mindtricks

“Through the process of natural selection, it finds new uses for existing features, often resulting in what is known as convergent evolution — the development of similar biological traits in different orders of animals, such as powered flight in birds and bats.

Now, research by University of Nebraska-Lincoln biologists has found convergent evolution of a key physiological innovation that traces back through the two deepest branches of the vertebrate family tree.

A team led by Jay Storz (prounounced storts), assistant professor of biological sciences, analyzed the complete genome sequences of multiple vertebrate species and found that jawless fishes (e.g., lampreys and hagfish) and jawed vertebrates (pretty much everything else, including humans) independently invented different mechanisms of blood-oxygen transport to sustain aerobic metabolism.”

Read more at Physorg

“Your brain is hard wired to pay attention to about 150 people. Try to have a relationship with any more than that, and your life will turn to pure crap. Just ask the Military, Gore-Tex, or Krippendorf’s tribe. They’ll all tell you the same thing. One fifty is the way to go. They’ve known for hundreds of years that people work best in groups of 150 or less. Now it’s your turn.

The human cortex, responsible for complex thought and reasoning, is overgrown in humans when compared to other mammals. Scientists have argued for years about why this is the case.

One theory holds that our brains evolved because our primate ancestors began to gather food in more complex ways. They began eating fruit instead of grasses and leaves. This involved traveling long distances to find food, and required each species to maintain a complex mental map in order to keep track of fruit trees. More brainpower might have been needed to determine if a fruit was ripe, or to discern proper methods for peeling fruit or cracking nuts.

The problem with this theory is that if one tries to match brain size with the eating habits of primates, it doesn’t work. Some small-brained monkeys are eating fruit and maintaining complex maps and some larger brained primates are eating leaves.”

Read more at Common Sense

“We have successfully uncovered and mapped the most comprehensive long-distance network of the Macaque monkey brain, which is essential for understanding the brain’s behavior, complexity, dynamics and computation,” Dr. Modha says. “We can now gain unprecedented insight into how information travels and is processed across the brain.

“We have collated a comprehensive, consistent, concise, coherent, and colossal network spanning the entire brain and grounded in anatomical tracing studies that is a stepping stone to both fundamental and applied research in neuroscience and cognitive computing.”

The scientists focused on the long-distance network of 383 brain regions and 6,602 long-distance brain connections that travel through the brain’s white matter, which are like the “interstate highways” between far-flung brain regions, he explained, while short-distance gray matter connections (based on neurons) constitute “local roads” within a brain region and its sub-structures.

Full story at Kurzweil

Someone, somewhere, can look you straight in the eye and say "I've got a PhD in booty call research".

A new study just published online in the Journal of Sex Research investigates where the booty call falls on the spectrum of relationships.

Positioning the Booty-Call Relationship on the Spectrum of Relationships: Sexual but More Emotional Than One-Night Stands

Peter K. Jonason; Norman P. Li; Jessica Richardson

Journal of Sex Research

Most research on human sexuality has focused on long-term pairbonds and one-night stands. However, growing evidence suggests there are relationships that do not fit cleanly into either of those categories. One of these relationships is a “booty-call relationship.”

The purpose of this study was to describe the sexual and emotional nature of booty-call relationships by (a) examining the types of emotional and sexual acts involved in booty-call relationships and (b) comparing the frequency of those acts in booty-call relationships to one-night stands and serious long-term relationships.

In addition, the manner in which sociosexuality is associated with the commission of these acts was also examined. Demonstrative of booty-call relationships' sexual nature was individuals' tendency to leave after sex and infrequent handholding.

In contrast, the romantic nature of booty-call relationships was demonstrated through the frequency of acts like kissing. The results suggest the booty-call relationship is a distinct type of relationship situated between one-night stands and serious romantic relationships.

Guys, if you need a post-doc... just call.

Link to booty call study in the Journal of Sex Research (via @NoahWG).

“Computational rephotography is a fancy name for photos taken from the exact same viewpoint as an old photograph. Actually, that’s just rephotography. The “computational” part is when software helps out.

I’m a sucker for photos of old street scenes. Seeing familiar parts of your city as they were many decades ago is fascinating, and if people are good enough to snap a new version, you can enjoy the differences of places you have never seen. At Flickr and a site called Historypin, you can see the old shots lined up over the new, like a window into the past.

Researchers at MIT have found a way to automate the process. Currently, they use a laptop to do the heavy lifting, but the software could just as easily sit inside a camera. In fact, that’s the plan. The system compares the scene in front of the camera with a historical photograph. It then works out the difference between the two and gives the photographer instructions along the lines of “up a bit, left a bit more.”

