The emergent mind

One of the arguments I've heard the most often in discussions of the possibility of developing a true artificial intelligence is that computers are completely mechanistic.  I've heard this framed as, "You can only get out of them what you put into them."  In other words, you could potentially program a machine to simulate intelligence, perhaps even simulate it convincingly.  But there's nothing really in there -- it's just an input/output device no more intelligent than a pocket calculator, albeit a highly sophisticated one.

My question at this juncture is usually, "How are our brains any different?"  Our neurons act on electrical voltage shifts; they fire (or not) based upon the movement of sodium and potassium ions, modulated by a complex group of chemicals called neurotransmitters that alter the neuron's ability to move those ions around.  That our minds are a construct of this elaborate biochemistry is supported by the fact that if you introduce substances that alter the concentrations or reactivity of the neurotransmitters -- better known as "psychoactive drugs" -- it can radically alter perception, emotion, personality, and behavior.

But there's the nagging feeling, even amongst those of us who are diehard materialists, that there's something more in there, an ineffable ghost in the machine that is somehow independent of the biological underpinnings.  Would a sufficiently complex electronic brain have this perception of self?  Could an artificial intelligence eventually be capable of insight, of generating something more than the purely mechanical, rule-driven output we usually associate with computers?  Of -- in other words -- creativity?

Or will that always be in the realm of science fiction?

If you doubt an artificial intelligence could ever have insight or creativity, some research out of a collaboration between Tsinghua University and the University of California - San Diego may make you want to reconsider your stance.

Ce Wang and Hui Zhai (Tsinghua) and Yi-Zhuang You (UC-San Diego) have created an artificial neural network that is able to look at raw data and figure out the equations that govern the reality.  In other words, it does what scientists do -- finds a mathematical model that accounts for observations.  And we're not talking about something simple like F = ma, here; the Wang et al. neural network was given experimental data of the measured position of quantum particles, and was able to develop...

... the Schrödinger Wave Equation.

To put this in perspective, the first data that gave us humans insight into the quantum-mechanical nature of subatomic particles, studies of photons by Max Planck in 1900, led to the highly non-intuitive notion that photons of light were quantized, emitted in discrete steps that were multiples of a minimum energy now known as Planck's constant.  From there, further experimentation with particle momentums and positions by such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and Werner Heisenberg led to the discovery of the weird wave/particle duality (subatomic particles are, in some sense, a wave and a particle simultaneously, and which properties you see depend on which you look for).  Finally, Erwin Schrödinger put the whole thing together in the fundamental law of quantum mechanics, now called the Schrödinger Wave Equation in his honor.

But it took twenty-five years.

For those of you who aren't physics types, here's the equation we're talking about:

And to make you feel better, I majored in physics and I can't really say I understand it, either.

Here's how Wang et al. describe their neural network's accomplishment:

Can physical concepts and laws emerge in a neural network as it learns to predict the observation data of physical systems?  As a benchmark and a proof-of-principle study of this possibility, here we show an introspective learning architecture that can automatically develop the concept of the quantum wave function and discover the Schrödinger equation from simulated experimental data of the potential-to-density mappings of a quantum particle.  This introspective learning architecture contains a machine translator to perform the potential to density mapping, and a knowledge distiller auto-encoder to extract the essential information and its update law from the hidden states of the translator, which turns out to be the quantum wave function and the Schrödinger equation.  We envision that our introspective learning architecture can enable machine learning to discover new physics in the future.

I read this with my jaw hanging open.  I think I even said "holy shit" a couple of times.  Because they're not stopping with the network recreating science we already know; they're talking about having it find new science that we currently don't understand fully -- or perhaps, that we know nothing about. 

It's hard to imagine calling something that can do this anything other than a true intelligence.  Yes, it's limited -- a neural network that discovers new physics can't write a poem or create a piece of art or hold a conversation -- but as one by one, each of those hurdles is passed, it's not hard to envision putting them together into one system that is not so far off from AI brains envisioned by science fiction.

