The imaginary fireball

The subject of today's post isn't anything new; it was just new to me, and, I suspect, will be to a good many of my readers, as well.  I found out about it from a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link about it with a note saying, "Okay, this is interesting. What think you?"

The link was to a 2008 article that appeared in Phys.org entitled, "Cuneiform Clay Tablet Translated for the First Time."   The tablet in question is called the "Sumerian planisphere," and was discovered in the ruins of Nineveh by a British archaeologist named Henry Layard in the middle of the nineteenth century.  From where it was found, it was dated to around 700 B.C.E., and although it was recognized that part of what it contained was maps of constellations, no one was quite sure what it was about.

The Sumerian planisphere [Image is in the Public Domain]

The researchers were puzzled by the fact that the arrangements of the stars in the constellations were close to, but not exactly the same as, the configurations they would have had at the time it was made, but then they concluded that those would have been their positions 2,400 years earlier -- and they claimed the text and maps didn't just show the stars on any old night, but on a sequence of nights chronicling the approach of a comet or asteroid.

Which, ultimately, hit the Earth.

They claim the collision site was near Köfels, Austria, and triggered a five-kilometer-wide fireball.  Why no huge crater, then?  The answer, they say, is that the steep side of the mountain gave way because of the impact, and a landslide ensued.  Organic matter trapped in the debris flow gave an approximate date, but once deciphered, the Sumerian planisphere's detailed sky maps (including the position of the Sun, the timing of sunrise, and so on) supposedly pinpointed the exact day of the impact: the 29th of June, 3123 B.C.E.

Between the planisphere and the geometry of the collision site, the researchers claimed that the comet came in at a very shallow angle -- their estimate is about six degrees -- clipped the nearby peak of Gamskogel, and exploded, creating a five-kilometer-wide moving fireball that finally slammed into Kófels head-on.

You may be wondering why Sumerian astronomers had any particular interest about an impact that occurred almost four thousand kilometers away.  They have an answer for that, too; the shallow impact angle created a sheet of superheated debris that arced away from the impact site, and right toward what is now the Middle East.  A 2014 paper by Joachim Seifert and Frank Lemke concluded that the greatest amount of damage didn't occur right at the collision site, but where all that flaming debris eventually landed -- in Mesopotamia.

"The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt," said Mark Hempsell of the University of Bristol, who is the chief proponent of the Köfels collision hypothesis.  "The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material - including human hair and clothes.  It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast."

The dust and ash from the event caused a hundred-year-long "impact winter" that triggered droughts, leading to a several-centuries-long famine that ultimately caused the collapse of the Akkadian Empire.

Okay, so that's the claim.  There are, unfortunately, a host of problems with it, beginning with those pointed out by the scathing rebuttal by Jeff Medkeff in Blue Collar Scientist.  The first issue is that there is "impact glass" -- vitrified shards of debris partially melted by a collision -- in central Europe, but it dates to much longer ago (certainly more than eight thousand years ago).  There is no impact debris to be found between central Europe and the Middle East anywhere near 3,100 B.C.E., no scorched pottery shards or charred bones that would be indicative of a rain of fire.  An asteroid or comet "clipping" a mountain -- and then generating a plume of debris that was still superheated four thousand kilometers downstream -- would have sheared off the entire mountain top, and there'd be clear evidence of it today.  Last -- and most damning -- the Köfels formation has been studied by geologists and found to be not a single event, but a series of landslides, none of which show convincing evidence of having been triggered by an impact.

The scientists involved don't even seem sure of their own chronology; the Phys.org article says 3123 B.C.E. (the 29th of June, to be exact), while the Seifert and Lemke paper says the impact occurred almost a thousand years later (in 2193 B.C.E.).  The latter date at least is closer to the claimed civilization-destroying effects; the Akkadian Empire fell in around 2154.  It seems likely, though, that the collapse of the Akkadians (and various others, including the Indus Valley Civilization, the Egyptian Old Kingdom, and the Chinese Liangzhu Culture) was due to a drought called the "4.2 Kiloyear Event."  The cause of that is uncertain, but probably wasn't an impact (again, because of the lack of clear stratigraphic evidence).  The most likely culprit was a shift in cold-water currents in the North Atlantic changing patterns of rainfall, but even that is speculative.

