Grace under pressure

In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was an eighteen-year-old French figure skater named Laëtitia Hubert.  She was a wonderful skater, even by the stratospheric standards of the Olympics; she'd earned a silver medal at the French National Championships that year.  But 1992 was a year of hyperfocus, especially on the women's figure skating -- when there were such famous (and/or infamous) names as Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi, Midori Ito, and Surya Bonaly competing.

What I remember best, though, is what happened to Laëtitia Hubert.  She went into the Short Program as a virtual unknown to just about everyone watching -- and skated a near-perfect program, rocketing her up to fifth place overall.  From her reaction afterward it seemed like she was more shocked at her fantastic performance than anyone.  It was one of those situations we've all had, where the stars align and everything goes way more brilliantly than expected -- only this was with the world watching, at one of the most publicized events of an already emotionally-fraught Winter Olympics.

This, of course, catapulted Hubert into competition with the Big Names.  She went into the Long Program up against skaters of world-wide fame.  And there, unlike the pure joy she showed during the Short Program, you could see the anxiety in her face even before she stated.

She completely fell apart.  She had four disastrous falls, and various other stumbles and missteps.  It is the one and only time I've ever seen the camera cut away from an athlete mid-performance -- as if even the media couldn't bear to watch.  She dropped to, and ended at, fifteenth place overall.

It was simply awful to watch.  I've always hated seeing people fail at something; witnessing embarrassing situations is almost physically painful to me.  I don't really follow the Olympics (or sports in general), but over thirty years later, I still remember that night.  (To be fair to Hubert -- and to end the story on a happy note -- she went on to have a successful career as a competitive skater, earning medals at several national and international events, and in fact in 1997 achieved a gold medal at the Trophée Lalique competition, bumping Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski into second place.)

I always think of Laëtitia Hubert whenever I think of the phenomenon of "choking under pressure."  It's a response that has been studied extensively by psychologists.  In fact, way back in 1908 a pair of psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, noted the peculiar relationship between pressure and performance in what is now called the Yerkes-Dodson curve; performance improves with increasing pressure (what Yerkes and Dodson called "mental and physiological arousal"), but only up to a point.  Too much pressure, and performance tanks.  There have been a number of reasons suggested for this effect, one of which is that it's related to the level of a group of chemicals in the blood called glucocorticoids.  The level of glucocorticoids in a person's blood has been shown to be positively correlated with long-term memory formation -- but just as with Yerkes-Dodson, only up to a point.  When the levels get too high, memory formation and retention crumbles.  And glucocorticoid production has been found to rise in situations that have four characteristics -- those that are novel, unpredictable, contain social or emotional risks, and/or are largely outside of our capacity to control outcomes.

Which sounds like a pretty good description of the Olympics to me.

What's still mysterious about the Yerkes-Dodson curve, and the phenomenon of choking under pressure in general, is how it evolved.  How can a sudden drop in performance when the stress increases be selected for?  Seems like the more stressful and risky the situation, the better you should do.  You'd think the individuals who did choke when things got dangerous would be weeded out by (for example) hungry lions.

But what is curious -- and what brings the topic up today -- is that a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that humans aren't the only ones who choke under pressure.

So do monkeys.

In a clever set of experiments led by Adam Smoulder of Carnegie Mellon University, researchers found that giving monkeys a scaled set of rewards for completing tasks showed a positive correlation between reward level and performance, until they got to the point where success at a difficult task resulted in a huge payoff.  And just like with humans, at that point, the monkeys' performance fell apart.

The authors describe the experiments as follows:

Monkeys initiated trials by placing their hand so that a cursor (red circle) fell within the start target (pale blue circle).  The reach target then appeared (gray circle with orange shape) at one of two (Monkeys N and F) or eight (Monkey E) potential locations (dashed circles), where the inscribed shape’s form (Monkey N) or color (Monkeys F and E) indicated the potential reward available for a successful reach.  After a short, variable delay period, the start target vanished, cueing the animal to reach the peripheral target.  The animals had to quickly move the cursor into the reach target and hold for 400 ms before receiving the cued reward.

And when the color (or shape) cueing the level of the reward got to the highest level -- something that only occurred in five percent of the trials, so not only was the jackpot valuable, it was rare -- the monkeys' ability to succeed dropped through the floor.  What is most curious about this is that the effect didn't go away with practice; even the monkeys who had spent a lot of time mastering the skill still did poorly when the stakes were highest.

