Globe-trotting with the gods

Despite my fairly persistent railing against people who make outlandish, unverifiable claims, I find it even more perplexing when people make outlandish, demonstrably false claims.  I mean, it's one thing to claim that last night you had a dream in which your late Aunt Gertrude told you her secret recipe for making her Extra-Zesty Bean Dip.  I couldn't disprove that even if I wanted to, which I don't, because I actually kind of like bean dip.

But when someone makes a statement that is (1) falsifiable, and (2) clearly incorrect, and yet stands by it as if it made complete sense... that I find baffling.  "I'm sorry," they seem to be saying, "I know you've demonstrated that gravity pulls things toward the Earth, but I believe that in reality, it works the opposite way, so I'm going to wear velcro shoes so I don't fall upward."

And for once I am not talking about young-Earth creationism.

This all comes up because of an article that appeared on Unexplained-Mysteries.com yesterday.  Entitled "Easter Island Heads -- They Speak At Last," it was written by L. M. Leteane.  If that name sounds familiar to regular readers of this blog, it's because Leteane has appeared here before, most recently for claiming that the Central American god Quetzalcoatl and the Egyptian god Thoth were actually the same person, despite one being a feathered snake and the other being a shirtless dude with the head of an ibis, which last I checked hardly look alike at all.  Be that as it may, Leteane concludes that this is why the Earth is going to end when a comet hits it in the year 3369.

So I suppose that given his past attempts, we should not expect L. M. Leteane to exactly knock us dead in the logic department.

But even starting out with low expectations, I have to say that he has outdone himself this time.

Here's the basic outline of his most recent argument, if I can dignify it by calling it that.  Fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a bit of a bumpy ride.

1)  The Bantu people of south-central Africa came originally from Egypt, which in their language they called Khama-Roggo.  This name translates in Tswana as "Black-and-Red Land."

2)  Charles Berlitz, of The Mystery of Atlantis fame, says that Quetzalcoatl also comes from "Black-and-Red Land."  Berlitz, allow me to remind you, is the writer about whose credibility the skeptical researcher Larry Kusche said, "If Berlitz were to report that a ship was red, the chances of it being some other color is almost a certainty."

3)  The Olmecs were originally from Africa, but then they accompanied the god Thoth to Central America.  In a quote that I swear I am not making up, "That is evidently why their gigantic sculptured heads are always shown helmeted."

4)  The Babylonian goddess Ishtar was also a real person, who ruled in the Indus Valley for a while (yes, I know that India and Babylonia aren't the same place; just play along, okay?) until she got fed up and also moved to Central America.  She took some people with her called the Kassites.  This was because she was heavily interested in tin mining.

5)   Well, three gods in one place are just too many (three too many, in my opinion), and this started a war.  Hot words were spoken.  Nuclear weapons were detonated.  Devastation was wreaked.  Passive voice was used repeatedly for dramatic effect.

6)  After the dust settled, the Olmecs, who were somehow also apparently the Kassites and the Bantu, found themselves mysteriously deposited on Easter Island.  A couple of more similarities between words in various languages and Pascuanese (the language of the natives of Easter Island) are given, the best one being "Rapa Nui" (the Pascuanese name for the island) meaning "black giant" because "Rapa" is a little like the Hebrew "repha" (giant) and "Nui" sounds like the French "nuit" (night).  This proves that the island was settled by dark-skinned giant people from Africa.  Or somewhere.

7)  The Olmecs decided to name it "Easter Island" because "Easter" sounds like "Ishtar."

8)  So they built a bunch of stone heads.  q. e. d.

Well.  I think we can all agree that that's a pretty persuasive logical chain, can't we?

Okay, maybe not.  Let's start with the linguistic funny business.  Unfortunately for L. M. Leteane, linguistics is something I know a bit about; I have an M. A. in Historical Linguistics (yes, I know, I teach biology.  It's a long story) and I can say with some authority that I understand how language evolution works.  I also know you can't base language relationships on one or two words -- chance correspondences are all too common.  So just because "roggo" means "red" in Tswana (which I'm taking on faith because Leteane himself is from Botswana, and my expertise is not in African languages), and "rouge" is French for "red," doesn't mean a damn thing.  "Rouge" goes back to the Latin "ruber," then to Ancient Greek "erythros," and finally to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root "reudr."  Any resemblance to the Tswana word for "red" is coincidental.  And as for "Rapa Nui" meaning "black giant," that's ridiculous; Pascuanese is a Polynesian language, which isn't Indo-European in the first place, and has no underlying similarity to either French or Hebrew other than all of them being languages spoken by people somewhere.

