By asking a group of older adults to analyze videos of other people conversing — some talking truthfully, some insincerely — a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco has determined which areas of the brain govern a person’s ability to detect sarcasm and lies.

Some of the adults in the group were healthy, but many of the test subjects had neurodegenerative diseases that cause certain parts of the brain to deteriorate. The UCSF team mapped their brains using magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, which showed associations between the deteriorations of particular parts of the brain and the inability to detect insincere speech.

{ UCSF | Continue reading }

How did dinosaurs manage to have sex?

From behind, probably.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

…study by Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. Wiseman surveyed a number of people and, through a series of questionnaires and interviews, determined which of them considered themselves lucky—or unlucky. He then performed an intriguing experiment: He gave both the “lucky” and the “unlucky” people a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell him how many photographs were inside. He found that on average the unlucky people took two minutes to count all the photographs, whereas the lucky ones determined the number in a few seconds.

How could the “lucky” people do this? Because they found a message on the second page that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” So why didn’t the unlucky people see it? Because they were so intent on counting all the photographs that they missed the message.

Wiseman noted, “Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner, and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through the newspaper determined to find certain job advertisements and, as a result, miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there, rather than just what they are looking for.”

{ Erik Calonius | Continue reading }

artwork { Andy Warhol, Dance Diagram, 1962 }

Humpback whales have their own version of the hit single, according to a new study. At any given time within a population, male humpbacks all sing the same mating tune. But the pattern of the song changes over time, with the new and apparently catchy versions of the song spreading repeatedly across the ocean, almost always traveling from west to east. (…)

This is the first time that such broad-scale and population-wide cultural exchange has been documented in any species other than humans, she added.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

You know how when you’re in an elevator or an underground train, everybody seems to try their darnedest not to look anyone else in the eye. This everyday experience completely contradicts hundreds of psychology studies conducted in the lab, which show how rapidly our attention is drawn to other people’s faces and especially their eyes.

Why the contradiction? Because psychologists have used pared down, highly controlled situations to study where people look, often involving faces and social scenes presented on a computer screen. And crucially, when participants look at a monitor, they generally know that the other person can’t look back. (…)

“Through the simple act of introducing the potential for social interaction, visual behaviour changed dramatically,” the researchers said.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

People who pitch project ideas to venture capitalists often focus on convincing them of #1, idea quality, not realizing that if you convince them of that but not #2, your team quality, they will just steal your idea and give it to another better team.

Usually they hear from several teams pitching pretty similar concepts, so they are judging mainly on team quality.

Knowing this, sophisticated innovators tend to neglect idea quality, and focus on team quality.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

oil on wood panel { Van Arno }

Hegel wrote in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right that the owl of Minerva flies only at night. It hoots at insomniacs. I know. I’m one. (…)

Insomnia has intrigued thinkers since the ancients, an interest that continues today, especially in Europe. (…)

Philosophy is no friend of sleep. In his Laws (circa 350 BC), Plato platonized, “When a man is asleep, he is no better than if he were dead; and he who loves life and wisdom will take no more sleep than is necessary for health.” (…) In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche preached that the high goal of good Europeans “is wakefulness itself.”

Aristotle said all animals sleep. In the 20th century, the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran added in On the Heights of Despair (first published in 1934): “Only humanity has insomnia.” Emmanuel Levinas, author of the erotic and metaphysical Totality and Infinity (1961), imagined philosophy, all of it, to be a call to “infinite responsibility, to an untiring wakefulness, to a total insomnia.” (…)

The first thing you learn about insomnia is that it sees in the dark. The second is that it sees nothing.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

We all know that we don’t get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the day — where they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee.

Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world.