So the choking-under-pressure phenomenon isn't limited to humans, indicating it has a long evolutionary history.  This also suggests that it's not due to overthinking, something that I've heard as an explanation -- that our tendency to intellectualize gets in the way.  That always seemed to make some sense to me, given my experience with musical performance and stage fright.  My capacity for screwing up on stage always seemed to be (1) unrelated to how much I'd practiced a piece of music once I'd passed a certain level of familiarity with it, and (2) directly connected to my own awareness of how nervous I was.  I did eventually get over the worst of my stage fright, mostly from just doing it again and again without spontaneously bursting into flame.  But I definitely still have moments when I think, "Oh, no, we're gonna play 'Reel St. Antoine' next and it's really hard and I'm gonna fuck it up AAAAUUUGGGH," and sure enough, that's when I would fuck it up.  Those moments when I somehow prevented my brain from going into overthink-mode, and just enjoyed the music, were far more likely to go well, regardless of the difficulty of the piece.

 

One of my more nerve-wracking performances -- a duet with the amazing fiddler Deb Rifkin on a dizzyingly fast medley of Balkan dance tunes, in front of an audience of other musicians, including some big names (like the incomparable Bruce Molsky).  I have to add that (1) I didn't choke, and (2) Bruce, who may be famous but is also an awfully nice guy, came up afterward and told us how great we sounded.  I still haven't quite recovered from the high of that moment.

As an aside, a suggestion by a friend -- to take a shot of scotch before performing -- did not work.  Alcohol doesn't make me less nervous, it just makes me sloppier.  I have heard about professional musicians taking beta blockers before performing, but that's always seemed to me to be a little dicey, given that the mechanism by which beta blockers decrease anxiety is unknown, as is their long-term effects.  Also, I've heard more than one musician describe the playing of a performer on beta blockers as "soulless," as if the reduction in stress also takes away some of the intensity of emotional content we try to express in our playing.

Be that as it may, it's hard to imagine that a monkey's choking under pressure is due to the same kind of overthinking we tend to do.  They're smart animals, no question about it, but I've never thought of them as having the capacity for intellectualizing a situation we have (for better or worse).  So unless I'm wrong about that, and there's more self-reflection going on inside the monkey brain than I realize, there's something else going on here.

So that's our bit of curious psychological research of the day.  Monkeys also choke under pressure.  Now, it'd be nice to find a way to manage it that doesn't involve taking a mood-altering medication.  For me, it took years of exposure therapy to manage my stage fright, and I still have bouts of it sometimes even so.  It may be an evolutionarily-derived response that has a long history, and presumably some sort of beneficial function, but it certainly can be unpleasant at times.

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Mystic mountain

The brilliant composer Alan Hovhaness's haunting second symphony is called Mysterious Mountain -- named, he said, because "mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man's attempt to know God."  Having spent a lot of time in my twenties and thirties hiking in Washington State's Olympic and Cascade Ranges, I can attest to the fact that there's something otherworldly about the high peaks.  Subject to rapid and extreme weather changes, deep snowfall in the winter, and -- in some places -- having terrain so steep that no human has ever set foot there, it's no real wonder our ancestors revered mountains as the abode of the gods.

Hovhaness's symphony -- which I'm listening to as I write this -- captures that beautifully.  And consider how many stories of the fantastical are set in the mountains.  From Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth to Tolkien's Misty Mountains and Mines of Moria, the wild highlands (and what's beneath them) have a permanent place in our imagination.

Certain mountains have accrued, usually by virtue of their size, scale, or placement, more than the usual amount of awe.  Everest (of course), Denali, Mount Olympus, Vesuvius, Etna, Fujiyama, Mount Rainier, Kilimanjaro, Mount Shasta.  The last-mentioned has so many legends attached to it that the subject has its own Wikipedia page.  But none of the tales centering on Shasta has raised as many eyebrows amongst the modern aficionados of the paranormal as the strange story of J. C. Brown.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michael Zanger, Sunrise on Mount Shasta, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Brown was a British prospector, who in the early part of the twentieth century had been hired by the Lord Cowdray Mining Company of England to look for gold and other precious metals in northern California, which at the time was thousands of square miles of trackless and forested wilderness.  In 1904, Brown said, he was hiking on Mount Shasta, and discovered a cave.  Caves in the Cascades -- many of them lava tubes -- are not uncommon; two of my novels, Signal to Noise and Kill Switch (the latter is out of print, but hopefully will be back soon), feature unsuspecting people making discoveries in caves in the Cascades, near the Three Sisters and Mount Stuart, respectively.