And as far as "Easter Island" being named after Ishtar... well, let's just say it'll take me a while to recover from the headdesk I did when I read that.  Easter Island was so named by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, because he first spotted it on Easter Sunday in 1722.  He called it Paasch-Eyland, Dutch for "Easter Island;" its official name is Isla de Pascua, which means the same thing in Spanish.  Neither one sounds anything like "Ishtar."

And as for the rest of it... well, it sounds like the plot of a hyper-convoluted science fiction story to me.  Gods globe-trotting all over the world, bringing along slave labor, and having major wars, and conveniently leaving behind no hard evidence whatsoever.

The thing I find maddening about all of this is that Leteane mixes some facts (his information about Tswana) with speculation (he says that the name of the tin ore cassiterite comes from the Kassites, which my etymological dictionary says is "possible," but gives two other equally plausible hypotheses) with outright falsehood (that Polynesian, Bantu, and Indo-European languages share lots of common roots) with wild fantasy (all of the stuff about the gods).  And people believe it.  His story had, last I checked, been tweeted and Facebook-liked dozens of times, and amongst the comments I saw was, "Brilliant piece of research connecting all the history you don't learn about in school!  Thank you for drawing together the pieces of the puzzle!"

So, anyway.  I suppose I shouldn't get so annoyed by all of this.  Actually, on the spectrum of woo-woo beliefs, this one is pretty harmless.  No one ever blew himself up in a crowded market because he thought that the Olmecs came from Botswana.  My frustration is that there are seemingly so many people who lack the ability to think critically -- to look at the facts of an argument, and how the evidence is laid out, and to see if the conclusion is justified.  The problem, of course, is that learning the principles of scientific induction is hard work.  Much easier, apparently, to blather on about feathered serpents and goddesses who are seriously into tin.

Beyoncé of the Illuminati

Well, Superbowl XLVII is history, and the Baltimore Ravens have taken it despite a second-half rally by the 49ers that had Baltimore fans chewing their nails off.

The Superbowl attracts watchers for a variety of reasons.  Some root for particular teams, and if their favorite doesn't make it, they don't bother watching (I know one person who refuses to discuss the event if it doesn't involve the New Orleans Saints).  Others watch for the commercials, or the enjoyment of a wild, lavish spectacle, or the sheer love of football.

This year, of course, there was the added attraction of seeing how Beyoncé was going to use her magical powers and connections with the Illuminati to spread her evil message about the New World Order.

You think I'm making this up, but conspiracy theory websites have been hopping ever since the halftime show.  Take a look, for example, at this one, written by Sarah Wilson, who given the title must work for the Department of Redundancy Department: "What's the Verdict on Beyoncé's Illuminati Performance?  Illuminati-Fueled or Not?"

If you are understandably reluctant to read the original, let me sum it up as follows:

1)  Beyoncé has Illuminati connections.  Her husband Jay-Z's record company, Roc-a-Fella Records, has as its symbol a letter R with a circle and a triangle.  This obviously has nothing to do with the name of the company starting with "R," and circles and triangles being common geometrical shapes.
2)  During the performance, Beyoncé made a triangle with her hands. 
3)  The halftime show involved mirrors, which have secret symbolism.
4)  There was a red circular light used during part of the show.  Obviously the "Eye of Horus."
5)  At one point, her legs made a shape that has "black sun symbolism."

And if that's not enough to convince you doubters out there: during the second half, there was a 35-minute power outage that stopped the game dead in its tracks.  "Interestingly," writes Sarah Wilson, "following Beyoncé's performance, the Superdome suffered an outage that affected lights within the stadium, some cameras, and various pieces of audio equipment.  Power was lost for about 35 minutes before it was gradually restored to affected parts of the stadium.  The power company denied responsibility...  Social media outlets were alive with theories as to why part of the Superdome went dark, which ranged from 'doubting the power of Beyoncé' to her halftime show draining all of the power to her suspected Illuminati connections playing a role in creating darkness."

