The imaginary scientist

The unfortunate reality is that in this "Age of Information," where we as a species have the ability to store, access, and transfer knowledge with a speed that fifty years ago would have been in the realm of science fiction, it is harder than ever to know what's true and what isn't.

The internet is as good a conduit of bullshit as it is of the truth.  Not only are there plenty of well-intentioned but ill-informed people, there are lots of folks who lie deliberately for their own ends -- monetary gain, power, influence, the dubious thrill of having pulled off a hoax, or just their "five minutes of fame."  It used to be that in order to be successful, these purveyors of bad information had to go to the trouble and expense of writing a book, or at least of finding a way to get speaking engagements.  Now that anyone with money and access can own a webpage, there's nothing stopping cranks, liars, hoaxers, and the rest from getting their message out there to the entire electronic world simultaneously.

When I taught a high school course in critical thinking, one of my mantras was "check your sources."  If you find a claim online, where did it come from?  What is the originator's background -- does it seem like (s)he has sufficient knowledge and expertise?  Has it been checked and corroborated by others?  If it's from a journal, is it a peer-reviewed source -- or one of the all-too-common "pay to play" journals that will take damn near anything you write if you're willing to pay them to do it?  Does it line up with what we already know from science and history?  (Another mantra was "nearly every time someone claims 'this new theory will overturn everything we know about physics!', it turns out to be wrong.")

None of this guarantees that the claim is correct, of course; but using those questions as general guidelines will help you to navigate the intellectual minefield of science representation on the internet.

Except when it doesn't.

As an example of this, have you heard of Camille Noûs?

I hadn't, until I read a troubling story that appeared last week in Nature, written by Cathleen O'Grady.  Camille Nôus first showed up as a signatory on an open letter about science policy in France early last year, and since then has been listed as a co-author on no fewer than 180 different papers.  She?  He? -- the name "Camille" could be either, which I don't think is accidental -- has been racking up citation after citation, in a wide range of unrelated fields, including astrophysics, ecology, chemistry, and molecular biology.

Pretty impressive accomplishments in the world of research, where increasing specialization has resulted in what a friend of mine described as "researchers knowing more and more about less and less until finally they'll know everything about nothing."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Yakuzakorat, Scientists are working in the lab.9, CC BY 4.0]

This same narrowing of focus is why the red flag of Camille Noûs's ubiquity would never become apparent to many scientists; they might find the name over and over in papers from their field of evolutionary biology, for example, and not realize -- probably never even see -- that Noûs had also, astonishingly, co-authored papers in medical biochemistry.

So what's going on here?

By this point, it probably will come as no shock that Camille Noûs doesn't exist.  The last name "Noûs" was chosen because "nous" means "we" in French, and is also a play on the Greek word νοῦς, which means "reason."  Noûs was the brainchild of  RogueESR, a French science advocacy group, as a way to personify collective efforts and knock the elitist attitude of some leading scientists down a peg.  RogueESR protested the cost-saving approach by many research institutions of eliminating tenure-track positions and making just about all available openings temporary, project-specific research, and they decided to come up with a moniker representing the human, group-cooperative side of science.

"Hundreds of articles will make this name the top author on the planet," they wrote in a newsletter, "with the consequence of distorting certain bibliometric statistics and demonstrating the absurdity of individual quantitative assessment."

Well, okay, I get the point.  At its best, science is a collective effort, and one should never lose sight of the fact that behind every technical paper there are creative, curious human minds who shouldn't be treated as expendable and replaceable cogs in a machine.  But the problem is, if you can't trust a paper in a major peer-reviewed journal to print the truth, who can you trust?  Yes, sometimes scientists make mistakes, and papers have to be retracted; but admitting an error, and publishing something that is known to be false up-front, are hardly the same thing.

Some journals are taking a stance on this issue, and are refusing to accept papers with Noûs's name on the list of authors, or at least agreeing to publish only if the name is removed.  But the fact that Noûs is already listed as an author on 180 papers -- and those papers are being cited in other papers, and round and round and round -- means that the imaginary author won't disappear any time soon.