As far as Hempsell's even more outlandish claim -- that the Köfels impact generated the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah -- I won't even go into details except to say that there is evidence of a much smaller airburst explosion where the cities were allegedly located, but once again, it's from a different date (around 1650 B.C.E.).  As for any other evidence of the biblical "Cities on the Plain," it's slim to nonexistent.  Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, of Tel Aviv University, called the tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah "an etiological story, that is, a legend that developed in order to explain a landmark.  In other words, people who lived in the later phase of the Iron Age, the later days of the kingdom of Judah, were familiar with the huge ruins of the Early Bronze cities and told a story of how such important places could be destroyed."

So given the (1) lack of any reasonably reliable evidence, (2) a chronology that even the researchers don't seem to be able to keep straight, and (3) plausible alternative explanations for the supposed societal aftereffects, I'm afraid I'm gonna be in the "don't think so" column on this one.  As dramatic as it would be if the astronomers of Sumer documented the approach and ultimate collision of a comet or asteroid, a collision that ultimately showered flaming debris over the entire Middle East, I think we have to set aside the drama of an imaginary fireball for the cold light of reason.

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Birds of a feather

I should probably avoid social media altogether, given what a cesspit of ugliness it can be sometimes.

Unfortunately, it's provided the simplest way of keeping in touch with dear friends I seldom see, especially during the height of the pandemic (when I kind of wasn't seeing anyone).  But to say it amplifies the echo chamber effect is an understatement.  Not only do we tend to link on social media to like-minded folks (can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say that they'd unfriended someone solely because of some opinion or another, usually political), but with the few non-like-minded social media friends we have and keep, it takes so much energy to argue that most of us just sigh heavily, shrug our shoulders, and move on, even when confronted with opinions completely antithetical to our own.

Take, for example, what I saw posted yesterday -- a meme saying, "All I'm saying is, if my dog got three rabies shots and then still got rabies, I'd begin to get suspicious."  (It took all my willpower not to respond, "Oh, how I wish that was all you were saying.")  In any case, not only does the post trumpet zero understanding about how vaccinations and immunity work, it's back to the maddening phenomenon of a layperson thinking an opinion formed from watching Fox News and doing a ten-minute read of some guy's website constitutes "research."

If that wasn't bad enough, a friend-of-the-friend -- no one I know -- responded, "It's what comes from drinking the libtard kool-aid."  So, let's take the ignorant post and make it worse by slathering on some ugly vitriol demeaning half the residents of the country.

And what did I do in response?

Nothing.

I just didn't have the energy to get drawn in.  Plus, there's a sense of such argument being futile anyhow.  I seriously doubt anyone, in the history of the internet, has ever had their opinion changed by arguing a point online with a total stranger.

Only a few minutes after seeing the post, though, I stumbled on some research out of the University of Buffalo that contains at least a glimmer of hope; that the screeching you hear on social media isn't necessarily reflective of the attitudes that the majority of people have, because these platforms amplify the loudest voices -- not necessarily the ones that make the best sense, or are even the most common.

In a paper in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Yini Zhang, Fan Chen, and Karl Rohe looked at our tendency to form "flocks" on social media.  By studying the posts from 193,000 Twitter accounts, and the 1.3 million accounts those accounts follow, they were able to uncover patterns of tweets and retweets, and found the strongest-worded opinions were the ones that got liked and retweeted the most.  They called this phenomenon murmuration -- the term comes from the flocking behavior of starlings -- capturing the idea that online expression of opinions forms and shifts not based on actual changes in the information available, but on who is saying what, and how stridently.

"By identifying different flocks and examining the intensity, temporal pattern and content of their expression, we can gain deeper insights far beyond where liberals and conservatives stand on a certain issue," said study lead author Yini Zhang, in an interview in Science Daily.  "These flocks are segments of the population, defined not by demographic variables of questionable salience, like white women aged 18-29, but by their online connections and response to events.  As such, we can observe opinion variations within an ideological camp and opinions of people that might not be typically assumed to have an opinion on certain issues.  We see the flocks as naturally occurring, responding to things as they happen, in ways that take a conversational element into consideration."

The fact that the social media flocking doesn't mirror the range of opinion out there is heartening, to say the least.  "[S]ocial media public opinion is twice removed from the general public opinion measured by surveys," Zhang said.  "First, not everyone uses social media.  Second, among those who do, only a subset of them actually express opinions on social media.  They tend to be strongly opinionated and thus more willing to express their views publicly."

It's not just political discourse that can be volatile.  A friend of mine just got blasted on Facebook a couple of days ago, out of the blue, because she posts stuff intended to be inspirational or uplifting, and one of her Facebook friends accused her of being "self-righteous," and went on to lambaste her for her alleged holier-than-thou attitude.  The individual in question doesn't have a self-righteous bone in her whole body -- she might be the only person I know who has more of a tendency to anxious self-doubt than I do -- so it was a ridiculous accusation.  But it does exemplify the sad fact that a lot of us feel freer to be unkind to people online than we ever would face-to-face.  

