The return of Lieutenant Kijé

Ever heard the story of Lieutenant Kijé?

He's the subject of a 1927 comic film made in the Soviet Union.  Set in the time of Tsar Paul I, it's the tale of a visit by the Tsar to a military outpost.  One night, the Tsar is awakened by a noise -- it's the sound of one of the officers getting a little too frisky with a young woman in an adjoining room -- and when the regiment commander is confronted about the outrage the next morning, he blames it on a (nonexistent) "Lieutenant Kijé."  ("Kijé" is a slang word meaning approximately the same thing as "whatchamacallit.")  The indignant Tsar demands to meet with this errant officer -- so the panicked commander says he can't, the matter is already settled, Kijé is in the brig and will be shipped off to Siberia.

Soon after, however, the real culprit's identity comes out, and the Tsar demands that the commander not only release and apologize to the wronged Lieutenant Kijé, but promote him to the rank of colonel.  Repeated requests by the Tsar to meet Kijé result in more and more elaborate stories made up about him explaining why this can't happen -- first that Kijé was on leave because he was getting married to the lovely Princess Gagarina, then because he's away at battle (which, of course, results in a brilliant triumph).  Finally, though, the whole house of cards can't be sustained any longer.  The Tsar demands to meet this valiant pinnacle of an officer so he can personally promote him to general.

The commander and the others who are in on the lie have no choice.  They invent one final story -- that the brave Colonel Kijé has tragically died a heroic death in battle.  Sad as it is to have to tell His Majesty the Tsar, there will never be an opportunity to meet this exemplary soldier in person.

The story only became known outside of Russia because of the absolutely delightful score for the film written by the brilliant Sergei Prokofiev -- the Lieutenant Kijé Suite is still a staple of the classical orchestral repertoire today.

I started thinking about the story Lieutenant Kijé this morning because of our own Tsar, Donald Trump.

If you watched the State of the Union address -- or, if (like me) you read excerpts because you can only listen to Trump's voice for about fifteen seconds without wanting to remove your ears, with a cheese grater if it's the only thing handy -- you probably know that he babbled on (and on and on) about government waste, citing eight million dollars that had been spent to "create transgender mice."  I probably don't need to tell you that this was an idiotic error.  The mice weren't transgender, they were transgenic.  Transgenic organisms are ones that have been genetically modified, in this case to engineer their immune systems to respond more like a human's would.  Transgenic organisms are a staple of medical research, especially into cancer, asthma, and autoimmune diseases.

Transgender mice, on the other hand, do not exist.

Naturally, anyone with an IQ higher than their hat size laughed directly into Trump's face for making such a moronic pronouncement (and in the State of the Union address, no less, in front of literally millions of watchers).  So what do you think his advisors did in response?  Issue some kind of "the President misspoke, and we'd like to correct it" statement?

Ha.  Of course not.  They started frantically going through every scrap of research involving mice they could find to see if they could come up with one that had anything to do with gender.  There's no way they could tell Tsar Donald he'd fucked up.

All they found was an obscure 2019 study that had to do with the role of stress in sexual development in mice, and said, basically, "Here it is!  This is what he was talking about!"  Never mind that (1) it was definitely not what he was talking about, (2) the 2019 study itself was published during Trump's first term, so hardly can be used as an example of wasteful spending today, (3) it still has nothing to do with mice (or anyone else) being transgender, and (4) Trump is so catastrophically stupid there's no way he's even capable of reading and understanding a scientific abstract, much less an academic paper in its entirety.

Then, when people pointed out the above, they doubled down again.  (Tripled down?)  They put out an official statement that yes, Biden did so waste money on transgender mice.  You ready for the studies they cited?

• a study to find out if hormone therapy affects the immune response in patients with HIV
• a study looking at how steroid hormone administration affects fertility
• a study of the effects of testosterone on breast cancer susceptibility
• a study of how hormone administration affects the microbiome
• a study of how reproductive hormones affect neurological development in embryos
• a study of how reproductive hormones affect asthma

All of that justifiable medical research.  None of it having anything to do with "making mice transgender."  The only connection with being transgender is that some of the hormones under study are the ones used in gender transition in humans.

So it's another reprehensible attack using the current furor over LGBTQ+ people to whip up the base, and has only a glancing connection to the truth.  But Trump's cronies had to keep defending it, because how else were they to keep up the appearance that the Tsar knows what he's talking about, and appease the "Trump Was Right About Everything!" crowd?

It's the same colossally ignorant approach that "DOGE" has used -- purging projects involving keywords (or syllables) like "diversity" and "trans" and accidentally trashing projects studying things like biodiversity and transnational terrorism.  There have now been at least three instances of mass firings that have led to the people in charge going "Oopsie" and trying to rehire the fired workers with only partial success -- at the FAA, the nuclear weapons oversight team at the Department of Energy, and the Center for Disease Control.

The bottom line is that the people now running the government aren't just greedy and amoral, they're fundamentally, deeply, and irrevocably stupid.  And -- like the Tsar in Lieutenant Kijé -- they have surrounded themselves by sycophantic toadies who are afraid to stand up and say, "Wait a moment.  You can't make that claim, it's false."  Or, in the case of "DOGE," that maybe hiring a bunch of hackers and then running around the place with a chainsaw is not the way to approach pulling back the reins on wasteful spending.

But I fear that the farce will continue.  When you're dealing with a man who has a bloated ego, has never been given a single meaningful consequence for wrongdoing in his entire life, has a whipcrack temper, and is in one of the most powerful elected positions in the world, we're going to see more of this kind of behavior.  All we can do is to continue to use our voices as strongly as we are able, and call out this sort of nonsense whenever we see it or hear it.

