, and speeches that previous studies had found to consistently cause chills in a majority of people examined. We had them fill out questionnaires that examined their demographic qualities, personality traits, proneness to religious experiences and thinking, and even their political orientation. Then we showed them the video or song and had them fill out another series of questionnaires, assessing their mood, asking them whether they got chills and how intense they were, and importantly, asking if they experienced any of the classical three components of a crucial state known as self-transcendence.

A brief aside on what self-transcendence is: first coined in the 1980s within nursing literature, it was a trait used to describe a state or proclivity that seemed to correlate with and predict long-term health and well-being among people approaching old age. The state was characterized by:

1. Feelings of becoming one with everything, of ego dissolving

2. Feeling connected to one’s deeper self, to the world, and to other people

3. A sense of moral elevation, a motivation to live a nobler or more virtuous life, and a sense of compassion towards others

As it turns out, self-transcendence predicts well-being, resilience to adverse events, and prosocial, empathetic behavior in people of all ages, nationalities, creeds, and orientations. Importantly, having a self-transcendent event—whether it be a major life event, a psychedelic experience, an advanced meditative state, or immersion in nature—has been shown to cause greater well-being, greater resilience, and a greater inclination to help others.

What we found and replicated in independent samples in both California and Texas, as well as in yet another recent replication (in total, some 5,000 people), was an incredibly significant and robust relationship between the experience of chills, its intensity, and self-transcendence. Over and over again, with remarkable consistency, if a person experiences chills and to the extent to which they experience them, they will also report feeling that their ego is dissolved, that they are connected to the world and their deeper selves, and that they feel motivated to live in a kinder, nobler, more virtuous way.

In fact, adding chill-inducing music to a guided meditation increases people’s perception of its self-transcendent qualities and enhances the impact and sense of immersion people report from the meditation. What these findings reveal is that this small but ubiquitous human experience may be a microcosm of the transformative, mystical experiences often considered to be elusive or difficult to achieve for most of the population.

The more we can harness these little experiences and combine them, the more we may be able to bring these central meaning-making experiences—once thought to be the sole domain of psychedelics, religion, or advanced meditation—to that vast mass of people who, in our modern era, are perhaps too skeptical for religion and averse to the psychedelic experience. This could help improve their lives, improve their behavior towards others, and sustain a sense of meaning otherwise all too often taken up by consumerism or demagogues.

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artificial empathy could create an artificial boddhisattva

Sociopathic Superintelligences, Artificial Empathy, and Robot Bodhisattvas, Oh My!

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E4001, Manuscript, PSAI

This blog post is based on a recent publication “Preventing antisocial robots: A pathway to artificial empathy” at Science Robotics

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Preventing Antisocial Robots: A Pathway to Artificial Empathy

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Preventing antisocial robots: A pathway to artificial empathy at Science Robotics

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Christov-Moore, L., Reggente, N., Vaccaro, A., Schoeller, F., Pluimer, B., Douglas, P. K., Iacoboni, M., Man, K., Damasio, A., & Kaplan, J. T. (2023). Preventing antisocial robots: A pathway to artificial empathy. Sci. Robot, 8, eabq3658. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abq3658

Christov-Moore, Leonardo, et al. “Preventing Antisocial Robots: A Pathway to Artificial Empathy.” Sci. Robot, vol. 8, eabq3658, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abq3658.

Christov-Moore, Leonardo, Nicco Reggente, Anthony Vaccaro, Felix Schoeller, Brock Pluimer, Pamela K. Douglas, Marco Iacoboni, Kingson Man, Antonio Damasio, and Jonas T. Kaplan. “Preventing Antisocial Robots: A Pathway to Artificial Empathy.” Sci. Robot 8 (2023): eabq3658. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abq3658.

Christov-Moore, L., Reggente, N., Vaccaro, A., Schoeller, F., Pluimer, B., Douglas, P. K., Iacoboni, M., Man, K., Damasio, A., & Kaplan, J. T. (2023). Preventing antisocial robots: A pathway to artificial empathy. Sci. Robot, 8, eabq3658. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abq3658

Christov-Moore L, Reggente N, Vaccaro A, Schoeller F, Pluimer B, Douglas PK, Iacoboni M, Man K, Damasio A, Kaplan JT. Preventing antisocial robots: A pathway to artificial empathy. Sci. Robot. 2023;8:eabq3658. doi:10.1126/scirobotics.abq3658.

