Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen

Academics get paid for writing rubbish that nobody reads

Daniel Lattier writes: Professors usually spend about three to six months (sometimes longer) researching and writing a 25-page article to submit an article to an academic journal. And most experience a twinge of excitement when, months later, they open a letter informing them that their article has been accepted for publication, and will, therefore, be read by…

… an average of 10 people.

Yes, you read that correctly. The numbers reported by recent studies are pretty bleak:

– 82 percent of articles published in the humanities are not even cited once.

– Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read.

– Half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors.

So what’s the reason for this madness? Why does the world continue to be subjected to just under 2 million academic journal articles each year?

Well, the main reason is money and job security. The goal of all professors is to get tenure, and right now, tenure continues to be awarded based in part on how many peer-reviewed publications they have. Tenure committees treat these publications as evidence that the professor is able to conduct mature research.

Sadly, however, many academic articles today are merely exercises in what one professor I knew called “creative plagiarism”: rearrangements of previous research with a new thesis appended on to them.

Another reason is increased specialization in the modern era, which is in part due to the splitting up of universities into various disciplines and departments that each pursue their own logic. [Continue reading…]

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Mice feel each other’s pain

Science magazine reports: To most people, the phrase “I feel your pain” is just an expression of sympathy. But it’s also a real biological phenomenon, a new study in rodents suggests. Healthy mice living in the same room with mice experiencing pain are up to 68% more sensitive to pain themselves, regardless of their stress levels, according to the new study, which found that mice could scent when their fellows were suffering. The discovery suggests that current methods for studying rodent pain may need to be overhauled, and it may even point to a novel mechanism for pain transmission between humans, the authors say.

Andrey Ryabinin, a behavioral neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, and colleagues stumbled on the phenomenon largely by accident. They were studying the effects of alcohol withdrawal in mice, looking for new ways to help people overcome addiction. One of the most common, but challenging, symptoms of alcohol withdrawal is an intense, generalized pain throughout the body—a difficult-to-define condition that often leads people back to drinking, he says. Recreating those painful withdrawal symptoms in mice is difficult, leading some researchers to question whether the rodents are a good model for alcohol addiction.

Ryabinin and his team were using a standard setup: The mice are allowed to lap freely at an ethanol and water solution, but then go into withdrawal after the bottle is removed. A control group, housed in the same room, drinks only water. Using multiple measures of pain sensitivity—including brushing their forepaws with a thin hair and dipping their tails into hot water, the researchers attempted to gauge how withdrawal might be affecting the addicted rodents.

The initial results were disappointing, showing no significant difference between the two groups. Before giving up, however, the scientists decided to cage the control mice in a different room. This time, the sober controls showed far less pain sensitivity than the controls in the previous experiment, suggesting that the latter group had somehow acquired a heightened pain sensitivity from their roommates, Ryabinin says. [Continue reading…]

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Science shows the richer you get, the less you pay attention to other people

Lila MacLellan writes: No one can pay attention to everything they encounter. We simply do not have enough time or mental capacity for it. Most of us, though, do make an effort to acknowledge our fellow humans. Wealth, it seems, might change that.

There’s a growing body of research showing how having money changes the way people see — or are oblivious to — others and their problems. The latest is a paper published in the journal Psychological Science in which psychologists at New York University show that wealthy people unconsciously pay less attention to passersby on the street.

In the paper, the researchers describe experiments they conducted to measure the effects of social class on what’s called the “motivational relevance” of other human beings. According to some schools of psychological thought, we’re motivated to pay attention to something when we assign more value to it, whether because it threatens us or offers the potential for some kind of reward. [Continue reading…]

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Our slow, uncertain brains are still better than computers — here’s why

By Parashkev Nachev, UCL

Automated financial trading machines can make complex decisions in a thousandth of a second. A human being making a choice – however simple – can never be faster than about one-fifth of a second. Our reaction times are not only slow but also remarkably variable, ranging over hundreds of milliseconds.

Is this because our brains are poorly designed, prone to random uncertainty – or “noise” in the electronic jargon? Measured in the laboratory, even the neurons of a fly are both fast and precise in their responses to external events, down to a few milliseconds. The sloppiness of our reaction times looks less like an accident than a built-in feature. The brain deliberately procrastinates, even if we ask it to do otherwise.

