Purging memory

Last night I had a good bit of trouble sleeping.

This isn't all that uncommon.  I've had issues with insomnia ever since I was a teenager.  Sometimes the issue is physical restlessness; sometimes it's anxiety, either over something real or something imagined.

Last night, it's because my brain was shrieking, over and over, "FELIZ NAVIDAD, FELIZ NAVIDAD, FELIZ NAVIDAD, PRÓSPERO AÑO Y FELICIDAD."

At least its timing was reasonably good, being that yesterday was Christmas.  What I wonder is why it couldn't choose a song that I don't hate.  I'm not one of those Bah-Humbug curmudgeons who dislikes all Christmas music; some of it I actually rather enjoy.

I'm of the opinion, however, that listening to "Feliz Navidad" over and over would have been ruled out as a torture device by Tómas de Torquemada on the basis of being too cruel.

Leaving aside my brain's questionable choice of which song to holler at me, a more interesting question is how to get rid of it once it's stuck there.  I've found that for me, the best thing is to replace it with something less objectionable, which in this case would have been just about anything.  There are a couple of pieces of sedate classical music and a slow Irish waltz or two that I can usually use to shove away whatever gawdawful song is on repeat in my skull, if I concentrate on running them mentally in a deliberate fashion.  It eventually worked, but it did take much longer than usual.

José Feliciano is nothing if not persistent.

The reason all of this comes up -- besides my Christmas-music-based bout of insomnia -- is some research out of a team from the University of Colorado - Boulder and the University of Texas - Austin that appeared in Nature Communications this month.  Entitled, "Changes to Information in Working Memory Depend on Distinct Removal Operations," by Hyojeong Kim, Harry Smolker, Louisa Smith, Marie Banich, and Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, this research shows that the kind of deliberate pushing away I use to purge bad music from my brain works in a lot of other situations as well -- and may have applications in boosting creativity and in relieving anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and PTSD.

What they did was to put a thought into their test subjects' heads -- a photograph of a face, a bowl of fruit, or an outdoor scene -- instructed them to think about it for four seconds, and then to deliberately stop thinking about it, all the while watching what happens to their neural systems using an fMRI machine.  Ceasing to think about something without replacing it with something else is remarkably hard; it brings to mind my dad's recommended cure for hiccups, which is to run around the house three times without thinking of an elephant.

The three different sorts of things they asked the subjects to try -- to replace the thought with something else, to clear all thoughts completely, or to suppress that one thought without replacing it -- all resulted in different patterns on the fMRI.  "Replace" and "clear" both worked fairly rapidly, but both left a trace of the original thought pattern behind -- a "ghost image," as the researchers called it.  "Suppress" took longer, and subjects described it as being more difficult, but once accomplished, the original pattern had faded completely.

"We found that if you really want a new idea to come into your mind, you need to deliberately force yourself to stop thinking about the old one," said study co-author Marie Banich, in a press release from the University of Colorado.

Co-author Jarrod Lewis-Peacock concurred.  "Once we’re done using that information to answer an email or address some problem, we need to let it go so it doesn’t clog up our mental resources to do the next thing."

[Image © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons; used with permission]

This explains another phenomenon I've noted; that when I'm trying to think of something I've forgotten, or come up with a solution to a problem that's stumping me, it often helps if I deliberately set it aside.  Just a couple of days ago, I was working on my fiction work-in-progress, and found I'd written myself into a corner.  I'd created a situation that called for some as-yet-undreamed-of plot twist, or else rewriting a big section of it to eliminate the necessity (something I didn't want to do).  After basically beating it with a stick for an hour or two, I gave up in frustration, and went to clean up my garage.

And while working on this chore, and not thinking about my writing at all, a clever solution to the problem simply popped into my head, seemingly out of nowhere.

This is far from the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, and the Kim et al. paper at least gives a first-order approximation as to how this occurs.  Pushing aside what you're thinking about, either consciously and deliberately or else (as in my garage-cleaning example) by replacing it with something unrelated, clears the cognitive thought patterns and gives your brain room to innovate.

Now, where exactly the creative solution comes from is another matter entirely.  I've described before how often my ideas for writing seem to originate from outside my own head.  I don't subscribe to a belief in any sort of Jungian collective unconscious, but sometimes it sure feels that way.