And keep in mind that even the tsars, as powerful as they were, did not last forever.

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Mental maps

Picture a place you know well.  Your house, your apartment, a park, a church, a school.  You can probably imagine it, remember what it's like to wander around in it, maybe even visualize it to a high level of detail.

Now, let's change the perspective to one you probably have never taken.  Would you be able to draw a map of the layout -- as seen from above?  An aerial view?

Here's a harder task.  In a large room, there are various obstacles, all fairly big and obvious.  Tables, chairs, sofas, the usual things you might find in a living room or den.  You're standing in one corner, and from that perspective are allowed to study it for as long as you like.

Once you were done, could you walk from that corner to the diagonally opposite one without running into anything -- while blindfolded?

Both of these tasks require the use of a part of your brain called the hippocampus.  The name of the structure comes from the Greek word ἱππόκαμπος -- literally, "seahorse" -- because of its shape.  The hippocampus has a role in memory formation, conflict avoidance... and spatial navigation.

Like the other structures in the brain, the hippocampus seems to be better developed in some people than others.  My wife, for example, has something I can only describe as an internal GPS.  To my knowledge, she has never been lost.  When we took a trip to Spain and Portugal a few years ago, we rented a car in Madrid and she studied a map -- once.  After that, she navigated us all over the Iberian Peninsula with only very infrequent checks to make sure we were taking the correct turns, which because of her navigational skills, we always were.

I, on the other hand, get lost walking around a tree.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Edward Betts, Bloomsbury - map 1, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The topic comes up because of a paper last week in Cell that showed something absolutely fascinating.  It's called "Targeted Activation of Hippocampal Place Cells Drives Memory-Guided Spatial Behavior," and was written by a team led by Nick T. M. Robinson of University College London.  But to understand what they did, you have to know about something called optogenetics.

Back in 2002, a pair of geneticists, Boris Zemelman and Gero Miesenböck, developed an amazing technique.  They genetically modified mammalian nerve tissue to express a protein called rhodopsin, which is one of the light-sensitive chemicals in the retina of your eye.  By hitching the rhodopsin to ion-sensitive gateway channels in the neural membrane, they created neurons that literally could be turned on and off using a beam of light.

Because the brain is encased in bone, animals that express this gene don't respond any time the lights are on; you have to shine light directly on the neurons that contain rhodopsin.  This involves inserting fiber optics into the brain of the animal -- but once you do that, you have a set of neurons that fire when you shine a light down the fibers.  Result: remote-control mice.

Okay, if you think that's cool, wait till you hear what Robinson et al. did.

So you create some transgenic mice that express rhodopsin in the hippocampus.  Fit them out with fiber optics.  Then let the mice learn how to run a maze for a reward, in this case sugar water in a feeder bottle.  Watch through an fMRI and note which hippocampal neurons are firing when they learn -- and especially when they recall -- the layout of the maze.

Then take the same mice, put them in a different maze.  But switch the lights on in their brain to activate the neurons you saw firing when they were recalling the map of the first maze.

The result is that the mice picture the first maze, and try to run that pattern even though they can see that they are now in a different maze.  The light activation has switched on a memory of the layout of the maze they'd learned that then overrode all the other sensory information they had access to.

It's as if you moved from Tokyo to London, and then tried to use your knowledge of the roads of Tokyo to find your way from St. Paul's Cathedral to the Victoria & Albert Museum.

This is pretty astonishing from a number of standpoints.  First, the idea that you can switch a memory on and off like that is somewhere between fascinating and freaky.  Second, that the neural firing pattern is so specific -- that pattern corresponds to that map, and no other.  And third, that the activation of the map made the mice doubt the information coming from their own eyes.  

So once again, we have evidence of how plastic our brains are, and how easy they are to fool.  What you're experiencing right now is being expressed in your brain as a series of neural firings; in a way, the neural firing pattern is the experience.  If you change the pattern artificially, you experience something different.

More disturbing still is that our sense of self is also deeply tied to our neural links (some would say that our sense of self is nothing more than neural links; to me, the jury's still out on where consciousness comes from, so I'm hesitant to go that far).  So not only what you perceive, but who you are can change if you alter the pattern of neural activation.

We're remarkable, complex, amazing, and fragile beasts, aren't we?

So that's today's contribution from the Not Science Fiction department.  I'm wondering if I might be able to get one of those fiber optics things to activate my hippocampus.  Sounds pretty extreme, but I am really tired of getting lost all the time.  There are trees everywhere around here.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that has raised a controversy in the scientific world: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madeleine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier.

It tells the story of a stupendous discovery -- twelve-million-year-old hominin fossils, of a new species christened Danuvius guggenmosi.  The astonishing thing about these fossils is where they were found.  Not in Africa, where previous models had confined all early hominins, but in Germany.

The discovery of Danuvius complicated our own ancestry, and raised a deep and difficult-to-answer question; when and how did we become human?  It's clear that the answer isn't as simple as we thought when the first hominin fossils were uncovered in Olduvai Gorge, and it was believed that if you took all of our millennia of migrations all over the globe and ran them backwards, they all converged on the East African Rift Valley.  That neat solution has come into serious question, and the truth seems to be that like most evolutionary lineages, hominins included multiple branches that moved around, interbred for a while, then went their separate ways, either to thrive or to die out.  The real story is considerably more complicated and fascinating than we'd thought at first, and Danuvius has added another layer to that complexity, bringing up as many questions as it answers.

Ancient Bones is a fascinating read for anyone interested in anthropology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology.  It is sure to be the basis of scientific discussion for the foreseeable future, and to spur more searches for our relatives -- including in places where we didn't think they'd gone.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]