Positivity Dogma

via RSAnimate, a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich about the dangers of installing positivity as an unchallengeable dogma.

Prenatal Learning

via TED.com - a talk about how much we are already primed to expect from the outside world, even before we are born.

Wired to Connect

Mothers and babies really do connect on a very fundamental level - babies and their biological mothers synchronize heartbeats when they are engaging in mutually cheerful behavior - smiling, cooing, or laughing.

The article is great, but the picture of the mother and baby smiling at each other is really priceless. Do yourself a favor and click through.

ScienceShot: Human Hearts Beat Together

Crying Means Distress

I could rant a lot more about this subject so I will restrain myself. Psychology Today has a really great article describing the impact that being left alone to "cry it out" has on babies and toddlers. In a nutshell, it makes kids grow up less intelligent, more anxious, unable to integrate socially, and highly liable to pass on those same unwanted traits to further generations.

Dangers of “Crying It Out”

Dancing Around the Subject

Psychology Today has run a really great article about dancing and how it allows us to access the wisdom of our bodies. We regularly stifle our body-wisdom in favor of our overactive minds. We're supposed to sit quietly and work only with our brains. Ugh! Kimerer LaMothe puts us right:

To Dance Is a Radical Act

Nuke Lint?

Afraid all life on earth is destined to die in a global thermonuclear holocaust? Check out the strange "lint" growing in tanks of water around spent fuel rods at the Savannah River Nuclear Site. We might bomb ourselves into oblivion, but fungus may yet prevail. Via the Augusta Chronicle.

Strange nuclear waste lint might be "biological in nature"

Bee Brains

SciGuru reports on new work showing similarities between how bees communicate and come to consensus to choose a new nesting site after a swarm, and how neurons in a human brain communicate to achieve consensus during the act of making a decision.

“This research shows that a key feature of a human brain – cross inhibition between evidence-accumulating populations of subunits – also exists in a swarm as it chooses its nesting site."

Basically, a quiet debate goes on between factions of bees - and between factions of neurons - and the process makes sure that different pros and cons are weighed before conscious choice is made. So when we spend an election season arguing with each other back and forth about the merits of any particular candidate or political stance, are we recreating the same process on a different scale? Interesting stuff.

House-hunting honey bees shed light on how human brains come to a decision

Expectations

Bobby McFerrin on the mysteries of the pentatonic scale.

The Language of Tantrums

Scientists have now studied and deconstructed the toddler temper tantrum, giving us a much better idea of what's actually going on behind all of that screaming...and a few better pieces of advice on how to deal with them. The old common wisdom is that tantrums always begin in anger and progress towards ending in tears, but vocal analysis shows that kids actually sway back and forth between anger and sadness as the tantrum goes on. There's a kind of pattern to them that can help us understand what's going on for the child a little better.

The best way to defuse a tantrum? Don't react. Rising with anger to the child's anger, or even just addressing it in any way, just prolongs it.

What's Behind A Temper Tantrum? Scientists Deconstruct The Screams

Child Abuse Never Really Stops

Kids who were abused as children grow up with brains tuned to be hypervigilant - similar changes have been observed in the brains of soldiers. Abused kids have a kind of permanent, low-grade Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that never really goes away. We have long known that abused kids grow up to be more anxious and depressed, and now we have the brain imaging showing permanent neural rewiring to go with that data.

Don't hit your kids. Just don't.

via SciGuru, Child abuse changes the brain

Honest Babies

Live Science reports on research showing that babies are inherently turned off by people who are dishonest or unreliable. Humans are, from an extremely early age, able to judge the behavior of others around them and to develop preferences for people they can rely upon. They also prefer to imitate and learn from those people. Let's live up to their expectations, shall we?

Babies Picky About Who They Imitate

Knowing

The Boston Globe has run a wonderful story about a set of identical twins, born as Jonas and Wyatt, who nevertheless have developed very differently. Wyatt, from as early as age 3, always self-identified as a girl. Now 14, Wyatt is now known as Nicole, and she is undergoing treatment to postpone male puberty until she can make the decision to undergo full male-to-female gender reassignment surgery after she's 18. The Globe's article details the tricky navigation of this social adjustment and the heartwarming bravery of Nicole and her family. Must-read.

Led by the child who simply knew

Crafty Buggers, part III

Bedbugs. Icky, icky, bedbugs. While they are undoubtedly becoming more resistant to pesticides, just like the corn borers that Monsanto has tried to thwart with GMO seeds, they also undoubtedly utilize the hearing-body-hair that all other insects and spiders have to help them locate predators and prey.

In case you were wondering about the superpowers of YOUR OWN leg hair, wonder no more. Body hair has been shown to help protect against bedbug bites. The bugs disturb your hairs as they crawl across your skin in the night, and you will twitch and flick them away in your sleep, apparently. This is also why bedbugs apparently have an evolved liking for the wrists and ankles, as these areas have less body hair on pretty much all humans (even Robin Williams). The BBC reports:

Hairy limbs keep bed bugs at bay

Crafty Buggers, part II

Recent work has shown that the hairs on spiders' and insects' legs act in the same way as the cilia in the cochlea of the mammalian inner ear - they pick up vibrations in the air, allowing the animals to hear each other. Wired has a great post on the story, including video of the laser and camera setup the researchers used to capture ultrafast images of the hairs doing their vibrational work.

Spiders’ Hundreds of Fine Hairs Are Hundreds of Ears

Crafty Buggers

Via Grist, a report on the burgeoning failure of Monsanto's GMO pesticide-resistant and pesticide-producing crops. Basically, in an evolutionary race against insects we will never win on any permanent basis by poisoning them, because their life cycles are so short that they can simply evolve around the obstacle.

The bugs that ate Monsanto

Frankl on Attitude

Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and respected psychiatrist, discusses the value of holding ourselves and others to a high standard of ethics and compassion. Footage is from 1972, via TED.




Viktor Frankl: Why to believe in others

Flight from Death

"To have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression...and with all this...yet to die."

Being alive and self-aware, to be aware that at some point in the future you will cease to be, this is a tremendous burden. We don't talk about how difficult it is - we just go about with our lives, ignoring this enormous elephant in the room. Yes Virginia, one day even you will also die.

The presence of our mortality provokes anxiety in us, and that anxiety pushes us to isolate ourselves within our sociocultural groups, to become xenophobic, to maim and kill and war upon those we consider to be dangerous either physically or ideologically.



Yet the future is not entirely dark. For one thing, this documentary was made in the first place, so we are at least becoming aware of the problem! I see a great awakening of the understanding that WE are the ones who run our lives. We can choose compassion and empathy over fear and rejection. We are, indeed, in the midst of doing so on a grand collective scale.

Also watch "Flight from Death" commercial-free on Netflix streaming.

Gratitude

It's so important to be grateful.

What Is The Purpose Of Life?

This question has been debated by people throughout the ages, but here's a novel answer:

The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.

Say what? The chemical equation is a little complex, but in short: The atmosphere of the primeval earth had a LOT of carbon dioxide in it. The interior of the planet had (and still has) a lot of free hydrogen in it. These two molecules would "prefer" to get together as hydrocarbons (such as methane) because they would be in a state of higher entropy if they did so. This is kind of like saying that two marbles put in a bowl would prefer to roll together at the bottom of the bowl...but there's a catch. In order for CO2 and H2 to combine, they actually need a little boost of energy first - imagine that there's a little lip on the bowl, and one of the marbles is stuck in the groove of it, so that the bowl needs a little jostle for the marble to hop over and roll to the bottom to join its companion.

CO2 and H2 can combine inorganically via a geochemical process called serpentinization (producing a kind of rock known as serpentine) - but biological processes are MUCH more efficient. Witness: all the hydrocarbons we've been pumping out of the earth's crust and burning were once living organic matter. And the carbon dioxide crisis we're creating by burning oil and coal is, essentially, running the evolution of our planet's atmosphere in reverse. Way back at the beginning of life on this planet, the air was great for trees but not so hot for animals to breathe. Yet another reason to pay attention to how we play around with the chemical balance of our environment.

Read more here: How Life Arose on Earth, and How a Singularity Might Bring It Down via scientificamerican.com

Triassic Self-Portraits?

