Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Perchance to dream

For the past three nights in a row, I've dreamed that I was being charged by a large, snarling dog.

Besides the repetitive nature of the dream -- I can't recall ever having recurring dreams before -- the weird part is that of all the animals to pick, dogs are the ones I'd be least afraid of.  I tend to be a dog magnet.  Even dogs that are kind of skittish recognize me as a kindred spirit.

To be absolutely honest, dogs generally like me better than people do.

Plus, you'd be hard-pressed to find two less threatening dogs than the ones I have.  I've never seen either one act aggressively toward anything but squirrels.  As an illustration, two nights ago, Guinness, our large, goofy American Staffordshire Terrier mix, was lying in my wife's spot when she decided to come to bed.  So I grabbed Guinness by all four paws and rotated him clockwise by 180 degrees.  His only response was to sigh heavily, and he ended up with my arm around him and his head resting on my shoulder, where he fell asleep again in a matter of minutes.

Fig. 1: What neither of my dogs looks even remotely like.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons; original at https://www.flickr.com/photos/statefarm/6993960366/]

So the content of the dream is as odd as its repetitive nature.  The first time I had the dream, I woke up at the moment the snarling dog was about to leap and sink its teeth into my throat, and shouted so loud it woke my wife up.  This, too, is something that hardly ever happens.  The second time, I dreamed I was using my left arm to ward off the dog's attack, and woke up to find I'd flung the blankets away from me.

I'm not at all sure why this is happening.  I started a new anti-anxiety med a few weeks ago, and all I can say is that if this is one of the side effects, it is not helpful.  The idea should not be to take something I'm not anxious about, and make me anxious about it.

This comes up not only because of my recent experiences, but because of a study that appeared last month in Nature called, "Peace of Mind and Anxiety in the Waking State are Related to the Affective Content of Dreams," by Pilleriin Sikka, Henri Pesonen, and Antti Revonsuo of the University of Turku (Finland).  The authors write:
Waking mental well-being is assumed to be tightly linked to sleep and the affective content of dreams.  However, empirical research is scant and has mostly focused on ill-being by studying the dreams of people with psychopathology.  We explored the relationship between waking well-being and dream affect by measuring not only symptoms of ill-being but also different types and components of well-being...  Healthy participants completed a well-being questionnaire, followed by a three-week daily dream diary and ratings of dream affect.  Multilevel analyses showed that peace of mind was related to positive dream affect, whereas symptoms of anxiety were related to negative dream affect.  Moreover, waking measures were better related to affect expressed in dream reports rather than participants’ self-ratings of dream affect.  We propose that whereas anxiety may reflect affect dysregulation in waking and dreaming, peace of mind reflects enhanced affect regulation in both states of consciousness. 
So this is a little troubling, given the screaming and thrashing about I've been doing recently.

Fig. 2: What I apparently don't look remotely like when I'm sleeping.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Chad fitz, Sleeping man with beard, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In an interview with PsyPost, study co-author Pilleriin Sikka said, "There is evidence that REM sleep may help regulate emotions but we need more studies to find out whether dreams and the emotional experiences in dreams have any important role...  Our dream emotions are not just a totally random creation of our brains and minds, but they are related to our waking ill-being and well-being.  Those who are more anxious in their waking life also experience more negative emotions in their dreams, whereas those who have more peace of mind while awake have more positive dream emotions.  This also means that the content of dream reports may reflect a person’s mental health."

I wonder what Sikka would have to say about the contents of my wife's dreams.  Whereas I (up to this week, anyhow) have tended to have vague, unsettling dreams that don't stick in my memory long, Carol dreams whole feature-length movies.  The plots are complex and impossibly convoluted, with subplots and twists and changes of scene, and she remembers them for some time upon awakening.  (In fact, my current work-in-progress, a speculative fiction novel called The Harmonic Labyrinth, got its inspiration from one of my wife's dreams.)

Her problem is that dreaming this way doesn't exactly lead to feeling rested in the morning, but I suppose it's still preferable to ripping the covers off and throwing them on the floor in an attempt to avoid getting disemboweled by a raging dog.

So the Sikka et al. study at least shows us a correlation between the emotional tone of dreams and our waking emotional state.  However, it still doesn't explain the more detailed content, which is pretty bizarre sometimes.  I've always thought that those "Your Dreams Explained" books you see sometimes, that tell you stuff like if there's an eggplant in your dream it means you are going to change jobs soon, are complete horseshit.  Not only is there no scientific support whatsoever that there's any kind of one-to-one correspondence between what appears in your dream and its meaning for your life, it makes no sense that any meaning that does exist would be consistent from person to person.

So maybe seeing an eggplant in your dream means something entirely different for you than it would for me.

Anyhow, it's all an interesting step forward in understanding the psychology of sleep.  Me, I'm just hoping for a restful night tonight, not only for myself but for my wife, who is sick and tired of my yelling and pulling the covers off at two AM.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]



Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Hot dog cure

There's nothing like a good parody to point up the absurdity of a claim.

