I'm sure I already told you about this...

One of the most peculiar sensations in the world is déjà vu.  I typically have the auditory version -- I am completely convinced that I have had this conversation before.  Others tend to have more visual déjà vu, having a certainty that they've been in a place where they know they've never been.

I'd heard a number of explanations of the phenomenon -- that it was memory being triggered subliminally by another sense, or that it came from the fact that our sensory processing and cognitive processing were running at different speeds, so the by the time everything was integrated it created a false memory of an experience that had already occurred.  Neither of those has ever sounded all that convincing to me.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Nor, I must add, did all of the woo-woo explanations, such as the idea that déjà vu was precognition, or a visitation by a ghost, or the recollection of an experience from a previous life.

Now, cognitive neuroscientists Josephine Urquhart and Akira O'Connor of the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) have devised an experiment that gives us at least a window on what might be going on -- by creating a situation where déjà vu can be induced.

The setup is simple and elegant.  You give your test subjects a list of words to memorize, and include several that have to do with sleeping -- bed, blankets, dreams, pillow.  "Sleep" itself is not included.  After studying the list, you ask the subjects if there were any words on the list beginning with the letter "s" (there weren't).  Afterwards, you ask them if the word "sleep" was on the list.

They know it couldn't have been, because they all answered in the negative regarding there being words beginning with "s" -- but when asked the question, most of the test subjects experienced an eerie sense of déjà vu, that the word "sleep" actually was on the list -- or, perhaps, on another similar list they'd seen before, somewhere else.  Urquhart and O'Connor write:

Déjà vu is a nebulous memory experience defined by a clash between evaluations of familiarity and novelty for the same stimulus.  We sought to generate it in the laboratory by pairing a DRM recognition task, which generates erroneous familiarity for critical words, with a monitoring task by which participants realise that some of these erroneously familiar words are in fact novel...  The key omission in [prior] déjà vu generation procedures... is the provision of information allowing the participant to make an evaluation of unfamiliarity or novelty to clash with the experimentally-generated familiarity.  In these procedures, there was no objective standard by which participants could verify that the stimuli provoking familiarity had in fact not previously been encountered.

Interestingly, when the subjects were being tested, they were simultaneously being monitored by an fMRI scanner -- and when the feelings of déjà vu were the most intense, the areas in the brain involved in memory (such as the hippocampus) were not very active.  Instead, the frontal cortex -- the part of the cerebrum responsible for decision-making -- was lighting up like mad.

O'Connor and Urquhart believe that the explanation for this is that déjà vu comes from our memory's error-checking procedure.  When we are forming memories, the frontal cortex is doing a continual spot-check to make sure that what is being placed into memory is accurate.  When an error is noted, it's brought to our attention.  Most of the time, the error is something that can be resolved quickly -- with a conclusion of "okay, that's not the way it happened."  But when the memory being analyzed is close in content to something else, especially something that the conscious brain knows can't have occurred, it generates a conflict that is what results in the sensation of déjà vu.

This is still a tentative finding -- there is a great deal we don't understand about memory and sensory processing, so concluding that the phenomenon of déjà vu is explained is probably premature.  But to my thinking, this is a hell of a lot better explanation than anything else I've heard.  O'Connor and Urquhart are going to continue trying to explore the phenomenon.  As a mysterious sensation that is nearly universal to all humans, it certainly begs explaining.  But look for more studies coming down the pike.  And don't forget: you heard it here first.

Death planet approaching

A couple of days ago, I looked at the fascination we have with things that are dangerous -- tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, supernovas.  Today we are going to consider the fact that this fascination is apparently strong enough that if there are no horrible natural disasters forthcoming, people feel the need to make one up.

This comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia wherein we find out that in South America, they have their own version of Nibiru, the fabled tenth planet (or ninth, if you agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson and leave Pluto out of the mix) that visits the inner Solar System every so often, sowing chaos and destruction.  Sort of like the way your least favorite relatives come to visit, bringing along their horribly-behaved children, resulting in a thousand-dollar bill from the plumber just to get the toy cars unstuck from the u-bend in the toilet and the wads of LaffyTaffy out of the bathroom faucet.