While I certainly agree with the motives behind the protest, this is an ethically questionable way of approaching it.  There is already enough distrust of science and scientists by the general public; the very last thing we need is researchers including an out-and-out lie in their papers, however noble their intentions, however tongue-in-cheek the lie is.

The people who are joining the protest and adding Noûs to their author list need to find another way to make their opinions on the issue heard.

The reason we critical thinking non-scientists always want people to go to the peer-reviewed research is because it is -- or should be -- the gold standard for representing the best, most thoroughly-tested, most comprehensive and accurate knowledge we currently have.  The Camille Noûs stunt weakens the whole enterprise.  "The campaign is naïve and ethically questionable," said Lisa Rasmussen, a bioethicist at the University of North Carolina - Charlotte.  "It flouts the basic principle of taking responsibility alongside the credit of authorship."

Which is it exactly.  I'll still rely on research in journals like Science and Nature when I want to be certain of my facts, but the whole incident brings home the unfortunate fact that even when you do your best to check your sources, you can still be led astray.  Science, however rigorous its methods, is still a human pursuit, and like all human pursuits, can be subject to bias, misjudgment, error -- and outright falsification, however well-intentioned.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

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

Secrecy failure equation

Every once in a while a piece of scientific research comes along that is so clever and elegant that I read the entire paper with a smile on my face.

This happened today when I bumped into the study by David Robert Grimes (of the University of Oxford) published in PLoS ONE entitled, "On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs."  What Grimes did, in essence, was to come up with an equation that models the likelihood of a conspiracy staying secret.  And what he found was that most conspiracies tend to reveal themselves in short order from sheer bungling and ineptitude.  In Grimes's words:

The model is also used to estimate the likelihood of claims from some commonly-held conspiratorial beliefs; these are namely that the moon-landings were faked, climate-change is a hoax, vaccination is dangerous and that a cure for cancer is being suppressed by vested interests. Simulations of these claims predict that intrinsic failure would be imminent even with the most generous estimates for the secret-keeping ability of active participants—the results of this model suggest that large conspiracies (≥1000 agents) quickly become untenable and prone to failure.

Grimes wasn't just engaging in idle speculation.  He took various examples of conspiracies that did last for a while (for example, the NSA Prism Project that was exposed by Edward Snowden) and others that imploded almost immediately (for example, the Watergate coverup) and derived a formula that expressed the likelihood of failure as a function of the number of participants and the time the conspiracy has been in action.  When considering claims of large-scale coverups -- e.g., chemtrails, the faking of the Moon landing, the idea that climatologists are participating in a climate change hoax -- he found the following:

The analysis here predicts that even with parameter estimates favourable to conspiratorial leanings that the conspiracies analysed tend rapidly towards collapse.  Even if there was a concerted effort, the sheer number of people required for the sheer scale of hypothetical scientific deceptions would inextricably undermine these nascent conspiracies.  For a conspiracy of even only a few thousand actors, intrinsic failure would arise within decades.  For hundreds of thousands, such failure would be assured within less than half a decade.  It’s also important to note that this analysis deals solely with intrinsic failure, or the odds of a conspiracy being exposed intentionally or accidentally by actors involved—extrinsic analysis by non-participants would also increase the odds of detection, rendering such Byzantine cover-ups far more likely to fail.

Which is something I've suspected for years.  Whenever someone comes up with a loopy claim of a major conspiracy -- such as the bizarre one I saw a couple of weeks ago that the Freemasons collaborated in faking the deaths of Larry King and Rush Limbaugh -- my first thought (after "Are you fucking kidding me?") is, "How on earth could you keep something like that hushed up?"  People are, sad to say, born gossips, and there is no way that the number of people that would be required to remain silent about such a thing -- not to mention the number required for faking the Moon landing or creating a climate change hoax -- would make it nearly certain that the whole thing would blow up in short order.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons allen watkin from London, UK, Weird graffiti (3792781972), CC BY-SA 2.0]

It's nice, though, that I now have some mathematical support, instead of doing what I'd done before, which was flailing my hands around and shouting "It's obvious."  Grimes's elegant paper gives some serious ammunition against the proponents of conspiracy theories, and that's all to the good.  Anything we can do in that direction is helpful.