The important point here is that it's easy to see the nastiness and foolishness on social media and conclude that this is the way the majority of the public believes and acts, but the Zhang et al. study suggests that the majority of the opinions of this sort are generated by a few strident people.  Only afterward do those posts act like a magnet to the like-minded followers they already had.

So as hard as it is to keep in mind sometimes, I maintain that the majority of people are actually quite nice, and want the same things we want -- safety, security, the basic necessities, health and happiness for our friends and family.  The ugly invective from people like the guy who made the "libtard" comment is far from a majority opinion, and shouldn't feed into a despairing sense that everyone is horrible.

The flocks, apparently, aren't led by the smartest birds, just the ones who squawk the loudest.  A lot of the rest are tagging along for the ride.  There's a broader population at the center, opinion-wise, than you'd think, judging by what you see on social media.  And when the birds step away from social media, most of them turn out to be ordinary tweeters just trying to stay with the flock-mates they feel the most comfortable with.

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Alchemy class

Frequently, when I'm asked why I'm opposed to science teachers being required to teach "alternate explanations" along with teaching evolution, I respond, "It's interesting that no one is asking teachers to present 'alternate explanations' in other areas of science.  No one, for example, expects chemistry teachers to advocate alchemy as an 'alternate explanation.'"

By now, you'd think I'd know better than to use the phrase "no one" in a statement about belief in some crackpot idea.

Meet Jay Weidner, film director responsible for such masterpieces as Timewave 2013, Infinity: The Ultimate Trip, and (most significantly, for our purposes) The Secrets of Alchemy: The Great Cross and the End of Time.  On his website, Weidner outlines his three laws of the universe, which are poised to oust Newton's Laws as fundamental rules governing nature:

• Weidner's First Law: "Whatever ideas are the most suppressed are the most likely to be the closest to the truth."
• Weidner's Second Law: "If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a symbol is worth a thousand pictures."
• Weidner's Third Law: "The only people who call conspiracies 'theories' are the conspirators."

The First Law would seem to suggest that we should go back the Four Humors Theory of Medicine (all illnesses are caused by an imbalance between the Four Bodily Humors -- blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), as that was suppressed back when they noticed that patients treated according to the recommendations of this theory usually died.  The Second Law means -- never mind, I don't know what the fuck the Second Law means.  But the Third Law would seem to indicate that I'm a conspirator.  I guess that given that I call most conspiracies "theories," and worse still, ridicule them frequently in my blog, I'm not only a conspirator, but I'm really high up in the hierarchy of the conspiracy because I'm so determined to convince everyone that it isn't real.

How about that?  I'm in such a high echelon in a top-secret conspiracy that the fact was secret even from me.  Now that's what I call a secret conspiracy.

In any case, Weidner is a big believer in alchemy, especially as it pertains to the production of the Philosopher's Stone, a substance that can give eternal life.  I thought that Dumbledore had destroyed the Philosopher's Stone way back in the first book of Harry Potter, but Weidner disagrees; he said he has discovered a book that shows you how to produce it, using "materials costing less than a thousand dollars," and he illustrates this on his website using a picture of Aquarius, symbolized by a guy with a Fabio hairstyle, huge pecs and biceps, a six-pack, and almost no clothes, pouring water out of a jar, wearing an expression that seems to say, "Hey, baby, you wanna partake of my Elixir of Life?"

Now there's a symbol that's worth a thousand pictures.

Anyway, the book that describes the process for making the Philosopher's Stone is available for free here.  Weidner cautions us all to download the book before the Evil Conspirators find out that it's available and "hit the internet kill switch."  Because we all know how much the people who run the internet care about the presence of wacky, absurd ideas out there online.  We can't have that.

Curious, I took a look at the book (The Book of Aquarius), since it's free.  When you go to the "Read Online" page, you get a set of chapter headings, and not wanting to slog through the pages of quasi-metaphysical bullshit, I decided to cut to the chase, and skipped to Chapter 14: What Is It Made Of?  And I found out that, to my great shock, the Philosopher's Stone is only made from one ingredient.  And that ingredient is...

... wait for it...

Urine.