Massively parallel wetware

Why should this be? Unlike computers, our brains are massively parallel in their organisation, concurrently running many millions of separate processes. They must do this because they are not designed to perform a specific set of actions but to select from a vast repertoire of alternatives that the fundamental unpredictability of our environment offers us. From an evolutionary perspective, it is best to trust nothing and no one, least of all oneself. So before each action the brain must flip through a vast Rolodex of possibilities. It is amazing it can do this at all, let alone in a fraction of a second.

But why the variability? There is hierarchically nothing higher than the brain, so decisions have to arise through peer-to-peer interactions between different groups of neurons. Since there can be only one winner at any one time – our movements would otherwise be chaotic – the mode of resolution is less negotiation than competition: a winner-takes-all race. To ensure the competition is fair, the race must run for a minimum length of time – hence the delay – and the time it takes will depend on the nature and quality of the field of competitors, hence the variability.

Fanciful though this may sound, the distributions of human reaction times, across different tasks, limbs, and people, have been repeatedly shown to fit the “race” model remarkably well. And one part of the brain – the medial frontal cortex – seems to track reaction time tightly, as an area crucial to procrastination ought to. Disrupting the medial frontal cortex should therefore disrupt the race, bringing it to an early close. Rather than slowing us down, disrupting the brain should here speed us up, accelerating behaviour but at the cost of less considered actions.

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Humans aren’t the only primates that can make sharp stone tools

 

The Guardian reports: Monkeys have been observed producing sharp stone flakes that closely resemble the earliest known tools made by our ancient relatives, proving that this ability is not uniquely human.

Previously, modifying stones to create razor-edged fragments was thought to be an activity confined to hominins, the family including early humans and their more primitive cousins. The latest observations re-write this view, showing that monkeys unintentionally produce almost identical artefacts simply by smashing stones together.

The findings put archaeologists on alert that they can no longer assume that stone flakes they discover are linked to the deliberate crafting of tools by early humans as their brains became more sophisticated.

Tomos Proffitt, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford and the study’s lead author, said: “At a very fundamental level – if you’re looking at a very simple flake – if you had a capuchin flake and a human flake they would be the same. It raises really important questions about what level of cognitive complexity is required to produce a sophisticated cutting tool.”

Unlike early humans, the flakes produced by the capuchins were the unintentional byproduct of hammering stones – an activity that the monkeys pursued decisively, but the purpose of which was not clear. Originally scientists thought the behaviour was a flamboyant display of aggression in response to an intruder, but after more extensive observations the monkeys appeared to be seeking out the quartz dust produced by smashing the rocks, possibly because it has a nutritional benefit. [Continue reading…]

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Where did the first farmers live? Looking for answers in DNA

Carl Zimmer writes: Beneath a rocky slope in central Jordan lie the remains of a 10,000-year-old village called Ain Ghazal, whose inhabitants lived in stone houses with timber roof beams, the walls and floors gleaming with white plaster.

Hundreds of people living there worshiped in circular shrines and made haunting, wide-eyed sculptures that stood three feet high. They buried their cherished dead under the floors of their houses, decapitating the bodies in order to decorate the skulls.

But as fascinating as this culture was, something else about Ain Ghazal intrigues archaeologists more: It was one of the first farming villages to have emerged after the dawn of agriculture.

Around the settlement, Ain Ghazal farmers raised barley, wheat, chickpeas and lentils. Other villagers would leave for months at a time to herd sheep and goats in the surrounding hills.

Sites like Ain Ghazal provide a glimpse of one of the most important transitions in human history: the moment that people domesticated plants and animals, settled down, and began to produce the kind of society in which most of us live today.

But for all that sites like Ain Ghazal have taught archaeologists, they are still grappling with enormous questions. Who exactly were the first farmers? How did agriculture, a cornerstone of civilization itself, spread to other parts of the world?

Some answers are now emerging from a surprising source: DNA extracted from skeletons at Ain Ghazal and other early settlements in the Near East. These findings have already challenged long-held ideas about how agriculture and domestication arose. [Continue reading…]

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