Skeptophilia

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Heavy-duty nonsense

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dirk Hünniger; Derivative work in english - Balajijagadesh, Hydrogen Deuterium Tritium Nuclei Schmatic-en, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The "Beginner's Guide to Deuterium and Health," however, has some information that would be seriously scary if it weren't for the fact that nearly all of it wrong. It starts with a definition of "deuterium," which is correct, and is honestly the last thing on the entire webpage that is. You're put on notice about the veracity of the site in the first paragraph, wherein we find that the details of how awful deuterium is for you is only accessible to "those with an understanding of advanced bio-chemistry, bio-physics and quantum health."

What, pray, is "quantum health?" The health of your subatomic particles? The health of people who are so extremely small that they can only be detected with sensitive instruments? The health of people who jump from "sick" to "well" and back again without passing all the stages in between?

Or, perhaps, does it refer to someone who is both sick and well at the same time until they go to a doctor, at which point the Alt-Med Wave Function collapses, and they become one or the other?

Then we find out that our health depends on how fast our mitochondria are spinning. No lie, here's the relevant passage:

At a quantum level hydrogen plays a vital role in mitochondria function. Mitochondria are the powerhouse batteries of the body. They ultimately facilitate energy production. Within the mitochondria there is a spinning head that rotates very fast, the rotation speed of this spinning head determines how efficiently you create energy. The faster the spinning head rotates the more energy you make and the healthier you will be. The slower the spinning head rotates the less energy you will make and this leaves you more susceptible to chronic mismatch diseases and faster aging.

What this is referring to, insofar as I can understand it, is the electron transport chain, wherein electrons in your mitochondria give up some of their energy through a series of oxidation/reduction reactions, and that energy is used to shuttle hydrogen ions across the mitochondrial membrane. The ultimate result is the generation of ATP, a crucial energy storage molecule.

The amusing part is that the rate of this reaction is controlled incredibly tightly. You need about seventy million ATP molecules per second, per cell, and you use them equally quickly -- ATP doesn't store well. If your rate of production went up without your rate of consumption going up, you won't be healthier; the ATP will break down, liberating the energy as heat, and you'll spontaneously burst into flame.

So the site is right to the extent that if this happened, worrying about illness and aging would be down near the bottom of your Priorities List.

Anyhow, what we're told is that deuterium kind of gums up the works, making the "spinning head" run more slowly, giving us chronic diseases. What kind of chronic diseases is never specified, because apparently they're all caused by the same thing, whether you're talking about arthritis or high blood pressure.

The pièce de resistance, however, is when the website tells us what to do about all this. In order to avoid this bad stuff, the solution is simple: we have to start drinking water with the deuterium removed.

But how do you do this?

Easy. You take ordinary tap water, and freeze it.

If you put water in the freezer, they say, the heavy water will freeze first. So you wait until a crust of ice forms, and either chip off and remove that, or else pour off the still-liquid part of the water. Do it again and again, and eventually you'll have healthful "deuterium-depleted" water.

It works even better, they say, if you start with water "from glacial regions," because it's already been de-deuterium-ized naturally.

I know that the people who construct nuclear reactors would be glad to hear this. The current method of producing heavy water for industry is called the Girdler sulfide process, which produces one ton of heavy water for every 340,000 tons of water you start with. This means the stuff's expensive -- one place I looked is charging $680 per liter. If all they had to do is freeze regular water and pull off the ice, it'd be quite a cost savings.

As with many wacky claims, there's a (small) grain of truth to this stuff. Heavy water does have a higher freezing point than ordinary water (3.7 C as compared to 0 C). It's also toxic, but only if you replace 25% of your body's water content with heavy water -- an expensive proposition given its cost. (One source said, "accidental or intentional poisoning with heavy water is unlikely to the point of practical disregard. Poisoning would require that the victim ingest large amounts of heavy water without significant normal water intake for many days to produce any noticeable toxic effects.")

