archive for the ‘science’ category
the audacity of hope?
…people are selectively worse at incorporating information about a worse-than-expected future
There are aspects of my life where I’m optimistic but probably less so than most people. I’m not a pessimist; I’m a self-decribed pragmatist: I see wonder and beauty all around but I also see problems coming a mile away.
In my work as a software architect I consistently encounter a propensity for optimism from folks who dream things—as opposed to those who build things. The dreamers are “The Business” and they are “bully”. To varying degrees, anything short of “can do” is nay-saying.
Strangely, it’s the dreamers who tend to label the do-ers (as pessimistic) but not the other way ’round. In professional life it’s taboo for someone to tell an optimist that they just don’t know enough to understand the real risks involved in X, Y or Z.
Those conversations do happen rarely and don’t often result in much change. Why?
One answer could come from applying evolutionary psychology to the SDLC. It’s a topic I’m interested in considering further.
As a start, I’ve looked at The brains rose-colored glasses : Nature Neuroscience.
The best way to think about the problem from The Business’s expectation is:
optimists’ brains fail to generate a learning signal when confronted with the evidence that negative events are more likely to occur than predicted
The foundation of Agile Methods—XP—took this into consideration. XP focused on measuring “velocity” and included rules that used past velocity to govern / temper the optimism of a future iteration.
More details can be found here: optimism
adding to the tally of war
Frontline’s “The Wounded Platoon” is documentary that follows members of Third Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st battalion, 506th infantry…the regiment known as the “Band of Brothers”. It exposes some of the repercussions of modern warfare on the psychological health of our troops.
One of the biggest impacts is PTSD.
PTSD was a term that emerged from the wars in Viet Nam. Some have said that it’s a new term that’s the same as the old adage that “War is hell”.
However, something else is going on:
Since 2002, the number of Fort Carson soldiers diagnosed each year with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, has risen from 26 to 1,120, a rise of over 4,000 percent.
In recent decades, medical science has greatly increased our knowledge of PTSD. One might naively think that a deeper understanding would result in more humane treatment of soldiers who can’t cope. That is true in some circumstances. However, our deeper understanding has also led our military to adapt policies and approaches for dealing with combat troops exposed to inhuman situations:
Before the Iraq War, American soldiers in combat zones were not allowed to take psychiatric medications…
But by the time of “The Surge”, more than 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were taking antidepressants and sleeping pills. These drugs enable the Army to keep soldiers with post-traumatic stress on the battlefield.
One soldier, Kenny Eastridge, came home with PTSD and got into some really bad trouble. He was convicted for participating in a crime spree that included drive-by shootings, aggravated robbery, running over and stabbing a nursing student and finally the execution-style murder of two fellow soldiers.
From his jail cell, soldier Kenny Eastridge recalls his own experiences from that his time in The Surge:
I was having, like, a total mental breakdown. Every day, we were getting in battles and never having a break, it seemed like. It was just crazy. I just got to where I couldn’t take it. I tried to go to mental health, and they put me on all kinds of meds, too, and I was still going out on missions.
Like, they had me on Ambien, Remeron, Lexapro, Celexa, all kind of different stuff. They tried different medications at different doses and nothing would work.
How is this different from human medical experimentation?
recalling the future
The Nature article Recalling the Future reviews the book Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future wherein Harvard’s Moshe Bar reviews cognitive science research about memory.
From the article I learned that there is growing experimental evidence for significant overlap between memory recall and future simulation. This relationship indicates that prediction is one potential reason why memory evolved: prediction is a unifying principle of the brain’s function and predictions are created from memories.
It seems that our minds spend a significant amount of time making predictions. These predictions are often mundane but sometimes they provide useful insight or even a survival advantage in a harsh and dangerous world. As our brains generate detailed pictures of future events, memory plasticity allows us to augment our recalled memories with up-to-date information. This also allows us to make new associations with a basis in past experience.
