I also can't recommend enough this book by sleep science pioneer Willima Dement, the Charles Darwin of sleep. If there is a sleep center at a hospital in your area, you can thank Dement. No Dement, no sleep center. These things were pioneered in Walla Walla, Washington, Dement's home town. Dement tells the full story in a chapter of his book.
For the full story of Kennewick Man, don't miss the Tri-City Herald's Kennewick Man Virtual Interpretive Center.
MORE "Mind Reading".
UPDATE: More here.
Autism. A growing understanding of autism brings with it a growing understanding of ourselves. Here are some recent scientific developments as reported by the NY Times. It's important to remember how far we have come:
The notion that autism was caused by "refrigerator" mothers and absent fathers [was] promoted by psychoanalysts in the 1950's and 1960's ..
Message? Group think among academics and intellectuals can evolve into a fully invented world -- with devastating consequences for flesh and blood folks living in a world very far from make believe. Don't think for a minute that it doesn't take place still today.. at a univesity near you.
Brain & Pain. " .. researchers .. showed that the brain was a mirror of suffering, reflecting through many of the same neural circuits the pain that others feel, much as if the sensation were its own genuine torment. Indeed, the brain's ability to share another's response to pain at such a fundamental cellular level may be the key to a sense of empathy, the personality trait that underpins so many human relationships ..". MORE on the mind and the neural creation of pain.
Reading Minds. "Until sometime between their third and fourth birthdays, young children seem not to understand that the relationship between a person's goals and her actions depends on the person's beliefs about the current state of the world .. ". More on Reading other Minds.
"Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to report something without saying how you found it out .. ". more. Well, state of the union speeches would be very different .. and what would become of Michael Moore?
This review of Friedrich Hayek's The Sensory Order really nails it:
Although Hayek's influence on economics and political science has been profound, his work in psychology, of which this book is the sole product, is still relatively unknown. This is unfortunate, not only because Hayek is a great psychologist, in the same league as Helmholtz, Fechner, and Freud, but also because his more influential work is often based on the conceptual framework established in The Sensory Order. I can think of several reasons for the neglect of this book. First, it is not easy to read. Despite a lucid style, the ideas contained are so complex and expressed in so compressed a form that several readings are required to fully appreciate them. Second, the ideas are so revolutionary that we still fail to grasp their implications, though even Hayek himself, it should be said, failed to address them adequately. Hebb's Organization of Behavior, the first explicit proposal of Hebbian learning and cell assemblies, and Gallistel's Organization of Action, a compilation of classic works on motor coordination, contained similar ideas, but they are nowhere as original and profound as this book.
The only thing I'd add is that this is NOT Hayek's sole work in psychology. Just as important and just as profound are his later essays on culturally acquired patterns of human behavior, found in his now out of print collections of essays.
The ever wonderful Oliver Sacks on Edelman, Hebb, James, Crick and the mystery of visual consciousness. I said wonderful, right?
Gerald Edelman's Wider than the Sky is due out in March. "In this direct and non-technical discussion of consciousness, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman draws on a lifetime of scientific inquiry into the workings of the brain to formulate answers to the mind-body questions that intrigue every thinking person. Concise and understandable, the book explains pertinent findings of modern neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains."
In my view Edelman is the greatest mind scientist of our time, perhaps of all time. Truly and justly the Darwin of modern brain science. Of course, I'd also recommend the work of Pinker, Hayek and Wittgenstein to all of those interested in some of the larger issues involved in the whole problem of understanding the mind/brain of man and its place in the social world of language, the natural world of everyday experience, and the theoretical world of science. On a related note William Calvin's A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond is also due in March.
Baby signing -- give your little one the power of language. It will be good for both of you. I recommend it from personal experience with my daughter. We didn't master many signs, but just those few helped us to understand one another. My daughter acquired spoken language so quickly that she soon was using words not so long after learning some signs. Research shows that the signing actually speeds up the process of learning spoken language. It seems to have played such a role with my little girl. Sign language learning can begin at about 8 months, quite a bit before before most babies can speak. The classic book on all this is Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk.
