Exploring what it means to be thinking matter
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
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.
This article from Science Daily has more details. The research was recently described in a report in the journal Science.
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!
A couple of weeks ago, Jane Goodall appeared on PBS on Bill Moyers Journal. You can watch the video online.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, one of the discoverers of Ardipithecus ramidus, will be giving a talk in Bloomington next week. He will be speaking on Tuesday, December 1, at 4:00 PM in Whittenberger Auditorium at IU Bloomington on “Ardi: Discovering and Interpreting Ardipithecus.” Ardi has been getting a lot of attention lately after 11 articles on this very early hominin fossil were published in the October 2 issue of Science. This looks like a great opportunity to learn more about Ardi from an expert.
So how about giving your brain something fun to think about the next time it rains? Check out this extremely slow-motion video of what happens when a water drop falls into a pool of water:
As someone in the video points out, that complicated and amazing process occurs every time a raindrop hits a puddle. I am moved to quote Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues, who spoke of “beauty to find in so many ways” and said that “it’s all around, if we could but perceive.” How cool that we can perceive so much more of it than we could before, and with any luck will continue to perceive more and more.
The group that brought us Earth Hour this past spring is now trying to collect as many “votes for Earth” as possible, to impress upon world leaders that people everywhere would appreciate it if they made serious progress toward addressing global climate change when they meet in Copenhagen next month. As with many of these “speak up” efforts, I don’t know how much difference it really makes, but it couldn’t hurt. Cast your vote at http://www.earthhour.org.
A new article in The Atlantic has rocked my world in a way that articles anywhere seldom do. David Dobbs explains a new hypothesis regarding genes, environment, and behavior, which he dubs the orchid hypothesis. I’ve written before about genes that appear to make a person vulnerable to things like depression or anxiety, but the vulnerability may be only half of the story. A growing amount of evidence indicates that those carrying such genes may not only be at risk of a particular disorder if they are raised in an unfavorable environment, but may also function at an above-average level if raised in a favorable environment. This could explain a lot about how supposedly detrimental genetic variants could have survived in the population.
As Dobbs points out, it also provides an amazingly different view of human strengths and weaknesses. While most of us, he says, are like dandelions that can thrive pretty much anywhere, the orchids among us respond especially poorly to a bad environment (with depression, anxiety, ADHD, or violence, for example, depending on their genes) but also respond better than the dandelions do to a good environment. Both dandelions and orchids are necessary to make our species what it is; the orchids are an asset rather than a liability.
What is particularly interesting is that Dobbs had himself tested to see which variant of the SERT gene (5-HTTLPR), which is involved in serotonin regulation, he had. There are three variants, or alleles, of this gene, two of which are believed to be linked to a greater vulnerability to depression. He suspected that he had one of these two, and indeed he did, but that news was less distressing to him than it would have been before he learned as much as he did about the orchid hypothesis. I’ve also wondered if I have one of the two higher-risk alleles of that gene, and one thing that has particularly bothered me about that is worries that I may have passed it along to my kids. I don’t usually like to put too much emotional stock into scientific results like this, but I have to say that after reading this article, I feel better about whatever genetic heritage I may have brought into and passed along in the world.
Are you reading an interesting book on a Thinking Meat topic? Write to books at thinkingmeat dot com and tell me about it.
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