If you’re hoping to see beefier-looking models at Fashion Week next month, you can forget about it: According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, it sounds like that’s not going to happen. (…)
So what’s the problem? You guessed it: Tatiana is — wait for it — a size 4. Modeling scouts advise her to slim down to a “loose size 2,” which would require losing ten to fourteen pounds.
“Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there is no difference in the motion of the features,” Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his posthumously published Treatise on Painting, “either in the eyes, mouth or cheeks.” With the difference between the physical expression of emotions so subtle, artists had a challenge on their hands: How to differentially depict, in the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the “frantic joy of a Bacchante and the grief of a Mary Magdalen”?
To do so, artists relied on a staged iconography of expression and posture, codified in handbooks. (…) Despite such expert guidance in the depiction of laughter, in the history of art there are very few images of people laughing. (…)
Nearly half a millennium after Leonardo, contemporary scientists have discovered a neurological explanation for the affinity between physical expressions and emotional sensations of joy and grief. In the centuries between, scientists took over where artists left off in urgently pursuing the question. Charles Darwin notably fused the two approaches, using the art of photography to further his scientific inquiry. (…) He hoped to use photography to portray emotional subtleties ” like the close similarity between the laughing and crying face ” with a renewed realism.
Capturing particular expressions, inherently transitory, volatile, and ephemeral, at first seemed almost impossible with the long exposure time photography then required. (…) Darwin described the spasms a laughing fit provoked, which would have rendered any photograph a blur: “During excessive laughter the whole body is often thrown backward and shakes, or is almost convulsed. The respiration is much disturbed; the head and face become gorged with blood, with the veins distended; and the orbicular muscles are spasmodically contracted in order to protect the eyes. Tears are freely shed,” he noted, appending a key observation, “Hence . . . it is scarcely possible to point out any difference between the tear-stained face of a person after a paroxysm of excessive laughter and after a bitter crying-fit”.
Darwin found a ready-made solution to the problem of how to capture raw expression in a set of extraordinary pictures taken by the French doctor Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne and reproduced in his book, Mécanismes de la physiognomie humaine (1862). Duchenne practiced medicine at the Salpêtrière hospital, where he embarked on an infamous series of experiments in an effort to explain the workings of facial musculature. His process involved administering a constant flow of electric current to human facial muscles, which contorted the face into various expressions and held them long enough for photographs to be taken. (…)
Five years ago, at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, where Duchenne had distorted faces with a galvanized rod, Professor Yves Agid implanted an electrode into the brain of a 65-year-old woman in the hope of discovering a cure for her Parkinson’s disease. The electric current would sometimes alleviate her symptoms, but this time something quite unexpected happened. A melancholy expression came over the patient, her head slumped forward, and she tilted to the right. She began sobbing uncontrollably. (…) With another flick of the switch her dark mood was immediately lifted. She smiled and said apologetically, “What was all that about?”
In Los Angeles, California, around the same time, another surgeon, Itzhak Fried, inserted the tip of an electrode into the skull of a 16-year-old girl to investigate her severe case of epilepsy. When a low voltage was applied she began to smile. As it increased she started giggling, until finally she fell about in paroxysms of laughter. “You guys are just so funny,” she guffawed at the team of scientists in white lab coats, who began to crack up too because her laughter was contagious.
By poking about in this adolescent girl’s head, neuroscientists had discovered, by mistake, what they called the “laughter center,” a piece of the brain roughly one inch square, in which our sense of humor seems to be located.
About 2 million years ago, the human brain rapidly increased its mass until it was double the size of other primate brains.
“This happened because we started to eat better food, like eating more meat,” said researcher Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. But the increase in size, Khaitovich continued, “did not make humans as smart as they are today.”
For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make “the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years,” he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.
To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism.
The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich. (…) Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and burn 20-25 percent of their calories running their brains. For comparison, other vertebrate brains use as little as 2 percent of the animal’s caloric intake.
The secret of why horror films make some people scream in terror while others may simply laugh has been revealed.
Scientists say different versions of a single gene linked to feelings of anxiety can explain the way in which some people simply cannot abide such movies, while others enjoy the suspense and the gore.
The findings may explain why it is that over the past 35 years people have had wildly different reactions to the classic horror film, The Exorcist.
While many screamed and some even fainted in cinemas at scenes of spinning heads and shaking beds, others simply laughed.
A particular variant of the ‘COMT’ gene affects a chemical in the brain that is linked to anxiety, they have found.