Oh, yeah, that's got to be it.  Because every time someone makes a special sign with their hands, it activates magical Illuminati Connections and causes a major power outage.  I have only one question to ask, to wit: did you learn logic from watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?  Or what?

It is a continual source of mystification for me how this kind of thinking can make sense to anyone.  That a performer might use edgy symbolism in his/her music, to deliberately up the hype, I can believe; if that's what Beyoncé was doing last night, it wouldn't be the first time.  Look at Madonna (not directly!  Use protective eyewear!).  She's worked so much arcane symbolism into her performances that she could be a walking illustration for the Malleus Maleficarum.  Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and Kanye West have also capitalized on the game of tweaking the fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists to get attention.

The thing is, does it mean anything?  Anything real?  There are those, of course, who would say yes; symbols have power, and that power can be invoked even if the people using them are doing so without awareness of what's really going on.  Predictably, I think the people who believe this are wingnuts.  Myself, I think the whole thing is just a publicity stunt, and any deliberate use of occult symbolism by pop music stars is just a callous attempt to get more attention.  As Brendan Behan once famously said, "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

So I doubt very much whether there was any connection between Beyoncé's use of the "Eye of Horus" -- deliberate or not -- and the power outage that followed.  If circular red lights caused power outages, then stoplights would be kind of problematic, you know?

In any case, if you watched the game, I hope you enjoyed it, and my condolences to any 49ers fans who are still weeping into their empty trays of chicken wings.  There's always next year.  That is, if Beyoncé doesn't wiggle her fingers at her next performance and somehow cause the collapse of major world governments.  You know how that goes.

Sea changes

As a science teacher, I am frequently asked about the evidence for climate change.  It's a more difficult question than it seems at first.  Teasing apart anomalous weather events from overall trends in the climate, determining if any changes we see are natural fluctuations or human-induced, and (if the latter) determining what could be done to ameliorate the situation -- none are trivial matters.  Add in the political spin, bias, and wishful thinking, and what you have is a recipe for fuzzy thinking and specious conclusions.

Nevertheless, the vast bulk of the data supports the contention that anthropogenic climate change is, in fact, occurring.  The best analysis of this position is from science writer James Lawrence Powell, who was an appointee to the National Science Board by both President Reagan and the first President Bush, and is available here.  Powell's angle was that if climate change denial is actually a scientifically supportable position, then it should be reflected in the peer-reviewed papers on the subject -- there should be approximately equal numbers of papers that show that the Earth is warming as ones that show that it is not.  In fact, here's what he found:

Which, as astronomer Phil Plait (of the wonderful blog Bad Astronomy) said, is a "slam dunk."

That hasn't stopped the controversy.  Peer review, deniers say, is skewed toward buying the party line.  The data is flawed, or outright fabricated.  Scientists have an agenda that they, in their surreptitious and evil manner, are foisting upon the unwitting public, as if somehow scientists want an environmental catastrophe to occur.  (I wonder if the ease with which some people accept this hearkens back to the "mad scientist" trope from 1950s-era horror movies.)

Of course, as the data keeps pouring in, deniers have to work harder to explain it away, and the explanations become more and more convoluted.  The best one I've seen yet I ran across just yesterday, in the accurately (and ironically) named website Aircrap.  Aircrap derives its moniker from its focus on the government's role in deliberate manipulation of the Earth's systems -- they just love chemtrails, HAARP, and DARPA, and blame everything from Hurricane Katrina to the Japanese tsunami on the American government.

Well, now that the evidence for climate change is becoming incontrovertible, they can't just accept that it's anything as routine as anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane to blame.  So they took one piece of the climate change puzzle -- sea level rise -- and came up with a novel way to explain it.  (And by "novel" I mean "so crazy that even Rush Limbaugh wouldn't believe it.")

In an article you can read here, they inform us that the sea level isn't rising; the land is sinking.

Yes, you read that right.  The oceans aren't getting any higher; that would be ridiculous.  What's really happening is that humans are extracting ground water, causing the ground to subside in the fashion of a sponge drying up.  The solution:  get the government to stop spraying cloud-seeding agents into the air, so that more rain falls, so that the water being pumped out of the ground gets replaced.