Yes, you read that right.  I know, because I had to read it several times before I was convinced that I was reading it correctly myself.  And I thought, "Well, at least Weidner was right when he said that you can get the ingredients for less than a thousand dollars."  Here's the relevant passage from the book:

I must explain that the Stone could in theory be made from anything, since everything contains the life-energy to some degree, which is the active ingredient of the Stone.  Urine contains this life-energy in high concentration, due to the fact that it has just come out of you, and you, as a living animal, are full of life-energy...  From the urine we will need to extract a distillate (water) and a salt.  The life-energy is in the water, and since the life-energy is so volatile it will remain with the water even when the water is distilled (evaporated and condensed).  Our bodies do not want to reject the life-energy in the urine, but have no choice since the life-energy is attached to the water.  Secondly, urine is the perfect ingredient because it is as of yet undetermined.  That is, it has been well filtered, broken down and purified.  It contains all kinds of different minerals, but in minute particles not yet assigned to any purpose.

At this point, I had to stop reading, mostly because it's hard to read the computer screen when your forehead is on your desk.

Anyhow, I encourage you to peruse Weidner's site (I especially recommend the stuff about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing) and The Book of Aquarius.  But if you succeed in making the Philosopher's Stone, please don't tell me about it.  I don't want to know.  For one thing, it will mean that you'll have been playing around with your own urine, or, god forbid, someone else's, and that's just nasty.  For another, at that point you'll have discovered the Secret of Eternal Life, and being that I'm one of the Conspirators, I'd be duty-bound to kill you.  That'd just be unfortunate for a variety of reasons, the most important one of which is that I need all the readers I can get, and if I went around killing them it might discourage people from following my blog.

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Thy fearful symmetry

Everyone knows that most living things are symmetrical, and the vast majority of them bilaterally symmetrical (i.e. a single line down the midsection divides the organism into two mirror-image pieces).  A few are radial -- where any line through the center point divides it in half -- such as jellyfish and sea anemones.  Even symmetrical organisms like ourselves aren't perfectly so; our hearts and spleens are displaced from the midline toward the left, the appendix to the right, and so forth.  But by and large, we -- and the vast majority of living things -- have some kind of overall symmetry.

True asymmetry is so unusual that when you see it, it really stands out as weird.  Consider the bizarre-looking flounder:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter van der Sluijs, Large flounder caught in Holland on a white background, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Flounders start out their lives as ordinary little fish, upright with symmetrically-placed eyes, fins, and so on.  But as they mature, their skulls twist and flatten, and they end up with both eyes on the same side of the head -- a great adaptation for a fish that spends its life lying flat on the seabed, and who otherwise would constantly have one eye pointing downward into the mud.

A question I've asked here before has to do with the constraints on evolution; which of the features of life on Earth are so powerfully selected for that we might expect to see them in life on other planets?  (An example of one that I suspect is strongly constrained is the placement of the sensory organs and brain near the front end of the animal, pointing in the direction it's probably moving.)  But what about symmetry?  There's no obvious reason why bilateral symmetry would be constrained, and it seems as if it might just be a holdover from the fact that our earliest ancestors happened to be bilateral, so we (with a few stand-out exceptions) have inherited it down through the eons from them.

What about symmetry in general, however?  If we went to another life-bearing planet, would we find symmetrical organisms, even if they differ in the type of symmetry from ours?

The answer, judging from a paper that appeared this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by a team led by Iain Johnston of the University of Bergen, appears to be yes.

What Johnston and his team did was analyze the concept of symmetry from the perspective of information theory -- not looking at functional advantages of symmetry, but how much information it takes to encode it.  There are certainly some advantages -- one that comes to mind is symmetrically-placed eyes allows for depth perception and binocular vision -- but it's hard to imagine that's a powerful enough evolutionary driver to account for symmetry in general.  The Johnston et al. research, however, takes a different approach; what if the ubiquity of symmetry is caused by the fact that it's much easier to program into the genetics?

The authors write:

Engineers routinely design systems to be modular and symmetric in order to increase robustness to perturbations and to facilitate alterations at a later date.  Biological structures also frequently exhibit modularity and symmetry, but the origin of such trends is much less well understood.  It can be tempting to assume—by analogy to engineering design—that symmetry and modularity arise from natural selection.  However, evolution, unlike engineers, cannot plan ahead, and so these traits must also afford some immediate selective advantage which is hard to reconcile with the breadth of systems where symmetry is observed.  Here we introduce an alternative nonadaptive hypothesis based on an algorithmic picture of evolution.  It suggests that symmetric structures preferentially arise not just due to natural selection but also because they require less specific information to encode and are therefore much more likely to appear as phenotypic variation through random mutations.  Arguments from algorithmic information theory can formalize this intuition, leading to the prediction that many genotype–phenotype maps are exponentially biased toward phenotypes with low descriptional complexity.

