Memory boost

About two months ago I signed up with Duolingo to study Japanese.

I've been fascinated with Japan and the Japanese culture pretty much all my life, but I'm a total novice with the language, so I started out from "complete beginner" status.  I'm doing okay so far, although the fact that it's got three writing systems is a challenge, to put it mildly.  Like most Japanese programs, it's beginning with the hiragana system -- a syllabic script that allows you to work out the pronunciation of words -- but I've already seen a bit of katakana (used primarily for words borrowed from other languages) and even a couple of kanji (the ideographic script, where a character represents an entire word or concept).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons 663highland, 140405 Tsu Castle Tsu MIe pref Japan01s, CC BY-SA 3.0]

While Duolingo focuses on getting you listening to spoken Japanese right away, my linguistics training has me already looking for patterns -- such as the fact that wa after a noun seems to act as a subject marker, and ka at the end of a sentence turns it into a question.  I'm still perplexed by some of the pronunciation patterns -- why, for example, vowel sounds sometimes don't get pronounced.  The first case of this I noticed is that the family name of the brilliant author Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is pronounced /ak'tagawa/ -- the /u/ in the second syllable virtually disappears.  I hear it happening fairly commonly in spoken Japanese, but I haven't been able to deduce what the pattern is.  (If there is one.  If there's one thing my linguistics studies have taught me, it's that all languages have quirks.  Try explaining to someone new to English why, for instance, the -ough combination in cough, rough, through, bough, and thorough are all pronounced differently.) 

Still and all, I'm coming along.  I've learned some useful phrases like "Sushi and water, please" (Sushi to mizu, kudasai) and "Excuse me, where is the train station?" (Sumimasen, eki wa doko desu ka?), as well as less useful ones like "Naomi Yamaguchi is cute" (Yamaguchi Naomi-san wa kawaii desu), which is only critical to know if you have a cute friend who happens to be named Naomi Yamaguchi.

The memorization, however, is often taxing to my 63-year-old brain.  Good for it, I have no doubt -- a recent study found that being bi- or multi-lingual can delay the onset of dementia by four years or more -- but it definitely is a challenge.  I go through my hiragana flash cards at least once a day, and have copious notes for what words mean and for any grammatical oddness I happen to notice.  Just the sheer amount of memorization, though, is kind of daunting.

Maybe what I should do is find a way to change the context in which I have to remember particular words, phrases, or characters.  That seems to be the upshot of a study I ran into a couple of days ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about a study by a group from Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh about how to improve retention.

I'm sure all of us have experienced the effects of cramming for a test -- studying like hell the night before, and then you do okay on the test but a week later barely remember any of it.  This practice does two things wrong; not only stuffing all the studying into a single session, but doing it all the same way.

What this study showed was two factors that significantly improved long-term memory.  One was spacing out study sessions -- doing shorter sessions more often definitely helped.  I'm already approaching Duolingo this way, usually doing a lesson or two over my morning coffee, then hitting it again for a few more after dinner.  But the other interesting variable they looked at was that test subjects' memories improved substantially when the context was changed -- when, for example, you're trying to remember as much as you can of what a specific person is wearing, but instead of being shown the same photograph over and over, you're given photographs of the person wearing the same clothes but in a different setting each time.

"We were able to ask how memory is impacted both by what is being learned -- whether that is an exact repetition or instead, contains variations or changes -- as well as when it is learned over repeated study opportunities," said Emily Cowan, lead author of the study.  "In other words... we could examine how having material that more closely resembles our experiences of repetition in the real world -- where some aspects stay the same but others differ -- impacts memory if you are exposed to that information in quick succession versus over longer intervals, from seconds to minutes, or hours to days."

I can say that this is one of the things Duolingo does right.  Words are repeated, but in different combinations and in different ways -- spoken, spelled out using the English transliteration, or in hiragana only.  Rather than always seeing the same word in the same context, there's a balance between the repetition we all need when learning a new language and pushing your brain to generalize to slightly different usages or contexts.

So all things considered, Duolingo had it figured out even before the latest research came out.  I'm hoping it pays off, because my son and I would like to take a trip to Japan at some point and be able to get along, even if we don't meet anyone cute named Naomi Yamaguchi.  But I should wind this up, so for now I'll say ja ane, mata ashita (goodbye, see you tomorrow).