And toddlers can learn to read beginning at about 18 months to 2 years. The classic book on this is How to Teach Your Baby to Read. My daughter can read a handful of words, but instruction has been spotty since her little brother appeared on the scene. She recognizes and calls out the words "pizza", "milk", "nose", "hand", "daddy" and a few others, which often catch mommy and daddy by surprise (she reads labels and signs at the grocery store and in the car at surprising times).
Kids are language marvels until about the time they hit puberty, when the part of the brain which learns language begins to freeze up a bit. What I find most remarkable is how a little one can pick up the significance of a word based on so little experience with the word. Sometimes only one use of the word will -- as if by magic -- give them the word, which they will then use correctly in new applications involving very altered contexts. Unbelievable. Somehow are brains seem to have come hard wired for solving Wittgenstein's "going on together" problem. (See Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). Remarkable creatures, we.
We have caused global warming -- for going on 10,000 years . And it's a damn good thing we did, scientists report. A new ice age would have engulfed the planet 4,000 years ago if it wasn't for man's intervention on the environment. And the climate today would be deadly cold.
Another reality check for watermellon scientists and the huge political class seeking to empower itself with watermellon science.
Conceiving man's genetic -- and social -- ancestors:
Fossil bones record the history of the human form but they say little about behavior. A richer source on the way human social behavior evolved may come from chimpanzees, with whom people shared a common ancestor as recently as five or six million years ago.From knowledge of chimp behavior, biologists can plausibly infer the social behavior of the shared human-chimp ancestor, and from that reconstruct the evolutionary history of human social behavior ...
A major surprise has been that chimps turn out to live in territories whose borders are aggressively defended by roving parties of males. Jane Goodall, who pioneered long-term studies of chimps at Gombe, at first believed she was watching a single peaceful community. But as researchers started to follow animals throughout the day and watch their interaction with others, they found that groups of male chimps went out on border patrols, ready to attack and kill the males of neighboring communities.
The males in each community are related to one another because they spend their lives where they were born, whereas the females usually migrate to neighboring communities soon after reaching puberty, a practice that avoids inbreeding. This patrilocal system, of a community based on male kin bonding, is unusual, but familiar to anthropologists because it is practiced by most hunter-gatherer societies.
The males' operational strategy seems to be to defend a territory as large as possible so as to improve the community's food supply, which is principally fruit, and thereby their reproductive success. Dr. Anne Pusey of the University of Minnesota has found that the larger the female chimp's home feeding area, the shorter the interval between births.
In two known cases, a chimp community has wiped out all of a neighbor's males. Though the females may be absorbed into the victors' community, the basic goal seems to be getting rid of a rival rather than capturing females, since male chimps often attack strange females.
Within a community, there is a male hierarchy that is subject to what primatologists euphemistically call elections. Alpha males can lose elections when other males form alliances against them. Losing an election is a bad idea. The deposed male sometimes ends up with personal pieces torn off him and is left to die of his wounds.
Very few other species live in male-kin-bonded communities with female dispersal. And only two practice lethal raids into neighbors' territory to kill off vulnerable enemies. "This suite of behaviors in known only among chimpanzees and humans," Dr. Wrangham and Dale Peterson write in their book Demonic Males ...
A community size of 80 to 100 people, typical among chimps and hunter-gatherers, is one feature inherited from the common ancestor. Another is a society formed on the basis of male kin bonding ...
Jonah Goldberg gets a letter from Hayek scholar Steve Horwitz on Hayek and gay marriage:
I think your state U poli sci prof has Hayek right. I've wanted to write a Hayekian defense of gay marriage paper for a few years, and eventually will. The key to the argument, it seems to me, is that Hayek has a quasi-functionalist view of social institutions - institutions have evolved for reasons, namely that they fulfill some social function. But in the "sifting" process of determining how a particular institution comes to be, certainly human judgments about the abililty of alternate institutions to do the job matter. The long-standing prohibition on homosexual acts/marriage may well be due to incorrect facts that people have held, and now with better factual knowledge, the old prohibitions aren't seen to perform their function any more, or better yet: allowing people to engage in the prohibited behavior doesn't undermine the function of the broader institution.Perhaps given the economic circumstances of a poorer, agricultural world, and the state of social and scientific knowledge, the various prohibitions on homosexuality made sense to people at the time, and perhaps they made sense in reality. But in a different era, with different knowledge, Hayek would be the first to say that the institution can and should evolve. After all, how different is it from prohibitions on interracial marriage, along these lines? Didn't many people believe that the factual knowledge supported an inequality of the races? Didn't changes in our factual knowledge contribute to the end of such laws?