Through the years, the public has been buffeted by much misguided information about caffeine and its most common source, coffee. (…)
Hydration. It was long thought that caffeinated beverages were diuretics, but studies reviewed last year found that people who consumed drinks with up to 550 milligrams of caffeine produced no more urine than when drinking fluids free of caffeine. Above 575 milligrams, the drug was a diuretic. (…)
Heart disease. Heart patients, especially those with high blood pressure, are often told to avoid caffeine, a known stimulant. But an analysis of 10 studies of more than 400,000 people found no increase in heart disease among daily coffee drinkers, whether their coffee came with caffeine or not. (…)
In fact, among 27,000 women followed for 15 years in the Iowa Women’s Health Study, those who drank one to three cups a day reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease by 24 percent, although this benefit diminished as the quantity of coffee rose. (…)
Cancer. In an international review of 66 studies last year, scientists found coffee drinking had little if any effect on the risk of developing pancreatic or kidney cancer. In fact, another review suggested that compared with people who do not drink coffee, those who do have half the risk of developing liver cancer. And a study of 59,000 women in Sweden found no connection between coffee, tea or caffeine consumption and breast cancer.
The one thing neuroscience cannot find is the loom of cells that creates the self. If neuroscience knows anything, it is that there is no ghost in the machine: there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don’t even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.
This is all undoubtedly true. And yet, if the mechanical mind is denied the illusion of a self, if the machine lacks a ghost, then everything falls apart. Sensations fail to cohere. Reality disappears.
{ Jonah Lehrer/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }
Lehrer’s notion is that the mystery of “self,” now the great challenge for neuroscientists all over the world, was a puzzle first articulately addressed by artists untutored in science.
“We now know enough to know that we will never know everything,” Lehrer wrote. “This is why we need art; it teaches us how to live with mystery.”
Infinity (symbolically represented with ∞) comes from the Latin infinitas or “unboundedness.” It refers to several distinct concepts (usually linked to the idea of “without end”) which arise in philosophy, mathematics, and theology.
The precise origin of the infinity symbol ∞ is unclear. One possibility is suggested by the name it is sometimes called—the lemniscate, from the Latin lemniscus, meaning “ribbon.”
A popular explanation is that the infinity symbol is derived from the shape of a Möbius strip. Again, one can imagine walking along its surface forever. However, this explanation is not plausible, since the symbol had been in use to represent infinity for over two hundred years before August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing discovered the Möbius strip in 1858.
It is also possible that it is inspired by older religious/alchemical symbolism. For instance, it has been found in Tibetan rock carvings, and the ouroboros, or infinity snake, is often depicted in this shape.
John Wallis is usually credited with introducing ∞ as a symbol for infinity in 1655 in his De sectionibus conicis. One conjecture about why he chose this symbol is that he derived it from a Roman numeral for 1000 that was in turn derived from the Etruscan numeral for 1000, which looked somewhat like CIƆ and was sometimes used to mean “many.” Another conjecture is that he derived it from the Greek letter ω (omega), the last letter in the Greek alphabet.
Another possibility is that the symbol was chosen because it was easy to rotate an “8″ character by 90° when typesetting was done by hand. The symbol is sometimes called a “lazy eight”, evoking the image of an “8″ lying on its side.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Today we enter one of the most auspicious days ever for the Chinese culture: 8-8-8.
But why is eight so lucky? ”In Cantonese [the language of Southern China and Hong Kong], the word for ‘fah’ means ‘eight,’ but also sounds like the word for ‘make a lot of fortune,’ ” explains Z.J. Tong, owner of the Chicago Chinese Cultural Institute and Bookstore. Thus in a homonym-crazy society like China’s: Eight equals lucky.
There is no such thing as “typical” deceptive behavior—”nothing as obvious as Pinocchio’s growing nose.” When people tell complicated lies, they frequently pause longer and more often, and speak more slowly; but if the lie is simple, or highly polished, they tend to do the opposite. Clumsy deceivers are sometimes visibly agitated, but, over all, liars are less likely to blink, to move their hands and feet, or to make elaborate gestures—perhaps they deliberately inhibit their movements. (…)
A liar’s testimony is often more persuasive than a truthteller’s. Liars are more likely to tell a story in chronological order, whereas honest people often present accounts in an improvised jumble. Similarly, according to DePaulo and Bond, subjects who spontaneously corrected themselves, or said that there were details that they couldn’t recall, were more likely to be truthful than those who did not—though, in the real world, memory lapses arouse suspicion.
