The postman always rings twice

When I started this blog ten years ago, I knew that I was gonna get hate mail.  It was inevitable, given my own strong opinions and the nature of the topics I write on.  I try to be as fair as I can, but I have no particular problem with identifying bullshit as such, and that has the effect of pissing a lot of people off.

 The thing that never fails to amaze me, though, is which posts get people stirred up.  I wrote a post comparing Donald Trump to Hitler, and nary a peep.  And yesterday I get two -- count 'em, two -- vitriolic screeds, both from posts I did ages ago -- one from the post I did in 2013 about the claim that hair is basically extended nerve endings, and the other about the claim I looked at a year earlier that there are giant glass pyramids on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that collect and focus cosmic ray energy.

The first one lambasted me for not going out and doing a study on the topic myself before criticizing it, despite the fact that the story I was responding to had no evidence presented whatsoever except for an alleged study by someone whose name was changed to protect privacy.  Because, presumably, studying hair is frowned upon by the scientific community and could result in death threats, or something.  The original article was also laced with claims that were demonstrably false (such as that hair "emits electromagnetic energy"). But I guess my pointing this out pasted a target on my chest:

Humans have predators in the natural world...you're trying to say that our primitive ancestors were as lazy and non-attentive as some random douche canoe 'skeptic' on his computer, shovelling Bugles into his mouth in his Family Guy jammie pants?  HA!  No.  They slept in fucking trees to stay alive (hence the hypnic jerk) and had to intuit and be aware of their surroundings.

No, what I'm saying is that hair, being dead strands of keratin, are not nerves.  Keep your eye on the ball, here.  Also, being that I spent years teaching a neuroscience class, I'm well aware that we have sense organs, and the evolutionary origins thereof.

You honestly believe that there is NO WAY somebody with longer hair might be able to sense changes in the wind, movements from other animals around them, foreign predatory energy (as in E=MC squared) approaching?  REALLY?  It makes SO much sense, that it warrants a study, and it should be done.

Actually, if you'll read what I wrote, you'll see that I did say that hair increases skin sensitivity, and that whiskers in many animals function as tactile sensors.  And did you really just say that Einstein's mass/energy equivalence has something to do with picking up "foreign predatory energy?"

And as far as this warranting a study, I'll simply quote Christopher Hitchens: "What is asserted without proof may be dismissed without proof."

You clearly have no fucking CLUE what you're talking about, and that's coming from somebody who actually comes from the scientific community.  Stop trying to play scientist; you're bad at it.  So many of you Atheist/skeptics/whatever say the things you BELIEVE a scientist would say, when they would NEVER say it; you don't have the knowledge to back a claim, and just go around saying something is bullshit because you think it makes you appear intelligent...but something you clearly don't know is that an actual researcher or scientist would know WITHOUT A DOUBT that something was correct or incorrect before saying so. 

Cf. my earlier comment about my teaching neuroscience. Your move.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The second one, about the ocean floor pyramids, was, if possible, even snarkier.  It began as follows:

The thing that makes me fucking angry about idiots like yourself is that you dismiss stuff you've never seen.

Another quote comes to mind, this one from Delos McKown, to wit: "The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike."  But point made. I've never been to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.  Do continue.

If something doesn't fit the way you think the world is, you say it doesn't exist, piss on it, and walk away. 

It's hard to see how I'd piss on something that doesn't exist.  Even worse, how I'd piss on a nonexistent object that's not at the bottom of the Atlantic.  But all purely mechanical problems aside, I guess I was a little dismissive.

How do you know what the effects of cosmic rays are on the energy of the planet?  You talk like you have proof that pyramids couldn't be channelers of energy, but you can't prove it because you never leave your fucking armchair long enough to do anything but scoff.

I get out of my armchair pretty frequently, actually.  As far as how I know what cosmic rays can and cannot do, I once again feel obliged to point out that I have a degree in physics, teaching certificates in physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics, and the ability to read.  Those put together give me at least a reasonably good ability to understand actual science.

And another thing: there's this fallacy called "shifting the burden of proof."  If you make an outrageous statement -- such as there being giant glass pyramids in the ocean that focus quantum energy frequency vibrations -- it is not the responsibility of those who say "bullshit" to prove they don't exist.

The pyramid guy ended by saying:

I bet you don't even have the balls to post this comment on your blog.  People like you hate it when you're challenged, because you want to be right without doing any work.  Anyhow, fuck you.

