Video: monkey fairness
Posted: September 15, 2011 Filed under: Animals, Research, Videos Leave a comment »A pair of capuchin monkeys show very compelling signs of cooperation and a sense of fairness, by working together to solve a problem using tools, and then sharing the reward.
They also show signs of understanding fairness: when unequal rewards are given to one monkey and not another, the monkey receiving the lesser treat would rather go hungry than accept anything less than an equal reward.
From the BBC documentary “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, narrated by the ever brilliant Sir David Attenborough.
For the full 29 minute documentary, “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle,” click here.
How a tired brain can slow your physical performance
Posted: September 7, 2011 Filed under: Health, Psychology Leave a comment »
By Alex Hutchinson
“It sounds crazy,” Samuele Marcora admitted during his talk at a conference on fatigue at Charles Sturt University in Australia last month, “but it’s actually not.”
Dr. Marcora, a professor at the University of Kent’s Centre for Sports Studies in Britain, has spent the past few years unravelling the surprising links between tired brains and physical performance. His initial results suggest that what we perceive as physical limits are actually highly dependent on our levels of motivation and mental fatigue – and that we may be able to use this fact to our advantage.Back in 2009, Dr. Marcora and his colleagues published a study in which 16 volunteers cycled to exhaustion after spending 90 minutes either watching “emotionally neutral” documentary movies or performing a demanding cognitive test called the AX-CPT, which requires “sustained attention, working memory, response inhibition and error monitoring.”
Although the cognitive test didn’t produce any physical fatigue, the volunteers gave up on the cycling test 15 per cent sooner when they were mentally fatigued compared to when they had simply watched the documentaries.
Dr. Marcora explains these results using a new “psychobiological” model of fatigue that views exercise limits as a balance between motivation and perceived effort: We stop not because our muscles are starved of oxygen or depleted of fuel, but because the effort it would take to keep going is greater than the rewards for continuing. In this picture, a tired brain and tired muscles are equally capable of increasing your perceived effort, and ultimately making you quit.
This principle doesn’t apply only to endurance sports. At the fatigue conference last month, researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney, presented data on the effects of mental fatigue on intermittent sports such as soccer, which mix short bursts of intense sprinting with longer stretches of low and medium intensity.
Using the AX-CPT test to induce mental fatigue prior to a simulated 45-minute game, the researchers found that the short, high-intensity sprints – when motivation was maximal – were unaffected by mental fatigue.
Quote: Bill Bryson
Posted: August 24, 2011 Filed under: Early Man, Quotes Leave a comment »
“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so….”Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.” — Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Thanks to Kathryn for sharing!
Why people who speak Chinese are better at math
Posted: August 22, 2011 Filed under: Education, Research Leave a comment »
By Malcolm Gladwell
“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
An excerpt from Chapter Eight of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Outliers.
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book “The Number Sense,” and as Dehaene explains:
Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is ‘si’ and 7 ‘qi’) Their English equivalents—”four,” “seven”—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.
It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one would think that we would also say one-teen, two-teen, and three-teen. But we don’t. We make up a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like what they are. But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound what they are but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second: twenty-one, twenty-two. For the teens, though, we do it the other way around. We put the decade second and the unit number first: fourteen, seventeen, eighteen. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don’t reach forty until they’re five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.
The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily. Ask an English seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty two, in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is nine and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens nine.
“The Asian system is transparent,” says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist, who has done much of the research on Asian-Western differences. “I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there’s a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it’s sensible. For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, ‘out of five parts, take three.’ That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.”
The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among western children starts in the third and fourth grade, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.
Asian children, by contrast, don’t face nearly that same sense of bafflement. They can hold more numbers in their head, and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their language corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is—and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.
When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have built-in advantage. . .
I think you’re fat
Posted: August 9, 2011 Filed under: Happiness, Inspiring, Psychology, Research Leave a comment »
By A.J. Jacobs
This story is about something called Radical Honesty. It may change your life. (But honestly, we don’t really care.)
Here’s the truth about why I’m writing this article:
I want to fulfill my contract with my boss. I want to avoid getting fired. I want all the attractive women I knew in high school and college to read it. I want them to be amazed and impressed and feel a vague regret over their decision not to have sex with me, and maybe if I get divorced or become a widower, I can have sex with them someday at a reunion. I want Hollywood to buy my article and turn it into a movie, even though they kind of already made the movie ten years ago with Jim Carrey. I want to get congratulatory e-mails and job offers that I can politely decline. Or accept if they’re really good. Then get a generous counteroffer from my boss.