Turns out that the South American version of Nibiru is called "Hercolubus."  And over at a site called the Alcione Association, we find out that Hercolubus is on its way, and boy, are we in for it:

Hercolubus, a planet so called by the sages of antiquity, is a gigantic world, 5 or 6 times bigger than Jupiter. In the past it put an end to the Atlantean civilisation and it is approaching Earth again. 

The impending approach of this heavenly body to our solar system will happen soon, so that everybody will be able to see.  It will bring about great upheaval in all corners of our planet.

Well, we wouldn't want any corner to feel left out, so I suppose that's fair enough.

In its present encounter, the progressive approach of Hercolubus will bring about all type of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tidal waves, which will become more and more frequent and intense until total devastation comes about.  When Hercolubus moves near the Earth, its gigantic gravitational force will attract the molten magma towards the Earth’s surface so that earthquakes, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions will increase in number and will reach unheard-of magnitudes.

What strikes me about all of this is that these people really don't understand how gravity works.  Do they think that the gravitational pull on liquids is stronger than on solids, for some reason?  It reminds me of the explanation Tom Weller gave in his phenomenal spoof of middle school science textbooks, Science Made Stupid (and if you haven't read this, go immediately to this site and read it, but don't try and drink anything while doing so or you'll be buying a new computer).   He explains the tides thusly:

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.

We then find out that "Hercolubus" is going to cause the pole to shift.  We can already see it starting, because the ice caps are melting, or something.  Because clearly the ice melting at the poles will affect the magnetism of the core of the Earth, which will in turn cause the whole planet to turn turtle, kind of like a kayak capsizing.

The reality is scary-looking enough.  [image courtesy of NASA]

So how are we going to escape all of this bad stuff?  Apparently, what we all need to do is to learn how to do astral projection:

Along the course of history, different people with Awakened Consciousness have told about such cosmic phenomenon.  A very clear and current example is the little book entitled ‘Hercolubus or Red Planet’ written by V.M. Rabolu, the great Colombian researcher in esotericism. T hat book can be qualified as a ‘document about the future written with full consciousness’. 

Based on his direct and conscious experience, its author, V.M. Rabolu, teaches us in his book the systems to eliminate our psychological defects and the techniques for astral projection as the only existing formulas to face the forthcoming times.

So I guess the idea is that when "Hercolubus" comes and everything on Earth kinda goes south, we can just astral project ourselves right the hell out of here.  Although that does bring up one problem; isn't the idea of astral projection that your soul goes away somewhere, and your body gets left behind?  It'd be a little inconvenient if your soul goes for a vacation on, say, Neptune, and comes back to find that your body has been obliterated by all the molten magma being pulled around by Hercolubus's crazy strong gravity.

You can see how that would kind of be a bummer.

Anyhow, here's one more thing for all of us to worry about.  The whole Nibiru thing seems to have calmed down some, especially now that 2012 has come and gone without the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse showing up.  But Hercolubus seems to run on its own timetable, so I guess we're not out of the woods yet.  My advice is to work on "eliminating your psychological defects."  Then, even if V. M. Rabolu is wrong about Hercolubus and the Earth flipping over and everything, at least you'll be less defective, which sounds like a good thing.

Chemtrail survey

One of the problems with scientists being understood by laypeople is that they don't speak the same language.

I'm not just talking about technical vocabulary, here, the ability to throw around words like photophosphorylation and anisotropy and eigenstate.  I'm talking about how they each use fairly simple words -- words like theory and hypothesis and proof.

As an example, consider the kerfuffle over the activation of the Large Hadron Collider, instrumental in the search for (and ultimately discovery of) the Higgs boson.  There was concern, mostly on the part of non-scientists, that the energy released by the collisions within the LHC could cause some untoward effects.  Since one of the metaphors used to describe what was happening therein was "recreating the conditions that were present at the Big Bang" (a statement that in any case is incorrect by several orders of magnitude), people wondered if the activation of the machine might generate mini black holes -- or possibly a new universe, which would expand and tear our universe apart from the inside.