In a happy juxtaposition, I also watched Nova’s What Are Dreams? on the same weekend that I read the Nature article. That’s where I learned of an interesting twist on the conventional notion that dreaming helps to reinforce memories. I’ve heard before that dreaming may be involved in moving memories from short-term storage to long-term storage. Now it seems that dreams may also be involved in using memories to help us predict.
This idea is expressed here by Harvard’s Robert Stickgold:
…this is all about the function of sleep and the role of dreaming in processing memories, that it refines the memory, it improves the memory, it makes the memory more useful for the future, and so when they come back, they’re going to be better.
My sense is that when we’re asleep and when we’re dreaming, we are actually conscious and figuring out what’s important about what happened to us and how that relates to everything else that’s happened to us in the past and figuring out what that means about our future.
I’ve often thought (as I’ve searched the house for my car keys) that my memory connects my past to my present. But I’m also aware of how often my memories of past experiences help me in new situations—sometimes when circumstances are similar and sometimes when they’re not.
MIT’s Matt Wilson puts prediction in perspective when he highlights the biggest challenge that we face as humans:
…it is the unknown of the future. And in REM, we may have the opportunity to step into that future world with no risk, because the consequences are simply things don’t work out as you might have expected, and then you wake up.
A safe and secure dry run of sorts…
Memory is information about the past but one useful outcome of remembering the past is the more effective predictions of the future. It seems that our brains are constantly involved with making predictions—both while asleep and awake—and that the key component to these predictions is a result of our mind’s ability to remember.
the enduring beat of circadian rhythms
Chronobiology…examines periodic (cyclic) phenomena in living organisms and their adaptation to solar—and lunar—related rhythms.
These cycles are known as biological rhythms.
I developed a general interest in chronobiology when I first learned about Michel Siffre. By isolating himself in caves—without external cues to the passage of time—Siffre conducted several experiments on human life’s biological cycles. He tried to understand the fundamental and natural state of biological rhythms by observing his own sleep/waking cycles (amongst other things). I’m not sure how impactful Michel’s research was vs. other researchers but one thing is certain: his commitment was impressive.
My general interest in chronobiology has been amplified by recent international trips and by all-night software-design sessions. I’m unable to recover quickly from jet lag and I’m extremely irritable for several days if I don’t get a decent amount of sleep. I’ve also had co-workers levy small apologies for similar behavior due to working ’round the clock.
My own experiences plus recent news stories about air traffic controllers and pilots falling asleep on the job have me wondering: How fundamentally important are our biological rhythms? New information published in the January 27th, 2011, issue of Nature have shown that these rhythms operate on a cellular level and have done so for billions of years.
Two studies (cited below) have focused on sampling the production of peroxiredoxins to understand the clock cycles present in all living cells. One study looked at peroxiredoxin in human red blood cells while the other used marine algae.
the 24-hour circadian clock found in human cells is the same as that found in algae and dates back millions of years to early life on Earth
These body clocks have been passed down through eons of evolution. They work at the cellular level as well as the super-cellular level. They affect us consciously and sub-consciously.
So there’s the answer: your biological rhythms affect you more than you know.
Other resources:
complex human thought
This is a quote from an episode of PBS’s “Human Spark” entitled “So Human, So Chimp“:
tiktaalik is a transitional fossil
Watching Nova’s “What Darwin Never Knew” I learned that Paleontologist Neil Shubin was part of a team that noted the gap in the fossil record between fish and land animals. In a wonderfully standard application of the scientific method they predicted the location and time that a transitional form probably existed. They used those predictions to determine where to look for fossil evidence and the result was the discovery of Tiktaalik.
In 2004, a field crew digging in the Canadian Arctic unearthed the fossil remains of a half-fish, half-amphibian that would all but confirm paleontologists’ theories about how land-dwelling tetrapods (four-limbed animals, including us) evolved from their fish ancestors.