In any case, all of this gives us a lens into how to make our own thought processes more efficient -- in cases of clogged creativity as well as situations where errant thoughts are themselves causing problems, as in PTSD.  What the Kim et al. research suggests is that the first thing to work on is consciously purging the brain in order to create space for more positive and beneficial thoughts.

It's not necessarily easy, of course.  For example, my brain has finally stopped screaming "Feliz Navidad" at me, but has replaced it with "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow," which is only fractionally less annoying.  My considered opinion is that whoever wrote "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow" should be pitched, bare-ass naked, head-first into a snowbank.

Okay, so maybe I am a Bah-Humbug curmudgeon.  God bless us every one anyhow, I suppose.

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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

Genetic walkabouts

Today's topic comes to us from the One Thing Leads To Another department.  

I got launched into this particular rabbit hole by a notice from 23 & Me that they'd refined their analysis of their test subjects' DNA, and now had a bigger database to extract from, allowing them to make a better guess at "percent composition" not only by general region, but by specific sub-region.

So I took a look at my results.  My DNA came out 63.5% French, 25.3% Scottish and English, 6.4% Ashkenazi, and the remaining 4.8% a miscellany.  This works out to be pretty much what I'd expect from what I know of my family tree.  My mom was close to 100% French, but a great-grandfather of hers, one Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was a French Jew from Alsace and is the origin of the Ashkenazic DNA.  My dad was a bit of a hodgepodge in which French, Scottish, and English predominate.

So like I said, no surprises.  I'm a white guy of western European descent, which if you look at my profile photo, is probably not going to come as any sort of shock.

What I thought was more interesting was the regional breakdown.  The Scottish and English bits were especially interesting because I don't have good records of where exactly my British Isles forebears were from.  Apparently I have a cluster of genetic relatives around Glasgow, the London area, and Yorkshire.  Other than my dad's paternal family (which was from the French Alps, near Mont Blanc and the border of Italy) and my Alsatian great-great-grandfather, my French ancestry is all in western France; this lines up with what I know of my mom's family, which came from Bordeaux, Poitou, the Loire Valley, and Brittany.

So all of this shores up their claims to accuracy, because this was ascertained purely by my DNA -- I didn't send them my family tree, or anything.  But then this got combined with another random thing, which is that I've been reading a book called The Ancient Celts by anthropologist Barry Cunliffe, and I was kind of surprised at how much of Europe the Celts once ruled -- not only the British Isles and all of France (then called Gaul), but what is now Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, the northern half of Italy, the eastern half of Spain, and down into a big chunk of the Balkans.  They seem to have been nothing if not inveterate wanderers, and their walkabouts took them just about everywhere in Europe but Scandinavia.  They were there for a long while, too; it was only when the Romans got their act together and started to push back that the Celts retreated; they were shoved farther west when first the Germanic tribes, and then the Slavs, moved in from the east and kind of kept moving.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all got me thinking, "Okay, when I say my ancestry is on the order of 2/3 French, what exactly am I saying?"  So I started doing some research into "the ethnic origin of the French," and I found out that it's not simple.  The western parts of France (whence my mom's family originated) are mostly of Celtic (Gaulish) ancestry.  People in the southeast, especially the lowlands near Marseilles, have a lot of Roman and Etruscan forebears.  When you get over into Languedoc -- the southwestern part of France, near the border of Spain -- there's an admixture not only from the Moors of North Africa, but from the Basques, who seem to be the remnants of the earliest settlers of Europe, and are the only ones in western Europe who don't speak an Indo-European language.  In Normandy there's a good admixture of Scandinavian blood, from Vikings who settled there a thousand years ago -- in fact, "Normandy" means "North-man-land."  Despite the fact that the name of the country and its people comes from a Germanic tribe (the Franks), the only place there's a significant amount of Germanic ancestry in France is in the east -- from Burgundy north into Alsace, Lorraine, and Picardy.

Apparently the only reason the French are Frankish is because the Franks ruled the place for a few hundred years, a bit the way the Normans did in England.  The common people, your average seventeenth-century peasants in Bordeaux, probably were nearly 100% Gaulish Celt.

So when I say my mom's family is French, and a guy from Lille and a woman from Marseilles say the same thing, what exactly do we mean?