So looking for reassurance, the scientists were contacted, and asked if this was possible.  And that's when the trouble started.

Scientists, for the most part, are extremely careful to differentiate between the words "possible" and "likely."  So they said, sure, it's possible.  Given that we haven't ever achieved collision energies this high, lots of things are possible, including some we probably haven't foreseen.  You can't rule out an eventuality that depends on data we don't have yet.

Well, at that point, the media was off to the races.  Headlines saying "Scientists Admit It's Possible the LHC Will Destroy the Universe!" began to appear.  Only after the hue-and-cry began did the scientists say, "Now, wait just one minute.  We didn't say it was likely.  In fact, it's extraordinarily unlikely."  But by that time no one was listening, because most people were too busy wailing about how we were all gonna die and it was the physicists' fault.

I'm happy to say, though, that not only did we not die when the LHC was activated, the scientists are beginning to learn how to talk to the rest of us.  Witness, for example, the rather annoyed-sounding paper that appeared in Environmental Research Letters a few days ago, entitled, "Quantifying Expert Consensus Against the Existence of a Secret, Large-Scale Atmospheric Spraying Program," by Christine Shearer, Mick West, Ken Caldeira, and Steven J. Davis.  If you're thinking, "wait, this can't be about what it sounds like," well, yes, it is:

Nearly 17% of people in an international survey said they believed the existence of a secret large-scale atmospheric program (SLAP) to be true or partly true.  SLAP is commonly referred to as 'chemtrails' or 'covert geoengineering', and has led to a number of websites purported to show evidence of widespread chemical spraying linked to negative impacts on human health and the environment.  To address these claims, we surveyed two groups of experts—atmospheric chemists with expertize in condensation trails and geochemists working on atmospheric deposition of dust and pollution—to scientifically evaluate for the first time the claims of SLAP theorists.  Results show that 76 of the 77 scientists (98.7%) that took part in this study said they had not encountered evidence of a SLAP, and that the data cited as evidence could be explained through other factors, including well-understood physics and chemistry associated with aircraft contrails and atmospheric aerosols.  Our goal is not to sway those already convinced that there is a secret, large-scale spraying program—who often reject counter-evidence as further proof of their theories—but rather to establish a source of objective science that can inform public discourse.

So this brings up a couple of points.  First, these folks are going about this the right way.  None of this pussyfooting around about how "we can't prove it" or "without evidence, we can't say it's impossible;" Shearer et al. are saying, "No, you loons, there are no such things as 'chemtrails.'"

Second, didn't you just love the comment about how conspiracy theorists "often reject counter-evidence as further proof of their theories?"  That, I believe, is what is referred to in scientific circles as a "mic drop moment."

But third, I have to wonder who the 77th atmospheric scientist was, the one who had found evidence of chemtrails.  I'd like to talk to that guy, wouldn't you?

Be that as it may, I think the scientists are figuring out that you can't just assume that everyone gets the way evidence and proof (and disproof) are used in science.  They're becoming bolder about saying things like, "Evolution is a fact," "Anthropogenic climate change is happening," and "Homeopathy is pseudoscientific bullshit."  Unfortunate though it may be, using the more cautious diction that is necessary in a scientific paper just doesn't work when communicating scientific findings to the masses.

Anyhow, that paper cheered me up immensely.  Given that common-sense considerations -- such as the fact that jet contrails would be a really crappy toxin delivery device -- don't seem to dissuade the True Believers, it's time for the scientists to come together and say, "Um... NO."  Not, as they pointed out, that it will convince the True Believers -- but because it will let anyone still on the fence know that there is no discussion about this amongst people who aren't certifiable wackos.

Looking down the gun barrel

I have to admit to a fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.

I've read book after book on earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes.  I've told my students that if I hadn't become a science teacher, I'd have been a storm chaser, thus combining two of my favorite things -- meteorology, and things that are big and powerful and can kill you.

