Finding the right search parameters

I was making dinner last week, and the recipe called for soy sauce.  I knew we had a bottle of it -- and I was pretty sure it was somewhere in the door shelves of the fridge, amongst the various salad dressings, jellies, jams, sauces, and marinades we'd collected.  But I could not find the damn thing, and was becoming increasingly frustrated.

So instead of a quick scan -- usually sufficient to find what I'm looking for -- I decided on a one-at-a-time, bottle-by-bottle search, and as you've probably already guessed, I found the soy sauce in under thirty seconds.  I realized immediately what the problem was; in my mind I pictured it as having a red cap, and our bottle had a green cap.

You'd think that wouldn't make a difference, given that everything else about it was exactly like what I was picturing, up to and including being full of soy sauce and having a big label on the front that said, "SOY SAUCE."  But one piece of the search parameter was off, and that made me scan right past it, not once but several times.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons GanMed64, Soy Sauce selection (6362318717), CC BY 2.0]

This is far from the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, and it amazes me how subtle the error can be and still derail my efforts.  It doesn't have to be anything nearly as egregious as in the hilarious anecdote Dave Barry writes about when his mother, groceries in a cart and two small children in tow, spent an hour trying to find her car in the store parking lot.  She looked so pathetic that several kind shoppers pitched in to try to help her.  "It's a black Chevrolet," she said, over and over.  It was only after the search had gone on for a ridiculous length of time, up and down the parking lot lanes, that she remembered that the previous week they'd traded in their old car for a new one, and told the helpers, "Wait!  I just realized, it's not a black Chevrolet, it's a yellow Ford!"

The helpers apparently were not amused, and his mom spent the rest of her life trying to live down the embarrassment.

So we can be confounded by our brain's preconceived notions of what we're looking for, from the subtle to the (should be) obvious.  And some researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that finding the right search parameters even extends to characteristics we can't see.

This puzzling result came out of a series of experiments that were the subject of a paper this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.  The team, led by cognitive neuroscientist Li Guo, timed how long it took test subjects to isolate a target object from clutter, and they found that knowing characteristics of the object that aren't apparent to the eye -- like hardness or fragility -- significantly improved the speed with which subjects could find the object in question.  The authors write:

Our interactions with the world are guided by our understanding of objects’ physical properties.  When packing groceries, we place fragile items on top of more durable ones and position sharp corners so they will not puncture the bags.  However, physical properties are not always readily observable, and we often must rely on our knowledge of attributes such as weight, hardness, and slipperiness to guide our actions on familiar objects.  Here, we asked whether our knowledge of physical properties not only shapes our actions but also guides our attention to the visual world.  In a series of four visual search experiments, participants viewed arrays of everyday objects and were tasked with locating a specified object.  The target was sometimes differentiated from the distractors based on its hardness, while a host of other visual and semantic attributes were controlled.  We found that observers implicitly used the hardness distinction to locate the target more quickly, even though none reported being aware that hardness was relevant.  This benefit arose from fixating fewer distractors overall and spending less time interrogating each distractor when the target was distinguished by hardness.  Progressively more stringent stimulus controls showed that surface properties and curvature cues to hardness were not necessary for the benefit.  Our findings show that observers implicitly recruit their knowledge of objects’ physical properties to guide how they attend to and engage with visual scenes.

What I find most curious about the results of this experiment is if the characteristic you're given can't be seen, how does it help your brain to locate the object you're searching for?  "What makes the finding particularly striking from a vision science standpoint is that simply knowing the latent physical properties of objects is enough to help guide your attention to them," said study senior author Jason Fischer.  "It's surprising because nearly all prior research in this area has focused on a host of visual properties that can facilitate search, but we find that what you know about objects can be as important as what you actually see...  To me what this says is that in the back of our minds, we are always evaluating the physical content of a scene to decide what to do next.  Our mental intuitive physics engines are constantly at work to guide not only how we interact with things in our environment, but how we distribute our attention among them as well."

