Through the looking glass

Regular readers of Skeptophilia may remember that a couple of weeks ago, I attempted to write a post on the odd superstitions surrounding mirrors, but got sidetracked over and over.

In a curious almost-synchronicity, today I ran into an article about how artificial intelligence can learn how to detect mirror-reversed images, even when they don't have such obvious cues as text to go by.  So I figured I ought to give another shot at addressing the topic of mirrors, more seriously this time.

Mirror reversal is a peculiar phenomenon, and I recall when I was in introductory physics in college and we were studying the optics of mirrors and lenses, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out why a flat mirror reverses an image right-to-left but not top-to-bottom.

The answer, which many of you probably already know, is that mirrors don't reverse right-to-left, exactly; they reverse back-to-front.  This has the effect of a right/left reversal because it's like you're looking at the object from the other side (imagine the object in question was transparent, but you could still see its contours, and the reasoning becomes easier).

Look, I can prove it to you.  Stand in front of a mirror.  What it seems like is that there is another person who looks exactly like you standing behind a clear piece of glass, at the same distance from the glass as yourself and facing you.  Now, think about what it would be like if you were to join him/her -- go behind the mirror.  To get there, you would have to walk behind the glass and turn 180 degrees about the vertical axis to face you.  If you did that, your left hand would be opposite his/her right hand, and vice versa.  What actually happened is that your reflection didn't do a 180 degree turn.  It was reversed front to back with no rotation at all.  You're seeing yourself not so much reversed as turned inside-out.

Interestingly, there is a mirror that reverses objects top to bottom -- a concave mirror.  It also creates an image that appears to be in front of the mirror, not behind it, and in the right setup, the image seems to be floating in space (which is why the physicists call concave mirror images "real images," and ones that are behind the mirror -- as in flat and convex mirrors -- "virtual images").

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Whether concave mirrors reverse text is left as an exercise for the reader.

But what brought me to the subject of mirrors (again -- although my first attempt was pretty pathetic) is the paper "Visual Chirality," by Zhiqiu Lin, Jin Sun, Abe Davis, and Noah Snavely, of Cornell University, which was presented at the 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.  What the researchers did was to use a trainable artificial intelligence program to analyze images, some of which were mirror-reversed and others which were not, to see if it was possible to determine reversal without using such giveaways as text, analog clocks, and so on.

And they got pretty good at it.  Some of the cues it picked up on were of the "oh, yeah, of course" type, such as looking at where the buttons were on a button-down shirt.  (Buttons tend to be on the right side -- although years ago women's shirts used to button from the other side, most shirts for either gender now usually have the buttons on the right.)  Wristwatches were also a giveaway, even when the faces weren't visible; most people wear them on the left wrist.  People carrying phones usually had them in their right hands, probably attributable to the fact that between seventy and eighty percent of us are right-handed.

But there were some curious ones.  Turns out the algorithm figured out that when people are in face-forward photographs but not looking directly at the camera, they usually gaze to the left.  Men with facial hair also were easy for the software to pick out when reversed -- the researchers suspect it has something to do with the way men trim their beards (perhaps also connected to using the right versus the left hand to do so), but what exactly the algorithm was picking up on, the researchers aren't certain.

"It’s a form of visual discovery," said study co-author Noah Snavely.  "If you can run machine learning at scale on millions and millions of images, maybe you can start to discover new facts about the world."

After training, the algorithm was getting the answer right eighty percent of the time even when all the obvious giveaways were removed -- not a bad score.  The study has applications in the analysis of images, and detection of when those images have been doctored or altered.

What it puts me in mind of is the facial asymmetry that most humans have, something well-known to portrait artists.  Take a sheet of paper, and stand in front of your bathroom mirror.  Relax your facial muscles -- try for a neutral expression -- and cover up first one, then the other, half of your face with the paper.  You'll be surprised at how different they look -- angle of the mouth, position of the eyebrows, and so on can vary greatly.  (There was an interesting study a while back that correlated facial symmetry with our perception of beauty -- and found that of the people tested, Denzel Washington had the most perfectly symmetrical face.  It may be that symmetry is an indication of freedom from some genetic flaws that influence skeletal development -- making symmetrical people good bets for producing healthy children -- but that, of course, is speculation.)