Lastly, as early as the early 70s, Hayek had a footnote about homosexual acts being an example of behavior that should not be prohibited, and spoke specifically of the British commission who examine it in the 50s or 60s (I don't have my book with me). Also, Hayek argued that the job of the social scientist was to assess critically each institution of society, but just not all of them at once. Yes, he argued for the importance of traditions, but he did not revere them. I think the gay marriage issue is a case where his evolutionary half would have won out over his traditional half.
Darwinian psychologist David Barash examines the world of reason and logic. Quotable:
the evolutionary design features of the human brain may well hold the key to our penchant for logic as well as illogic. Following is a particularly revealing example, known as the Wason Test.Imagine that you are confronted with four cards. Each has a letter of the alphabet on one side and a number on the other. You are also told this rule: If there is a vowel on one side, there must be an even number on the other. Your job is to determine which (if any) of the cards must be turned over in order to determine whether the rule is being followed. However, you must only turn over those cards that require turning over. Let's say that the four cards are as follows:
T 6 E 9
Which ones should you turn over?
Most people realize that they don't have to inspect the other side of card T. However, a large proportion respond that the 6 should be inspected. They are wrong: The rule says that if one side is a vowel, the other must be an even number, but nothing about whether an even number must be accompanied by a vowel. (The side opposite a 6 could be a vowel or a consonant; either way, the rule is not violated.) Most people also agree that the E must be turned over, since if the other side is not an even number, the rule would be violated. But many people do not realize that the 9 must also be inspected: If its flip side is a vowel, then the rule is violated. So, the correct answer to the above Wason Test is that T and 6 should not be turned over, but E and 9 should be. Fewer than 20 percent of respondents get it right.
Next, consider this puzzle. You are a bartender at a nightclub where the legal drinking age is 21. Your job is to make sure that this rule is followed: People younger than 21 must not be drinking alcohol. Toward that end, you can ask individuals their age, or check what they are drinking, but you are required not to be any more intrusive than is absolutely necessary. You are confronted with four different situations, as shown below. In which case (if any) should you ask a patron his or her age, or find out what beverage is being consumed?
#1 #2 #3 #4
Drinking Water Over 21 Drinking Beer Under 21
Nearly everyone finds this problem easy. You needn't check the age of person 1, the water drinker. Similarly, there is no reason to examine the beverage of person 2, who is over 21. But obviously, you had better check the age of person 3, who is drinking beer, just as you need to check the beverage of person 4, who is underage. The point is that this problem set, which is nearly always answered correctly, is logically identical to the earlier set, the one that causes considerable head scratching, not to mention incorrect answers.Why is the second problem set so easy, and the first so difficult? This question has been intensively studied by the evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides. Her answer is that the key isn't logic itself -- after all, the two problems are logically equivalent -- but how they are positioned in a world of social and biological reality. Thus, whereas the first is a matter of pure reason, disconnected from reality, the second plays into issues of truth telling and the detection of social cheaters. The human mind, Cosmides points out, is not adapted to solve rarified problems of logic, but is quite refined and powerful when it comes to dealing with matters of cheating and deception. In short, our rationality is bounded by what our brains were constructed -- that is, evolved -- to do.
Even low level alcohol use is shown to cause serious fetal brain damage. Quotable: "in recent decades, scientists have discovered that alcohol can be remarkably toxic � more than any other abused drug � to developing fetuses." Spread the word.
Musical training boosts word power. Wonder what instrument Dennis Miller took up as a kid.
Test your senses -- and find out what is going on, when things go wrong. Maybe this is why I missed those shots in high school ... The color tile example is a great illustration of a point about words and colors taught by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his refutation of both British empiricism and mainstream analytic philosophy of language. Believe it or not! (See, for example, Wittgenstein's Remarks on Color).