File this one under "just plain weird."

Seems that paleontologists have recently turned up some pretty strange fossils - bones of a kind of ichthyosaur called Shonisaurus popularis have been found in strange arrangements. Specifically, vertebrae from several different animals have been found fossilized into a linear pattern. What's going on here?

We don't know, but Mark McMenamin thinks he has a clue. Apparently, octopuses have been known to do the same thing with fish bones - they take the vertebrae and arrange them so that they look like octopus suckers. Are these fossils evidence of some ancient molluscan self-portrait? What do you think?

Read more here: Triassic 'Kraken' may have created self-portrait via tgdaily.com

Mindfulness Matters

A great deal of our everyday unhappiness arises from the perceived rift between "self" and "everything else." It is difficult to be self-aware and to experience yourself as separate from the universe. It can be lonely and confusing and even frightening. What is the purpose of all of this crazy stuff going on around me? What am I supposed to be doing here? Why me?

All of this chatter in our heads just contributes to the problem. The more you concentrate on something, the bigger part of your life it will take up - the snake bites its own tail, and voila, misery! We can break the cycle of self-obsession by taking up our time in different ways: we become busy, we eat or drink or smoke, or we meditate or pray. Among these coping skills, meditation and prayer are the most effective.

A series of studies have now shown exactly how effective "mindfulness work" (meditation, prayer, etc.) can be.


Read more here: Eat, Smoke, Meditate: Why Your Brain Cares How You Cope via Forbes.com

The Oldest People

New evidence indicates that humans have lived on the island of Australia for some 70,000 years now. That is a simply mind-boggling amount of time. The Australian aborigines' ancestors were the first humans to get the itch to travel - and they left Africa long before the rest of us did. They had boats, too. Australia was an island already by that time, and was not visible from the rest of Indonesia. Explorers would have to have inferred its presence by the patterns of weather and waves.

Read more here: Aboriginal DNA dates Australian arrival via ABC.net.au

There's No Such Thing As "Outside" Any More.

We have a natural handicap to our individual human thought processes: because we have individual bodies and we can draw a conceptual distinction between "self" and "everything else", we are burdened with this illusory notion of "outsideness." But when you throw something away, exactly where is "away"? On a small planet in the middle of a vast and chilly void, there is no such thing as "away."

And so, let's cheer the canny editors over at Discovery.com, who have collated a list of seven ways that poo will power the future. Even our excrement can't be thrown "away" any more. That's valuable biomass, and we should be putting it to good use! From park lights powered by a dog-poop methane reactor, to spaceborne fuel cells, there's more value in what we flush away than we think.

Read more here: 7 Places Poo Will Power the Future via news.discovery.com

Weather Wars

Feeling blue as the weather starts getting more wintery? The wider implications of long-term weather trends on human culture are startling. Scientists have recently performed statistical analyses that show correlation between periods of shifting climate and wars and other social upheavals. The premise is not startling - basically, the weather gets colder for a few years, the crops are not as bountiful or fail altogether, and human life becomes stressed. Stressed humans are grouchy, and they take out their upset on each other. Voila, war.

Read more here: Got War? Blame the Weather via news.sciencemag.org

The Long Slow Make

This is a very interesting video on the political implications of the Maker movement.

Your Genes Are What You Eat, Too.

Ribonucleic acid, or RNA, is a kind of molecule which is part of the DNA genetic system. DNA contains the code for creating every part of our bodies - it tells our cells how to divide, how to create proteins, how to grow and differentiate into the different tissues of our flesh, and how to metabolize. RNA is the molecule which reads these instructions and carries them out.

It's extremely interesting, then, that we have recently learned that some plant RNA can pass directly into the human bloodstream. Micro RNA (miRNA) from rice has been shown to pass into the blood of both mice and humans. We've always known the truth of "you are what you eat," but this research opens up another interesting line of inquiry: how are these organic molecules affecting the expression of our genes? Our food may be even more important than we thought.

Read more here: What You Eat Affects Your Genes: RNA from Rice Can Survive Digestion and Alter Gene Expression via Discovermagazine.com

Personal Magnetism?

Estonian scientists with transcranial magnetic stimulation devices have found that applying a strong magnetic field to the left or right frontal lobes of the brain can have an effect on "spontaneous" decisions whether to tell a lie or tell the truth. These findings dovetail with research performed at MIT last year, showing that transcranial magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes can make people "temporarily less moral" - more likely to exhibit self-serving behavior in an experimental setting.

Think you're in charge of your mind? There's more going on than we suspected.

Read more here: Magnetic Pulses to the Brain Make it Impossible to Lie via uk.ibtimes.com

Prosocial Progress

Would you help an old lady cross the road? How about picking up a stamped addressed letter off the sidewalk and putting it in a nearby mailbox? Or perhaps you might return a lost wallet you found? All of those actions are known as "prosocial" or society-promoting behaviors, and it's been a question for the ages as to how a human culture is best able to foster them. David Sloan Wilson has been working on exactly that. First, he and his team set out to measure the prevalence and geographical distribution of prosocial behaviors in his hometown of Binghamton, New York. The results were striking - prosociality (and I guess its inverse, which might be antisociality?) proved to be a cluster-based phenomenon. Prosocial people are grouped into geographic neighborhoods, with voids between them. Basically, Wilson has figured out a way to scientifically define a "good neighborhood."

At this point, Wilson and his team then looked at the results from an evolutionary standpoint.

As an academic evolutionist, I knew that prosociality can evolve in any species when highly prosocial individuals are able to interact with each other and avoid interacting with selfish individuals - in other words, when those who give also receive. Our surveys show that this is what is happening in Binghamton. The most caring and altruistic individuals receive the most social support from multiple sources, including family, neighbourhood, school, religion, and through extracurricular activities such as sports and arts. Groups that satisfy this basic condition for prosociality are likely to thrive.

Not only that, but he tracked people over time as they moved from neighborhood to neighborhood around town, and he found that their prosociality changed to match the existing levels of their new neighborhood! So obviously humans are versatile and resilient, and able to a certain extent to change themselves to fit their environment. Given this, let's go back to our original question - how do we foster prosociality?

Projects in the works to test for this include a neighborhood "Design Your Own Park" initiative, and the Regents Academy - a program being rolled out in local schools to aid at-risk children.

A group that functions well is a bit like an organism with numerous organs: remove any single organ and the organism dies. The Regents Academy has all the necessary organs to function as an effective group, and it seems to be working.

If we can understand the anatomy of a healthy social group, then we can start tinkering with and improving our own social health. In a prosocial culture, everyone wins.

Read more here: Evolutionary theory can make street life better via New Scientist

Just Gorgeous

What can we do with technology these days? Have a look at this printer-fountain in Osaka.

Go With Your Gut

It's been known for a while that quite a large proportion - about 95%! - of the neurotransmitter serotonin is made in the human gut, rather than in the brain. In fact, it has even been argued that the intestinal tract constitutes a "second brain" - and that our emotional wellbeing may be intricately tied to the sensations that arise in the gut.

Recent research has expanded this work, with results indicating that mice who have a healthy probiotic balance of gut microbes react more efficiently to stress - that is, they were braver and less paralyzed by fear when faced with experimental situations designed to test their mettle. Mice fed probiotic feed were more likely to spend longer in parts of a maze that didn't have a roof (mice don't like to be exposed from above - predators come from there!) and they reacted much more calmly to being put in bowls of water where they were required to swim around a bit and find a hidden platform to stand on.

Are probiotics a good idea for both mice and men? Anything that makes my tummy feel good is alright by me.

Read more here: From guts to brains – eating probiotic bacteria changes behaviour in mice via discovermagazine.com

Ball of Light

Denis Smith was once in high-pressure sales, but found that the lifestyle was destroying him. Now he paints with light - a type of photography that involves leaving the shutter open for long nighttime exposures, and then creating shapes by waving various light sources around in front of the lens. Humans generally move too fast and aren't reflective enough to even register as a blur in the resulting photo - the light forms seem to stand on their own, and to have their own existence and life.

