I saw the light

We are currently in the middle of an early nor'easter, which is supposed to bring rain, wind, lightning, and thunder to us well into midday, which is probably why I was thinking this morning about the subject of Lights in the Sky.

The topic had also come up a few days ago in a conversation with a student, a young man who shares my skeptical outlook.  He showed me a video montage he'd found on YouTube of recent UFO sightings, and laughingly described a conversation he'd had with a friend who evidently liked the "alien spacecraft" hypothesis so much that he needed some reminding of what the "U" in "UFO" stands for.  In any case, I decided to do a little research regarding mysterious lights.

[image courtesy of photographer Andy Pham and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, allow me to state up front that although several of these are as-yet unexplained, I strongly believe that they all have perfectly natural explanations.  The rush to blame any odd phenomenon on the paranormal is a tendency I've blogged about before, and I wouldn't want anyone to interpret my love of a mystery as an unwarranted attribution of these occurrences to ghosts, demons, or Little Green Men.

That disclaimer made, here are a few examples of odd light phenomena that I found out about.  I've included links for each of them that you should peruse if you want more information.

The Hessdalen Light has been seen since the 1940s in the valley of Hessdalen in Norway. It's a stationary, bright white or yellow light, floating above the ground, sometimes remaining visible for over an hour. With such a cooperative phenomenon, you would think it would be easily explained; but despite the efforts of scientists, who have been studying the Hessdalen Light for decades, there is yet to be a convincing explanation.  Hypotheses abound: that it is the combustion of dust from the valley floor; that it is a stable plasma, ionized by the decay of radon from minerals in the valley; or even that it is an electrical discharge from piezoelectric compression of quartz crystals in the underlying rock.  None of these is completely convincing, and the Hessdalen Light remains one of the most puzzling natural phenomena I know of.

Similarly peculiar are the Brown Mountain Lights, near Brown Mountain in the Pisgah National Forest of North Carolina.  These brightly-colored lights have been seen since the early 20th century, usually hovering near the horizon, and skeptics have claimed that they are the headlights of a train or automobiles, as there is a highway and a train track fairly near to the site where the lights are most often seen.  However, when a flood washed out the train overpass and rendered the highway impassable, the lights continued to be seen.  They're still seen today, apparently most commonly between September and November.

Likely to be a combination of lights from a highway and an atmospheric condition are the Paulding Lights, of Paulding, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  This phenomenon is the subject of a variety of YouTube videos (search for "Paulding Lights" and you'll find a bunch), and in fact became the topic of an episode of Fact or Faked: The Paranormal Files on the Syfy Channel.  The FOF people, as you might predict, concluded that it was "unexplained."  However, after doing some digging myself, I found that researchers had concluded that the mysterious lights seen near Paulding were due to automobile headlights refracting through an inversion layer -- a layer of cool air near the ground bounded by warmer air above.  So I will respectfully disagree with the investigators on FOF and place this one in the file labeled "Probably Solved."

The Gurdon Light, of Gurdon, Arkansas, is one that has a lot of supernatural folklore attached to it.   It's a bobbing light seen in a wooded area near railroad tracks, and the legend is that it is a lantern held by a ghostly man who had been killed by a train.  Needless to say, I'm not buying that, and the information I found indicates that this one is fairly poorly documented -- leading me to surmise that it can be explained by nothing more than the overactive imagination of the superstitious.  Nonetheless, Gurdon remains a popular destination -- on Halloween.