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The haunted sentry box

A while back, my wife and I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit the lovely island of Puerto Rico.  On the way there, Carol asked me what I wanted to do while we were in San Juan.  I thought about all the possibilities -- lounging on the beach, swimming, snorkeling, hiking, seeing the sights -- so of course what I said was, "I want to see the Haunted Sentry Box."

I first ran into the tale of the Haunted Sentry Box of Old San Juan when I was perhaps twelve years old, and happened upon a copy of C. B. Colby's book Strangely Enough.  This book is a whimsical, often scary, sometimes hilarious account of dozens of "true tales of the supernatural," each only a page or two long.  It was one of my first encounters with someone who claimed that ghosts, UFOs, and monsters could be real, and is one of the things that started me down the long and twisty road that led to Skeptophilia.  (I still have my battered and much-reread copy.)

The Tale of the Haunted Sentry Box is chilling in its simplicity.  In it, we hear about a sentry "many years ago" in the fortress of San Cristóbal in the oldest part of San Juan, who was assigned duty in one of the stone sentry boxes that jut out from the main wall.  He was reluctant, we're told, because it was a lonely post, and he had a "feeling of foreboding."  And sure enough, when another soldier went to relieve him some hours later, the sentry box was empty.  His superiors were certain the man had deserted.

One of the sentry boxes on the wall of San Cristóbal.  I have to admit, it wouldn't be a job for the claustrophobic.

So the second soldier was assigned to take the missing man's place, and a watch was set on the wall overlooking the sentry box.  Only shortly afterwards, a searing light blazed from inside the sentry box, shining out through the slit-like windows, and a "piercing scream" split the night.  The watchman roused his superiors from sleep, and they ran to investigate.  The second soldier was now missing as well -- the inside walls were "black with soot," and there was a strong smell of sulfur.

The sentry box was, understandably, never used again.

See why I wanted to go there?  So we hiked on over to San Cristóbal, paid our five bucks' admission fee, and explored the ancient walls and rooms of the fortress.  But although "La Garita del Diablo" was marked on maps -- proving that Colby hadn't, at least, made the story up himself -- we couldn't find the actual item.

Me, exploring one of the non-haunted sentry boxes of San Cristóbal.  I detected no soot, sulfur, or traces of missing soldiers.

Finally, after perhaps an hour of wandering around, I decided to ask in the souvenir shop (of course there's a souvenir shop) about the Haunted Sentry Box.  Could I have directions for how to get there?

The young woman behind the counter looked alarmed.  "Oh, no, no," she said, her eyes wide.  "We do not allow anyone to go there, sir."

"Really?" I said.  "Why?  I was hoping to see it for myself."

"It is not allowed," she said firmly.  From her expression, she looked torn between crossing herself and forking the sign of the evil eye in my direction.

She added reluctantly that there was, however, a point on the exterior wall where one can lean out and peer down toward La Garita del Diablo, if I was so determined to blight the memory of my visit with such a place.  Eager to so blight myself, I followed her directions to the wall's edge, and leaned over.  And here it is:

Not impressive at this distance, perhaps.  And I wasn't able to pick up any presentiments of evil through my binoculars when I scanned the place.  No black smoke curling up from the windows, no leering face in the shadows of the door.  It looked just like all of the other sentry boxes we saw, both in San Cristóbal and in the big fortress of El Morro only a mile westward along the coast of San Juan Harbor.

So the whole thing was a little anticlimactic.  Here I hoped to give Satan a good shot at me, and I was prevented from doing so by some silly regulation about protecting the tourists from being vaporized.

I'm happy to say that the remainder of the trip was wonderful, and I did get to spend a lot of time lounging on the beach in swim trunks, drinking coconut rum, and trying unsuccessfully to get rid of all the sand stuck to my legs.  We also spent a happy half-day hiking in the El Yunque Rain Forest, only an hour's drive to San Juan, which is a must-see for birders and other nature lovers.

But I have to confess to some disappointment about the Haunted Sentry Box.  So near, and yet so far.  Not only did I not get incinerated by Satan, our airplane crossed the Bermuda Triangle (twice) and we didn't disappear.  You know, if the world of the paranormal is so eager to interact with us living humans -- and to give a skeptic his well-deserved comeuppance -- they really aren't taking these opportunities very seriously.

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I've got your number

An inevitable side-effect of writing six times a week here at Skeptophilia is that I get some weird gifts sometimes.