Anyhow, it's an interesting finding.  But I'm definitely going to pay more attention next time I trim my facial hair.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Today's post -- retraction

Hi all,

Just as a head's up:

I received several comments & emails (all polite, which I appreciate) setting me straight on the topic of today's post -- apparently there is something to the seizure- and migraine-inducing capacity of the Ravelry website.  So I (and Dr. Bartholomew of Psychology Today) were just plain wrong.

If you want more information, here's a website that gives more accurate information.

I've taken the post down.  My apologies for spreading misinformation, which is exactly the opposite of what I set out to do here at Skeptophilia.  But thanks for the readers who took the time to tell me to look deeper and reconsider what I'd written.

cheers,

Gordon

Word search

I've always wondered why words have the positive or negative connotations they do.

Ask people what their favorite and least-favorite sounding words are, and you'll find some that are easily explicable (vomit regularly makes the "least-favorite" list), but others are kind of weird.  A poll of linguists identified the phrase cellar door as being the most beautiful-sounding pair of words in the English language -- and look at how many names from fantasy novels have the same cadence (Erebor, Aragorn, Celeborn, Glorfindel, Valinor, to name just a handful from the Tolkien mythos).  On the other hand, I still recall passing a grocery store with my son one day and seeing a sign in the window that said, "ON SALE TODAY: moist, succulent pork."

"There it is," my son remarked.  "A single phrase made of the three ugliest words ever spoken."

Moist, in fact, is one of those universally loathed words; my surmise is the rather oily sound of the /oi/ combination, but that's hardly a scholarly analysis.  The brilliant British comedian Miranda Hart had her own unique take on it:

Another question is why some words are easier to bring to mind than others.  This was the subject of a fascinating paper in Nature Human Behavior this week, "Memorability of Words in Arbitrary Verbal Associations Modulates Memory Retrieval in the Anterior Temporal Lobe," by neuroscientists Weizhen Xie, Wilma A. Bainbridge, Sara K. Inati, Chris I. Baker, and Kareem A. Zaghloul of the National Institute of Health.  Spurred by a conversation at a Christmas party about why certain faces are memorable and others are not, study lead author Weizhen Xie wondered if the same was true for words -- and if so, that perhaps it could lead to more accuracy in cognitive testing for patients showing memory loss or incipient dementia.

"Our memories play a fundamental role in who we are and how our brains work," Xie said in an interview with Science Daily. "However, one of the biggest challenges of studying memory is that people often remember the same things in different ways, making it difficult for researchers to compare people's performances on memory tests.  For over a century, researchers have called for a unified accounting of this variability.  If we can predict what people should remember in advance and understand how our brains do this, then we might be able to develop better ways to evaluate someone's overall brain health."

What the team did is as fascinating as it is simple; they showed test subjects pairs of functionally-unrelated words (say, "hand" and "apple"), and afterward, tested them by giving them one word and asking them to try to recall what word it was paired with.  What they found is that some words were easy to recall regardless of what they were paired with and whether they came first or second in the pair; others were more difficult, again irrespective of position or pairing.

"We saw that some things -- in this case, words -- may be inherently easier for our brains to recall than others," said study senior author Kareem Zaghloul.  "These results also provide the strongest evidence to date that what we discovered about how the brain controls memory in this set of patients may also be true for people outside of the study."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mandeep Singh, Emotions words, CC BY 4.0]

Neither the list of easy-to-remember words nor the list of harder-to-remember ones show any obvious commonality (such as abstract versus concrete nouns, or long words versus short ones) that would explain the difference.  Each list included some extremely common words and some less common ones -- tank, doll, and pond showed up on the memorable list, and street, couch, and cloud on the less-memorable list.  It was remarkable how consistent the pattern was; the results were unequivocal even when the researchers controlled for such factors as educational level, age, gender, and so on.

