The Thinking Meat Project

Why, you might ask, should you not offend a crow? (Other than the fact that they’re smart [and smart-ass] birds who deserve a little respect, that is.) Well, the crow may remember your face and hassle you every time you show it in his vicinity. Furthermore, he may alert other crows to the fact that you’re a dangerous element, and they may hassle you too. This New York Times article describes the work of John Marzluff of the University of Washington, who has established that crows and other corvids recognize individual human faces. His experimental procedure involved masks that were used to isolate facial recognition from other unique aspects of humans appearance such as dress or gait. Some of the masks were initially worn only by people who were catching and banding crows (which made them bad guys, as far as the crows were concerned), and others only by people who were going about their business without bothering the birds. Later, when people wearing either a bad-guy mask or a neutral mask walked around on campus not pestering the birds, the crows heckled those in the bad-guy masks more than they did those in the neutral masks. In one case, a professor wearing the bad-guy mask got a reaction from more crows than had originally seen the capture and banding that had earned the face its bad reputation, indicating that the birds were learning from each other which hominids were less than desirable. It’s a pretty cool story, and if you want more, you can read one of Marzluff’s papers.

OK, this one is off the beaten path, but bear with me. This article from the Wilson Quarterly is about a traffic engineer, Hans Monderman, but it also covers some topics that I think are related to vital thinking meat concepts. Monderman was an advocate of removing the signage and barriers that separate automobile and pedestrian/cyclist traffic; the idea is that if you’re not instilling a possibly illusory sense of safety and containment in drivers, they will be more aware of their surroundings and drive more cautiously. (And in fact there is some evidence that a decrease in signage and a greater integration among the various modes of traffic—cars, pedestrians, and cyclists—can reduce accidents. One thing I know from my many years as an urban walker and from listening to urban cyclists is that staying alive on foot or on a bicycle involves a keen awareness of what the cars surrounding us are doing. It seems to me that one of Monderman’s points was that everyone is safer if drivers are also keenly aware of the presence of pedestrians and bicycles in their midst.)

The article touches on themes like how we perceive space, time, and distance, how we conceptualize danger, and how we alter our behavior based on our surroundings. Given the importance that we as a society have placed on the automobile over the past couple of generations without thinking about or even being aware of all the ramifications of a car-centric society, I think it’s good to look at how things (specifically, our cities and towns) got to be this way and how they might be otherwise. And what the hey, this is the only article on traffic design I’ve run across that mentions the writing of Marcel Proust and John Ruskin. Bound to be interesting, right?

Some interesting things that have crossed my radar lately:

• This article from the New York Times goes into the psychology of magic, covering a different batch of research than another article on the same subject that I linked to recently.
• And this one from the Boston Globe discusses the psychology of trust, and describes the facial features that appear most, and least, trustworthy–all in the context of the story of a recently unmasked imposter.
• Scientific American Mind has posted an article from its newest issue about what your brain gets up to at night.
• And from Scientific American, we have this article about research into what makes a brain brilliant.
• This brief but highly intriguing story from Physorg.com describes a synthetic telepathy project that would allow people to project messages to each other via thoughts, without speech. (Thanks to Keith for passing this one along.)

Various people have pointed out to me over the years that I tend to be a bit jumpy. For example, once when I was crossing to Mackinac Island from the lower peninsula of Michigan on a ferryboat, I nearly leaped from my seat when the boat blew its horn, much to the amusement of my companion, who took the blast of sound in stride. I explained it by saying that I keep my gain set very high so I can observe and absorb as much as possible of the world around me (that was my inner novelist speaking).

Another facet of jumpiness, of course, is a wariness and nervousness about the world around you—in a word, anxiety—and that also describes me a good bit of the time. I was joking about keeping my gain set high, but recent research points to a genetic variant that might tend to elevate circulating dopamine levels in some people’s brains, and that could be linked with a tendency toward anxiety. The study looked at two alleles of a particular gene that encodes an enzyme that causes dopamine to break down; experimental evidence indicates that those with two copies of one of the alleles are more prone to anxiety. The allele that they had two copies of is the result of a mutation that happened relatively recently (as these things go) and appears only in humans. Although it’s just one thing out of many possible influences shaping a person’s typical anxiety levels, this is apparently the first time a link has been suggested between a specific gene and the trait of anxiety. I’m not worried about it or anything, but I’m definitely curious about what my own genetic portrait looks like in that particular area. The work is reported in this press release from EurekAlert, which cites the full article as COMT Genetic Variation Affects Fear Processing: Psychophysiological Evidence, Christian Montag, Joshua W. Buckholtz, Peter Hartmann, Michael Merz, Christian Burk, Juergen Hennig, and Martin Reuter; Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol 122, No. 4.

Once when I heard Daniel Dennett giving a talk, he spoke briefly on the curious nature of reality and magic. What many people would call real magic—genuinely making something disappear into thin air or otherwise behave contrary to the laws of nature— does not of course exist, and in that sense is not real. But the kind of magic that people do every day, real working magic based on adroitness, cleverness, and knowledge of human psychology, would be considered not real, because in fact the coin is not really appearing out of thin air or whatever. Funny things, words. (Or should I say, “Funny things, hominids”?)

The kind of real, everyday magic that people can in fact do is seen by some scientists as a key to certain aspects of human perception and cognition. This article from Science Daily briefly describes a paper coming out soon that explores the features of human vision and attention that are exploited by magicians. (The paper, Towards a science of magic, by Ronald Rensink, Gustav Kuhn, and Alym Amlani, will be out soon in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, but more than that I was unable to discover.) Check out the links in the Science Daily story that go to supplemental material, in particular this “looking but not seeing” page. It contains a link to videos that illustrate the phenomenon of change blindness: two very similar scenes are alternated in a video loop, separated by a blank frame, and it can be amazingly hard to spot the difference between them, because of the way we see but don’t necessarily attend to what is different. For most of the clips, I had to stop the loop and look at each frame separately, even though a decent-sized piece of the scenery was appearing and disappearing or shifting around in each clip.

Are biological evolution and the evolution of languages two examples of the same general evolutionary process? This review article from PLoS Biology surveys some of what we know so far about how language evolves and how that seems to parallel biological evolution. Fascinating stuff, with some interesting pros and cons for different positions on the relationship between biological and cultural evolution. I was astounded–and excited–to read what Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading in England, had to say about the possibility that researchers may be able to use the commonest (and most stable) words in languages to construct language genealogies going back 20,000 years that show how languages are related. My impression, which this article confirms, is that most linguists today think the practical limit is 8,000 years, so that would allow us to look a good bit further back in time, if it really is possible.

I think I’ve written before about deep electrical stimulation of the brain as a treatment for cases of depression that are resistant to other treatments. This article from Science Daily describes a new study, larger than previous ones, that confirms the value of this type of therapy and talks a bit about how it works. In a nutshell, the stimulation is done at a part of the brain that appears to be a crucial nexus in a “depression network” of areas implicated in depression. Changing electrical activity at this hub seems to have positive effects all through the network. And so far, no long-term side effects have been found (it sounds like the treatment was continued successfully for up to a year in some patients).

The EPOXI mission of NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft took pictures of Earth late in May 2008 from 31 million miles away, with the goal of examining Earth as if it were an extrasolar planet and looking for signs that would indicate life. The result is some interesting observations and a stunning movie that shows a full rotation of Earth with the moon passing across the field of view. It’s one of the most spectacular views of Earth from space that I’ve ever seen. For information about the observations and links to a second video, visit the EPOXI transit press release. Thanks to Mark for passing this one along.

I was surprised and equally delighted by another video that showed up as today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. It’s a little unusual for APOD, but when I thought about it, I realized that in a way, it makes for an interesting counterpart to the EPOXI video. It’s an example of what you might get if you could zoom in on that spinning blue planet: a video montage of people all over the world dancing along with Matt Harding, who has taken to the road with an informal, energetic dance he does, and has found that if you start dancing, people in many parts of the world are happy to dance along with you. I was utterly charmed by the video; there is something beautifully goofy and joyous in the sight of all these people sharing moments of happy commotion. The wide range of natural and man-made environments was also impressive. I’m not sure why I found this video so emotionally moving. On the whole I find human diversity fascinating; I still remember a line from the original Star Trek where Spock said something about IDIC (infinite diversity in infinite combinations) and “the ways our differences can combine to create meaning and beauty.” But we so often have a hard time dealing constructively or even non-destructively with our differences, on levels from the individual up to the national. Maybe I just needed a reminder that for all the things that divide humans, we share some things in common as well.

A neurophysiologist at UCLA has done a meta-analysis of more than 160 studies of how food affects the brain. The results were recently published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience and are summarized in a press release on EurekAlert. There’s quite a lot in the EurekAlert story about omega-3 fatty acids (a so-called “good fat” found in salmon, flax seed, walnuts, and other foods), and also some information about transfats (distinctly bad, for the brain as well as your cardiovascular system), folic acid (good), and curcumin (an ingredient in the curry spice turmeric; also good and perhaps responsible for the low rate of Alzheimer’s in India). Also, it turns out that excessive caloric intake can be bad for your brain, and, interestingly, perhaps for the brains of your descendants as well.

Scientific American has posted a nice article about human genetic history. It’s a good introduction to the current state of knowledge with respect to how our DNA can help us figure out human prehistory and evolution. There’s a section on the perennial question “Did humans and Neanderthals interbreed?” (no firm answer yet, but a summary of some recent work) and perhaps the most fascinating of all, some information about how we’re still evolving.

In case you missed it, the IEEE Spectrum ran a special report last month on the singularity, a supposed future event in which humankind will merge with machines to transcend humanity as we know it. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of many of the claims being made about the singularity. If you are a true believer, I must warn you that the IEEE series debunks the more radical claims of the singularitarians from a variety of well-informed viewpoints, pointing out the nakedness of this particular ruler but also going into some of the exciting possibilities that realistically may well await us in the future. The introduction by Glenn Zorpette has links to all the individual articles. (The IEEE site is a bit balky at the moment but it looks like much if not all of the content is available to non-subscribers.) Interesting stuff in there about the human brain, consciousness, and AI. Enjoy!

A number of book reviews on more or less Thinking Meat topics have crossed my radar lately, including these:

• How the Mind Works, a review of several new books on the brain from The New York Review of Books
• The kindness of strangers, a book review from The Prospect that is essentially an essay on the genetic realities of race and the human capacity for altruism
• Interpreting the Evolution of English, a review of a couple of books about the history and future of the English language, from the Wall Street Journal
• A review of Lee Alan Dugatkin’s The Altruism Equation from Metapsychology Online Reviews
• And last but I hope not least, my own review of Your Brain on Cubs, also at Metapsychology Online Reviews

When I was a kid I remember watching a show on PBS where violinist Isaac Stern played one of the themes from Beethoven’s violin concerto, first very correctly but with no expression at all, and then a beautiful rendition much more full of feeling. I was fascinated by the small choices he made, even in just a few bars, that turned the music into something much more emotionally effective, and to this day I’m fascinated by how performers know how to do that. I tend to respond strongly to emotionally charged music, so I was interested in this article from PLoS ONE about how the brain responds to music. People were exposed to piano sonatas played by a human performer and by a computer, and, in a nutshell, it appears that the response to emotional expression in the human performances was distinct from the response to unexpected chords (elements of musical grammar). People, even those without musical training, can get the structure of a piece by listening to a rendition without the nuances that a human player adds, at least enough to be surprised by something that doesn’t really fit in, but the emotional response is stronger when it’s a human playing it. The research was done to examine the effectiveness of using non-naturalistic music (i.e., not what people normally listen to) in studies of musical cognition and perception. EurekAlert has a brief press release if you want the short version.