So it may be that we're approaching our search from a set theory perspective; searching through "the set of all things in my living room" is more efficient if I can eliminate "the subset of things in my living room that are rigid, heavy, stand upright," etc., so eventually my brain can whittle it down to "the couch throw-pillow my dog dragged behind the recliner."

It's still puzzling to me how our brains actually accomplish this, because it means some kind of interaction is occurring between our visual interpretive systems and our non-visual memories (of such things as texture, durability, and so on).  It'd be interesting to have people perform this task while in a fMRI machine -- and see how their brain firing pattern differs while performing this task as compared to performing a task that simply requires memory retrieval.

So that's our latest look at the fascinating world of cognitive neuroscience.  It doesn't explain, however, the weird phenomenon that happens to me while I'm doing home repair projects, wherein I spend 5% of the time doing actual home repair and 95% stomping around swearing and looking for the tool that was just in my damn hand five seconds ago.  That one's a mystery.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

The persistence of memory

One of the many amazing things about the brain is its ability to form connections between associated events.

These links can have amazing staying power.  The smell of old books will forever remind me of my grandmother's attic, which was my bedroom for a year when I was about ten years old.  Dan Fogelberg's songs always bring back painful memories of my ex-wife (a shame to have that association, because I actually like Dan Fogelberg).  The pretty little flowers called "sweet williams" call to mind the small plot of garden I had in my parents' back yard -- they were the first flowers I had real success with, and I still remember the pure, unalloyed joy of watching them flower for the first time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jim Evans, Sweet William -- Dianthus barbatus, CC BY-SA 4.0]

That we form these kinds of associations is common knowledge; how we do it is another matter entirely.  But some new research at Columbia University's Zuckerman Mind-Brain Behavior Institute has shed some light on this innate and ubiquitous capacity of the human mind.

In "Hippocampal Network Reorganization Underlies the Formation of a Temporal Association Memory," by Mohsen S. Ahmed et al., which appeared a couple of weeks ago in the journal Neuron, we find out that memories are as persistent as they are not because of a change in the neural firing pattern -- but because they actually cause a reorganization of synaptic connections in the hippocampus, a part of the brain long known to be crucial in memory consolidation.

The researchers taught mice to associate a neutral sound with a short, startling puff of air.  They were quick to learn to link the two; which, after all, was no different than Pavlov's dog connecting a bell with being fed dinner.  Because the two events being linked in the brain occurred with a significant separation in time, the researchers didn't think it could be that the parts of the hippocampus responsible for storing the memory of each were engaging in some kind of continuing cross-talk.  "We expected to see repetitive, continuous neural activity that persisted during the fifteen-second gap, an indication of the hippocampus at work linking the auditory tone and the air puff," said Stefano Fusi, professor of neuroscience at Columbia's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and co-author of the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "But when we began to analyze the data, we saw no such activity...  We were happy to see that the brain doesn't maintain ongoing activity over all these seconds because, metabolically, that's not the most efficient way to store information.  The brain seems to have a more efficient way to build this bridge, which we suspect may involve changing the strength of the synapses."

Understanding the way memories of different events become linked in the brain isn't just of academic interest, explaining the kinds of ordinary associations I described from my own life; it could be of real help in treating people with severe anxiety and/or post-traumatic stress syndrome, where traumatic events are linked to common stimuli (such as survivors of wartime who are triggered to panic by loud noises).  "While our study does not explicitly model the clinical syndromes of either of these disorders, it can be immensely informative," said study lead author Mohsin Ahmed.  "For example, it can help us to model some aspects of what may be happening in the brain when patients experience a fearful association between two events that would, to someone else, not elicit fright or panic."

The strength and persistence of memories can be a lifelong reminder of something joyful, or of something tragic, shocking, angering, or outright painful.  This experiment represents the first step on the road to understanding how our brain forms one memory and links it to another, and -- possibly -- gives us a direction to pursue in searching for how to disconnect that link, and allow people with severe anxiety and PTSD to live more normal lives.