What about our consumption of heavy water from contamination of ordinary water? Well, since in virtually all tested water sources, the concentration of heavy water is one part in 3,200, I don't think you have much to worry about. But if it amuses you to partly freeze your drinking water and throw away the icy part, by all means have at it.

Oh, and the website also says that once you "flush out the deuterium" from your body, your "energy level will increase, along with your magnetic field." Which sounds potentially dangerous to me. I would hate to have just made myself all healthy and deuterium-free, then I walk into a Williams-Sonoma and my magnetic field starts attracting metal kitchen implements, and I get impaled in the forehead by a meat cleaver or something.

So there you have it. How to go through a lot of folderol to remove something from your water that (1) is there in vanishingly small amounts, and (2) has no toxic effects at that dosage. Me, I'm more inclined to eat right and exercise regularly, but maybe I'm only saying that because the deuterium has gummed up the "spinning heads" in my brain's mitochondria and I'm not thinking straight. You can see how that could happen.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Friday, May 4, 2018

Alien DNA test

Being that the print is a little small, let me list the salient features:

It sounds like your typical DNA analysis kit, wherein you spit into a test tube and send it in. I did one of these (23 & Me) just out of curiosity, not that there's anything particularly in question about my own ancestry. My heritage is French, Scottish, German, Dutch, and English, and my DNA came back: French, Scottish, German, Dutch, and English. At least it speaks well for the accuracy of the analysis, not to mention my genealogical research and the low incidence of infidelity in my family. (Incidentally, my DNA profile allowed me to connect with four different people whom I had not known before, and who turned out to be fairly close cousins.)
The difference here is that instead of telling you your ethnic makeup, this test purports to tell you how much of it doesn't originate on planet Earth. Note that it is accompanied by a highly scary-looking artist's representation of an individual who, if your test turns out to be positive, is apparently your Great-Great-Great Grandpa G'zork.
It originates in Canada, and you can't have it shipped to the United States. I find this a little suspicious. I mean, it could be because it would require the transportation of bodily fluids across national boundaries, which could be a serious issue vis-à-vis disease transmission, but I prefer the hypothesis that it's because here in the United States, they'd prefer it if we don't find out we're actually aliens. So far, apparently they're keeping Rudy Giuliani in the dark, and he looks a lot more like the aforementioned G'zork than most of the humans I've seen.
It costs only $15.95 (Canadian). This is a hell of a deal, especially given what it purports to do. My 23 & Me test set me back eighty bucks, which I spent to find out what I more or less already knew. (It did tell me that I have about three hundred "Neanderthal gene markers," which probably explains why I like my steaks on the rare side, and periodically feel like hitting people with a club, especially the ones who walk really slowly while blocking the entire aisle in the grocery store.)

So to any of my Canadian readers who don't mind sacrificing sixteen bucks for a little empirical research, I encourage you to buy a kit, and let us know here at Skeptophilia headquarters about the results.

Having a background in genetics, however, I have to wonder what they're using for their basis of comparison. I know that in the historical documentary The X Files, the government had lots of deep-frozen alien babies in a lab somewhere, which (of course) Mulder found and (of course again) Scully didn't get to see. So did they do a genetic analysis of the alien babies?

More importantly, why am I putting so much effort into analyzing this?

My general feeling is that even if alien intelligence exists, it's extremely unlikely that it will have a similar biology to ours, and even less likely that it will encode its genetic material the same way. (Witness the fact that even related terrestrial species, who have fairly recent common ancestry, can't interbreed.) So the chance of human/alien hybridization is nil, and that's even assuming they have naughty bits that are of the right size and shape to be compatible with ours.

Anyhow, that's our dip in the deep end for today. And if you turn out to have alien DNA, I'm sorry if I sounded scornful. I don't mean to insult your family.

Although I'd make an exception in the case of Rudy Giuliani.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Thursday, May 3, 2018

Taming the multiverse

Online Critical Thinking course -- free for a short time!