To be totally honest, I was sorry I mentioned this idea to my boss about three seconds after I opened my mouth. Because I knew the article would be a pain in the ass to pull off. Dammit. I should have let my colleague Tom Chiarella write it. But I didn’t want to seem lazy.
What I mentioned to my boss was this: a movement called Radical Honesty.
The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.
Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever, right up there with Vanilla Coke and giving Phil Spector a gun permit. Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.
And yet…maybe there’s something to it. Especially for me. I have a lying problem. Mine aren’t big lies. They aren’t lies like “I cannot recall that crucial meeting from two months ago, Senator.” Mine are little lies. White lies. Half-truths. The kind we all tell. But I tell dozens of them every day. “Yes, let’s definitely get together soon.” “I’d love to, but I have a touch of the stomach flu.” “No, we can’t buy a toy today — the toy store is closed.” It’s bad. Maybe a couple of weeks of truth-immersion therapy would do me good.
I e-mail Blanton to ask if I can come down to Virginia and get some pointers before embarking on my Radical Honesty experiment. He writes back: “I appreciate you for apparently having a real interest and hope you’re not just doing a cutesy little superficial dipshit job like most journalists.”
I’m already nervous. I better start off with a clean slate. I confess I lied to him in my first e-mail — that I haven’t ordered all his books on Amazon yet. I was just trying to impress upon him that I was serious about his work. He writes back: “Thanks for your honesty in attempting to guess what your manipulative and self-protective motive must have been.”
Blanton lives in a house he built himself, perched on a hill in the town of Stanley, Virginia, population 1,331. We’re sitting on white chairs in a room with enormous windows and a crackling fireplace. He’s swirling a glass of Maker’s Mark bourbon and water and telling me why it’s important to live with no lies.
“You’ll have really bad times, you’ll have really great times, but you’ll contribute to other people because you haven’t been dancing on eggshells your whole fucking life. It’s a better life.”
“Do you think it’s ever okay to lie?” I ask.
“I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie….I lie to any government official.” (Blanton’s politics are just this side of Noam Chomsky’s.) “I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified. I lie in golf. And in poker.”
Blanton adjusts his crotch. I expected him to be a bully. Or maybe a new-age huckster with a bead necklace who sits cross-legged on the floor. He’s neither. He’s a former Texan with a big belly and a big laugh and a big voice. He’s got a bushy head of gray hair and a twang that makes his bye sound like bah. He calls himself “white trash with a Ph.D.” If you mixed DNA from Lyndon Johnson, Ken Kesey, and threw in the nonannoying parts of Dr. Phil, you might get Blanton.
He ran for Congress twice, with the novel promise that he’d be an honest politician. In 2004, he got a surprising 25 percent of the vote in his Virginia district as an independent. In 2006, the Democrats considered endorsing him but got skittish about his weeklong workshops, which involve a day of total nudity. They also weren’t crazy that he’s been married five times (currently to a Swedish flight attendant twenty-six years his junior). He ran again but withdrew when it became clear he was going to be crushed.
My interview with Blanton is unlike any other I’ve had in fifteen years as a journalist. Usually, there’s a fair amount of ass kissing and diplomacy. You approach the controversial stuff on tippy toes (the way Barbara Walters once asked Richard Gere about that terrible, terrible rumor). With Blanton, I can say anything that pops into my mind. In fact, it would be rude not to say it. I’d be insulting his life’s work. It’s my first taste of Radical Honesty, and it’s liberating, exhilarating.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707-2
Dopamine squirts, intermittent reinforcement, and mobile apps
Posted: July 28, 2011 Filed under: Health, Psychology, Research, Technology Leave a comment »
Is this you? Your phone vibrates and you pull it out of your pocket to check and see if anything interesting caused the vibration. You have a moment of boredom in a store, in a checkout line, while waiting for your spouse to get dressed – so you pull out the phone and run through a checklist of information to peruse – looking to see if anything exciting has occurred in your digital universe be it Twitter, Facebook, or any of a thousand different things people can check on these days. Finally, after prolonged lack of exposure to your smart phone, your overall sense of boredom is heightened. You get fidgety, you get bored quickly, and you feel disconnected and out of touch. Often times you simply don’t know what to do with yourself w/out a laptop or your mobile phone.