I find it interesting that the chemtrails crowd is anti-climate-change.  You'd think they'd love this idea, as it gives fertile ground for conspiracy theories involving the US government and Big Oil covering up evidence.  But in a scan through chemtrails websites, at the cost of millions of innocent cells in my prefrontal cortex who died in agony, I didn't find a single one that accepted climate change.  The whole thing is a conspiracy of a different sort -- a conspiracy by the evil scientists who want to deflect your attention from what the government is actually up to.  In their skewed worldview, the scientists are complicit in the coverup and are fabricating data on Antarctic ice melt in order to keep you from finding out that the government is putting secret weather-altering chemicals into jet fuel.

Now, don't get me wrong; I know enough geology to realize that extraction of groundwater can cause subsidence.  It's called "sinkhole formation."  But the idea that the continental landmasses everywhere are somehow settling downward as water is pumped out is, to put not too fine a point on it, moronic.  It reminds me of the amazingly wonderful science textbook spoof Science Made Stupid (available online, for free, here!  WARNING: Once you start reading it, you will read the whole thing in one sitting), wherein we find the following explanation of tides:

We sometimes speak of the tides causing the oceans to rise or fall. Of course, this is a fallacy. Actually, it is the land that rises and falls.

As the Earth rotates, the moon's gravitational attraction is greatest first on one side, then the other. Land masses, being rigid, are pulled up or down accordingly. Oceans, being liquid, are free to flow back to their normal level.

You have to wonder if the folks over at Aircrap stumbled on a copy of Science Made Stupid at a used book sale, and thought it was serious.

It would explain a lot.

Anyhow, it's interesting to see how people approach the whole thing, and as more evidence for climate change amasses (which it will) how long it will take for the last few deniers finally to cave.  Well, not the last few; as we've seen over and over in this blog, you can never convince everyone, not with mountains of evidence.  But at least, enough people that we finally have the global will to try to do something about it.

I can only hope that that sea change doesn't come too late.

For sale: one wine cabinet. Comes with an evil spirit.

Coming on the heels of yesterday's post about a study that showed that once our brains are primed to notice paranormal occurrences, we will, and in fact, will proceed to notice more and more as time goes on -- today we have the story of the haunted wine cabinet.

This one is courtesy of a friend, who asked me if I'd ever heard of the "Dybbuk Box," and said she had a co-worker who found the story terrifying.  I told her I hadn't.  But anything that scares someone is bound to be interesting to me, so I looked into it, and lo and behold, it has its own Wikipedia page and a website devoted to the legend.

The basic story goes something like this.

In 2003, a writer named Kevin Mannis bought a wooden wine cabinet at an estate sale.  The box had belonged to a Holocaust survivor named Havela, and Mannis found out from Havela's granddaughter that the box was a family heirloom.  At that point Mannis offered to sell, or even give, the box back to the family, feeling that given the family's history they should probably have it.  The granddaughter didn't want it; she said, in fact, that no one ever used it, because a dybbuk lived inside it.  "Actually," she told Mannis, "I don't advise you to open it."

*cue scary music*

A dybbuk is, according to Jewish folklore, the disembodied spirit of a dead person -- usually not a nice dead person, but someone who made people miserable while (s)he was alive and whom you can well imagine wanting to continue to do the same after kicking the bucket.  The difference is that the dybbuk, now that it is freed from its mortal body, can latch on to another one (the Jewish answer to demonic possession) or -- as in this case -- attach itself to an object.

So, of course, Mannis did exactly what you would do, if you were the stupid character in a horror movie who is the bold one and (not coincidentally) the first one to die: he opened the box.  And inside, he found an odd collection of items.  There were two pennies from the 1920s, a lock of blond hair bound with cord, a lock of dark hair bound with cord, a small statue engraved with the Hebrew word "shalom," a small wine goblet made of solid gold, one dried rose bud, and a candle holder with legs shaped like octopus tentacles.

Pretty atmospheric stuff, isn't it?  Suggestive.  And suggesting something is apparently exactly what it did.  Mannis proceeded to have a series of horrific nightmares of a terrifying old hag, and started getting terrible headaches.  The box, obviously, was to blame.  He realized that he had to somehow get rid of it, that the story of its being haunted was real and was clearly responsible for his experiences.  So he thought, "Here I have this box which is infested with a horrifying spirit of the damned, and which is making me miserable.  Hmm, what should I do with it?"  And he found the perfect solution.

