The Thinking Meat Project

Einstein and Mozart

If last year was the year of Einstein (marking 100 years since he burst into prominence with four revolutionary physics papers), this year is the year of Mozart, whose 250th birthday was celebrated around the world last Friday. This New York Times article offers a look at the role Mozart’s music played in Einstein’s life and suggests some connections between the lives and work of the two men. The common thread seems to be the human pursuit of the beautiful in different forms.

          

How baboons grieve

This press release from the University of Pennsylvania describes some similarities between how baboons and humans react when they lose an important relationship. The blood levels of glucocorticoids (stress hormones such as cortisol) rise in baboons who are under stress, as they do in humans. And after the death of a family member, female free-ranging baboons sought to widen their social circles and, as they returned to more frequent grooming, their glucocorticoid levels went down. Not that baboons and humans behave exactly the same, but this is an interesting look at perhaps some of the older roots of human mourning behavior. Now I’ve got the REM song “Everybody hurts” running through my mind, especially the line, “Take comfort in your friends.”

          

The immune system and the brain

The immune system does more than protect us from illness; it evidently contributes to the brain’s ability to generate new neurons in the hippocampus. Some new research with rats shows a relationship between the presence of T cells (part of the autoimmune system) and neurogenesis in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is crucial to forming memories; the discovery that new neurons are created there challenged the belief that adult brains do not grow new cells. As adults age, their immune systems weaken; in light of this recent research, this might be related to the memory loss and cognitive impairment that often accompanies old age. Perhaps treatments that boost the immune system could also help maintain brain function.

http://www.rxpgnews.com/research/immunology/article_3219.shtml

          

Acting and memory

This press release from the Association for Psychological Science describes some research into the way actors memorize lines and what that says about memory for the rest of us. Evidently it’s not rote memorization so much as it is placing the lines in the context of the feelings, events, and actions of a particular scene. The kind of training that helps actors to memorize their lines is also useful in enhancing cognitive performance in older people. Thanks to Greg H. for telling me about this story.

          

Re-evaluating our family tree

This press release from EurekAlert describes some recent work on the genetic relationship between chimps and humans that suggests a closer relationship than previously thought. Sorry, not much commentary from me today. A very minor injury has me typing single-handed this evening.

          

Extrasolar planet news

A newly discovered extrasolar planet is the closest thing to an Earth-like planet that’s yet been discovered; although there are some major differences from Earth, it’s likely the smallest extrasolar planet found to date orbiting a normal star, and it’s probably rocky like Earth. The planet has about 5 1/2 times the mass of Earth, a good bit smaller than the previous smallest planet which was 7 1/2 times Earth-size. Astronomers have found Earth-sized planets, but they were orbiting neutron stars. The new planet is 2 1/2 times as far from its star as the Earth is from the sun (interesting because previous smaller planets have been much closer to their stars) and its star is a red dwarf, considerably cooler than the sun, and so this planet is too cold for liquid water and likely too cold for life as we know it. But still, it’s a good step on the way to finding an Earth-like planet. And the way it was found is interesting. Most of the extrasolar planets discovered to date have been identified because of minuscule shifts in the position of their parent stars due to the tiny but measurable gravitational pull of the planets; this one was found by using gravitational microlensing, in which the parent star’s gravity bends the light from a distant background star. The planet causes a brief brightening in the light from the background star.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060125_smallest_planet.html

          

Politics, emotion, and reason

An fMRI study of people who strongly identified as either Republican or Democrat showed that making a judgment about their party’s candidate activated brain areas associated with emotion, but not those associated with conscious reasoning. This press release from EurekAlert explains the study, which took place in the last few months before the 2004 election. Participants in the study were given information to evaluate about Bush, Kerry, or a control who was politically neutral (e.g., Tom Hanks), including a statement from the candidate and a contradictory statement that cast doubt on the candidate’s veracity. While they could spot the discrepancy between the two pieces of information for the other side’s candidate, people were less successful at evaluating their own party’s candidate. Furthermore, when evaluating their own candidate, participants’ brains showed increased activity in areas involved in the processing of emotion, but not in areas associated with reasoning, and furthermore not in areas that are involved in the conscious suppression of emotion. It looks like the emotional reactions may be occurring outside of conscious awareness, which might explain why entrenched political opinions (on either side) are sometimes resistant to analysis and change.