You're right that I'm not posting it, because it is, as you point out, my blog.  (Although I am writing an entire post about it instead, the irony of which does not escape me.)  Let me be plain about this: commenting is a privilege, not a right.  I'm happy to post contrary points-of-view -- not that I enjoy being wrong, mind you, but having new information brought to light is how we learn.  I've more than once printed retractions when I have been dead wrong, an experience which is profoundly humbling but is necessary for honesty's sake.

But it's a little frustrating to be accused of being a shallow-minded scoffer by people who retort with shallow-minded scoffing.  If someone has legitimate science -- not just a screaming post of "it could be so, and you can't prove it isn't, so fuck you!" -- I'm happy to listen.

Until then, I'm sticking with my original stance, and don't expect me to rise to the bait and argue with you.   Or even post your comment.  Call me a douche canoe skeptic, but there you are.

In any case: keep those cards and letters coming.  I'm not fond of hate mail, but as Brendan Behan put it, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."  

So I tend to agree with Captain Jack Sparrow.  If people are sending me hate mail, at least they're reading what I write, and there's nothing wrong with that.

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Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

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

Sighting a survivor

I think if I had to choose one extinct species to bring back, it would be the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus).  Second place would be a harder choice; I've always wished we could resurrect some of the dozens of extinct endemic Hawaiian birds, including the three species of 'o'o and the various Hawaiian honeycreepers -- all of which were wiped out in the past 150 years from a combination of habitat destruction, hunting for decorative feathers, and the introduction of mosquitoes and avian malaria.

But there's something about the thylacine that has always fascinated me.  Also called the "Tasmanian wolf" -- a complete misnomer, as its range was not restricted to Tasmania, and it's not a wolf but a marsupial -- the last wild thylacine was shot by a farmer in 1931, and the last captive individual of the species died in a zoo in Hobart in 1936.  They certainly look canine, but it's a case of convergent evolution.  Adults were on the size of a large German shepherd, something on the order of a meter and a half tip-to-tail and sixty centimeters at the shoulder, with a distinctive pattern of stripes on the back (giving them their other misnomer of "Tasmanian tiger").  Their jaws were odd -- long and narrow and capable of almost a ninety-degree gape, giving it a powerful "scissor bite" that allowed them to take down prey far larger than themselves.

This, in fact, was largely their undoing.  They often went after domestic animals, especially sheep, earning them the enmity of farmers and other residents.  They were hunted as nuisances, and in the early twentieth century the Tasmanian government offered a £1 a head bounty on thylacines, something that was taken advantage of over two thousand times.  The scheme worked.  Within two decades the thylacine was functionally extinct, and a few years after that, extinct in reality.

Captive thylacines, ca. 1903 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Since its official extinction in the 1930s, however, there have been regular sightings of thylacines.  At least alleged sightings, because none of them have resulted in anything a scientist would accept as hard evidence -- a photograph, a clump of hair, a bone, even a footprint.  But the claims that the thylacine still exists refuse to die down as they have with other animals.  (No one, for example, claims to have seen a dodo recently on Mauritius Island.)

The problem, besides the lack of evidence, is that there are a lot of ways to misidentify this animal, similar to how an untrained observer might mistake the probably-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker for the relatively common Pileated Woodpecker.  A quick glance could well make someone identify an Australian wild dog (or dingo) for a thylacine -- or even a large feral domestic dog.  Plus, most of the sightings have been in poor light or from a distance.  (To be fair, even if some of these have been actual sightings, that wouldn't be unusual; thylacines were notoriously shy of contact with humans.)

The reason this comes up is because just a few days ago, there was an alleged thylacine sighting, not in Tasmania but in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia.  Once again, there was no photograph or other hard evidence, but this sighting does have some features that make me hopeful it could be the real deal.

According to the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia, a gentleman who lives in the Adelaide Hills -- a relatively wild forested area, where you can easily picture an animal living and going unnoticed -- was up at six AM and saw what he unequivocally thinks was a mother thylacine with several pups.  What sets his account apart is that he claims he heard the animal vocalizing, and what he describes is very similar to how the howling of thylacines was described in accounts from the nineteenth century.

TAGOA explains the sighting as follows:

Last night, however, when we spoke and I interviewed them both, it was clear he now has 100% belief in what his wife had witnessed as he too has now seen the unbelievable.  A podcast of our discussion will be released soon on our YouTube channel, as well as Mark Taylor's report when he heads out there in the next day or so to set up trail cameras and get a handle on the area….more to come soon...