Smith has gravitated toward a particular shape in his light painting - the "ball of light" - in which he stands very still in one place and swings a light on a string around him to create an almost perfect sphere. I love this story so much - it's inspirational in so many ways. Take 15 minutes off your day and watch this:

Ball Of Light from Sam Collins on Vimeo.

Find the original documentary link here:

http://documentaryheaven.com/ball-of-light/

The Good News, Courtesy of Uncle Carl

Excuse my erratic posting behavior here - I have been on the road a lot in the past month. Enjoy this video with Carl Sagan - he was always one of the best optimistic humanists.

The Hackerspace Revolution

"I don't do what I do because of hope, I do what I do because it feels right." - Mitch Altman

#CCCAMP11 - Mitch Altman, Tvbegone/Noisebridge [EN] from Owni on Vimeo.

Can a love of making stuff fix the world? Let's find out!

Too Close For Comfort

Relationships are usually way more complicated than they appear. Case in point, new evidence from a study conducted jointly by the University of Chicago and Cornell University, which suggests that men whose wives are friendly with their male buddies are significantly more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction.

What’s going on here? It’s not as simple as straight-up insecurity or jealousy. Rather, the results appear to indicate that the friendly wife interferes with the social connections that maintain her husband’s male identity. In this kind of “partner-betweenness” situation, men were an astonishing 92% more likely to report erectile dysfunction than men of a similar age not in a betweenness situation. As men entered old age, though, the correlation faltered. Old men do not define their masculinity by their buddy friendships, but have identities supported more by relationships with family members.

What makes a man a man? Certainly not the ability to coerce, threaten, or control his wife – to forbid her to socialize with his friends – or to play upon her insecurities to keep her compliant. The results of this study beg more examination, but in the meantime I might suggest: if you’re a man who wants to keep up keeping it up all through middle age, take the time to figure out who you are without your buddies around to remind you.

Read more here: Is impotence linked to dating within your group of friends? Via io9.com

The 10,000 Year Explosion

The University of Utah’s own Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran have co-authored a new book about the ways that the human genome has evolved during the past 10,000 years – the blink of an eye in terms of the life of our species. From detailing the development of lactose tolerance and malaria resistance, to the startling suggestion that we may have improved our capacity for intelligence by interbreeding with Neanderthals, this book is a compelling and well-written exploration of this fascinating subject.

The 10,000 Year Explosion is available in local bookstores and via Amazon.com

I Said, and We Heard

What do your emails reveal about your relationships with those around you? More that just the details of the subject, apparently. Psychologist James Pennebaker has been studying the use of pronouns in written language, and he has uncovered a startlingly robust correlation: in correspondence between people of unequal rank, the lower ranked person will use more “I,” “me,” and “my” pronouns, and the higher ranked person will use more “we,” “us,” and “our” pronouns. This gives a whole new spin to the “royal we.”

Read more here: The Secret Language Code via Scientificamerican.com

Up From Down's

Trisomy 21, in which an extra copy of the 21st human gene is coded for in a person's cells, is the root cause of Down's Syndrome. Down's people tend to have lower-than-average cognitive abilities, but new works suggests that this particular symptom of the syndrome may be avoidable if certain brain-stimulating drugs are given to Down's patients as children. The cognitive effects of Down's seem to be associated with the neurons of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that forms and processes memory. In Down's, the hippocampus develops much more slowly than in unaffected children - so giving a drug that stimulates the hippocampus may improve the cognitive function. Early work with drugs intended for Alzheimer's sufferers appears promising.

Read more here: A Drug for Down Syndrome via NYTimes.com

Who's Domesticating Whom?

Certain troops of baboons have learned to keep dogs as pets, to work for them as dogs work for humans - to keep the baboons safe from predators, to help hunt, and to be petted and accepted as part of the family.

Life, Emerging and Merging.

Way back in the early days when life was just getting going on this planet, the raw "life soup" that made up the oceans had some pretty weird stuff going on in it. At first, (we think) it was just raw strands of DNA, RNA, and amino acids floating around, interacting and replicating. At some point those informational molecules got their act together inside a lipid wall, and the first cell was born.

Very early cells didn't have a nucleus or a cellular membrane. The cells that make up our human bodies (and the bodies of all animals, fungi, and plants) do have both of these. So what happened? Apparently, these complex eukaryotic cells arose when two different kinds of primitive cells (one archaebacteria and one eubacteria) merged together, instead of one eating the other.

New evidence suggests that the genes of these two primitive cell lines, to this very day, metabolize and work very differently inside all of our cells - a symbiosis that is 1.5 billion years old. We are all chimeras - the cellular equivalent of a blending of fish and fowl. Without this ancient cooperation, none of the life we see every day around us would exist.

Read more here: Human Cells a Chimera of Ancient Life via Wired.com

Beside the Seaside

Our fossil origins are being uncovered more completely every day, but the question still remains - when can we draw a line and say that after this point, we are "human" and before it, we were just hominids? Where did this population of recognizably-modern humans arise? What was their lifestyle like?

Some of these questions are being answered in more detail by a team of researchers working in South Africa. We have had genetic evidence of a "bottleneck" - an event during which almost all the human lineage died - for some time now, but it has been unclear exactly what happened. Now it appears that we may have survived this bottleneck event, and gone on to prosper by living on the seashore, eating easily-available seafoods from intertidal pools, and expanding our brains both by the increased input of Omega-3 fatty acids and by the challenge of calculating the monthly cycle of spring and neap tides needed to know when it was safe to venture out onto the rocks to gather mussels and other shellfish.

More information here: Water’s edge ancestors via Sciencenews.org

Audio Illusion

What do you hear? This sound is like an audio Rorschach test - it is meaningless, but our brains try to insert meaning into it. What you hear often reflects upon your state of mind.

The Aggro Ego

Why is anger such a seductive emotion? We are in love with anger. Watch almost any of our movies, read a novel, hell - watch the news any night, and at some point you will encounter information intended to make you good and angry. We even have a whole entertainment genre dedicated to the airing of unpleasant emotions like anger and sadness - it's called "drama."

When you look at how anger actually affects the social fabric among people, you wonder why we put up with it being so prevalent. Anger shuts down communication, and it is designed to force an outcome, when working cooperatively to let one evolve often results in a solution that is both more appropriate and more robust. Still, getting your anger on just feels good. Giving in to our emotions and our impulses feels good. For that matter, eating a Twinkie feels good.

And yet, we exercise self-control in the face of that tempting Twinkie, in order that we have a healthier body. But does that self-denial come at a price? Studies have shown that people who exercise restraint in the face of one temptation are measurably more quick to anger right afterward. They call this effect "ego depletion." Psychologists David Gal and Wendy Liu, however, have been studying self-control and anger, and they have found evidence that not only does exercising self-control tend to make it harder for us to contain our anger later on, but that self-control may in fact be inherently aggravating.

Maybe this is why we love fictional drama and angry news so much - it gives us an outlet for all of that aggro ego.

Read more here: Where Do Bad Moods Come From? via Wired.com

Everything Evolves...

...even us. It's hard for us to really understand, because we experience things individually on a personal timescale, compared to which the development of our genetic inheritance goes on at a geological pace. But are we evolving? Yes. The gene for the "alcohol flush reaction" which is common among Asians arose around 10,000 years ago, and a set of genes to help cope with low oxygen levels (read: high altitudes) may have evolved among Tibetans as recently as 3,000 years ago.

Researchers are finding that the human genome is constantly changing, and that many traits are influenced by dozens of genes at a time, enabling those traits to be selected for more quickly in response to changing environmental pressures.

Read more here: Adventures in Very Recent Evolution via NYTimes.com

Signs of Intelligence?

Anthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger is constructing a database of our earliest signs and symbols - markings drawn or painted by humans on cave walls up to 60,000 years ago. The interesting thing about this work is that certain symbols recur at different caves, geographically distant, and across tens of thousands of years. What does all this mean? Petzinger has no solid answer, but she does have some interesting theories. Entoptic patterns very similar to these symbols are seen by shamans in altered states of consciousness, and it could be that these oddly common cave art symbols arose directly from the human brain, and were accessed via religious trance.

