I don’t know how I first ran across the original version of this time-lapse video taken on Mauna Kea in Hawaii (home of many telescopes). At any rate, I found it an unexpectedly poignant look at humankind’s place in the cosmos. The majestic night sky wheels overhead impervious to all the little human movements going on below, and the magnificent telescopes face skyward in silent pursuit of photons. Here’s a slightly newer expanded version:
Several perennially fascinating questions arise in the study of humankind: What makes us so different from other animals? Was there some turning point or specific development that marks the emergence of uniquely human behavior? In other words, how did we become human? A recent workshop at Arizona State University, “Origins of Human Uniqueness and Behavioral Modernity,” addressed these questions. This article from Scientific American describes the conference, briefly describing how three core abilities (cognition, culture, and cooperation) together shaped the emergence of the human.
The other night I watched the women’s free skating in the Olympics. As always, I thought I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more of the skaters a little further down the ranks; even if they aren’t in the running for a medal, the fact that they made it to the Olympics means they are amazingly skilled. This sentiment was reinforced when a friend sent me a link to this interactive feature at the New York Times site, which illustrates aurally how very short the difference in time can be between a medalist and a non-medalist in various speed-based Olympic sports. Everyone who goes to the Olympics should be proud of having made it, regardless of how well they did, but I can see how that might be cold comfort if you lost out on a medal, or got a silver instead of a gold, by the merest sliver of a second, or made a small but costly mistake.
Then I heard this story on NPR about the emotions of silver and bronze medalists. Images of the faces of Olympic athletes immediately after an event were shown to volunteers who did not know how the athletes placed in the event, and the volunteers evaluated how happy the athletes looked. Bronze medal winners looked significantly happier than silver medal winners. They also looked happier when they were on the medal stand.
The difference could be the way they frame it. A silver medalist might be focusing on the gold that got away (the dreaded “if only,” one of the most painful thoughts that can torment the human mind). The bronze medalist, on the other hand, might well be thinking of the alternative of not getting a medal at all, compared to which a bronze looks pretty good. This is borne out by analysis of things the medalists said in interviews; bronze medalists used more statements expressing the idea of “at least I,” and silver medalists said “if only” much more often. I can’t say it’s all in how you frame it, but certainly the stories you tell yourself about the things that happen make a difference. Might as well tell yourself good ones.
When I was an undergraduate, there was a cartoon posted on the wall of a student computing cluster in Swain East at Indiana University that I really liked. (The room was full of VT100 terminals that we used to connect to the university’s VAXes, just to give you an idea how long ago this was.) In the first panel of the cartoon, a man was sitting at a desk working away with paper and pencil, and a thought balloon over his head was filled with equations. Second panel, same thing. The third panel showed his thought balloon filled with the image of a voluptuous reclining woman, and he was smiling. In the fourth, it was back to the equations. I thought this was hilarious; the value of little mental vacations in the middle of a physics problem set, for example, was obvious.
Some recent research suggests that the type of daydreaming you do could affect your capacity for creative or analytical thought. Groups of subjects were asked to think about either spending quality time with their partner or having casual sex with someone they didn’t love; other groups were subliminally primed to think about either love or sex. Then all the groups were given both creative tasks to complete and questions to answer that tested their analytical thinking skills. Those whose thoughts had turned to romance did better at the tasks requiring creativity, and those who thought about sex were better at the tasks requiring analytical thinking.
This supports the hypothesis that thinking of love broadens the mind’s focus and is associated with seeing the big picture and connecting diverse ideas, whereas thinking of sex appears to be a more concrete, in-the-minute kind of thing that is linked to a focus on details. I’m kind of curious about what happens when you think about sex with someone you love, and I’m not sure I entirely grasp the reasoning behind this hypothesis, but it’s interesting at any rate.
The research is reported briefly in Scientific American. The paper that this article refers to (citation below) is based on construal level theory, which I knew nothing about, so I looked up some information about that. In a nutshell, this theory suggests a link between how distant in space or time a person, thing, or event is from us and how concretely or abstractly we think about it, and predicts the different effects of thinking concretely or abstractly (e.g., the difference in cognitive performance reported here). This Psychlopedia page on construal level theory has a “love versus sex” section that briefly describes the paper; the page also gives some other examples of how the theory is used.
Citation:
Why Love Has Wings and Sex Has Not: How Reminders of Love and Sex Influence Creative and Analytic Thinking, by Jens Förster, Kai Epstude, and Amina Özelsel. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 11, 1479-1491 (2009). (abstract)
A recent find on Crete shakes up the current view of human prehistory. Archaeologists have found more than 2,000 stone tools, including hand axes, probably dating back at least 130,000 years on the southern shore of Crete. This is more than 100,000 years earlier than previously known arrivals at islands in that part of the Mediterranean, and around 70,000 years earlier than the earliest well-established maritime migration anywhere in the world. The geological strata in which the tools were found are around 100,000 to 130,000 years old, and the discoverers consider that to be a minimum age for the tools themselves, which could be considerably older. It’s not clear who made them: Homo sapiens or one of the other hominids still around 130,000 years or more ago. In any event, it’s a surprising insight into unsuspected capabilities of very early seafaring hominids. More work, planned for this summer, may narrow down the date at which the stone artifacts were produced.
