Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen

Don’t overestimate your untapped brain power

Nathalia Gjersoe writes: Luc Besson’s latest sci-fi romp, Lucy, is based on the premise that the average person only uses 10% of their brain. This brain-myth has been fodder for books and movies for decades and is a tantalizing plot-device. Alarmingly, however, it seems to be widely accepted as fact. Of those asked, 48% of teachers in the UK, 65% of Americans and 30% of American Psychology students endorsed the myth.

In the movie, Lucy absorbs vast quantities of a nootropic that triggers rampant production of new connections between her neurons. As her brain becomes more and more densely connected, Lucy experiences omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. Telepathy, telekinesis and time-travel all become possible.

It’s true that increased connectivity between neurons is associated with greater expertise. Musicians who train for years have greater connectivity and activation of those regions of the brain that control their finger movements and those that bind sensory and motor information. This is the first principle of neural connectivity: cells that fire together wire together.

But resources are limited and the brain is incredibly hungry. It takes a huge amount of energy just to keep it electrically ticking over. There is an excellent TEDEd animation here that explains this nicely. The human adult brain makes up only 2% of the body’s mass yet uses 20% of energy intake. Babies’ brains use 60%! Evolution would necessarily cull any redundant parts of such an expensive organ. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The orchestration of attention

The New Yorker: Every moment, our brains are bombarded with information, from without and within. The eyes alone convey more than a hundred billion signals to the brain every second. The ears receive another avalanche of sounds. Then there are the fragments of thoughts, conscious and unconscious, that race from one neuron to the next. Much of this data seems random and meaningless. Indeed, for us to function, much of it must be ignored. But clearly not all. How do our brains select the relevant data? How do we decide to pay attention to the turn of a doorknob and ignore the drip of a leaky faucet? How do we become conscious of a certain stimulus, or indeed “conscious” at all?

For decades, philosophers and scientists have debated the process by which we pay attention to things, based on cognitive models of the mind. But, in the view of many modern psychologists and neurobiologists, the “mind” is not some nonmaterial and exotic essence separate from the body. All questions about the mind must ultimately be answered by studies of physical cells, explained in terms of the detailed workings of the more than eighty billion neurons in the brain. At this level, the question is: How do neurons signal to one another and to a cognitive command center that they have something important to say?

“Years ago, we were satisfied to know which areas of the brain light up under various stimuli,” the neuroscientist Robert Desimone told me during a recent visit to his office. “Now we want to know mechanisms.” Desimone directs the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; youthful and trim at the age of sixty-two, he was dressed casually, in a blue pinstripe shirt, and had only the slightest gray in his hair. On the bookshelf of his tidy office were photographs of his two young children; on the wall was a large watercolor titled “Neural Gardens,” depicting a forest of tangled neurons, their spindly axons and dendrites wending downward like roots in rich soil.

Earlier this year, in an article published in the journal Science, Desimone and his colleague Daniel Baldauf reported on an experiment that shed light on the physical mechanism of paying attention. The researchers presented a series of two kinds of images — faces and houses — to their subjects in rapid succession, like passing frames of a movie, and asked them to concentrate on the faces but disregard the houses (or vice versa). The images were “tagged” by being presented at two frequencies — a new face every two-thirds of a second, a new house every half second. By monitoring the frequencies of the electrical activity of the subjects’ brains with magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Desimone and Baldauf could determine where in the brain the images were being directed.

The scientists found that, even though the two sets of images were presented to the eye almost on top of each other, they were processed by different places in the brain — the face images by a particular region on the surface of the temporal lobe that is known to specialize in facial recognition, and the house images by a neighboring but separate group of neurons specializing in place recognition.

Most importantly, the neurons in the two regions behaved differently. When the subjects were told to concentrate on the faces and to disregard the houses, the neurons in the face location fired in synchrony, like a group of people singing in unison, while the neurons in the house location fired like a group of people singing out of synch, each beginning at a random point in the score. When the subjects concentrated instead on houses, the reverse happened. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Scientists got it wrong on gravitational waves. So what?

Philip Ball writes: It was announced in headlines worldwide as one of the biggest scientific discoveries for decades, sure to garner Nobel prizes. But now it looks likely that the alleged evidence of both gravitational waves and ultra-fast expansion of the universe in the big bang (called inflation) has literally turned to dust.

Last March, a team using a telescope called Bicep2 at the South Pole claimed to have read the signatures of these two elusive phenomena in the twisting patterns of the cosmic microwave background radiation: the afterglow of the big bang. But this week, results from an international consortium using a space telescope called Planck show that Bicep2’s data is likely to have come not from the microwave background but from dust scattered through our own galaxy.