Brown's cave, though, was different -- or so he said.  It was eleven miles long, and led into three chambers containing a king's ransom of gold, as well as 27 skeletons that looked human but were as much as three and a half meters tall.

Brown tried to drum up some interest in his story, but most people scoffed.  He apparently frequented bars in Sacramento and "told anyone who would listen."  But then a different crowd got involved, and suddenly he found his tale falling on receptive ears.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia might recall a post I did last year about Lemuria, which is kind of the Indian Ocean's answer to Atlantis.  Well, the occultists just loved Lemuria, especially the Skeptophilia frequent flyer Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy.  So in the 1920s, there was a sudden interest in vanished continents, as well as speculation about where all the inhabitants had gone when their homes sank beneath the waves.  ("They all drowned" was apparently not an acceptable answer.)

And one group said the Lemurians, who were quasi-angelic beings of huge stature and great intelligence, had vanished into underground lairs beneath the mountains.

In 1931, noted wingnut and prominent Rosicrucian -- but I repeat myself -- Harvey Spencer Lewis, using the pseudonym Wishar S[penley] Cerve (get it?  It's an anagram, sneaky sneaky), published a book called Lemuria, The Lost Continent of the Pacific (yes, I know Lemuria was supposed to be in the Indian Ocean; we haven't cared about facts so far, so why start now?) in which he claimed that the main home of the displaced Lemurians was a cave complex underneath Mount Shasta.  J. C. Brown read about this and said, more or less, "See?  I toldja so!"

And, astonishingly, people didn't think to ask (1) why no one had seen any Lemurians until now, and (2) why, if there was a cave with jewels and gold underneath the mountain, Brown hadn't gone back to get some of the goodies himself in the intervening almost-three decades.  Instead, they were like, "Hell yeah!  Sign me up!", and before you knew it Brown had eighty people volunteering to help him go back to his cave, which he said he could relocate with no difficulty.

There was a six-week planning period during which the volunteers got outfitted and prepared.  An interesting point here -- the relevance of which will become clear in a moment -- is that no one gave Brown any money; he'd made it clear he couldn't afford to equip anyone, so people were responsible for their own gear, lodging, food, and so on.  He was apparently enthusiastic that finally, finally, someone was listening to him, and he'd have a chance to go back to Shasta and prove all the scoffers wrong.

Then the day of the expedition arrived -- and Brown failed to show.

He was never seen or heard from again.

The June 19, 1934 front page of the Stockton Evening and Sunday Record [Image is in the Public Domain]

People seemed more concerned than miffed at Brown's disappearance.  Since, as I mentioned, Brown himself hadn't profited from the lead-up to the planned trek, there were no accusations that he'd swindled anyone.  A police report was filed, a search initiated -- but no trace of Brown was ever found.  It was as if he'd suddenly evaporated.

The superstitious speculated that the Lemurians (or their human agents) had done away with Brown because he was the only one who knew where the entrance to the cave was, and had to be stopped before he gave away the game.  The more pragmatic said that Brown had successfully painted himself into a corner with his tall tales, and couldn't face leading eighty people into the wilderness only to find bupkis.  The truth is, we don't know what happened to him, although being someone who generally casts a suspicious side-eye at claims of the supernatural, I'm a lot more likely to give credence to the latter than the former.  

I have to say, though, that it's pretty odd that the guy had hung around the area for thirty years saying, "You've got to come see this crazy cave I found!  It's amazing!  I'll show it to you!" and then when people finally said, "Okay," he noped his way right into the ether.

And weird stories about Mount Shasta and the Lemurians continue, lo unto this very day; it's no surprise that the main "power center" of the August 17, 1987 Harmonic Convergence, during which the planets were supposed to align and cause a "resonance" which would cause "a great shift in the earth’s energy from warlike to peaceful," was on Mount Shasta.