And there's nothing unusual about the French in that regard; I just use them as an example because I happen to know more about them.  The same is true pretty much anywhere you look except for truly insular cultures like Japan, which have had very little migration in or out for millennia.  We're almost all composites, and ultimately, all cousins.  I remember when I first ran into this idea; that the further back you go, the more our family trees all coalesce, and at some point in the past every human on Earth could be sorted into one of two categories -- people who were the ancestors of every one of us, and people who left no living descendants.

That point, most anthropologists believe, is way more recent than most of us would suspect.  I've heard -- to be fair, I've never seen it rigorously proven, but it sounds about right -- that the two-category split for those of us with western European ancestry happened in around 1,200 C.E.  So pick out anyone from thirteenth century western Europe, and he's either my ancestor, or he has no descendants at all.

This brings up a couple of things.  First, "royal blood" is an idiotic concept from just about whichever angle you choose.  Not only does royal ancestry not confer fitness for leading a country -- let's face it, a lot of those kings were absolute loonies -- I can pretty much guarantee that I descend from Charlemagne, and if you have European ancestry, so do you.  My wife actually descends from an illegitimate child of King Edward IV of England (something she likes to remind me about whenever I get uppity), but the truth is, all of us have royal blood and peasant blood pretty well mixed indiscriminately.

Second, racism, ethnicism, and xenophobia are all equally ridiculous, since (1) we're virtually all genetic mixtures, (2) regardless of our ethnicity, our genetic similarities far outweigh our differences, and (3) we're all cousins anyhow.  I find that rather cool, honestly -- that a Zulu woman living in Botswana and I have common ancestry if you go back far enough.  Race is a cultural construct, not a genetic one, which you can see with extraordinary vividness if you take a DNA test, or if you read anything about the migration patterns humanity has taken since first leaving the East African savanna something like 250,000 years ago.

Anyhow, those are my musings about ethnicity, DNA, ancestry, and so on.  It all goes to show that we're wonderfully complex creatures, and the determination of some of us to see the world as if it was straightforward black-and-white is not only inaccurate, it misses a great deal of the most interesting parts of it.  As the brilliant science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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

Signal out of noise

I think I share with a lot of people a difficulty in deciphering what someone is saying when holding a conversation in a noisy room.  I can often pick out a few words, but understanding entire sentences is tricky.  A related phenomenon I've noticed is that if there is a song playing while there's noise going on -- in a bar, or on earphones at the gym -- I often have no idea what the song is, can't understand a single word or pick up the beat or figure out the music, until something clues me in to what the song is.  Then, all of a sudden, I find I'm able to hear it more clearly.

Some neuroscientists at the University of California - Berkeley have found out what's happening in the brain that causes this oddity in auditory perception.  In a paper in Nature: Communications, authors Christopher R. Holdgraf, Wendy de Heer, Brian Pasley, Jochem Rieger, Nathan Crone, Jack J. Lin, Robert T. Knight, and Frédéric E. Theunissen studied how the perception of garbled speech changes when subjects are told what's being said -- and found through a technique called spectrotemporal receptive field mapping that the brain is able to retune itself in less than a second.

The authors write:

Experience shapes our perception of the world on a moment-to-moment basis.  This robust perceptual effect of experience parallels a change in the neural representation of stimulus features, though the nature of this representation and its plasticity are not well-understood. Spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) mapping describes the neural response to acoustic features, and has been used to study contextual effects on auditory receptive fields in animal models.  We performed a STRF plasticity analysis on electrophysiological data from recordings obtained directly from the human auditory cortex. Here, we report rapid, automatic plasticity of the spectrotemporal response of recorded neural ensembles, driven by previous experience with acoustic and linguistic information, and with a neurophysiological effect in the sub-second range.  This plasticity reflects increased sensitivity to spectrotemporal features, enhancing the extraction of more speech-like features from a degraded stimulus and providing the physiological basis for the observed ‘perceptual enhancement’ in understanding speech.

What astonishes me about this is how quickly the brain is able to accomplish this -- although that is certainly matched by my own experience of suddenly being able to hear lyrics of a song once I recognize what's playing.  As James Anderson put it, writing about the research in ReliaWire, "The findings... confirm hypotheses that neurons in the auditory cortex that pick out aspects of sound associated with language, the components of pitch, amplitude and timing that distinguish words or smaller sound bits called phonemes, continually tune themselves to pull meaning out of a noisy environment."