According to an abstract on rephotography, it is a lot more complicated than it seems. In lining up the images you must consider “six degrees of freedom of 3-D translation and rotation, and the confounding similarity between the effects of camera zoom and dolly”

Read more at Wired (Thanks @LairyT)

Spanish daily El País recently published an article on psychologist Stanley Milgram which had this amazing photo of the young conformity researcher where he looks surprisingly beatnick.

Sadly the photo isn't dated but it makes quite a contrast to the better known photos where he looks much more like the typical professor of the age.

He looks both wonderfully creative and slightly haunted, which seems to capture his contribution to psychology perfectly.

The article is also worth checking out but is only available in Spanish, so you may have to deploy a utilisation of the page of Google's Translate which can make a translate of the text if you desire to read it in the English.

Link to El País article 'El psicólogo'. Link to big version of photo.

“If you’re studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you’re trying to memorize a list in order – facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table – the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, United Kingdom, looked at the ability to recall information in the presence of different sounds. They instructed 25 participants between ages 18 and 30 try to memorize, and later recall, a list of letters in order. The study authors are Nick Perham and Joanne Vizard, and the study will appear in the September 2010 issue of Applied Clinical Psychology.

Participants were tested under various listening conditions: quiet, music that they’d said they liked, music that they’d said they didn’t like, a voice repeating the number three, and a voice reciting random single-digit numbers.

The study found that participants performed worst while listening to music, regardless of whether they liked that music, and to the speech of random numbers. They did the best in the quiet and while listening to the repeated “three.”

Music may impair cognitive abilities in these scenarios because if you’re trying to memorize things in order, you may get thrown off by the changing words and notes in your chosen song, the authors speculate.”

Read more at CNN Health (Thanks @XLadyClaireX)

“Why does human conversation come so easily? A new study chalks it up to a sort of “mind meld” between participants. Researchers have found that the brains of speakers and listeners become synchronized as they converse and that this “neural coupling” is key to effective communication.

Scientists have traditionally considered talking and listening to be two independent processes. The idea is that speech is produced in some parts of the brain, including a region known as Broca’s area, and understood in others, including a region known as Wernicke’s area. But recent studies suggest that there’s actually much more overlap. For example, partners in a conversation will unconsciously begin imitating each other, adopting similar grammatical structures, speaking rates, and even bodily postures.

This overlap helps people establish a “common ground” during conversation and may even help them predict what the other is going to say next, argue psychologist Martin Pickering of the University of Edinburgh and psychologist Simon Garrod of the University of Glasgow, both in the United Kingdom. Some researchers think that so-called mirror neurons, which fire when one individual observes the actions of another, might be involved in these interactions.”

Read more at Science Mag (Thanks @XLadyClaireX)

The best 'poker face' is probably not a neutral expression, but a happy one, as it led to a greater number of opponent mistakes in a study just published in PLoS One.

The research looked at how poker playing was influenced by the emotional expression of opponents and discovered that blank and threatening expressions had little effect, but a positive expression tends to lull people into a false sense of trust and puts them off their game.

Taken from the study abstract:

This study investigates whether an opponent's face influences players' wagering decisions in a zero-sum game with hidden information. Participants made risky choices in a simplified poker task while being presented opponents whose faces differentially correlated with subjective impressions of trust. Surprisingly, we find that threatening face information has little influence on wagering behavior, but faces relaying positive emotional characteristics impact peoples' decisions.

Thus, people took significantly longer and made more mistakes against emotionally positive opponents. Differences in reaction times and percent correct were greatest around the optimal decision boundary, indicating that face information is predominantly used when making decisions during medium-value gambles. Mistakes against emotionally positive opponents resulted from increased folding rates, suggesting that participants may have believed that these opponents were betting with hands of greater value than other opponents.

According to these results, the best "poker face" for bluffing may not be a neutral face, but rather a face that contains emotional correlates of trustworthiness. Moreover, it suggests that rapid impressions of an opponent play an important role in competitive games, especially when people have little or no experience with an opponent.

Link to Pubmed entry for study. Link to full-text of study at PLoS One.

One of the highlights of the tour this year was indoor skydiving at Airkix in Milton Keynes. This is quite something. An enormous structure which is in essence an inverted wind tunnel, circulating air through a central chamber. Jump in and you’re airborne. We received the essential lowdown from Sean, our cool and perky trainer, and then each got a go in the flight chamber with Sean helping us along. It is extraordinary, exhilarating, and SO much fun. The team there looked after us very well and what you see in the video is Coops’ edit of Airkix’s footage. We’ve spared the rest of the team from having their escapades published, as, well, you don’t look your best when you’re at it.