And while we’re on the subject of politics, here’s another press release from last month with more disheartening news about the irrational roots of political behavior. This one, about another study conducted before the 2004 election, describes how people who had spent time thinking and writing about their own deaths were more likely to say they would vote for Bush, while those who considered a neutral subject were more likely to say they’d vote for Kerry. Pushing the fear button is obviously part of Bush’s strategy (I’ve seen an analysis of how he uses language to this end, although I can’t find it online any more). The authors of this study advice that we “take pains to resist any efforts by candidates to capitalize on fear-mongering”. Amen, but how likely is that to happen on a large scale?

          

Thinking about dying

This is not exactly a cheerful topic, but here’s an interesting press release about research at the University of Michigan into how people feel about various end-of-life matters. Researchers used a number of focus groups to study the feelings of different groups (men, women, Hispanics, African Americans, whites, Arab Americans) about things like assisted suicide, medical intervention at the end of life, and hospice care versus being cared for at home. There were some big cultural and gender differences; Arab Americans, for example, generally feel that it’s the family’s responsibility to take care of them in their final illness, whereas Americans do not feel that way. All 73 focus group participants were over the age of 50, so they presumably had some experience with parents or other family members dying and were old enough to be able to think realistically about what they would want when it’s their turn. It’s interesting to see the cultural trends, although I’m sure that’s only part of the story when an individual faces these kinds of decisions. I wonder if all these people went out to talk to their lawyers and draw up living wills and such after examining their own possible futures.

          

Men, women, and revenge

Revenge is a dish best served cold, says the proverb, but according to this article about some recent research, it’s a dish that women are more likely to pass up. Participants in a study first played a game with people they didn’t know, the purpose of which was basically to establish the reputation of the unknown people as either fair or unfair. Those actors who played the game fairly were perceived by the participants as being not only more fair but more likeable. Then the researchers administered shocks to the participants and to the fair and unfair actors, while monitoring the brain activity in the participants. When a fair actor received a shock, the participants’ brains showed an increase in activity in areas related to the perception of pain; with unfair actors, the increase was smaller in women and non-existent in men. This seems to indicate that the participants felt empathy for the fair actor, but either less empathy or none at all for the unfair actor. According to questionnaires that they filled out afterward, the men felt more of an urge for revenge than the women did. Actually I’m most curious about something mentioned at the end of the article, that what’s going on might be related to the type of punishment involved, and if you were dealing with something like social ostracism, for example, women’s reactions might have been different. It would be kind of interesting if they took people of different religious beliefs and saw how they responded. Would a Buddhist or a Quaker feel more empathy for the people being given painful shocks, no matter how they had behaved in the game, compared to someone whose belief system involves a physical punishment for those who behave badly?

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060118_empathy_revenge.html

          

Leptin and depression

Leptin, which has been recognized for awhile as a key hormone in controlling appetite and weight, is also linked to depression, at least in rats. It makes sense that appetite is linked to mood; who hasn’t felt too anxious or depressed to eat? But it’s not clear how this recent work with rats might translate to humans. (Leptin was supposed to be a big anti-obesity drug because of how it acted in rats, but it didn’t work the same for people.) In a recent study, stressed rats had lower levels of leptin in their blood and also showed signs of depression, which were reversed when the rats were given leptin injections. If leptin does turn out to be useful in treating human depression, scientists would likely need to develop a way to reproduce the effect with another molecule that has only the anti-depressant effects, to avoid side-effects due to all the other roles that leptin plays in the body. I suspect we’re in such early days in figuring out how this all works that people are going to look back 100 years from now and be amused at our misconceptions based on the bits and pieces we know so far, but we’ve got to keep gathering the bits and pieces to try to assemble them into a coherent picture. (There’s a technical term, by the way, for the particular type of stress the rats were subjected to: chronic unpredictable stress, or CUS. I’ll have to try that one out in conversation the next time I’m complaining about my job.)