"We thought one way to understand the results of the word pair tests was to apply network theories for how the brain remembers past experiences," Xie said.  "In this case, memories of the words we used look like internet or airport terminal maps, with the more memorable words appearing as big, highly trafficked spots connected to smaller spots representing the less memorable words.  The key to fully understanding this was to figure out what connects the words."

The surmise is that it has to do with the way our brains network information.  Certain words might act as "nodes" -- memory points that connect functionally to a great many different concepts -- so the brain more readily lands on those words when searching.  Others, however familiar and common they might be, act more as "dead-ends" in brain networking, making only a few conceptual links.  Think of it as trying to navigate through a city -- some places are easy to get to because there are a great many paths that lead there, while others require a specific set of roads and turns.  In the first case, you can get to your destination even if you make one or two directional goofs; in the second, one wrong turn and you're lost.

All of which is fascinating.  I know as I've gotten older I've had the inevitable memory slowdown, which most often manifests as my trying to recall a word I know that I know.  I often have to (with some degree of shame) resort to googling something that's a synonym and scanning down the list until I find the word I'm looking for, but it makes me wonder why this happens with some words and not with others.  Could it be that in my 59-year-old brain, bits of the network are breaking down, and this affects words with fewer working functional links than ones with a great many of them?

All speculation, of course.  I can say that whatever it is, it's really freakin' annoying.  But I need to wrap up this post, because it's time for lunch.  Which is -- I'm not making this up -- leftover moist, succulent pork.

I'll try not to think about it.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Siesta time

I'm a morning person.

I know this is pretty unusual.  I also know from first-hand experience that night owls tend to hate us morning people, who are up with the sun and at least reasonably coherent by six a.m., if not always showered and fully dressed.  (Hell, I'm retired.  Fully dressed sometimes doesn't happen at all, especially when the weather is warm.)

The result, though, is that I fade out pretty early in the evening.  I'm one of those people who, when invited to a party, seriously consider saying no if the start time is after seven in the evening.  By eight I want to be reading a book, and the times I'm still awake at ten are few and far between.

But the lowest time for me, energy-wise, is right after lunch.  Even when I get adequate sleep, I go through a serious slump in the early afternoon, even if I was chipper beforehand.  (Okay, given my personality, I'm never really chipper.  I also don't do "perky" or "bubbly."  So think about it as "chipper as compared to my baseline demeanor.")

Turns out, I'm not alone in finding the early afternoon a tough time to be productive, or even to stay awake.  As I learned from a paper in The Journal of Neuroscience, the problem is a fluctuation in the brain's reward circuit -- it, like many other human behaviors, is on a circadian rhythm that affects its function in a regular and predictable fashion.

The problem is a misalignment of the putamen (part of the brain's reward circuit) and the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which acts as a biological clock.  The putamen is most active when you receive a reward you weren't expecting, and least active when you expect a reward and don't get one.  The cycling of the suprachiasmatic nucleus stimulates the putamen to expect a reward after lunch, and then when it doesn't come -- one in the afternoon is nowhere near quitting time or happy hour, and most people's schedules don't accommodate an early afternoon nap -- the expected payoff doesn't happen.

The result: sad putamen.  Drop in motivation levels.

"The data suggest that the brain’s reward centres might be primed to expect rewards in the early afternoon, and be ‘surprised’ when they appear at the start and end of the day," said neuroscientist Jamie Byrne of Swinburne University.  "[The] brain is ‘expecting’ rewards at some times of day more than others, because it is adaptively primed by the body clock."

