Galileo -- Smarter than you thought

It is often said of cognitive scientists that we have, as a group, a memory that only stretches back about 10 years. This is for good reasons and bad. Methods change and improve constantly, constantly making much of the literature irrelevant. Then there is the fact that there is so much new work, it's hard to find time to read the old.

This is a shame, because some of the really old work is impressive for its prescience. A recent issue of Trends in Neurosciences carried an article on Galileo's work on perception. Most people then -- and probably most people now -- conceived of the senses as passing along an accurate representation of the world to your brain. We now know the senses are plagued by illusions (many of them actually adaptive).

Galileo was on to this fact. His study of the moon proved that perceptions of brightness are constantly subject to illusion. More generally, he noted -- contrary to the popular view -- that much of what we sense about the world is in a real sense an illusion. Objects exist, but colors and tastes in an important sense do not. It's worth presenting a few of the quotes from the article:

I say that, as soon as I conceive of a piece of matter, or a corporeal substance,...I do not feel my mind forced to conceive it as necessarily accompanied by such states as being white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or quiet, or having a nice or nasty smell. On the contrary, if we were not guided by our senses, thinking or imagining would probably never arrive at them by themselves. This is why I think that, as far as concerns the object in which these tastes, smells, colours, etc., appear to reside, they are nothing other than mere names, and they have their location only in the sentient body. Consequently, if the living being were removed, all these qualities would disappear and be annihilated.

see also:

A wine's good taste does not belong to the objective determinations of the wine and hence of an object, even of an object considered as appearance, but belongs to the special character of the sense in the subject who is enjoying this taste. Colours are not properties of bodies to the inuition of which they attach, but are also only modifications of the sense of sight, which is affected in a certain manner by light.

Marco Piccolino, Nicholas J. Wade (2008). Galileo Galilei's vision of the senses Trends in Neurosciences, 31 (11)

Another language blog

My favorite language blog remains Language Log. However, I was informed of a very interesting blog on language. Like Language Log, it's focus is not empirical research (as is the focus here). But the group of authors do regularly hit on interesting phenomena in language and have insightful things to say about them. I recommend that you check it out.

Do Bullies like Bullying?

Although Slate is my favorite magazine, and usually the first website I check each day, I've been known to complain about its science coverage, which typically lacks the insight of its other features. A much-too-rare exception to this are the occasional articles by Daniel Engber (full disclosure: I have attempted to convince Engber, a Slate editor, to run articles by me in the past, unsuccessfully).

Yesterday, he wrote an excellent piece about a recent bit of cognitive neuroscience looking at bullies and how they relate to bullying. Researchers scanned the brains of "bullies" while they viewed videos of bullying and reported that pleasure centers in the brain activated.

In a cheeky fashion typical of Slate, Engber questions the novelty of these findings:

Bullies like bullying? I just felt a shiver run up my spine. Next we'll find out that alcoholics like alcohol. Or that overeaters like to overeat. Hey, I've got an idea for a brain-imaging study of child-molesters that'll just make your skin crawl!

Obviously, I was a sympathetic reader. But Engber does not stop there:

OK, OK: Why am I wasting time on a study so lame that it got a write-up in the Onion? Hasn't this whole fMRI backlash routine gotten a bit passé?

Engber goes on to detail a number of limitations to the study, including how the kids were defined as "bullies" (some appear to be rapists, for instance) and also how "pleasure center" was defined (the area in question is also related to anxiety, so one could reasonably argue bullies find bullying worrisome, not pleasurable).

The second half of the article is a plea for better science reporting, one that I hope is widely-read. Read it yourself here.

How the Presidential Campaign Changed the English Language

Languages change over time, which is why you shouldn't take seriously any claims about this language being older than the other, or vice versa. A language is only old in the same sense that a farmer can say, "I've had this axe for years. I've only changed the handle twice and the head three times."

Language change is probably slowed these days by stasis-inducing factors like books. However, rapid communication means that new phrases or ways of speaking can be disseminated with lightning speed. Here is an interesting article about the effect McCain & Palin's drill, baby, drill has had on the English language.

A Bush-administration flunkee's unfortunate statement that reporters -- but not members of the Bush administration -- are members of "what we call the reality-based community" led to an interesting shift in the way Progressives speak. The compound adjective "reality-based" has become part inside joke, and part simply a new word. I suspect "real America" will similarly entrench itself in the English language.

Don't blink, you'll lose the election!

Sarah Palin has been clear on one subject: You can't blink. While people argue about whether this is a good administrative philosophy, there is no actually scientific evidence that it is good campaign strategy.