A related phenomenon is visual priming, which occurs when people are presented with a seemingly meaningless pattern of dots and blotches, such as the following:

Once you're told that the image is a cow, it's easy enough to find -- and after that, impossible to unsee.

"Something is changing in the auditory cortex to emphasize anything that might be speech-like, and increasing the gain for those features, so that I actually hear that sound in the noise," said study co-author Frédéric Theunissen.  "It’s not like I am generating those words in my head.  I really have the feeling of hearing the words in the noise with this pop-out phenomenon.  It is such a mystery."

Apparently, once the set of possibilities of what you're hearing (or seeing) is narrowed, your brain is much better at extracting meaning from noise.  "Your brain tries to get around the problem of too much information by making assumptions about the world," co-author Christopher Holdgraf said.  "It says, ‘I am going to restrict the many possible things I could pull out from an auditory stimulus so that I don’t have to do a lot of processing.’  By doing that, it is faster and expends less energy."

So there's another fascinating, and mind-boggling, piece of how our brains make sense of the world.  It's wonderful that evolution could shape such an amazingly adaptive device, although the survival advantage is obvious.  The faster you are at pulling a signal out of the noise, the more likely you are to make the right decisions about what it is that you're perceiving -- whether it's you talking to a friend in a crowded bar or a proto-hominid on the African savanna trying to figure out if that odd shape in the grass is a crouching lion.

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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

Flat space, Hawking radiation, and warm spots

Ever wonder if the universe is flat?

No, I haven't taken Wingnut Pills and decided that the Flat Earthers make sense.  This is an honest-to-Einstein problem in physics, one that not only raises eyebrows about the supposed "fine-tuning" of the universe but has a huge effect on its ultimate fate.

By this time most people who are reasonably scientifically literate (or at least watch Star Trek) know about curved space -- that the presence of mass warps space-time, a little like the way a heavy weight on a trampoline stretches and deforms the flexible sheet it's sitting on.  The trampoline analogy isn't a bad one; if you have a bowling ball in the middle of a trampoline, and you roll a marble on the surface, the marble's path will be deflected in such a way that it appears the bowling ball is attracting the marble.  In reality, however, there's no attraction involved; the bowling ball has warped the space around it, and the marble is only following the contours of the space it's traveling through.

Bump up the number of dimensions by one, and you've got an idea of how curved space-time works.  The trampoline is a 2-D surface warped into a third dimension; where you're sitting right now is a 3-D space warped into a fourth dimension.

The "flatness problem" asks a seemingly simple question; okay, matter deforms space locally, but what's the shape of space as a whole?  In our trampoline analogy, you can visualize that although the bowling ball deflects the surface nearby, as a whole the trampoline is flat.  Harder to picture, perhaps, is that the trampoline could be a different shape; the surface of the entire trampoline could be spherical, for example, and still have indentations on the surface corresponding to places where massive objects were located.

That, in a nutshell, is the flatness problem.  The key is the matter/energy density of the entire universe.  If the universe is flat as a whole, the matter/energy density is exactly right for the outward expansion from the Big Bang to slow down, asymptotically approaching zero, but never quite getting there (and never reversing direction).  A universe with a higher matter/energy density than the critical value would eventually halt, then fall inward again, resulting in a "Big Crunch" as all the stuff in the universe collapses back to a singularity.  (This is sometimes called a "spherical universe" because space-time would be warped into a four-dimensional hypersphere.  If you can't picture this, don't worry, neither can anyone else.)  If the matter/energy density is lower than the critical value, the universe would continue to expand forever, getting thinner and more spread out, eventually reaching the point where any particular cubic light year of space would have very little chance of having even a single atom in it somewhere.  (This is known as a "hyperbolic universe," for analogous reasons to the "spherical universe" mentioned above, but even harder to visualize.)

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

So, which is it?

There doesn't seem to be a good reason, argued from first principles, that the universe has to be any particular one of the three.  When I first ran into this concept, in high school physics class, I was rooting for the spherical universe solution; ending the universe with an enormous collapse seemed (and still seems) preferable to the gradual attenuation of matter and energy that would occur with the other two.  Plus, it also raised the possibility of a rebounding second Big Bang and a new start, which was kind of hopeful-sounding even if nothing much would survive intact through the cusp.