Which is a fascinating idea.  It's also one with some analogous features in other realms of physiology.  Why, for example, do men have nipples?  They're completely non-functional other than as chest adornments.  If you buy intelligent design, it's hard to see what an intelligent designer was thinking here.  But it makes perfect sense from the standpoint of coding simplicity.  It's far easier to have a genetic code that takes the same embryonic tissue, regardless of gender, and modifies it in one direction (toward functional breasts and nipples) in females and another (toward non-functional nipples) in males.  It would take a great deal more information-containing code to have a completely separate set of instructions for males and females.  (The same is true for the reproductive organs -- males and females start out with identical tissue, which under the influence of hormones diverges as development proceeds, resulting in pairs of very different organs that came from the same original tissue -- clitoris and penis, ovaries and testicles, labia and scrotum, and so on.)

So symmetry in general seems to have a significant enough advantage that we'd be likely to find it on other worlds.  Now, whether our own bilateral symmetry has some advantage of its own isn't clear; if we landed on the planets orbiting Proxima Centauri, would we find human-ish creatures like the aliens on Star Trek, who all looked like people wearing rubber masks (because they were)?  Or is it possible that we'd find something like H. P. Lovecraft's "Elder Things," which had five-way symmetry?

And note that even though the rest of its body has five-way symmetry, the artist drew it with bilateral wings. We're so used to bilateral symmetry that it's hard to imagine an animal with a different sort. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Українська: Представник_Старців (фанатський малюнок)]

So that's our fascinating bit of research for today; coding simplicity as an evolutionary driver.  It's a compelling idea, isn't it?  Perhaps life out there in the universe is way more similar to living things down here on Earth than we might have thought.  Think of that next time you're looking up at the stars -- maybe someone not so very different from you is looking back in this direction and thinking, "I wonder who might live on the planets orbiting that little star."

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Accent contagion

One of the features of linguistics I find the most interesting is regional accents.

Americans are usually aware of this phenomenon apropos of English in the United States; it doesn't take any great skill to detect a difference between speech amongst natives of Maine, Mississippi, and Minnesota.  It's a phenomenon that is hardly limited to the US, however.  I heard loud and clear the differences between English spoken in Cornwall, Suffolk, Yorkshire, and Durham when I was in England.  And I still recall when I was in a band that played French music, and we had a gig at Cornell University.  Afterward, a very nice couple with a distinctly French-from-France accent came up afterward.

"We loved your singing," they said to me, "and your French is excellent.  But where are you from?  You don't sound Parisian or any of the accents from southern France, and you're definitely not Québecois."

I said, "My family is from Louisiana."

The light bulb went on.  "Ah!" the man said, smiling.  "Of course!"

I guess the Cajun still comes through, even though I haven't lived in my home state in forty years.

What I find even more interesting is how resistant my English-speaking accent has been to change, despite living in YankeeLand for decades.  I took the New York Times Accent Quiz, and even though I feel like my mode of speech has been pretty well homogenized from ten years in Seattle and thirty in upstate New York, the three cities that I scored the highest matches with were Shreveport, Louisiana, Biloxi, Mississippi, and Houston, Texas.

Connect those three into a triangle, and where I grew up is pretty much right in the middle.

The test relies not only on differences in pronunciation (e.g., of the words "merry," "Mary," and "marry," which ones, if any, are said the same way?) but in identifiable regional words.  For example:

• What do you call the children's playground equipment that's a long board that pivots in the middle, so two kids on opposite ends can take turns going up and down?
• What do you call the strip of ground running along the side of a road?
• What do you call fizzy sweetened drinks?
• What do you call a machine affixed to a wall that provides cold water to drink?
• What do you call a residential road with a green space running down the middle?

(My answers, if you're curious: teeter-totter, verge, soda, water fountain, boulevard.)

Of course, there are a few dead giveaways.  My use of the word "y'all" as a second-person plural pronoun pinpoints me in the southeast of the country right from the outset.  And there are a few bizarre regionalisms -- the most striking one, that none of my friends who took the test had even heard of, is the strange expression "the devil is beating his wife" for the phenomenon of rain falling while the sun is shining.  (No, I have no idea where it comes from, but I can remember my dad saying that when I was little.  Apparently it is of uniquely southern-Louisiana provenance.)

What brings this up is a study from the University of Pennsylvania that appeared in the journal Language last week, looking not only at regional accents but in an odd phenomenon called linguistic convergence -- that people tend to imitate the accents they hear, often unconsciously, resulting in phonetic conventions not native to the person's own region or ethnic background showing up in their speech.