And anything we can do to alleviate that suffering is a most laudable goal.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

Stairway to heaven

One of the things I love about writing daily here at Skeptophilia is that my long-time readers are constantly on the lookout for good topics.  One of my regular contributors, not to mention a dear friend, is the inimitable novelist K. D. McCrite, best known for her charming cozy mysteries and her fall-out-of-your-chair-funny young adult series The Confessions of April Grace.  K. D. and I were chatting a couple of days ago, and she asked me if I had ever heard of the phenomenon of stairs in the forest.

I told her I hadn't.

"Oh, yes," K. D. told me.  "Apparently it's a big thing.  You're out there in the woods, far away from everything, and you happen unexpectedly upon a set of stairs that goes nowhere.  No building, nothing nearby."

"What's it supposed to be?" I asked.  "I mean, besides a random set of stairs."

She told me that the aficionados claimed it was some kind of portal to another dimension.  "Supposedly it's connected with hikers going missing and other such spooky stuff."  She then sent me a couple of videos about the phenomenon.

If you want to take a look for yourself, the videos are here and here, and are worth watching just for the creepy photographs.  The general upshot of the videos is "there's this thing we've found in the woods and we don't know why it's there, so alien abductions and time slips and general scary shit."

Whatever the origin of the staircases, it's always a little spooky to find something in the woods you weren't expecting.  I still remember the inexplicable thrill of fear I felt when my wife and I were on a late October hike in our nearby national forest a few years ago, and I found something odd -- a Mardi Gras mask, in perfect condition, sitting on a log.  It looked like it'd just been placed there; it was in pristine condition, and wasn't even damp.  It was a cool, cloudy day, and we hadn't seen a single other person out there, which made it doubly bizarre.

So I said, "Hey, Carol," and put the mask on.

Carol looked at me for a moment, and then said, "You know, if you were a character in one of your own novels, you'd be about to die right now."

Anyhow, I didn't die, or even get possessed by an evil spirit or anything.  So I brought it home, and hung it on the wall in my office.

The next morning when I came in, the mask was in the middle of the floor.

After doing a double take, and then getting my heart rate back to normal, I ascertained that the strap had come loose.  So I put the strap back on, rehung it, and it's been there quietly ever since then.

Probably just waiting for an unguarded moment to jump on me and glue itself to my face and take over my soul.  You know how haunted masks are.

But I digress.

The staircase-in-the-woods thing is certainly atmospheric and creepy, although K. D. and I are in agreement that if we saw one, we'd immediately climb up to the top.  This would be inadvisable, according to one witness:

This is... probably the weirdest story I have.  Now, I don't know if this is true in every SAR [search-and-rescue] unit, but in mine, it's sort of an unspoken, regular thing we run into.  You can try asking about it with other SAR officers, but even if they know what you're talking about, they probably won't say anything about it.  We've been told not to talk about it by our superiors, and at this point we've all gotten so used to it that it doesn't even seem weird anymore.  On just about every case where we're really far into the wilderness, I'm talking 30 or 40 miles, at some point we'll find a staircase in the middle of the woods.  It's almost like if you took the stairs in your house, cut them out, and put them in the forest.  I asked about it the first time I saw some, and the other officer just told me not to worry about it, that it was normal.  Everyone I asked said the same thing.  I wanted to go check them out, but I was told, very emphatically, that I should never go near any of them.  I just sort of ignore them now when I run into them because it happens so frequently.

People who come across these lone staircases frequently feel "an unaccountable sensation of dread," and folks who have climbed them have come back down to find that several hours have passed, when it only felt like a few minutes.

That's... if they're ever seen again.

*cue scary music*

Now, as you might expect, I think there's a prosaic explanation here, or more likely, several of them.  The more pristine-looking ones, such as the one in the photograph above, could be observation platforms.  I've seen this sort of thing in a lot of places, especially areas known for their wildlife viewing.  The more dilapidated ones are probably the remnants of wood-frame houses with stone stairs, left behind when the wooden parts rotted away.  (Hiking with my brother-in-law in rural Massachusetts, we've come across a good many old house foundations -- one of which was the inspiration for my creepy story "The Cellar Hole.")  Some of the ones pictured in the video looked like they were simply steps that had been built into a steep hillside, and so not "going nowhere" at all.  Others appeared to be what was left of bridges or overpasses that had caved in.  Some could well be there because someone thought it'd be fun to create a mystery in the woods, like the little footbridge over nothing out in a flat open field near where my son used to live in Palmyra, New York.