Lastly, we return to Norway for what is in my opinion the best documented of these occurrences -- the Norwegian Spiral Anomaly of 2009.  (Do check out this link, which has excellent photographs and video of this strange and beautiful phenomenon.)  On the 9th of December in 2009, thousands of people all over central Norway took photographs and video footage of a spiral light in the sky, with a blue-green filament coming from its center, that opened up into a black hole.  Naturally, there was a rush to explain it as visitation by aliens, or as a physics experiment gone very wrong that had resulted in the formation of an actual black hole.  A more conventional explanation -- that it was a spiral vapor trail left by a failed flight of a Russian Bulava missile -- is only partially convincing; there was a missile test that day, and simulations of the pattern made by the ignited fuel from a spinning missile did form a spiral pattern, but the Spiral Anomaly looked essentially the same from all observation points, and this would not be true if it had been a missile vapor trail (some people would have seen it center-on, others from the side, etc.).  In my mind, it's still a mystery, and remains one of the most recorded, and most perplexing, light phenomena I've ever heard of.

So, there you have it; some reasons to keep your eye on the sky.  And even if I'm in no rush to attribute any of these to spirits or alien spacecraft, I have to admit that they are intriguing.  And there's something in all of us that loves a good mystery, isn't there?

A sugar pill for creativity

Following hard on the heels of a post about the possibility of creativity existing in a machine (and how we could tell if it did), today we look at recent research from the Weizmann Institute of Science (of Rehovot, Israel) showing that your creativity can be increased...

... by a placebo.

In a paper released last month, neuroscientists Liron Rozenkrantz, Avraham E. Mayo, Tomer Ilan, Yuval Hart, Lior Noy, and Uri Alon used three standard measures of creativity -- the creative foraging game, alternate uses test, and Torrance test of creative thinking -- to see if subjects' creativity levels improved if they were given a vial of a cinnamon-scented liquid to sniff beforehand.  The interesting thing is that the aromatic chemical in the liquid isn't neuroactive, but some of the test subjects' creativity improved anyhow.

As long as they were told ahead of time that's the effect it would have.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The authors write:

Creativity is the ability to generate ideas, solutions or insights that are new and potentially useful.  Creativity is often viewed as a trait characteristic of a person; however, creativity can also be viewed as a state, affected by expectation and motivation...  

We find that placebo can enhance the originality aspect of creativity...  What are the psychological mechanisms that allow placebo to increase the originality aspect of creativity?  There are at least two possibilities. The first mechanism is based on extensive research by Amabile and Deci and Ryan, that suggests that creativity is modulated by motivation.  Extrinsic motivators were shown to be mostly detrimental to creativity, whereas intrinsic motivation is conductive to and strongly associated with creative abilities.  A key factor in intrinsic motivation, according to self-determination theory, is the belief in one’s competence.  For example subjects who practiced encouraging statements (related to self-confidence, releasing anxieties etc.) and omitted self-incapacitating statements showed improved creativity scores.  This is in line with the verbal suggestion in our study that the odorant increases creativity, which may have made subjects feel more competent.  Additional components of intrinsic motivation, such as social relatedness, may also have been increased by experimenter effects in the present study, by the experimenter’s perceived interest in the effects of the odorant. 

A second possible psychological mechanism of placebo, as suggested by Weger et al., is to weaken inhibitory mechanisms that normally impair performance.  Creativity was found to increase in several studies that tested conditions with reduced inhibitions, such as alcohol consumption.  Wieth and Zacks showed that creative problem solving was improved when participants were tested during non-optimal times of day, and suggested that this is due to reduced inhibitory control... This effect was suggested to be in line with paradoxical functional facilitation theory, which attributes improved performance of damaged nervous system to release from inhibition. Informal notions in improvisation theatre suggest that the inner critic is a source of inhibition that limits creativity.  The verbal suggestion made in our study that the odorant increases creativity and reduces inhibitions may thus work through a reduced-inhibition mechanism and/or by increasing belief in one’s competence.

So this suggests that there are two outcomes, here:

• Anything that works to increase your confidence in your own creativity will improve your ability.  This undoubtedly varies greatly from person to person, but it does make me wonder if all of the happy-talk "self-affirmation" stuff, which I had previously derided as pop psychology, might not have something to it.
• Ernest Hemingway may have been right when he said, "Write drunk, edit sober."