Me, I wonder why this priming happens at all.  What sort of reward did we receive in the early afternoon in our evolutionary history that led to this response becoming so common?  Honestly, I wonder if it was napping; an afternoon nap has been found not only to improve cognitive function, but (contrary to popular opinion) doesn't generally interfere with sleeping at night.  Having evolved on the African savanna, where the early afternoon can be miserably hot, it could be that we're built to snooze in the shade after lunch, and now that most of us are on an eight-to-five work schedule, we can't get away with it any more.  But the circadian rhythm we evolved is still there, and our energy levels plummet after lunch.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jamain, Sleeping man J1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It reminds me of the three weeks I spent in Spain and Portugal a few years ago.  I was astonished at first by the fact that no one ate dinner -- even considered eating dinner -- until nine in the evening.  (On one of our first days there, we went to a restaurant at about eight, and asked the waiter if we could be seated at a table.  His response was, "Why?"  I think he was genuinely puzzled as to why anyone might want dinner at such a ridiculously early hour.)  But once we got the hang of it -- a big lunch with a bottle of fine red wine, then a three-hour siesta during the hottest part of the day, when businesses close their doors so there's nothing much to do but sleep anyhow -- even I was able to stay up late with no problem.

All in all, a very pleasant lifestyle, I thought.

So we now know there is a neurological reason for the early-afternoon energy slump.  Kind of a fascinating thing how much we're at the mercy of our biological clock.  But anyhow, I better get busy and get some chores done.  Time's a-wasting, and I'm guessing by lunchtime I won't be feeling like doing much but hitting the hammock and conking out for a while.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Grotesques

My interest in gargoyles started back in the mid-1970s, when I was a teenager, and my dad and I were watching the 1972 movie of that name.  I was lying on the couch and my dad was in his recliner, and my eyes were fixed on the screen as the main character, the brave and handsome anthropologist Dr. Mercer Boley, hit one of the devilish creatures with his pickup truck while traveling the roads of rural New Mexico at night.

Dr. Boley had been trying to convince his skeptical peers for ages that gargoyles were real, and that the medieval statuary on church roofs had been sculpted from live models.  So when he clobbered one, he figured that was his chance to prove his point.  He loaded up the gargoyle's body in the bed of his truck.

He stopped at a motel for the night, and was worried what someone would think if they walked past his truck and saw a dead gargoyle in the back.  So he did what anyone would do, provided they had the IQ of a peach pit: he carried the gargoyle into his motel room.

Well, if you've ever seen any 1970s horror movies, you know what happened next.  The gargoyle was only stunned, not dead.  The camera angle is looking down the length of Dr. Boley's body, lying in bed under his blanket, and in the deep shadows, a humanoid figure starts to rise up over the foot of the bed...

At that point, my dad, who had a questionable sense of humor but impeccable timing, reached out and grabbed my shoulders and shouted, "THERE'S ONE NOW!"

I'm honestly not sure how Dr. Boley got away, because it took me about ten minutes first to peel myself off the ceiling with a spatula, and then to go look for a change of underwear.  My dad thought all this was drop-dead funny -- which it almost literally was -- and commented later that the movie hadn't been all that good, but the halftime show was brilliant.

Anyhow, I've been interested in these strange critters for a long while, even though I don't think they're sculpted from life.  One of my numerous hobbies is pottery, and I've taken to making ceramic gargoyles.  Here's one of my better efforts:

His expression seems to say, "How the hell did I get up here on this roof?  And why am I naked?"  To which I can only answer that I've been to parties like that myself.

I was a little surprised to find out that what I make aren't technically gargoyles.  The word gargoyle is a cognate to the French gueule (throat), and refers to creepy statues on church roofs that were used as rain spouts.  The statues that I make, and others like it that are devilish winged guys but don't spit out water when it rains, are grotesques.  (The origin of that word, if you're curious, is the Italian opera grottesca, which means "a work of art found in a grotto.")

But that's a technicality.  I did a bit of research and I found out from the art history site My Modern Met that the gargoyle legend apparently started because St. Romain, who was the Bishop of Rouen, France in the seventh century, was credited with saving the town from a hideous, fire-breathing monster called la gargouille.  St. Romain conjured up some saintly power and subdued the beast, which then was burned at the stake.

This brings up the question of the efficacy of burning a creature who breathes fire.  You'd think they'd be more susceptible to drowning, or even to suffocating if you throw a thick blanket over them.  Apparently it worked anyhow, although as I would have predicted the head and neck of the monster wasn't consumed, so St. Romain nailed it up on the cathedral wall as a waterspout.