People who are afraid of being disbelieved, even when they are telling the truth, may well look more nervous than people who are lying. This is bad news for the falsely accused, especially given that influential manuals of interrogation reinforce the myth of the twitchy liar. “Criminal Interrogation and Confessions” (1986), by Fred Inbau, John Reid, and Joseph Buckley, claims that shifts in posture and nervous “grooming gestures,” such as “straightening hair” and “picking lint from clothing,” often signal lying. (…)
The federal government still performs tens of thousands of polygraph tests a year—even though an exhaustive 2003 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that research on the polygraph’s efficacy was inadequate, and that when it was used to investigate a specific incident after the fact it performed “well above chance, though well below perfection.” Polygraph advocates cite accuracy estimates of ninety per cent—which sounds impressive until you think of the people whose lives might be ruined by a machine that fails one out of ten times. The polygraph was judged thoroughly unreliable as a screening tool; its accuracy in “distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers” was deemed “insufficient to justify reliance on its use.” And its success in criminal investigations can be credited, in no small part, to the intimidation factor. People who believe that they are in the presence of an infallible machine sometimes confess, and this is counted as an achievement of the polygraph. (According to law-enforcement lore, the police have used copy machines in much the same way: They tell a suspect to place his hand on a “truth machine”—a copier in which the paper has “LIE ” printed on it. When the photocopy emerges, it shows the suspect’s hand with “LIE ” stamped on it.)
Over the past two decades, inventors have attempted to supplant the polygraph with new technologies: voice-stress analysis; thermal imaging of the face; and, most recently and spectacularly, brain imaging. (…) Thermal imaging, an approach based on the finding that the area around the eyes can heat up when people lie. The developers of this method—Ioannis Pavlidis, James Levine, and Norman Eberhardt—published journal articles that had titles like “Seeing Through the Face of Deception” and were accompanied by dramatic thermal images. But the increased blood flow that raises the temperature around the eyes is just another mark of stress. Any law-enforcement agency that used the technique to spot potential terrorists would also pick up a lot of jangly, harmless travellers. (…)
The word “lie” is so broad that it’s hard to imagine that any test, even one that probes the brain, could detect all forms of deceit: small, polite lies; big, brazen, self-aggrandizing lies; lies to protect or enchant our children; lies that we don’t really acknowledge to ourselves as lies; complicated alibis that we spend days rehearsing. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine that all these lies will bear the identical neural signature. In their degrees of sophistication and detail, their moral weight, their emotional valence, lies are as varied as the people who tell them. As Montaigne wrote, “The reverse side of the truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.” (…)
Nancy Kanwisher, a cognitive scientist at M.I.T., points out that the various brain regions that appear to be significantly active during lying are “famous for being activated in a wide range of different conditions—for almost any cognitive task that is more difficult than an easier task.” (…) As he put it, “Saying ‘You have activation in the anterior cingulate’ is like saying ‘You have activation in Massachusetts.’ ”
Kanwisher’s complaint suggests that fMRI technology, when used cavalierly, harks back to two pseudosciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: physiognomy and phrenology. Physiognomy held that a person’s character was manifest in his facial features; phrenology held that truth lay in the bumps on one’s skull. In 1807, Hegel observed that “the rules that we use in everyday life in interpreting facial expression are highly fallible.”
Whatever the neurological roots of genius, being brilliant only increases the probability of success; it does not ensure accomplishment in any endeavor. Even for academic achievement, IQ is not as important as self-discipline and a willingness to work hard.
University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman examined final grades of 164 eighth-grade students, along with their admission to (or rejection from) a prestigious high school. By such measures, the researchers determined that scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ.
What is more, they reported in 2005, students with more self-discipline—a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain—were more likely than those lacking this skill to improve their grades during the school year. A high IQ, on the other hand, did not predict a climb in grades.
A new calculation suggests that adding vast quantities of limestone to the world’s oceans could be an effective solution to climate change. Experts remain to be convinced, however.
The revised estimate is based on an existing ‘planetary engineering’ theory first mooted in 1995 by Haroon Kheshgi, a scientist with oil conglomerate Exxon Mobil. Kheshgi proposed that adding lime to seawater might help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, by reacting with the dissolved greenhouse gas and locking it away as calcium bicarbonate.
The process would also turn back the clock on ocean acidification, which is caused by excess CO2 in the water, and poses a threat to the growth or corals and other shelled marine life.