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060116/full/060116-3.html

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/tb/2496

          

Language resurrected

A language holds within its words and its structures many clues to how the people who spoke it lived. When a language dies, we’ve lost a unique window on the world. But sometimes, a language can be brought back to life to some degree. Virginia Algonquian, spoken by some of the Native Americans that met the first European settlers in North America, ceased being spoken around 1785, but has been reconstructed for the movie The New World, directed by Terrence Malick and recently released by New Line Cinema. A historical linguist from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Blair Rudes, was called in to resuscitate the language enough that it could be spoken in the movie. This press release from EurekAlert describes some of the work involved in recalling the language and a bit of the world that shaped it. I expect it’s a dim echo of the living language, but it’s better than nothing.

          

Neanderthal vs human hunters

OK, another story about what might have happened to the Neanderthals. Actually this press release briefly describes a new paper about how Neanderthals and early humans likely had very similar hunting practices, and thus it’s not safe to assume that the Neanderthals were done in by failure to compete effectively for food with modern humans. Over the past year or so, I’ve seen a few news items about social differences between modern humans and Neanderthals that might account for the demise of the latter, namely that humans figured out concepts like division of labor and trading economic resources with each other, which gave them the edge over the Neanderthals. The authors of this new study propose something similar, instead of a difference in hunting abilities, as an explanation for why we’re still here and the Neanderthals are not.

          

Revising the Drake equation

The AAS (American Astronomical Society) met last week and all kinds of cool new findings were announced. This press release from the Carnegie Institution is about binary stars and planets. Until now astronomers have thought that the complicated gravitational landscape around binary stars would preclude the formation and retention of planets. Since binaries or other multiple star systems account for two out of three stars in our galaxy, this had a big effect on any estimates of the number of planets there might be in the galaxy. But extrasolar planet hunters have found some planets in binary systems, and it wasn’t clear how they had managed to form. Now Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution has done some modelling that shows that in some circumstances, planets can form around binary star systems as easily as they can around a single star. In fact, in some cases, the presence of a second star in a system can actually make it easier for planets to form. The Drake equation is the one for estimating the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy, based on factors that include the fraction of stars that have planetary systems. Adding binary systems to the candidates would change the calculation quite a bit. (Although I will once again mention Ward & Brownlee’s book Rare Earth, which argues that life may be quite common in the cosmos but intelligent life much less so.)

          

Spatial memory and sleep

When you have to learn a new spatial task, your hippocampus generates new neurons that help anchor your memory of what you’ve learned. In sleep-restricted rats, this process appears to be derailed. In a recent study, rats who had less sleep were worse at remembering a path through a maze than their well-rested counterparts; also, the rested rats showed increased neurogenesis in their hippocampi, but in the sleep-restricted rats, the rate of survival for these newly created cells was lower. These rats weren’t deprived of sleep altogether, just given less sleep than is normal for them, so the experiments more or less mimic what a lot of humans live with. On the other hand, the sleep-restricted rats did better than the rested rats when the task involved relying on sensory cues rather than memory for navigating the maze, indicating that since they couldn’t use memory, they were forced to find another strategy that was not as affected by the lack of sleep. So it looks like interfering with sleep might rearrange the normal hierarchy of processes the brain uses. Interesting stuff for those curious about what is going on in the brain during sleep and why the brain needs sleep (a fact that busier hominids sometimes regret). At least we’re not lab rats swimming through a maze. Thanks to Greg H. for telling me about this story.

