The Thinking Meat Project

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.

This article from the Boston Globe isn’t about brain science, exactly, but it’s an interesting take on how we find meaning in the results of scientific research. Everyone knows about the butterfly effect, which has to do with very minor changes in initial conditions having profound but essentially unpredictable consequences on later events. The point of the butterfly effect, described by Edward Lorenz, is that the subtle interactions of the natural world confound our efforts to pin down the cause of any particular event. However, the pop culture take on it frequently has it the other way around, focusing on a supposed ability to identify key turning points or critical moments that determine the future. The article is about how we try to wring certainty out of an uncertain world, and about how scientific research is sometimes misunderstood.

The noted futurist Ray Kurzweil was at the first annual World Science Festival in New York last week, and speculated about the possible timeline for artificial intelligence, as reported in the New York Times. He has bet that a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029 (i.e., engage in conversation indistinguishably from a human). Kurzweil has always seemed over-optimistic to my mind, but on the other hand, he has data of a sort to back up his predictions: graphs showing the “amazingly predictable trajectories” of past progress in various technologies. Will neuroscience, computer science, etc., also show exponential progress in the near future? Time will tell.

The argument over whether or not a human-like brain can be artificially created hinges in part on the idea that the brain is a kludge–and kludges are harder to re-create than intelligently put-together objects. Having participated in the creation of many a programming kludge at work, I can vouch for the fact that they can be difficult to unravel later, even if you watched them being made. Now that I think about it, though, at work we typically untangle a kludge as part of the process of replacing it with something more rationally designed. Do AI researchers need to re-create the exact mechanisms of the human brain, with its idiosyncratic history, or do they need to see what it does and figure out a logical way to mimic that? Not that the latter is easy by any means, but it might at least be easier than re-inventing that flawed but fantastic wheel that is the human brain.

Based on how people behave, it would appear that we have two ways of solving problems or making decisions. The quick and dirty way comes up with an automatic, instinctive answer, and the slow, careful way thinks a situation through carefully. It’s easy to see the survival value, and the possible shortcomings, of each. Sometimes it’s essential to size up a situation roughly but quickly and take decisive action, but because we don’t always size up a situation correctly, we can get ourselves into trouble. (Actually maybe it would be better to describe them as complementary than as dueling.) This article from Scientific American Mind discusses the psychological studies that have revealed what we know so far about these two mechanisms. The article also talks about the next step: figuring out how the observed behavioral patterns correlate to what is going on in the brain. There probably aren’t two totally independent little circuits or systems in there for each kind of thought, but what is going on when we engage in each type of mental activity?

Somewhere in the last few years I ran across the concept of satisficing, which involves choosing something or solving a problem based on what works, not necessarily on what is the optimum choice or solution. I think I read about this in the context of the overabundance of things and choices we have these days (three different flavors of vanilla ice cream, multiple cell phone plans, four different styles when you buy blue jeans, etc.). Life is often easier for those who satisfice–look around a bit, find something that works, make a decision, and move on, rather than examine every last possibility before being willing to finally make a purchase. Anyway, one of the things I realized about evolution is that nature is a satisficer: things have to be only good enough to allow an organism to survive and somehow get its genes into the next generation. Evolution doesn’t have the luxury of considering all the possible options for some biological function and choose the best one; it goes with what works well enough out of what is already there. (How anybody can believe that the process of human birth, for example, was intelligently designed is beyond me.) As it goes with the rest of the body, so it goes with the brain. Gary Marcus, a scientist who studies language acquisition in children, has written a book called Kluge: The haphazard construction of the human mind. The New Scientist recently posted this interview with Marcus in which he talks about some of our inherent limitations and biases and how to live with them. I haven’t read the book yet–in fact these days I barely have time to read my email–but it looks like a good one.

I’m as happy as the next person (maybe happier, even) to read about the things that researchers see when they look at functional brain scans like fMRI–tools for seeing where the action is when the brain is performing a particular task. However, these tools are probably best described as exploratory and not yet suited for diagnosis. This article from Wired describes some of the efforts at using functional brain scans for diagnosing specific conditions like depression; most of them are still in their infancy. The exception is some fairly reliable software for detecting when people are lying, and even that is not reliable enough to be marketed and widely used. The article provides an educational and cautionary tale about the ways people are trying to use (and make money from) our current knowledge of brain scans to make diagnoses and recommendations. I guess the thought that our best, shiniest, coolest new gadgets will probably look like stone knives and bear skins to future generations is comforting, because it requires a belief in progress.

A TOT (tip-of-the-tongue) state is what happens when you grope around in the dimmer recesses of your brain for awhile trying to come up with a word that you know but have temporarily lost track of. (I don’t know whether it’s more difficult to undergo a TOT state yourself, or to have a conversation disrupted by the laments of someone else who is in the middle of one and has not provided enough context for you to be able to help.) This article from American Scientist goes into some interesting detail about how people resolve TOT states (or not), and what that tells us about the mental machinery that (usually) produces just the words we need, just when we need them.

This article from the New York Times goes into some recent research into the mental advantages of possessing an older brain. What some lament as a loss of focus and keen, quick recall is perhaps but the flip side of a broadened field of attention that soaks up more information, and a greater ability to adapt that information for use in different situations. Something to look forward to as I forge on through middle age…

And this press release from the University of Texas describes a study that looked at emotions and aging. It appears that overall, people’s emotions tend to be both more positive and more passive (as opposed to active) as they age, with people over 60 describing themselves as more contented.