The problem is, Grimes's study isn't likely to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.  The conspiracy theorists will probably just think that Grimes is one of the Illuminati, trying to confound everyone with his evil mathe-magic.  Grimes alluded to this, in his rather somber closing paragraphs:

While challenging anti-science is important, it is important to note the limitations of this approach.  Explaining misconceptions and analysis such as this one might be useful to a reasonable core, but this might not be the case if a person is sufficiently convinced of a narrative.  Recent work has illustrated that conspiracy theories can spread rapidly online in polarized echo-chambers, which may be deeply invested in a particular narrative and closed off to other sources of information.  In a recent Californian study on parents, it was found that countering anti-vaccination misconceptions related to autism was possible with clear explanation, but that for parents resolutely opposed to vaccination attempts to use rational approach further entrenched them in their ill-founded views.  The grim reality is that there appears to be a cohort so ideologically invested in a belief that for whom no reasoning will shift, their convictions impervious to the intrusions of reality.  In these cases, it is highly unlikely that a simple mathematical demonstration of the untenability of their belief will change their view-point.

And there's also the problem that the conspiracy theorists view themselves as stalwart heroes, the only ones brave enough to blow the whistle on the Bad Guys.  My guess is that most of the adherents to conspiracy theories would read Grimes's paper, assume that the equation is correct, and conclude they're the geniuses who are exposing the conspiracy and causing it to fail.  You really can't win with these people.

Be that as it may, it's heartening to know that we now have some theoretical support for the idea that most conspiracy theories are bullshit.  Even if it doesn't change anyone's mind, it cheered me up considerably, and I'm thankful for that much.

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I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

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

Gem water sales pitch

Yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the note, "Now I've heard everything."

The link was to the home page of a company called VitaJuwel.  The sales pitch is headed with the line, "Create Your Own Fresh and Pure Gemstone Water!"

Evidently the idea here is that we're going one step beyond "crystal healing;" now what you do is take crystals and put them in your water, and it somehow makes the water...

... well, I dunno.  Waterier or something.  They're never completely clear on that point.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sapphiredge, Sapphire Gem, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's funniest about this is that the gems they sell you are encased in glass vials, so they don't even come into physical content with the water.  You just immerse the vial with the gems into the water, and somehow the jewel-ness of the gems seeps right through the glass and into the water.  Oh, but all of this is highly scientific:

Seven years ago, we revolutionized the way to prepare vital and fresh water at home.  Following age-old traditions, we created gemstone vials to hygienically inspirit drinking water.  Our vision now and then is to provide you with homemade, natural gemwater like fresh from the spring! 

VitaJuwel gem vials are made from lead-free glass and hand-picked gems.  We offer several different gem blends, tested by naturopaths and based on the insights of modern crystal healing.  Their scientifically proven efficiency make them an essential accessory in health-seeking households worldwide.

So naturally I wanted to find out what this "scientifically proven efficiency" was based on, so I went to their "methods" page, and I'm happy to say it did not disappoint:

The use of gems to vitalize water is a traditional art which was already known to the ancient Greek and wise men and women during medieval times.  Recently, this old tradition has been rediscovered.  Gemstones have the ability to store energy.  That effect makes quartz watches work, for example.

What they're referring to here is the piezoelectric effect, which is the property of certain crystalline substances to alter in their electric charge in response to mechanical stress.  This property is used in dozens of applications -- in everything from guitar pickups to inkjet printers to electric lighters.  In quartz clocks, a disk of quartz is used to generate an oscillating change in electrical voltage that then can regulate the ticking of the second hand.

Which has fuck-all to do with immersing jewels in water and then drinking it.

And of course, the gemstone water people aren't talking about anything nearly that concrete and demonstrable in any case.  Here's how they say it works:

Each type of gem, by nature, has its unique kind of energetic information.  The gems inside the VitaJuwel vials transfer their information to the water that surrounds the vial and, thus, improve the waters' vitalization level.  An effect which regular water drinkers might even be able to taste!