This explains why I am the proud owner of:

• a cardboard-cutout Bigfoot that you can dress up with various stickers (he's currently wearing a kilt and a jaunty-looking tam-o'shanter)
• a certificate insuring my dog in case of alien abduction
• a very creepy-looking ritual mask from the Ivory Coast
• a book entitled UFOs: How to See Them
• a deck of steampunk Tarot cards
• a drawing of a scowling alien with a speech bubble saying "Nonbelievers Will Be Vaporized"
• a car air freshener shaped like a Sasquatch (fortunately, it doesn't smell like one)
• the poster made famous from Fox Mulder's office, with a UFO and the caption "I Want To Believe"

The latest addition to my collection comes to me from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  I got a surprise package from him in the mail, and when I opened it up, it turned out to be a book called...

... Mysteries and Secrets of Numerology.

This book, by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, is a complete analysis of the practice of numerology across the world, as viewed through the critical lens of believing every bit of it without question.  I checked out how it has fared on Amazon, and found that it has thus far received two reviews:

1: This book is full of wonderful information regarding numerology.  I got a copy from the library, but I will be buying my own to keep as a reference for numerology and sacred geometry.  Well Done!... and:

2: Fine.  This purchase was for some research I was doing and I came away amazed that anyone can take this entire subject matter area seriously.  The book drones on forever and that makes it great bedtime reading...  Yes, I did work the examples on my own set of numbers as well as those other family members and it didn't help me understand them any better than I did before.  They're still boring.  I put this book in the same category as those purporting to provide proof of alien abductions happening every day, all over planet earth.  If you really must find something in which to believe to give your life purpose, or help you amaze your friends, this book is for you.

So it's gotten a fairly mixed reception so far.

Undeterred by the second review, I read through it.  I will admit that I skimmed past the parts of it where the authors calculate numerological values for everyone from Hippocrates to Alexander Graham Bell.  I did note that the authors concluded that the "dark side of his numerological 1" for the famous British murderer Hawley Crippen "may have been what drove him to the rash and impetuous murder" of his second wife, Cora.  Which seems like a stretch, as from pure statistics one out of every nine people on Earth are "numerological 1s," and as far as I can tell, very few of them murder their second wives.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The practice of numerology goes back a long way.  The whole thing seems to have begun with the mystical practice called gematria, which basically assigned numbers to damn near everything -- and woe be unto you if your number turned out to be bad.  The whole 666 being the Number of the Beast thing comes from gematria; and there's a lot of equating one thing for another because they "have the same number."  Here's an example from the Third Book of Baruch, one of the biblical apocrypha, as explained in the above-linked Wikipedia article:

A snake is stated to consume a cubit of ocean every day, but is unable to ever finish consuming it, because the oceans are also refilled by 360 rivers.  The number 360 is given because the numerical value of the Greek word for snake, δράκων, when transliterated to Hebrew (דרקון) is 360.

Makes perfect sense to me.

In any case, back to the Fanthorpes' book.  The last section, while no less ridiculous, was at least kind of interesting.  We're told therein that because all sorts of factors can contribute to a person acting a particular way, or an action having a particular outcome, there's no reason not to believe that "numbers can exert invisible and unsuspected influences just as powerful."  We're then instructed that we should all pay more attention to the numbers in our lives, and especially look for the good influences of the numbers 1 (which, I note, didn't help Crippen much), 3, 6, 7, and 9.  Only in the second-to-last paragraph do the Fanthorpes bring up the central problem with the whole thing: "These attempts to use numbers as influences to attract good things and to protect against negative things are very interesting, but are open to the question of whether -- when they seem to work -- they are actually self-fulfilling prophecies."

Well, yeah.  The whole book is basically Confirmation Bias "R" Us.

So I'm sure you're all dying to know what my number is.  The book gives detailed instructions on how to calculate your number, although it does say there are different ways of doing so.  "Therefore," the authors write, "two equally well-qualified and experienced numerologists working with slightly different systems could reach very different conclusions."  (Which to me, is just a fancy way of saying, "we admit this is bullshit.")

I used what they say the "simplest way" is -- writing out the English alphabet underneath the numbers 1-9, starting with A=1, B=2, and so on; after you reach I=9, you start over with J=1.  Following this protocol, my whole name adds up to 76.  You're then supposed to add the digits (giving 13) and then add those (giving a final answer of 4).