Read more here: Human Ingenuity: A 100,000-Year-Old Story via forbes.com

The Illusion of Coherence

Think you know how you think? Think again. Your memory is full of holes, and your memories might not even be real. Our sense of self (the ego) glosses over all of this stuff in the endeavor of fostering a sense of personal continuity, but if you look closely at your experience of the world, everything begins to come apart. Don't feel too bad about it. Cosmologists have noted that physical matter exhibits the same behavior, for what it's worth.

Read more here: 5 Mind Blowing Ways Your Memory Plays Tricks On You via Cracked.com

Civilization, Unleaded.

To what extent are we responsible for our actions? Civilizations over thousands of years have struggled with this question while formulating their laws and moral standards. In general, it has been assumed that if you have poor impulse control, that is your problem to solve, and therefore it is the action of a responsible society to put you in prison or execute you if you are aggressive and unable to integrate socially.

The more we learn about the human brain, though, the more evidence we are gathering that indicates that how we behave relies greatly upon the development and health of that piece of gray matter between our ears. Poor impulse control appears now to be less a conscious decision, and more a result of irregularities in the formation of the brain. In particular, lead exposure has been shown to cripple the prefrontal cortex of growing children, resulting in a permanent loss of volume in that area of the brain. The prefrontal cortex is directly involved with executive function and, you guessed it, impulse control. Kids - in particular, boys - who are exposed to lead grow up to be, on average, much more aggressive.

Researchers have been puzzling for years over the precipitous drop in the U.S. murder rate over the past few decades. Can it be that phasing out leaded gas and paint has helped our young men avoid becoming aggressive? There are many other factors to consider as well, but I think the most important point is this: in our effort to create a civil society, an ounce of prevention is worth several tons of cure.

Read more here: The Crime of Lead Exposure via Wired.com

Resourceful Reptiles

More on the brainy-nonhuman-species front: Anole lizards are proving to be smarter than some birds when faced with simple puzzles. Our assumptions that animal intelligence and problem-solving capabilities require large, mammalian-style brains are continuing to be eroded. I especially like the last paragraph:

"For decades researchers have discovered that the world's animals are often far more clever than society has given them credit for. Along with the great apes, crows and octopus have been shown to use tools. Bees can count. Hens experience empathy for their chicks. Paper wasps can other recognize wasp-faces. The more we learn about animal intelligence, the less distinct we are."

Read more here: Brainy lizards rival birds in intelligence via mongabay.com

Ivy League

Can we hear it for the University of Utah? They have recently begun an initiative to cover one of their buildings with "solar ivy" - a technology developed by New York-based Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology (SMIT). Each ivy "leaf" is a small photovoltaic panel, and the electricity generated by the array will go towards decreasing the University's reliance on the grid. About 2/3 of the project has been funded already, and the remaining funds are being raised by selling sponsorship of individual leaves.

Read more here: Leaf-shaped solar panels could coat buildings like ivy via Wired.co.uk

DONATE and buy your own leaf here: University of Utah Office of Sustainability, Solar Ivy Initiative

Go, Fish!

Photos have recently surfaced of a fish using tools- the first time this behavior has ever been documented photographically. A blackspot tuskfish in Australia's Great Barrier Reef has been captured breaking clamshells against a rock in order to get at the juicy meat inside. It can be argued that the fish isn't actually using a "tool" since it is bringing the clamshells to the rock, and not picking up a rock with which to crush the clamshells - but for an animal with no hands I think it's doing pretty well. The point is, a non-tool-using species would simply try to open the clam with its mouth and give up if it didn't have the strength. Bashing the clam against a rock is an example of meta-level thinking - something we used to think that only humans did.

Read more here: This is the first ever photo of a fish using tools via io9.com

Beautiful

Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

The first picture of the Earth seen from space is hailed as the moment when we began to understand our real situation in the universe. Now you don't have to be an astronaut to get a peek outside our ordinary world - photographers with time-lapse equipment have been making some really amazing nightscapes lately. Want to get the sense that we really are just little motes of life stuck to the surface of a spherical bit of rock hurtling through the vastnesses of space? Check it out.

Even Stevens

We know when we're being gypped, and we don't like it at all. Research has shown that we have an instinct to punish the unequitable - scientists devised a game where volunteers partnered up, and one partner was given some money to share with the other partner, any way he or she saw fit. The key to the game was, if the other partner rejected the split, nobody got any money. At around an 80% to 20% split, the responding partners tended to get angry at the inequity and make sure the unfair partner didn't get paid, even though logically this meant that both partners "lost." We would rather punish a greedy personality, it seems, than to make a little money ourselves.

The NYTimes posits that this sense of fairness is one of the roots of our humanity. We as a species have benefited because we as individuals learned to squelch behavior that would lead one of us to benefit at the cost of the many. I think it's evident this struggle is far from over, but it is becoming clear that to call us "selfish, greedy, and destructive" and to leave it at that is missing a large part of the picture.

Read more here: Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive via NYTimes.com

Not The Bees' Knees

And while I'm on the subject of what-makes-us-human, apparently honeybees can be trained to become pessimistic. The more information I collect about animal analogs of common human experiences, the less I'm convinced that there's any meaningful point of hierarchical differentiation between our species and all the rest.

Read more here: Honeybees Might Have Emotions via Wired.com

Thinking About Thinking About Thinking

What makes us human? When I was a kid, it was the assertion that we were the only animals that used tools. Then we noticed that wasn't true, so the supposed bright line between Us and Them was pushed toward the formulation of language. Alas, we have now noticed the apparent existence of names and evidence for simple grammar and syntax among the vocalizations of species as charismatic as whales and as humble as prairie dogs. So what is it then that "separates us from the animals"?

A new theory by Michael Corballis, detailed in his new book The Recursive Mind, pins the blame for this individuation on our ability to think about thinking, and to be aware of our thinking. This recursive ability, he posits, comes before language and shapes language. Interesting stuff, but I've read of separate research that recently came to light suggesting the existence of limited recursive thinking in other animals based on their ability to figure out the logical consequences of actions within an experimental setting. My Google-fu is weak this morning but I will find that link and post it here as well when I do.

So really, guys, this "separation from the animals" concept - what does it do for us precisely? It's like so many other interestingly useful cultural concepts; it can help us move gracefully through the day without worrying too much about trivia, but as we zoom in on it, it expands until the tipping point becomes completely arbitrary. Still, I am glad to see someone else mounting a reasonable refutation of Chomsky's all-pervasive ideas on linguistics.

In my best recursive fashion, I am posting a link to a review of the book. So, you may read more about reading more about it here: Thoughts within thoughts make us human, via NewScientist.com

Hello, I'd Like To Have an Argument.

Reason, logic, and rationality are supposed to be the foundation of our Western way of life. Science relies upon rationality in order to advance, and our entire law system is based upon the idea that logical argument will enable justice by uncovering the truth of a situation. In spite of this ideal, it's well known that bad science happens all the time, and that money will often buy victory in the court of law through the modus of expensive and highly-skilled lawyers.

Odd, then, that it's only just now been noticed by science that rational argument is bent more often in the service of victory than it is in pursuit of objective truth. It is, apparently, far more often just one more way for a human to consolidate power and win a mate. It's a good thing that we're admitting there's no such thing as true objectivity - we can, however, attempt to analyze our lack of objectivity in an objective manner, nesting quasi-objectivity inside itself recursively and approaching some kind of asymptotic ideal that way. Or we could just watch Monty Python videos about arguing about arguing about arguing and have a laugh at ourselves instead.

Read more here: Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth via NYTimes.com

Moody's Tweets

When I lived on the north side of Chicago, I didn't have to turn on the TV or the radio to find out how the Cubs were doing in their games. All around me the city roared and booed in response to every play, and I couldn't have ignored it if I tried. More recently here in Salt Lake City, I noticed that everyone I ran into on one specific Wednesday last month was in a really good mood. I suspect the cause may have had to do with the U2 concert the night before, where thousands upon thousands of happy fans finally got to see their idols in the flesh. Whole cities do experience group moods; anxiety when the weather is changeable or windy, depression when it's dark and smoggy for a long time, and happiness when it's sunny. A local disaster can ruin everyone's day, and even a single fender-bender on the freeway at rush hour can cause a domino-effect of lateness and grouchiness for hundreds of people that ripples outwards as they subsequently interact with their families and coworkers. This kind of stinky karma, by the way, is the best reason ever to be an attentive and conscientious driver!