Because there seemed to be no reason to expect the value of the matter-energy density -- known to physicists as Ω -- to be constrained, figuring out what it actually is occupied a great deal of time and effort by the astrophysicists.  It was a matter of some shock when by their best measurements, the value of Ω was:

1.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

To save you the trouble, that's exactly one, out to the 62nd decimal place.

So in other words, the universe is flat, or so close to it that we can't tell the difference.

This engenders more than a few other problems.  For one thing, why is Ω exactly 1?  Like I said earlier, nothing from the basic laws of physics seems to require it.  This brings up the issue of cosmological fine-tuning, which understandably makes us science-types a little twitchy.  Then there's the problem that the outer reaches of the universe that we can see -- so places farther away in space, and further back in time -- are moving away from us a lot faster than they should if the universe was flat.  This has given rise to a hypothesized repulsive "dark energy" to account for this, but what exactly dark energy is turns out to be even more problematic than the "dark matter" that appears to comprise over a quarter of the overall mass/energy of the universe even though we haven't been able to detect it other than by its gravitational bending of space-time.

The reason this warped topic comes up is research by the groundbreaking and often controversial Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, who published a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this summer that identified six "warm spots" that had been detected in the background radiation of the universe, and which Penrose believes are "Hawking points" -- places where a black hole evaporated due to its "Hawking radiation" eventually bleeding off mass (a topic that deserves a whole other post).  The problem is, the evaporation of a black hole by Hawking radiation generates theoretical lifetimes for your average black hole of many times the current age of the universe, so the presence of six of them indicates something funny must be going on.

What that funny business is, Penrose claims, is that we're seeing the ghosts of black holes that evaporated before the Big Bang that formed our universe.

In other words, in a previous universe.

"The Big Bang was not the beginning," Penrose said in an interview with Sarah Knapton in The Telegraph.  "There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.  We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon.  So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon."

So he's not talking about a spherical universe, collapsing in on itself; Penrose thinks that even if the universe is flat or hyperbolic, eventually random quantum fluctuations will generate an expansion that will start it all over again.  This may seem a little like the example my thermodynamics teacher used about random motion -- yes, it's possible that all the molecules in your cup of coffee will by chance jitter in the same direction at the same time, and your coffee will fountain up out of the cup.  He had us calculate the odds, though, and it turns out it's so remote that it's virtually certain it has never happened anywhere in the universe, during its entire thirteen-odd billion year existence.

But if you consider that a flat universe would have an essentially infinitely long time span, all it takes is the coffee to jitter in the right direction once, and you generate a new Big Bang.

Metaphorically speaking.

Whether Penrose is right about this remains to be seen, but it must be pointed out that he's had ideas before that have seemed "out there" and have turned out to be correct.  Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge and no faint light himself, said, "There would, I think, be a consensus that Penrose and Hawking are the two individuals who have done more than anyone else since Einstein to deepen our knowledge of gravity."

So I'm disinclined to shrug my shoulders at anything Penrose says, however odd it may sound.  And it brings me back to the hopes for an oscillating universe I first held when I was seventeen years old.  If Penrose is right, there was something that existed before our current universe, and likely something will exist afterward.  Even if those are in the impossibly remote past and future, it still seems preferable to the miserable demise of a standard flat or hyperbolic universe.

So the issue is far from settled.  Which is the way of science, after all.  Every problem you solve brings up two more new ones.  Meaning we should have enough to keep us occupied until the nest Big Bang -- and maybe even beyond.

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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

Hurricanes on Neptune

In yesterday's post, we looked at a peculiar, as-yet unexplained radio transmission from Proxima Centauri, but there's an awful lot we don't understand right here in our own Solar System.

Okay, most of it's not as exciting as a candidate for a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence, although it must be mentioned that just last week scientists, using data from the Cassini probe, suggested that the chemistry of the ocean beneath the frozen surface of Enceladus (the sixth-largest moon of Saturn) shows signs of a complex chemistry that might be indicative of the presence of life.  If there's anything alive there, it's almost certainly nothing larger than microbes, but at this point, I'll take it.  If life can develop on a frigid, icy world like Enceladus, it further bolsters my conviction that life must be plentiful in the universe.