This week, we're launching a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking through Udemy! It includes about forty short video lectures, problem sets, and other resources to challenge your brain, totaling about an hour and a half. The link for purchasing the course is here, but we're offering it free to the first hundred to sign up! (The free promotion is available only here.) We'd love it if you'd review the course for us, and pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Thanks!

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I had a rather mind-blowing experience yesterday, as I was reading a BBC Online article called "Professor Stephen Hawking's Multiverse Finale," by Pallab Ghosh.

You know how sometimes when you're reading a book or watching a movie, and suddenly you realize that a major plot twist is about to happen? At first, you're thinking, "No... no, that can't be what's happening... Really?" Then you think, "C'mon... wow... that couldn't be what this is leading up to!" And finally, "OMG it actually happened!"

That's how I felt reading this article.

It'd have been interesting even without the sucker punch. It's about Stephen Hawking's last academic paper, co-authored with American physicist James Hartle and submitted to the Journal of High-Energy Physics ten days before his death, which proposed a solution to the result of the Big Bang (and largely unrelated to the issue of cosmic inflation I wrote about in yesterday's post, except that they happened at the same time) that simultaneously solved several "loose ends" regarding the beginning of the universe.

The problem was, their first attempt at a solution generated another problem; an infinite number of parallel universes, each with their own physical laws, and seemingly no particular reason why a given universe had a given set of rules.

Thomas Hertog, of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who contributed to the research, wasn't satisfied with this. "Neither Stephen nor I were happy with that scenario," he said in an interview with BBC News. "It suggests that the multiverse emerged randomly and that we can't say very much more about that. We said to each other: 'Maybe we have to live with it'. But we didn't want to give up."

So they didn't. And their investigations concluded something earthshattering:

The multiverse is only composed of universes with physical laws similar to our own.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I first ran into the concept that the properties of the universe were controlled by a small number of seemingly arbitrary constants when I read Sir Martin Rees's book Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shaped the Universe, wherein we find out that there are six that seem "fine-tuned" to generate a universe that can support life: N (the ratio between the electromagnetic and gravitational forces), ε (the strength of the strong nuclear force), Ω (the ratio of the mass of the universe to the critical mass), λ (the cosmological constant), Q (the ratio of the gravitational energy required to pull a large galaxy apart to the energy equivalent of its mass), and D (the number of spatial dimensions).

Rees's book goes into the fascinating details of what a universe would look like if one of those constants was even slightly different than it is. The end result for most of these nudges is a universe that would be profoundly uninhabitable; in many of them, stars couldn't form, and in some of them, there would be no atoms, only a homogeneous soup of quarks. Rees himself seems inclined to use this seeming "fine tuning" as support for the Strong Anthropic Principle -- that our universe was created with the physical constants it has so that it will be conducive to the formation of matter, stars, and ultimately, life.

Predictably, that solution has never really appealed to me. I'm much more inclined toward the Weak Anthropic Principle -- that of course our universe has constants set in such a way as to allow life, because if they hadn't been, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

But Stephen Hawking's final contribution toward physics may render all of this a moot point. If the mathematics of quantum physics restricts the Big Bang from forming universes except those with physical constants like our own, it may have been constrained -- and these seemingly un-derivable constants may come from the physics of the Big Bang itself.

Which is mind-blowing. From the chaos of an infinite number of universes with random physical laws, we have the possibility of a multiverse composed of universes much like our own. Of course, it still seems certain that there is no travel between our home and these parallel worlds, which invalidates the premise of about half of the plots of Star Trek: The Next Generation (not to mention my own novel Lock & Key). But that's a price I'm willing to pay. The contribution of Stephen Hawking, along with his colleagues James Hartle and Thomas Hertog, have brought order to a universe that seemed random, and may have provided us the answer to one of the most fundamental questions -- why our universe has the laws it does.

What more fitting Swan Song could Hawking have had?

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Condensation and inflation

0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds, and

0.0000000000000000000000000000001 seconds following the Big Bang.