Of course, when what you're parodying is itself ridiculous, you stand the chance of having your parody sound as plausible as the original claim.  (Which is the basic idea of Poe's Law.)  And that's why it took me about ten minutes to figure out that what Douglas Bevans was doing at Gwyneth Paltrow's "Goop Health Summit" in Vancouver, British Columbia, was a prank.

Bevans was there to sell Hot Dog Water -- which is, unfortunately, exactly what it sounds like.  It's a bottle of water with a hot dog suspended inside.  The product, he says, has innumerable health benefits.  "Our extraction experts have deemed it a miracle product and with reason.  First of all it’s keto-compatible, you can lose weight, look younger, increase vitality for sure, and last but not least, increase brain function."

It's also gluten-free, and "full of sodium and other important electrolytes."  Bevans says not only does he have drinkable hot dog water, but hot dog water lip balm and hot dog water breath spray.


The problem, of course, is that this sounds a great deal like claims Paltrow has actually made, such as "gemstone water," which is like hot dog water only replacing the hot dog with an emerald.  "Although humorous," Bevans says, "Hot Dog Water is not a prank, and people are not being tricked into drinking it.  Rather, in its absurdity, the art performance encourages critical thinking related to product marketing and the significant role it plays in our purchasing choices."

Well, it'd be nice to think that this'd be the effect, but having written here at Skeptophilia for eight years, I'm perhaps to be excused for thinking that he might be vastly overestimating the human race's capacity for critical thinking.  After all, people buy Quantum Downloadable Medicine (you pay by credit card, then sit in front of your computer as the medicine "downloads directly into your body"), homeopathic water (which is water diluted with water), and arranging your diet based on the phases of the moon (it is called, I shit you not, the "Werewolf Diet").  To me, Hot Dog Water is actually more sensible than any of those, although it pains me to admit it.

I mean, tickets to the Goop Health Summit cost $400 each, and she sold out.  I don't want to think of how much money she made from this event, and that's not even considering the fact that the whole point of the summit is that she's trying to get her products into Canadian markets.  She called it a "mind-expanding day," which apparently means that your mind turns into a gas and then drifts out of your ears.

Because in my opinion, that's the only way you could believe 90% of Paltrow's health claims.

Nevertheless, Paltrow considers the event to be a roaring success, and brags that she "goopified" Stanley Park Pavilion.

Whatever the hell that means.

So I'm not sure I should be encouraged by Bevans's Hot Dog Water stunt.  I mean, I laughed, not least because it reminded me of "hot ham water" from Arrested Development (Lindsay Bluth's one and only attempt to fix dinner -- ham soaked in hot water.  "It's watery," she bragged.  "With a smack of ham.").  But the fact that there are people who probably think Bevans is serious is a little disturbing.

I'd better go get a cup of my favorite health supplement -- "hot bean water."  With extract of the tropical plant Saccharum officinarum.

Better known as coffee with a teaspoon of sugar.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]



Monday, October 29, 2018

The Mothman cometh

In breaking news about creatures that almost certainly don't exist, today we have: Mothman Visits Chicago.

If you've heard of Mothman, it's probably because of the 2002 movie The Mothman Prophecies starring Richard Gere, which had nothing to do with prophecies but did feature a large, dark creature whose only apparent similarity to a moth was having wings.  To me, it looks more like a cross between a spider monkey and a peregrine falcon, with the added feature of having glowing red eyes.

Here's an artist's conception of the Mothman:


[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tim Bertelink, Mothman Artist's Impression, CC BY-SA 4.0]

I'm a little mystified by the guy waving cheerily in the inset on the top right.  He looks perfectly at ease.  "Hey, y'all," he seems to be saying.  "I'm completely unconcerned by the fact that I'm standing next to a scarlet-eyed demon from the Ninth Circle of Hell."

Which brings up another point I've never understood -- the thing about glowing eyes, scarlet or otherwise.  Reflective eyes, yes; many animals, especially nocturnal ones, have something called the tapetum lucidum behind the retina, which reflects back any light that makes it past the retinal receptors, giving them a second chance to catch it.  This is why, for example, the eyes of deer glow in car headlights.  (Our eyes in a camera look red not because of a tapetum, nor because of being evil hell-beasts, but because a flash photograph in dim light bounces light through our dilated pupils and illuminates the blood vessels in the retina.)

But glowing eyes?  Where's the light coming from?  Is there a little man with a flashlight inside the Mothman's eyes, shining the beam out through the pupil?  In the usual course of things, light goes into the eye, not out of it.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the movie was based on the almost entirely unreadable book of the same name by John Keel, which wanders around aimlessly talking about aliens and UFOs and Men in Black and so on, for two hundred pages or so.  The part that is actually about the Mothman is regrettably brief, but I guess if that's all he'd published, it would have been called The Mothman Short Story.  The gist of it is that near the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966 and 1967, a number of people saw something big with wings at night, and the whole thing generated a lot of hysteria, especially after the Silver Bridge, which crosses the Ohio River at Point Pleasant, collapsed on December 15, 1967.  Forty-eight people died, and the cause was later found to be a corroded I-beam, which as far as I can see has absolutely nothing to do with a giant winged creature with red eyes.