The oceans currently take in approximately one third of the world’s excess CO2, making them the world’s greatest carbon sink.
photo { Torkil Gudnason, Sirens, 2004 }
At a major conference last year in Las Vegas, in a scientific paper published last week and another due out this week, psychologists have argued that magicians, in their age-old quest for better ways to fool people, have been engaging in cutting-edge, if informal, research into how we see and comprehend the world around us. Just as studying the mechanisms of disease reveals the workings of our body’s defenses, these psychologists believe that studying the ways a talented magician can short-circuit our perceptual system will allow us to better grasp how the system is put together.
“I think magicians and cognitive neuroscientists are getting at similar questions, but while neuroscientists have been looking at this for a few decades, magicians have been looking at this for centuries, millennia probably,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute and coauthor of one of the studies, published online last week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. “What magicians do is light-years ahead in terms of sophistication and the power of these techniques.” (…)
A great deal of the success of a piece of magic is simply getting the audience’s attention and sending it to the wrong place - to a right hand flourishing a wand while the left secrets a ball away in a pocket or plucks a card from a sleeve. Magic shows are masterpieces of misdirection: they assault us with bright colors and shiny things, with puffs of smoke and with the constant obfuscatory patter that many magicians keep up as they perform.
For years, cognitive scientists thought of perception as like a movie camera, something that reproduced the world in its panoply of detail. Over the past decade, though, that model has been increasingly questioned. For one thing, people have a pronounced tendency to miss things that are happening right in front of them. Daniel Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, did a series of now-famous studies in the late 1990s that showed the extent of this cognitive blindness. In one, people were approached by someone asking them for directions, only to have, in the middle of the conversation, that person replaced by another. Only half noticed the change.
In another study, people were shown a movie clip of two teams, one in black shirts and one in white, each passing a basketball around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes one of the teams made. Half said afterward that they hadn’t noticed the woman in a gorilla suit who, midway through the clip, strolled through, paused, and beat her chest.
Because of work like this, a new model has arisen over the past decade, in which visual cognition is understood not as a camera but something more like a flashlight beam sweeping a twilit landscape. At any particular instant, we can only see detail and color in the small patch we are concentrating on. The rest we fill in through a combination of memory, prediction and a crude peripheral sight. We don’t take in our surroundings so much as actively and constantly construct them.
“Our picture of the world is kind of a virtual reality,” says Ronald A. Rensink, a professor of computer science and psychology at the University of British Columbia and coauthor of a paper on magic and psychology that will be published online this week in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. “It’s a form of intelligent hallucination.” (…)
The vanishing ball illusion is one of the most basic tricks a magician can learn: a ball is thrown repeatedly into the air and caught. Then, on the final throw, it disappears in midair. In fact, the magician has merely mimed the last throw, following the ball’s imagined upward trajectory with his eyes while keeping it hidden in his hand.
But if the technique is easily explained, the phenomenon itself is not. If done right, the trick actually makes observers see the ball rising into the air on the last toss and vanishing at its apex. As Rensink points out, this is something more powerful than merely getting someone to look in the wrong direction - it’s a demonstration of how easy it is to nudge the brain into the realm of actual hallucination. And cognitive scientists still don’t know exactly what’s causing it to happen.
photo { Bradini Magic Productions | more }
A couple of years ago, Dr. Karasu received a call on behalf of an entertainment executive who wanted to reschedule an appointment at the last minute.
Dr. Karasu said the only time he had available that week was at 7 one night. The executive’s assistant said: “He’s having dinner then. How about 10 p.m.? He’s flying out to the Hamptons, but we’ll send a car for you and you can ride with him and do therapy on the helicopter, and then we’ll send you home in the morning.”
On and on it went. “If I would say I am busy on Saturday, the assistant would offer to pay me extra, as if that would be the answer,” Dr. Karasu said, adding that he declined the request. “For the average patient, the 45 minutes with a therapist is the most precious time. For this patient, it was just another activity superimposed on his schedule, and the therapist has to accommodate his way of being — like his trainer, his cook, his pilot, his administrative staff.”
Dr. Karasu and several of his peers voiced a concern that a rich person today was ever more inclined to view his or her psychotherapist as nothing more than a highly skilled member of his personal army. (…)
“It’s King Ludwig Syndrome. In the 19th century, Bernhard von Gudden was the psychiatrist for the Bavarian royal family and began to treat King Ludwig II, who was psychotic. In the end, the two of them drowned in a boat. So I teach my people who are treating wealthy people, ‘Don’t get in your patients’ boats.’ ”