But leaving behind the topic of extraterrestrial life for a bit (face it, this is me writing this, it's bound to come up again soon), there's strange enough stuff to investigate right here and right now without postulating something we honestly don't have any hard evidence for.  Take, for example, the odd behavior of the storm on Neptune that was described in a press release from NASA last week.

To understand its oddity, a brief physics lesson.  Forgive me if this is familiar ground, but to see why the Neptunian observations are so weird, the average layperson might need some background explanation.

There's a phenomenon that occurs on planets' surfaces called the Coriolis effect.  The Coriolis effect, named after nineteenth century French physicist Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis, is a "fictitious force," a bit like "centrifugal force," that only occurs because we're in a non-inertial reference frame -- in this case, sitting on a spinning ball rather than standing still.  The simpler situation of centrifugal force not being a real force can be illustrated if you've ever ridden the Gravitron at a carnival, the ride where you stand with your back against the wall in a spinning cylinder, and you feel like you're getting pushed back and held against the wall.  The reality is that your body is just trying to obey Newton's First Law, of moving in a straight line at a uniform velocity, but you're being prevented from doing so by the rigid wall pushing you in toward the center of the cylinder.  In other words, the actual force is pointing inward (a "centripetal force"); you only feel like there's an outward-pointing force because you're moving in a rotating, non-inertial reference frame.

In the slightly more complicated situation of the Coriolis effect, here it manifests as an apparent deflection of the path of an object traveling from a straight line with respect to someone on the surface of the Earth.  In reality, of course, the object is traveling in a straight line, and you'd see that if you watched it from a stationary point in space; it's the observer, and the surface of the Earth (s)he is standing on, that isn't.  The result is that moving objects appear to be deflected clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern, which explains the rotation of hurricanes but does not account for water spiraling down a drain (drains are way too small for the Coriolis "force" to have a measurable effect; the swirl of water going down a drain is due to the shape of the basin and water's movement left over from when it was poured).

The Coriolis effect.  The object in question is moving from the upper left to the lower right.  The blue line shows its path as seen in an inertial reference frame (i.e. from space); the red curve shows its apparent position relative to a fixed point on the Earth's surface.  Notice that this gives the object a seemingly rightward (clockwise) deflection from the point of view of someone watching it from an earthbound perspective.  [GIF courtesy of Georgia State University]

The reason all this twisty stuff comes up is an observation of a storm on the planet Neptune.  Neptune is a gas giant, a planet large enough and cold enough that its atmosphere comprises a significant portion of the radius of the planet (rather than just a thin shell like ours).  The core is probably rocky, but we honestly don't know much about it, because the place is basically one enormously thick layer of clouds.

And it's turbulent.  The storms on Neptune dwarf the ones here on Earth; the one in question, which looks like a dark spot in the bright blue surface of the tops of the clouds, has a diameter larger than the Atlantic Ocean.  But even on Neptune, the laws of physics are strictly enforced, and when astronomers saw the massive hurricane heading toward the planet's equator -- where the Coriolis effect drops to zero, then picks up in the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere -- they thought the reversal of deflection would shear it to bits.

Neptune's enormous storm [Image courtesy of NASA]

But that didn't happen.  The storm appeared headed southward toward certain destruction, but then curved around and started heading north again.  Even weirder, it split off a smaller storm ("smaller" at 3,900 kilometers in diameter) which can be seen in the upper right of the planet's disc.  How it did that, and whether that had anything to do with the main storm's unexpected turn, is unknown.

"It was really exciting to see this one act like it's supposed to act and then all of a sudden it just stops and swings back," said Michael Wong, astrophysicist at the University of California-Berkeley, who led the team that made the discovery.  "That was surprising...  When I first saw the small spot, I thought the bigger one was being disrupted.  I didn't think another vortex was forming because the small one is farther towards the equator.  So it's within this unstable region.  But we can't prove the two are related.  It remains a complete mystery.  It was also in January that the dark vortex stopped its motion and started moving northward again.  Maybe by shedding that fragment, that was enough to stop it from moving towards the equator."

But the truth is, they really don't know for sure what caused the storm's odd trajectory.  It doesn't seem to be obeying the pattern we'd expect of a storm track -- although even here on Earth, predicting the path of a hurricane is an inexact science at best.  What it illustrates is that even in our own astronomical back yard, there are phenomena we're still working to explain.