As in cities, so in the country at large. Remember 9/11? Who wasn't freaked out? How about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? That put a damper on the whole summer last year. We share our emotions, and now that the Internet lets us connect instantaneously over long distances, we share them to an even larger effect. This has not remained unnoticed by economists, and also by certain data-mining companies who keep track of the financial markets.

An average of three days after the Twittersphere indicated a spike in anxiety, share prices across many indices consistently took a dive. Flighty investors were reacting to their emotions. Conversely, when tweeters in general were happy, share prices rose. Economics is the universal human language, and it has proven as horrifically complex to forecast as the weather. Are we finally seeing a quantifiable illustration of the way in which the weather (among other things) directly influences the economy? What happens to us when common financial forecasting algorithms are all based off reading mass human emotion? Well, for one, you can say goodbye to that three day lead time they noticed in the 2008 data. For another, you then open the possibility for, say, a single nationwide blizzard causing a computer-entrained investor panic that persists for much longer than it might have, as low share prices fuel anxiety that loops out into the social networking sites and then back into the financial algorithms. The question arises: Who's running this junk show? Us, the computers, or the weather? What might happen if unscrupulous people try to run the system in reverse?

But seriously, folks, the mind boggles; much too much boggling to fit in this little blog, which has already well overrun its target word count. Perhaps the moral of this story might be, never trust a financier with your emotional wellbeing. It's wonderful and sunny today; don't you think a walk in the park would be nice?

And Phil Connors from the movie Groundhog Day offers some solid advice: "Don't drive angry!"

Read more here: Can Twitter predict the future? via Economist.com

Extreme Worms

Life on Earth exists pretty much everywhere. And I mean everywhere, including the middle of crustal rock, miles down from the surface of the planet, completely in the absence of light energy or free gaseous oxygen. Science has known for over 20 years about this bacterial subsurface biosphere, but recently in South Africa we have found the first multicellular organisms that can survive that deep: a kind of nematode worm that rejoices in the name of Halicephalobus mephisto. Named after the demon who tempted Faust, this invertebrate can survive relatively high temperatures and feeds off the films of sturdy bacteria that form in the fractures between slabs of bedrock.

It seems to me that the debate over the existence of extraterrestrial life just keeps getting more interesting. I doubt we're going to ever find highly intelligent green Martian people living in vast, underground cities, but I think it's becoming more and more likely that we will find life to be incredibly common, with single-celled or simple multicellular creatures carving out a metabolic niche wherever they are able.

Read more here: Worms from hell identified far below the Earth's surface via physorg.com

The Economy of Attention

Do you have a large social circle? Are you bad with names? Here's the science that lets you off the hook: Dunbar's Number (named for its formulator, Robin Dunbar), posits that there's a theoretical limit to the number of stable social relationships any single human can keep track of. That number? About 150. If you regularly interact with more than 150 people on a face to face basis, you are going to run into the natural limits of your tribal brain, evolved over millennia to keep you copacetic with your clan. Nature doesn't care about keeping track of all 850 people in your graduating class, and she doesn't think you should care either.

Dunbar's Number has recently been confirmed by research on an unexpected data resource: Twitter. You'd think that, for all the thousands upon thousands of followers that some people tweet to, and the hundreds upon hundreds of tweeters that some people follow, that we'd see some evidence that social technology was allowing us to venture beyond the limits of our evolution. Not so. Data collected from Twitter over six months, and across 1.7 million users, show that for each user the number of "active relationships" they maintain is between 100 and 200. The "economy of attention" appears to be at a stable set-point. We are wired for quality over quantity, so next time someone forgets your name, smile and forgive.


Read more here: Validation of Dunbar's number in Twitter conversations via arxiv.org

In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

- Douglas Adams

The financial markets often seem illogical, but it is with a certain amount of satisfaction that I note the Economist, that hoary-bearded sage of the Dismal Science, now admits that the whole shebang is just as faith-based as any apocalyptic religion. This all makes me wonder, how will the markets perform in the future? Information used to be rare and precious, and consensus was easier to create back when everyone was reading the same columns in the same newspapers. Now there is a confusing polyphony of loud opinion spiced with Damned Lies and Statistics. I don't pretend to know what things will look like going forward, but I suspect we are in for, at the very least, some interesting times.

Read more here: Faith and the markets via Economist.com

The Anthropocene Has Arrived

I am so happy that the BBC has made the entire length of these shows available on YouTube. All 58 minutes and 19 seconds of Iain Stewart's wonderful episode on how humanity is affecting the geological processes of the planet are here for the watching!

The Anthropocene, the Age of Humans, is upon us. It's a moot point to argue whether our species is changing the Earth, or even whether we should. The fact is that we are, and that we have to take responsibility for that power.

Read more here: A man-made world: Science is recognising humans as a geological force to be reckoned with via Economist.com

Watching the Watchers

I love this crazy French street artist. He goes by the moniker 'JR.'



Watch the video, and I dare you not to be emotionally moved by it. I see him accomplishing a very simple act: He gives the unseen the ability to be seen, in the act of SEEING. He gives them power that way.

When your mother's eyes are plastered, four stories high, across a favela wall that overlooks the entire valley, how will you feel about hitting your wife?

Bats Without Belfries

Maria Sagot and Richard Stevens, of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge recently correlated a lot of existing data about bats. Some bats, it seems, make their own shelters of leaves or other plant material under which to hang while they snooze during the day. Some shelters last longer than others, depending upon what kinds of plants grow in the places where the bats live. The scientists wanted to know, what kind of social bonds do these bats develop among them? The working theory was that flimsy shelters would correlate with poor social bonds.

In fact, they found exactly the opposite. Bats with sturdy houses tended to stick together less, and bats with more ad-hoc shelters displayed social bonds that were extremely strong. The Economist, reporting on this work, notes, "[as] in people, so in bats: adversity promotes solidarity."

This strikes at the heart of human instinct. Even in our sedentary, city-bound Western lifestyle, we still talk about our lives as if we are nomadic, although the span of time has replaced the physical path that was once laid in front of us. Where did we come from? Where are we going? Does some part of us suffer from too much comfort? Our distant ancestors walked endlessly back and forth across the African savannah, following game and avoiding predators. Our first shelters were flimsy huts that might have lasted a few weeks to a few months at most, and our tribes must have been very, very closely bonded.

Read more here: Bats building bonds via Economist.com

Anonymous No More!

Since Alcoholics Anonymous was founded back in 1935, it has provided a philosophical foundation for millions of addicts trying to get their behavior under control. Used to be, alcoholism (and substance dependency in general) was a shame, and something to hide. Society just didn't want to "see" alcoholics - and so in order for a single individual to acknowledge and address their problems, they had to remove the connection between their bad behavior and their public face.

The world has moved on. Being in recovery isn't a stigma like it used to be - and dozens of different books have been written about the process of kicking substance dependency. If you find yourself addicted to meth, you aren't alone. It is a shame for you, but not a shame in general - there are thousands of other meth addicts out there, self-identified and ready to talk about what worked for them in the struggle to free themselves from the pipe. People who were once meth-addicted are now functioning and productive members of society. If they can do it, so can you!

Humans have always used mind-altering substances. Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians brewed beer, Greeks and Romans used opium, and the history of cannabis is found in archaeological sites all over the near East. Each encounter with a chemical that alters perception is like a dance with a demon; depending on your psychological history and your metabolism, you may find it easy to say no to that second glass of wine and quit the dance floor gracefully, or you may become so enraptured by the experience that you'll let that demon dance you to death. Collectively closing our eyes and covering our ears and shouting "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" does not make this fundamental aspect of human behavior any less fundamental; for our own good we should be dealing with it openly so that we can see what the mechanisms of addiction really are. Too many people have danced themselves to death already. Anonymity is very often the first door to recovery, but maintaining it across the board, far beyond its utility, is destructive. My respects to those who have been brave enough to talk about their journey openly.