So my number is 4, which unfortunately is not one of the "auspicious numbers" mentioned above.  Four, apparently, means "a foundation, the implementation of order, a struggle against limits, and steady growth."

I suppose it could be worse.

In any case, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I didn't get "9" (the number of "immense creativity").  Nor am I going to do what the authors say some folks have done, which is change their name to one that has a better number.

It might be worth getting a second opinion, however. Maybe I should see what the "steampunk Tarot cards" have to say on the matter.  That should be illuminating.

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In memoriam

I want you to recall something simple.  A few to choose from:

• your own middle name
• the street you grew up on
• your best friend in elementary school
• the name of your first pet
• your second-grade teacher's name

Now, I'm presuming that none of you were actively thinking about any of those before I asked.  So, here are a couple of questions:

Where was that information before I asked you about it?  And how did you retrieve it from wherever that was?

The simple answer is, "we don't know."  Well, we have a decent idea about where in the brain specific kinds of information are stored, mostly from looking at what gets lost when people have strokes or traumatic brain injury.  (A technique my Anatomy and Physiology professor described as "figuring out how a car functions by smashing parts of it with a hammer, and then seeing what doesn't work anymore.")

But how exactly is that information is encoded?  That's an ongoing area of research, and one we're only beginning to see results from.  The prevailing idea for a long time has been that interactions between networks of neurons in the brain allow the storage and retrieval of memories -- for example, you have networks that encode memory of faces, ones that involve familiarity, ones that activate when you feel positive emotions, possibly ones that fire for particular stimuli like gray hair, glasses, being female, being elderly, or tone of voice -- and the intersection of these activate to retrieve the memory of your grandmother.

The problem is, all attempts to find a Venn-diagram-like cross-connected network in the brain have failed.  Even so, the idea that there could be a much smaller and more specific neural cluster devoted to a particular memory was ridiculed as the "grandmother cell model" -- the term was coined by neuroscientist Jerome Lettvin in the 1960s -- it was thought to be nonsense that we could have anything like a one-to-one correlation between memories and neurons.  As neuroscientist Charles Edward Connor put it, the grandmother cell model had "become a shorthand for invoking all of the overwhelming practical arguments against a one-to-one object coding scheme.  No one wants to be accused of believing in grandmother cells."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Michel Royon]

The problem came roaring back, though, when neurosurgeons Itzhak Fried and Rodrigo Quian Quiroga were working with an epileptic patient who had electrical brain-monitoring implants, and found that when he was shown a photograph of Jennifer Aniston, a specific neuron fired in his brain.  Evidently, we do encode specific memories in only a tiny number of neurons -- but how it works is still unknown.  

We have over eighty billion neurons in the brain -- so even discounting the ones involved in autonomic functioning, you'd still think there's plenty to encode specific memories.  But... and this is a huge but... there's no evidence whatsoever that when you learn something new, somehow you're doing any kind of neural rewiring, much less growing new neurons.

The upshot is that we still don't know.

The reason this comes up is because of a study at Columbia University that was published last week in Nature Human Behavior, that looked at a newly-discovered type of brain wave, a traveling wave -- which sweeps across the cerebrum during certain activities.  And what the researchers, led by biomedical engineer Joshua Jacobs, found is that when memories are formed, traveling waves tend to move from the back of the cerebrum toward the front, and in the opposite direction when memories are retrieved.

Of course, nothing in the brain is quite that simple.  Some people's brain waves went the other direction; it seems like the change in direction is what was critical.  "I implemented a method to label waves traveling in one direction as basically 'good for putting something into memory,'" said Uma Mohan, who co-authored the paper.  "Then we could see how the direction switched over the course of the task.  The waves tended to go in the participant’s encoding direction when that participant was putting something into memory and in the opposite direction right before they recalled the word.  Overall, this new work links traveling waves to behavior by demonstrating that traveling waves propagate in different directions across the cortex for separate memory processes."

The other limitation of the study is that it doesn't discern whether the traveling waves, and the change in direction, are a cause or an effect -- if the change in direction causes recall, or if the shift in wave direction is caused by some other process that is the actual trigger for recall -- so the direction change is merely a byproduct.  But it certainly is an intriguing start on a vexing question in neuroscience.