I suspect I am not alone in this.  Look at the common little kid fascination with dinosaurs, and which ones tend to be the favorites -- not the peaceful herbivorous dinosaurs, but creatures like the T. rex and the Velociraptor and the Deinonychus, which would happily tear you limb from limb.  Look at the disaster movies, stretching all the way back to such flicks as The Poseidon Adventure.  Look at Twister and The Day After Tomorrow and The Perfect Storm.  Look, if you dare, at Sharknado.  What are they now up to, Sharknado 5 or something?

If not, they should be.

I think this is why a couple of days ago there was an article in The Daily Mail called, "Death Rays From Space: Bursts of Energy From Black Holes Could Wipe Out Life on Earth WITHOUT Warning."  Which brings up a number of questions, the most important of which is, what kind of warning would you expect a black hole to give?  Do you think that a few hours before giving off a Burst of Energy, the black hole is going to post something on Twitter that says, "Beware! I am about to wipe out all life on Earth! #DeathRaysFTW #SorryNotSorry"?

Be that as it may, it turns out that The Daily Mail actually got something right, an eventuality that ranks right up there with the fabled monkeys typing out the script to Hamlet.  There are stars which are capable of giving forth incredible amounts of energy in a very short amount of time.  They're called gamma-ray bursters, and are every bit as scary as they sound.  These things give off as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will release in its entire ten billion year lifespan.  That, my friends, is what the astrophysicists refer to as "a shitload of energy."

And there's one only 7,500 light years away.  I say "only" not because that's an insignificant amount of distance, but because that's close enough that if the thing was aimed toward Earth and went off, we'd be fucked.  Called Wolf-Rayet 104 (or WR-104 for short), it's a good candidate for a core-collapse supernova followed by a long-duration gamma-ray burst.

Of course, there's no particular reason to get all bent out of shape about it.  WR-104 is thought to stand a good chance of doing its thing not day after tomorrow, but some time in the next hundred thousand years.  And even then, it's pretty certain that the gamma-ray burst would be emitted in narrow jets from the magnetic poles of the star -- thus, it would only be a problem if we were literally looking right down the gun barrel, which most astronomers think we aren't.

WR-104 [image courtesy of the Keck Telescope and NASA]

That, of course, doesn't stop The Daily Mail from waxing rhapsodic about how we're all gonna die, or at least get converted into the Incredible Hulk or something.  It's happened before, they say -- a gamma-ray burst is what caused the Ordovician extinction, 450 million years ago, that wiped out 85% of all marine life.  It's only later in the article that they admit that this conjecture is "impossible to prove," and even more reluctantly mention that "in a galaxy like ours, a gamma ray burst will happen once every million years, and it would need to be pointing in the right general direction to hit us... So, are they going to kill us?  Probably not."

Is it just me, or do they sound... disappointed by this?  I would think that the idea that the Earth is unlikely to get fried by high-intensity gamma rays would be good news.  But I guess this goes back to what I started with; there's something about dangerous stuff that is attractive.  The idea that the universe is big and scary makes us appreciate even more living in our safe houses, where we are very unlikely to be eaten by velociraptors.

Myself, I think it's the raw power that these kinds of things wield that is the source of the fascination. I remember, as a kid growing up in southern Louisiana, there was something pretty exciting about being in the bullseye of a hurricane.  I distinctly recall standing in my parents' garage during the approach of Hurricane Carmen in 1974.  Just before closing the garage door and retreating inside, my dad and I watched in awe as tree branches and garbage cans flew through the air, rain fell sideways, and lightning struck every ten seconds.  It was scary but thrilling.  (The aftermath -- being without electricity for two weeks, losing everything in the fridge and freezer, and cleaning up all of the damage was distinctly non-thrilling, but the storm itself was pretty exciting, at least to a kid.)

So there's some strange attraction to the dangerous things in the universe.  Even if for most of them, we'd like to observe from a safe distance.  Like gamma-ray bursters.

Not to mention sharknadoes.