The witnesses both claim that they have heard weird noises of a screaming nature several times and just fobbed it off.  The beauty of this sighting is that the husband saw the mother (animal) make the weird screechy noise…that part is rare as rocking horse shit.

Which is a wonderful simile that I will be sure to incorporate in my conversations from now on.

Okay, I know, claims like this are a dime a dozen, and I've been unhesitating in dismissing that sort of thing vis-à-vis bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.  But at least this claim has going for it that we know thylacines did exist at some point in the past, which is more than I can say for most other cryptids.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if the claim was borne out?  It would mean there was a breeding population of thylacines not just in Tasmania but in mainland Australia that has persisted since the last wild sighting occurred in 1931.  And hell, the coelacanth was supposedly extinct for sixty-odd-million years until someone caught one off the coast of Madagascar, so stranger things have happened.

Anyhow, keep your eye on Australia.  It'll be interesting to see how the ongoing search progresses.  How encouraging would it be to find out that at least one of us humans' attempts to wipe out an entire species actually failed?

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Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

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

Overcoming the snap

One of the most frustrating thing about conspiracy theorists is how resistant they are to changing their minds, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence.

Look, for example, at the whole "Stop the Steal" thing.  There are a significant number of Republicans who still won't acknowledge that Biden won the election fair and square, despite the fact that the opposite claim -- that there was widespread voter fraud that favored the Democrats, and an organized effort by the Left to make it seem like Trump lost an election he actually "won in a landslide" -- has gone to court in one form or another over sixty times, and in all but one case the lawsuit was thrown out because of a complete lack of evidence.  The judges who made these decisions include both Republicans and Democrats; the legal response to "Stop the Steal" has been remarkably bipartisan.

Which, you'd think, would be enough, but apparently it isn't.  An amazingly small number of Republicans have said publicly that they were wrong, there was little to no fraud, certainly not enough to sway the election, and that Biden clearly was the victor.  Mostly, the lack of evidence and losses in court has caused the True Believers double down, has made them even surer that a vast conspiracy robbed Trump of his win, and the lack of any kind of factual credibility is because there's an even vaster conspiracy to cover it all up.

Essentially, people have gone from "believe this because there's evidence" to "believe this despite the fact there's no evidence" to "believe this because there's no evidence."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons SkepticalScience, Conspiracy Theories Fallacy Icon, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Once you've landed in the last-mentioned category, it's hard to see what possible way there'd be to reach you.  But there may be hope, to judge by a study that came out last week in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In "Jumping to Conclusions: Implications for Reasoning Errors, False Belief, Knowledge Corruption, and Impeded Learning," by Carmen Sanchez of the University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign and David Dunning of the University of Michigan (of Dunning-Kruger fame), we find out that there is a strong (and fascinating) correlation between four features of the human psyche:

• Jumping to conclusions -- participants were given a task in which a computerized character was fishing in a lake.  The lake had mostly red fish and a few gray fish, and the researchers looked at how quickly the test subject was confident about predicting the color of the next fish pulled from the lake.
• Certainty about false beliefs -- volunteers were given a test of their knowledge of American history, and for each four-answer multiple choice question they were asked how confident they were in their answer.  The researchers looked at people who got things wrong -- while simultaneously being certain they were right.
• Understanding of basic logic -- participants were given a variety of logic puzzles, such as simple syllogisms (All fish can swim; sharks are fish; therefore sharks can swim), and asked to pick out which ones were sound logic and which were faulty.
• Belief in conspiracy theories -- test subjects were given a variety of common conspiracy theories, such as the belief that cellphones cause cancer but it's being covered up by big corporations, and asked to rank how likely they thought the beliefs were to be true.

They found that the faster you are to jump to conclusions on the fish test, the worse you are at logic, and the more certain you are about your beliefs even if they are wrong -- and, most critically, the more likely you are to believe spurious, zero-evidence claims.

So far, nothing too earth-shattering, and I think most of us could have predicted the outcome.  But what makes this study fascinating is that Sanchez and Dunning looked at interventions that could slow people down and make them less likely to jump to false conclusions -- and therefore, less likely to feel certain about their own false or counterfactual beliefs.