The reason this all comes up is because of a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link two days ago about how people are now seeing Mothman in Chicago.  There have been no fewer than fifty-five sightings in the past year, and eyewitnesses describe it as a "large, black, bat-like being with glowing red eyes" and "something like a Gothic gargoyle."  More disturbing, some people haven't just seen it from a distance.  Apparently it has more than once dropped onto the hoods of cars, or peered into people's windows at night.

The phenomenon has come to the attention of cryptozoologist Lon Strickler, who runs the wonderful website Phantoms and Monsters.  Strickler seems to be pretty excited by the whole thing.  "This group of sightings is historical in cryptozoology terms," he said, in an interview in Vice (linked in the first paragraph).  "For one, it's happening in an urban area for the most part and that there are so many sightings in one period."

However, Strickler says we shouldn't panic.  "These beings are less aggressive than the one in Point Pleasant, for the most part," he said.  "I believe overall there was only one being in the Point Pleasant-area that was seen during that period, while there appear to be at least three here in Chicago...  I think they're flesh and blood beings that aren’t of this world."

Which, now that I come to think of it, really isn't all that comforting.

What this once again brings home is that frustration I have with the fact that these things never happen to me.  You'd think I'd have the ideal spot -- a large, rambling house on a wooded lot with a creek, out in the middle of nowhere.  Okay, I have two dogs, which might be discouraging to monsters who are considering showing up, but allow me to reassure any Beings That Aren't Of This World who might be reading Skeptophilia that as guard dogs, these two rank only slightly above stuffed toys in terms of viciousness.  If a Mothman showed up at my window, baleful red eyes glowing in my direction, I can almost guarantee that Lena would sleep right through it.  As for Guinness, if Mothman brought along a pocketful of dog treats, or better yet, a tennis ball, Guinness would be his friend for life.

So you'd think I'd be a sitting duck.  But never, not once, have I ever seen a UFO, alien, Bigfoot, poltergeist, ghost, demon, Mothman, or Sheepsquatch.

I bet you were expecting me to say "I made the last one up."  But no, there is a Sheepsquatch, or at least some people in Virginia claim there is, although looking at the artist's rendering from eyewitness accounts, I can't think of anything it looks less like than a sheep.

So some people have all the luck.  Maybe now that I've pointed out their omission, the Mothmen et al. will be kind enough to pay me a visit.  If so, you'll be the first to hear about it.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]



Saturday, October 27, 2018

Fish tales

Today's topic comes from Cool News in Paleontology.

I was alerted to this story because I was perusing science research sites and saw a photograph that looked, to my untrained eye, like a Croc shoe with eyes and a pine cone stuck on the heel.  After saying, "What the hell is that?" I found that it was a reconstruction of a primitive vertebrate called a placoderm, or armored fish.  Lest you think my description is an exaggeration, there's the beast that caught my eye:


This led me to a paper in Science called "The Nearshore Cradle of Early Vertebrate Diversification," by Lauren Sallan, Matt Friedman, Robert S. Sansom, Charlotte M. Bird, and Ivan J. Sansom, wherein I found that this was by far not the weirdest-looking reconstructed critter in the study.  Here are a few others (all reconstructions by Nobumichi Tamura):


I particularly like the one on the lower left, which looks to me like someone took a fish and stuffed its head in a funnel.  I don't know why any of these other species became extinct, but I'm guessing the one on the lower left looked in the mirror and died of sheer embarrassment.

The research, though, is pretty damn cool.  The authors write:
Ancestral vertebrate habitats are subject to controversy and obscured by limited, often contradictory paleontological data.  We assembled fossil vertebrate occurrence and habitat datasets spanning the middle Paleozoic (480 million to 360 million years ago) and found that early vertebrate clades, both jawed and jawless, originated in restricted, shallow intertidal-subtidal environments.  Nearshore divergences gave rise to body plans with different dispersal abilities: Robust fishes shifted shoreward, whereas gracile groups moved seaward.  Fresh waters were invaded repeatedly, but movement to deeper waters was contingent upon form and short-lived until the later Devonian.  Our results contrast with the onshore-offshore trends, reef-centered diversification, and mid-shelf clustering observed for benthic invertebrates.  Nearshore origins for vertebrates may be linked to the demands of their mobility and may have influenced the structure of their early fossil record and diversification.
They also bring up an interesting conjecture; that the tougher anatomy, and especially the presence of a backbone to protect the dorsal nerve cord, might have arisen because of the rough-and-tumble nature of near-shore ecosystems -- you have to be tough or you'll get battered to pieces by the waves.