The specific one they looked at was the so-called "long i" sound, more technically the diphthong /ai/, as found in the English words "ride" and "dine."  In a lot of parts of the American southeast, that diphthong gets flattened out to /æ/, the vowel sound in the standard English pronunciation of "cat."

What they found was that if a (non-southeastern US) English-speaking test subject was exposed to someone who did have a southeastern accent -- but who had been instructed beforehand not to use any words that had the /ai/ -> /æ/ diphthong shift -- and then instructed to read a list of words, the test subject was more likely to say something closer to /ræd/ and /dæn/ than the standard pronunciations of /raid/ and /dain/.

Evidently hearing southeastern accents makes you likely to adopt southeastern-sounding phonetics, even if you haven't heard the particular phonetic shift in question.

What's interesting about this is that it's not only unconscious, it's temporary -- when time has elapsed and speech is heard using the test subject's native regional accent, the effect goes away.  But we apparently have a mental representation of what "talking southern" sounds like, and that finds its way into our speech when we hear it.

My wife, I've noticed, has a tendency to do this -- she picks up accents, and has to work actively to halt it (she's very conscious of not wanting people to think she's mimicking or mocking them).  I'm not sure if I do it -- I'll have to ask her to pay attention next time we're in a place where the accent is different from mine.

My question, of course, is why?  Humans learn a lot when we're little through mirroring both what we hear and what we see.  Is this a holdover from the way we learn language when we're children?  Or is it some kind of unconscious attempt to fit in with the people we're talking to, to seem less "other" than we would have?  The underlying cause was beyond the scope of the current research, but it's an interesting question about something that seems to be a universal tendency.

So next time you're around someone who speaks with a different accent than yours, keep your ears perked.  I wonder if the fact that you're now aware of this will make it less likely to happen?  Maybe your accent will bleed over into the person you're talking to.  Let me know what happens to y'all, y'hear?

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The merry-go-round of self-blame

Depression is, at its heart, a completely irrational condition.

One of the (many) therapists I've seen during my life told me that the way to deal with depression and/or anxiety was to do a reality check.  Is this feeling I'm having right now consistent with what I know reality to be?  It sounds good, but in practice, it's extraordinarily difficult to do.  Depression and anxiety make it harder for you to be certain what reality is.  The problem is that the depressed and/or anxious response feels just as real as reality does.  You can analyze those feelings in as dispassionate a way as you want, but when the things you're trying to discern seem to be equally plausible, you're in trouble.

One good example is my continual fear of talking too much or calling attention to myself in social situations, especially when I've had a drink or two.  If I'm stone-cold sober there's usually no question, because I hardly ever say anything, much less too much or the wrong thing.  But the inhibition-releasing tendency of alcohol consumption blurs the ability to self-perceive accurately, and afterward, I'm always convinced that I said more than I should have or something I shouldn't have, and nearly every time I have to appeal to my wife to do my reality checking for me.

This is why my reaction to a piece of research that appeared last week in the Journal of Psychiatric Research made me say, "Well, duh."  Not, understand, that I am at all critical of research to support what are honestly anecdotal claims; more that what they found is essentially how I live.  A team at King's College London, led by clinical psychologist in mood disorders Roland Zahn, studied the reactions of a group of test subjects -- some of whom had a history of suffering from depression, and others who did not -- to various hypothetical social interactions, and had them identify what would be their most likely responses if it were a real situation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sander van der Wel from Netherlands, Depressed (4649749639), CC BY-SA 2.0]

What the team found was that people who have depression tend to blame unpleasant social interactions on themselves, even if the circumstances make it unlikely that they were at fault.  "Self-blaming feelings such as guilt, self-disgust and self-directed anger are key symptoms of depression and Freud is widely credited for pointing to the importance of excessive self-blame in depression," Zahn said, in an interview in PsyPost.  "Social psychologists have done research into these so-called ‘action tendencies’, i.e. implicit feelings of acting in a certain way, such as hiding or creating a distance from oneself, which are entailed in complex feelings.  This is why my PhD student Suqian Duan set out to investigate this question.  In this study, we investigated blame-related action tendencies for the first time systematically in people with depressive disorders."

The response Zahn describes is strikingly similar to my experience of clamming up completely in social situations.  "Many people with a history of major depression, despite having recovered from symptoms, showed an action tendency profile that was different from people who had never experienced major depression and are thus at a lower risk of depression overall," he said.  "They were more likely to feel like hiding, creating a distance from themselves and attacking themselves when faced with a hypothetical scenario of acting badly towards their friend whilst being less likely to apologize.  Interestingly, we showed that the label of the emotion did not map one-to-one on specific action tendencies as was often assumed but rarely tested.  Feeling like attacking oneself was specifically associated with self-disgust/contempt, a feeling which we had previously found to be the most common form of self-blaming feeling in depression."