What exact "information" they're talking about is unclear, as is the means by which a gem could transfer this information into water through the sides of a glass bottle.  The skeptics, though, they dismiss with the following inadvertently hilarious statement: "Infusing water with the power of gems is an age-old tradition and – comparable to homeopathy – hard to grasp by conventional 'scientific' means."

Yup. In fact, gemstone water works precisely in the same way that homeopathy does.

Oh, and by the way: they say it also works for a glass of wine.  Which, after reading the shtick on this website, I feel like I could use one or two of.

Did you notice that in the last quote, they put the word scientific in quotation marks?  I have to admit that it torques me a little, because the implication is that a claim being supported by "conventional scientific means" is a bad thing.  Oh, those silly scientists -- always demanding proof and evidence and so on.  Never just accepting an "age old tradition" about "unique energetic information" without expecting it to generate results that stand up to analysis -- and that have some kind of understandable mechanism by which they could work.

And that's not even looking at the fact that these "VitaJuwel" vials, as far as I could see from their website, start at $78.  That's just for the economy model, if you want cheap, tabloid-magazine-level information being imparted to your water.  For the truly Shakespeare-quality information, you have to go for the ViA Crystal Edition Golden Moments vial, for a cool $340.

My advice: keep your money.  Putting a glass bottle with some shiny rocks into your drinking water (or wine) is going to generate nothing more than a lighter pocketbook and the placebo effect.  As far as the rest of the pseudoscientific blather on the site -- I'm calling bullshit.

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

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

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

The scent of memory

When I was about nine years old, I went to live with my paternal grandmother for a year.

Ostensibly the reason was that my parents were in the process of building a house, and where they were living -- a room in my maternal grandfather's house -- there wasn't space for a kid.  My grandmother, on the other hand, lived in a rambling old house with tons of space.  Plus, I idolized my grandma, and had a rather fractious relationship with my parents, so the move resolved several problems simultaneously.

While living with my grandma, my bedroom was in the attic.  Don't think of a cramped, dark space; it was wide open, with dormer windows and lots of separate "rooms" with various nooks and crannies and alcoves and places to explore.  Got a little hot in the summer -- this was southern Louisiana, and there were lots of fans but no air conditioning except a single window-mounted unit down in the living room -- but it was a splendid retreat for a kid who was already a bit of a loner.

Because of the heat, I often slept with the windows open, and one of the two things that will always bring back memories of that year is the sound of church bells in the distance.  My grandma's house was a couple of blocks from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, and the bells ringing in the evening reminds me of those quiet nights in the attic room.

The other, and stronger, association is the smell of old books.

My grandma loved books.  The attic walls were lined with shelves, and filled with what looked to my young eyes like thousands of books, from old cloth-bound textbooks to paperback novels, and everything in between.  The dusty, dry smell of old books brings me back instantaneously; I can almost see the book sitting in my lap as I sat cross-legged on the attic floor, feel texture of the brittle, yellowed pages and the worn cover.  The memories are vivid, detailed, and immediate.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tom Murphy VII, Old book bindings, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I've always wondered why smells can evoke such powerful memories.  It's a common response, but despite this, the underlying mechanism has remained elusive.  But now a study out of Northwestern University, published this week in Progress in Neurobiology, has shed some light on the relationship between olfaction and memory -- and found that it results from an underlying structural feature of the human brain.

The team, led by neuroscientist Guangyu Zhou, studied the connections between the olfactory centers and other parts of the brain, and also looked at activity levels using fMRI technology.  They found something fascinating -- that the olfactory centers have a higher degree of connectivity with the hippocampus (one of our main memory centers) than any other sense, and the activity level in those connections oscillates to match the rate of our breathing.

"During evolution, humans experienced a profound expansion of the neocortex that re-organized access to memory networks," said study co-author Christina Zelano, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Vision, hearing and touch all re-routed in the brain as the neocortex expanded, connecting with the hippocampus through an intermediary -- association cortex -- rather than directly.  Our data suggests olfaction did not undergo this re-routing, and instead retained direct access to the hippocampus."