And thus the tradition was born.

St. Romain and la gargouille, on Rouen Cathedral [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Giogo via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)]

Not all the church fathers were as keen, however.  The prominent twelfth-century Benedictine monk St. Bernard of Clairvaux thought putting them on churches was a bad idea, and said so in no uncertain terms:

What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters before the eyes of the brothers as they read?  What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these strange savage lions, and monsters?  To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man, or these spotted tigers?  I see several bodies with one head and several heads with one body.  Here is a quadruped with a serpent's head, there a fish with a quadruped's head, then again an animal half horse, half goat...  Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities, we should at least regret what we have spent on them.

It didn't have much effect, however.  The use of gargoyles on church roofs went on well into the nineteenth century, when architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc made a name for himself by going around renovating old Gothic cathedrals and basically gargoyling the hell out of them.

I have to say that I approve, and that I like them a great deal better than I do a lot of religious statuary.  I didn't know about the origins either of the word or the legend, so it was fun to find that out.  I'll probably make a bunch more of them, although my wife has instructed me to make some that aren't as creepy as the one pictured above.  Like, puppies and kittens with wings, or something.

I'll see what I can do, although I'm not sure it qualifies as a gargoyle if it isn't at least a little scary.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Writing's on the wall

I was chatting with my friend, author and all-around cool person K. D. McCrite, a couple of days ago about superstitions.

It probably won't come as any surprise that I'm not superstitious.  About the only time that particular irrationality raises its ugly head is in my occasional conviction -- usually when I'm already in a foul mood -- that inanimate objects are conspiring to get in my way, fall out of my hand, break, or otherwise further fuck up my day.  My logical brain tells me that this is probably because I'm in a bad temper and more prone to being careless and rough with handling things, but sometimes it really does seem like the various objects around me have decided to infuriate me out of nothing but pure malice.

Other than that, though, I'm inclined to consider superstitions so bizarre that it's incomprehensible that anyone would have come up with them in the first place.  K. D. mentioned that growing up in rural Missouri, she used to hear that if you dropped a dishrag, company was coming.  Same thing, apparently, if your nose itches; but only a few states south, where I grew up in southern Louisiana, your nose itching means you're going to kiss a fool.  We didn't have one for company coming, at least not that I recall; but if you've got company and you want them to leave, all you have to do is stand a broom up in the corner near the front door.

Of course, my guess is that if your company knows the superstition, and they see you standing a broom up in the corner, they'll get pissed off and leave.  So this might fall into the "self-fulfilling prophecy" department.

Spurred by that discussion, I started looking into various superstitions in different cultures, and man, there are some weird ones, making the bad luck brought by black cats, broken mirrors, and walking under ladders sound positively normal.  Here are a few I came across:

• If you wear red, you're more likely to be struck by lightning.  (Philippines)
• If you say "rabbit rabbit" as your first words after you wake up on the first day of the month, you'll prosper.  (northern England)
• If you're out drinking with friends, and you're ready to leave, don't say "this is my last drink."  If you do, you'll die soon, and it really will have been your last drink.  (Cuba)
• Running a fan in a closed room while you sleep will kill you.  (South Korea)
• Don't toast someone with water, or you're cursing them with bad luck.  (Germany)
• Whistling indoors will summon a demon.  (Lithuania)
• Standing chopsticks upright in your rice bowl is extremely rude, because the crossed chopsticks look like the Japanese character for the number four, which is supposed to represent death.  (Japan)
• Don't shake hands or kiss across a threshold, or you will eventually fall out.  (Russia)
• Having two mirrors facing each other on opposite walls opens a door for Satan.  (Mexico)
• If you're giving a knife or something else sharp as a gift, it can sever the relationship; so the recipient is supposed to give you a penny in return, so that it's a purchase, not a gift.  (Denmark)
• If you walk backwards, it's bad luck, because you're showing the devil which way you were going.  (Portugal)
• Stepping in dog shit is good luck, but only if you do so with your left foot.  (France)
• You should always enter a room with your right foot.  Especially if you've just come from France.  (Spain)

(My sources for the above, if you're curious, are here, here, and here.)