That, in fact, is why this study was such a mammoth undertaking.  "The main problem is that the fossil record [of vertebrates] is absolutely terrible for the first fifty million to one hundred million years of their existence," said paleobiologist Lauren Sallan of the University of Pennsylvania, in an interview with Science News.  "And when [there are] fossils, they’re in tiny pieces.  It’s hard to tell what exactly’s going on."

The researchers put together the pieces of 2,827 fossils that date to the age range they were studying, and came to the conclusion that all vertebrates trace their lineage back to shallow, near-shore environments.  So maybe I shouldn't laugh at Pine Cone Butt and the Spotted Funnel-Head.  They could be my great-great-great (etc.) grandparents.

I've always had a fascination for paleontology, and this study impresses me not only for its breadth but for what it tells us about our own ancestry.  The forces of evolution have created some amazing-looking creatures, and it's wonderful that we're getting a look into where they may have lived.  It does bear mention, however, that even with the thoroughness of the Sallan et al. study, we're still barely scratching the surface.  We only know about the species that left fossils behind -- which by some estimates is less than a hundredth of a percent of the species that were around at any given time.

So imagine what it would be like to go back there and see it for yourself, back to a time when there was not a single species of plant or animal around that exists today.  Mind-blowing, no?  As the old adage goes, the only thing that is constant is change -- and that is especially true with the natural world.

***********************************

The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.




Friday, October 26, 2018

Woo-woo world update

Yesterday's political post resulted in five people calling me a "libtard snowflake" (or the equivalent), a recommendation to "shut the fuck up until I get past my brainwashing," a person who said he was going to laugh after November 6 when "the leftist assholes like [me] are going down in flames," and one email that I was a "partisan hack working for the disinformation specialists."  The result is that today, we'll consider a different set of issues, to wit:
  • Do ghosts hug each other in the afterlife?
  • If you were strapped for cash, could you count on an angel to give you a hundred bucks?
  • What would you do if you saw a UFO that made "sci-fi noises" and made your dog "go mental?"
Apparently the answers are, respectively:
  • Yes.
  • Yes, and your two pals would also get a hundred bucks each.
  • Report it to the local newspaper, who would treat it as fact.  Of course.
You're probably wondering about the details by now, so allow me to elaborate.  The first story comes out of Lincolnshire, England, specifically Revesby Abbey, a Cistercian monastery that dates back to 1143.  Ron Bowers was conducting a "paranormal investigation" of the Abbey because of its reputation for being haunted, and he snapped a photograph that should be encouraging to any of us who are not looking forward to the idea of an afterlife with no cuddling.  Here's the photo:


Which looks, at a stretch, like a couple hugging.  So Bowers turned the image into its negative, because there's nothing like noodling with the image if it doesn't show you what you want:


And I have to admit it's a little spooky, although as I've pointed out before, pareidolia works even on people who know what it is and realize that their sensory/perceptive systems are being fooled.

Bowers, on the other hand, is all in.  "I thought I could hear a rustling in bushes behind me before the capture of what looks like an embracing couple which led me to think it could be someone in the physical [sic]," Bowers said.  "At first, I thought it was one figure, but within a few seconds I realized it could be two – one with an arm around the other.  The arm is very prominent, and it looks like two people embracing, it looks like they are in love...  It’s nice to believe that love continues.  It’s a lovely picture and who knows maybe there is a love story there.  For me it’s a little more of a confirmation that our lives continue or that our energies can return to our favorite places.  If it is possible that we are energy, it could return to our favorite places, like homes, pubs, maybe schools and other locations.  I don’t believe I have ever had something so intimate as that picture."

The second story comes from Dreamy Draw Mountain in Arizona, where three college students from Phoenix were on a hike a few weeks ago, and had a big surprise.  The students, Allisa Miller, Jen Vickman, and Kassi Sanchez, had started out the day poorly, sleeping through their alarms, and getting up to find that it was hot out.

Which makes me wonder what they expected, in Phoenix.

"Like we didn’t want to hike," said Sanchez, whom I dearly hope isn't majoring in communication.  "Like something we had to do almost forced fun."

Despite this devastatingly tragic start, they persevered where weaker individuals would have given up, and made it up the mountain trail.  And when they got near the top, they saw...

... Jesus.

Or an angel, or something.  They don't seem all that sure, themselves.  "We just see a silhouette of this man, it looks like he has long hair and he’s in a robe," said Miller.  "He was like right there on the top of the mountain.  We were all just kinda shocked, we just kinda sat there."

So they went up toward him, but he vanished.  Near where he was, they found an envelope stuck between two rocks.  They opened it, and found a long, rambling note quoting the bible and various Christian rock singers, signed, I shit you not, "J."  And with the note were three one-hundred-dollar bills, one for each of them.