It does make me wonder a bit about my own case, though, because after decades of sinus problems, my sense of smell is pretty lousy.  It's not gone completely, but I certainly don't have the sensitive nose that many have.  (Which has a variety of downsides, including explaining why I was assigned to clean up when our septic tank backed up, and also give our dogs baths the time they got skunked at five AM.)  Now, there's the additional complication of COVID-19 infection wiping out people's senses of smell entirely.  "Loss of the sense of smell is underestimated in its impact," Zelano said.  "It has profound negative effects of quality of life, and many people underestimate that until they experience it.  Smell loss is highly correlated with depression and poor quality of life...  Most people who lose their smell to COVID regain it, but the time frame varies widely, and some have had what appears to be permanent loss.  Understanding smell loss, in turn, requires research into the basic neural operations of this under-studied sensory system."

I'm a little dubious that my poor sense of smell has anything to do with my tendency toward depression, but that they correlate in my case is at least interesting.  It's reassuring that I still do have memories triggered by smells, so even if I might not be having the full experience of the sense of smell, that part of the system still seems to be working just fine.

Especially the smell of old books and memories of living with my grandmother.  That one is intact and fresh, and (fortunately) a very positive association.  Add it to some sounds -- church bells, the rhythmic drone of an oscillating fan, the song of whippoorwills at night -- and I can close my eyes and for a moment, be nine years old again.

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

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

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

Becoming the character

When I was about fourteen, I read Richard Adams's novel Watership Down.

I had never experienced being completely swallowed up by a book the way this one did.  I couldn't put it down -- read, literally, all day long, including over breakfast and lunch.  (Couldn't get away with reading during dinner.  That was verboten in my family.)  It didn't bother me that it's a story about rabbits; in Adams's hands they are deeply real, compelling characters, while never losing their core rabbit-ness.  Their adventure is one of the most gripping, exciting stories I've ever read, and it's still in my top ten favorite books ever.

One of the primary reasons for this is the main character, Hazel.  Hazel is a true leader, bringing his intrepid band through one danger after another to get to a new and safe home, and he accomplishes this without being some kind of high-flung hero.  He's determined, smart, and loyal, but other than that quite ordinary; his main skill is in using all the talents of his friends to their utmost, leading through cooperation and respect rather than through fear.  (And if that point wasn't clear enough, when you meet his opposite, the terrifying General Woundwort, the contrast is obvious -- as is why Hazel and his friends ultimately win the day.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons CSIRO, CSIRO ScienceImage 1369 European rabbit, CC BY 3.0]

We love Hazel because we can be him, you know?  He's not an archetypical warrior whose feats are beyond the ability of just about all of us.  I loved (and still love) a lot of sword-and-sorcery fantasy, but it's never the Lords and Ladies of the Elves, the ones always featured on the book covers, whom I identify with.  It's the Samwise Gamgees that capture my heart every time.  Maybe King Aragorn is the hero of Lord of the Rings, but even he told Sam, "You kneel before no one."

In a passage that is kind of a meta-representation of my own absorption in the story, about a third of the way through Watership Down, Hazel and his friends meet two other rabbits from their home warren, and find out that those two are the only other survivors left after the warren was destroyed by humans so the property could be developed for residences.  Adams's description of the characters listening to the horrific account of their escape -- and of their friends who were not so lucky -- parallels what we feel reading the larger story:

Hazel and his companions had suffered extremes of grief and horror during the telling of Holly's tale.  Pipkin had cried and trembled piteously at the death of Scabious, and Acorn and Speedwell had been seized with convulsive choking as Bluebell told of the poisonous gas that murdered underground...  [But] the very strength and vividness of their sympathy brought with it a true release.  Their feelings were not false or assumed.  While the story was being told, they heard it without any of the reserve or detachment that the kindest of civilized humans retains as he reads the newspaper.  To themselves, they seemed to struggle in the poisoned runs...  This was their way of honoring the dead.  The story over, the demands of their own hard, rough lives began to reassert themselves in their hearts, in their nerves, their blood and appetites.