He gave it to his mother as a birthday present.

And mom proceeded immediately to have a stroke.

After that, Mannis had second thoughts.  So he sold it on eBay.  Once you've given True Evil to your mother, and nearly killed her in the process, the next step is to sell it to an unwitting victim for profit, right?   The box was bought by Iosef Neitzke, a student at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, who reported that the box smelled either like "cat urine or jasmine flowers" (which is kind of an odd pairing), and that after he bought the box the light bulbs in his house started to burn out, and he started losing his hair.  So he sold it to Jason Haxton, who had been following Neitzke's experiences on a blog, and when Neitzke wrote that he had enough of cat piss, dead light bulbs, and hair loss, and was ready to get rid of the box, Haxton jumped at it.

Haxton proceeded to start coughing up blood, developed "head-to-toe welts," and had strange dreams.  So he thought that it was time to get the experts involved.  He got a hold of a couple of rabbis, who successfully locked the dybbuk back in the box, and then he hid the box in a secret location.

And no, he won't tell anyone where it is.

It's an interesting story; and significant, I think, that the first person who brought the box to light was a writer.  I'm speaking purely from personal experience, here, but fiction writers are pretty good at making weird shit up.  (See the sidebar for examples.)  And, as we saw yesterday, once you're looking for strange occurrences, you will find them -- or take perfectly normal things (like hair loss and bad dreams) and attribute them to the paranormal explanation you had already decided was true.  As far as the welts -- hives are known to be a common psychosomatic symptom, triggered not only by allergens but by emotional stress.  As skeptic Chris French of Goldsmiths College said of the dybbuk box, "(all of the owners were) already primed to be looking out for bad stuff.  If you believe you have been cursed, then inevitably you explain the bad stuff that happens in terms of what you perceive to be the cause.  Put it like this: I would be happy to own this object."

Still, that hasn't stopped the woo-woo crowd from capitalizing on the whole thing.  The dybbuk box story has been featured on Paranormal Witness, Mysterious Universe, and Paranormal State, and was the basis of the movie The Possession...

... which, of course, used the tag line "Based on a true story."

Interesting, given my fascination with weird claims, and all of the coverage it's gotten, that the whole thing was completely new to me.  So I give my friend some props for throwing it my way.  It's a fun story, even if I don't buy the supernatural explanation, which you pretty much knew I wouldn't in any case.  And like French, I'd love to own the box, not that that's likely.  I think I would be pretty resistant to its ill effects.  I'm firmly in possession of all of my hair, am not prone to welts, and given the fact that I own two aging cats there's already enough of a pervasive cat-piss smell in my den that it probably wouldn't make much difference if I stored it there.  And I'm already prone to insomnia and bad dreams.

Of course, there's the whole coughing-up-blood thing.  That would kind of suck, and I am sort of susceptible to bronchitis, especially in the winter.  So maybe I'm better off without it, after all.

Priming the paranormal

There's a familiar cliché, that "you see what you are looking for."  It's something that I think we can all relate to; our perception is often limited by what we already thought was there.  That our perceptual/integrative systems are inaccurate we've known for years; experiments have supported the conjecture that when our attention is focused, we can miss major features of what we're seeing.  (If you don't believe it, check out this amazing video -- it's less than two minutes long and will blow your mind.)  Further, when we already have preconceived notions about what we are going to see, we tend to find it whether it actually exists or not (this is the basis of the logical fallacy confirmation bias).

This latter point was the subject of a brilliant little study by Chris Jensen Romer, funded by the Society for Psychical Research, and which was just published this week.  It bounces off (and improves upon) a 1996 study by Houran and Lange, which looked at how individuals who are primed to notice "paranormal occurrences" in their houses mostly... do.