Me, I want to know what's going on with the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon.  Just about everyone experiences it -- you know the memory is in there somewhere, you can almost get it, but... nope.  Most puzzling (and frustrating), I find that giving up and going to The Google often triggers the memory to appear before I have the chance to look it up.  This happened not long ago -- for some reason I was trying to come up with the name of the third Musketeer.  Athos, Porthos, and... who?  I pondered on it, and then finally went, "to hell with it," and did a search, but before I could even hit "return" my brain said, "Aramis."

What the fuck, brain?  Do you do this just to taunt me?

At least I comfort myself in knowing that we don't really understand how any of this works.  Which is slim consolation -- but at least it means that my own brain is no more baffling than anyone else's.

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Speaking beauty

My novel In the Midst of Lions, the first of a trilogy, has a character named Anderson Quaice, who is a linguistics professor.  He also has a strong pessimistic streak, something that proves justified in the course of the story.  He develops a conlang called Kalila not only as an entertaining intellectual exercise, but because he fears that civilization is heading toward collapse, and he wants a way to communicate with his friends that will not be understood by (possibly hostile) outsiders.

Kalila provides a framework for the entire trilogy, which spans over fourteen centuries.  I wanted the conlang to follow a similar trajectory as Latin did; by the second book, The Scattering Winds, Kalila has become the "Sacred Language," used in rituals and religion; by the third, The Chains of Orion, it has been relegated to a small role as a historical curiosity, something learned (and mourned!) only by academics, and which few speak fluently. 

But of course, in order to incorporate it into the narrative, I had to invent the conlang.  While I'm not a professor like Quaice, my master's degree is in historical linguistics, so I have a fairly solid background for comprehending (and thus creating) a language structure.  I've mostly studied inflected languages, like Old Norse, Old English, Latin, and Greek -- ones where nouns, verbs, and adjectives change form depending on how they're being used in sentences -- so I decided to make Kalila inflected.  (Interestingly, along the way English lost most of its noun inflections; in the sentences The dog bit the cat and The cat bit the dog you know who bit whom by word order, not because the words dog and cat change form, as they would in most inflected languages.  English does retain a few inflections, holdovers from its Old English roots -- he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs, and who/whom are examples of inflections we've hung onto.)

One of the interesting choices I had to make centers on phonetics.  What repertoire of sounds did I want Kalila to have?  I decided I was aiming for something vaguely Slavic-sounding, with a few sound combinations and placements you don't find in English (for example, the initial /zl/ combination in the word for "quick," zlavo.)  I included only one sound that isn't found in English -- the unvoiced velar fricative (the final sound in the name Bach), which in accordance with the International Phonetic Alphabet I spelled with a letter "x" in the written form; lexa, pronounced /lekha/, means "hand."

Of course, in the end I used about one percent of all the syntax and morphology and lexicon and whatnot I'd invented in the actual story.  But it was still a lot of fun to create.

The topic comes up because of a really cool study that recently came out in the journal Language and Speech, by a team led by linguist Christine Mooshammer of Humboldt University in Berlin.  The researchers wanted to find out why some languages are perceived as sounding more pleasant-sounding than others -- but to avoid the bias that would come with actual spoken languages, they confined their analysis to conlangs such as Quenya, Sindarin, Dothraki, Klingon, Cardassian, Romulan, and Orkish.

The first stanza of a poem in Quenya, written in the lovely Tengwar script Tolkien invented [Image is in the Public Domain]

The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, rated Quenya and Sindarin (the two main Elvish languages in Tolkien's world) as the most pleasant, and Dothraki (from Game of Thrones) and Klingon to sound the most unpleasant.  Interestingly, Orkish -- at least when not being snarled by characters like Azog the Defiler -- was ranked somewhere in the middle.

Some of their conclusions:

• Languages with lower consonantal clustering were rated as more pleasant.  (On the extreme low end of this scale are Hawaiian and Japanese, which have almost no consonant clusters at all.)
• A higher frequency of front vowels (such as /i/ and /e/) as opposed to back vowels (such as /o/ and /u/) correlates with higher pleasantness ratings.
• Languages with a higher frequency of continuants (such as /l/, /r/, and /m/) as opposed to stops and plosives (like /t/ and /p/) were ranked as more pleasant-sounding.
• Higher numbers of unvoiced sibilants (such as /s/) and velars (such as the /x/ I used in Kalila) correlated with a lower ranking for pleasantness.
• The more similar the phonemic inventory of the conlang was to the test subject's native language, the more pleasant the subject thought it sounded; familiarity, apparently, is important.