The intervention had four parts:

• An explanation of the "jumping to conclusions" phenomenon, including an explanation of why it happens in the brain and the fact that we are all prone to this kind of thing.
• An acknowledgement of the difficulty of making a correct decision based on incomplete information.  Test subjects were shown a zoomed-in photo, and then it was zoomed out a little bit at a time, and the test subjects had to decide when they were sure of what they were looking at. 
• An exercise in studying optical illusions.  Here, the point was to illustrate the inherent flaws of our own sensory-integrative mechanisms, and how focusing on one thing can make you miss details elsewhere that might give you more useful information.
• A short video of a male jogger who compliments a female street artist, and gets no response.  He repeats himself, finally becoming agitated and shouting at her, but when she reacts with alarm he turns and runs away.  Later, he finds she has left him a picture she drew, along with a note explaining that she's deaf -- leaving the guy feeling pretty idiotic and ashamed of himself.  This was followed up by asking participants to write down snap judgments they'd made that later proved incorrect, and what additional information they'd have needed in order to get it right.

This is where I got a surprise, because I've always thought of believers in the counterfactual as being essentially unreachable.  And the intervention seems like pretty rudimentary stuff, something that wouldn't affect you unless you were already primed to question your own beliefs.  But what Sanchez and Dunning found is that the individuals who received the intervention did much better on subsequent tasks than the control group did -- they were more accurate in assessing their own knowledge, slower to make snap judgments, and less confident about crediting conspiracy theories.

I don't know about you, but I find this pretty hopeful.  It once again reinforces my contention that one of the most important things we can do in public schools is to teach basic critical thinking.  (And in case you didn't know -- I have an online critical thinking course through Udemy that is available for purchase, and which has gotten pretty good reviews.)

So taking the time to reason with people who believe in conspiracies can actually be productive, and not the exercise in frustration and futility I thought it was.  Maybe we can reach the "Stop the Steal" people -- with an intervention that is remarkably simple.  It's not going to fix them all, nor eradicate such beliefs entirely, but you have to admit that at this point, any movement in the direction of rationality is worth pursuing.

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Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

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

The cost of regret

"But what would have been the good?"

Aslan said nothing.

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?"

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No.  Nobody is ever told that."

"Oh dear," said Lucy.

"But anyone can find out what will happen," said Aslan.  "If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me – what will happen?  There is only one way of finding out."

This passage, from C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian, has always struck me with particular poignancy, because one of the most consistent themes of my life has been regret at not having made different decisions.  People I dearly wish I had not hurt.  Opportunities I passed up because of my shyness and risk-aversion.  More specific ones, like my (all things considered) terrible decision to live at home while going to college.  My (at the time) barely-acknowledged choice to keep my bisexuality hidden for decades.

It's not, mind you, that I'm unhappy with my life as it is.  I have a wonderful wife, two sons I'm proud of, and spent 32 years in a rewarding career that I discovered quite by accident,  as a consequence of other seemingly unrelated decisions I made.  I have seventeen books in print, something I have dreamed about since elementary school.  I live in a wonderful part of the world, and have had the good fortune to travel and see dozens of other wonderful places.

And I'm aware of the fact that things could have turned out far worse.  Whatever else you can say about the decision, my choice to live at home during college, with conservative, strait-laced parents who kept close tabs on me, kept me out of all sorts of trouble I might otherwise have gotten into.  If I'd come out as bisexual in college, it would have been in around 1980 -- and this was right at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was still poorly understood, and a diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence.

There's any number of ways the course of my life could have been deflected into an alternate path, and led me to somewhere very different.  Big decisions -- where to go to college, who to marry, what career to pursue.  Tiny actions with big effects, such as Donna Noble's choice of which direction to turn at an intersection in the mind-blowing Doctor Who episode "Turn Left" -- and of which in my own case I'm almost certainly unaware because looking back, they seem entirely insignificant.  

As I said, I like my life just fine.  Even so, I've never been able to shuck the regret, and more than that the fact that like Lucy Pevensie in Prince Caspian, I'll never know what would have happened had I done otherwise.

The topic comes up because of a fascinating paper in the journal Psychological Science called "The Lure of Counterfactual Curiosity: People Incur a Cost to Experience Regret," by Lily FitzGibbon and Kou Muryama (of the University of Reading), and Asuka Komiya (of Hiroshima University).  They did a risk/choice/reward assessment task with 150 adults, and after the task was completed, the volunteers are allowed to pay for information about how they would have fared had they chosen differently.