Romer's study, which is outlined in more detail here, involved five couples keeping a diary of "unusual or unexplainable experiences" that occurred in their homes over a one-month period (between October 17 and November 17, 2012).  Here were the instructions that were given to the couples who volunteered:

For the next month, until November 17th, please pay particular attention to any unusual occurrences in your residence. These occurrences may be emotional feelings, physical sensations, or environmental events in your residence. Please keep detailed and accurate notes, even if you know or believe to know what caused the occurrences to happen. I will need the gender and age of adult occupants, and who had each experience noting. If you have children please do not discuss this with them. I have no desire to upset children! The types of unusual experiences I am interested include but are not limited to

* Visual – seeing things not there

* Audio – hearing stuff with no known cause

*Tactile – the feeling of being touched with no obvious reason

* Olfactory – strange smells

* Sensed “presences”

* Intense emotion for no apparent cause beyond that you might normally experience

* Object movements with no apparent cause

* erratic function of equipment.

Of the five couples involved in the experiment, only one of them reported no experiences of any kind that fell into the categories listed.  The other four couples all reported varying numbers of odd observations; one couple said that these had occurred in the family car, but not in the home, a finding that Romer's analysis excluded as it did not fit the methodology, but which still supports Romer's conclusion quite nicely.  The other three couples all reported a great many goings-on, with one recording 22 overall "unusual experiences" -- just shy of one a day.

What's most interesting about this study is that consistently, the test subjects reported higher and higher frequencies of "unusual experiences" as the month progressed.  Although in my opinion it's still a small data set to draw any kind of rock-solid conclusion upon, the relationship looks linear -- the number of weird things you notice seems to be directly proportional to the amount of time you've spent looking for them.  This, Romer concludes, "... may simply show the priming effect of participating in the experiment.  There is no reason to think the participants would have thought very much if at all about what occurred, let alone ascribed it to spooks, if they had not been participating in the diary study."  It's evident that these peculiar little events happen all the time, and most of them (rightly) escape our notice; but when we're forced to notice them, we do, and then the ones we notice increase our certainty that "something strange is going on," and the whole thing snowballs.  Romer writes, "... I have no doubt that life is full of tiny anomalies: during the day it has taken me to write up this replication my partner has texted to say she had her sat nav come on while lying on her bedroom floor and make her jump by telling her to “turn right”; I myself thought I saw Cuddles my black cat sitting on top of a cupboard, but on looking again he was not there, and was still sleeping in my bedroom when I returned to the computer."  We only ascribe meaning to them when we're primed to -- when enough of them occur in rapid succession that we're forced to pay them more attention, when we already thought our house was haunted... or when we're asked to notice them and write them down.  After that, positive feedback takes over.

It's the psychological component of our perception that always makes me suspicious of eyewitness accounts.  People act as if we're highly accurate recorders of what we experience, when in reality our attention is selective and our memories highly unreliable.  Odd, then, that eyewitness testimony is considered one of the highest forms of evidence in courts of law, isn't it?  What Romer's study does is to cast further doubt on our ability to discern what constitutes out-of-the-ordinary occurrences -- which makes me even more suspicious of most of the alleged evidence of hauntings.

On the other hand, the whole thing has made me wonder a little about the scraping noise I keep hearing up in the attic.  Wonder if I should investigate?

Nah.  I'm sure it's nothing.

Breaking news: UC scientist finds that the universe really isn't all that much like a brain

Sometimes I get really mad at the way popular media reports science.

Science does what it does by being precise.  Precise measurements of data; precise analyses of these data; precise use of words to describe assumptions, methodologies, conclusions.  Not, of course, that it is always free from error.  Like any human endeavor, its practitioners can make mistakes or draw erroneous inferences.  But this brings up the other critical aspect of science -- it self-corrects.  Bad science seldom lasts long, because peer review acts as a first-line defense, and even after publication, others in the field replicate, question, and test the conclusions that the researchers came to.

But then, of course, popular media get involved, and the first thing they often do is to muddy the waters.  They can't just report the damn story; they have to make it sound flashy and appealing, and as a result, they do a pretty good job of vaguing things up in the minds of non-scientists.

A particularly egregious example of this was published in Huffington Post yesterday.  The title of the piece immediately put my skepti-senses on red alert: "Physicists Find Evidence That the Universe is a 'Giant Brain.'"  The author, Michael Rundle, goes on to tell the reader that Dmitri Krioukov, of the University of California - San Diego, has shown that the universe has a lot in common with the brain.  The article starts out thusly:  "The idea of the universe as a 'giant brain' has been proposed by scientists -- and science fiction writers -- for decades.  But now physicists say there may be some evidence that it's true.  In a sense."