This last one introduces the bias I mentioned earlier, something that Mooshammer admits is a limitation of the study.  "One of our main findings was that Orkish doesn’t sound evil without the special effects, seeing the speakers and hearing the growls and hissing sounds in the movies," she said, in an interview with PsyPost.  "Therefore, the average person should be aware of the effect of stereotypes that do influence the perception of a language.  Do languages such as German sound orderly and unpleasant and Italian beautiful and erotic because of their sounds, or just based on one’s own attitude toward their speakers?"

I wonder how the test subjects would have ranked spoken Kalila?  If the researchers want a sample, I'd be happy to provide it.

It's a fun study, which I encourage you to read in its entirety.  It brings up the bigger question, though, of why we find anything aesthetically pleasing.  I'm fascinated by why certain pieces of music are absolutely electrifying to me (one example is Stravinsky's Firebird) while others that are considered by many to be masterpieces do nothing for me at all (I've yet to hear a piece of music by Brahms that elicits more than "meh" from me).  There's an emotional resonance there with some things and not others, but I'm at a loss to explain it.

So maybe I should end with a song by Enya, which is not only beautiful musically, but is sung in the conlang she invented, Loxian.  Give this a listen and see where you'd rank it.

I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty sweet-sounding.

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A tangle of beliefs

I hold two strong opinions that sometimes come into conflict with one another.

The first is that everyone comes to understand the universe in their own way.  Most of the time, we're all just muddling along trying to figure things out and simultaneously keep our heads above water, so who am I to criticize if you draw a different set of conclusions from this weird and chaotic place than I do?  Honestly, as long as you don't push your beliefs on me or use them to discriminate against people who think differently than you do, I don't have any quarrel with you.

On the other hand, there's no requirement that I "respect your beliefs," in the sense that because you call them sacred or religious or whatnot, I'm somehow not allowed to criticize them (or point out that they make no sense).  No beliefs -- and that includes mine -- are immune to critique.

So, respect people?  Of course, always.  But respect claims?  Only if they make sense and follow some basic principles like honoring the rights of others.  My support of "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is tempered by, "... but if thou appearest to be a wingnut, thou shouldst not expect me not to point that out."

This is the thought that kept occurring to me as I perused a Wikipedia page I stumbled across, titled, "List of New Religious Movements."  By "new" they mean "after 1800," and the point is made rather forcefully that it's an incomplete list -- and that "scholars have estimated that the number of new religious movements now number in the tens of thousands worldwide."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ReligijneSymbole.svg: Dariusofthedark]

I find this kind of mind-boggling.  I'm so uncertain about most of the Big-Question type beliefs that I'd never presume to say, "Hey, I know what's true!  Here's what everyone else should believe!"  Yeah, I come on pretty strong about things like "science works" and "we should respect hard evidence," but stuff like, "is there a Higher Power at work?" and "is there an afterlife?" and "is there any absolute truth?" -- I'm not going to claim my answers are any better than anyone else's.

But apparently there are a great many people who don't share that attitude.  And a lot of answers they've come up with -- and feel strongly enough about that they try to convert others -- are, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking bizarre.  You have to wonder how many of the leaders of these groups were motivated by true belief, and how many by desire for power, wealth, fame, and adulation, but even so some of the "new religious movements" on this list are so strange that I find it astonishing they attracted any followers at all.  Here's a sampler of some of the more peculiar ones:

• Chen Tao, founded in 1993 in Taiwan by Hon-Ming Chen.  He later upped stakes and moved his community to Garland, Texas, because "Garland" sounds a little like "God's land."  This one mixes Buddhism, Christian End-Times stuff, and... UFOs.  Chen became infamous for stating that on March 31, 1998, God would be visible nationwide on Channel 18, and would have an important message for us (because, of course, what other kind of message could God have?).  When God failed to show, Chen (showing remarkable contrition for a cult leader) said, "I must have misunderstood," and offered to be crucified or stoned as penance, but no one took him up on it.
• The Ásatrú Folk Assembly, founded in northern California in the 1970s by Stephen McNallen, which combines Norse mythology with ancestor worship and a nasty streak of white supremacy.
• The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, founded in 2009 by Jim Humble and self-styled "QAnon prophet" Jordan Sather, which seems to have been mostly a way of selling something called "Miracle Mineral Supplement" as a cure for everything from COVID-19 to cancer, but which turned out to be a solution of chlorine dioxide (bleach).  The "miracle" is that anyone survives after drinking it.  Some people, unfortunately, did not.
• The Church of Light, founded in 1932 by C. C. Zain, which melds astrology, occultism, hermeticism, and Christianity.  This one, though, has been torn apart by internal schisms and rifts, to the point that there now seem to be more sects and sub-sects of the Church of Light than there are actual members.
• The Amica Temple of Radiance, founded in 1959 by Roland Hunt and Dorothy Bailey, based on the teachings of spiritualist Ivah Bergh Whitten.  The idea here is apparently that colors have a sacred significance, and you can heal yourself (both physically and spiritually) by figuring out what your color is and then exposing yourself to that frequency of light.  Seems to me that "... but this doesn't actually work" would pretty much puncture a hole in the claim, but I guess the placebo effect can be awfully powerful.
• The Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, founded in 1922 by May Otis Blackburn, who told her devotees she was charged by the archangel Gabriel to reveal the secrets of heaven and earth to the masses.  Some of her "secrets" had to do with resurrecting the dead, once again resulting in the objection "... but this doesn't actually work" (as you'll see, this will become a recurring theme here).  The whole thing fell apart when Blackburn was imprisoned for stealing forty thousand dollars from one of her followers.
• Adonism, a neo-pagan religion founded in 1925 by German esotericist Franz Sättler.  The Adonists worshipped a few of the Assyrian gods such as Bel, but their main deity was the Greek mythological figure Adonis, the worship of whom involved having lots of sex with whatever gender(s) you like.  So I guess I can understand why devotees thought Adonism was pretty cool.  Sättler, though, ran afoul of the anti-decadency drive of the Nazis, ended up in jail, and is thought to have died in Mauthausen concentration camp.
• People Unlimited, founded in 1982 by Charles Paul Brown, which teaches that humans can be immortal.  The claim ran into an unfortunate snag in 2014 when Brown died, but (astonishingly) the group didn't lose members, who transferred their allegiance (and hopes of eternal life) to Brown's widow Bernadeane.
• The Missionary Church of Kopimism, founded in Uppsala, Sweden in 2010 by Isak Gerson and Gustav Nipe.  The main tenet of this movement is that information is sacred, and therefore copyright law is inherently immoral.  The internet is "holy," they say, because it is a conduit of communication, and file sharing is a sacrament.  Their logo -- I swear I am not making this up -- is a yin-yang kind of thing containing "ctrl-C" and "ctrl-V."
• "Love Has Won," founded by Amy Carlson, who claimed to be a nineteen-billion-year-old being who had birthed all of creation.  Not content with that, she was reincarnated 534 times, including incarnations as Jesus, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Marilyn Monroe, finally ending up as a 32-year-old manager of a Dallas, Texas McDonalds before founding her cult in 2007.  Among her odder claims were that Donald Trump had been her father in a previous incarnation, Robin Williams was an archangel, and the remnants of the inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria live beneath Mount Shasta.  She said that she was going to "lead 144,000 souls into the fifth dimension," but died in 2021 under mysterious circumstances before she had the chance.

And this is just a very short sampler from a very long list.

It's not that I'm perplexed about the founders, for the most part.  Some (like Humble and Sather, the ones hawking the Miracle Mineral Supplement) are almost certainly in it for the money.  Others are motivated by having power and influence over their followers, or (like Franz Sättler) because free sex with whoever you want is a nifty perk.  Yet others (like Amy Carlson) probably are just mentally ill.

But what honestly puzzles me is how so many people can look at these sorts of cults and say, "Yes!  Of course!  That makes perfect sense!"  And, even stranger, continue to believe even after circumstances (or hard evidence) show that what the leaders are claiming can't be true.

To return to my initial point -- it's hardly that I'm sure of everything myself, or am somehow convinced I have a direct pipeline to the Eternal Truths.  But to fall for some of these (tens of thousands!) of "new religious movements," you have to entangle yourself in belief systems that honestly make no sense whatsoever.