Think about what kind of bizarre stuff we'll find when we are finally able to look farther afield.  What weird weather, geology, and oceanography might occur on planets around other stars -- planets that might have very elliptical orbits, rapid revolutions close in to the host star, or be spinning much faster than the Earth -- or maybe is tidally locked, so that the same side of the planet faces the star all the time?  I think we're in for some surprises, wherever we look.

Kind of boggles the mind, doesn't it?

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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

A signal from our neighborhood

I try to keep my rational brain engaged, but man, sometimes it's hard going.

Like when I read the story that popped up over at Scientific American last Friday.  My ears perked up at the very first line: "It's never aliens, until it is."

Written by Jonathan O'Callaghan and Lee Billings, it tells about a recent discovery made by "Breakthrough Listen," the search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence program launched by entrepreneur Yuri Milner in 2015.  Despite scanning the skies for five years looking for something that might be a sign of alien intelligence, Breakthrough Listen hasn't found anything that couldn't be explained using ordinary astrophysics...

... until now.

Maybe.  I hate to add that word, but... "rational brain engaged," and all.  There's a lot that's exciting about what they discovered, not least that the signal they found comes from Proxima Centauri -- the nearest star to the Sun, right in our own neighborhood at only 4.2 light years' distance.  (Okay, I probably shouldn't say "only."  4.2 light years is about 25,000,000,000,000 miles.  One of the fastest spacecraft ever made by humans, Voyager 2, would still take 73,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri -- if it were heading that way, which it's not.)

The proximity of the signal's source is hardly the only exciting thing about it.  After all, the universe has plenty of radio sources, and all the ones we've found so far have purely prosaic explanations.  The signal is weirdly compressed, occupying a narrow band of frequencies centering around 982 megahertz.  Interestingly, this is a frequency range that is usually fairly empty of transmissions, which is one of the reasons the signal stood out, and decreases the likelihood that it's some kind of human-made source being picked up accidentally.  "We don’t know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency,” said astrophysicist Andrew Siemion, who is on the team that analyzed the signal.  "Perhaps, some as-yet-unknown exotic quirk of plasma physics could be a natural explanation for the tantalizingly concentrated radio waves, but for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological."

The "tantalizing" part is that we know for sure that Proxima Centauri has at least one Earth-like planet -- Proxima b, which is 1.2 times the size of the Earth, and orbits its star in eleven days.  (If that doesn't sound very Earth-like, remember that Proxima Centauri, as a red dwarf, is a lot less massive than the Sun, so its "Goldilocks zone" -- the band of orbital distances that are "just right" for the temperatures to allow liquid water" -- is a lot closer in, and the planets in that region travel a lot faster.)  Red dwarf stars are prone to solar flares, so some of the more pessimistic astrophysicists have suggested that the radiation flux and general turbulence would destroy any nearby planets' atmosphere, or at least shower the surface with sufficient ionizing radiation to prevent the development of complex biochemistry, let alone life.

But it's important to realize that this, too, is a surmise.  Truthfully, we don't know what's down there on Proxima b -- just that it's got a rocky surface and a temperature range that would allow for liquid oceans, rivers, and lakes.

Just like here.

In short, finding a suspicious radio signal from the nearest star to our own is pretty amazing, even if I *wince* *grimace* keep my rational brain engaged.

The fact is, even the scientists -- normally the most cautious of individuals -- are sounding impressed by this.  "It’s the most exciting signal that we’ve found in the Breakthrough Listen project, because we haven’t had a signal jump through this many of our filters before," said Sofia Sheikh of Pennsylvania State University, who led the team that analyzed the signal and is the lead author on an paper describing it, scheduled for publication this spring.

Honestly forces me to add that there's one bit of information about the signal that points away from it being a technosignature: unlike the signal detected at the beginning of the movie Contact, it has no internal fine structure.  “BLC1 [Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1] is, for all intents and purposes, just a tone, just one note," Siemion says.  "It has absolutely no additional features that we can discern at this point."

But even the doubters are saying it's worthy of further study.  "If it’s an ETI it must eventually be replicable, because it’s unlikely it would be a one-off,” said Shami Chatterjee, a radio astronomer at Cornell University.  "If an independent team at an independent observatory can recover the same signal, then hell yes.  I would bet money that they won’t, but I would love to be wrong."