If this is you, don’t be ashamed. You’re just like millions of other people who are being conditioned by their “smart” mobile devices. Every time your phone vibrates to alert you of the possibility of something interesting, exciting, or even mundane (but new) – your brain is getting what psychologists call a “Dopamine squirt”. Over time, your brain links the phone vibration, ring, or the “new SMS” tone to a brief release of dopamine. You feel this tiny little rush of excitement that feels like adrenaline every time your phone vibrates, jingles, rings, or otherwise begs for your attention. Since this is dopamine we’re talking about, you actually suffer mild withdrawal symptoms when you are away from your phone or your phone is idle/quiet for a long period of time. You get fidgety, anxious, bored, etc.
Intermittent Reinforcement is another psychological term that is used to refer to the behavior of people tethered to their smart phones. Even if their phone has been programmed to alert them to the arrival of something new and noteworthy, millions of people will pull out their phones and do a quick scan for “new or interesting stuff”. The next time you’re in an airport, or a Starbucks, or any other crowded place (especially one with business people on their lunch break), sit back and do some people watching. Watch how often people pull out their phone, do a scan, then put their phone back. The scary part comes when you see the same person do this 4, 5, 10 times in a row while waiting in line for their coffee, sandwich, or standing on a street corner waiting for the “walk” signal to light up.
Brain over brawn is the key to survival
Posted: July 15, 2011 Filed under: Dinosaurs, Early Man, Nature, Science, Technology Leave a comment »>
By Canadian Press David Suzuki With Faisal Moola, David Suzuki Foundation.
Many people say George Wald was the greatest lecturer in Harvard’s history. He was certainly the best I’ve heard. Dr. Wald won a Nobel Prize in 1967 for his work on the biochemical basis of colour vision. He and I became friends in the 1970s because we shared a common concern about the misapplication of science, especially during the war in Vietnam. Dr. Wald once captivated me with a story he told:
For close to 150 million years, dinosaurs dominated the planet, and they were impressive. They were huge animals, armed with weapons like spikes on their tails, giant claws, and razor-sharp teeth. They were covered with armour plates. They seemed invincible, and when they roamed the Earth, other creatures fled in terror. But they had a fatal flaw: a tiny brain in relation to their body size. Despite their impressive traits, they disappeared – victims, in part, of their low brain-to-brawn ratio.
About 64 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct, a beautiful animal appeared on the plains of Africa. This animal stood upright and walked on two legs, and its skin was free of fur. Unlike the plentiful wildebeest, this animal was rare. It wasn’t as big as a hippo. It wasn’t even as fast as an elephant. It wasn’t as strong as a chimpanzee, and it couldn’t see like an eagle, smell like a dog, or hear like a gazelle.
But those first beautiful humans were endowed with the highest brain-to-brawn ratio ever achieved, and in only 150,000 years, they had spread to every continent on Earth. Humans eventually outnumbered other mammals on the planet. Their high brain-to-brawn ratio served them well as they learned to domesticate plants and animals, and to live in environments as varied as Arctic tundra, deserts, coral atolls, mountain slopes, wetlands, and forests of every kind.
But then they invented guns and cannons and their brain-to-brawn ratio fell. They got into cars, tanks, and planes, and dropped napalm and nuclear bombs. And with each innovation, the brain-to-brawn ratio sank toward that of the dinosaurs.
I love Dr. Wald’s story because it encapsulates much of our dilemma. The human brain was the critical factor that more than compensated for our lack of physical and sensory abilities. We had a vast memory, we were observant and curious, and we were creative. In the past, our innovations such as the needle, bow and arrow, and pottery had huge repercussions but took centuries to evolve into the culture.
Agriculture was the big shift that released us from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmers and village dwellers. Then the Industrial Revolution heralded a massive change. In only two centuries, people were able to harness the cheap, portable energy of fossil fuels to create machines of incredible power. In the movie Avatar, the giant robots have no heads, a symbol of what we have become as a species. We have acquired vast technological power but far too little of the brainpower or wisdom needed to use that power well.
Consider this simple example. When New Zealand fishers discovered a fish called orange roughy in deep-sea waters, they thought they had hit a bonanza. Technology to fish the deep sea – radar, sonar, GPS, freezers, giant nets – enabled them to exploit the abundant fish in massive numbers. Despite the fact that these were a new target species about which virtually nothing was known, the animals were taken in vast quantities. It’s called “harvesting” but it was really a “mining” operation. Only years later did we learn these fish live more than a hundred years and grow and mature far more slowly than inshore species.