It turns out, people are willing to pay a lot, even when they find out that they chose poorly (i.e. they would have had a greater reward had they made a different choice), and even though knowledge of their poor decision causes regret, self-doubt, and worse performance on subsequent tasks.  The authors write:

After one makes a decision, it is common to reflect not only on the outcome that was achieved but also on what might have been.  For example, one might consider whether going to a party would have been more fun than staying home to work on a manuscript.  These counterfactual comparisons can have negative emotional consequences; they can lead to the experience of regret.  In the current study, we examined a commonly observed yet understudied aspect of counterfactual comparisons: the motivational lure of counterfactual information—counterfactual curiosity.  Specifically, we found that people are so strongly seduced to know counterfactual information that they are willing to incur costs for information about how much they could have won, even if the information is likely to trigger negative emotions (regret) and is noninstrumental to obtaining rewards.

Why would people seek out information when they know ahead of time it is likely to make them feel bad?  The authors write:

One explanation for seeking negative information is that people may also find it interesting to test their emotional responses—a mechanism that might also underlie so-called morbid curiosity.  Counterfactual information of the kind sought in the current experiments may be desirable because it has high personal relevance—it relates to decisions that one has made in the recent past.  People’s desire for information about their own performance is known to be strong enough to overcome cognitive biases such as inequality aversion.  Thus, opportunities to learn about oneself and the actual and counterfactual consequences of one’s decisions may have powerful motivational status.

Chances are, if I was able to do what Donna did in "Turn Left" and see the outcome had I chosen differently, I'd find the results for my life's path would be better in some aspects and worse in others.  Like everything, it's a mixed bag.  Given the opportunity to go back in time and actually change something -- well, tempting as it would be, I would be mighty hesitant to take that step and risk everything I currently have and have accomplished.

But still -- I'd like to know.  Even if in some cases, I'd have done far better making a different choice, and then would add the certainty of having made a bad decision on top of the more diffuse regret I already have.  The temptation to find out would be almost irresistible.

Maybe it's better, honestly, that we don't see the long-term consequences of our actions.  Fortunate, to put it in Aslan's words, that "Nobody is ever told that."  It's hard enough living with knowing you fell short or behaved badly; how much worse it would be if we saw that things could have been far better if we'd only chosen differently.

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

Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

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

The shifting sands

In H. P. Lovecraft's wildly creepy story "The Shadow Out of Time," we meet a superintelligent alien race called the Yith who have a unique way of gathering information.

The Yith, who lived in what is now Australia's Great Sandy Desert some 250 million years ago, are capable of temporarily switching personalities with other intelligent beings throughout the cosmos and from any time period.  While the consciousness of the kidnapped individual is residing in its temporary Yith body, it enjoys the freedom to learn anything it wants from the extensive library of information the Yith have gleaned -- as long as the individual is willing to contribute his/her own knowledge to the library.  The main character, early twentieth century professor Nathaniel Peaslee, is switched, and while he is living with the Yith he meets a number of luminaries whose personalities have also been swiped, including:

• Titus Sempronius Blaesus: a Roman official from 80 B.C.E.
• Bartolomeo Corsi: a twelfth-century Florentine monk
• Crom-Ya: a Cimmerian chief who lived circa 15,000 B.C.E. 
• Khephnes: a Fourteenth Dynasty (circa 1700 B.C.E.) Egyptian pharaoh
• Nevil Kingston-Brown: an Australian physicist who would die in 2518 C.E.
• Pierre-Louis Montagny: an elderly Frenchman from the time of Louis XIII (early seventeenth century)
• Nug-Soth: a magician from a race of conquerors in16,000 C.E,
• S'gg'ha: a member of the star-headed "Great Race" of Antarctica, from a hundred million years ago
• Theodotides: a Greco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C.E.
• James Woodville: a Suffolk gentleman from the mid-seventeenth century
• Yiang-Li: a philosopher from the empire of Tsan-Chan, circa 5000 C.E.

Compared to most of the gory dismemberments other Lovecraftians entities were fond of, the Yith are remarkably genteel in their approach. Of course, it's not without its downside for the kidnapped individual; not only do they lose control over their own bodies for a period up to a couple of years, they experience serious disorientation (bordering on insanity in some cases) upon their return to their own bodies.

Nevertheless, it's a fantastic concept for a story, and I remember when I first read it (at about age sixteen) how taken I was with the idea of being able to meet and talk with individuals from both past and future, not to mention other species.  But what struck me most viscerally when I read it was when Peaslee, in the Yith's body, describes what he sees surrounding the library.

It's a tropical rain forest.  What now is a barren desert, with barely a scrap of vegetation, was a lush jungle:

The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would witness tremendous rains.  Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the Sun -- which looked abnormally large -- and the Moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never fathom.  When -- very rarely -- the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition.  Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the Earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn.