The reason I thought of Watership Down, and this passage in particular, is because of a paper I read in the journal Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience a couple of days ago.  In "Becoming the King in the North: Identification with Fictional Characters is Associated with Greater Self/Other Neural Overlap," by Timothy Broom and Dylan Wagner (Ohio State University) and Robert Chavez (University of Oregon), participants were asked to evaluate how closely they identified with fictional characters -- in this case, from Game of Thrones -- and then the researchers looked at the volunteers' brain activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), an area associated with our perception of self, when thinking about the various characters in the story.

When thinking about the characters the test subjects liked best, there was much stronger activity in the vMPFC, suggesting that the participants weren't only experiencing enjoyment or appreciation, they were -- like Hazel's friends -- becoming the character.  The authors write, "These results suggest that identification with fictional characters leads people to incorporate these characters into their self-concept: the greater the immersion into experiences of ‘becoming’ characters, the more accessing knowledge about characters resembles accessing knowledge about the self."

"For some people, fiction is a chance to take on new identities, to see worlds though others’ eyes and return from those experiences changed," study co-author Dylan Wagner said, in a press release from Ohio State University.  "What previous studies have found is that when people experience stories as if they were one of the characters, a connection is made with that character, and the character becomes intwined with the self.  In our study, we see evidence of that in their brains."

"People who are high in trait identification not only get absorbed into a story, they also are really absorbed into a particular character," co-author Timothy Broom explained.  "They report matching the thoughts of the character, they are thinking what the character is thinking, they are feeling what the character is feeling.  They are inhabiting the role of that character."

So there's a neurological underpinning to our absorption into a truly fine story -- or, more specifically, a character we care about deeply.  It's what I hope for when people read my own books; that they will not just appreciate the plot but form an emotional connection to the characters.  My contention is that however plot-driven a genre is, all stories are character stories.  The plot and scene-setting can be brilliant, but if we don't care about the characters, none of that matters.

It's fascinating that we can be so transported by fiction, and suggests that we've been storytellers for a very long time.  When reading or hearing a profoundly moving story, we are able to drop the veneer of what Adams describes as our "reserve and detachment... [while reading] the newspaper."  We get swallowed up, and our brain activity reflects the fact that on some level, we're actually there experiencing what the character experiences.

Even if that character is "just a rabbit."

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

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

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

Isolation and anxiety

Last September I took a job working half-time, providing companion care for a senior gentleman who lives in a full-care facility about twenty minutes' drive from where I live.  The work was easy -- mostly what he wanted to do was go for long walks -- and it helped replace a little bit of the income I lost when I retired from teaching.  It also got me out of the house, and (in my wife's words) kept me from turning into a complete recluse.

Then in November, I was furloughed because of the pandemic.

I was in the fortunate position that the financial hit of not working wasn't the dire situation it is for many.  The loss of my weekly paycheck didn't mean we would go without food or miss our mortgage payment.  What it did mean -- both for my client and me -- was that since then, we've been pretty well totally isolated.  My client still sees the nursing staff at the facility; and, to be clear about this, they are stupendous, doing their best to see not only to the physical but to the mental and emotional health of their residents.  For me, it's meant that other than occasional quick trips to the grocery store, the only person I see is my wife.

That's been the situation since the first week of November.

I honestly thought it would be easier for me to deal with isolation.  I'm an introvert by nature, and pretty shy and socially awkward at the best of times.  But the last few months have been dismal, with the fact of it being the middle of an upstate New York winter not helping matters.  I've been fighting bouts of depression and anxiety -- something I've dealt with all my life, but lately it's seemed a lot worse than my usual baseline.

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by the director of the facility.  Because I've been vaccinated against COVID, and the residents were also receiving their vaccines, they were reopening to non-essential visits, and my client was eager to resume our daily time together.  Yesterday was my first day back at work after being stuck at home, pretty much continuously, for four months.

This is where things get weird.  Because instead of it relieving my anxiety, it made it spike higher.  I'm talking, to nearly panic-attack levels.