When was the last time you ate orange roughy? They have been nearly wiped out all around the globe because our technology was too powerful in relation to our knowledge. We didn’t consider our limitations, which should have caused us to be far more cautious and conservative. The technology meant that brain-to-brawn sank toward a level closer to that of the dinosaurs.
Technology can provide great benefits, but unless we learn to use our heads in applying our technologies, we will also go the way of the dinosaurs.
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David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation. Faisal Moola is the director of science at the foundation (www.davidsuzuki.org).
Thanks to Michele for sharing!
Creative kryptonite and the death of productivity
Posted: July 9, 2011 Filed under: Health, Psychology, Research, Technology Leave a comment »
By Jonathan Fields
Great work, brilliant ideas, extraordinary art requires space.
Time away. Room to process, synthesize, allow connections between seemingly disparate parts to effervesce out of the ether of the mind.
Genius is the offspring of the in-between.
But, increasingly, technology is removing the in-between.
We don’t just walk in contemplation, we walk, talk and type.
We don’t just drive, we drive, talk and every time we stop the car, we check, tap and reply. Red lights, the bain of a life-long quest to get “there,” have now become a sought after opportunity to catch up on any communication that may’ve arrived since the last red-light…5 blocks ago.
But when we fill in all the organic in-betweens with texting, e-mailing, DMing and updating, we unintentionally kill the a critical step in the ideation process—percolation and contemplation—and along with it go creativity, innovation and despite your opposite intention, productivity.
So, why do we do it?
Filling in the in-between, we say, lets us get so much more done. Wrong.
Hyperconnectivity gives us the perception of getting more done, it makes us feel like we’re doing more, because we’re using every free moment of every waking hour.
There is often a huge chasm between being busy and being productive.
Hyperconnectivity requires a massive volume of switchtasking, which destroys true-productivity and efficiency because every time you page through your various modes of connectivity and respond to different prompts, you lose focus. To regain that focus requires a certain amount of time and cognitive effort.
Put another way, there is a ramping cost every time you switch gears, then return.
So when you spiral through every known mode of communication hundreds of times a day, you may be busy as hell, but you damn sure aren’t productive. At least nowhere near the level you could be. You’ve just created the illusion of productivity.
By the way, if you’re wondering if that’s you, here’s an easy test:
Next time someone asks what you did at the end of a day, if you know you were crazy busy but you can’t immediately pin-point a small number of substantially-meaningful accomplishments, critical insights or measurable forward movement…let alone recall any tasks beyond “oh I answered a lot of emails, put out fires and had a bunch of meetings…you’ve very likely fallen into hyperconnected lost-sock land.
All of which begs an even bigger question…
If hyperconnectivity really isn’t about efficiency and productivity, like we claim it is, what is it about?
Why is 10:10 the default setting for clocks and watches?
Posted: October 15, 2010 Filed under: Technology 1 Comment »>
Its said that the 10:10 position gives the clock or watch a number of benefits:
• The hands not overlapping, so they’re fully and clearly visible and their styling can be admired.
• The arrangement of the hands is symmetrical, which people generally find more pleasant than asymmetry, making the product more appealing to customers.
• The manufacturer’s logo, usually in the center of the face under the 12, is not only visible, but nicely framed by the hands.
• Additional elements on the face (like date windows and secondary dials), usually placed near the 3, 6, or 9, won’t be obscured.
According to the folks at Timex (who set their products at 10:09:36 exactly), the standard setting used to be 8:20, but this made the face look like it was frowning. To make the products look “happier,” the setting was flipped into a smile (occasionally, you’ll still see the 8:20 setting on some clocks or watches where the manufacturer’s logo is at bottom of the face above the 6).
By spellitme.wordpress.com
Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor
Posted: October 14, 2010 Filed under: Early Man, Research, Science Leave a comment »
ScienceDaily — New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
What is the genetic mutation
“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes”. The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. The “switch”, which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris – effectively “diluting” brown eyes to blue. The switch’s effect on OCA2 is very specific therefore. If the OCA2 gene had been completely destroyed or turned off, human beings would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colour – a condition known as albinism.
Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” says Professor Eiberg. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.” Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.
Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour.
Nature shuffles our genes
The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human’s chance of survival. As Professor Eiberg says, “it simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so.”
University of Copenhagen (2008, January 31). Blue-eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 26, 2010. Source