I can say from my own experience that frustration is the thing that kills my creativity the fastest.  Whether with music or writing (my two main creative outlets), if I start becoming frustrated with my skill, output, or proficiency, all it serves is to get in my way and make things worse.  I used to grit my teeth and try to plow through it, but I learned that this only tightened the downward spiral -- once frustration has set in, every fumbled note, every clumsy sentence, only serves to further shut me down.  The only solution was to leave the instrument or the keyboard behind -- not easy to do for a tightly-wound type-A personality like myself -- and do something completely different, preferably something active like going running.

Afterwards, it was amazing how the cogs had been loosened and the cobwebs blown away.  With writer's block, I often found that it was while I was running that the solution to whatever plot point I was wrestling with suddenly came to me, seemingly out of nowhere.  The research by Rosenkrantz et al. suggests that the loss of inhibition and cessation of negative self-talk from switching gears entirely might have been what shook the ideas free.

In any case, it's fascinating to find how malleable our minds are, how amenable to suggestion.  It also brings to mind the 2010 study that found that placebos work even when subjects know they're being given a placebo -- and makes me wonder if I should take a good whiff of cinnamon before I next sit down to write.

Artificial scriptwriting

When I was a young and cocky junior in college, a couple of friends and I wrote a (very simple) computer program to generate free-verse poetry.  With input of a list of promising-sounding verbs, nouns, and adjectives, we were able to produce hundreds of poems that sounded a little like William Carlos Williams on acid.

It was pretty clunky stuff, really, although at the time my friends and I thought it was the funniest thing ever, a poke in the eye of the full-of-themselves modern poets.  Honestly, it was really nothing more than souped-up MadLibs.  But there were a few of the "poems" that got close to making sense -- that did in fact sound a bit like loopy, arcane examples of modern poetry.

Of course, that was almost forty years ago, and back then the capability of software (not to mention programmers' capability of writing it) was rudimentary to say the least.  Now, there are artificial neural networks that are able not only to learn, but to abstract patterns from observations in much the way a human child does, trying things out, seeing what works, and improving as they go.  And just last year, a very-far-evolved version of our Modern Poetry Generator produced a movie script by looking at tropes in dozens of futuristic science fiction movies, and then writing one of its own.

The neural network named itself Benjamin -- itself a curious thing -- and the result was Sunspring, a surreal nine-minute long script showing the interaction of three people in what appears to be a love triangle.  Best of all, the people who created Benjamin hired some actors to stage Sunspring (the link is to a YouTube video of the production), and it's predictably a mashup of nonsense and strange passages that come damn close to profound.

[image courtesy of photographer Michel Royon and the Wikimedia Commons]

Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, who oversaw the creation of Sunspring, entered it in the Sci-Fi London contest -- and it won.  I suspect that part of its success was simply the novelty of seeing a film whose script was written by an artificial neural network.  But part of it was that there is a disturbing sort of sense behind the script, which you can't help but see when you watch it.

When Benjamin won the contest, his creators arranged for him to be interviewed by the emcee at the awards ceremony.  When Benjamin was asked how he felt about competing successfully against human filmmakers, he replied, "I was pretty excited. I think I can see the feathers when they release their hearts.  It's like a breakdown of the facts.  So they should be competent with the fact that they weren't surprised."

Which, like much of Sunspring, almost makes sense.

As a fiction writer, I find this whole thing intensely fascinating.  I've often pondered the source of creativity, not to mention why some creative works appeal (or are meaningful) to some and not to others.  It strikes me that creativity hinges on a relationship -- on establishing a connection between the creator and the consumer.  Because of this, there will be times when that link simply fails to form -- or forms in a different way than one or both anticipated.