So, right off the bat, you're led to a woo-woo conclusion -- that the universe is some great big sentient intelligence, and the stars and nebulae and galaxies and all are the neurons.  Isn't that all just... cosmic?

The problem is, that isn't what Krioukov et al. are saying.  At all.  And Rundle himself hints at it, later in the article, although he sounds like he's kind of hesitant to bring it up:

The team's simulation modeled the very early life of the universe, shortly after the big bang, by looking at how quantum units of space-time smaller than subatomic particles 'networked' with each other as the universe grew.

They found that the simulation mirrored that of other networks. Some links between similar nodes resulted in limited growth, while others acted as junctions for many different connections.

For instance, some connections are limited and similar - like a person who likes sports visiting many other sports websites - and some are major and connect to many other parts of the network, like Google and Yahoo.

No, it doesn't quite mean that the universe is 'thinking' - but as has been previously pointed out online, it might just mean there's more similarity between the very small and the very large than first appearances suggest.

It doesn't quite mean that the universe is thinking?  How about it doesn't mean that AT ALL?  Let's take a look at the actual press release from the University of California about the research.  Oh, hey!  Look!  All we have to do is read the first two paragraphs:

The structure of the universe and the laws that govern its growth may be more similar than previously thought to the structure and growth of the human brain and other complex networks, such as the Internet or a social network of trust relationships between people, according to a new paper published in the science journal Nature’s Scientific Reports.

"By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain or a computer," said Dmitri Krioukov, co-author of the paper, published by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. "But the discovered equivalence between the growth of the universe and complex networks strongly suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of these very different complex systems."

Did you catch that?  It ain't subtle.  By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain.  Right from one of the co-authors of the study.  So what's the HuffPost headline?  Let's take another look, shall we?  "Physicists Find Evidence That the Universe is a 'Giant Brain.'"

Krioukov et al. did a very intriguing piece of research; to show how the model of a networked system -- like the brain, or a social network, or the internet -- could have the same basic pattern, or map, as a model of the interactions between particles in the early universe.  Nowhere, nowhere does he say that the universe is brain-like in any other fashion.  But that's exactly the conclusion that Rundle would lead you to believe, isn't it?  If you don't think that this is how your average reader would interpret Rundle's article -- and especially any readers who already had woo-woo tendencies -- take a look at one of the posts from the comment section (you'll have to trust me that I copied this verbatim; there's only so many times you can write [sic] in one paragraph):

You need know the theoretical model of primordial galaxies made by Matrix/DNA Theory, where cells systems are exactly copies of those galaxies models. If neuronal cells are exactly like galaxies, the human brain must be a exactly copy of the Universe. But... we need remember that logics demands that there are living beings with brains and consciousnesses everywhere. My idea is that we are a kind of genes building some region or part of an embryo. Since our brain is shared by regions of functions, maybe the whole earth's consciousnesses is responsible by some region of Universes' embryo brain. Andromeda is responsible by other region, and so on. Finally: all humans will be one cosmic planetary mind, and all planetary minds will be one universal mind. Beautiful. You mist love and help any human being and any other lifeform conscious of this universe, because they are you and you are they, into one.

Wow.  I would feel so beautiful and universal and planetary, if I hadn't just finished slamming my forehead against the desk repeatedly.

Okay, I know people are gonna believe weird stuff.  It's kind of inevitable.  No matter what, there are going to be some uncritical thinkers out there.  But fer cryin' in the sink, we don't need the purveyors of popular media out there making things worse.  If they're going to report on science, the least they can do is not to interject their own crappy understanding of scientific principles into the freakin' headline.

All right, all right, I'll calm down, now.  I realize I shouldn't get so wound up about this stuff.  Isn't good for the blood pressure.  Maybe I should just relax and concentrate on soothing thoughts.  Maybe they'll be sent in from the "Andromeda region" of my brain.  Wouldn't that just be cosmic?