I wonder how the hell these superstitions started.  I know that for some superstitions, the origin is in the religious beliefs of the culture; the practice of throwing spilled salt over the left shoulder actually dates from Roman times, where salt was a valuable commodity -- in fact, the English word salary comes from the Latin word meaning salt -- and spilling it was considered careless and wasteful.  To make up for it you were supposed to give a pinch of it to the household spirits, the Lares and Penates, who hovered around behind you watching you eating dinner.

Because that's not creepy at all.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar / CC BY-SA 3.0, Saleros - 5394, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But for some of them, it's hard to imagine any events that could have led to the conviction that they were true.  I mean, "rabbit rabbit?"  Did people in medieval England try various animal names every day until they found a combination of animal and day of the month that preceded their having a good day?  And I'm sorry, stepping in dog shit is not in any sense auspicious.

I own two dogs and I know whereof I speak.

It does bear mention that there are a few completely bizarre-sounding superstitions that have at least semi-logical origins.  In northern Germany, for example, there's an old belief that when a baby is born, the grandma is supposed to kiss the baby's forehead, and if she tastes salt, the baby will be sickly and die young.  This seems ridiculous -- until you find out that northern Germany has the world's highest incidence of the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, which has as one of its symptoms extremely salty sweat.

Another one that has a genetic origin is the old prohibition amongst the Basques -- especially the women -- against marrying non-Basques.  While on the surface this seems like the usual insularity and cultural/ethnic purity nonsense, there's more to it.  Similar to the German belief, the superstition here is that a Basque woman marrying a non-Basque man will be cursed to have their children die in infancy.

Which turns out to have a kernel of truth.  The Basques have the highest incidence in the world of the Rh negative blood allele, a recessive gene that causes people who are homozygous (who inherited a copy from each parent) to lack a particular protein in the blood.  This causes no health effects for the person; but if a Rh-negative woman conceives an Rh-positive child, there's a good chance of Rh incompatibility syndrome, where the mother's immune system recognizes the blood protein in the child to be foreign, and proceeds to destroy the baby's blood cells.  And this is only possible if the father is Rh-positive -- meaning (probably) non-Basque.

So unlike just about every other prohibition against marrying outside of your culture, this one does have a basis in reality.

But the majority of superstitions admit of no easy explanation other than accident and confirmation bias.  And you'd think all it would take is one or two counterexamples -- people who slept soundly in a closed room with a fan running and woke up perfectly healthy, for example -- to make people say, "Oh.  I guess that's not true, then.  What goobers we are."

For some reason, though, that doesn't seem to happen, and I'm at a loss to explain why.

In any case, these beliefs are interesting from an anthropological standpoint, even if they're a bit maddening to the skeptics of the world.  There are about a million others I didn't mention (further supporting the Senegalese maxim that "there are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense).  If you know any especially funny, weird, or cool ones, leave a note in the comments.  But now, I need to go fix myself some breakfast.  I hope the coffee maker and the microwave aren't in cahoots again.  They don't like me, for some reason.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Talking to birds

A friend of mine, knowing my interest in linguistics and birdwatching, sent me a link to a fairly mindblowing post on the blog Corvid Research a couple of days ago.  But first, a little background.

Bird communication is generally not considered to be language.  The usual definition of language is "arbitrary symbolic communication that has a characteristic and meaningful structure."  The "arbitrary" bit is sometimes misunderstood; it doesn't mean any sounds can mean anything within a language (something that's obviously not true).  In this context, it means that the sound-to-meaning correspondence is arbitrary, in that the word "dog" is no inherently doggier than the French word chien or the Japanese word inu.  With the exception of a few onomatopoeic words, like "bang" and "swish" and "splat," the sound of the word itself has no particular connection to the concept it represents.