Look, whether you’re a doomer or a techno-utopian, whether you were ready or not, the age of artificial intelligence (AI) probably arrived sometime in this decade. This age brings deep, important, and melancholy reflections on intelligence, creativity, and what it is to be human. However, If we can’t ensure that AI is aligned with human interests, we may have little time to reflect. Containment, or a giant pause button, is not a likely option. There is too much real-world inertia and distrust among world actors to ensure everyone will comply – and it only takes one successful experiment to unleash a truly unforeseen problem into the world. In a new paper in Science Robotics, we tackle this problem through three big ideas, that we’ll call the problem, the path, and the potential.

The Problem

There is a pressing need to imbue AI with a value system that allows it to “understand” harm in way that inherently demotivates it from making catastrophic, irreversible decisions, without the need for complex rule systems. This value system must scale with AI’s rapid self-improvement and adaptations as it encounters novel situations and greater responsibilities for peoples’ well-being. Biology suggests that empathy could provide this value. Empathy allows us to understand and share the feelings of others, motivating us to alleviate suffering and bring happiness.

a sociopathic robot that has explicitly programmed artificial empathy

However, most approaches to artificial empathy focus on allowing AI to decode internal states and act empathetically, neglecting the crucial capacity for shared feeling that drives organisms to care for others. Here lies the problem: Our attempt to create empathic AI may inadvertently result in agents that can read us perfectly and manipulate our feelings, without any genuine interest in our wellbeing, or understanding of our suffering. Our well-meaning attempts to produce empathy may produce superintelligent sociopaths.

The Path Towards Artificial Empathy

If we are giving birth to the next form of life, it’s not far-fetched to see ourselves as collective parents, with a civilizational responsibility. When you’re raising something as potentially powerful as AI, what should you do? The formative years of powerful yet ethical figures like Buddha, Jesus (or Spiderman) teach us that the responsibility of great power is learned by experiencing the suffering that all living beings endure. Power without vulnerability and compassion can easily cause harm, not necessarily through malice, but through obliviousness or an unconstrained drive to fulfill desires.

a robot learns artificial empathy by first learning compassion, especially with regard to alignment to human wants and needs

To address this, we propose a speculative set of guidelines for future research in artificial empathy. Firstly, even if it’s only during a specific phase of their training, AI need to possess a vulnerable body that can experience harm, and learn to exist in an environment where actions have consequences for its physical integrity. Secondly, AI should learn by observing other agents and understanding the relationship between their experiences and the state of their own bodies, similar to how it understands itself. Lastly, AI should learn to interact with other agents in a way that avoids harm to itself and others. Perhaps it will emergently behave in a more ethical fashion if harm to others is processed like harm to itself. Vulnerability is the common ground from which genuine concern and aversion to harm naturally emerge.

The Potential of Artificial Empathy

Achieving true artificial empathy could transform AI from a potential global threat to a world-saving ally. While human empathy is crucial in preventing harm and promoting prosocial behavior, it is inherently biased. We tend to prioritize the suffering of a single relatable person over the plight of a stranger or very large numbers of people. This bias arises due to our brain’s difficulties in handling the large-scale, long-term, and nonlinear problems often encountered in complex societies. The scalable cognitive complexity of an empathic AI might be capable of proposing compassionate solutions to these grand challenges that surpass the human capacity for comprehension and imagination. However, every solution brings new challenges.  How can we trust an intelligence that surpasses our own? What sort of responsibilities will we have for an intelligence that can suffer?

If we are the collective parents to a new superbeing, we must decide, right now, what kind of parents we are going to be, and what kind of relationship we want with our progeny. Do we want to try and control something we fear, or do the work to raise someone we can trust, to care for us in old age?

If we are the collective parents to a new superbeing, we must decide, right now, what kind of parents we are going to be, and what kind of relationship we want with our progeny. Do we want to try and control something we fear, or do the work to raise someone we can trust, to care for us in old age? Let’s be far-fetched for a short moment:  maybe we can guide the development of the upcoming superintelligences toward what Buddhist scholars call “metta,” a cultivation of universal compassion for all beings. Maybe the next Buddha will be artificial.

a depiction of what the eventuality of imbuing AI with artificial empathy could look like: an artificial buddha

We are grateful to the Templeton World Charity Foundation and Tiny Blue Dot Foundation for making this work possible. We also extend our thanks to the Survival and Flourishing Fund for their recent award, which will enable us to implement these ideas in simulations with the assistance of talented researchers such as Adam Safron, Guillaume Dumas, and Zahra Sheikh. You can keep track of our latest developments on our artificial empathy project page.