Read more here: Challenging the Second ‘A’ in A.A. via NYTimes.com

"Son, Have You Rehabilitated Yourself?"

The Daily Mail online has printed an article about a "cushy" prison in Norway, where prisoners are treated well, given privileges such as living in cabin dormitories and taking care of livestock, and are trained to live in the outside world before they are released. Recidivism rates are the lowest in Europe. What's going on?

Well, for one, it appears that we now have a clearly working model of rehabilitation versus punishment. If the goal of a prison is to create a better society, then it matters a lot how we treat our prisoners. What interests me even more about this article are some of the very well-written and cogent comments, some "voted up" many dozens of times. Public opinion, at least some portion of it, supports rehabilitation. We get that "an eye for an eye" leaves everyone blind. We want better for ourselves, and we understand how to accomplish that.

Read more here: Norway's controversial 'cushy prison' experiment - could it catch on in the UK? via DailyMail.co.uk

Underwater Aliens

Researchers are developing a system that will allow humans and dolphins to speak to one another. Can I get a "woah! dude!" please? This is straight out of Star Trek. We were supposed to have to wait another 300 years at least for this kind of technology.

This is incredibly interesting stuff. Much is made about the existence or nonexistence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but we've been sharing this planet with several other intelligent species the whole time - and we haven't been able to communicate with them much at all. Gorillas and chimpanzees have learned American Sign Language and given us some clues about what it's like to be a different kind of ape, and Alex the parrot helped prove that higher cognition isn't just the purview of mammals, but what kind of culture develops underwater? What differences in the development of mind does an aquatic environment make? What's it like not to have fire or opposable thumbs? Learning from the other inhabitants of this planet can give us a much better idea of how self-awareness arises in response to wildly differing environments.

Read more here: Underwater Translator May Finally Let Us Talk to Dolphins via Techland.Time.com

If Memory Serves

New research on marine snails suggests that science is drawing closer to the day when memories may be erased at will, like something out of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There's some debate as to whether this could possibly be a good thing - after all, even our worst traumas prove formative and can mold us into wiser, happier people in the long run.

But what about those trapped in the endless nightmare of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Sometimes the mechanisms in the brain for dealing with bad memories become stuck, and we lose our ability to move on.

Memory is more than just a read/write function of the brain though - it's made up of somatic feedback loops and automated responses that arise from the body, not from the mind. I wonder, if we remove the memory, would that necessarily remove the behavior? Or would it perhaps just remove the fulcrum against which we might eventually get some traction to change the out-of-control distress response?

My father died of complications related to senile dementia, and I've watched several other close relatives falter under the gradual erosion of Alzheimer's disease. From my own observations I am unconvinced that memory erasure would bring definitive relief from behavioral problems, but I'm glad to see that we're learning so much about the physical mechanisms involved.

Read more here: Even If We Could Erase Bad Memories, Should We? via TheAtlantic.com

Dr. Not-So-Evil

Simon Baron-Cohen has been working his whole life to understand the scientific nature of what we call "evil," and he believes that the keystone to the phenomenon is a lack of empathy. Well, yes, I agree wholeheartedly. I have been telling this story through article after article, but each new one I post just makes me feel better about our chances as a species. YES, we are finally "getting it." Armageddon is optional. No ideology or doctrine contains us; we exist in a sea of influences both internal (genetic, metabolic) and external (cultural, environmental). The future is clearly in our hands, and we are capable of harnessing both the intelligence and the motivation to make it a good one.

The opposite of empathy is contempt. Baron-Cohen talks a lot about empathy, and in previous work Paul Ekman and John Gottman talk about the effects of contempt on relationships. Marriages may be full of conflict and yet still be successful and fulfilling to both parties, as long as empathy and respect exists between them. Once contempt creeps into a relationship, it has a tendency to expand until it destroys the fabric of it.

Empathy and contempt are both just concepts, but they are powerful ones and are no less influential for being incorporeal. A large, strong, and morally questionable person is able to coerce your body, so early in life you learn the social cues needed for detecting these people (and the places they might hang out) and avoiding them. Contempt has no physical existence, but it's just as big and powerful and unscrupulous. It sits inside your body, manipulating your endocrine system and making itself a comfy little nest in your reptilian brain - but like hanging out with any big, unpleasant, sweaty galoot, it's totally optional if you can but figure out how to get away.

Back when the human superorganism was much more loosely connected, contempt functioned to keep individual tribes and their memetic heritages safe against competition and extinction. There are too many of us now, and we are too closely connected. Vestigial contempt turns us against ourselves. Shake yourself loose, go take a shower, and go find someone nicer to hang out with!

Read more here: FEATURE-Scientist seeks to banish evil, boost empathy via Reuters.com, and here: Predictable Patterns of Marriage Breakdown via MentalHelp.net

Twisted, Messy, Perfect.

NASA just announced results from an epic experiment some 47 years in the making; the rotation of the Earth does indeed twist and distort the fabric of space-time, and data from a set of the most perfect gyroscopes ever made now confirms this aspect of Einstein's theories of relativity. The gyros, part of the Gravity Probe B satellite experiment, were engineered to an unbelievable degree of precision. The quartz-silicon spheres at the heart of the devices are as close to Euclidean perfection as the human race has yet been able to achieve, and the slight observed precession of their spins over time, as predicted by Einstein, measured the relativistic "frame drag" created by Earth's great mass rotating at the bottom of its gravity well.

I'm impressed. The scope of this experiment is amazing, and it speaks volumes about our drive to understand the reality that contains us. The world is messy, and creating precision is one valid reaction to the chaos. A ruler brings order - we can begin to fence off little pieces of the infinite fields of data available, testing pieces one against the other so that we can begin to make some sense of the constant riot that surrounds us.

Does precision oppose chaos, or does it pay respect to it? The Universe will never be precise, but by creating precision we can perhaps enjoy the mess a little more.

Outside of the Box

We live in a box we can't see out of. Quite literally, because light has a speed (186,000 miles per second), as we look out into the night sky, the farther out we look the farther back in time we see. And since the Universe has an age (our best current guess is just shy of 14 billion years), it has an observable limit. More Universe surely exists beyond the limit of our visibility some 45.7 billion light years away*...but we won't ever get to see it.

Not only that, but we won't personally get to see most bits of the universe that are inside the observable limit, simply because what's going on there "now" won't be visible to us til the light reaches us. A star 7,000 light years away from us could have ceased to exist yesterday, and we won't know it for another 7000+ years. To us, that star is still shining. Light and time, those phenomena easily detected by our senses, have set boundaries around us. Even though the geocentric theory of creation has been roundly debunked on several orders of magnitude, in one very important way it is still valid. The point of observation is, by definition, the center of the observable universe.

We still keep searching for ways to escape the box, though. We keep dreaming up new theories, testing and wringing new data from the stuff that makes up our physical reality. We sit at the center of the Universe, but the edges of it are right here as well, nested in the folds of the human mind.

Read more here: Five weird theories of what lies outside the universe via io9.com and here: Observable Universe via Wikipedia.org

*The Universe is expanding at an apparently increasing rate. This means that what we can see is farther away than the age of the Universe in years times the speed of light, because space keeps getting "bigger." Weird enough for ya yet?

Plato's Revenge

For Plato, ideas were the only true reality - famously, he compared the material objects we interact with on a day to day basis to shadows of "true objects" projected onto the wall of a cave. We've spent the past 2,400 years (give or take) either simply disbelieving him or arguing one direction or another over what his Theory of Forms actually meant.

The development of memetics - the study of ideas as life forms - explains a little more about what Plato may have been thinking, and the evolution of the Internet provides a visible ground that can show us in very concrete terms how ideas mate, evolve, and die off - and how we give ourselves to them, how we are controlled by them, and how they compete for our attention. A really fabulous article by James Gleick on the Smithsonian site pulls all of the major threads of this new discipline together in an entertaining and readable four pages. Put aside the ten minutes to read it and make yourself a cup of tea, because this is important stuff.

