Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen

Sino-Tibetan populations shed light on human cooperation

By Ruth Mace, UCL

One of the big questions in anthropology is why humans, unlike most animals, cooperate with those we are not closely related to. Exactly what has driven this behaviour is not well understood. Anthropologists suspect it could be down to the fact that women have usually left their homes after marriage to go and live with their husband’s family. This creates links between distant families, which may explain our tendency to cooperate beyond our own households.

Now our study on the Tibetan borderlands of China, published in Nature Communications, shows that it is indeed the case that cooperation is greater in populations where females disperse for marriage.

A natural experiment in social structure

There are a lot of different theories about the link between dispersal, kinship and cooperation, which is what we wanted to test. Anthropologists believe that dispersal leads to cooperation through links between families, and some evolutionary models predict that when nobody moves this leads to residents competing for the same resources and greater conflict between kin. But there are also models that suggest the opposite is true – that if nobody moves, neighbours are more likely to be related, leading to more cooperation in the neighbourhood.

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Einstein was wrong. ‘Spooky action’ is real

Delft University of Technology reports: In 1935, Einstein asked a profound question about our understanding of Nature: are objects only influenced by their nearby environment? Or could, as predicted by quantum theory, looking at one object sometimes instantaneously affect another far-away object? Einstein did not believe in quantum theory’s prediction, famously calling it “spooky action”.

Exactly 80 years later, a team of scientists led by professor Ronald Hanson from Delft University of Technology finally performed what is seen as the ultimate test against Einstein’s worldview: the loophole-free Bell test. The scientists found that two electrons, separated 1.3 km from each other on the Delft University campus, can indeed have an invisible and instantaneous connection: the spooky action is real.

The experiment, published in Nature today, breaks the last standing defence of Einstein’s iconic 1935 paper: it closes all the loopholes present in earlier experiments. The Delft experiment not only closes a chapter in one of the most intriguing debates in science, it may also enable a radically new form of secure communications that is fundamentally impossible to ‘eavesdrop’ into.

“Quantum mechanics states that a particle such as an electron can be in two different states at the same time, and even in two different places, as long as it is not observed. This is called ‘superposition’ and it is a very counter-intuitive concept”, says lead scientist Professor Ronald Hanson. Hanson’s group works with trapped electrons, which have a tiny magnetic effect known as a “spin” that can be pointing up, or down, or – when in superposition – up and down at the same time. “Things get really interesting when two electrons become entangled. Both are then up and down at the same time, but when observed one will always be down and the other one up. They are perfectly correlated, when you observe one, the other one will always be opposite. That effect is instantaneous, even if the other electron is in a rocket at the other end of the galaxy”, says Hanson. [Continue reading…]

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Long before going to Europe, humans ventured east to Asia

LiveScience reports: Teeth from a cave in China suggest that modern humans lived in Asia much earlier than previously thought, and tens of thousands of years before they reached Europe, researchers say.

This discovery yields new information about the dispersal of modern humans from Africa to the rest of the world, and could shed light on how modern humans and Neanderthals interacted, the scientists added.

Modern humans first originated about 200,000 years ago in Africa. When and how the modern human lineage dispersed from Africa has long been controversial.

Previous research suggested the exodus from Africa began between 70,000 and 40,000 years ago. However, recent research hinted that modern humans might have begun their march across the globe as early as 130,000 years ago. [Continue reading…]

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Old and new: How the brain evokes a sense of familiarity

Science News reports: It’s happened to all of us at one time or another: You’re walking through a crowd, and suddenly a face seems incredibly familiar — so much so that you do a double-take. Who is that? How do you know them? You have no idea, but something about their face nags at you. You know you’ve seen it before.

The reason you know that face is in part because of your perirhinal cortex. This is an area of the brain that helps us to determine familiarity, or whether we have seen an object before. A new study of brain cells in this area finds that firing these neurons at one frequency makes the brain treat novel images as old hat. But firing these same neurons at another frequency can make the old new again.

“Novelty and familiarity are both really important,” says study coauthor Rebecca Burwell, a neuroscientist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “They are important for learning and memory and decision making.” Finding a cache of food and knowing it is new could be useful for an animal’s future. So is recognizing a familiar place where the pickings were good in the past.

But knowing that something is familiar is not quite the same thing as knowing what that thing is. “You’re in a crowd and you see a familiar face, and there’s a feeling,” Burwell explains. “You can’t identify them, you don’t know where you met them, but there’s a sense of familiarity.” It’s different from recalling where you met the person, or even who the person is. This is a sense at the base of memory. And while scientists knew the perirhinal cortex was involved in this sense of familiarity, how that feeling of new or old was coded in the brain wasn’t fully understood. [Continue reading…]

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Our moral identity makes us who we are

Nina Strohminger writes: e morning after her accident, a woman I’ll call Kate awoke in a daze. She looked at the man next to her in bed. He resembled her husband, with the same coppery beard and freckles dusted across his shoulders. But this man was definitely not her husband.

Panicked, she packed a small bag and headed to her psychiatrist’s office. On the bus, there was a man she had been encountering with increasing frequency over the past several weeks. The man was clever, he was a spy. He always appeared in a different form: one day as a little girl in a sundress, another time as a bike courier who smirked at her knowingly. She explained these bizarre developments to her doctor, who was quickly becoming one of the last voices in this world she could trust. But as he spoke, her stomach sank with a dreaded realisation: this man, too, was an impostor.

Kate has Capgras syndrome, the unshakeable belief that someone – often a loved one, sometimes oneself – has been replaced with an exact replica. She also has Fregoli syndrome, the delusion that the same person is taking on a variety of shapes, like an actor donning an expert disguise. Capgras and Fregoli delusions offer hints about an extraordinary cognitive mechanism active in the healthy mind, a mechanism so exquisitely tuned that we are hardly ever aware of it. This mechanism ascribes to each person a unique identity, and then meticulously tracks and updates it. This mechanism is crucial to virtually every human interaction, from navigating a party to navigating a marriage. Without it, we quickly fall apart. [Continue reading…]

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Humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things

Robert Twigger writes: I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, they told me that carrying too many tools is the sign of a weak man; it makes him lazy. The real master has no tools at all, only a limitless capacity to improvise with what is to hand. The more fields of knowledge you cover, the greater your resources for improvisation.

We hear the descriptive words psychopath and sociopath all the time, but here’s a new one: monopath. It means a person with a narrow mind, a one-track brain, a bore, a super-specialist, an expert with no other interests — in other words, the role-model of choice in the Western world. You think I jest? In June, I was invited on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 to say a few words on the river Nile, because I had a new book about it. The producer called me ‘Dr Twigger’ several times. I was flattered, but I also felt a sense of panic. I have never sought or held a PhD. After the third ‘Dr’, I gently put the producer right. And of course, it was fine — he didn’t especially want me to be a doctor. The culture did. My Nile book was necessarily the work of a generalist. But the radio needs credible guests. It needs an expert — otherwise why would anyone listen?

The monopathic model derives some of its credibility from its success in business. In the late 18th century, Adam Smith (himself an early polymath who wrote not only on economics but also philosophy, astronomy, literature and law) noted that the division of labour was the engine of capitalism. His famous example was the way in which pin-making could be broken down into its component parts, greatly increasing the overall efficiency of the production process. But Smith also observed that ‘mental mutilation’ followed the too-strict division of labour. Or as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: ‘Nothing tends to materialise man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labour.’ [Continue reading…]

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