This week’s physics colloquium at Indiana University is a talk by neuroscientist Olaf Sporns on “Mapping the Networks of the Human Brain” (abstract is available online). It’s at 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 17, in Swain West 119.
An ad appeared recently on Bloomington buses that said, “You can be good without god.” It seemed like a fairly obvious statement to me, but it took some doing to get Bloomington Transit to agree to run the ads. (Atheist ad campaigns like this one are making a modest sweep of the US; billboards with similar messages have appeared in various cities around the country.)
A recent article offers some evidence that morality and religious affiliation (or the lack thereof) are indeed two separate things. The article includes a meta-analysis of existing studies that have investigated the link between a person’s religious affiliation and the moral judgements he or she makes. The idea was to explore two divergent views on how religion evolved: Was it adaptive because it fostered cooperation between individuals who were not genetically related, or did it emerge as a side effect of other cognitive abilities that were themselves adaptations?
Current evidence shows that people make the same intuitive judgements about novel moral dilemmas regardless of their religious background, suggesting that morality and religion are not necessarily linked. It also suggests that the mental machinery underlying religious belief might be separate from that involved in making moral judgements, and that religion did not originate as an adaptation linked to cooperative behavior. One line of evidence involves studies based on responses to the online Moral Sense Test, and a study of a rural Mayan population provides further evidence.
Of course, morality and religion have become linked in the minds of many people, which is why getting those ads to run was not simple. The story of why and how that happened is yet to be fully explained.
You can read more in this article from Science Daily. The full text of the paper is available online; this was a pleasant surprise to me, and I’m not sure how long it will be true, but here’s the citation and a link:
Those of you here in Bloomington might be interested in hearing this week’s Patten lectures at Indiana University. Andrew Knoll of Harvard will be speaking Tuesday, February 9, on the early history of life on earth, and Thursday, February 11, on the search for life on Mars. Both lectures are at 7:30 in Rawles Hall 100. For more information, see the Patten lecture page.
This video is full of gorgeous images of planet Earth and its creatures, accompanied by music and the gently inspiring words of Richard Dawkins. It’s one of the finer meditations on the human condition that I’ve ever seen. For all its problems, being a bit of conscious matter on this planet is a rare and precious thing.
Some things that change in time seem to be following a particular trajectory. Hard drives get smaller. Cell phones gain functionality. Internet advertising gets more annoying. Primate brains get bigger. Well, wait a minute. Human technologies may be progressing along a particular path, but the evolution of the primate brain is not quite the same. Evolution adapts organisms to their circumstances over time, and evidently in some primate lineages, this results in smaller rather than larger brains. A recent study, spurred by the discovery of fossilized remains of diminutive (and small-brained) Homo floresiensis, examined brain size and body size over time in a variety of primate species. Although brains have certainly gotten bigger in some lineages, most notably us, in other branches of the primate family tree, brains have gotten smaller. This article from Scientific American has more.
P.S. Oops, I somehow accidentally deleted the sentence about how this study supports the idea that the small brain size of Homo floresiensis is a result of standard evolutionary procedure rather than evidence of deformity.
These days I’ve been experimenting with baking bread using various sourdough cultures. Furthermore, my interest in wine has certainly deepened over the last few years. You could say that I’ve become a big fan of fermentation, and I think sometimes about its importance in human life. My hat is off to whatever curious humans first discovered the process and decided to put it to good use.
Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist who studies human exploration of fermented beverages, believes that it might have been the desire for reliable access to alcohol, not food, that spurred the farming revolution that swept Neolithic culture, largely banishing hunter-gatherer ways from many parts of the world. You can think of this revolution in terms of its benefits: farming allowed for settled and growing populations that fostered the sharing of ideas and nurtured technological and cultural innovations. Alternatively, you can focus on the disease, limited diet, and economic inequities that eventually emerged in farming populations (some scholars go so far as to suggest that agriculture was a bad idea). Either way, it was one of the most significant transitions humans have undergone. Was it really spurred by beer?
McGovern has recently written a book, Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages, that describes the role of fermentation in human history. This article from Spiegel Online and this one from The Independent describe some of his research, which involves chemical analyses of clay pots and other vessels that reveal traces of their former contents. So far, the earliest evidence he’s been able to find for human alcohol production goes back about 9,000 years—long enough for a quite respectable history of beer and wine, certainly, but not quite enough to say anything definitive about the role of alcohol in the Neolithic Revolution. He does argue that beer probably came before bread because the discovery of fermentation apparently predated the domestication of grains to the point where they would make a decent loaf. In time, perhaps we will learn things about the development of bread and wine that will clarify their respective places in the story of humankind. Meanwhile, McGovern’s book sounds like a fascinating read. Cheers!
