According to the textbooks, our perception of size and distance is a product of how the brain interprets different visual cues, such as the size of an object on the retina and its movement across the visual field. Some researchers have claimed that our bodies also influence our perception of the world, so that the taller you are, the shorter distances appear to be. However, there has been no way of testing this hypothesis experimentally – until now.

Henrik Ehrsson and his colleagues at Karolinska Institutet have already managed to create the illusion of body-swapping with other people or mannequins. Now they have used the same techniques to create the illusion of having a very small doll-sized body or a very large, 13-foot tall body. Their results show for the first time that the size of our bodies has a profound effect on how we perceive the space around us.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut and June Newton }

Some blind people are able to use the sound of echoes to “see” where things are and to navigate their environment. Now, a new study finds that these people may even be using visual parts of their brains to process the sounds.

Echolocation is best known in bats, who send out high-pitched sounds and then use the echoes to track their prey in the dark. But a select few blind people use echolocation as well, making clicking sounds with their tongues to tell them where obstacles are. The new study, published May 25 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, is the first to peer into the brains of blind people who are doing just that.

The study finds that in two blind men who can echolocate, brain areas normally associated with vision activate when they listen to recordings of themselves echolocating.

{ Live Science | Continue reading }

photo { Victor de Mello | Hannah Marshall, Autumn/Winter 08-09 }

{ High-speed video shows that canines don’t simply scoop up water, they toss it into their mouths just like cats. | Science News | full story

{ I’ve just come across a deeply disturbing paper: Attempted ignition of petrol vapour by lit cigarettes and lit cannabis resin joints. The authors set out to discover whether you could set petrol on fire by dropping a lit cigarette or hash joint onto it. It turns out, surprisingly, that you can’t. | Neuroskeptic | full story }

Villagers belonging to an Amazonian group called the Mundurucú intuitively grasp abstract geometric principles despite having no formal math education, say psychologist Véronique Izard of Université Paris Descartes and her colleagues.

Mundurucú adults and 7- to 13-year-olds demonstrate as firm an understanding of the properties of points, lines and surfaces as adults and school-age children in the United States and France, Izard’s team reports.

These results suggest two possible routes to geometric knowledge. “Either geometry is innate but doesn’t emerge until around age 7 or geometry is learned but must be acquired on the basis of general experiences with space, such as the ways our bodies move,” Izard says.

Both possibilities present puzzles, she adds. If geometry relies on an innate brain mechanism, it’s unclear how such a neural system generates abstract notions about phenomena such as infinite surfaces and why this system doesn’t fully kick in until age 7. If geometry depends on years of spatial learning, it’s not known how people transform real-world experience into abstract geometric concepts — such as lines that extend forever or perfect right angles — that a forest dweller never encounters in the natural world.

{ Science News | Continue reading }

artwork { Richard Serra }

On the plains of New Mexico, a band of elite marathoners tests a controversial theory of evolution: that humans can outrun the fastest animals on earth.

Between two and three million years ago, when our australo­pithecine ancestors ventured out of the forests and onto the protein-rich African savanna, they were prey more often than hunter. They gathered plant-based foods, just as their primate brethren did. Then something changed. They began running after game with long, steady strides. Evolutionary biologists like Harvard’s Dan Lieberman think the uniquely human capacity for endurance running is a distant remnant of prehistoric persistence hunting.

We can run all day, the theory goes, because there was once a caloric advantage to it. Our two human legs, packed as they are with long slow-twitch muscle fibers, make us better runners over long distances than most quad­rupeds. And our three million sweat glands give us the ability to cool our bodies with perspiration. An antelope, by contrast, sprints—for up to 15 minutes—while wearing a fur coat and relies on respiration (panting) to release the heat that builds up with exertion. Add to the mix our ability to organize and strategize and, well, you can see how persistence hunting might actually work. (…)

There’s no hard archaeological evidence of persistence hunting, but half a dozen tribes are known to have pursued game this way in the past century: the Aborigines in Australia, the Navajo in the American Southwest, the Seri and Tarahumara Indians in Mexico. Of the tribes thought to practice it, though, only the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert have been seen chasing antelope in recent decades. In the 1980s, South African mathematician Louis Liebenberg joined a successful Bushman persistence hunt for kudu in 107-degree heat.

{ Outside | Continue reading }

related { Does sexual intercourse hinder subsequent athletic performance? }

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is the idea that all possible alternate histories of the universe actually exist. At every point in time, the universe splits into a multitude of existences in which every possible outcome of each quantum process actually happens.

So in this universe you are sitting in front of your computer reading this story, in another you are reading a different story, in yet another you are about to be run over by a truck. In many, you don’t exist at all.

This implies that there are an infinite number of universes, or at least a very large number of them. (…)

The reason many physicists love the many worlds idea is that it explains away all the strange paradoxes of quantum mechanics.