You do lots of things without being aware of them. You breathe, for example, and you digest your food. If your conscious mind had to concern itself with every breath or every chemical reaction in your gut, you’d have no time to do the important things, like check the baseball scores or work a sudoku. But it’s unsettling to see evidence that you make some decisions before you are consciously aware of having made them, and furthermore that with the right equipment, others can extract information about your decisions from your brain before you yourself learn what’s going on in there. This article from the Wall Street Journal describes some recent work involving fMRI scans of the brains of fourteen young adults while they decided, totally at their own discretion, when to press a button and which button to press. Relevant brain areas showed activity up to ten seconds before the subjects themselves announced that they had made their choice. This study builds on a classic 1983 paper by Benjamin Libet and his co-authors in which they also discovered signs of brain activity before people consciously announced the results of an unforced decision.

The sidebars and graphics are nice, but I’m a bit troubled by the statement in one sidebar about how “Your brain knows what you’re going to do 10 seconds before you are aware of it.” My brain is me, so if my brain knows it, then it would seem that I know it, in some sense. But it’s obviously not the sense in which people normally mean they know something. I guess this kind of linguistic uncertainty is what you get sometimes when you lift up the hood and see what the brain is doing. In that sense, we live in fascinating times.

Languages order the basic elements of a sentence in different ways. In English, we’re used to the subject-verb-object order (SVO; in stripped-down form, this would be, for example, “blogger eats chocolate”). Other languages use subject-object-verb (SOV; e.g., “chocolate blogger eats”). Most languages use either SVO or SOV, with a small percentage using VSO; the other possibilities occur in very few languages. (Some languages don’t have a fixed word order but use inflected forms of words rather than word order to convey the role of words in a sentence.) A recent experiment, however, suggests that for nonverbal communication, people prefer SOV no matter what language they speak.

Forty adults (ten speakers each for four different languages) were asked to describe the action that occurred in brief video clips, first with speech and then with gestures. When speaking, people followed the word order of their language (three of the languages used SVO and one used SOV). But when gesturing, they all followed SOV order, no matter what language they spoke. It’s a small study but an intriguing result. The idea that the way a language is structured significantly shapes the way that those who use the language think and even behave has a long and somewhat checkered history. This result indicates that there may be some influence going the other way as well (or instead?), perhaps some fundamental aspect of nonverbal or preverbal thought that then shapes language (although obviously the whole story must be very complicated).

At any rate, it’s something to think about. Meanwhile, this blogger is going to go eat some chocolate.

P.S. I was so eager to get to my chocolate that I forgot to include a link to this press release from EurekAlert, where I learned about this research. –July 2, 2008

Humankind’s urge to seek patterns and ability to recognize them—or even to find them where they don’t exist— is well known and is arguably one of our prime survival skills. When faced with floods of information, be it sensory data, impressions of the personalities of those around us, or facts and figures, it’s easier to recall and use the information if we can fit it into some kind of pattern. A new theory of humor makes what strikes me as a surprising but fascinating connection between our pattern-recognition skills and our capacity for humor.

Science writer Alastair Clarke has come up with a pattern recognition theory of humor that in itself illustrates the ability to look beyond superficial differences in the content of humor to identify an underlying pattern for the phenomenon. The idea appears to be that pattern recognition is such an essential cognitive skill that our brains are wired to reward us for recognizing an unexpected pattern, and the response to such recognition is laughter. By looking beyond the content, which can vary from culture to culture and person to person, the theory applies broadly across the species while still offering a way to explain individual variation. And because pattern recognition is an important aspect of cognition, the theory is linked to other areas of study involving human evolution and cognitive science. You can read more in this article from PhysOrg.com. Thanks to Keith for passing this one along.

The perennially popular topic of what the Neanderthals were like and how they lived is in the news this week. This article from the Discovery Channel describes some work at an archaeological site in southern England that has been a treasure trove of Neanderthal stone tools. The picture that is evidently emerging through research at the site is of a canny Neanderthal population that was technologically sophisticated (for its day). The site appears to have been occupied just before the disappearance of the Neanderthals, and the new view of how they lived may make their demise a bit more mysterious.

So what is information technology doing to our brains? Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has written a book about the upside and the downside of a world full of email and other instant electronic communication, video and online games, and the vast, beckoning, vital but sometimes time-wasting web of information at our fingertips. This article from The Australian describes some of her concerns. The article also includes some quotes from nay-sayers as well, so it’s an interesting look at her arguments.

Certainly we’re exposing our brains to things that brains have never had to deal with before. The pace of life and the flow of information can seem overwhelming, and immersing ourselves in the new world created by technology is bound to have an effect on us. The plastic human brain, resilient, adaptive, and often cited as a cause for hope, is also apt to be shaped by whatever environment we provide for it, whether we plan carefully to provide an optimum environment or just go with whatever the latest gadget is. So Greenfield has some legitimate concerns, and the question of how our technology is changing our minds is a good question to be asking. However, some of the concerns mentioned in the article sound more like basic human nature rather than anything caused by technology. For example, take her description of the next generation of young people:

“They will be people who are more hedonistic and tend to live for the moment, a life that is more sensory and less cognitive. People who have a less robust sense of their own identity and are therefore more easily persuaded or swayed by the wrong kind of things, as we see already in the way people are easily persuaded into movements nowadays.

“People with less meaning to their lives, possibly, and less of a strong life narrative, so they may be happy rather than fulfilled: there is a difference.”

Maybe in the book there is some evidence to back up the implicit claim that people are more easily persuaded into movements today, but I’m skeptical. (And even if you could pin down that fact, I’m not sure how you’d tie it to computer use.) People have always gone chasing after things that promise an answer to life, the universe, and everything. Fads and mass movements of all kinds have periodically swept through humankind, or those parts of it in communication with each other, for hundreds of years.

In fact the entire quote seems to me to describe an essential aspect of the human condition. It’s often hard to think rationally, to pursue long-term goals rather than short-term rewards, to establish your own identity and maintain it in the face of societal pressure and the crush of day-to-day responsibilities. Collectively we’ve always been tempted, to one degree or another, towards the herd mind, the short-term, the hedonistic. Maybe information technology does push some of our buttons fairly hard, but I’m not convinced that that’s the whole story. I do believe that we should be cautious about which technologies we adopt and which we decide to leave alone, and it would be good to know as much as possible about how IT affects our ability to do the hard things humans have always had trouble with. But every time I hear someone warning of how the human race is heading into trouble and the young folks these days are just not getting it, I hear in my mind a chorus of voices raised in similar laments going back hundreds of years. By all means, we should examine the effect of our tools on our brains, but let’s not get too wound up about the dire possibilities until we know more of the story.

This spring I had a three-month leave from my day job, and one of the things I liked the most about it was that I was freer to follow the schedule my body wanted to follow. In particular, when I got sleepy in the late afternoon, I was often able to take a nap. In the end, that made me more productive and certainly happier than trying to soldier on through intense drowsiness. I’m a big believer in the mental and physical benefits of napping, so I was delighted to find this guide to napping from the Boston Globe. In a poster-like format, it summarizes some recent research into how naps improve mental performance and reduce stress, and provides concrete and useful tips for napping intelligently, taking into account the brain’s sleep cycles and your own circadian rhythms. If I print this out and post it outside my cube at work, do you think I could get away with an afternoon siesta now and then?

As Charles Darwin suggested and Paul Ekman helped verify, facial expressions for some of the more basic human emotions are universal and universally recognized. This indicates a biological rather than a cultural basis for the faces we make to express happiness, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise. Some recent research, reported in this New Scientist article, examined the possible physiological benefits that might underlie the expressions of fear and disgust. It turns out that the wide-open eyes of fear allow for faster tracking and quicker detection of objects, and the open mouth lets in more air–all of which sound like useful things in scary situations (future research will check to see how much use the brain appears to be making of this added sensory capacity). Disgust, on the other hand, scrunches up the face and allows in less air. This sounds like the start of some interesting work.