Some will regard this as a huge embarrassment, not only for the Bicep2 team but for science itself. Already some researchers have criticised the team for making a premature announcement to the press before their work had been properly peer reviewed.

But there’s no shame here. On the contrary, this episode is good for science. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why the symbol of life is a loop not a helix

Jamie Davies writes: Here is a remarkable fact about identical twins: they have the same DNA, and therefore the same ‘genetic fingerprint’, yet their actual fingerprints (such as they might leave behind on a murder weapon) are different, and can be told apart in standard police observations. Fingerprints are, of course, produced by the pattern of tiny ridges in skin. So, it would appear that certain fine-scale details of our anatomy cannot be determined by a precise ‘genetic blueprint’.

It isn’t only fine details that seem open to negotiation in this way: anyone who has seen Bonsai cultivation knows how the very genes that would normally build a large tree can instead build a miniature-scale model, given a suitable environment. Bonsai trees aren’t completely scaled down, of course: their cells are normal-sized – it’s just that each component is made with fewer of them.

In the 1950 and ’60s, many children were affected by their mothers taking the drug thalidomide while pregnant, when the drug blocked growth of the internal parts of their limbs. Even though growth of the skin is not directly affected by thalidomide, the very short limbs of affected children were covered by an appropriate amount of skin, not the much larger amount that would be needed to cover a normal limb. The growth of the skin cannot, therefore, just be in response to the command of a hard-wired internal blueprint: something much more adaptive must be going on.

Such observations are not troubling for biological science as such. But they are troubling for a certain picture of how biology works. The symbol for this worldview might be the DNA double helix, its complementary twisting strands evoking other interdependent pairs in life: male and female, form and function, living and non-living. DNA on its own is just a chemical polymer, after all, essential for life but not itself alive. Yet it holds out the promise that we can explain living processes purely in terms of the interactions between simple molecules. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama creates world’s largest ocean reserve in the Pacific — more than twice the size of California

tidepools-pacific-remote-islands

Vox reports: On Thursday, President Obama created the world’s largest ocean reserve.

The new reserve, an enlargement of the existing Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, nearly quadruples the total amount of US ocean territory that’s protected from commercial fishing, oil drilling, and other activities.

Previously, the monument — a cluster of reserves surrounding seven uninhabited islands south and west of Hawaii — covered about 86,888 square miles. The new monument will cover nearly 490,000 square miles in total, with the gains coming from extending the borders to 200 miles off the coasts of Wake Island, Jarvis Island, and Johnston Atoll. This is as far as the US government is permitted to protect, according to international law.

Despite the huge gains, though, the new monument is considerably smaller than the one Obama originally proposed in July, which would have been 782,000 square miles, and extended the protected zone around four other islands as well. Opposition from the commercial tuna fishing industry during the public comment period led to the shrinkage.

At the moment, there’s no drilling and not that much fishing in the newly protected area — so the reserve won’t be hugely impactful at the start. Still, it’s a big step forward in proactively protecting marine habitats on a massive scale. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

We are more rational than those who nudge us

Steven Poole writes: Humanity’s achievements and its self-perception are today at curious odds. We can put autonomous robots on Mars and genetically engineer malarial mosquitoes to be sterile, yet the news from popular psychology, neuroscience, economics and other fields is that we are not as rational as we like to assume. We are prey to a dismaying variety of hard-wired errors. We prefer winning to being right. At best, so the story goes, our faculty of reason is at constant war with an irrational darkness within. At worst, we should abandon the attempt to be rational altogether.

The present climate of distrust in our reasoning capacity draws much of its impetus from the field of behavioural economics, and particularly from work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1980s, summarised in Kahneman’s bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). There, Kahneman divides the mind into two allegorical systems, the intuitive ‘System 1’, which often gives wrong answers, and the reflective reasoning of ‘System 2’. ‘The attentive System 2 is who we think we are,’ he writes; but it is the intuitive, biased, ‘irrational’ System 1 that is in charge most of the time.

Other versions of the message are expressed in more strongly negative terms. You Are Not So Smart (2011) is a bestselling book by David McRaney on cognitive bias. According to the study ‘Why Do Humans Reason?’ (2011) by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, our supposedly rational faculties evolved not to find ‘truth’ but merely to win arguments. And in The Righteous Mind (2012), the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the idea that reason is ‘our most noble attribute’ a mere ‘delusion’. The worship of reason, he adds, ‘is an example of faith in something that does not exist’. Your brain, runs the now-prevailing wisdom, is mainly a tangled, damp and contingently cobbled-together knot of cognitive biases and fear.

This is a scientised version of original sin. And its eager adoption by today’s governments threatens social consequences that many might find troubling. A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail