2009 December » The Thinking Meat Project

Busy meat

Brain and mind, Human origins and evolution, Psychology Comments Off

Dec 172009

Between keeping up with the workload and preparing for the holidays, this week has been absolutely nuts, so once again I’m afraid I’m going to simply toss a few links your way. Keep that meat thinking!

First, if you are looking for worthy secular charities for holiday giving, check out the TechSkeptic’s list of atheist charities.
New Scientist has published an article suggesting that higher level processing plays a role in synesthesia and also offers an accompanying slide show.
Sizing up our conspecifics is one of the most important things we do, but sometimes it seems complicated. (Ask anyone who has recently ventured into an online dating site or been involved in a hiring decision.) Cognitive Daily discusses a recent paper about whether small snippets of observations of a person can add up to an accurate perception of personality or intelligence.
And while we’re on the subject of evaluating the personalities of others, here’s a press release from EurekAlert about the degree to which people can judge the personalities of strangers based solely on photographs. The press release is quite short, but it links to the paper itself, which is briefly available for free online.
Last spring I attended a fascinating talk at IU about the complex mix of factors that determine human skin color. This nifty web page explains succinctly why northern Europeans are white.

Friday video: Jane Goodall on Bill Moyers Journal

Animal behavior Comments Off

Dec 112009

A couple of weeks ago, Jane Goodall appeared on PBS on Bill Moyers Journal. You can watch the video online.

Evolving music

Being human Comments Off

Dec 102009

Human culture changes with time; if it didn’t, we’d all still be wearing those hairstyles that look so amusing when they appear in old yearbook photos, and the music of the 1980s would sound just like the music of the 1970s or the 1770s or…well, you get the picture. How much of a parallel there is between the process of cultural change and biological evolution is an open question.

An online experiment in the evolution of music aims to examine how cultural evolution works. A randomly generated parent generation consisting of two brief loops of sound was used to create 100 offspring, which people rate on a five-point scale from “I love it” to “I can’t stand it.” The most popular clips survive and are used to create the next generation (with some random mutations thrown in); the least popular clips vanish from the gene pool.

This CultureLab blog entry from New Scientist gives more details. For the next week or so, you can participate by listening to and rating clips. It’s a strangely compelling pursuit, like evaluating galaxies at Galaxy Zoo. Visit DarwinTunes to learn more, and click the participate link at the top to help shape the music.

What’s your favorite word?

General Comments Off

Dec 072009

The latest “Casual Friday” post at Cognitive Daily links to a survey that’s kind of fun, if you enjoy thinking about things like your favorite word and least favorite word. The survey includes the ten questions that guests answer on every episode of the show Inside the Actor’s Studio, and an interesting bunch of questions it is. The authors of the blog are going to analyze the responses to see if they can spot any patterns based on demographic data like age and gender. You’ve got a few more days to take the survey and add your data to the mix. The results will be posted on Cognitive Daily this Friday.

The famous brain of H.M.

Brain and mind Comments Off

Dec 072009

If you’ve read anything about the study of memory, you are probably familiar with the story of Henry Molaison, a man who lost the capacity to form new memories after brain surgery to control seizures in 1953. Known for years only by his initials, Molaison offered some fascinating insights to scientists while he was alive. Last year he died at the age of 82, leaving his brain to science. Researchers have sliced this famous brain into extremely thin sections and are going to map it digitally in great detail for further study. You can read more about it in this article from the New York Times. The Brain Observatory web site at the University of California at San Diego has more information.

Friday video: Earth in flux

General 1 Response »

Dec 042009

On a human time scale, few things are more permanent and immobile than the Earth’s surface. Visible signs of change are relatively rare and noteworthy: hillsides roaring down onto highways, the neat lines of fences or roads disrupted by earthquakes, the tops of volcanoes blowing off and new volcanoes sprouting from underwater. However, we know that these are not really lapses in an underlying stability, except if you think solely in terms of human time scales. When you consider a longer time scale, the face of the planet transforms itself restlessly. This video simulation condenses 650 million years of plate motion (from 400 million years ago to 250 million years in the future) into 1 minute and 20 seconds. I like the serene majesty of the music (from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite) accompanying the motion of the continents.

650 Million Years In 1:20 Min.
Uploaded by xchristox. – Discover more science and tech videos.

Links between musical scales and speech

Being human 3 Responses »

Dec 042009

Music is surprisingly mysterious, for something so ubiquitous. For example, it’s not really clear why we generally associate major keys with happy moods and minor keys with more somber feelings. Also, we choose our scales somewhat arbitrarily out of a range of possibilities. Within a single octave, humans can discern about 240 different musical tones, but the ways we divide this complex tonal landscape are fairly uniform across not only western music but at least some other musical traditions, despite the multitude of other options.

A couple of papers from the lab of Dale Purves at Duke suggest that the answers to both questions are linked to the properties of human speech.

A paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America reports on research comparing the tonal qualities of excited and subdued speech and finds that the former contains more major intervals and the latter more minor intervals, which suggests a source for our identification of the emotional qualities of music in major and minor keys. Another paper in PLoS One shows that the musical intervals making up the most widely used scales are those that most closely resemble the harmonic structure of vowel sounds appearing in human speech.

These close links between the tonal qualities of music and speech suggest that one reason music is such a powerful influence on humans is that it uses whatever mental machinery evolved to pay attention to the utterances of other humans (or as the Purves lab web page puts it, “These findings are consistent with the idea that humans have a bias for conspecific vocalizations.”).

You can read an article from Science Daily about this work. The two papers are:

Major and Minor Music Compared to Excited and Subdued Speech, by D.L. Bowling, K. Gill, J.D. Choi, J. Prinz, D. Purves. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, December 2009.

A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales, by K. Gill and D. Purves.
PLoS One, 4(12): e8144. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008144, published December 3, 2009.

Thinking Meat roundup

Brain and mind, General, Human origins and evolution Comments Off

Dec 022009

A number of good stories have slipped by me while I was busy with Thanksgiving and work. Without further ado, here are links to some of the cooler Thinking Meat news lately.

Scientific American offers an article about Ardipithecus that examines this intriguing creature’s place in our family tree.

Wired.com has a profile of Viktor Deak, a paleoartist who has created 3D models of our long-gone ancestor species, most recently for the PBS series “Becoming Human.”

The New York Times recently published an article about the cooperative spirit inherent in humankind. It examines the behavior of very small children, who demonstrate spontaneous (perhaps innate) helpfulness, and compares the behavior of chimps and humans. Cooperation and a sense of “shared intentionality” are essential to holding human groups together.

You probably saw the stories about a supercomputer that can simulate a brain as complex as that of a cat. (This is the latest progress report from IBM’s ambitious project for simulating the human brain.) Here’s Jonah Lehrer’s take on that story, considerably less breathless and more critical than some of the hype. (Hat tip to Adam for passing this one along.)