The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendron, and Sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic fronds waving mockingly in the shifting vapors...  I saw constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark I could tell but little of their towering, moist vegetation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carl Malamud, Cretaceous Diorama 2, CC BY 2.0]

I think it's the first time I'd really gotten hit square between the eyes with how different the Earth is now than it had been, and that those changes haven't halted.  In the time of Lovecraft's Yith, 250 million years ago, where I am now (upstate New York) was underneath a shallow saltwater ocean.  Only a hundred thousand years ago, where my house stands was covered with a thick layer of ice, near the southern terminus of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet.  (In fact, the long, narrow lakes that give the Finger Lakes Region its name were carved out by that very glacier.)

I was immediately reminded of that moment of realization when I read a paper a couple of days ago in Nature called "Temperate Rainforests Near the South Pole During Peak Cretaceous Warmth," by a huge team led by Johann Klages of the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung, of Bremerhaven, Germany.  Klages's team made a spectacular find that demonstrates that a hundred million years ago, Antarctica wasn't the windswept polar desert it currently is, but something more like Lovecraft's vision of the site of the prehistoric library of Yith.  The authors write:

The mid-Cretaceous period was one of the warmest intervals of the past 140 million years, driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of around 1,000 parts per million by volume.  In the near absence of proximal geological records from south of the Antarctic Circle, it is disputed whether polar ice could exist under such environmental conditions.  Here we use a sedimentary sequence recovered from the West Antarctic shelf—the southernmost Cretaceous record reported so far—and show that a temperate lowland rainforest environment existed at a palaeolatitude of about 82° S during the Turonian–Santonian age (92 to 83 million years ago).   This record contains an intact 3-metre-long network of in situ fossil roots embedded in a mudstone matrix containing diverse pollen and spores.  A climate model simulation shows that the reconstructed temperate climate at this high latitude requires a combination of both atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 1,120–1,680 parts per million by volume and a vegetated land surface without major Antarctic glaciation, highlighting the important cooling effect exerted by ice albedo under high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

It's a stunning discovery from a number of perspectives.  First, just the wonderment of realizing that the climate could change so drastically.  Note that this wasn't, or at least wasn't entirely, because of tectonic movement; the site of the find was still only eight degrees shy of the South Pole even back then.  Despite that, the warmth supported a tremendous assemblage of life, including hypsilophodontid dinosaurs, labyrinthodontid amphibians, and a diverse flora including conifers, cycads, and ferns.  (And given that at this point Antarctica and Australia were still connected, Lovecraft's vision of the home of the Yith was remarkably accurate.)

So, if it wasn't latitude that caused the warm climate, what was it?  The other thing that jumps out at me is the high carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere back then -- 1,000 parts per million.  Our current levels are 410 parts per million, and going up a steady 2.5 ppm per year.  I know I've rung the changes on this topic often enough, but I'll say again -- this is not a natural warm-up, like the Earth experienced during the mid-Cretaceous.  This is due to our out-of-control fossil fuel use, returning to the atmosphere carbon dioxide that has been locked up underground for hundreds of millions of years.  When the tipping point will occur, when we can no longer stop the warm up from continuing, is still a matter of debate.  Some scientists think we may already have passed it, that a catastrophic increase in temperature is inevitable, leading to a complete melting of the polar ice caps and a consequent rise in sea level of ten meters or more.

What no informed and responsible person doubts any more is that the warm-up is happening, and that we are the cause.  People who are still "global warming doubters" (I'm not going to dignify them by calling them skeptics; a skeptic respects facts and evidence) are either woefully uninformed or else in the pockets of the fossil fuel interests.

I don't mean to end on a depressing note.  The Klages et al. paper is wonderful, and gives us a vision of an Earth that was a very different place than the one we now inhabit, and highlights that what we have now is different yet from what the Earth will look like a hundred million years in the future.  It brings home the evocative lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's wonderful poem "In Memoriam:"

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves and go.

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

Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

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

The voice of nature

Yesterday I wrote about my difficulty with maintaining concentration.  My mind's tendency to wander has been with me all my life, and at after sixty years of fighting with it I'm beginning to think it always will be.  This, coupled with an unfortunate history of not sticking with things long if I don't see quick results, has been why my attempts to make a practice of meditation have, all things considered, been failures.

