Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen

Music permeates our brain

Jonathan Berger writes: Neurological research has shown that vivid musical hallucinations are more than metaphorical. They don’t just feel real, they are, from a cognitive perspective, entirely real. In the absence of sound waves, brain activation is strikingly similar to that triggered by external auditory sounds. Why should that be?

Music, repetitive and patterned by nature, provides structure within which we find anchors, context, and a basis for organizing time. In the prehistory of civilization, humans likely found comfort in the audible patterns and structures that accompanied their circadian rhythms — from the coo of a morning dove to the nocturnal chirps of crickets. With the evolution of music a more malleable framework for segmenting and structuring time developed. Humans generated predictable and replicable temporal patterns by drumming, vocalizing, blowing, and plucking. This metered, temporal framework provides an internal world in which we construct predictions about the future — what will happen next, and when it will happen.

This process spotlights the brain itself. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen hyphenated the term for his craft to underscore the literal meaning of “com-pose” — to put together elements, from com (“with” or “together”) and pose (“put” or “place”). When we imagine music, we literally compose — sometimes recognizable tunes, other times novel combinations of patterns and musical ideas. Toddlers sing themselves to sleep with vocalizations of musical snippets they are conjuring up in their imagination. Typically, these “spontaneous melodies,” as they are referred to by child psychologists, comprise fragments of salient features of multiple songs that the baby is piecing together. In short, we do not merely retrieve music that we store in memory. Rather, a supremely complex web of associations can be stirred and generated as we compose music in our minds.

Today, amid widely disseminated music, we are barraged by a cacophony of disparate musical patterns — more often than not uninvited and unwanted — and likely spend more time than ever obsessing over imagined musical fragments. The brain is a composer whose music orchestrates our lives. And right now the brain is working overtime. [Continue reading…]

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Meet Walter Pitts, the homeless genius who revolutionized artificial intelligence

Amanda Gefter writes: Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he ducked into the local library to hide. The library was familiar ground, where he had taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics—better than home, where his father insisted he drop out of school and go to work. Outside, the world was messy. Inside, it all made sense.

Not wanting to risk another run-in that night, Pitts stayed hidden until the library closed for the evening. Alone, he wandered through the stacks of books until he came across Principia Mathematica, a three-volume tome written by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, which attempted to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic. Pitts sat down and began to read. For three days he remained in the library until he had read each volume cover to cover — nearly 2,000 pages in all — and had identified several mistakes. Deciding that Bertrand Russell himself needed to know about these, the boy drafted a letter to Russell detailing the errors. Not only did Russell write back, he was so impressed that he invited Pitts to study with him as a graduate student at Cambridge University in England. Pitts couldn’t oblige him, though — he was only 12 years old. But three years later, when he heard that Russell would be visiting the University of Chicago, the 15-year-old ran away from home and headed for Illinois. He never saw his family again. [Continue reading…]

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Stunning astronomical discovery vanishes in cloud of dust

Space.com reports: It is the announcement no one wanted to hear: The most exciting astronomical discovery of 2014 has vanished. Two groups of scientists announced today (Jan. 30) that a tantalizing signal — which some scientists claimed was “smoking gun” evidence of dramatic cosmic expansion just after the birth of the universe — was actually caused by something much more mundane: interstellar dust.

In the cosmic inflation announcement, which was unveiled in March 2014, scientists with the BICEP2 experiment, claimed to have found patterns in light left over from the Big Bang that indicated that space had rapidly inflated at the beginning of the universe, about 13.8 billion years ago. The discovery also supposedly confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, theoretical ripples in space-time.

But in a statement today, scientists with the European Space Agency said that data from the agency’s Planck space observatory has revealed that interstellar dust caused more than half of the signal detected by the Antarctica-based BICEP2 experiment. The Planck spacecraft observations were not yet available last March when the BICEP2 science team made its announcement. [Continue reading…]

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A conversation with Adam Curtis

Jon Ronson writes: I’ve known Adam Curtis for nearly 20 years. We’re friends. We see movies together, and once even went to Romania on a mini-break to attend an auction of Nicolae Ceausescu’s belongings. But it would be wrong to characterise our friendship as frivolous. Most of the time when we’re together I’m just intensely cross-questioning him about some new book idea I have.

Sometimes Adam will say something that seems baffling and wrong at the time, but makes perfect sense a few years later. I could give you lots of examples, but here’s one: I’m about to publish a book – So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed – about how social media is evolving into a cold and conservative place, a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing, and when people step out of line in the smallest ways we destroy them. Adam was warning me about Twitter’s propensity to turn this way six years ago, when it was still a Garden of Eden. Sometimes talking to Adam feels like finding the results of some horse race of the future, where the long-shot horse wins.

I suppose it’s no surprise that Adam would notice this stuff about social media so early on. It’s what his films are almost always about – power and social control. However, people don’t only enjoy them for the subject matter, but for how they look, too – his wonderful, strange use of archive.

His new film, Bitter Lake, is his most experimental yet. And I think it’s his best. It’s still journalism: it’s about our relationship with Afghanistan, and how we don’t know what to do, and so we just repeat the mistakes of the past. But he’s allowed his use of archive to blossom crazily. Fifty percent of the film has no commentary. Instead, he’s created this dreamlike, fantastical collage from historical footage and raw, unedited news footage. Sometimes it’s just a shot of a man walking down a road in some Afghan town, and you don’t know why he’s chosen it, and then something happens and you think, ‘Ah!’ (Or, more often, ‘Oh God.’) It might be something small and odd. Or it might be something huge and terrible.

Nightmarish things happen in Bitter Lake. There are shots of people dying. It’s a film that could never be on TV. It’s too disturbing. And it’s too long as well – nearly two and a half hours. And so he’s putting it straight onto BBC iPlayer. I think, with this film, he’s invented a whole new way of telling a nonfiction story.

VICE asked the two of us to have an email conversation about his work. We started just before Christmas, and carried on until after the New Year. [Continue reading…]

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Ancient planets are almost as old as the universe

New Scientist reports: The Old Ones were already ancient when the Earth was born. Five small planets orbit an 11.2 billion-year-old star, making them about 80 per cent as old as the universe itself. That means our galaxy started building rocky planets earlier than we thought.

“Now that we know that these planets can be twice as old as Earth, this opens the possibility for the existence of ancient life in the galaxy,” says Tiago Campante at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope spotted the planets around an orange dwarf star called Kepler 444, which is 117 light years away and about 25 per cent smaller than the sun.

Orange dwarfs are considered good candidates for hosting alien life because they can stay stable for up to 30 billion years, compared to the sun’s 10 billion years, the time it takes these stars to consume all their hydrogen. For context, the universe is currently 13.8 billion years old.

Since, as far as we know, life begins by chance, older planets would have had more time to allow life to get going and evolve. But it was unclear whether planets around such an old star could be rocky – life would have a harder time on gassy planets without a solid surface. [Continue reading…]

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