Attached to our helmets – by which I mean, you know, our helmets – are toy animals, flapping in the wind. Coops has a monkey, I have a vampire bat. We chose well. You’ll see my effort first, then Mr Coops, and then finally me again doing a few tricks after some more practice. OK, that last bit’s not true. Make sure you watch the last section to show what can be done – it’s the brilliant Sean and he’s a living Spiderman. Just incredible. All this has made us very enthusiastic to do a proper (ie outdoor, terrifying etc) skydive at some point, and the lovely people at The Red Devils have offered to host it. Wowzers. Expect more footage when that happens, though more likely of Coops and me wetting ourselves at so many thousand feet. Wheee!

Click to Watch

Some awesome geek moves from the science of phonetics, as applied to the new wave punk classic 'Ça Plane Pour Moi' previously and falsely believed to have been sung by Plastic Bertrand.

From the AV Club report:

A staple of any new-wave dance night (ask a white person), “Ca Plane Pour Moi” made a chart-stopping star out of Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand (né Roger Jouret) and provided him with his most lasting legacy—except an expert linguist has just proved that Bertrand didn’t actually sing on his most famous record. The battle over “Ca Plane Pour Moi” has been brewing for four years now, stemming from a 2006 lawsuit involving original producer Lou Deprijck, who released his own version of the single under the marketing claim that he was the “original voice.” At the time, Deprijck found himself sued by record label AMC.

As a result, a panel of experts was appointed to study the track, and today a linguist announced that, after three months of study, during which he compared the original to Deprijck's 2006 version, he had determined that “the way the phrases end on each record show that the song could only have been sung by a Ch'ti—otherwise known as someone from the Picard region of France. It could therefore not have been Plastic Bertrand—who was born in Brussels—and was surely Monsieur Deprijck.” So it's been settled: Plastic Bertrand was the Milli Vanilli of the punk era.

Link to AV Club on the fake Plastic Bertrand (via @sophiescott).

“Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history – 21st century America – is slowly getting less pleased with life. (Or as the economists behind this recent analysis concluded: “In the United States, the [psychological] well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time.”)

Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure. That’s why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo. We’ve been led to believe that dollars are delight in a fungible form.

But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. The scientists explore the “experience-stretching hypothesis,” an idea first proposed by Daniel Gilbert. He explains “experience-stretching” with the following anecdote:

I’ve played the guitar for years, and I get very little pleasure from executing an endless repetition of three-chord blues. But when I first learned to play as a teenager, I would sit upstairs in my bedroom happily strumming those three chords until my parents banged on the ceiling…Doesn’t it seem reasonable to invoke the experience-stretching hypothesis and say that an experience that once brought me pleasure no longer does? A man who is given a drink of water after being lost in the Mojave Desert may at that moment rate his happiness as eight. A year later, the same drink might induce him to feel no better than a two.

What does experience-stretching have to do with money and happiness? The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.”

Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

“South African wildlife experts are calling for urgent action against poachers after the last female rhinoceros in a popular game reserve near Johannesburg bled to death after having its horn hacked off.

Wildlife officials say poaching for the prized horns has now reached an all-time high. “Last year, 129 rhinos were killed for their horns in South Africa. This year, we have already had 136 deaths,” said Japie Mostert, chief game ranger at the 1,500-hectare Krugersdorp game reserve.

The gang used tranquilliser guns and a helicopter to bring down the nine-year-old rhino cow. Her distraught calf was moved to a nearby estate where it was introduced to two other orphaned white rhinos.

Wanda Mkutshulwa, a spokeswoman for South African National Parks, said investigations into the growing number of incidents had been shifted to the country’s organised crime unit. “We are dealing with very focused criminals. Police need to help game reserves because they are not at all equipped to handle crime on such an organised level,” she said.

Rhino horn consists of compressed keratin fibre – similar to hair – and in many Asian cultures it is a fundamental ingredient in traditional medicines.”

Read more at The Guardian (Thanks Tracey)

An amazing passage about the use of coca among of the indigenous Kogi and Ika people of Colombia, taking from p24 of anthropologist Wade Davis' magical book on the ethnobotany of ceremonial chemicals, One River.