When you say that someone "died for his principles," you are describing the concrete result of a powerful intangible. The concept of nationality is a meme, as is religion, as are the tenets of every culture, and as is the viral spread of our individual emotional reactions to any event. When the Greeks described their gods, they were personifying memetic currents that they very clearly sensed flowing throughout their society. Just like the Greek gods, memes have no inherent morality. They play by their own rules, and the strong ones may easily crush any mere mortals that stand in their way. For centuries we have lived blindly enslaved by them - but at last we are developing both the technology and the awareness to study and understand them - and perhaps, with hope, to tame the worst of them.

Read more here: What Defines a Meme? via Smithsonianmag.com

Compassion In The Wake Of The Storm

Our new ability to connect immediately and effectively without regard for distance is fundamentally changing the concept of what it means to be human. The tornadoes that ripped through the heart of America last week are a tragedy on every level, but in the tracks left by those massive twisters we are seeing the blossoming of empathy: photos and personal papers released by the storms, often hundreds of miles away from the homes where they belong, are being collected and returned to their rightful owners via special pages posted on social networking sites.

We often wonder what use Facebook really is, but here's one answer. It is a tool to expand our compassion and our humanity. People who have lost everything they owned to the storms are receiving more than just lost photographs - they're receiving the love of their fellow humans, empathy and solace across the miles. Disaster these days draws us together more than it ever has, and our strength lies there.

Read more here: Memories Lost to a Whirlwind Alight on Facebook to Be Claimed via NYTimes.com

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

There's a point of development at 15 months of age before which a child will not recognize herself in a mirror. The brain has to mature, and the mind has to come to a point of organization so that the kid will recognize the image as "oh, that's me!" and not "who's that other baby behind the glass?" Our capacity to recognize ourselves, literally our ability to reflect upon our being and actions, is a major part of what makes us human individually.

Interesting then, that we are beginning to hold a mirror up to ourselves collectively, and to gather information about our knottiest problems in as objective a way as we can. In the mirror today: Religion. The Economist reports on the work of Dr. Nicholas Baumard, who is investigating our conceptual ideas of "just deserts" and "fate." It appears that we act differently - and more ethically - when we think we are being watched. Religions, of course, provide us with the deity as the Ultimate Watcher - you cannot hide anything from God.

But now we are watching God back - or at least we are watching ourselves feel watched by God. Who watches the watchers? It might turn out to be us, after all.

Read more here: The good god guide via Economist.com

The Birth of Art

Cave art has always fascinated us; who were these people, and what were their intentions? Werner Herzog's new film, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, provides us with food for thought in the form of a luscious 3D reconnaissance of the oldest painted cave system in the world, Chauvet. The cave paintings of Chauvet are very fragile, and the production and distribution of this film will enable millions more people to experience them than could possibly ever be permitted into the cave itself.

Great art is universal; it may mean a different thing to every person, but it means something to almost everyone. These paintings were made 31,000 years ago. The artists were our ancestors. How are we the same as them, and how do we differ? This movie will allow you to see, judge, and draw your own conclusions.

I am not able to track down showtimes for the Salt Lake area yet, but when I find them I will post them for Catalyst readers!

Read a review of Herzog's film here: How were Ice Age cave painters able to create great art? via IrishTimes.com

Take A (Not So) Deep Breath

My first yoga guru gave me some invaluable advice for use during panic and anxiety attacks: "Use the three-part breath," she said. "Breathe to the bottom third of the lungs, hold for two seconds, then to the middle third, and hold for two seconds, and then fill your lungs all the way up and hold for another two seconds. Breathe out slowly and completely and hold again for a couple of seconds when the lungs are empty." I've used this method myself for dealing with (among other things) air-travel related terrors, and it works really well.

The problem, specifically, is hyperventilation. Panic will make you breathe much more quickly and deeply than usual (as preparation for fight or flight), and without actual physical exertion to balance the scale, the lower overall levels of carbon dioxide in the blood will worsen the physical symptoms of the anxiety. Researchers at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, have applied technology to the problem and, perhaps, reinvented the yogic wheel on this one. The Capnometry-Assisted Respiratory Training (CART) system consists of a bunch of wires and sensors that report a subject's CO2 levels as they experience a panic attack, and it coaches them on how to breathe more shallowly and regularly so that their CO2 levels rise back into a comfortable zone.

I am, on the one hand, pleased to see this kind of sensible approach to panic disorder - it's far more useful than simply pointing out to the sufferer that there's really nothing to be afraid of (or simply drugging them senseless). One of the most awful parts of a panic attack is often that feeling of simply being out of control emotionally, even as your logical mind is screaming at you that there is NOTHING WRONG AT ALL, SO WHY DO YOU FEEL SO BAD, DUMMY? So yes, a sensible, active, and drug-free approach to physically managing your emotions? Bring it on.

On the other hand, I'm amused that SMU has taken an awful lot of effort to develop a (presumably expensive) machine that replicates all the advantages of yogic breathing practice. Our left-brained culture is intoxicated with technology! I wish more people would just go to yoga class, but if it takes a machine to teach us how to calm ourselves down physically, then I guess what matters most is that we calm down...however we achieve that.

Read more here: A new breathing therapy reduces panic and anxiety by reversing hyperventilation via the SMU research blog

Seeing The Light

Ideas ripen, just like fruit, and technology builds upon itself. Once humans had mastered the manufacture and casting of glass, it was only a matter of time before we noticed how light is refracted through thicknesses of it, and the prism was born. One of the earliest uses of the prism was nautical: old sailing ships (and classic sailing boats today) would have a flat-topped prism mounted in the deck surface to redirect sunlight into the hold without letting in sea-spray as well.

Enter, eventually, the ubiquitous plastic two-liter soda bottle. Emptied and crushed it's only so much more mass to be recycled (hopefully), or more likely to be sent to the landfill or the incinerator. But refilled with water and capped with a UV-resistant plastic top...?



Ideas cross-pollinate, and people who live in dark, tin-roofed buildings in Brazil get a cheap and highly effective method of lighting their homes and businesses during the day.

Beeware!

The keeping of honeybees became one of the cornerstones of agriculture as farming grew more intensive - without them a great many of our non-cereal crops would fail. It's alarming, then, that in the past several years entire hives of bees have been emptied by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The causes of CCD are poorly understood, but it is clear that we've been widely mismanaging our bees for several decades now. The spread of the varroa mite, malnutrition caused by substituting sugar water for harvested honey, and exposure to a variety of pesticides all appear to contribute to CCD. Lately, though, it appears that the bees themselves have at least been attempting to manage their exposure to pesticides.

The worker bees who harvest pollen for the hive are apparently not able to discern between pollen that is clean and pollen from flowers treated by pesticides, but within the hive the housekeeper workers who store the pollen away can tell that there's something wrong. They "entomb" the bad pollen in special cells lined with disinfectant propolis resin - however, this last-ditch effort does not save the hive - the entombing of pesticide-laden pollen is seen in hives that subsequently succumb to CCD. It does, however, indicate that the bees know that something bad is afoot and are trying to do something about it.

I am no apiarist, but the way that hives affected with CCD are simply abandoned by all the worker bees makes me wonder about the subtle mechanisms that keep a hive together in the first place. The chemical and behavioral communication that allows a hive to make decisions as a single entity must be breaking down. Humans also live in hives - made of concrete instead of wax, and tied together with electromagnetic communications instead of pheromones. What poisons - literal and figurative - are we managing? What are the things that keep us together in societies and allow us to cooperate? And should we perhaps be paying a little more attention to them?

Read more here: Honeybees 'entomb' hives to protect against pesticides, say scientists via guardian.co.uk

Yadda Yadda Yadda

Speech is one of the most basic things that makes us human. We wait eagerly for our kids to utter that first word, and many parents can remember the exact day that they first heard their child begin to communicate intelligibly. We have traditionally marked ourselves off from the "dumb beasts" by our ability to jabber at each other in bursts of vocal sound densely packed with meaning - but how much of that meaning, on average, actually gets through?

I'd hazard a lot less than we assume. In a lot of ways, speech is a distraction from what's really going on, the gist of which is often shown quite clearly by body language and actions. How many times have you heard a political speech and then gone on to watch the speaker do precisely the opposite of what he or she had been verbally endorsing? If we hadn't invented speech, it would be a lot harder for us to lie.