One minor example of this occurred with a reader of my time-travel novel Lock & Key.  One of the main characters is the irritable, perpetually exasperated character of the Librarian, the guy whose responsibility is keeping track of all of the possible things that could have happened.  I describe the Librarian as being a slender young man with "elf-like features" -- by which I meant something otherworldly and ethereal, a little like the Elves in J. R. R. Tolkien but not as badass.  But one reader took that to mean that the Librarian was a Little Person, and she maintains to this day that she sees him this way.

I suppose this is why I always cringe a little when I hear they're making a movie of one of my favorite books.  That relationship between reader and story is sometimes so powerful that no movie will ever depict accurately the way the reader imagined it to be.  (I had a bit of that experience when I first watched the movie adaptation of Lord of the Rings.  By and large, I found the casting to be impeccable -- by which I mean they looked a lot like I pictured -- with the exception of Hugo Weaving as Elrond.  Hugo Weaving to me will always be Agent Smith in The Matrix, and in every scene where Elrond appeared, I kept expecting him to say, "I will enjoy watching you die, Mr. Frodo.")

So meaning in books, music, and art is partly what the creator puts there, and partly what we impose upon them when we experience them.

Which leaves us with a question: what, if anything, does Sunspring mean?  It features exchanges like the following, between one of the male characters ("H") and the female character ("C"):

H:  It may never be forgiven, but that is just too bad.  I have to leave, but I'm not free of the world.
C:  Yes.  Perhaps I should take it from here...
H:  You can't afford to take this anywhere.  This is not a dream.

Which I'm not sure actually means anything, but is certainly no weirder than dialogue I've heard in David Lynch movies.

In any case, as Benjamin's creators would no doubt agree, the application of neural networks and AI learning to creative endeavors is only in its infancy, and I suspect that within a few years, Sunspring will be considered as laughable an attempt at computer scriptwriting as our clumsy foray into poetry-writing was software 37 years ago.  But it does give us an interesting twist on the Turing test, the old litmus for determining if an AI is actually intelligent; if it can fool a sufficiently intelligent human, then it is.  Here, there's the added confounding condition of our bringing to a creative experience our own biases, visions, and interpretations of what's going on.

So if someone finds a computer-created work of literature, art, or music beautiful, poignant, or meaningful, where is the meaning coming from?  And how is it different from any experience of meaning in creative works?

I don't even begin to know how to answer that question.  But even so, I'll be waiting for the first AI novel to appear -- something that can't be far away.

Distilled spirits

Today is my 57th birthday, which I bring up primarily because I look at that number and think, "How the hell could I be this old?"  I'm only three years from another Dreaded Zero Birthday, and next year is my fortieth high school reunion.

I have tried to combat this by remaining immature.  But even watching cartoons and laughing at fart jokes only gets you so far.

In any case, if any of you are looking for a gift for your favorite blogger, allow me to suggest something that I just found out about yesterday: a bottle of gin personally cursed by a real witch.

Professional witch Julianne White, infusing the spirits with spirits

I'm not making this up.  It's called "Evil Spirits Gin."  Made by Union Distillers in England, the gin is produced by "an authentic and unique triple-chilling filter process," and then infused with apples and mint grown in Pluckley, which was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the most haunted town in Britain."

I was naturally curious about Pluckley, and after a little research I found out one of the main ghosts in Pluckley is called "Watercress Woman."  "Watercress Woman" is apparently the ghost of an old lady that is seen frequently on Pinnock Bridge, near the village center.  The old lady apparently made a living by sitting on the bridge selling watercress.  Which, I must say, strikes me as a difficult way to make a living.  I would think that you'd have to sell a crapload of watercress in order to make enough money to buy anything, not to mention the fact that I don't think watercress is really all that big a seller in the first place.

Maybe it's more popular in Pluckley than it is in upstate New York.  I dunno.

Be that as it may, the old watercress saleswoman spent her days sitting on the bridge, selling watercress, while smoking her pipe and drinking gin.  Until one day she dropped her pipe, and it set fire to her gin-soaked dress, and she burned to death.