I've had more than one person recommend meditation and mindfulness training as a means for combatting depression, anxiety, and insomnia, all of which I struggle with.  I even did a six-week mindfulness training course three years ago, thinking that if perhaps I learned some strategies for dealing with my errant brain, I might be more successful.  But even training didn't seem to be able to fix the fact that when I meditate, I nearly always veer off either into an anxiety attack or else fall asleep.  Steering a middle course -- being relaxed and tranquil enough to gain some benefit from it, but not so relaxed and tranquil that I lose consciousness -- just never seemed to be within my grasp.

Part of my problem is that I have a loud internal voice,  I know we all deal with internal chatter, but mine has the volume turned up to eleven.  And it's not even interesting chatter, most of the time.  I sometimes have looped snippets of songs, usually songs I hate.  (Last week, I woke up at two AM with the song "Waterloo" by Abba running through my head.  God alone knows why.  I don't even like that song during the day.)  Sometimes it's just completely random musings, like while I was running yesterday and pondering how weird the word "aliquot" is.  (For you non-science folks, it means "a sample" -- as in, "transfer a 3.5 ml aliquot of the solution to a test tube."  I also found out, because I was still thinking about it later and decided to look it up, that it comes from a Latin word meaning "some.")

So most of the time, my brain is like a horse that's always on the verge of spooking, throwing its rider, and then running off a cliff.

The topic comes up because of a paper that appeared this week in the journal Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, which found that the old technique used for combatting distraction during meditation -- to focus on your breath -- simply doesn't work well for some people.  Not only is it an ongoing battle, a lot of people have the same problem I did, which is taking those mindfulness skills and then applying them during the ordinary activities of the day.

In "Exploring Mindfulness Attentional Skills Acquisition, Psychological and Physiological Functioning and Well-being: Using Mindful Breathing or Mindful Listening in a Nonclinical Sample," by Leong-Min Loo, Jon Prince, and Helen Correia, we read about a study of 79 young adults who were trained in mindfulness and meditation techniques -- but for some of them, they were instructed in the traditional "return to your breath if you get distracted" method, and others were told to focus on external sounds like quiet recorded music or sounds of nature.  Interestingly, the ones who were told to focus on external sounds not only reported fewer and shorter episodes of distraction during meditation, they reported greater ease in using those techniques during their ordinary daily activities -- and also reported lower symptoms of depression and anxiety afterward than the group who mediated in silence.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons anonym, Bronze figure of Kashmiri in Meditation by Malvina Hoffman Wellcome M0005215, CC BY 4.0]

What's funny is I was just thinking about the idea of soothing sounds a couple of days ago, when I participated in one of those silly online quizzes.  One of the questions was, "What are your favorite sounds?" -- and after I rattled off a few, I realized that all but one of them were natural sounds.  Thunder.  Wind in the trees.  The dawn chorus of birds in spring.  A hard rain striking the roof.  Ocean waves.  (The only one on my list that wasn't natural was "distant church bells at night" -- a sound that reminds me of when I was nine and lived with my grandma for a year, and every evening heard the beautiful and melancholy sound of the bells of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Broussard, Louisiana, rising and falling with the breeze.)

So maybe it's time to try meditation again, but using some recordings of natural sounds to aid my focus.  I know I'll still have to combat my brain's tendency to yell absurd and random stuff at me, and also my unfortunate penchant for giving up on things too easily.  But something external to focus on seems like it might help a bit, at least with the attentional part of it.

And lord help me, if it purges "Waterloo" from my brain, it'll be worthwhile regardless.

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

I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

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

The mental walkabout

I don't know about you, but I have a real problem with my mind wandering.

It's not a new thing.  I can remember getting grief for daydreaming back when I was in grade school.  I'd be sitting in class, trying my damndest to concentrate on transitive verbs or the Franco-Prussian War or whatnot, but my gaze would drift off to some point in the middle distance, my auditory processing centers would switch from "external input" to "internal input" mode, and in under a minute I'd be out in interstellar space or roaming around Valhalla with Odin and the Boys or rowing a boat down the Amazon River.

Until the teacher would interrupt my reverie with some irrelevant comment like, "Gordon!  Pay attention!  Why don't you tell us how to find x in the equation 5x - 9 = 36?"  I was usually able to refrain from saying what came to mind, namely, that she was the one who lost x in the first place and it was hardly my responsibility to find it, but I usually was able to get myself together enough to take a shot at playing along and giving her a real answer.