In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab. (…)

For most of us, eight hours of sleep is excellent and six hours is no good, but what about if we split the difference? (…)

Belenky’s nine-hour subjects performed much like Dinges’s eight-hour ones. But in the seven-hour group, their response time on the P.V.T. slowed and continued to do so for three days, before stabilizing at lower levels than when they started. (…)

Not every sleeper is the same, of course: Dinges has found that some people who need eight hours will immediately feel the wallop of one four-hour night, while other eight-hour sleepers can handle several four-hour nights before their performance deteriorates. There is a small portion of the population — he estimates it at around 5 percent or even less — who, for what researchers think may be genetic reasons, can maintain their performance with five or fewer hours of sleep. (There is also a small percentage who require 9 or 10 hours.)

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

In the community of believers, paranormal sexual encounters are known as “spectrophilia.” Whether it’s invisible kisses and caresses, sex with Satan, phantom fornication, or obscene phone calls from the dead, let’s explore some claims of anomalous amorous phenomena.

{ Skeptical Inquirer | Continue reading }

The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary; and again we must halt at every stage, for each is itself a complete individual form, and is fully and finally considered only so far as its determinate character is taken and dealt with as a rounded and concrete whole, or only so far as the whole is looked at in the light of the special and peculiar character which this determination gives it.

{ Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, 8, 29, 1807 | Continue reading }

images { 1. Robert Mapplethorpe | 2 }

The world’s 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species. (…)

The origin of early languages is fuzzier. Truly ancient languages haven’t left empirical evidence that scientists can study. And many linguists believe it is hard to say anything definitive about languages prior to 8,000 years ago, as their relationships would have become jumbled over the millennia.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

JamesMTitus was manufactured by cyber-security specialists in New Zealand participating in a two-week social-engineering experiment organized by the Web Ecology Project. Based in Boston, the group had conducted demographic analyses of Chatroulette and studies of Twitter networks during the recent Middle East protests. It was now interested in a question of particular concern to social-media experts and marketers: Is it possible not only to infiltrate social networks, but also to influence them on a large scale?

The group invited three teams to program “social bots”—fake identities—that could mimic human conversation on Twitter, and then picked 500 real users on the social network, the core of whom shared a fondness for cats. The Kiwis armed JamesMTitus with a database of generic responses (“Oh, that’s very interesting, tell me more about that”) and designed it to systematically test parts of the network for what tweets generated the most responses, and then to talk to the most responsive people.

After the first week, the teams were allowed to tweak their bot’s code and to launch secondary identities designed to sabotage their competitors’ bots.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

The basic concept is that we think writers should be paid for their work.

{ Why the Times Pays Writers Even When It Doesn’t Have To | Forbes | full story }

images { 1 | 2 }

Tech bubbles happen, but we usually gain from the innovation left behind. This one—driven by social networking—could leave us empty-handed

As a 23-year-old math genius one year out of Harvard, Jeff Hammerbacher arrived at Facebook when the company was still in its infancy. This was in April 2006, and Mark Zuckerberg gave Hammerbacher—one of Facebook’s first 100 employees—the lofty title of research scientist and put him to work analyzing how people used the social networking service. Specifically, he was given the assignment of uncovering why Facebook took off at some universities and flopped at others. The company also wanted to track differences in behavior between high-school-age kids and older, drunker college students. “I was there to answer these high-level questions, and they really didn’t have any tools to do that yet,” he says.

Over the next two years, Hammerbacher assembled a team to build a new class of analytical technology. His crew gathered huge volumes of data, pored over it, and learned much about people’s relationships, tendencies, and desires. Facebook has since turned these insights into precision advertising, the foundation of its business. (…)

After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.” (…)

Hammerbacher quit Facebook in 2008, took some time off, and then co-founded Cloudera, a data-analysis software startup. He’s 28 now and speaks with the classic Silicon Valley blend of preternatural self-assurance and save-the-worldism. (…) He’s not really a programmer or an engineer; he’s mostly just really, really good at math. (…)

On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They’re the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds. Hammerbacher was a quant. After about 10 months, he got back in touch with Zuckerberg, who offered him the Facebook job in California. That’s when Hammerbacher redirected his quant proclivities toward consumer technology.