Which makes me wonder how soused she was.  Because I have drunk plenty of gin in my time, and I can say that I have never dumped enough of it on my clothes that I would burst into flame if I dropped my pipe, if I smoked a pipe, which I don't.

But she's only one of a variety of ghosts in Pluckley.  Amongst the other spooks and specters to be found there are the spirits of a screaming brickworker who fell off the factory roof, a highwayman who was run through with a sword and pinned to a tree, and a schoolmaster who was so unpopular that his students revolted and hanged him from a tree.

The last-mentioned making me feel like any problems I have in my classroom are minor by comparison.

But anyhow, back to Evil Spirits Gin.  Not only do the distillers add apples and mint from the Haunted Gardens of Pluckley to the gin, they also add an extract of an African plant called "devil's claw."  Why?  I have no idea.  Because of the devil or something.

The best part, though, is that after all of this, the distillers hand over the bottles of gin to Julianne White, the aforementioned "professional witch."  Which, frankly, sounds like a worse way to make a living than selling watercress.  But anyhow, White casts a spell on the gin, so that drinking it "empowers the drinker to follow whatever their hearts desire – whether it is for good or evil."

So that's pretty cool, and would be a nice benefit to having a gin & tonic.

In any case, I would definitely enjoy a bottle of Evil Spirits Gin.  Otherwise I will have to make do with ordinary uncursed gin, which means I won't be able to blame any hangovers I experience on black magic, an excuse I really wish I'd thought of thirty years ago.

Paint thinner cure

Let me preface this post by saying, once, "I am not making any of this up."  Because, as you'll see, otherwise I'd have to say it every other line.

I will also suggest ahead of time that the folks who coordinate the Darwin Awards might want to keep an eye on the people I'm going to tell you about, because trust me, this is a Darwin Award waiting to happen.

What, you're probably asking, could induce me to make such a blanket statement right out of the starting gate, especially considering the ridiculous stuff I deal with here at Skeptophilia on a daily basis?  The reason is that a loyal reader sent me a link about a group of people who think...

... that the key to health and curing disease is in drinking turpentine.

You read that right.  Turpentine, i.e., paint thinner.  The stuff that has "Harmful or fatal if swallowed, do not induce vomiting" on the side of the container.  This has become a popular enough alt-med remedy that there is actually a (closed) Facebook group devoted to the practice.  The contention is that all disease is caused by parasites, and that turpentine will kill the parasites and therefore cure your disease.

Which is 1/3 true.  There are lots of diseases that are caused by something other than parasites -- genetic illnesses, for example.  So "killing the parasites" would only work if that's what's making you ill.

The part of it that is true is that turpentine will kill parasites.  The problem is, it also will kill you.  The upside is that your corpse will be delightfully parasite-free.

What about the "harmful or fatal" business?  That, turpentine-aficionados say, is put on there because turpentine manufacturers are "forced to do this by our corrupt FDA."  And if that doesn't appall you enough, there's the comment from one turpentine-drinker that when she has a bowel movement, "lots of red liquid comes out, is this normal?"

To which another proponent of the practice responded, "Maybe old and damaged intestinal wall is coming out.  Don't worry."

Okay, a couple of things here.

• The red stuff is blood.  If you're pooping blood, this is a bad sign.  You definitely should worry.
• Even if the guy who responded is right, "your intestinal wall" is also high on the list of things that you should not be pooping out.
• Lastly: are you people fucking insane?

Time for some science.  Turpentine is what is called a nonpolar solvent -- a liquid that is good at dissolving other nonpolar substances, such as oils and fats.  (That's why it's used to clean up brushes after using an oil-based paint.)  Here's the problem: your cell membranes are largely composed of double layers of a specific kind of organic compound -- a type of fat called a phospholipid.  What's holding the two layers of the membrane together are hydrophobic interactions -- the watery solution both inside and outside your cells push away nonpolar (hydrophobic) regions of the phospholipids, and it forms sheets.  If you replace the water outside the cells with a nonpolar solvent like turpentine (or gasoline or kerosene or benzene), it replaces that repulsive force with an attractive one.