http://www.brightsurf.com/news/headlines/view.article.php?ArticleID=22476

          

Stardust returns safely to Earth

Some fragments of cosmic history, holding clues to the origin of the solar system and possibly the origin of life, floated to Earth in the Utah desert early this morning. NASA’s Stardust mission returned a sample of a comet safely to Earth, providing scientists their first opportunity to study cometary material in the lab. Stardust launched in 1999 and has spent the past seven years making the journey to comet Wild 2 to collect samples of cometary dust and gas and then returning home. Because comets contain some of the oldest and most pristine material in the solar system, and possibly the raw materials for life, examining comet innards up close could tell us a lot about the earliest days of the solar system. In addition, we might learn more about the ways that comets affected the early Earth (possibly supplying volatiles or the organic materials that might have been the seeds of life). In addition to these ancient remnants of the early solar system, Stardust brought back samples of interstellar dust, including some from a stream of dust arriving at our solar system from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, which may date back to before the solar system formed.

Stardust consisted of the main spacecraft and a sample return capsule. During the mission, a tennis-racket-shaped paddle was exposed to the comet during a fly-by, and to the interstellar medium. The paddle contained an aerogel with lots of pockets to collect tiny specks of ancient dust. The main spacecraft jettisoned the sample return capsule, which streaked through the sky over California, Nevada, and Utah early this morning before deploying its parachutes and dropping gently to the ground in Utah. The main spacecraft then headed off into an orbit around the sun. It sounds like the landing went beautifully. Now we get to see what the samples tell us.

          

Realizing life while you live it

It seems a bit strange, but somehow I’ve lived all these years without reading or seeing Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town until this afternoon. I had the idea that it was a nostalgic piece about a simpler time, but that’s not it at all. For one thing, the play contains plenty of bitter truths and does not present a sanitized vision of “the good old days”. The lack of props and sets, the stage manager who addresses the audience, the simultaneous presence of past and present and future: these were all revolutionary when the play was first written, and I think Wilder used them to capture some fascinating truths about how consciousness works and what art is for. Wilder wrote, “I regard theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.” I’ve thought before that art helps us deal with being thinking meat, and this to me describes one of the ways that art works. I don’t know why it’s so important to share our experiences of what it means to be human, but it is. Maybe it helps teach us how to live well, but I think more likely the most important thing it does is to alleviates the loneliness of being a conscious animal.

Wilder continues, “The supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always now on the stage.” Somewhere (I wish I could remember where) I read that the subconscious doesn’t know time in the same way that the conscious mind does. For the subconscious, everything is now. This is why it can feel so astonishing, even years after the fact, that someone close to us has died and is no longer here. In our subconscious mind, that person is still here, so how can she be gone out there in the world? The shifting nature of time in the play felt connected to that subconscious eternal now. However, Wilder also writes of the “now” of the stage: “The personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being…” I am fascinated by this link between the arts and the study of human consciousness. Bernard J. Baars, in In the theater of consciousness, suggests that the scientific study of consciousness is an extension of what humans have been doing for centuries through the arts: “to apply the mind to its own understanding.”

The point of the play is that it’s a great gift to be here, in this moment and at this place, and that even the most mundane of events and objects are worthy of our attention and love. The catch is that except for “poets and saints”, it’s hard to realize this and appreciate the life you’re living while you’re in the middle of living it. These lines from another Wilder play, The Woman of Andros, express that dilemma: “…we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to live every moment…” Some spiritual traditions focus on mindfulness, an awareness of the present moment, which I think is the same thing as keeping our hearts “conscious of our treasure” and a wonderful goal. However, it’s true that it’s very difficult to live that way every moment. I guess all we can do is keep trying.