Zahn points out (correctly) that one of the difficulties is there is such a thing as reasonable guilt.  Purging oneself of all guilt feelings shouldn't be the goal; sometimes we feel guilty for a very good reason, and those feelings can prompt us to make amends for mistakes we've made.  "There is... a controversy around how to measure and define healthy forms of guilt, which help us to apologize and try to repair the damage we might have done from unhealthy forms of self-blame, where we take responsibility for things that are out of our control and feel paralyzed by our guilt or sense of failure, so that we hide away from the situation," Zahn explains.

The trouble is, with depression and anxiety, the ability to discern between justified and unjustified guilt or self-blame gets blurred, and depression and toxic narcissism lead to opposite and equally damaging false conclusions; the former, that every negative interaction is our fault, the latter that none of them are.

It's hard to see, in the absence of someone like my wife to do an external reality check, what you could do to get off the self-blame merry-go-round.  When the heart of the problem is an inaccurate but compelling view of oneself and the situation, trying to do any kind of internal reality check is likely to meet with limited success.  That's certainly been my experience.  I can even go into a social situation with the mantra, "I know I don't talk too much, everything is going to be fine, I should loosen up and just chat with people," but afterwards the inclination to self-blame anyhow is awfully powerful.

No wonder we feel like hiding a lot of the time.

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Re-examining the ganzfeld

Today's post asks a question not because I'm trying to lead you toward a particular answer, but because I honestly don't know the answer myself.

In Wednesday's post, I discussed some alleged claims by psychics (which a team in Australia evaluated for accuracy and found seriously wanting) and made the statement, "I'm all for keeping an open mind about things, but at some point you have to conclude that a complete absence of hard evidence means there's nothing there to see."

A friend of mine responded, "What if there's hard evidence out there that you're choosing not to accept because you've already made your mind up?"  He wasn't being combative; like me, he was just asking a question, and it's actually a reasonable thing to ask.  And he sent me a link to a post over at Paranormal Daily News that looks at one of the most famous experimental setups for detecting psychic powers: the ganzfeld experiment.

"Ganzfeld" is German for "complete field," and refers to the fact that the test subjects are placed in near-complete sensory deprivation, in order to keep them from receiving any information accept (allegedly) from telepathy.  Padded goggles are placed over the eyes; earpieces play recordings of white noise.  The subjects lie flat in a place with no drafts or other air movement.  (Some have even had subjects floating in a sensory deprivation tank.)  Then the "sender" -- usually the researcher conducting the experiment -- looks at some kind of pattern, often the famous "Zener cards" (cards with five different geometric patterns in five different colors), and the "receiver" (the test subject) reports what (s)he sees/experiences.

A participant in a ganzfeld experiment [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Wikipedia page for the ganzfeld experiment (linked above) is unequivocal; it says, "[It] is a pseudoscientific technique to detect parapsychological phenomena...  Consistent, independent replication of ganzfeld experiments has not been achieved."  However, the article my friend sent is equally unequivocal in the opposite direction -- that it has generated results that are far outside of what would come out of a random-choice statistical model, and has been done over and over with the same outcome.  The author, Craig Weiler, writes:

This works.  Not perfectly, but certainly well enough for an experiment.  It’s been done more than enough times by more than enough people to rule out any statistical anomalies.  The success rate is typically between 32 and 35%.  That’s pretty normal for a successful, statistics based experiment.  There have been six different meta analyses from skeptics and researchers alike, all showing positive results.  From an objective scientific perspective, this is an ordinary successful scientific experiment.

While I can't say I warm to the sneery tone of the article -- Weiler really needs to learn the difference between a "skeptic" and a "scoffer" -- it does bring up the question of who's right, here.  The critics of the ganzfeld experiment and other such attempts to prove the existence of paranormal abilities claim that no sufficiently-controlled experiment has ever generated positive results; the supporters claim that there are plenty of positive results that all the scientists are ignoring because they can't explain them (or, worse, because those results contradict their own biases).