This is, I think, one of the reasons why animals are so good for us. They don't talk, and they don't really listen to our speech - they hear the tone of voice we use, and they understand our energy. We might spend the whole day at the office fronting to our colleagues, but when we get home the dog knows all about our day as soon as we walk in the door. Animals keep us honest.

Check out #715; In which Speech is merely a Dialect, via Wondermark.com

You're Doing It Wrong

Culture is a weird thing. We grow up inside one, and for the most part, we stay there entirely unaware of the effects and distortions it is wreaking upon our reality. Culture is, in fact, so transparent to us that we have coined a term for the sensation of being suddenly dislocated from it: culture shock.

Getting outside of your culture is one of the most valuable things a human can do. Want to understand yourself on a deeper level? Go somewhere where you don't recognize any of the food, or where the steering wheel is on the opposite side of the dashboard. Alas, not all of us can afford a vacation to Scotland or Vanuatu - so what's a good global citizen to do? Luckily for us, we invented the Internet.

Did you know that everything you do is influenced by your culture? And I do mean everything. The good folks over at Cracked.com truly relish relieving us of our misconceptions, and they have outdone themselves with this latest effort. Think you know how to breathe, sleep, and poop? Check again. Our enculturation is seated at the very deepest level, and it turns out that in many cases it arbitrarily runs counter to even the basic efficiency of our bodily functions.

Read more here: 7 Basic Things You Won't Believe You're All Doing Wrong via Cracked

This Way to the Egress

More women are becoming funeral directors. Hallelujah; it's about time we put a little more caring into the "death care industry." Americans are legendarily averse to dying, but fear of dying is really about fear of living - of prizing life so much that, like a spoiled child, it suffers in quality by being kept from risk. The laying out of the dead was traditionally always women's work, and has only suffered its present pseudo-scientific objectification since the U.S. Civil War, when embalming became the rage to preserve the corpses going home north and south via road and rail. Like it or not, being born means having, at some point, to die. Women bring us onto the planet; it's only right that we have the opportunity to be seen off by them too.

Read more here: Funeral Divas via Slate.com

The Clevon Fallacy

Used to be, you grew up and got married and had kids, and that was how it was for everyone - but a larger percentage of couples now are simply opting out of that traditional lifestyle, and saying no to children. Details magazine online this month features a neatly polarizing article about the virtues of remaining childless. Seems like people have some quite pointed opinions on the subject. But, really, kids or no kids - so what?

Well, if you've seen Mike Judge's cult hit Idiocracy, you'll be familiar with what I'll call the Clevon theory of human evolution. In a nutshell, Judge notes the inverse correlation between IQ and having kids; that the more intelligent we get, the fewer children we have. Follow this observation to its logical conclusion, and eventually all the smart people die out and you wind up with a planet populated entirely by dunces almost too stupid to remember to breathe.

That's a good basis for a funny movie, but it's way too simplistic of a take. Yes, the correlation exists, but look closer: it's specifically the women who are controlling the birth rate, and it doesn't have anything to do with native IQ (which is also a measure of Western enculturation, not just of simple problem-solving intelligence). It's EDUCATION that makes the difference. The more educated we become, the fewer children women choose to have, across the board, regardless of race or nationality.

So, really, does this mean we should ban smart women from college just so we can keep having smart babies? I'd like to note that I know many intelligent, college-educated women who have families - but that in general they chose to have two kids, not seven. Not only that, but Judge has been thinking about intelligence as if it's hard-wired, ignoring all the myriad influences that environment can have upon the expression of genes. There are indeed some really stupid people out there who just drew short straws genetically, but I'd bet that for every one of those you'd find three who just didn't get enough vitamin D as children, or whose mothers were exposed to punishingly high levels of stress while they were in the womb, or who were exposed to any of thousands of different intelligence-busting developmental influences. Poverty hurts everyone. Moreover, if it wasn't possible for intelligence to arise spontaneously as an adaptive response to our richly interactive environment, we'd never have bothered coming down from the trees and taming fire in the first place, never mind inventing space flight and the Internet.

The human population of Earth is brushing 7 billion, which in this blogger's humble opinion is just too damned many. So educate the women, let us choose when and if to have kids, and could we please ditch the Malthusian melodramatics? We're doing OK; we really are. Rather than sweating the population analytics, we'd do better to spend effort getting over our entrenched and purely reflexive preference for whatever culture we were raised in. We need to teach the children we have to see the web of life on this planet as it truly is - a single entity to whose health we individually contribute or detract depending upon how well we run our own lives.

Read more here: THE NO-BABY BOOM via Details.com

Toward an Empathic Civilization

I really don't know if I can say it better than this.

Love's Labors Won

Sometimes it's amazing the things we manage to forget, and we could fill encyclopedias with the sheer amount of common sense that we've discounted or ignored as we've constructed our civilizations around us. The good news is, we seem to be rediscovering some of this lost wisdom, and this time science is backing it up. Want your relationship to stay solid? Then it's a good idea to practice good old fashioned human bonding behaviors. Cuddling, eye contact, relaxing skin-to-skin contact of all kinds, and providing physical comfort like shoulder or head rubs - all of these behaviors are integral to defusing defensiveness and building trust inside a relationship. Human bonding is modeled on the emotional bond between a mother and her child - and though you'd think it would have always remained obvious how important it is to develop this maternal bond, as recently as the middle of the 20th Century, parents were being advised not to hold or comfort their children because of the "dangers of mother-love."

Love, bonding, and trust are "dangerous?" Why would we ever conceive of such a thing? How could we ever stray so far, en masse, from these simple instincts? The reasons are multifarious and the logic is deeply hidden in the labyrinths of our biochemistry, but what matters is this: A simple headline on an internet news aggregator can help set things straight, at least a single reader at a time.

Read more about it here: The Lazy Way to Stay in Love: Steer your limbic system to sustain romance via Psychology Today

We Want A Rock

Humans are a pattern-seeking species. Whether there is a true line of logical causality between two similar phenomena or not, if they seem to match up we will correlate them. The science-minded among us will argue that if no logical causality can be proven, then the correlation is meaningless. Individual subjective reality, however, does not draw its power from logic.

If a rock looks like a face, then it becomes something more than a rock. We see faces in the rock, and somewhere behind that phenomenon we're tacking on a personality to the face. There's no shame in that - it's what our brains are wired to do, because seeking pattern is a big part of what's kept our species alive so far. Is that a leopard, or just the midday sun shining through leaves? We might remind ourselves, "don't be silly, it's just a rock," but that rock kind of looks like Grampa, and that makes me think of the time we went fishing when I was six...

The magic happens inside our heads, which is also conveniently where we keep the Universe. Peek-a-boo, rock people see you.

Read and see more here: I See Rock People: Mimetoliths of the World, via wired.com

(And for those of you with They Might Be Giants stuck in your heads from reading the title to this post, here is relief.)

When The Going Gets Weird, We Inflate New Dimensions

It's axiomatic that the individual human intellect can't wrap itself around the real shape of the universe, but it's interesting to see how science, since we decoupled it from religion more or less five centuries ago, keeps presenting us with stranger and stranger versions of what might really be going on. In the beginning, Copernicus and Galileo unseated our planet as the center of the cosmos - such a counterintuitive development, as any human can easily see that the sun goes around the earth, and that the fixed stars wheel around us pinned to the inside of a giant sphere. It seems so evident that the Earth is the center of the universe, doesn't it?

It also seems evident that natural space is made of four dimensions: three of space and one of time. New work, however, is suggesting that this wasn't always the case. Way back at the beginning of time, during the first few moments of the Big Bang, it now appears that the universe may have possessed only two dimensions: one of space and one of time. What's more, the Large Hadron Collider (in between creating black holes with which to destroy the solar system) may be able to furnish us with evidence to support this hypothesis - which if true, suggests something even stranger: Our universe, as it ages, may be dimensionally "promoted" again, so that the same natural space we now move through will be made up of five dimensions, not four.

What seems evident right now is that I need another cup of tea, before anything even weirder occurs. I'm not sure I know how to boil water in the fifth dimension.

Read more about it here: ONCE UPON A TIME, THE UNIVERSE WAS REALLY WEIRD via Discovery News