So bird song fails the definition of language on a number of counts.  When the Carolina wrens that nest in our back yard start their outsized calls of "TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE" at four in the morning, those vocalizations don't mean anything more than "I'm a male bird in a territory and you need to leave" or, to any available females, "Hey, baby, how about it?"  They're not capable of representational language, in the sense of using a different set of sounds to represent discrete concepts.

The situation blurs considerably when you look at parrots, many of which can learn to mimic human speech convincingly.  An African gray parrot named Alex learned, with the help of cognitive behavior Irene Pepperberg, not only to mimic speech but to understand that it has meaning, connecting sounds to objects in a consistent fashion.  There's no indication that Alex comprehended syntactic structure -- and the jury's still out as to whether he was simply learning to behave in a particular way to get a reward, similar to training a dog to sit or stay or roll over.  (Although -- as you'll see if you watch the video -- Alex did know how to count, at least up to five, which is pretty impressive.)

The blur only gets worse when you consider corvids, the group that contains crows and ravens.  Corvids are widely considered to be among the most intelligent birds, and their ability to problem solve is astonishing.  They do a great many higher-level behaviors, including having a sophisticated sense of play -- such as the crow that used a plastic lid as a sled on a snow-covered roof, doing it for no apparent reason other than the fact that it was fun.  But some research released recently in the journal EvoLang has shown another facet of corvid intelligence; they can apparently distinguish between different human languages.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Aomorikuma（あおもりくま） , Carrion crow 20090612, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Sabrina Schalz (Middlesex University) and Ei-Ichi Izawa (Keio University) studied eight large-billed crows (Corvus macrorhynchos) that were raised in captivity in Japan, cared for by fluent Japanese speakers.  Schalz and Izawa wanted to find out if the birds were able to distinguish that language from another, so they played recordings of people speaking Japanese and people speaking Dutch.  The Japanese recordings didn't elicit much of a response; their attitude seemed to be, "Meh, I've heard that before."  But the Dutch recordings were a different story.  The crows gathered around the speaker, and sat perfectly still, their attention fixed on the sounds they were hearing.

It was clear that they were able to recognize the sound of Dutch as being foreign!

The cadence of a language, and how one differs from another, is a fascinating topic.  It has not only to do with the phonemic repertoire (the exact list of sounds that occur in the language) but pacing, stress, and tone.  The latter is why to non-Mandarin speakers, Mandarin sounds "sing-song" -- the rising and falling pitches actually change the meanings of the words being spoken.  Put another way, the same syllable spoken with a rising tone means something entirely different to the same syllable spoken with a falling tone, something that is not true in non-tonal languages like English (with minor exceptions such as the rising tone at the end of a sentence indicating a question).

Besides the different sounds in the Japanese language as compared to Dutch, the two languages also differ greatly in how words are stressed.  Japanese syllables can differ in length (and in fact, that carries meaning, much as tone does in Mandarin), but they're all stressed about equally.  This is why the way most Americans pronounce the city name Hiroshima is distinctly non-Japanese -- usually either hi-RO-shi-ma or hi-ro-SHI-ma.  The Japanese pronunciation stresses the syllables evenly.  (Try saying the word out loud with no change in syllable stress, and you'll hear the difference.)

So what were the crows picking up on?  I doubt seriously that they were thinking, "Okay, I don't know that word," but was it the sound system differences, the stress patterns, or something else?  Probably impossible to know, although it would be interesting to try to tease that out -- having someone speak Dutch with artificially even stress, or Japanese with non-Japanese syllable stress, and seeing what the reaction is, would be an interesting next step.  If it's the sound repertoire, then the reaction of crows to two mutually-unintelligible languages with similar phonetics, one of which they'd heard and one which is novel -- say, Dutch and German -- should elicit identical reactions.

Whatever's going on here, it's fascinating, and another indication of how intelligent these creatures are.  And it does make me wonder if I should be a little more careful when I'm talking outdoors -- who knows?  Maybe the crows are taking notes of what they overhear, in hopes of eventual world domination.

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I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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