Remembrance of things past

I'm going to begin today's post with a bit of shameless self-promotion.  The wonderful site The Skeptic is sponsoring a contest to select (amongst other things) the best skeptical blog of 2012, and if you have read and enjoyed Skeptophilia, I'd like to toss aside my usual charming modesty and ask for your vote.  It takes only a moment -- click on the site link I posted above, and go down to the heading "Best Blog of 2012," and put in my website address (skeptophilia.blogspot.com).  I'd appreciate it immensely!

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I've been interested in memory as long as I can remember.  Part of the reason is that my own personal brain seems to be made up of a rather peculiar assemblage of things I can remember with apparent ease and things that I don't seem to be able to remember at all.  I recall music with no effort whatsoever; I once put a nifty little Serbian dance tune into long-term storage for over twenty years after hearing it twice (and not practicing it or writing it down in the interim).  Names, likewise, stick with me; I know more scientific names of obscure species than is useful or even reasonable, and it's not from engaging in any sort of surreptitious memorization of taxonomic lists late at night when no one's looking.  That sort of stuff simply sticks.

On the other hand, numbers.  I know people who can remember what their phone number was in houses they haven't lived in for thirty years.  I'm lucky when I can remember what my phone number is now.  In this day of passwords, PINs, and so on, there are a variety of number/letter combinations I'm expected to remember, and the maximum amount of these I seem to be able to recall is: one.  For all of the passwords where this is possible, I use the same one.  If anyone ever discovers it, I'm royally screwed.  Fortunately, it's pretty obscure, so I don't think it's likely (meaning you shouldn't waste your time trying to figure it out).

It does, however, point up something odd about memory, which is how compartmentalized it is.  People can be exceptionally good at certain types of memory, and rather bad at others.  A few things, however, seem common to all sorts of memory; repetition improves retention, memory consolidation increases after sleep, and we all get worse at it (all types) as we age.

This last one is the subject of a recent bit of research published in Nature (available here), by Zhenzhong Cui, Ruiben Feng, Stephanie Jacobs, Yanhong Duan, Huimin Wang, Xiaohua Cao, and Joe Z. Tsien, as a collaborative project between Georgia Health Sciences University and East China Normal University.  The experiments involved using transgenic mice that overproduced a neurotransmitter receptor called NR2A, and found that they were significantly poorer than normal at forming new long-term memories than ordinary mice were.  The reason, the researchers speculate, is that this receptor is involved in weakening the synaptic firing patterns from old memories.

Put another way, it seems like one of the reasons we become more forgetful as we age is that we aren't as good at getting rid of things we already have stored in there.  In an interview with The New York Times, study lead author Joe Z. Tsien compares our brains when young to a blank page, and older brains to a page from a newspaper.  "The difference is not how dark the pen is," he said, "but that the newspaper already has writing on it."

"What our study suggests," Tsien added, "is that it’s not just the strengthening of connections, but the weakening of the other sets of connections that creates a holistic pattern of synaptic connectivity that is important for long-term memory formation."

In other words, our brains really do fill up and (in some sense) run out of space.

It's a funny thought, isn't it?  One of the reasons I can't remember where I left my keys is because my brain still is determined to hang onto the name of my 7th grade English teacher (Mrs. Trowbridge).

I find this a fascinating result, partly because it contradicts my long-held belief (admittedly based on no evidence whatsoever) that no one ever gets close to the actual memory storage capacity of the brain.  Also, it brings up the questionably prudent possibility of developing technology to selectively erase memories, à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Not, in this case, to eliminate traumatic or unpleasant memories, as it was for Jim Carrey's character -- but to free up hard drive space.

In any case, this is only the beginning.  A dear friend of mine, the brilliant (now retired) Cornell human genetics professor Dr. Rita Calvo, once made the prediction that "if the 20th century was the century of the gene, the 21st will be the century of the brain."  We are, she said, right now with respect to our understanding of the brain approximately where we were in 1913 with respect to our understanding of genetics -- we know a little bit of the "what" and the "how much," but almost nothing about the "how" and the "why."

If so, we should be looking forward to some amazing advances over the next few years, and I'm sure I'll have to do a lot of reading to keep up with the research even well enough to teach competently my Introductory Neurology class.  It's exciting, however, to think that we may finally be elucidating the inner workings of our most intricate organ, and finding out how it does one of the most mysterious things of all -- storing, and retrieving, information.

Oh, and one more thing; did you vote for my blog?  I hope you hadn't forgotten.