{ BusinessWeek | Continue reading }

The American painter Barnett Newman once said that an artist gets from aesthetics what a bird gets from ornithology—nothing. (…)

There are things in our context that we readily recognize to be art because they are sufficiently like it in relevant respects—even though they may not “look like art” in every respect. What is this form of life in which this likeness can be seen? (…)

The notion that “vision itself has its history,” to use the words of Heinrich Wölfflin, has been one of the longest-lasting and deepest- seated principles of art history, even if it has sometimes been somewhat subterranean.

{ Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture | Continue reading | PDF }

photo { Richard Ross, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 1986 }

Physicians may choose riskier treatment for themselves than they’d recommend for their patients, according to a study that highlights a need for candid discussions about patients’ preferences.

The findings are important because patients faced with difficult medical decisions often ask their doctors, “What would you do?” The answer reflects the doctors’ values — not necessarily those of the patient. (…)

The study asked more than 700 primary-care doctors to choose between two treatment options for cancer and the flu — one with a higher risk of death, one with a higher risk of serious, lasting complications.

In each of the two scenarios, doctors who said they’d choose the deadlier option for themselves outnumbered those who said they’d choose it for their patients. (…)

Previous research shows many people would react in a similar emotional way when presented with difficult choices for themselves versus others.

For example, one study asked participants if they would approach an attractive stranger in a bar if they noticed that person was looking at them. Many said no, but they would give a friend the opposite advice. Saying “no” meant avoiding short-term pain — possible rejection by an attractive stranger — but also missing out on possible long-term gain — a relationship with that stranger.

{ News & Records | Continue reading }

screenshots { 1 | 2 }

In the present study 24 university students read four different texts in four conditions:

(1) while listening to music they preferred to listen to while studying;

(2) while listening to music they did not prefer to listen to while studying;

(3) while listening to a recording of noise from a café; and finally

(4) in silence.

After each text they took a reading-comprehension test. Eye movement data were recorded for all participants in all conditions.

A main effect for the reading-comprehension scores revealed that the participants scored significantly lower after they had been listening to the non-preferred music while reading, compared with reading in silence.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

photo { Kyoko Hamada }

Anecdotal reports suggest that some users of ecstasy (MDMA) experience increased feelings of empathy and are more social while under influence of the drug. Such effects may contribute to the timing and frequency of ecstasy use and may also contribute to risk of abuse or dependence. Understanding this phenomenon in more detail might provide clinicians with better strategies to reduce use and the associated complications of ecstasy use.

Studying acute effects of illicit drugs is difficult under natural conditions. Users of ecstasy commonly also use alcohol, nictoine and other illicit drugs in the context of ecstasy use. Isolating psychological effects of one agent in this type of environment is difficult if not impossible. One alternative is to admiinster ecstasy in a laboratory setting with subjects blind to whether ecstasy or placebo is being administered. However, this approach poses significant ethical challenges. One approach, is to limit human study in the lab to those who have previously use ecstasy and intend to continue using. (…)

A study in Biological Psychiatry took this approach when over four sessions, healthy ecstasy using volunteers received either a low or high dose of MDMA, a dose of methamphetamine (METH) or placebo. (…)

Findings suggest MDMA increases social approach (sociability). The study supports the possibility that increased social behavior with MDMA might be due to a reduced sensitivity to negative emotions of others rather than increasing recognition of positive emotions in others.

{ Brain Posts | Continue reading }

photo { Noritoshi Hirakawa }

Numerous studies in recent years have reported that drinking coffee may be good for the cardiovascular system and might even help prevent strokes. Just last month, Swedish researchers announced results of a large study showing that coffee seemed to reduce the risk of stroke in women by up to 25%. (…)

A 2008 study of more than 26,000 male smokers in Finland found that the men who drank eight or more cups of coffee a day had a 23% lower risk of stroke than the men who drank little or no coffee. And a few other reports suggest the effect applies to healthy nonsmokers too.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

Social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.

But nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance, says Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America. (…)

For centuries, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. (…) The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.

{ Smithsonian Magazine | Continue reading }