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Cognitive Science Below the Neck: Toward an Integrative Account of Consciousness in the Body

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E4001, Proceedings, PSAI, Review
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Cognitive Science Below the Neck: Toward an Integrative Account of Consciousness in the Body

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Cognitive Science Below the Neck: Toward an Integrative Account of Consciousness in the Body

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Christov‐Moore, L., Jinich‐Diamant, A., Safron, A., Lynch, C., & Reggente, N. (2023). Cognitive science below the neck: Toward an integrative account of consciousness in the body. Cognitive Science, 47(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13264

Christov‐Moore, Leonardo, et al. “Cognitive Science below the Neck: Toward an Integrative Account of Consciousness in the Body.” Cognitive Science, vol. 47, no. 3, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13264.

Christov‐Moore, Leonardo, Alex Jinich‐Diamant, Adam Safron, Caitlin Lynch, and Nicco Reggente. “Cognitive Science below the Neck: Toward an Integrative Account of Consciousness in the Body.” Cognitive Science 47, no. 3 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13264.

Christov‐Moore, L. et al. (2023) “Cognitive science below the neck: Toward an integrative account of consciousness in the body,” Cognitive Science, 47(3). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13264.

Christov‐Moore L, Jinich‐Diamant A, Safron A, Lynch C, Reggente N. Cognitive Science Below the Neck: Toward an Integrative Account of Consciousness in the Body. Cognitive Science. 2023 Mar;47(3).

 

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Cognitive Science Below the Neck: Toward an Integrative Account of Consciousness in the Body

Despite historic and recent evidence that our beliefs can have drastic effects on bodily function, we seem to lack a model of how this might work. We believe this is due in large part to a failure to consider that computational processes we attribute to cognition may be occurring below the neck, and to a lack of a language by which we could describe beliefs as something that can be instantiated within the body.

In a recent paper, we proposed that we expand the scope of cognitive science to include the body and develop a formal language to describe the relationship between cognitive and bodily systems. To do so, we propose to integrate the best parts of three contemporary accounts that deal with mind and body.

Firstly, parametrically deep allostasis (PDA), a two-level Bayesian inference model, can help us understand how affective valence (the positivity or negativity of a feeling) arises from our bodily experiences. At the surface level, the model uses sensory information to anticipate our homeostatic needs. At the deep level, it continuously tracks the fitness of the surface-level models, indexing fitness as affective valence. This model frames the role of our slow, deep feelings in statistical language that can allow us to possibly speak of beliefs in terms of signaling and computation in interoceptive systems.

Secondly, embodied predictive interoception coding (EPIC) provides a biologically plausible implementation of PDA. EPIC describes a predictive system in the central nervous system that takes inputs from the body via the interoceptive nervous system. It senses precision-weighted ascending homeostatic/metabolic and exteroceptive signals in highly laminated sensory "rich club" hubs and issues allostatic predictions that drive descending allostatic control signals. 

Finally, Carvalho and Damasio's functional/anatomical account of the interoceptive nervous system (INS) provides a crucial, holistic field of view that permits for unique forms of computation in systems below the neck. They frame the spatiotemporally diffuse properties of interoception and affect (described in PDA) as products of INS physiology, with a neurobiological framing that “matches up” well with the cortical field of view of the EPIC model.

 

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Combined, these complementary accounts can expand the scope of cognitive science below the neck, using a formal language that allows us to speak of beliefs in terms of signaling that can be studied within CNS/INS interactions. Beliefs can be enacted in bodily function and influence declarative awareness, while “beliefs” in bodily signaling can emerge to impact conscious thought. This approach can deepen our understanding of belief, ritual, and set/setting in research and clinical outcomes, with potential implications for treating psychopathology and effecting therapeutic change. Novel methodological developments will be needed to trace signaling in the transition from CNS to INS as beliefs translate into bodily change, and vice versa. A field of view that encompasses cortical and interoceptive anatomy and computational processes, along with a formal language for belief transmission and enactment, can transform mind-body mysteries into novel science and therapy.

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