Today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. The theory of evolution by natural selection might be the single most fertile and elegant scientific hypothesis of all time. To celebrate the bicentennial, I’ve been reading the two volume biography by Janet Browne, Voyaging and The Power of Place. Though I’m not through both of them, I can already recommend the books as among the best intellectual biographies I’ve ever read. One of the encouraging things about Darwin is that he doesn’t appear to have been one of those almost magical minds ala Newton, inventing calculus on the way to greater things. Darwin, it seems, was driven by a relentless intellectual curiousity and a keen eye for good explanations: characteristics that are a little easier to emulate than pure mathmatical aptitude. He was also, it must be said, in the right place at the right time–which is a little harder to emulate.
According to The USA Today:
A new study finds that certain brain functions of some low-income 9- and 10-year-olds pale in comparison with those of wealthy children and that the difference is almost equivalent to the damage from a stroke.
This from a study to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience this year. This raises some important questions in political philosophy, and should cause us to seriously question certain free market conceptions of justice that presume a level playing field. It’s too early to know what these results really mean, but this is an area that certainly deserves some attention.
In a remarkable use of fMRI technology, researchers in Japan have been able to use brain imaging to map blood flow changes in the brain as subjects viewed images. After “learning” how blood flow changed when subjects viewed one set of images (simple characters, for example) a computer was able to reconstruct what the subjects were looking at when they were shown new images.
Bad ass.
See more at Pinktentacle.com.
An interesting study recently showed that while alcohol reduced the competence of individuals performing tasks requiring vigilance (counting the the’s in an article), those negative effects were mitigated when the drunks were surrounded by other drunks. One suspects that the presence of the others raised their awareness that they were incapacitated, triggering compensatory attention. Interesting result.
Hypnosis is a strange phenomenon, bound to invite skepticism. Now, with technologies such as fMRIs, some of that skepticism can be assuaged. A recent study by a group at the Weizmann Institute in Israel confirms the fact that at least in the case of post-hypnotic amnesia (“PHA,” in which subjects are hypnotised to forget something until a cancelling command is uttered) pre-conscious brain behavior is significantly modified.
In the study, a group of subjects susceptible to this hypnotism were asked to watch a movie after which PHA was induced. In comparison with a control group that was not susceptible to hypnosis, the subjects had difficulty recalling the movie’s content, but not the context in which they saw the movie. After the “cancelling command” their performance matched that of the control group. When they had trouble remembering, their brains showed comparatively little activity in the occipital lobe (responsible for visualization) and the left temporal lobe (responsible for analyzing the questions) as well as increased activity in the prefrontal cortex which regulates othe brain activities.
This probably won’t convince die-hard skeptics, but it should get close. It is pretty clear, given the brain activity, that the subjectsare not, for example, remembering but simply failing to produce the answers.
Read more at Scientific American.
From Scientific American
When we feel like we don’t have command of our own fate, our brains often invent patterns that offer a sense of self-control. Some folks knock on wood or step over cracks in the sidewalk. Scientists call this illusory pattern perception. Work published in the October 3rd issue of the journal Science offers a look inside our heads as they try to make us feel less helpless.
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin devised six experiments to test students’ reactions to different situations of uncertainty. One experiment mimicked the stock market, while another asked students to search for images in television static. Time and again, students saw images where there were none and found stock patterns that didn’t exist. The authors then asked students to perform self-affirmation exercises instead of looking for external design. These exercises calmed them and increased their capacity to see, well, reality. But if you’re not changing your socks or shaving because it clearly helps your favorite team, go right ahead. Some unkempt fan in Tampa Bay has to be the reason behind the Rays winning the American League East.
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This seems like it deserves a song…
Patterns by Simon and Garfunkel
Patterns.mp3
An interesting article in the new Scientific American discusses the possible implications of quantum gravity theory for Cosmology. In my limited understanding, quantum gravity theory was developed as an alternative to string theory in an attempt to reconcile Einsteins theory of general relativity with quantum theory–both of which are well confirmed but seem to conflict. One of the surprising predictions of quantum gravity theory is that space-time is atomistic–not continuous, as one would intuitively expect. In this recent article by Martin Bojwald, another consequence is explained: the universe did not begin with the Big Bang, but with a quantum driven contraction that resulted in an explosion–a big bounce. I can’t say I really completeluy understand it, of course, but the article proves interesting reading nonetheless. Check it out here.
Last spring, I was eating dinner in a semi-fancy restaurant that incongruously had flat screen TVs playing news in the corner. (This is very Dallas, by the way.) My taste for food faded as I saw a commercial for Japanese Foot Pads which reportedly sucked various toxins from your feet while sleeping. It was both gross and grossly implausible. Here’s the ad:
Recently, All Things Considered on NPR (or, as my wife affectionately calls it, “the nipper”) had a feature that pretty conclusively unveiled the sham. Listen here as Sarah Varney blackens her soles for science. I still see these things in stores. More evidence that people are idiots.
One of the more interesting arguments for the existence of God claims that our universe is “finely tuned” so that life will emerge. In other words, with only slight variations in the physical constants the universe could not bear life, and the best way to explain the aptness of this universe is that the constants were set by an entity that wished for life to emerge. There are problems with the argument, of course, but the basic empirical premise is usually accepted–that the conditions under which a universe would bear life are rare. An interesting result to be published in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, however, questions that.
Fred Adams at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor maintains that the appearance of fine tuning is illusory. While it is perhaps true, Adams says, that if you fiddle with just a single characteristic of the universe it would no longer be apt for life, it does not follow that if you generated a host of settings randomly that the resulting universes would only rarely allow for life. When Adams ran a computer model of such a test, however, about a quarter of the universes included stars that result in some sort of life. Thus, even the empirical premise of the fine-tuning argument is substantially undermined.
Read more at The New Scientist.