End result?  Your cell membranes dissolve.

WHICH IS BAD.

The Toxicology Database at the National Institute of Health website is unequivocal about this.  Here's what they have to say about turpentine:

Vapor is irritating to eyes, nose, and throat.  If inhaled, will cause nausea, vomiting, headache, difficult breathing, or loss of consciousness.  Liquid irritates skin.  If ingested, can irritate the entire digestive system, and may injure kidneys.  If liquid is taken into lungs, causes severe pneumonitis.  Men exposed to concentrations of 720-1100 ppm complain of chest pain, and vision disturbances.  Turpentine is a skin irritant and skin contact may cause eczema.  Workers in the chemical, rubber and welding industries exposed to turpentine have developed contact dermatoses.  In humans, chronic inhalation of turpentine has caused extensive glomerulonephritis.  Chronic dermal contact may cause allergic erythema, headaches, coughing, and sleeplessness.

Oh, but the National Institute of Health is probably corrupt, too.  My bad.

To some extent, I feel like letting these people do what they want, and if they die, well, it's not like the information wasn't out there.  A kind of life-or-death version of caveat emptor.   But part of me believes that even people who are this catastrophically ignorant shouldn't suffer gastrointestinal distress and kidney injury.

Much less pooping out blood, which I regret even thinking about.

So, if you are at all of the "alternative medicine" bent, and were considering drinking turpentine to rid yourself of the parasites causing your ingrown toenail, I have one thing to say:

Don't.

Seriously.  That shit'll kill you.

A fight over teeth

It may seem like a trivial thing to gripe about, but I am absolutely sick unto death of people taking some completely ordinary scientific discovery, and shrieking, "This will completely rewrite every textbook on the subject!", or worse, "This invalidates everything we thought we knew about X!"

I know a bit about the history of scientific inquiry.  I'm no expert, but I'm definitely Better Than The Average Bear.  And when it comes to real, honest-to-Galileo scientific revolutions, I can only think of a few:

• The Copernican idea of the planets (including the Earth) going around the Sun, further modified by Kepler, who found out they weren't moving in perfect circles
• Isaac Newton's theories of force, motion, and gravitation
• Charles Darwin's explanation of the mechanism of evolution
• The elucidation of electricity and magnetism by James Clerk Maxwell and others
• The discovery of the gene as the fundamental unit of heredity, followed by a century and a half of refinement of our understanding of how DNA produces traits
• The discovery of radioactivity, which directly led to our understanding of atomic structure and quantum mechanics -- a discovery, it must be said, that immediately followed the eminent physicist Lord Kelvin stating, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.  All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
• The discovery of plate tectonics as a driver for geological processes, by Alfred Wegener, Harry Hess, J. Tuzo Wilson, and others

And that's about it.  Oh, there were other big developments.  The invention of the computer, for example, has changed our experience about as much as anything I can think of.  But it really wasn't an overturning of our understanding of how the world works; it was more a new and clever application of known physical laws to the problem of computation and information storage.

So what stands out about real scientific revolutions is how uncommon they are.  And given the precision of our tools, and the level of our inquiry in the past century, the chances of our having missed something fundamental is pretty slim.

Which is why I rolled my eyes and said a very bad word when I saw an article over at Inverse entitled, "9.7 Million-Year-Old Teeth Found In Germany Could Recast Human History."  The discovery, which is actually fairly cool, is that a team led by Herbert Lutz, director of the Natural History Museum of Mainz, Germany discovered some hominin teeth in a dig near the Rhine River.  It is an unusual find; most of the hominin fossils of that age have been confined to Africa.  But it certainly doesn't "rewrite human history."  The fact that there might have been a branch of hominins that made it to Europe ten-odd million years ago is interesting, but doesn't really overturn anything.  It just adds a branch to our family tree (and one that almost certainly isn't our director ancestor, anyhow).