          

Darwinian aesthetics

Here’s an article by Denis Dutton, who is writing a book on Darwinian aesthetics. This article is an interesting overview of some of the things that people are starting to consider from an evolutionary point of view: why we typically favor the type of landscape we do, why we generally all like the same kinds of stories and are drawn to similar themes in them, and why we crave novelty in the arts, and what role sexual selection might have played in shaping human characteristics and talents like musical ability or verbal skill. I’m looking forward to reading the book whenever he’s done with it. Over the past six months or so I’ve learned about a number of new fields of study, like Darwinian literary criticism, biopoetics, and biomusicology, that take a scientific approach to studying the arts. When I read Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience last year I didn’t really grasp that it was starting to happen to this degree. It should be interesting to watch these fields develop.

          

How the Taung child died

At least one pre-human child was killed not by a ground-based predator as previously thought but by a bird of prey. This story gives me the heebie-jeebies for some reason, even though the death in question happened two million years ago. The Taung child’s skull, discovered in 1924, was the first fossil identified as belonging to Australopithecus africanus. It’s long been thought that the child was killed by a large feline predator, but previously unnoticed marks on the skull indicate that instead the two- or three-year-old child was done in by a bird of prey that carried it off to its nest for dinner. The bird scooped out the eyes, and that left distinctive marks on the skull that are similar to those eagles leave on the skulls of their small primate prey today. I don’t know why it seems worse to know that this kid was carried off by a bird than it does to think he was mauled by a tiger; maybe I’ve just had years to get used to the fact that humans get eaten by big cats but I’ve never thought of us as vulnerable to birds of prey. Perhaps this vulnerability influenced some of our more characteristic behaviors, like walking upright. Thanks to Mark D. for passing this one along.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L1222947.htm

          

Alzheimer’s and daydreaming, part 2

It looks like certain areas of the brain might benefit from a little down time, because the process of communication between brain cells in those areas contributes to the formation of the plaques associated with Alzheimer’s. Back in August there was a story about how the brain areas active in wool-gathering or musing in healthy young people were also the areas that are likely to develop these plaques. A new study shows that the higher rate of communication between neurons in these areas increases the amount of amyloid beta, an important ingredient in the plaques. This article from ScienceDaily describes the mechanisms involved and possible treatments that might result from a better understanding of how this works and why it happens only in certain areas of the brain. When I first heard this I thought, What ever happened to “Use it or lose it”? But it turns out that the advice about working puzzles and keeping your mind sharp is not contraindicated by this latest result; the cognitive effort involved in mental exercise may decrease the activity in the areas more prone to Alzheimer’s plaques. Thanks to my friend Vania for telling me about this story.

          

Ovulation makes the heart go yonder?

Based on two studies of college women, researchers note that the women with less attractive mates lusted after hunkier guys when they were ovulating. In one study, 38 women between the ages of 18 and 40 kept daily diaries of their sexual feelings over a period of just over a month; the information in the diaries was combined with information about how attractive the women felt that their partners were and about their menstrual cycles. Another study involved 43 women, who made only two diary entries, one of which was timed so it was written when they were ovulating. The researchers also gathered information about how these women perceived their partners’ behavior, which led to some interesting observations about when the men were more likely to display jealousy or watchfulness. Neither of those sounds to me like a very big sample, so I’m not sure how sweeping a conclusion I’d draw from the whole thing.

One possible explanation for such variations in desire is that during ovulation there’s some kind of biological trigger for seeking out the most handsome guy to mate with (whether he’s the woman’s steady partner or not), assuming that good looks are an indicator of genetic fitness and a better chance of survival for any child that results. Even if this really is how it generally works, of course there’s a huge difference between having urges toward infidelity and acting on them. A lot more goes into people’s decision-making about such things than the unconscious wish to maximize reproductive success, and that to me is usually the most interesting tension in discussions of evolutionary psychology.

http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6713

There’s also an article from the Albuquerque Journal that quotes one of the researchers as saying that the ideas about why this happens are all just speculation, and no one has to believe it. I found that refreshingly honest and a little amusing.