The International Journal of Psychophysiology recently published an abstract that claims that from 1960-2004, the US presidential candidate who blinked most during the debates got fewer votes than his opponent in every election. For those counting, that is every election which has featured televised debates.

The point of the abstract, interestingly, is not to predict campaign outcomes. The point was to study eyeblinks. Specifically, there are hypotheses about what elevated rates of blinking might suggest, such as a lack of focus or a negative mental state. The question the researchers were asking was whether observers pick up on eyeblink rates and make judgments or predictions based on them. This *might* suggest that they do.

It's important to note that this is a published abstract, not a full paper, so it is difficult to evaluate the methods used, though presumably they involved counting eyeblinks.

On more psychologists in Congress

Dennis Shulman is an ordained rabbi with a clinical psychology Ph.D. from Harvard. He is the New York Times choice for the New Jersey's 5th district. In the interest of greater representation of psychologists in Congress, he's mine, too.

Still, I wouldn't mind if a psycholinguist ran for Congress.

Physics is for wimps

Matt Springer may not have been throwing down the gauntlet in his Oct. 21 post, but I'm picking it up. In a well-written and well-reasoned short essay, he lays out just what is so difficult about the study of consciousness:

PZ Myers, as is his wont, recently wrote here that after his death he will have ceased to be. In other words, his experience of consciousness will have ended forever. Can we test this?

He goes on to describe some possible ways you might test the hypothesis. It turns out it is very difficult.

[PZ Myers] could die and then make the observation as to whether or not he still existed. If he still did he'd be surprised, but at least he'd be able to observe that he was still somehow existing. If he didn't still exist, he's not around to make the observation of his nonexistence. So personal experimentation can't verify his prediction.

Springer goes through some possible ways one might use neuroscience to test the hypothesis. None of them are very good either. In the end, he concludes:

Where am I going with this? Nowhere, that's the point. Clean experimental testability is why I like physics.

Now, I like physics, too. I almost majored in it. But I like cognitive science more for precisely this reason: developing the right experiment doesn't just take knowing the literature or being able to build precision machinery, though both help. What distinguishes the geniuses in our field is their ability to design an experiment to test something nobody ever thought was testable. (After that, the engineering skill comes in.)

Hands thrown up.

Many people threw up their hands at answering basic questions like how many types of light receptors do we have in our eyes or how fast does a signal travel down a nerve cell ("instantanously" was one popular hypothesis) until Hermann von Helmholtz designed ingenious behavioral experiments long before the technology was available to answer those questions (and likely before anyone knew such technology would be available).

However, while Helmholtz pioneered brilliants methods for understanding the way the adult mind works, he declared it impossible to ever know what a baby was thinking. His methods wouldn't work with babies, and he couldn't think of any others. A hundred years later, however, researchers like Susan Carey, Liz Spelke and others pioneered new techniques to probe the minds of babes. Spelke managed to prove babies only a few months old have basic aspects of object perception in place. But Spelke herself despaired of ever testing certain aspects of object perception in newborns, until a different set of researchers (Valenza, Leo, Gava & Simion, 2006) devised an ingenious experiment that ultimately proved we are born with the ability to perceive objects (not just a blooming, buzzing confusion).

"I study dead people, everywhere."

I'm not saying I know how to test whether dead people are conscious. I'm still stumped by much easier puzzles. But a difficult question is a challenge, not a reason to avoid the subject.

Nature Magazine endorses Obama (but not because of science policy)

Nature Magazine's latest issue, just published online, endorses Obama. Interestingly, this is not because of "any specific pledge to fund some particular agency or initiative at a certain level." Instead, the editorial emphasizes the contrast in the ways the two candidates reach decisions:

On a range of topics, science included, Obama has surrounded himself with a wider and more able cadre of advisers than McCain. This is not a panacea. Some of the policies Obama supports -- continued subsidies for corn ethanol, for example -- seem misguided. The advice of experts is all the more valuable when it is diverse: 'groupthink' is a problem in any job. Obama seems to understands [sic] this. He tends to seek a range of opinions and analyses to ensure that his opinion, when reached, has been well considered and exposed to alternatives. He also exhibits pragmatism -- for example in his proposals for health-care reform -- that suggests a keen sense for the tests reality can bring to bear on policy.

Some will find strengths in McCain that they value more highly than the commitment to reasoned assessments that appeals in Obama. But all the signs are that the former seeks a narrower range of advice. Equally worrying is that he fails to educate himself on crucial matters; hte attitude he has taken to economic policy over many years is at issue here. Either as a result of poor advice, or of advice inadequately considered, he frequently makes decisions that seem capricious or erratic.

The power of because

To ask for a dime just outside a telephone booth is less than to ask for a dime for no apparent reason in the middle of the street.

-Penelope Brown & Stephen Levinson, Politeness

The opening quote seems to be true. It raises the question of why, though. An economist might say a gift of 10 cents is a gift of 10 cents. You are short 10 cents no matter what the requestee's reason. So why should it matter?

The power of because?
Empirically, in a well-known experiment, Ellen Langer and colleagues showed that 95% of people standing in line to use a copy machine were willing to let another cut in line as long as the cutter offered a reason, even if that reason was inane (e.g. "because I have to make copies.")

The explanation given by Langer and colleagues was that people are primed to do defer to somebody who provides a reason. Thus, the word "because" essentially in and of itself can manipulate others. This not only causes us to give money to people who need it to make a phone call, but to simply give money to anybody who gives a reason.

I haven't been able to find the original research paper -- it seems to have perhaps been reported in a book, not in a published article -- so I don't know for sure exactly what conditions were used. However, none of the media reports I have read (such as this one) mention the perhaps the most important control: a condition in which the cutter gives no excuse and does not use the word "because."

What are other possible explanations?
Other possible explanations are that people are simply reluctant to say 'no,' especially if the request is made in earnest.

There are a couple reasons this could be true. People might be pushovers. They might also simply have been taught to be very polite.

Something that strikes me more likely is that most people avoid unnecessary confrontation. Confrontation is always risky. It can escalate into a situation where somebody gets hurt. Certainly, violent confrontations have been started over less than conflicting desires to use the same copier.

Speculation

None of these speculations, however, explain the opening quote. Perhaps there is an answer out there, and if anybody has come across it, please comment away.

A vote for McCain is a vote against science

Readers of this blog know that I have been skeptical of John McCain's support for science. Although he has said he supports increasing science funding, he appears to consider recent science funding budgets that have not kept pace with inflation to be "increases." He has also since called for a discretionary spending freeze.

In recent years vocally anti-science elements have hijacked the science policies of the Republican party -- a party that actually has a strong history of supporting science -- so the question has been where McCain stands, or at least which votes he cares about most. The jury is still out on McCain, but Palin just publicly blasted basic science research as wasteful government spending.

The project that she singled out, incidentally, appears to be research that could eventually lead to new treatments of Autism. Ironically, Palin brought up this "wasteful" research as a program that could be cut in order to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Become a Phrase Detective: A new, massive Internet-based language project

A typical speech or text does not consist of a random set of unrelated sentences. Generally, the author (or speaker) starts talking about one thing and continues talking about it for a while. While this tends to be true, there is typically nothing in the text that guarantees it:

This is my brother John. He is very tall. He graduated from high school last year.

We usually assume this is a story about a single person, who is tall, a recent high school graduate, named John, and who is brother of the speaker. But it could very well have been about three different people. Although humans are very good at telling which part of a story relates to which other part, it turns out to be very difficult to explain how we know. We just do.

This is a challenge both to psychologists like myself, as well as to people who try to design computer programs that can analyze text (whether for the purposes of machine translation, text summarization, or any other application).

The materials for research

A group at the University of Essex put together an entertaining new Web game called Phrase Detectives to help develop new materials for cutting-edge research into this basic problem of language. Their project is similar to my ongoing Dax Study, except that theirs is not so much an experiment as a method for developing the stimuli.

Phrase Detectives is set up as a competition between users, and the results is an entertaining game that you can participate in more or less as you choose. Other than its origins, it looks a great deal like many other Web games. The game speaks for itself and I recommend that you check it out.

What's the point?

Their Wiki provides some useful details as to the purpose of this project, but as it is geared more towards researchers than the general public, it could probably use some translation of its own. Here's my attempt at translation:

The ability to make progress in Computational Linguistics depends on the availability of large annotated corpora...

Basically, the goal of Computational Linguistics (and the related field, Natural Language Processing) is to come up with computer algorithms that can "parse" text -- break it up into its component parts and explain how those parts relate to one another. This is like a very sophisticated version of the sentence diagramming you probably did in middle school.

Developing and testing new algorithms requires a log of practice materials ("corpora"). Most importantly, you need to know what the correct parse (sentence diagram) is for each of your practice sentences. In other words, you need "annotated corpora."

...but creating such corpora by hand annotation is very expensive and time consuming; in practice, it is unfeasible to think of annotating more that one million words.