For example, the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat–trapped in a box in which a quantum process may or may not have killed it– is that an observer can only tell whether the cat is alive or dead by opening the box.

But before this, the quantum process that may or may not kill it is in a superposition of states, so the cat must be in a superposition too: both alive and dead at the same time.

That’s clearly bizarre but in the many worlds interpretation, the paradox disappears: the cat dies in one universe and lives in another.

Let’s put the many world interpretation aside for a moment and look at another strange idea in modern physics. This is the idea that our universe was born along with a large, possibly infinite, number of other universes. So our cosmos is just one tiny corner of a much larger multiverse.

Today, Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in Palo Alto and Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley, put forward the idea that the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { William Eggleston }

In the area of particle physics, we need many years to run our experiments and analyze the data. In the past fifty years, we have developed the Standard Model of particle physics. It describes the microcosm as we know it: the matter particles and the forces between them. But we are still missing one cornerstone to explain how elementary particles get their mass. We think that the Higgs mechanism could provide the answer to that question. The manifestation of that mechanism is something called the Higgs Boson – a particle that is thought to exist but hasn’t been found in experiments yet. Our goal is to find the Higgs Boson. If we succeed, then we will conclude the theory of the Standard Model. (…)

At the edge of physics, it becomes linked to philosophy. But in the case of particle physics, it is really not a question of “believing” but of deducing something from a larger theoretical framework or from experimental data. Once you can prove something, it is no longer a question of philosophy.

{ Interview with Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research/CERN laboratories | Continue reading }

“After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, ‘I’m looking at five to seven years.’ So I asked the other prisoners what to do. They said, ‘Easy! Tell them you’re mad! They’ll put you in a county hospital. You’ll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will bring you pizzas.’”

“How long ago was this?” I asked.

“Twelve years ago,” Tony said.

Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you’re 17 and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don’t need to know how authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarise the character Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet. That’s what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart, and a love letter was a bullet from a gun, and if you received a love letter from him, you’d go straight to hell.

Plagiarising a well-known movie was a gamble, he said, but it paid off. Lots more psychiatrists began visiting his cell. He broadened his repertoire to include bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange and David Cronenberg’s Crash. Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual pleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him feel normal. (…)

Tony said the day he arrived at the dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD) unit, he took one look at the place and realised he’d made a spectacularly bad decision. He asked to speak urgently to psychiatrists. “I’m not mentally ill,” he told them. It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy. (…)

“I know people are looking out for ‘nonverbal clues’ to my mental state,” Tony continued. “Psychiatrists love ‘nonverbal clues’. They love to analyse body movements. But that’s really hard for the person who is trying to act sane. How do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way?” (…) “I volunteered to weed the hospital garden. But they saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I could behave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad.” (…)

I didn’t know what to think. Unlike the sad-eyed, medicated patients all around us, Tony had seemed perfectly ordinary and sane. But what did I know?

The next day I wrote to Professor Anthony Maden, the head clinician at Tony’s unit at Broadmoor – “I’m contacting you in the hope that you may be able to shed some light on how true Tony’s story might be.” (…)

A week passed and then the email I had been waiting for arrived from Professor Maden. “Tony,” it read, “did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison.” (…)

“Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy.” (…)

Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, Maden explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you’d expect of a psychopath.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

Quantification — describing reality with numbers — is a trend that seems only to be accelerating. From digital technology to business and financial models, we interact with the world by means of quantification.

While we all interact with the world through more-or-less inflexible models, mathematics contributes to this lack of flexibility because it is seemingly precise and objective. Even though mathematical models can be very complex, you can use them without understanding them very well. A trader need not really understand the financial engineering models that he may use on daily basis. This uncritical acceptance amounts to the assumption that reality is identical to our rational reconstruction of reality — for example, that the economy or the stock market is captured by our latest model. (…)

Statistical models are all based on the notion of randomness, but no one can really understand randomness. Many people use the word random without realizing that random means what it says — randomness cannot be predicted or controlled. A model of randomness is no longer true randomness.

Because they are logically consistent, mathematical models screen out ambiguity. Ambiguity is real, but business and financial models have little to no room for it.


{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

Powerful people smile less, interrupt others, and speak in a louder voice. When people do not respect the basic rules of social behavior, they lead others to believe that they have power, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science. (…) Acting rudely also leads people to see power.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Individuals who took coffee from another person’s can (Study 1), violated rules of bookkeeping (Study 2), dropped cigarette ashes on the floor (Study 3), or put their feet on the table (Study 4) were perceived as more powerful than individuals who did not show such behaviors.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

In his talk, Gregory Longmore of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, outlined some of the complex signaling pathways responsible for metastasis. Somehow, cancer cells break off from a primary tumor, break through the layer of cells that separates them from the bloodstream, and then spread to new sites.