Weiler is right that there have been meta-analyses done of the ganzfeld results, and that they have changed the minds of neither the pro- nor the anti- factions.  Finding a truly unbiased analysis has turned out to be not to be easy.  A September 2020 article in Frontiers in Psychology by Thomas Rayberon comes the closest of anything I've seen, but unfortunately tries to steer a middle course of "maybe, maybe not" by agreeing with both sides at once even though they're saying opposite things.  Rayberon writes (citations have been removed in the interest of space; go to the original article if you're interested in seeing them):

Psi research can be considered as a subfield of consciousness studies concerned with interactions between individuals and their environment that transcends the ordinary constraints of space-time.  Different lines of research have been developed for more than a century to tackle psi using experimental research, spontaneous cases, clinical cases, selected participants, and applications.  Several meta-analyses of studies conducted under controlled conditions examine precognitive dreams, telepathy, and presentiment and have demonstrated statistically significant effects...

While these results support the existence of consistent anomalous experience/behavior that has been labeled “psi,” there is currently no consensus in the scientific community concerning their interpretation and two main positions have emerged so far.  The “skeptics” suppose that they are the consequences of errors, bias, and different forms of QRPs [questionable research practices].  The “proponents” argue that these results prove the existence of psi beyond reasonable doubt and that new research should move on to the analysis of psi processes rather than yet more attempts to prove its existence.  This absence of consensus is related to the difficulty of drawing firm conclusions from the results of psi research.  Indeed, they represent an anomaly because there is currently no scientific model – based on physical or biology principles – to explain such interactions even if they exist.

Which reminds me from the quote from Lord of the Rings, "Go not to the Elves for advice, for they will say both yes and no."  The last bit -- that there is no current scientific model that could account for psychic phenomena -- is certainly true; but if there are statistically significant effects (which Rayberon says explicitly in the preceding paragraph), then surely there must be some protocol for devising an experiment that meets the minimum criteria of the true skeptics (people who base their understanding on the evidence, regardless of what their preconceived notions might have said).  The fact that there is no current scientific model to explain telepathy is, while correct, entirely irrelevant.  The first thing to do is to determine if the phenomenon itself is real.  There was no scientific model to explain radioactivity when it was discovered by Henri Becquerel, nor the apparent constancy of the speed of light when it was demonstrated by Michelson and Morley, nor the patterns of inheritance uncovered by Gregor Mendel.  The first thing was to determine if what they were seeing was accurate.  Once that happened, the scientists moved on to trying to figure out a model that accounted for it.

Rayberon then goes on to make quite a puzzling statement that implies it might be impossible even to tell if the phenomenon is real.  Science, he says (again, correct most of the time) uses experimental protocols that eliminate any possibility of interference by the experimenter.  That's impossible in psi research (italics are the author's):

Thus, if psi exists, the problem is the following: an advertent or inadvertent “direct” interaction between the researcher and the object of study could be possible.  This destroys the conditions necessary for the convincing scientific demonstration of psi itself.

Rayberon says this "paradox" makes psi research impossible to confirm or disconfirm.  But isn't an interaction between the researcher and the test subject what the psi researchers themselves are trying to demonstrate?  What an honest psi researcher -- well, any honest researcher, really -- needs to do is to isolate the variable (s)he's studying so that, as far as is possible, whatever results come out of the experiment can only be attributable to that variable.  So in a properly-conducted ganzfeld experiment, the researcher has eliminated any possibility of the test subject getting information about the pattern from anywhere except the mind of the "sender."

And from my admittedly layperson's viewpoint, that can't be all that hard to do.  If there have been multiple instances of positive, statistically-significant results from ganzfeld trials -- and Weiler and Rayberon agree that there have been -- then they deserve some explanation other than shrugging and saying, "I don't see how it could work."  If there are "errors, biases, and questionable research practices" generating the results, the "skeptics" (using the word in the sense both Weiler and Rayberon use) need to determine what those are.  If, on the other hand, the results aren't from poor experimental design or outright cheating, then let's have the "skeptics" and "proponents" team up to find a protocol they can both agree to.

Figuring out a model for what's going on can wait until we see if there is anything going on.

So after accusing Rayberon of playing both sides, I'm honestly not doing much better.  My inclination is to doubt the existence of psi abilities because the evidence seems sketchy for such a wild claim.  But that inclination is a bias I'm well aware of, and all it would take is one sufficiently well-designed experiment to convince me I was wrong.  Right now, all that seems to be happening is both sides becoming more entrenched and yelling at each other across no-man's land, which doesn't accomplish much but pissing everyone off.

So come on, folks.  Either psi exists or it doesn't.  If it doesn't, we can go on to studying actual real phenomena.  If it does, it will overturn pretty much everything we know about psychology, and would be one of the most colossal discoveries in the past hundred years.  How about teaming up and settling this question once and for all?

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