No wands for you!

New from the "So Weird I Couldn't Possibly Make It Up" department, the owner of a magical tools store in England is refusing to sell wands to Harry Potter fans because he says the wands he sells are real magic wands.  Like, that can cast spells and everything.

Richard Carter, owner of Mystical Moments in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, is miffed that he is being approached by customers who want one of his hand-made wooden wands not because they plan on using it for witchcraft, but because they fancy themselves candidates for Gryffindor.  So apparently you have to subscribe to the right brand of fiction to be able to buy a wand.

"J.K. Rowling has obviously done her research but Harry Potter is for children," Carter told a reporter for The Telegraph.  "It has done nothing for business."

Well, obviously not, if you refuse to sell them your wands.  But it's kind of hard to imagine turning away customers throwing cash in your general direction as being a sound business strategy.

"You wouldn't believe how many real witches and wizards there are knocking about," Carter went on.  "You would be amazed.  They know they can come here in reveal themselves without people thinking they're mental...  I don't have customers who have been Harry Potterfied.  If I had someone come in wanting a wand just because they liked Harry Potter I would not sell them one, not matter how much money they were offering."

Which brings up how Carter could tell the Harry Potterfied people from the Potterless variety, since I'm guessing that once the word got out that he wasn't serving the Potterfied folks they wouldn't just walk in and announce what House they got sorted into.  But Carter is way ahead of any people who are thinking of sneaking:

He can tell the Potterfied customers by their aura.

Apparently he can also recognize the ones who intend to use the wand for evil purposes.  No Harry Potter fans or dark witches and wizards, that's Carter's motto.

So that goes double for you, Bellatrix Lestrange.

He seems like he's got a knack for making some pretty cool items, however.  He picks different woods for different uses -- oak for strength, chestnut for love, elm for balance, mahogany for spiritual growth.  Oh, and yew for immortality, because that's always a possibility, even considering that the Sorcerer's Stone is kind of out of the question.

He makes the wands on a lathe, but claims he has no background in wand-making at all.  "I have no training in woodwork.  I use spiritual guidance and don't know how any of the wands will turn out.  All you need for them to work is faith."

It bears mention that my son works on a lathe as part of his job every day -- a glass lathe, not a woodworking one, but same principle.  And he says, "Working on a lathe and expecting the spirits to tell you what to do sounds like a good way to lose a hand."

Carter's been lucky so far, apparently, because as of the time of this post he has both limbs attached and is still doing his thing.  And after making the wands, he anoints them with oil, and then puts them into a locked cabinet until the right witch or wizard comes along.

Predictably, local Hogwarts fans are a bit ticked off.  Slaithwaite Harry Potter enthusiast Mariella May said that Carter's refusal to sell wands to J. K. Rowling fans is like "McDonald's refusing to sell Happy Meals to sad people."  Which is an apt, and strangely hilarious, comparison.

Not everyone has had such a shoulder shrug of a reaction, though.  Fantasy author G. P. Taylor suggested that the shunned fans should take Carter to court.  Which opens up the possibility of Carter defend himself to a judge regarding how he discriminates on customers based on whether or not he approves of their aura.

See what I mean about this being way weirder than anything I could have made up?

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Me, I kind of admire Carter for his purity of purpose.  Isn't that supposed to be one of the guiding principles of good magic, or something?  Everything in balance, don't try to take advantage for your own gain.  So however weird it sounds to a doubter like myself, I hope that the publicity he's getting helps his sales -- only to bonafide witches and wizards, of course.

Linguistic brain atlas

Well, folks, I'm going to be away for a little while again... and I'll be out of wifi and cellphone range (for those of you who know my general attitude about technology, you can probably imagine what a respite this will be for me).  I'll be back with a new post on Monday, August 15.  See you in a few days!

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Science is amazing.

I know, I know, I say that every other day.  But there are times when I read the science news and am completely overwhelmed by how cool it all is, and am frankly astonished by our ability to parse the way the universe works.