That doesn't mean that if I came across one, I wouldn't be a little weirded out, especially now that I've been primed to think about Scary Stuff when I see one.  I still am pretty sure I'd climb it, because when might I have another opportunity to be abducted by aliens?

But sadly, I've never seen anything like this, despite the fact that when I was in my twenties and thirties, I spent damn near every summer back-country camping in the Cascades and Olympics.  The weirdest thing I saw out there was a random boardwalk in the middle of nowhere across a place called Ahlstrom's Prairie, where you're hiking through dense Douglas fir forest and suddenly come out into an open field bisected by a wooden boardwalk.  The effect is startling, a sudden reminder of humanity in a place out in the wilderness where you can spend a week and not see a single other person.

Of course, there's a reason for the boardwalk in Ahlstrom's Prairie: Ahlstrom, who built the thing and lived in a cabin nearby in the early part of the 20th century.  And the Parks Service that keeps it in good shape.  But it's an atmospheric place, and on my many hikes down it on the way to the mouth of the Ozette River, I always found it to be a little spooky, especially on a foggy day (pretty common in western Washington).

So I'm not going to jump to any paranormal explanations for the staircases in the woods, at least not till I experience a time slip myself.  But my thanks to my pal K. D. for suggesting the topic, which (despite all my inquiries into the supernatural over the past ten years) I'd never even heard of.

But I should wrap this up, because that mask hanging on my wall is whispering to me again, and I am compelled to do its bidding.  You know how it goes.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

Oobleck and stupidity

In his 1980 essay "The Cult of Ignorance," scientist, novelist, and polymath Isaac Asimov wrote, "The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through [American] political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

Asimov's words are, if anything, truer today than they were forty years ago when he wrote them.  It's an attitude I have a hard time comprehending.  My opinion has always been that of course I want our leaders to be more intelligent than I am; I know I'm not nearly smart enough to be the president.  But we've gone beyond the acceptance of ignorance Asimov pointed out into the realm of celebrating abject stupidity -- and, all too frequently, electing it to public office.  We've entered a terrifying time of living in the Upside Down, where individuals who can't put together a single sensible, grammatically-correct sentence, who engage in playground taunts that would sound immature coming out of the mouth of a third-grader, are lauded as "plain-spoken" and "willing to say what's on their mind."

Of course, as Stephen Colbert pointed out, "My drunk uncle says what's on his mind, and I don't want him to be president, either."

The American attitude toward intellectuals jumped out at me just a couple of days ago because of a charming piece of research into the behavior of "oobleck" -- the bizarre cornstarch/water mixture most of us got to play with as children.  Oobleck is a dilatant fluid, one in which the viscosity increases in proportion to the amount of shear strain.  Put more simply, if you hit it, it acts like a solid; if you press it gently, it acts like a liquid.  It is one of a group of weird substances called non-Newtonian fluids, which alter in viscosity dependent on stress, and include materials that are thixotropic (the fluid thins when it's stressed, like yogurt and ketchup) and ones that are rheopectic (the fluid thickens when it's stressed, like printer ink).  (Nota bene: it sounds like dilatant and rheopectic fluids are the same thing, but there's a technical difference in that rheopectic fluids continue to increase in viscosity the more they're shaken, while with dilatant fluids it's kind of an either/or thing.  But that's a minor point.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Baminnick, Cornstarch Experiment Materials, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In any case, the research I referenced above came out last week in Science Advances, and had to do with the old party trick of filling a shallow basin with oobleck and having people run across it barefoot.  Because of oobleck's dilatant nature, the faster you run, the harder the soles of your feet strike the surface -- so its viscosity and resistance increase, and you can run on the surface of something that's technically a liquid.