In case this isn't clear enough, there is nothing rational about this reaction.  My client has some developmental disabilities, and frequently needs a lot of help and encouragement, but he's kind, funny, and a pleasure to be with.  The job itself is the opposite of stressful; the worst part of it is having to keep track of the paperwork required by the agency and the state.  Being stuck home made my anxiety worse; if anything made sense about this, you'd think being given the green light to work again would assuage it.

Edvard Munch, Anxiety (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently, though, I'm not alone in this rather counterintuitive reaction.  A paper last week in the journal Brain Sciences found that the social isolation a lot of us have experienced over the past year has caused a measurable spike in the levels of a hormone associated with stress called cortisol.  Cortisol is a multi-purpose chemical; it has a role in carbohydrate metabolism, behavior, resilience to emotional stressors, and reducing inflammation (cortisone, used for treating arthritis and joint injury, and topically for relieving skin irritations, is basically synthetic cortisol).  This last function is thought to be why long-term stress has a role in many inflammatory diseases, such as ulcers, acid reflux, and atherosclerosis; just as overconsumption of sugar can lead to the body losing its sensitivity to the hormone that regulates blood sugar (insulin), continuous stress seems to lower our sensitivity to cortisol, leading to increased inflammation.

Apropos of its role in emotional stress, the authors write:

There are important individual differences in adaptation and reactivity to stressful challenges.  Being subjected to strict social confinement is a distressful psychological experience leading to reduced emotional well-being, but it is not known how it can affect the cognitive and empathic tendencies of different individuals.  Cortisol, a key glucocorticoid in humans, is a strong modulator of brain function, behavior, and cognition, and the diurnal cortisol rhythm has been postulated to interact with environmental stressors to predict stress adaptation.  The present study investigates in 45 young adults (21.09 years old, SD = 6.42) whether pre-pandemic diurnal cortisol indices, overall diurnal cortisol secretion (AUCg) and cortisol awakening response (CAR) can predict individuals’ differential susceptibility to the impact of strict social confinement during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on working memory, empathy, and perceived stress.  We observed that, following long-term home confinement, there was an increase in subjects’ perceived stress and cognitive empathy scores, as well as an improvement in visuospatial working memory.  Moreover, during confinement, resilient coping moderated the relationship between perceived stress scores and pre-pandemic AUCg and CAR.

I thought it was pretty interesting that heightened cortisol has the effect of improving visuospatial working memory, but it makes sense if you think about it.  When a person is in a stressful situation, there's a benefit to being on guard, to keeping constant tabs on what's around you.  The downside, of course, is that such perpetual wariness is downright exhausting.

The last bit is also fascinating, if hardly surprising.  People who were capable of resilient coping with stress beforehand were less affected by the new emotional impact of being isolated; people like myself who were already struggling fared more poorly.  And interestingly, this was a pronounced enough response that it had a measurable effect on the levels of stress hormones in the blood.

This may explain my odd reaction to being taken off furlough.  Cortisol can be thought of as a sort of an "adrenaline for the long haul."  Adrenaline allows a fight-or-flight reaction in sudden emergencies, and has a rapid effect and equally rapid decline once the emergency is over.  Cortisol handles our response to long-duration stress -- and its effects are much slower to go away once the situation improves.  For people like myself who suffer from anxiety, it's like our brains still can't quite believe that we're no longer teetering over the edge of the cliff.  Even though things have improved, we still feel like we're one step from total ruin, and the added stressor of jumping back into a work situation when we've been safe at home for months certainly doesn't help.

In any case, yesterday's work day went fine.  As they always do.  I'm hoping that after a couple of weeks, my errant brain will finally begin to calm down once it realizes it doesn't have to keep me ramped up to red alert constantly.  It helps knowing I'm not alone in this reaction, and that there's a biochemical basis for it; that I'm not just making this up (something I was accused of pretty much every time I had an anxiety attack when I was a kid).

But it would also be nice if my brain would just think for a change.