In a sacred landscape in which every plant is a manifestation of the divine, the chewing of hayo, a variety of coca only found in the mountains of Colombia, represents the most profound expression of culture. Distance in the mountains is not measured in miles but coca chews. When two men meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Their societal ideal is to abstain from sex, eating and sleeping while staying up all night, chewing hayo and chanting the names of ancestors. Each week the men chew about a pound of dry leaves, thus absorbing as much as a third of a gram of cocaine each day of their adults lives.

The book traces Davis' own travels, and those of his mentor Richard Evans Schultes, to understand the culture and chemistry of psychoactive plants among the native peoples of America, both North and South.

It's an amazingly evocative book and is full of engrossing cultural insights into how plants like coca, the peyote cactus and psilocybin mushrooms have been used traditionally and how they were discovered by Western science.

Link to more info on One River.

“Ford, looking for a way to make themselves look modern and interesting, have rigged up a Fiesta with sensors and made it post messages on Twitter as it drives.

It refers to itself in the third person as AJ, following the science fiction rule that low-grade artificial intelligence can’t work out pronouns. Run low on petrol and it announces to the world: ‘AJ is about to die! (Fuel level is 14%)’. Leave the windscreen wipers off and the 588 people who are following it are informed that ‘No rain … no pain. Current conditions: fair (day)’. The driver doesn’t have to do anything, it all goes on in the background.

Using GPS and Foursquare, the mobile location tracking app, AJ can say where it is. Cameras attached to the bodywork build up a geo-tagged photo album of its travels.

So far, so completely pointless, you might think. Bridges and clocks can tweet and it’s mildly amusing for a few seconds, but I’m blowed if I want the world knowing where I am all the time or annoying everyone I know with gratingly cheerful statements about the weather. It’s only a matter of time before the Government intercept the messages and use it to work out how fast I’m going and send me a ticket, it’s the nanny state gone mad etc etc.”

Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks Tracey)

Mind Hacks updates may be a little hit and miss over the next week as I'm off to San Francisco for SciFoo - the Nature / Google / O'Reilly science anti-conference.

Apart from conferencing I'll be sleeping on floors and wandering the streets but normal service should be resumed in a week.

Each month, National Geographic magazine features breathtaking photographs in Visions of Earth. Browse through visions of the world as seen through a photographer’s eye.

Head over to National Geographic to see the amazing collection. (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

“Doesn’t it seem likely that the reason all of us can’t see God is because there is no God?

If God exists… why isn’t his existence obvious?

And is “free will” a good answer to this question?

A few weeks ago, in this very publication, I posed the question, “Why did God create atheists?” If God reveals himself to religious believers, in visions or revelations or other spiritual experiences… why doesn’t he do it with everyone? Why are those revelations so contradictory — not to mention so suspiciously consistent with whatever the people having them already believe or want to believe? And why doesn’t everyone have them? If God is real, I asked — if religious believers are perceiving a real entity with a real effect on the world — why isn’t it just obvious?

Why is God playing hide and seek?

When I wrote that piece, I addressed (and dismantled) two of the most common responses to this question: “God has revealed himself to you, you’ve just closed your heart to him,” and, “God doesn’t care if you’re an atheist — as long as you’re a good person, he doesn’t care if you believe in him.”

But I neglected to address one of the most common religious answers to this question:

Free will.”

Read more at AlterNet (Thanks Erich and @XxLadyClaireXx)

McSweeney's has a funny piece where Freud visits the ad agency Sterling Cooper from the Mad Men television series:

FREUD: Well, as you know, we've dominated psychology for decades. But lately we've begun losing our share of the market to Behaviorism. People want a more comforting interpretation of their lives. They don't want to be told that they're suppressing base urges, or that their problems can be traced back to how they learned to use the toilet.

DRAPER: But that's always been your identity. People think of Freudian insights as rising above the crowd. It's an attitude that says, "I'm educated. I'm not a mechanic." I don't think you toy with that.

FREUD: Society is changing. At our last board meeting, we decided we have to reposition ourselves. We want to promote our expertise in dreams. We want people to see them as the means to discover themselves, and that Freud will show them how.

PEGGY OLSON: When I was a girl, I always lay in bed in the morning thinking over the dream I just had. It was the happiest part of my day.

FREUD: (Brightening) That's the feel that we're looking for. People want a lift, and we give it to them.

OLSON: You could have a slogan like, "Dare to Dream." Or "Full Dream Ahead."

Although intended to be satirical, Freud's family has a long association with advertising. His nephew, Edward Bernays, essentially invented the field of PR, and his great grandson, Matthew Freud, is the founder of Freud Communications, one of the biggest PR companies in the UK.

Link to 'Freud: The Rebranding' (via @mrianleslie).