It turns out that there's a simple way to defeat this ability; all you have to do is rotate the basin.  The twisting motion means that when your foot strikes the surface, there's not only a vertical stress from the impact, there's horizontal shear from the basin turning under you, and that perpendicular shear reduces the viscosity and gets rid of the dilatant effect.  In other words, try running in oobleck on a rotating basin, and you'll sink.

I thought this was a pretty fun piece of research about a substance's very odd behavior, and noted with approval that it had been posted on social media...

... until I started reading the comments.

Here is a sampler.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because I don't want to run out of sics.

• This is what the scientist's are doing?  Taking taxpayer money and playing with goop.
• I read bullshit like this and I'm supposed to take "climate science" seriously?
• The usual libtard jerking off on the public dime.
• Youd think they had more important things to do, like inventing the next "pandemic."
• This is typicle waste of money.  They wonder why no one has faith in education when this is the kind of thing they spend time on than call it science.
• Check out where this happened.  A universtiy.  Color me surprised.

*brief pause to scream obscenities and kick a wall*

Okay, let me point out a few things, now that I've gotten that (mostly) out of my system.

First, just because the experiment was performed using something associated with kids' parties, they think it has no other applications?  What this shows is that they didn't even bother to read the paper itself, because the authors say the following:

The ability of OSP [orthogonal superimposed perturbations, the application of a rotational shear to flowing fluids] to de-solidify plugs formed under extension and fast compression has potential industrial applications where it is important to increase the flow rate or control the viscosity or unclog a pipe.  These applications range from high-throughput processing of dense suspensions such as cement and concrete to avoid jamming in narrow pipes and three-dimensional printing.

Stop for a moment and consider how many examples you can come up with of thick fluids flowing through pipes.  You think coming up with a simple, inexpensive way to stop those pipes from clogging is "the usual libtard jerking off?"

Second, there is a huge value to pure research.  I dealt with this here at Skeptophilia a very long time ago in a post that was spurred by the same kind of cretinous anti-intellectual commentary as this one was.  It looked at how pure research (which the uninformed call "just messing around") gave us, amongst many other things, antibiotics, x-rays, Teflon, and our understanding of anaphylactic shock and how genes produce proteins.  Just because you (not you personally) can't see the utility of a piece of research doesn't mean the scientists can't see it.

Third, why do these people think everything has to have utility in the first place?  Science used to be rightly revered for its capacity to expand the mind, to open our eyes to the wonder of the universe, to understand a small piece of it a little more clearly.  The subtext of the commentary from the yahoos I quoted above seems to be, "I'm fine being stupid and you have no right to try to fix that, or even to be smarter than I am."  This is, essentially, being arrogant about stupidity. as if being an absolute moron was a virtue, as if they were proud (and fortunate) that their brains had never been contaminated by any of that useless book-learnin'.

I honestly don't know how we've gotten here.  The popular attitude toward science and the intellect has become a race to the bottom.  A race we seem to be winning, given that we have a senator who thinks that a snowball disproves climate change, a representative who thinks we shouldn't be limiting our production of carbon dioxide because it's necessary for plant growth, and a president who makes so many ludicrous and ignorant statements daily that they're hard to keep up with.

A lot of it probably has its origins in the misguided egalitarianism that Asimov pointed out.  No, my ignorance is not as good as your knowledge.  All opinions are not equal.  My fifteen minutes of online "research" is not equivalent to the ten years of intensive study you spent to become an actual scientist.

Now, I'm not saying ignorance is necessarily shameful.  We're all ignorant about some things.  But we shouldn't be proud of it, either, and -- more to the point -- we should all be trying to remedy it.  Science remains our best way of doing that, and that means actual science, done by actual trained scientists who know how to evaluate data and who know when a hypothesis is supported and when it isn't, not the latest bizarre claim by some self-styled expert who happens to have a computer, a microphone, a YouTube channel, and a vastly inflated sense of the validity of his own opinions.