One of the Eppelsheim teeth [image courtesy of the Mainz Natural History Museum]

Lutz himself didn't help matters any by his statement to the press.  "It’s something completely new, something previously unknown to science," Lutz said.  "It’s a complete mystery where this individual came from, and why nobody’s ever found a tooth like this somewhere before."

I can put this reaction down to a scientist being understandably excited about his own work.  But when the media hears the words "unknown to science" and "mystery," they picture scientists sitting around with befuddled looks on their faces, then standing up and throwing away all of the textbooks and journals on the subject in question.

Which is a far sight from the truth, as Michael Greshko of National Geographic states.  "Do these teeth, as many news outlets have proclaimed, 'rewrite human history?'" Greshko writes.  "In a word, no."

In fact, there's still a lot of argument amongst paleontologists over whether the teeth are actually from a hominin, as Lutz believes.  Bence Viola of the University of Toronto, a world-renowned expert on the structure of hominin and hominoid teeth, is doubtful.  "I think this is much ado about nothing," Viola said.  "The second tooth (the molar), which they say clearly comes from the same individual, is absolutely not a hominin, [and] I would say also not a hominoid."

Viola suspects that the teeth are from some kind of pliopithecoid, a branch of primates only distantly related to humans, and which are known to have lived in Europe and Asia between seven and seventeen million years ago.

Viola's colleague, paleoanthropologist David Begun, is even more dismissive.  "The 'canine' looks to me like a piece of a ruminant tooth," Begun said.  "It has a funny break that makes it look a bit like a canine, but it is definitely not a canine, nor is it [from] a primate."

So not only do the teeth not "rewrite human history," there isn't even agreement about what animal the teeth were from.  So if you were thinking we were going to add an eighth scientific revolution to the seven I mentioned above based on Lutz's discovery, I fear you are destined for disappointment.

And the problem only gets worse when you're talking about a field in which people have a vested interest to disbelieve.  I can't tell you the number of times I've seen headlines like, "Paleontologist Finds Bone in a Dig Site -- Evolutionists Baffled!" or "Blizzard On the Way -- Climate Change Supporters Fumble for Explanation."  Trust me on this: no one's baffled or fumbling, and they're not rewriting the textbooks.  What the scientists are doing is adding another bit to our understanding of the universe.

Because that's how science works.

Dog days

As I mentioned in my last post, I have two dogs.  First we have Grendel:

Grendel is a very mixed breed.  We think that in his ancestry he has some boxer, pug, German shepherd, and (given his general build) potato.

And in case you were wondering: no, he's not a bit spoiled.

Then we have Lena:

Lena always has this chipper, alert expression, which we didn't realize until we got her home was her way of expressing the concept, "Derp."  She's one of the sweetest dogs I've ever met, but also possibly the dumbest.  She has been known to stare at a stuffed toy on a shelf for 45 minutes straight, presumably because she thought it was a squirrel, or possibly because she was simply interested in interacting with something that was on her intellectual level.

So we're totally dog people.  They're a nuisance sometimes, make a lot of noise, and a lot of the past twenty years has been one long series of carpet stains.  But we love 'em, and honestly, I can't imagine living without at least one dog.

This comes up because of two academic papers that I ran into last week that shed interesting light on dog behavior.  In the first, by a team led by Biagio d'Aniello of the University of Naples, we find out that dogs actually can smell fear -- but it doesn't make them attack, it makes them scared, too.