It's a miracle!  A visitation from Jesus, who evidently stopped by the Pearly Gates National Bank on his way to Arizona!

Or maybe it's a poorly-thought-out publicity stunt.  I'll let you decide.

The last story comes from Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, England, where an "unnamed eyewitness" reports seeing a UFO close-up while out walking his dog.

"The UFO was hovering about 50 foot [sic] away from me, but we could not smell fuel or anything, I was shocked that it did not hit our house," he told a reporter for the Stroud News & Journal.  "It seemed like it was trying to fly below the radar, so it could avoid being scanned - at the time my dog was going mental at it... it looked like a huge tube with intricate ship-style rivets...  When I came across it coming through the forest I thought it must be a plane or hot air balloon, but it was clearly not and it was making sci-fi-like sounds.  Before it shot off into the clouds at immense speed the engines turned bright white, I've never seen anything like it."

Although he had his cellphone with him, he was "too shocked to take a photograph" of it.  Because of course he was.

This is apparently the second UFO sighting near Stonehouse in the past two weeks, which makes me wonder why they have all the luck.  I would love to see a UFO, or a ghost or Bigfoot or whatnot, and here I sit.  And I guarantee that I wouldn't miss an opportunity to take a photograph if I did.  I'd even remember to take my cellphone camera off the "auto-blur" setting.

So that's the news from the Wide World of Woo-Woo this week.  Affectionate ghosts, cash-dispensing messiahs, and UFOs that make "sci-fi-like" sounds and are held together with rivets.  I think we can all agree that this is preferable to a lot of silly stories about politics and neuroscience and genetics and so on.  Stories about ghosts and angels and UFOs don't result in my getting death threats or being called a "fucking ultra-left-wing looser [sic]."  Which is a little off-putting.  If you know any ghosts, you might want to mention that I could use a hug.

***********************************

The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.




Thursday, October 25, 2018

Giving no quarter

As of this morning, six explosive devices addressed to prominent critics of Donald Trump have been discovered, one of them (the one mailed to former CIA director John Brennan) found at the headquarters of CNN.  Fortunately, all of them were intercepted and rendered harmless.  As of the writing of this post, it is yet to be determined if any of the devices were capable of detonating, but officials say that they "contained some of the components that would be required to build an operable bomb" and the potential danger was being studied.


Trump was quick to disavow any responsibility for what happened.  In a speech given at the White House, he said, "In these times we have to unify.  We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America."

Fine words from a man who has repeatedly vilified the men and women who were the targets, and done whatever he could to sow division, paranoia, and polarization.  Just last week he praised Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte for body slamming a reporter.   He initially condemned a neo-Nazi gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia that resulted in one death and nineteen injuries, but quickly backpedaled, saying, "I think there is blame on both sides.  You look at both sides.  I think there is blame on both sides."  He has called CNN and other members of the mainstream news media "enemies of the people" over and over.  Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, called it correctly.  'There is a total and complete lack of understanding at the White House about the seriousness of their continued attacks on the media.  The President, and especially the White House Press Secretary, should understand their words matter.  Thus far, they have shown no comprehension of that."

Then Trump's cronies joined in the fray.  CNN was just "getting what it deserved" for "spewing hate speech 24/7."  "Democrats are worse," one man on Twitter commented, then quoted Cory Booker's comment, "Get in their face," Maxine Waters's "No peace, no sleep," and Hillary Clinton's "We can't be civil until Democrats win."

Because this, apparently, justifies receiving a pipe bomb in the mail.

While other networks were covering the incidents, Fox News was discussing how outrageous it was that Mitch McConnell got heckled in a restaurant.  In fact, Meghan McCain equated getting heckled in a restaurant with receiving a pipe bomb in the mail, in a conversation with Joy Behar on The View.

"Every time [Trump] says things like the press is the enemy of the people, his entire party needs to stand up against him and say something," Behar said.  "Mitch McConnell, where is he?  He’s the leader of this party."

"He’s getting harassed and heckled when he goes out in public to have dinner with his wife," McCain responded.  "So are we."

It didn't take long for a bunch of right-wing talking heads to say not only that liberals were responsible for the pipe bombs because they encourage violence, but that the liberals sent the pipe bombs themselves to make the Republicans look bad.  Chris Swecker, former analyst for the FBI, said in an interview on Fox, "It could be someone who is trying to get the Democratic vote out and incur sympathy."  Pro-Trump media personalities John Cardillo, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and Bill Mitchell were quick to agree.

But no one is capable of throwing gasoline on a fire like Rush Limbaugh.  "Republicans just don't do this kind of thing," Limbaugh said.  "You’ve got people trying to harm CNN and Obama and Hillary and Bill Clinton and Debbie 'Blabbermouth' Schultz and, you know, just, it might serve a purpose here."

Okay, you get the picture.