Of the facts and figures Longmore cited, two struck me especially. Ninety percent of cancer patients are killed by metastases, not primary tumors. Ninety-nine percent of cancer cells that make their way into the bloodstream die. “Metastasis is incredibly inefficient,” he said.

{ Charles Day/Physics Today | Continue reading | More: Oncogenes }

Researchers have found that while cell phone use appears to increase the level of testosterone circulating in the body, it may also lead to low sperm quality and a decrease in fertility. (…)

More in-depth research is needed to determine the exact ways in which EMW affects male fertility.

{ Queen’s University | Continue reading }

This paper considers what motivates people to improve themselves. Across four studies the authors find that benign envy stimulates better performance. They reveal that admiration feels good but does not lead to a motivation to improve oneself. This has been labelled happy self-surrender, a feeling that the other is so good at something that one can only look with appreciation at how good the other is.

Benign envy (not malicious envy), on the other hand, feels frustrating but it does lead to a motivation to improve.

{ Why Envy Outperforms Admiration | Continue reading }

Who is harder to raise, sons or daughters? I’ve asked by a show of hands and with iClickers, over the years, and the room of 750 is almost unanimous: daughters are harder to raise. (…)

So then I show them this.

It is a graph of maternal longevity based on the number of sons or daughters they have. This data was based on a historical population from Finland from 1640-1870 using church records (Helle et al 2002). As you can see, the more sons mothers bear, the shorter their lifespans.

{ Context and Variation | Continue reading }

Yes, there’s a correlation between early sexual initiation (this study defined this as 16 or younger) and later sexual risk-taking. But, as a causal factor for sexual risk-taking—multiple partners, drug and alcohol use during sexual encounters, or unprotected intercourse—“it doesn’t really matter whether you delay sex or not.” (…)

The researchers looked at more than 1,000 pairs of identical and fraternal twins. (…) Numerous runs of the data led to the same conclusion: “You take two twins who share 100 percent of their genes. One has sex at 15 and one at 20. You compare them on risk-taking at 24—and they don’t differ.”

So why does someone end up sexually promiscuous? The researchers think it’s a combination of genetic factors—such as the strong inherited tendency to be impulsive or anti-social – and environmental ones, such as poverty or troubled family life.

{ APS | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Mapplethorpe, Calla Lily, 1987 }

{ Contaminants Can Flow Up Waterfalls, Say Physicists }

For the past 150 years, MIT has been leading us into the future. The discoveries of its teachers and students have become the warp and weft of modernity, the stuff of daily life that we now all take for granted. The telephone, electromagnets, radars, high-speed photography, office photocopiers, cancer treatments, pocket calculators, computers, the internet, the decoding of the human genome, lasers, space travel… the list of innovations that involved essential contributions from MIT and its faculty goes on and on.

And with that drive into modernity MIT has played no small part in building western, and particularly US, global dominance. Its explosive innovations have helped to secure America’s military and cultural supremacy, and with it the country’s status as the world’s sole superpower.

{ Guardian | Continue reading | video via copyranter }

Scientists have tested the old Danish myth that it is possible to get drunk by submerging your feet in alcohol. (…)

The researchers submerged their feet in washing bowls containing three 700mL bottles of vodka (37.5% by volume). They then recorded the level of drunkenness using the concentration of plasma ethanol and a more interesting secondary outcome. (…) “The secondary outcome was self assessment of intoxication related symptoms (self-confidence, urge to speak, and number of spontaneous hugs).”

The results of the blood plasma ethanol levels were all below the detection limit of 2.2 mmol/L and the secondary outcome results were deemed not significant. Although they did observe that after the experiment the skin on the researchers feet was ‘clean and smooth’.

{ B Good Science | Continue reading }

Burundanga is a scary drug. (…) The scale of the problem in Latin America is not known, but a recent survey of emergency hospital admissions in Bogotá, Colombia, found that around 70 per cent of patients drugged with burundanga had also been robbed, and around three per cent sexually assaulted. “The most common symptoms are confusion and amnesia,” says Juliana Gomez, a Colombian psychiatrist. (…)

News reports allude to another, more sinister, effect: that the drug removes free will, effectively turning victims into suggestible human puppets. Although not fully understood by neuroscience, free will is seen as a highly complex neurological ability and one of the most cherished of human characteristics.

{ Wired UK | Continue reading }

Neuroscientists 
increasingly describe our behaviour as the result of a chain of
cause-and-effect, in which one physical brain state or pattern of
neural activity inexorably leads to the next, culminating in a
particular action or decision. With little space for free choice in
this chain of causation, the conscious, deliberating self seems to
be a fiction. From this perspective, all the real action is
occurring at the level of synapses and neurotransmitters.

For now most of us are content to believe that we have control over
our own lives, but what would happen if we lost our faith in free
will?

{ Susan Sayler | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Aron Wiesenfeld, The Wedding Party }