I never outgrew the tendency (either to daydreaming or to giving authority figures sarcastic retorts).  It plagued me all through college and beyond, and during my teaching career I remember dreading faculty meetings because I knew that five minutes in I'd be doodling on the agenda despite my vain attempt to be a Good Boy and pay attention.  It's part of how I developed my own teaching style; a mentor teacher told me early along that teaching was 25% content knowledge and 75% theater, and I took that to heart.  I tried to lecture in a way that kept students wondering what the hell I was going to say or do next, because I know that's about the only thing that kept me engaged when I was sitting in the student's desk and someone else was in front of the room.

One amusing case in point -- Dr. Cusimano, who taught a British History elective I took as a senior in college.  He was notorious for working puns and jokes into his lectures, and doing it so smoothly and with such a straight face that if you weren't paying attention, it could slip right past you.  I recall early in the course, when he was talking about the fall of the Roman Empire, Dr. Cusimano said, "During that time, what was left of the Roman Empire was invaded by a series of Germanic tribal leaders -- there was Alaric, King of the Visigoths; Gunderic, King of the Vandals; Oscar Mayer, King of the Franks..."

I'd bet cold hard cash there were students in the class who wrote that down and only erased it when one by one, their classmates caught on and started laughing.

I never daydreamed in Dr. Cusimano's class.

Edward Harrison May, Daydreaming (1876) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Anyhow, all of this comes up because of a study out of the University of California - Berkeley that appeared this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Entitled, "Distinct Electrophysiological Signatures of Task-Unrelated and Dynamic Thoughts," by Julia W. Y. Kam, Zachary C. Irving, Caitlin Mills, Shawn Patel, Alison Gopnik, and Robert T. Knight, this paper takes the fascinating angle of analyzing the electroencephalogram (EEG) output of test subjects when focused on the task at hand, when focusing on something unrelated, or when simply wandering from topic to topic -- what the authors call "dynamic thought," like much of the game of random free association that my brain spends a significant portion of its time in.

The authors write:

Humans spend much of their lives engaging with their internal train of thoughts.  Traditionally, research focused on whether or not these thoughts are related to ongoing tasks, and has identified reliable and distinct behavioral and neural correlates of task-unrelated and task-related thought.  A recent theoretical framework highlighted a different aspect of thinking—how it dynamically moves between topics.  However, the neural correlates of such thought dynamics are unknown. The current study aimed to determine the electrophysiological signatures of these dynamics by recording electroencephalogram (EEG) while participants performed an attention task and periodically answered thought-sampling questions about whether their thoughts were 1) task-unrelated, 2) freely moving, 3) deliberately constrained, and 4) automatically constrained...  Our findings indicate distinct electrophysiological patterns associated with task-unrelated and dynamic thoughts, suggesting these neural measures capture the heterogeneity of our ongoing thoughts.

"If you focus all the time on your goals, you can miss important information," said study co-author Zachary Irving, in an interview with Science Direct.  "And so, having a free-association thought process that randomly generates memories and imaginative experiences can lead you to new ideas and insights."

Yeah, someone should have told my elementary school teachers that.

"Babies' and young children's minds seem to wander constantly, and so we wondered what functions that might serve," said co-author Allison Gopnik.  "Our paper suggests mind-wandering is as much a positive feature of cognition as a quirk and explains something we all experience."

So my tendency to daydream might be a feature, not a bug.  Still, it can be inconvenient at times.  I know there are a lot of things that would be a hell of a lot easier if I could at least control it, like when I'm reading something that's difficult going but that I honestly want to pay attention to and understand.  Even when my intention is to concentrate, it usually doesn't take long for me to realize that my eyes are still tracking across the lines, my fingers are turning pages, but I stopped taking anything in four pages ago and since that time have been imagining what it'd be like to pilot a spaceship through the Great Red Spot.  Then I have to go back and determine when my brain went AWOL -- and start over from there until the next time I go on mental walkabout.

I guess there's one advantage to being an inveterate daydreamer; it's how I come up with a lot of the plots to my novels.  Sometimes my internal imaginary worlds are more vivid than the real world.  However, I do need to re-enter the real world at least long enough to get the story down on paper, and not end up being too distracted to write down the idea I came up with while I was distracted last time.

In any case, I guess I'd better wrap this up, because I'm about at the limits of my concentration.  I'd like to finish this post before my brain goes on walkies and I end up staring out of my office window and wondering if there's life on Proxima Centauri b.  Which I guess is an interesting enough topic, but hardly the one at hand.

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

I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

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