Words matter.  This has progressed far past the usual fractious partisan rhetoric and posturing that has gone on as long as there have been elected offices.  This is a leader -- the President of the United States -- who has over and over used inflammatory rhetoric to stir up his supporters, leading the cry of "lock her up" against Hillary Clinton (who has never been tried for, much less found guilty of, anything).  Ted Cruz, who evidently thought it was a good idea to take a page from Trump's playbook, said that Clinton and Cruz's opponent Beto O'Rourke could "share a double-occupancy cell."

Apparently now it's a crime to be a Democrat.

It's taken a lot to get me involved in politics.  I've said before that I hate politics because half of it is arguing over things that should be self-evident and the other half arguing over things that probably have no feasible solution.  I'm the child of two staunch Republicans, with whom I sometimes disagreed but always respected.  Personally, I've always been kind of a centrist; one of my besetting sins is that I see most things in shades of gray.

But if you still support Donald Trump, you are aiding and abetting someone who not only lies compulsively, not only is a homophobic, misogynistic narcissist, but is appealing to the worst traits in the American personality -- the tribalism, the xenophobia, the racism.  Not only appealing to them, encouraging them, inflaming the fear and the hatred and the polarization.  I usually try to find common ground with people I disagree with, but I'm beginning to think there is no common ground here.

If you voted for Trump, I get it.  He's very good at telling people what they want to hear, convincing them he's got all the answers.  If you still support him, I have nothing more to say to you other than that I will fight what Trump and his cadre stand for with every breath I take.  I'm done with being bipartisan, with trying to be polite to folks who want people like me erased from the earth.

At some point, you have to stop being nice and say "enough."  If there's still dialogue to be had, if they're still convincible, it's still worth talking.  But if not?  The only thing left is to push back with everything you've got.  I'll end with a quote from William Lloyd Garrison: "With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men, I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.




Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Wired for sound

Staying with the general linguistics angle my posts this week have been taking, today we will consider some new research that has identified the neural circuitry that underpins human language -- and comes to a startling conclusion regarding evolution and our mammalian cousins.

True language is thought to be one of the unique features of Homo sapiens.  No other species, as far as we know, has evolved symbolic communication.  Chimpanzees and gorillas can be taught the rudiments of it, and even have come up with novel expressions that have the same creativity and whimsy as human utterances -- such as Koko the gorilla naming her kitten "All Ball."  Whale and dolphin vocalizations might be symbolic language -- but most ethologists think it's simple vocal signaling, like a dog's bark or a cat's meow.

That's why we tend to think of language as a clear deciding line between "human" and "non-human."  The problem with those lines is that they don't reflect the reality of evolution -- that structures and behaviors can't come out of nowhere, and always result from modification of pre-existing genes (and the traits they generated).  So it should have been no real surprise when the FOX-P2 (forkhead box protein 2) gene was discovered in 1990, and it was found that a defect in this gene in humans causes developmental verbal dyspraxia -- a loss of motor coordination and inability to produce speech.

FOX-P2, the protein that allows us to speak [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons, Emw, Protein FOXP2 PDB 2a07, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So is this the "human language gene?"  That's the way it was described, but this runs up against a truth that is uncomfortable for proponents of human uniqueness -- other animals have a FOX-P2 gene, one that isn't identical to humans, but critical nonetheless.  Knocking out the FOX-P2 gene in mice causes fatal developmental disorders.  But the real kicker was that species that have complex vocalizations -- such as songbird and bats -- have a much greater diversity and much greater activity of FOX-P2 genes.

Maybe human language isn't as unique as it seemed at first.

This conclusion got another piece of support last week, with the publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called, "Child First Language and Adult Second Language are Both Tied to General-Purpose Learning Systems," by Phillip Hamrick (of Kent State University), Jarrad A. G. Lum (of Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia), and Michael T. Ullman (of Georgetown University).  And what their research suggests is that the parts of our brain that allow us to use language are not novel, and (very much) not unique to humans -- they are found in many other species and serve a variety of purposes.  The authors write:
Do the mechanisms underlying language in fact serve general-purpose functions that preexist this uniquely human capacity?... The results, which met the predicted pattern, provide comprehensive evidence that language is tied to general-purpose systems both in children acquiring their native language and adults learning an additional language. Crucially, if language learning relies on these systems, then our extensive knowledge of the systems from animal and human studies may also apply to this domain, leading to predictions that might be unwarranted in the more circumscribed study of language.  Thus, by demonstrating a role for these systems in language, the findings simultaneously lay a foundation for potentially important advances in the study of this critical domain...  The results have broad implications. They elucidate both the ontogeny (development) and phylogeny (evolution) of language.  Moreover, they suggest that our substantial knowledge of the general-purpose mechanisms, from both animal and human studies, may also apply to language.