This era is called the "inflationary period," a term that was coined by Alan Guth (then at Cornell) and Andrei Linde of Stanford, way back in 1979, who were investigating the question of why there are no magnetic monopoles (magnetic particles with only a north or south pole, but not both) and stumbled upon a phenomenon called a false vacuum that accounted for the known properties of matter and the universe. The problem was, the mathematics of the false vacuum required a period extremely early on in the universe's history when it underwent exponential expansion. If you thought the time duration of inflation defied the imagination, the size expansion is worse -- in that minuscule fraction of a second, the universe increased in volume by a factor of 10⁷⁸ -- one followed by 78 zeroes.

(Regular readers of Skeptophilia may remember that a while back, I wrote about a rather hysterical article that was making the rounds, speculating about the likelihood of our false vacuum state being superseded by a true vacuum -- which would rapidly destroy the entire universe. The general conclusion of the physicists is that the risk of this is close enough to zero that you shouldn't be losing any sleep over it.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Original: Drbogdan Vector: Yinweichen, History of the Universe, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As crazy as this sounds, it's been borne up by the evidence. The vast majority of the research done on this topic is far beyond me even considering my B.S. in physics, but suffice it to say that most physicists accept inflation as a reality. It accounts for a number of interesting phenomena, including isotropy -- that the universe looks homogeneous no matter what direction you look, which begs an explanation unless you think that the Earth is located in the dead center of the universe, a possibility that is even less than our risk of being destroyed by a true vacuum. So it may sound hard to believe, but apparently, this enormous expansion in an unimaginably tiny fraction of a second actually happened.

Just last week there was another piece of evidence added to all of this, wherein scientists at the University of Maryland created a peculiar form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate that exhibited the properties of cosmic inflation, albeit (and fortunately) on a much smaller scale. Emily Conover, over at Science News, describes the experiment as follows:

Shaped into a tiny, rapidly expanding ring, the condensate grew from about 23 micrometers in diameter to about four times that size in just 15 milliseconds. The behavior of that widening condensate re-created some of the physics of inflation, a brief period just after the Big Bang during which the universe rapidly ballooned in size (SN Online: 12/11/13) before settling into a more moderate expansion rate.

In physics, seemingly unrelated systems can have similarities under the hood. Scientists have previously used Bose-Einstein condensates to simulate other mysteries of the cosmos, such as black holes (SN: 11/15/14, p. 14). And the comparison between Bose-Einstein condensates and inflation is particularly apt: A hypothetical substance called the inflaton field is thought to drive the universe’s extreme expansion, and particles associated with that field, known as inflatons, all take on the same quantum state, just as atoms do in the condensate.

Another point in favor of this research having recreated on some level the early expansion of the universe is that sound waves sent through the condensate increased in wavelength -- just as light has been red-shifted by the expansion of the space it's traveling through.

I'd be lying if I said I understood last week's paper on anything but the most rudimentary level, but it still gives me a sense of wonder that we can peer into the distant past -- into a time that lasted almost no time at all -- and use that information to draw conclusions about why the universe has the properties it does. The progress we've made in expanding scientific understanding, in just the last twenty years, is mind-boggling.

All of which makes me wonder what the next twenty years will bring. I'm hoping it's a warp drive, but that might be a forlorn hope, given that the General Theory of Relativity is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

A switch for aging

CRITICAL THINKING COURSE AVAILABLE STARTING TODAY!

I have an exciting announcement -- today, I'm launching a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking through Udemy! It includes about forty short video lectures, problem sets, and other resources to challenge your brain, totaling about an hour and a half. The link for purchasing the course is here, but we're offering it free to the first hundred to sign up! (The free promotion is available only here.) We'd love it if you'd review the course for us, and pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Thanks!

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I, and many of my friends, are of That Certain Age where we have started getting such awesome physical symptoms as graying hair, wrinkles, arthritis, forgetfulness, and the necessity of either wearing reading glasses or getting arm extensions. I'm not the sort that will let being 57 (or any other age) slow me down if I can help it, but there's no denying that I don't feel as young as I did twenty (or even five) years ago.

So any time I see an article on the biology of life span, my ears perk up. I'm hopeful that there will eventually be medical ways to extend healthy life span (sure would be nice if it happened soon...), but to get there, we need to understand how aging actually works. And a new piece of research out of the University of Minnesota has given us another clue.

Geneticists Adam McLain and Christopher Faulk were interested in a feature of the genetics of all eukaryotes (life forms that have nuclei -- therefore, every common organism with the exception of bacteria) called a promoter. To see where this is going, a brief biology lesson.

You can think of genes as recipes. They are a set of instructions that, speaking in the A/T/C/G language, spell out the directions for building proteins. Many of those proteins then go on to influence other genes, creating a cascade of activity that we collectively call "development."

Promoters are, in a way, the director of the orchestra. Or -- a more apt analogy -- they're like a set of switches. The promoters are not part of the recipe itself; they have instead the critical job of pointing out where the recipe is, making sure that it's switched on (or off) at the right time, and regulating how fast the end product is produced. Errors in a promoter region are usually devastating -- one of the milder examples is genetic lactose intolerance, where faulty promoter turns off the gene that produces lactase, the enzyme that digests lactose, leading to an inability to drink milk after the age of three or four (and some pretty nasty symptoms if you do).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So promoters are critical to genes, not only turning them on or off in the right sequence, but making sure that the right amount of the protein is made in the right tissue type. This importance means they're what geneticists call "highly conserved sequences" -- things go so badly awry when they malfunction that there are few mutational differences between promoters in different species. What McLain and Faulk wondered is if promoter activity might have something to do with the rate of aging, so they set out to compare those small number of mutational differences between species that have generally short life spans (such as mice) and those that have generally long life spans (such as elephants).

What they looked at are called CpG sites -- areas high in the bases cytosine and guanine (and in which they occur right next to each other), which are found in promoters and are targets for methylation, a process that turns promoters off more or less permanently. And what they found is that the density of CpG sites positively correlates with average age at death.

Which is pretty amazing. The authors write:

As vertebrates age, the epigenomic pattern of DNA methylation degrades, with the highly methylated CpG sites gradually becoming demethylated, while CGIs increase in methylation. Therefore, DNA methylation becomes dysregulated as a function of aging and high CpG density may delay or buffer specific regions from age-related changes. Some gene exons have undergone accelerated evolution in long-lived species as their protein function is under selection. However, unlike coding sequences, promoter regions alter gene expression, not protein function, so different species can regulate expression without altering the protein function. Within promoter regions the rapid mutation of CpG sites and their function in epigenetic gene expression make them prime targets for natural selection. We chose CpG site density because density alone is sufficient to predict methylation level. Since methylation degrades over an individual's lifespan, we reasoned that selection for long lifespan may act not only on gene coding regions but on promoter regions. This selection would change promoter CpG density for genes whose expression must be more tightly regulated to allow for longer lifespan.

So methylation, connected to the presence (and number) of CpG sites, is tightly connected to life span; as you age, the regulation of methylation starts to fall apart, deactivating genes that should be active and activating genes that should be turned off. Species whose promoters have a higher density of CpG sites regulate methylation more tightly -- and age more slowly!

When I got to the punchline of their paper, I was a little stunned. It's astonishing that life span could be controlled by something that simple (okay, the concept isn't simple, but the connection between CpGs and aging rate is pretty straightforward). The next question, of course (especially those of us who are rapidly approaching geezerhood) is whether there's a way to affect the process of methylation -- preserving its ability to regulate gene expression, and (presumably) slowing down the aging process.

