Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen

Can microbes encourage altruism?

Elizabeth Svoboda writes: Parasites are among nature’s most skillful manipulators — and one of their specialties is making hosts perform reckless acts of irrational self-harm. There’s Toxoplasma gondii, which drives mice to seek out cats eager to eat them, and the liver fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, which motivates ants to climb blades of grass, exposing them to cows and sheep hungry for a snack. There’s Spinochordodes tellinii, the hairworm that compels crickets to drown themselves so the worm can access the water it needs to breed. The hosts’ self-sacrifice gains them nothing but serves the parasites’ hidden agenda, enabling them to complete their own life cycle.

Now researchers are beginning to explore whether parasitic manipulations may spur host behaviors that are selfless rather than suicidal. They are wondering whether microbes might be fundamentally responsible for many of the altruistic behaviors that animals show toward their own kind. Altruism may seem easy to justify ethically or strategically, but explaining how it could have persisted in a survival-of-the-fittest world is surprisingly difficult and has puzzled evolutionary theorists going all the way back to Darwin. If microbes in the gut or other tissues can nudge their hosts toward generosity for selfish reasons of their own, altruism may become less enigmatic.

A recently developed mathematical model and related computer simulations by a trio of researchers at Tel Aviv University appear to validate this theory. The researchers showed that transmissible microbes that promoted altruism in their hosts won the survival battle over microbes that did not — and when this happened, altruism became a stable trait in the host population. The research was published in Nature Communications earlier this year.

“The story is fascinating, because we don’t think of altruism in terms of the host-microbiome relationship,” said John Bienenstock, a biologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and director of the Brain-Body Institute at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, who was not involved with the simulation work. “You can’t ignore the possible effect of what your bug population is doing.” [Continue reading…]

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Sending information without transmitting a signal

Joshua Roebke writes: We connect to each other through particles. Calls and texts ride flecks of light, Web sites and photographs load on electrons. All communication is, essentially, physical. Information is recorded and broadcast on actual objects, even those we cannot see.

Physicists also connect to the world when they communicate with it. They dispatch glints of light toward particles or atoms, and wait for this light to report back. The light interacts with the bits of matter, and how this interaction changes the light reveals a property or two of the bits—although this interaction often changes the bits, too. The term of art for such a candid affair is a measurement.

Particles even connect to each other using other particles. The force of electromagnetism between two electrons is conveyed by particles of light, and quarks huddle inside a proton because they exchange gluons. Physics is, essentially, the study of interactions.

Information is always conveyed through interactions, whether between particles or ourselves. We are compositions of particles who communicate with each other, and we learn about our surroundings by interacting with them. The better we understand such interactions, the better we understand the world and ourselves.

Physicists already know that interactions are local. As with city politics, the influence of particles is confined to their immediate precincts. Yet interactions remain difficult to describe. Physicists have to treat particles as individuals and add complex terms to their solitary existence to model their intimacies with other particles. The resulting equations are usually impossible to solve. So physicists have to approximate even for single particles, which can interact with themselves as a boat rolls in its own wake. Although physicists are meticulous, it is a wonder they ever succeed. Still, their contentions are the most accurate theories we have.

Quantum mechanics is the consummate theory of particles, so it naturally describes measurements and interactions. During the past few decades, as computers have nudged the quantum, the theory has been reframed to encompass information, too. What quantum mechanics implies for measurements and interactions is notoriously bizarre. Its implications for information are stranger still.

One of the strangest of these implications refutes the material basis of communication as well as common sense. Some physicists believe that we may be able to communicate without transmitting particles. In 2013 an amateur physicist named Hatim Salih even devised a protocol, alongside professionals, in which information is obtained from a place where particles never travel. Information can be disembodied. Communication may not be so physical after all.[Continue reading…]

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Being bilingual makes you experience time differently

Quartz reports: A new study shows that the words we use to talk about time also shape our view of its passage. This, say researchers, indicates that abstract concepts like duration are relative rather than universal, and that they are also influenced rather than solely innate.

The work, published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: General on April 27, examined how Spanish- and Swedish-speaking bilinguals conceived of time. The researchers—from University of Stockholm in Sweden and the University of Lancaster in the UK—found that their subjects, 40 of whom were native Swedish speakers and 40 of whom were native Spanish speakers—tended to think about time in terms that correspond to each language’s descriptors when linguistically prompted in that particular language but moved fluidly from one concept of time to another generally. This was true regardless of their native language.

Different languages describe time differently. For example, Swedish and English generally refer to time according to physical distance (“a long time,” “a short break”). Meanwhile, languages like Spanish or Greek, say, refer to time in volume generally (“a big chunk of time,” “a small moment”). [Continue reading…]

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Why your brain hates other people — and how to make it think differently

Robert Sapolsky writes: As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups.

It’s been said, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” In reality, there’s lots more of the former. And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them, ingroup and outgroup, “the people” (i.e., our kind) and the Others.

Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic status, and so on. And it’s not a pretty picture. We do so with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. Pretty depressing.

But crucially, there is room for optimism. Much of that is grounded in something definedly human, which is that we all carry multiple Us/Them divisions in our heads. A Them in one case can be an Us in another, and it can only take an instant for that identity to flip. Thus, there is hope that, with science’s help, clannishness and xenophobia can lessen, perhaps even so much so that Hollywood-extra chimps and gorillas can break bread together. [Continue reading…]

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