So would a lot of us, Dr. Chatterjee.  I know we've had other strange signals before, stretching all the way back to the beginnings of radio astronomy and the discovery of incredibly rapid-fire "blinking" of a radio source discovered at Jodrell Bank by astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967.  That one also elicited the comment of "we don't know a natural process that could generate such fast oscillation" -- and the source was actually nicknamed "LGM" (Little Green Men) until Burnell showed that the signal was coming from a pulsar, a rapidly-spinning neutron star.

So it was bizarre, perhaps, but not a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

In any case, I'll be eagerly awaiting replication and confirmation of the discovery.  Even if it doesn't turn out to be aliens *heavy sigh* it'll probably turn out to be something interesting.  But until then... well, I guess it's premature to request transport to the mother ship, but I can still keep hoping.

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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

Frozen lightning

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will recognize the name Andrew Butters, my fellow blogger over at the wonderful Potato Chip Math.  Andrew and I are so much alike that mutual friends suspect we were twins separated at birth.  Besides both being bloggers, we are both novelists, were both physics majors (degrees we completed despite the fact that, to put it bluntly, we both kind of sucked at it), both have seriously demented senses of humor, and both love weird and arcane science stuff.

It's this last commonality that has earned Andrew mention in Skeptophilia more than once, because he frequently passes along science news articles he runs across, and a good many of these have ended up here.  And today I once again give him my tip o' the hat for sending me a link to a story from Science about some recent research on the topic of fulgurites.

What's a fulgurite, you might ask?  The -ite ending might clue you in to surmise correctly that we're talking about some sort of mineral.  Fulgurite isn't just some ordinary garden-variety rock, though.  Fulgurites are formed when lightning strikes the ground, discharging into soil that has a high mineral (and low organic matter) content.  When this occurs, an electrical potential difference of as much as a hundred million volts is bridged.

This is what physicists call "a hell of a big short circuit."  Lightning releases all the energy stored in that potential in a fraction of a second.  The column of air through which the current passes superheats, generating the light flash and booming shock wave we associate with a nearby strike.

But it doesn't expend all its stored energy on its passage through the air.  As the current dissipates in the ground, it generates so much heat that it melts the minerals in the soil, when then fuse together into a twisted tube of glass that charts the pattern the lightning bolt took once it struck.

Fulgurites [Image licensed under the Creative Commons John Alan Elson, Fulgsdcrb, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The topic comes up because the article Andrew sent me a couple of days ago is about a geologist, Jonathan Castro, at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, who came up with the novel idea of using fulgurites to chart ancient climate trends.  Fulgurites are often found near mountaintops -- the peak of Mount Shasta, for example, is pitted with them, the rock blackened and scarred from the hundreds of hits the mountain has taken.  Castro found that when a fulgurite forms, it evaporates all the water in the glass chunk formed; the fulgurite then begins to take up water again at a slow and steady rate, so the water content in the pores of the glass can give you a good idea of when it formed.

Not only does this serve to date lightning strike frequency -- and thus give data about the paleoclimate -- it also can be used to time the advance and retreat of glaciers.  A strike onto a thick layer of ice would cause shock cracks and melting, but in short order there'd be no trace left of it.  Once the glacier retreats and exposes bare rock surfaces, though, any strikes would cause the formation of long-lasting fulgurites.

So, fossilized frozen lightning.

Reading about this sort of thing always makes me realize something I never thought about during the years of my abortive attempt to launch a career in scientific research.  Research depends not only on technical know-how and a solid background in your subject, it depends hugely on creativity -- the capacity for coming up with a way of tackling the question at hand in a novel way.  When I read about Castro's use of fulgurites to date the movement of glaciers, my first thought was, "I never would have thought of doing that."  It's not just that I'm not a geologist -- and actually, because of growing up around my rockhound dad, I knew about fulgurites before reading the article -- I just can't imagine being scientifically creative enough to put fulgurites together with glaciers together with water uptake rates by glass and come up with a new lens on the climate ten-thousand-odd years ago.

But I have the utmost respect for anyone whose brain does work that way.  When Andrew sent me the link, my response was, "Okay, that is just cool."  And it once more points at something I've said many times before; if you're interested in science -- even if you were kind of a washout as a physics student -- you'll never, ever be bored.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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