One million words may seem like a lot, but it isn't really. One of the complaints about one of the most famous word frequency corpora (the venerable Francis & Kucera) is that many important words never even appear in it. If you take a random set of 1,000,000 words, very common words like a, and, and the take up a fair chunk of that set.

Also, consider that when a child learns a language, that child hears or reads many, many millions of words. If it takes so many for a human who is genetically programmed to learn language, how long should it take a computer algorithm? (Computers are more advanced than humans in many areas, but in the basic areas of human competency -- vision, language, etc. -- they are still shockingly primitive.)

However, the success of Wikipedia and other projects shows that another approach might be possible: take advantage of the willingness of Web users to collaborate in resource creation. AnaWiki is a recently started project htat iwll develop tools to allow and encourage large numbers of volunteers over the Web to collaborate in the creation of semantically annotated corpora (in the first instance, of a corpus annotated with information about anaphora).

This is, of course, what makes the Web so exciting. It took a number of years for it to become clear that the Web was not just a method of doing the same things we always did but faster and more cheaply, but actually a platform for doing things that had never even been considered before. It has had a deep impact in many areas of life -- cognitive science research being just one.

Human behavior on display in the subway

Riding Boston's T through Cambridge yesterday, I was reminded of why I love this town. You can learn a lot about a city riding its public transportation (and if the city doesn't have public transportation, then you have learned something, too).

In Russia, for instance, people stare coldly off into space. The blank look can appear hostile to those not accustomed to it, but it's really more representative of how Russians carry themselves in public than representative of what Russians are like more generally (some of the warmest people I know are Russian. They just don't display it on the train). To the extent that people do anything while on the train, they mostly do crossword puzzles (at least in St. Petersburg, where I've spent most of my time).

In Taiwan, reading is rampant. You can see this outside of the subway as well, since there are bookstores everywhere, and they are very popular. This made me feel more at home (I almost always read on the train) than in business-minded Hong Kong, where reading was much less common. Hong Kong is one of my favorite cities, but its decidedly short on bookstores.

This brings me back to my T ride through Cambridge yesterday. The person sitting next to me was reading what was clearly a language textbook, but I couldn't recognize the writing system. It looked vaguely Asian, but I know enough of Japanese, Chinese and Korean to know it wasn't one of those. Eventually, he closed the book and I saw it was a an Akkadian textbook. Akkadian, incidentally, hasn't been spoken in about two thousand years.

That is Cambridge -- and Boston more generally. Many of the people on the train are grading papers, reading scientific articles or studying a language. It's very much a town of academics. (A large percentage of the metro riders also wear Red Sox gear. The two populations are not mutually exclusive.)

Singapore's Science Complex

Among developing countries that are investing heavily in science, Singapore (is Singapore still a developing country?) stands out. A recent article in Nature profiles a massive new public/private science complex called "Fusionopolis." This is a physical-sciences counterpart to the existing "Biopolis."

Although the overall spending rate on science is still small by country standards ($880 million/year), it is impressive on a per-capita basis. Currently, it is spending 2.6% of its gross domestic product on science, and plans to increase to 3% by the end of the decade, which would put it ahead of Britain and the United States.

What struck me in the article was that Singapore is very explicit about it's goal, and that isn't knowledge for knowledge's sake. According to Chuan Poh Lim, chairman of A*STAR, Singapore's central agency for encouraging science and technology, Singapore recognizes it can't compete with China or India as a low-cost manufacturer. "In terms of 'cheaper and faster', we will lose out. We need a framework for innovation."

The ultimate goal is to build an economy with a stronger base in intellectual property, generating both new products and also patent royalties.

Iranian politician moonlights as scientific plagiarist

It appears that one of the plagiarists caught by Harold Garner's Deja Vu web database, "author" of a paper, 85% of which was stitched together from five papers by other researchers, is Massoumeh Ebtekar, former spokeswoman for the militant students that held 52 Americans hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran during the Carter administration, former vice-president under Mohammad Khatami, and current member of the Tehran City Council.

Nature, my source for this news, reports that she has blamed this on the student who helped her with the manuscript. This would seem to indicate that the student wrote most or all of the paper, despite not being listed as an author...which is a different kid of plagiarism, if one more widely accepted in academia.

As ice melts, oceanography freezes

Nature reports that the US academic oceanographic fleet is scaling back operations due to a combination of budget freezes and rising fuel costs. This means that at least one of its 23 ships will sit out 2009, and two others will take extended holidays.

Even so, more cuts will probably necessary.

This is of course on top of the budgetary crisis at one of the USA's premier physics facitilities, Fermi Lab.