"Our conclusion that language is learned in such ancient general-purpose brain systems contrasts with the long-standing theory that language depends on innately-specified language modules found only in humans," said Michael Ullman, senior author of the study.  "Researchers still know very little about the genetic and biological bases of language learning, and the new findings may lead to advances in these areas.  We know much more about the genetics and biology of the brain systems than about these same aspects of language learning...  Since our results suggest that language learning depends on the brain systems, the genetics, biology, and learning mechanisms of these systems may very well also hold for language."

"These brain systems are also found in animals — for example, rats use them when they learn to navigate a maze," added study co-author Dr. Phillip Hamrick.  "Whatever changes these systems might have undergone to support language, the fact that they play an important role in this critical human ability is quite remarkable."

So yet another blow to our sense of uniqueness, that we are somehow different from the rest of the natural world.  The same forces that generated the wombat and the cactus and the slime mold generated us, and we are deeply tied to our nearest relatives not only on the genetic level, but on the level of brain structure.  The idea that evolution could take the same basic neural circuitry and adapt it in one animal species into the ability to navigate a maze, and in a different one into allowing Shakespeare to write Macbeth, is nothing short of astonishing.

It seems fitting to end with the famous quote from Charles Darwin, the last paragraph of The Origin of Species.  "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.




Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Onomatopoeia FTW

Given my ongoing fascination with languages, it's a little surprising that I didn't come across a paper published two years ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier.  Entitled, "Sound–Meaning Association Biases Evidenced Across Thousands of Languages," this study proposes something that is deeply astonishing: that the connection between the sounds in a word and the meaning of the word may not be arbitrary.

It's a fundamental tenet of linguistics -- that language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication."  Arbitrary because there is no special connection between the sound of a word and its meaning, with the exception of the handful of words that are onomatopoeic (such as boom, buzz, splash, and splat).  Otherwise, the phonemes that make up the word for a concept would be expected to having nothing to do with the concept itself, and therefore would vary randomly from language to language (the word bird is no more fundamentally birdy than the French word oiseau is fundamentally oiseauesque).

That idea may have to be revised.  Damián E. Blasi (of the University of Zurich), Søren Wichmann (of the University of Leiden), Harald Hammarström and Peter F. Stadler (of the Max Planck Institute), and Morten H. Christiansen (of Cornell University) did an exhaustive statistical study, using dozens of basic vocabulary words representing 62% of the world's six thousand languages and 85% of its linguistic lineages and language families.  And what they found was that there are some striking patterns when you look at the phonemes represented in a variety of linguistic morphemes, patterns that held true even with completely unrelated languages.  Here are a few of the correspondences they found:
  • The word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘ooze.’
  • The word for ‘tongue’ is likely to have ‘l’ or ‘u.’
  • ‘Leaf’ is likely to include the sounds ‘b,’ ‘p’ or ‘l.’
  • ‘Sand’ will probably use the sound ‘s.’
  • The words for ‘red’ and ‘round’ often appear with ‘r.’ 
  • The word for ‘small’ often contains the sound ‘i.’
  • The word for ‘I’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, p, b, t, s, r and l.
  • ‘You’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l.
"These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage," said Morten Christiansen, who led the study.  "There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns.  We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s there."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

One possibility is that these correspondences are actually not arbitrary at all, but are leftovers from (extremely) ancient history -- fossils of the earliest spoken language, which all of today's languages, however distantly related, descend from.  The authors write:
From a historical perspective, it has been suggested that sound–meaning associations might be evolutionarily preserved features of spoken language, potentially hindering regular sound change.  Furthermore, it has been claimed that widespread sound–meaning associations might be vestiges of one or more large-scale prehistoric protolanguages.  Tellingly, some of the signals found here feature prominently in reconstructed “global etymologies” that have been used for deep phylogeny inference.  If signals are inherited from an ancestral language spoken in remote prehistory, we might expect them to be distributed similarly to inherited, cognate words; that is, their distribution should to a large extent be congruent with the nodes defining their linguistic phylogeny.
But this point remains to be tested.  And there's an argument against it; if these similarities come from common ancestry, you'd expect not only the sounds, but their positions in words, to have been conserved (such as in the English/German cognate pair laugh and lachen).  In fact, that is not the case.  The sounds are similar, but their positions in the word show no discernible pattern.  The authors write:
We have demonstrated that a substantial proportion of words in the basic vocabulary are biased to carry or to avoid specific sound segments, both across continents and linguistic lineages.  Given that our analyses suggest that phylogenetic persistence or areal dispersal are unlikely to explain the widespread presence of these signals, we are left with the alternative that the signals are due to factors common to our species, such as sound symbolism, iconicity, communicative pressures, or synesthesia...  [A]lthough it is possible that the presence of signals in some families are symptomatic of a particularly pervasive cognate set, this is not the usual case.  Hence, the explanation for the observed prevalence of sound–meaning associations across the world has to be found elsewhere.
Which I think is both astonishing and fascinating.  What possible reason could there be that the English word tree is composed of the three phonemes it contains?  The arbitrariness of the sound/meaning relationship seemed so obvious to me when I first learned about it that I didn't even stop to question how we know it's true.