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I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

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

In your right mind

There's a peculiarity of the human brain called lateralization, which is the tendency of the brain to have a dominant side.  It's most clearly reflected in hand dominance; because of the cross-wiring of the brain, people who are right-handed have a tendency to be left brain dominant, and vice versa.  (There's more to it than that, as some people who are right handed are, for example, left eye dominant, but handedness is the most familiar manifestation of brain lateralization.)

It bears mention at this juncture that the common folk wisdom that brain lateralization has an influence on your personality -- that, for instance, left brain dominant people are sequential, mathematical, and logical, and right brain dominant people are creative, artistic, and holistic -- is complete nonsense.  That myth has been around for a long while, and has been roundly debunked, but still persists for some reason.

I first was introduced to the concept of brain dominance when I was in eighth grade.  I was having some difficulty reading, and my English teacher, Mrs. Gates, told me she thought I was mixed-brain dominant -- that I didn't have a strongly lateralized brain -- and that this often leads to processing disorders like dyslexia.  (She was right, but they still don't know why that connection exists.)  It made sense.  When I was in kindergarten, I switched back and forth between writing with my right and left hand about five times until my teacher got fed up and told me to simmer down and pick one.  I picked my right hand, and have stuck with it ever since, but I still have a lot of lefty characteristics.  I tend to pick up a drinking glass with my left hand, and I'm strongly left eye dominant, for example.

Anyhow, Mrs. Gates identified my mixed-brainness, and the outcome apropos of my reading facility, but she also told me that there was one thing that mixed-brain people can learn faster than anyone else.  Because of our nearly-equal control from both sides of the brain, we can do a cool thing, which Mrs. Gates taught me and I learned in fifteen seconds flat.  I can write, in cursive, forward with my right hand while I'm writing the same thing backwards with my left.  (Because it's me, they're both pretty illegible, but it's still kind of a fun party trick.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Evan-Amos, Human-Hands-Front-Back, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Fast forward to today.  It's been known for years that lots of animals are lateralized, so it stands to reason that it must confer some kind of evolutionary advantage, but what that might be was unclear until recently.

Research by a team led by Onur Güntürkün, of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at Ruhr-University Bochum, in Germany, has looked at lateralization in animals from cockatoos to zebra fish to humans, and has described the possible evolutionary rationale for having a dominant side of the brain.

"What you do with your hands is a miracle of biological evolution," Güntürkün says. " We are the master of our hands, and by funneling this training to one hemisphere of our brains, we can become more proficient at that kind of dexterity.  Natural selection likely provided an advantage that resulted in a proportion of the population -- about 10% -- favoring the opposite hand.  The thing that connects the two is parallel processing, which enables us to do two things that use different parts of the brain at the same time."

Additionally, Güntürkün says, our perceptual systems have also evolved that kind of division of labor.  Both left and right brain have visual recognition centers, but in humans the one on the right side is more devoted to image recognition, and the one on the left to word and symbol recognition.  And this is apparently a very old evolutionary innovation, long predating our use of language; even pigeons have a split perceptual function between the two sides of the brain (and therefore between their eyes).  They tend to tilt their heads so their left eye is scanning the ground for food while their right one scans the sky for predators.

So what might seem to be a bad idea -- ceding more control to one side of the brain than the other, making one hand more nimble than the other --turns out to have a distinct advantage.  And if you'll indulge me in a little bit of linguistics geekery, for good measure, even our word "dexterous" reflects this phenomenon.  "Dexter" is Latin for "right," and reflects the commonness of right-handers, who were considered to be more skillful.  (And when you find out that the Latin word for "left" is "sinister," you get a rather unfortunate lens into attitudes toward southpaws.)

Anyhow, there you have it; another interesting feature of our brain physiology explained, and one that has a lot of potential for increasing our understanding of neural development.  "Studying asymmetry can provide the most basic blueprints for how the brain is organized," Güntürkün says.  "It gives us an unprecedented window into the wiring of the early, developing brain that ultimately determines the fate of the adult brain.  Because asymmetry is not limited to human brains, a number of animal models have emerged that can help unravel both the genetic and epigenetic foundations for the phenomenon of lateralization."

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

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

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