The authors write:

Do human body odors (chemosignals) produced under emotional conditions of happiness and fear provide information that is detectable by pet dogs (Labrador and Golden retrievers)?  The odor samples were collected from the axilla of male donors not involved in the main experiment.  The experimental setup involved the co-presence of the dog’s owner, a stranger and the odor dispenser in a space where the dogs could move freely.  There were three odor conditions [fear, happiness, and control (no sweat)] to which the dogs were assigned randomly.  The dependent variables were the relevant behaviors of the dogs (e.g., approaching, interacting and gazing) directed to the three targets (owner, stranger, sweat dispenser) aside from the dogs’ stress and heart rate indicators.  The results indicated with high accuracy that the dogs manifested the predicted behaviors in the three conditions.  There were fewer and shorter owner directed behaviors and more stranger directed behaviors when they were in the “happy odor condition” compared to the fear odor and control conditions.  In the fear odor condition, they displayed more stressful behaviors.  The heart rate data in the control and happy conditions were significantly lower than in the fear condition.  Our findings suggest that interspecies emotional communication is facilitated by chemosignals.

Which certainly squares with what I've observed in my own dogs, especially Grendel, who is (and I say this with all due affection) a great big coward.  Just last night, I woke up in the middle of the night to a pack of coyotes howling nearby, and Grendel (who was sleeping in bed with me because my wife is currently away at an art show, and that's how we both cope with her being gone) jerked awake, whimpered, and then snuggled up closer to me.  The message was clear: "Protect me from the big mean wild dogs."  Presumably he knew that the big mean wild dogs were outside and he was in the house, but he still engaged in the horizontal equivalent of hiding behind my legs.

Then there was the study by Juliane Kaminski et al. of the University of Portsmouth, wherein we find out that dogs don't just pick up on our emotions; they manipulate them toward their own ends.  The "puppy dog eyes" we get from our dogs are reserved for their human companions -- and, as I've suspected for ages, they use 'em in a completely calculated fashion to get attention and treats from us.

The experiment studied 24 family dogs, who were tested with and without their owners, and also when the owners were watching them and when the owners were present but turned away from them.  And they found that dogs produce a much greater range of facial expressions when their owners are looking at them.

"Domestic dogs have a unique history," Kaminski said.  "They have lived alongside humans for 30,000 years and during that time selection pressures seem to have acted on dogs' ability to communicate with us.  We knew domestic dogs paid attention to how attentive a human is - in a previous study we found, for example, that dogs stole food more often when the human's eyes were closed or they had their back turned.  In another study, we found dogs follow the gaze of a human if the human first establishes eye contact with the dog, so the dog knows the gaze-shift is directed at them."

This behavior is remarkably sophisticated, Kaminski said.  "We can now be confident that the production of facial expressions made by dogs are dependent on the attention state of their audience and are not just a result of dogs being excited.  In our study they produced far more expressions when someone was watching, but seeing food treats did not have the same effect.  The findings appear to support evidence dogs are sensitive to humans' attention and that expressions are potentially active attempts to communicate, not simple emotional displays."

Which again squares with my experience.  I know that both of my dogs turn on the charm when they want something, and know I'm watching.  When I'm busy writing and Grendel wants attention, he comes quietly into my office and puts his chin on my leg, then just waits.  Sometimes I try to ignore him, but inevitably I look down and make eye contact, and he starts wagging, because he knows he's won.

Making me wonder sometimes who trained whom.  

Lena is at least a little more subtle.  When she wants us to notice her, she adopts what my wife and I have called her "splat pose" -- flat on the floor on her belly, legs splayed out, her long floppy ears stretched straight out from the side of her head -- a position that makes her look like she was dropped from a considerable height.  Then she stares at us with her liquid brown eyes until we give her what she wants, which is typically either food, an ear skritch, or a stuffed toy to have a philosophical conversation with.

So it's nice to know that we're not the only ones being played by our pets.  In the long haul, though, I doubt it'll change our behavior.  They're just too good at what they do.  In fact, I have to wind this up, because Grendel is currently staring at me.  I'd better go see what he wants, or he'll resort to his "Sad Eyes And Furrowed Brow" tactic, and heaven knows we wouldn't want that.