Generally a dangerous position for a skeptic to be in.

I hope that the research on this topic is moving forward, because it certainly would be cool to find out what's actually going on here.  I'll have to keep my eyes out for any follow-ups.  But now I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, which I think we can all agree is a nice, warm, comforting-sounding word.

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.




Monday, October 22, 2018

Sit. Stay. Speak. Understand.

As regular readers of Skeptophilia know, we have two dogs.  One of them is a blue-tick/redbone coonhound mix named Lena, who is sweet, friendly, laid back, and has the IQ of a peach pit.  Where some dogs's brains are finely-constructed computers, instantaneously aware of their surroundings and ready to respond to whatever circumstance they're faced with, Lena has an Etch-a-Sketch.  If you turn her upside down and shake gently, she forgets everything she ever learned.


She makes up for this lack of brainpower for being eternally cheerful, although sometimes you have to wonder if she's happy mostly because she has no idea what's going on.

Then there's Guinness.  Guinness is an American Staffordshire Terrier mix whose entire raison d'être is playing fetch.  We're not entirely sure how smart he is, because he might be the most stubborn dog I've ever met.  I think sometimes he pretends he doesn't understand because if he let on, then he'd have to admit that he's not following our commands purely because he doesn't want to.


But he's incredibly sweet and snuggly, at least when he's not bouncing off the ceiling.

This comes up because of some research out of Emory University that was published last week in Frontiers in Neuroscience that put dogs in a fMRI machine to try to learn how good their linguistic skills are -- if they're simply associating sounds with an object or set of actions, learned through classical conditioning, or if they're actually forming representational connections in their brains when they learn words (in other words, when Guinness hears "ball," does he picture the red rubber ball we always play fetch with?).

The paper, called, "Awake fMRI Reveals Brain Regions for Novel Word Detection in Dogs," authored by Ashley Prichard, Peter F. Cook, Mark Spivak3, Raveena Chhibber, and Gregory S. Berns, found that dogs' processing of spoken words is remarkably like that of humans -- except for the fact that dogs show greater neural activation for words they don't know than ones they are familiar with.  The authors write:
How do dogs understand human words?  At a basic level, understanding would require the discrimination of words from non-words.  To determine the mechanisms of such a discrimination, we trained 12 dogs to retrieve two objects based on object names, then probed the neural basis for these auditory discriminations using awake-fMRI.  We compared the neural response to these trained words relative to “oddball” pseudowords the dogs had not heard before.  Consistent with novelty detection, we found greater activation for pseudowords relative to trained words bilaterally in the parietotemporal cortex.  To probe the neural basis for representations of trained words, searchlight multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) revealed that a subset of dogs had clusters of informative voxels that discriminated between the two trained words.  These clusters included the left temporal cortex and amygdala, left caudate nucleus, and thalamus.  These results demonstrate that dogs’ processing of human words utilizes basic processes like novelty detection, and for some dogs, may also include auditory and hedonic representations.
[Nota bene:  If you're like me and didn't know the word "hedonic," it means "having to do with a relationship to sensations, either pleasant or unpleasant.]

The authors speculate that the reason for the greater activation in dogs when confronted with novel words is because dogs are so tuned in to their owners -- the desire to please is incredibly powerful in the dog-human relationship.  So that suggests that when dogs hear unfamiliar words, they really want to understand.

This explains the Canine Head Tilt of Puzzlement that Guinness gives us whenever we talk to him.  You really get the impression he's trying his hardest to figure out what we're saying to him.  And when he succeeds in understanding -- such as when one of us says, "Do you want your dinner?" or "Let's go outside and play ball," he's absolutely thrilled.  He reacts much like I did when I was taking Classical Mechanics in college, a class that was so far over my head that most of the concepts passed me by without so much as ruffling my hair.  When I did understand something, it was so exciting that if I'd had a tail, I'd have been wagging the hell out of it.

"We know that dogs have the capacity to process at least some aspects of human language since they can learn to follow verbal commands," said senior author Gregory Berns.  "Previous research, however, suggests dogs may rely on many other cues to follow a verbal command, such as gaze, gestures and even emotional expressions from their owners...  Dogs may have varying capacity and motivation for learning and understanding human words, but they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they have been taught, beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response."

Which is pretty cool.  I've always been convinced that my dogs understand every word I'm saying to them, even though you can say any damn thing you want to Lena and she'll still look at you as if you are the smartest person she's ever met.  But it's amazing to think they actually have some rudimentary linguistic skill beyond just simple conditioning.

And, of course, the communication goes the other way, too.  Guinness just came and dropped his ball into my lap.  I tried to tell him that it's snowing out and there's a 25-mile-per-hour wind, but he just gave me the infamous Head Tilt, which is so cute that it gets me to do his bidding every single time.  Making me wonder sometimes who's trained whom.

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.