Tiktaalik lived approximately 375 million years ago. It represents one of the earliest creatures that could bear weight on front limbs. The anatomy of these limbs combines a fin with an arm. This structure is found today in every 4 limbed animal.
It also had eyes that were forward facing and on the top of its head. Good for looking around on land.
The DNA of Human Evolution
I’ve know that we share 99% of our DNA with chimps. But I haven’t understood what that really means until I read this article about Katie Pollard’s research.
In this conversation with Nova, Pollard puts the numbers in perspective:
Given that our DNA sequence has about three billion “letters” in it, one percent is still a pretty vast territory to search. There are about 15 million human-specific letters that have changed in the last six million years.
Pollard and her team are studying these areas of DNA differences:
It turns out that the vast majority of these fast-evolving sequences are not genes, the parts of our genome that encode proteins. The pieces that have changed the most in our DNA look like they are switches, switches that turn nearby genes on and off. So what makes a human different from a chimp isn’t that we’re made up of different building blocks, different genes, but instead that we’re using those pieces in different ways.
Another thing that was really amazing was that more than half of these fast-evolving switches are near genes that are active in the brain, either in the developing embryo or in the adult brain. In a way, this makes perfect sense, because our brains are essential to a lot of things that make us human: our speech, our culture, religion, even our ability to do science.
this is your brain on music
Think that new track is dope? Thank dopamine.
people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure
The journal Nature Neuroscience published an article titled “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music” wherein the researchers used PET scans and Functional MRI scans to monitor subject’s brains while listening to music.
Interestingly, they found that one area of the brain is excited with dopamine while anticipating an upcoming moment of a musical piece and another section is excited when actually listening to that piece.
Initially found via Health | Study: Love music? Thank a substance in your brain | Seattle Times.
Dogs Decoded on pbs
Watch it on Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Dogs-Decoded-Nova/70148726
I’m not a huge dog lover these days—something to do with stepping in mess one too many times. Still, I was really fascinated by Dogs Decoded on NOVA.
One of the major themes centered around communication between dogs and humans. There’s the notion that humans have a left-gaze bias when reading the emotions of other humans. Seems dogs have learned this bias, too:
And when we look at a face, we have what’s known as a natural left-gaze bias, so you naturally look much more towards the left, i.e. the right-hand side, of somebody’s face.
As far as we know, no other animal has this relationship with the human face. And dogs don’t do this with each other. This suggests that dogs have acquired a new skill enabling them to communicate with us on an emotional level.
Also regarding inter-species communication was the notion that we can understand a dog’s emotion based on their bark.
DOGS BARKING: Bark , bark, ruff, ruff.
ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI: Anger, fear, happiness, despair.
Then there’s the idea that dog domestication may have helped shift us away a from being hunter/gatherers. Seems dogs helped with fundamental changes in human lifestyle:
We are carnivores; we are social carnivores. We hunt in groups, and we hunt in daylight. There are not many other species that do that. The wolf is a social carnivore that hunts by daylight, and, therefore, I think there’s natural potential for teamwork between those two species.
GREGER LARSON: Dogs absolutely turn the tables. Without dogs, humans would still be hunter gatherers, and without that initial starting phase of dog domestication, civilization just would not have been possible.
So put dog domestication alongside of the idea that cooking made us human and you see a picture of serious changes that have radically changed our existence.
human family tree
This is a terrific interactive site from the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. The list of human characteristics is a good jumping-off point:
The Human Family Tree
Human Family Tree | The Smithsonian Institutions Human Origins Program.
Bonus Factoid:
Did you know that your brain makes up about 2% of your body weight…but uses about 20-25% of your body’s total energy, just for its basic activity? That’s one hungry brain! No wonder it’s good to eat nutritious foods that offer a lot of energy. The brain of a newborn baby is even more amazing, as it takes up about 60% of the baby’s energy as the brain grows at an astonishing pace.