But once you've decided that ignorance is desirable, you've crossed a line into outright stupidity.  Ignorance is inevitable; stupidity is a choice.  Or, as it was put by my dad -- who wasn't well educated, but was one of the wisest, smartest people I've ever met, and who worked like hell to learn and to fill in those gaps in his knowledge left behind from his impoverished childhood -- "Ignorance is only skin deep; stupidity goes all the way to the bone."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

The selfie from hell

"Selfies" are all the rage these days. Heaven knows why, because they're usually poorly composed and not in focus.   They also tend to be taken at inadvisable times, such as when the subject-and-photographer has had one too many strawberry daiquiris, which is almost certainly what resulted in the invention of the truly unfortunate cultural phenomenon of "duck lips."

I won't say that I haven't succumbed to the temptation myself once or twice, although I hasten to add that it was sans daiquiris and "duck lips."  Here's one I took a few weeks ago to document my progress toward having completely unmanageable hair, given that all the barbershops are closed because of the pandemic:

So they don't all turn out terrible or embarrassing, although it still bears keeping in mind that the camera can still only do so much with the material it's given.  At least this one isn't the kind of thing I'll look at later and say, "How the hell did this end up on my phone?"

Which was apparently the question that was asked by one Gina Mihai, 34, of an unnamed village in Romania, according to a story in The Daily Mirror sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Mihai says she was looking through the photographs on her phone one day recently, and found the following rather horrifying image:

Pretty scary.  Mihai was understandably creeped out, but she had an explanation ready at hand.  She told reporters, "When I switched the phone on I was horrified to see my dead grandmother’s face.  She had what looked like a snake around her neck, and the whole image looked as if it had been taken through a hole, like it was shot through a tear in the fabric that separates the living from the dead."

In other words, poor grandma ended up in hell, and for some reason decided to send her granddaughter what amounts to an infernal selfie.  For comparison purposes, here's grandma in real life, just before she died:

I don't really see a lot of resemblance, myself.  But maybe that's because being in hell, not to mention having a snake around your neck, would kind of have a tendency to change your facial expression.

Mihai followed up the experience with a visit to a fortune-teller, because of course that's who you'd want to see if you wanted a touchstone of reality.  And the fortune-teller said that Mihai was right, granny was in hell, and the snake around her neck was because she was "being punished for certain sins."

The trouble is, the article also had a photograph of Mihai herself, which I include below:

And what strikes me is that the "selfie from hell" looks more like Mihai than it does like her grandmother.  My contention is that Mihai digitally altered a photograph of herself, an easy enough thing to do with any ordinary image modification software, and now is getting her fifteen minutes of fame by disparaging her poor grandma.

But even if her contention is correct, and grandma is in hell, I thought that once you were there, it amounted to solitary confinement in the Lake of Fire?  It's hard to imagine Satan allowing texting:

Grandma:  Excuse me, Your Infernal Evilness, can you hang on a minute?  I just need to send a message to my granddaughter.  *takes pic of herself with her phone*

Satan:  Well, okay, I'll let it go this time.  Just so long as you don't do "duck lips."  That earns you five more years in the red-hot lava pit.

Grandma:  How about the snake around my neck?  I can show my granddaughter that, right? 

Satan: Sure.

So the whole thing seems pretty improbable to me, just as improbable as claims of Jesus or various saints showing up on slices of toast.  You'd think that being powerful supernatural beings, they'd pick more direct ways of speaking to us, wouldn't you?  Like gigantic burning bushes or pillars of fire or hosts of heavenly and/or demonic entities rushing about.  But you never see any of that stuff, despite what you hear in all the folklore.

I wonder why that is.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

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

Looking for Martians

When I first read C. S. Lewis's book Out of the Silent Planet, when I was in high school, one of the things that struck me was his vision of life on Malacandra -- what we here on Earth call Mars.

Malacandra, Lewis tells us, is evolved sentient life much earlier than the Earth did, and is therefore approaching the end of its habitability -- the planet is cooling (the majority of its surface is too cold, and the air far too thin, to support life), and its three species of intelligent life have retreated to the deepest parts of the canyons, where the hot springs keep things comfortable.  Given that this is Lewis, there are supernatural overtones to the story, and it's a rollicking good adventure, but what stuck with me most is his vision of a planet that is dying.  Just about every other science fiction novel or movie or television show at the time seemed to picture things as static -- whatever the civilization was, it was just kind of there.  You got the impression things could go on that way forever.

Lewis, on the other hand, recognized not only that organic life forms evolve, but that the planets they live on change as well, and not just in relatively minor ways such as the arrangement of the continents and the depth of the oceans and the presence or absence of ice caps.  The entire planet can shift in such a way as to become uninhabitable -- and, as Lewis points out, that will be the ultimate fate of the Earth as well.

Mars just happened to be closer to the end than we are.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA - European Space Agency & Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research for OSIRIS Team ESA/MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, OSIRIS Mars true color, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO]

The truth of Lewis's vision has been realized lately in our discovery that long ago, Mars was warm enough to have liquid water and a significant atmosphere.  And this week, a paper came out in Nature Communications that analyzes date from the HiRISE camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showing that Mars's rivers and oceans left behind layers of sedimentary rock -- a site where future exploration might look for fossils of Martian life.

"Unfortunately we don’t have the ability to climb, to look at the finer-scale details, but the striking similarities to sedimentary rocks on Earth leaves very little to the imagination," said lead author Francesco Salese, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, in a press release.   "To form these 200-metre-thick deposits we needed conditions that would have required an environment capable of maintaining significant volumes of liquid water."

What this means is that not only was it warmer, the atmosphere was thicker.  The current thin atmosphere on Mars's surface means the pressure is low enough that water would evaporate away post-haste.  A billion years ago, Mars's climate was a great deal more like Earth's is today, but why the change happened isn't known.

I doubt it was the evil eldil from Thulcandra smiting the planet with his mighty fist, but otherwise, Lewis's picture of Mars's evolution toward the dead world it currently is was remarkably prescient.

"We’ve never seen an outcrop with this amount of detail on it that we can definitely say is so old,” said study co-author Joel Davis, postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London.  "This is one more piece of the puzzle in the search for ancient life on Mars, providing novel insight into just how much water occupied these ancient landscapes...  The rivers that formed these rocks weren’t just a one-off event — they were probably active for tens to hundreds of thousands of years."

I hope this will spur us to launch more projects with landers that can excavate and analyze these rocks, looking for (amongst other things) fossils.  What we can do remotely, albeit amazing, is still pretty rudimentary -- we can't launch an electron microscope into space yet -- but even a preliminary analysis of the sedimentary layers could produce some fascinating results.

Unfortunately, even if further exploration will discover traces ancient Martian life, I doubt they'll resemble Lewis's hrossa, séroni, and pfifltriggi.  A pity.  Those things were pretty cool.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

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

In your wildest dreams

So, last night, this weird thing happened.  I was skinnydipping in the Caribbean, swimming along trying to get to the other side, when I noticed some people on a boat following me.  They started yelling at me, not (surprisingly) to ask why I was out in the middle of the ocean, but to let me know that there was a hurricane coming and I'd better swim faster because otherwise I wouldn't reach Senegal (which is apparently on the "other side of the Caribbean") in time to avoid drowning in the storm.  They then motored off to get to safety themselves.  It never crossed my mind to wonder why, if the situation was so dire, they hadn't hauled me aboard.  Maybe it was because they were embarrassed by the fact I was naked and they didn't have an extra pair of swim trunks, although I don't remember being much bothered by the fact myself.  Or maybe it was because I'd apparently gotten out there myself, I could damn well get myself out of it, and they'd done their duty by at least letting me know that I was about to be in the middle of a cyclone.

I don't remember what happened after that.  I think it got a little weird.