P.S. I just remembered a New Yorker article from last year about beer. Luckily it’s available online; toward the bottom, there’s a section about a contemporary brewer who works with McGovern to recreate ancient beers.
I was pleased to learn that the Thinking Meat Project appears among the 15 Best Brain Blogs of 2009 over at Online Colleges and Universities. Check it out!
It’s easy to feel that the milk of human kindness has curdled, or perhaps was sour to begin with. Some religious and social practices seem to assume the worst of people: our selfish, antisocial desires must be kept firmly in check by fear of god or of human authorities. However, compassion and generosity are arguably at least as much a part of who we are as self-interest and greed. This article from Greater Good magazine examines some of the evidence for inborn physiological and psychological mechanisms of kindness and caring.
One part that really struck me was the discussion of the autonomic nervous system, which controls our physiological responses to situations, preparing us to react appropriately to situations. The reaction to a threat is the famous fight-or-flight response, which has a distinctive profile (if you’ve read anything about stress, you know about the ways that breathing and blood flow change to make us more ready to run, or fight, for our lives). There is also a distinctive physiological pattern related to a compassionate response to a situation. When I read this, I wondered if the practice of compassion meditation is in part a deliberate attempt to harness that physiological response.
The Greater Good article also talked about a positive feedback loop between compassionate thoughts and behavior and increased production of oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter that has been linked with feelings of trust, closeness, and empathy. In other words, as you cultivate a compassionate outlook, you may be setting up your neurochemistry for further feelings and behaviors of love and connection. The article also mentions some research that indicates that the brain might be particularly plastic—flexible and open to change—with regard to positive emotions, indicating that we can foster such emotions (especially by the way we raise our children).
In short, this is not only fascinating but comforting. Self-centered, aggressive, or uncharitable behavior might be part of our repertoire, but it’s good to remember that we also have the potential for greater kindness, love, and respect. It’s up to each of us to cultivate it.
Seashells were painted and used as adornment by early humans, and this is commonly taken to indicate an ability to think symbolically. There has been very little evidence that Neanderthals shared this ability. In fact, the belief that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to humans has been given as a reason for why they died out.
However, a recent find challenges the idea that Neanderthals were incapable of symbolic thought. Scallop and cockle shells showing traces of applied pigment were found in two caves in southeastern Spain. The shells are estimated to be about 50,000 years old; fossil evidence of modern humans in the area goes back only 40,000 years.
Several past discoveries have suggested that Neanderthals might have created what could be considered jewelry or art. The evidence was scanty, and these earlier discoveries were generally not interpreted as true instances of symbolic thinking. This new evidence, however, combined with the earlier finds, seems to indicate that we’ve been underestimating the mental capacities of this fascinating species. In fact, this article from Scientific American even suggests that rather than developing jewelry independently, Neanderthals might have taught humans how to make art, or vice versa.
The findings will appear in the January 11 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and are available online now:
Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals
João Zilhão, Diego E. Angelucci, Ernestina Badal-García, Francesco d’Errico, Floréal Daniel, Laure Dayet, Katerina Douka, Thomas F. G. Higham, María José Martínez-Sánchez, Ricardo Montes-Bernárdez, Sonia Murcia-Mascarós, Carmen Pérez-Sirvent, Clodoaldo Roldán-García, Marian Vanhaeren, Valentín Villaverde, Rachel Wood, and Josefina Zapata.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0914088107
Imagine a scientist going through your house to analyze the purpose and likely use of each of the different spaces based on the tools, supplies, and trash she finds in each place. Now imagine that 750,000 years of history have come and gone, making it hard to even figure out for sure where your house was. Researchers have carried out this kind of detective work at an archaeological site in northern Israel, drawing on plant and animal remains and stone tools found at the site to understand how people lived there 750,000 years ago. They found evidence of areas devoted to specific activities, an organization of space that is believed to be unique to modern humans; earlier research had found such areas going back to only 250,000 years ago.
Two activity areas were identified, one evidently a workshop where flint tools were made and fish were processed and eaten. The second was an area near a hearth where multiple activities were carried out.
The American Museum of Natural History has put together a wonderful video that takes you from the surface of the Earth (the Himalayas, to be specific) out to the edges of the known universe. The graphics are cool and all the depictions of astronomical objects are based on our current knowledge of them. This six-and-a-half minute trip made me feel very lucky to be here. Enjoy, and best wishes to everyone for a peaceful and joyful 2010.
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!
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.
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.
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.
, that describes the role of fermentation in human history. This 