In conclusion -- if you belong to any of these groups, please don't come after me with a machete.  I'm not saying you can't belong to the Missionary Church of Kopimism and do a Gregorian chant every time you cut-and-paste, or immerse yourself in a beam of orange light to try to cure your acne. 

But at least allow me my incredulity, okay?

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Turning the focus knob

I am really distractible.

To say I have "squirrel brain" is a deep injustice to squirrels.  At least squirrels have the focus to accomplish their purpose every day, which is to make sure our bird feeders are constantly empty.  If I was a squirrel, I'd probably clamber my way up the post and past the inaccurately-named "squirrel baffle" and finally get to the feeder, and then just sit there with a puzzled look, thinking, "Why am I up here, again?"

My "Oh, look, something shiny" approach to life has at least a few upsides.  I tend to make weird connections between things really fast, which long-time readers of Skeptophilia probably know all too well.  If someone mentions something -- say, an upcoming visit to England -- in about 3.8 milliseconds my brain goes, England > Cornwall > Tintagel > King Arthur > Monty Python > the "bring out yer dead" scene > the Black Death > mass burials > a weird study I read a while back about how nettle plants need high calcium and phosphorus soils, so they're often found where skeletons have decomposed, and I'll say, cheerfully, "Did you know that nettles are edible?  You can cook 'em like spinach," and it makes complete sense to me even though everyone else in the room is giving me a look like this:

Talking to me is like the conversational equivalent of riding the Tilt-O-Whirl.

Which, now that I come to think of it, is not really an upside after all.

A more significant downside, though, is that my inability to focus makes it really hard in noisy or chaotic environments.  When I'm in a crowded restaurant or bar, I can pay attention for a while to what the people I'm with are saying, but there comes a moment -- and it usually does happen quite suddenly -- when my brain just goes, "Nope.  Done," and the entire thing turns into a wall of white noise in which I'm unable to pick out a single word.  

All of the above perhaps explains why I don't have much of a social life.

However, as a study last week in Nature Human Behavior shows, coordinating all the inputs and outputs the brain has to manage is an exceedingly complex task, and one a lot of us find daunting.  And, most encouragingly, that capacity for focus is not related to intelligence.  "When people talk about the limitations of the mind, they often put it in terms of, 'humans just don't have the mental capacity' or 'humans lack computing power,'" said Harrison Ritz, of Brown University, who led the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "[Our] findings support a different perspective on why we're not focused all the time.  It's not that our brains are too simple, but instead that our brains are really complicated, and it's the coordination that's hard."

The researchers ran volunteers through a battery of cognitive tests while hooked up to fMRI machines, to observe what parts of their brain were involved in mental coordination and filtering.  In one of them, they had to estimate the percentage of purple dots in a swirling maelstrom of mixed purple and green dots -- a task that makes me anxious just thinking about it.  The researchers found two parts of the brain, the intraparietal sulcus and the anterior cingulate cortex, that seemed to be involved in the task, but each was functioning in different ways.

"You can think about the intraparietal sulcus as having two knobs on a radio dial: one that adjusts focusing and one that adjusts filtering," Ritz said.  "In our study, the anterior cingulate cortex tracks what's going on with the dots.  When the anterior cingulate cortex recognizes that, for instance, motion is making the task more difficult, it directs the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the filtering knob in order to reduce the sensitivity to motion.

"In the scenario where the purple and green dots are almost at 50/50, it might also direct the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the focusing knob in order to increase the sensitivity to color.  Now the relevant brain regions are less sensitive to motion and more sensitive to the appropriate color, so the participant is better able to make the correct selection."

The applications to understanding disorders like ADHD are obvious, although of course identifying the parts of the brain that are responsible is only the beginning.  The question then becomes, "But what do you do about it?", and the truth is that current treatments for ADHD are a crapshoot at best.  Even so, it'd have been nice if this understanding had come sooner -- it might have saved me from being told by my third grade teacher, unkindly if accurately, "You have the attention span of a gnat."

I apparently haven't changed much, because recalling this comment made me go, gnats > a scene in one of Carlos Castaneda's books where the main character was high on mushrooms and hallucinated a giant man-eating gnat > edible mushrooms, which my wife hates > food preferences > licorice, another thing a lot of people hate > a study I read about using licorice extract to treat psoriasis.

Hey, did you know that the word psoriasis comes from the Greek word ψώρα, meaning "itch"?  I bet you didn't know that.

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