As exciting as it is, this also makes me a little nervous.  Deep thinkers such as Stephen Hawking, Nick Bostrom, Marvin Minsky, and Roman Yampolskiy have all urged caution in the development of AI, suggesting that the leap from artificial neural networks being beneath human intelligence levels to being far, far beyond them could happen suddenly.  When an artificial intelligence gains the ability to modify its own source code to improve its own functionality -- or, perhaps, to engage in such human-associated behaviors as self-preservation -- we could be in serious trouble.  (The Wikipedia page on the existential risk from artificial general intelligence gives a great overview of the current thought about this issue, if you're interested, or if perhaps you find you're sleeping too soundly at night.)

None of which is meant to detract from Wang et al.'s accomplishment, which is stupendous.  It'll be fascinating to see what their neural network finds out when it moves beyond the proof-of-concept stage and turns its -- mind? -- onto actual unsolved problems in physics.

It does leave me wondering, though, when all is said and done, if we'll be looking at a conscious emergent intelligence that might have needs, desires, preferences... and rights.  If so, it will dramatically shift our perspective as the unquestioned dominant species on Earth, not to mention generating minds who might decide that it is in the Earth's best interest to end that dominance permanently.

At which point it will be a little too late to say, "Wait, maybe this wasn't such a good idea."

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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!]

Halos and shadows

About two weeks ago, I wrote a piece here about a Scottish cryptid called the Am Fear Liath Mòr -- which roughly translates from Gaelic as "the big gray dude" -- a horrifying apparition that has been seen in the Cairngorms of northern Scotland.  It's described as a human figure, but huge and hulking, that appears in the distance, understandably creating "uneasy feelings" in the observer.

As I mentioned in my previous post, if I were to see such a thing, my "uneasy feelings" would include being so terrified I'd drop dead of a brain aneurysm.  Because I'm just that brave.

Well, thanks to a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I've learned that this might be an unfortunate overreaction on my part.  The Am Fear Liath Mòr may have a completely rational, scientific explanation, and one that doesn't require belief in some enormous Sasquatch knock-off wandering around in the Highlands.  It seems like the Scottish Big Gray Dude might be an example of a phenomenon that occurs in foggy mountains called the "Brocken spectre."

The Brocken spectre (or "Brocken bow") is an optical effect that occurs when there are eye-level uniformly-dispersed water droplets of all about the same size -- as you find in a fog bank -- and you're backlit by sunlight.  This requires specific conditions, not only fog in front of you, but it being clear enough behind you that there's sufficient sunlight to cast a shadow.  The result is that your shadow, or more accurately the light rays that outline it, are refracted and reflected by the water droplets in the fog, creating a hugely magnified shadow surrounded by a halo of glare, sometimes with a rainbow sheen.

A Brocken spectre photographed near the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brocken Inaglory, Solar glory and Spectre of the Brocken from GGB on 07-05-2011, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The phenomenon gets its name from the Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains of Germany, where it has been observed for centuries, and was described in detail by scientist Johann Silberschlag in 1780.  The idea of the allegedly-supernatural Brocken spectre being nothing more than an optical illusion generated by a shadow and the refractive effects of water droplets is supported by the fact that it's always seen in the fog when the Sun is behind you, and it seems to shift size unpredictably -- unsurprising if you're moving (which I sure as hell would be if I saw one), and there's a breeze making the fog bank waver and shift.

So it turns out that the Big Gray Dude of Scotland may not be a cryptid at all, just a weird -- and fascinating -- localized weather phenomenon.  And it also accounts for other instances of eerie figures in the mist, such as the "Dark Watchers" of the Santa Lucia Mountains in California and the strange looming presence reported by British mountaineer Eric Shipton while climbing Mount Kenya.  It's also related to the optical phenomenon called heiligenschein ("holy light") which probably accounts for instances of people being seen surrounded by what appears to be a ghostly halo.  The somewhat anticlimactic explanation for this latter effect is that it's not Tongues of Fire or the Radiance of God descending upon you, it's light scattering and a thoroughly understood mechanism called retroreflection that happens regardless of the holiness level of the person involved.

In any case, one more win for the scientific approach, even if it kind of blows away the mystique of a giant scary shadow-man wandering about in the Scottish Highlands.  Skeptic though I am, I have to admit to being a little disappointed.  It seems like if there's anywhere that should actually be haunted, it's the Cairngorms.  But even so, it's somehow fitting that the thing that has been terrifying the superstitious for centuries turns out to be nothing more than...

... their own shadows.

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

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!]

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.

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

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.

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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!]

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!]