Somewhere along the way, I woke up, and in the words that every bad fantasy writer has written at some point, "He realized it was only a dream."  Lying there in the dark, I started wondering why my errant brain had come up with something that odd, and came to the conclusion that it was an amalgam of various things over the last few days, like the NOAA bulletin I read saying we were likely to have an above-average year for dangerous hurricanes, and looking at some photos someone posted on Twitter from West Africa.  The skinnydipping part at least makes a modicum of sense because I love to swim but kind of hate swearing swim trunks.  Fortunately I have a pond that's in the privacy of my fenced back yard and only visible from the road if you look exactly in the right direction at exactly the right time, and my opinion is if someone's that determined to see my bare ass, they can have at it.  (Of course, given the way the weather's currently going in the Northeast, it'll probably be August before I'd be willing to swim without a fully-insulated dry-suit, much less naked.)

And for the record, this dream still wasn't as completely fucked up as my wife's dream a couple of nights ago about being tackled by an enormous kangaroo, or the one last night where she had rented an apartment in Washington D.C. but was dismayed to find that it had no door, and the only way you could get in was by climbing through the mail slot.

Apparently even King Solomon had some weird dreams, because I don't know what the hell this is about.  Luca Giordano, The Dream of Solomon (1694) [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of this comes up because of a paper this week in Cell Reports about a study of two epileptic patients who had implants to monitor their brain activity.  These electrodes were supposed to act as neuromuscular interfaces, allowing the individuals to overcome motor paralysis and move their arms simply by thinking about it, but along the way the devices made sensitive readings of neural firing patterns.  And what the researchers found was that when the patients went into the REM (rapid eye-movement) phase of sleep, during which we dream, the brain was apparently replaying firing patterns for motor control that had been learned the previous day.

So the researchers had the patients play a mental game of "Simon" -- remember the popular electronic toy where you had to press buttons to repeat a pattern of sounds and colors?  Of course, given these individuals' disabilities, they couldn't play the actual game, so the scientists instructed the patients to think through and recall the pattern they'd just seen, picturing themselves pushing the buttons in the correct order.

Then the patients took a nap.  And during REM, the same pattern emerged as they'd seen during the mental game.

Apparently, they were playing Simon in their dreams.

My wife had an experience like this back when she was in graduate school, and engaged in the occupation that all serious grad students take part in, namely: playing video games instead of studying.  In her case, it was Tetris, and she finally realized she was spending way too much time playing it when she started having Tetris dreams.

But evidently this is something we all do, and gives us a lens into why we dream in the first place.  It's long been thought that dreaming has to do with memory consolidation -- reinforcing pathways that the brain has decided are important, moving critical memories into long-term storage, and pruning away information that is less essential.  Your brain makes the understandable (if sometimes erroneous) judgment that if you repeat an activity a bunch of times, it must have some survival value, and you replay it while you sleep so you can do it more fluidly when you're awake.

Even if all you're practicing is your ability to stack up bunches of colored blocks while vaguely Russian-sounding music plays in the background.

"This study is fascinating," said Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who was not involved in the study, in an interview with CNN.  "Despite decades of research, it remains somewhat unclear how 'short-term' memories get filed away to become 'long-term' memories that can be recalled later.   Using a brain-computer interface is an exciting way to study memory since it can record brain cell activity patterns and then look for those exact patterns later...  This supports the notion that in order to optimize memory function and learning, people need to prioritize restful activities -- most importantly adequate sleep -- to keep our 'engines' running at peak performance."

Which is fascinating, but hardly news to chronic insomniacs like myself.  I know that after a night's poor sleep, everything -- memory, motor responses, mood, sensory awareness -- is affected negatively.  The restorative power of sleep is well-documented, and absolutely essential to health, both physical and mental.

What this study does, though, is to pinpoint one of the ways sleep helps us -- by reinforcing our memory of critical events from the previous days.  We already knew why dreams are so bizarre; during REM, the prefrontal cortex -- which among many other things, acts as a sort of "reality filter," allowing you to sift fact from fantasy -- is essentially offline.  Apparently the memory consolidation function works best when you can get the hypercritical "Okay, that is clearly not real" part of your brain out of the way.

But I still don't think it can explain why I was swimming toward Senegal, naked, during a hurricane.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

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