All of which is far beyond the scope of this study. But still, it's an intriguing prospect, whether or not it ever becomes feasible in practice. Me, I hope it does, and I hope it's soon. Because I've about had it with gray hair, creaky joints, and entering a room only to immediately forget why I'm there.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Monday, April 30, 2018

Music and dementia

My mother's elder sister died ten years ago, at the age of 90, after a long, slow, tragic decline from Alzheimer's disease. I remember my Aunt Florence as a bright, intelligent woman, who loved to read, had a whipcrack sense of humor, and could beat just about anyone around at Scrabble. The first symptoms were a gradual descent into what my mom called "fogginess," but it was accompanied by worry, anxiety, and paranoia. She lost more and more of herself to this horrible disease, and during the last few years of her life she was immobile, unresponsive, with no apparent awareness of her surroundings.

My cousin, her eldest daughter, and her family cared for Aunt Florence with a diligence and selflessness that borders on heroism. Even after she no longer knew where she was or who was in the room with her, they talked to her, made sure she was kept warm and safe, and was hugged and shown affection every single day.

To me, dementia is one of the scariest things out there. I can't imagine anything more fundamentally terrifying than to lose one's memory and sense of self, to have a damaged mind trapped in a withering body, to be totally dependent on others for my care. No one should have to endure that. I'm hopeful that research in Alzheimer's will one day find a therapy or medication that slows down the progress of the disease, or perhaps cures it entirely.

In the meantime, there's been some interesting research into palliative care. Just last week, the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced some research that will be published this month in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer's Disease, done at the University of Utah, that considers using music as a way to alleviate the horrible anxiety that comes along with the early and middle stages of the disease.

Researchers found that the part of the brain that mediates our emotional response to music is relatively undamaged by Alzheimer's (for reasons as yet unknown). They investigated the possibility that even people whose memories were largely gone might remember, and be comforted by, hearing familiar music. And their results were striking.

Jace King, lead author of the study, said the response was obvious. "When you put headphones on dementia patients and play familiar music, they come alive. Music is like an anchor, grounding the patient back in reality."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Evdokiya, EscportalW Music transparent, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The researchers placed the test subjects in an fMRI machine, and monitored brain activity while playing one of three things through headphones -- a selection from the patient's music collection, the same music played backwards, and silence. The familiar music triggered dramatically increased activity in the cerebrum, and a spike in functional connectivity.

The previously quiet parts of the brain were once again talking to each other.

Norman Foster, senior author of the paper, was encouraged by these results. "This is objective evidence from brain imaging that shows personally meaningful music is an alternative route for communicating with patients who have Alzheimer's disease," Foster said. "Language and visual memory pathways are damaged early as the disease progresses, but personalized music programs can activate the brain, especially for patients who are losing contact with their environment."

It's not a cure, or even a treatment, for the disease, but anything that can alleviate the horrific anxiety that comes along with it is a blessing. "In our society, the diagnoses of dementia are snowballing and are taxing resources to the max," study co-author Jeff Anderson said. "No one says playing music will be a cure for Alzheimer's disease, but it might make the symptoms more manageable, decrease the cost of care and improve a patient's quality of life."

Which is tremendous in and of itself. Considering how much music affects me emotionally -- I'm the guy who wept the first time I heard Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis -- it's fantastic that there is a way to bring some of that emotional depth back to people who are becoming progressively disconnected from their world.

So if, heaven forfend, I ever descend into that deep, dark pit that is Alzheimer's, please give me a temporary reprieve by playing some of my favorite music. You could start with Stravinsky's Firebird.

After that, use your imagination. I'll be thankful, even if at that point I may not be able to say so.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Saturday, April 28, 2018

The beat goes on

I've been a language geek for a very long time, which at least partly explains how a guy who has a bachelor's degree in physics and teaches high school biology has a master's degree in linguistics. There's something about the way communication works that is simply fascinating to me.