It's even less surprising that ever since August 18, 1987, people have gone on killing each other just like before.

So that's our strange tale for the day.  Now that Hovhaness's Mysterious Mountain is finishing up, I might cue up Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, and Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lake in the Mountains.  May as well keep the theme going for a while.

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The edges of knowledge

The brilliant British astrophysicist Becky Smethurst said, "The cutting edge of science is where all the unknowns are."  And far from being a bad thing, this is exciting.  When a scientist lands on something truly perplexing, that opens up fresh avenues for inquiry -- and, potentially, the discovery of something entirely new.

That's the situation we're in with our understanding of the evolution of the early universe.

You probably know that when you look out into space, you're looking back into time.  Light is the fastest information carrier we know of, and it travels at... well, the speed of light, just shy of three hundred thousand kilometers per second.  The farther away something is, the greater the distance the light had to cross to get to your eyes, so what you're seeing is an image of it when the light left its surface.  The Sun is a little over eight light minutes away; so if the Sun were to vanish -- not a likely eventuality, fortunately -- we would have no way to know it for eight minutes.  The nearest star other than the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away; the ever-intriguing star Betelgeuse, which I am so hoping goes supernova in my lifetime, is 642 light years away, so it might have blown up five hundred years ago and we'd still have another 142 years to wait for the information to get here.

This is true even of close objects, of course.  You never see anything as it is; you always see it as it was.  Because right now my sleeping puppy is a little closer to me than the rocking chair, I'm seeing the chair a little further in the past than I'm seeing him.  But the fact remains, neither of those images are of the instantaneous present; they're ghostly traces, launched at me by light reflecting off their surfaces a minuscule fraction of a second ago.

Now that we have a new and extremely powerful tool for collecting light -- the James Webb Space Telescope -- we have a way of looking at even fainter, more distant stars and galaxies.  And as Becky Smethurst put it, "In the past four years, JWST has been taking everything that we thought we knew about the early universe, and how galaxies evolve, and chucking it straight out of the window."

In a wonderful video that you all should watch, she identifies three discoveries JWST has made about the most distant reaches of the universe that still have yet to be explained: the fact that there are many more large, bright galaxies than our current model would predict are possible; that there is a much larger amount of heavy elements than expected; and the weird features called "little red dots" -- compact assemblages of cooler red stars that exhibit a strange spectrum of light and evidence of ionized hydrogen, something you generally only see in the vicinity hot, massive stars.

Well, she might have to add another one to the list.  Using data from LOFAR (the Low Frequency Array), a radio telescope array in Europe, astrophysicists have found bubbles of electromagnetic radiation surrounding some of the most distant galaxies, on the order of ten billion light years away.  This means we're seeing these galaxies (and their bubbles) when the universe was only one-quarter of its current age.  These radio emissions seem to be coming from a halo of highly-charged particles between, and surrounding, galaxy clusters, some of the largest structures ever studied.

[Image credit: Chandra X-ray Center (X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Radio: ASTRON/LOFAR; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk)

"It's as if we've discovered a vast cosmic ocean, where entire galaxy clusters are constantly immersed in high-energy particles," said astrophysicist Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of the Université de Montréal, who led the study.  "Galaxies appear to have been infused with these particles, and the electromagnetic radiation they emit, for billions of years longer than we realized...  We are just scratching the surface of how energetic the early Universe really was.  This discovery gives us a new window into how galaxy clusters grow and evolve, driven by both black holes and high-energy particle physics."

Every once in a while I'd have a student tell me, in some disdain, "I don't know why we have to learn science when it could all be proven wrong tomorrow."  My response to that is that science's ability to self-correct is a strength, not a weakness.  How is desperately hanging on to your prior understanding when you're presented with new evidence a good thing?   People like to be sure of everything, but really, are we ever?  Nothing is ever absolutely settled; we sometimes kid ourselves that we've found The Answer, but that's honestly a response born of a combination of insecurity and the desire not to think about the matter any more.

Richard Feynman, in his wonderful book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, summarized this brilliantly:

There is no learning without having to pose a question.  And a question requires doubt.  People search for certainty.  But there is no certainty.  People are terrified — how can you live and not know?  It is not odd at all.  You only think you know, as a matter of fact.  And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things.  It is possible to live and not know.

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