The most recent research that provoked that reaction is a paper that appeared in Nature this week entitled, "Natural Speech Reveals the Semantic Maps that Tile Human Cerebral Cortex," by Alexander G. Huth, Wendy A. de Heer, Thomas L. Griffiths, Frédéric E. Theunissen, and Jack L. Gallant.  And what this research has done is something I honestly didn't think was possible -- to create a "brain atlas" that maps how words are organized in the cerebrum.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The scientists did this by having subjects in an fMRI machine listen to the MOTH Radio Hour, a compelling storytelling program that the researchers thought would be riveting enough to keep people's interest and their minds from wandering.  And while they were listening, the fMRI mapped out which words and groups of words triggered responses in tens of thousands of spots all over the cerebral cortex.

"Our goal was to build a giant atlas that shows how one specific aspect of language is represented in the brain, in this case semantics, or the meanings of words," said study author Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.  As science writer Ian Sample of The Guardian put it:

The atlas shows how words and related terms exercise the same regions of the brain. For example, on the left-hand side of the brain, above the ear, is one of the tiny regions that represents the word "victim."  The same region responds to "killed," "convicted"," "murdered" and "confessed."  On the brain’s right-hand side, near the top of the head, is one of the brain spots activated by family terms: "wife," "husband," "children," "parents."

Further, as many words have more than one definition, the researchers were able to map how context influences meaning and changes the site of brain activation.  The word "top," for example, can mean a child's toy, a woman's shirt, or can be a relational word that describes position.

The study's authors write:

We show that the semantic system is organized into intricate patterns that seem to be consistent across individuals.  We then use a novel generative model to create a detailed semantic atlas.  Our results suggest that most areas within the semantic system represent information about specific semantic domains, or groups of related concepts, and our atlas shows which domains are represented in each area.  This study demonstrates that data-driven methods—commonplace in studies of human neuroanatomy and functional connectivity—provide a powerful and efficient means for mapping functional representations in the brain.

The research is groundbreaking.  Lorraine Tyler, cognitive neuroscientist and head of the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at Cambridge University, described it as "a tour de force" -- a phrase scientists don't use lightly.  There is already talk of using the research to allow people who are unable to speak for reasons of illness or injury, but whose other cognitive processes are undamaged, to communicate with speech-production software via a brain/computer interface.  What other applications might come up are mind-bending even to consider.  Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton, said, "There are so many implications... we are barely touching the surface."

So once again, it's science for the win.  It's heartening to think, in this age where I'm often afraid to open up the newspaper for fear of finding out what new and unusual ways we've come up with to be horrible to one another, that we are capable of elegant and beautiful research that elucidates how our own minds work.  As Carl Sagan put it, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

The paper's authors write:


We show that the semantic system is
organized into intricate patterns that seem to be consistent across individuals. We then use a novel generative model to
create a detailed semantic atlas. Our results suggest that most areas within the semantic system represent information
about specific semantic domains, or groups of related concepts, and our atlas shows which domains are represented in
each area. This study demonstrates that data-driven methods—commonplace in studies of human neuroanatomy and
functional connectivity—provide a powerful and efficient means for mapping functional representations in the brain.



We show that the semantic system is

organized into intricate patterns that seem to be consistent across individuals. We then use a novel generative model to

create a detailed semantic atlas. Our results suggest that most areas within the semantic system represent information

about specific semantic domains, or groups of related concepts, and our atlas shows which domains are represented in

each area. This study demonstrates that data-driven methods—commonplace in studies of human neuroanatomy and

functional connectivity—provide a powerful and efficient means for mapping functional representations in the brain.

We show that the semantic system is

organized into intricate patterns that seem to be consistent across individuals. We then use a novel generative model to

create a detailed semantic atlas. Our results suggest that most areas within the semantic system represent information

about specific semantic domains, or groups of related concepts, and our atlas shows which domains are represented in

each area. This study demonstrates that data-driven methods—commonplace in studies of human neuroanatomy and

functional connectivity—provide a powerful and efficient means for mapping functional representations in the brain.