There's a tremendous diversity in how languages work. On the basic level, the phonetics of languages can differ greatly; each language has a unique sound structure. Some really different, at least to my English-speaking brain; consider Xhosa, the language spoken by over ten million people in South Africa, which has three different consonants that are clicks (usually written "c" for the dental click, "x" for the lateral click, and "q" for the palatal click). If you want to hear Xhosa sung, check out this video of the legendary Miriam Makeba singing the song "Qongqothwane:"

Another complication is tonality -- for many languages, the same syllable spoken with a rising vs. a falling tone actually has a completely different meaning. (English only has one consistent tonal feature, which is that a rise in tone at the end of a sentence can denote a question, but the pitch change doesn't alter the meaning, as it does in many languages.)

It can be odder than that, though. There are whistled languages, such as Silbo in the Canary Islands. Many examples exist -- France, Greece, Turkey, India, Nepal, and Mexico all have groups who communicate by whistling (although they also have spoken language; no group I've ever heard of communicates exclusively by whistles). Along the same lines -- and it was recent research on this topic that spurred this post -- are drummed languages.

Linguist Frank Seifart was researching endangered languages in Colombia, and was in a village where the Bora language is spoken while the chief was away. The chief was sent for -- by someone drumming out a pattern that meant, "A stranger has arrived. Come home."

And it's not just a code, like Morse code; the drumbeat patterns actually mimic the changes in timbre, pitch, and rhythm of the speech the drummer is trying to emulate. The paper, which appeared in the journal Royal Society Open Science last week, was titled, "Reducing Language to Rhythm: Amazonian Bora Drummed Language Exploits Speech Rhythm for Long-Distance Communication," and begins as follows:

Many drum communication systems around the world transmit information by emulating tonal and rhythmic patterns of spoken languages in sequences of drumbeats. Their rhythmic characteristics, in particular, have not been systematically studied so far, although understanding them represents a rare occasion for providing an original insight into the basic units of speech rhythm as selected by natural speech practices directly based on beats. Here, we analyse a corpus of Bora drum communication from the northwest Amazon, which is nowadays endangered with extinction. We show that four rhythmic units are encoded in the length of pauses between beats. We argue that these units correspond to vowel-to-vowel intervals with different numbers of consonants and vowel lengths. By contrast, aligning beats with syllables, mora or only vowel length yields inconsistent results. Moreover, we also show that Bora drummed messages conventionally select rhythmically distinct markers to further distinguish words. The two phonological tones represented in drummed speech encode only few lexical contrasts. Rhythm thus appears to crucially contribute to the intelligibility of drummed Bora. Our study provides novel evidence for the role of rhythmic structures composed of vowel-to-vowel intervals in the complex puzzle concerning the redundancy and distinctiveness of acoustic features embedded in speech.

An amusing part of the research is that in the Bora drummed language, each message is followed by a pattern that means, "Now, don't say that I am a liar." Seifart says that the gist is much like a parent yelling at a child, "Don't tell me you didn't hear me!"

The whole thing is fascinating -- when communicating over distances long enough that our voices won't reach, people have invented new ways to send messages -- and those new ways incorporate many of the phonetic, tonal, and syntactic frameworks of the original language.

The biologist in me, however, is curious about how this is being processed in the brain. Does drummed speech get interpreted in the same place in the brain where spoken language is? There's been a parallel study on whistled languages -- Onur Güntürkün, a biopsychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Bochum, Germany, who has studied how whistled languages are processed in the brain, found that there was an intriguing difference between the activity of the brain while listening to whistled versus spoken language. Since we process melodic tones primarily in the right side of the cerebrum and language primarily in the left, Güntürkün suspected that whistled languages would activate both sides equally -- and he was right.

As far as drummed languages, Güntürkün was especially interested in how the content of messages could be conveyed by milliseconds-long variations in the rhythm pattern. "I’m amazed that these tiny milliseconds are doing the job," he said, adding that the next step is an analysis of how the two hemispheres of the brain process drummed speech, specifically timing cues.

All of which brings home again not only the amazing processing power of the brain, but the drive in humans to communicate. It emphasizes once again the importance of preserving these endangered languages -- not only for reasons of protecting people's cultural identities, but for what it tells us about the neurological underpinning of our own minds.

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