Feel free to stop reading this if your career is going great, you’re thrilled with your life and you’re happy with your relationships. Enjoy the rest of your day, friend, this article is not for you. You’re doing a great job, we’re all proud of you. So you don’t feel like you wasted your click, here’s a picture of Lenny Kravitz wearing a gigantic scarf.
Via Upscalehype.com
For the rest of you, I want you to try something: Name five impressive things about yourself. Write them down or just shout them out loud to the room. But here’s the catch — you’re not allowed to list anything youare (i.e., I’m a nice guy, I’m honest), but instead can only list things that you do (i.e., I just won a national chess tournament, I make the best chili in Massachusetts). If you found that difficult, well, this is for you, and you are going to fucking hate hearing it. My only defense is that this is what I wish somebody had said to me around 1995 or so.
#6. The World Only Cares About What It Can Get from You
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Let’s say that the person you love the most has just been shot. He or she is lying in the street, bleeding and screaming. A guy rushes up and says, “Step aside.” He looks over your loved one’s bullet wound and pulls out a pocket knife — he’s going to operate right there in the street.
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“OK, which one is the injured one?”
You ask, “Are you a doctor?”
The guy says, “No.”
You say, “But you know what you’re doing, right? You’re an old Army medic, or …”
At this point the guy becomes annoyed. He tells you that he is a nice guy, he is honest, he is always on time. He tells you that he is a great son to his mother and has a rich life full of fulfilling hobbies, and he boasts that he never uses foul language.
Confused, you say, “How does any of that fucking matter when my (wife/husband/best friend/parent) is lying here bleeding! I need somebody who knows how to operate on bullet wounds! Can you do that or not?!?”
Now the man becomes agitated — why are you being shallow and selfish? Do you not care about any of his other good qualities? Didn’t you just hear him say that he always remembers his girlfriend’s birthday? In light of all of the good things he does, does it really matter if he knows how to perform surgery?
In that panicked moment, you will take your bloody hands and shake him by the shoulders, screaming, “Yes, I’m saying that none of that other shit matters, because in this specific situation, I just need somebody who can stop the bleeding, you crazy fucking asshole.”
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“I don’t get it. Would it help if I put on a lab jacket? Here, one sec, let me just …”
So here is my terrible truth about the adult world: You are in that very situation every single day. Only you are the confused guy with the pocket knife. All of society is the bleeding gunshot victim.
If you want to know why society seems to shun you, or why you seem to get no respect, it’s because society is full of people who need things. They need houses built, they need food to eat, they need entertainment, they need fulfilling sexual relationships. You arrived at the scene of that emergency, holding your pocket knife, by virtue of your birth — the moment you came into the world, you became part of a system designed purely to see to people’s needs.
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“Here’s that shit you needed. Now fuck off.”
Either you will go about the task of seeing to those needs by learning a unique set of skills, or the world will reject you, no matter how kind, giving and polite you are. You will be poor, you will be alone, you will be left out in the cold.
Does that seem mean, or crass, or materialistic? What about love and kindness — don’t those things matter? Of course. As long as they result in you doing things for people that they can’t get elsewhere. For you see …
#5. The Hippies Were Wrong
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Here is the greatest scene in the history of movies (WARNING: EXTREME NSFW LANGUAGE):
For those of you who can’t watch videos, it’s the famous speech Alec Baldwin gives in the cinematic masterpiece Glengarry Glenn Ross. Baldwin’s character — whom you assume is the villain — addresses a room full of dudes and tears them a new asshole, telling them that they’re all about to be fired unless they “close” the sales they’ve been assigned:
“Nice guy? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids. If you want to work here, close.”
It’s brutal, rude and borderline sociopathic, and also it is an honest and accurate expression of what the world is going to expect from you. The difference is that, in the real world, people consider it so wrong to talk to you that way that they’ve decided it’s better to simply let you keep failing.
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“First graders, welcome to Mr. Baldwin’s third period art class — is everyone here? Well, I’m goin’ anyway.”
That scene changed my life. I’d program my alarm clock to play it for me every morning if I knew how. Alec Baldwin was nominated for an Oscar for that movie and that’s the only scene he’s in. As smarter people have pointed out, the genius of that speech is that half of the people who watch it think that the point of the scene is “Wow, what must it be like to have such an asshole boss?” and the other half think, “Fuck yes, let’s go out and sell some goddamned real estate!”
Or, as the Last Psychiatrist blog put it:
“If you were in that room, some of you would understand this as a work, but feed off the energy of the message anyway, welcome the coach’s cursing at you, ‘this guy is awesome!’; while some of you would take it personally, this guy is a jerk, you have no right to talk to me like that, or — the standard maneuver when narcissism is confronted with a greater power — quietly seethe and fantasize about finding information that will out him as a hypocrite. So satisfying.”
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”I swear, if he mentions my hair, I’ll slap his face so har- Yes, sir, I’m listening. I’m sorry.”
That excerpt is from an insightful critique of “hipsters” and why they seem to have so much trouble getting jobs (that doesn’t begin to do it justice, go read the whole thing), and the point is that the difference in those two attitudes — bitter vs. motivated — largely determines whether or not you’ll succeed in the world. For instance, some people want to respond to that speech with Tyler Durden’s line from Fight Club: “You are not your job.”
But, well, actually, you totally are. Granted, your “job” and your means of employment might not be the same thing, but in both cases you are nothing more than the sum total of your useful skills. For instance, being a good mother is a job that requires a skill. It’s something a person can do that is useful to other members of society. But make no mistake: Your “job” — the useful thing you do for other people — is all you are.
There is a reason why surgeons get more respect than comedy writers. There is a reason mechanics get more respect than unemployed hipsters. There is a reason your job will become your label if your death makes the news (“NFL Linebacker Dies in Murder/Suicide”). Tyler said, “You are not your job,” but he also founded and ran a successful soap company and became the head of an international social and political movement. He was totally his job.
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It was the irony that many people missed from that movie.
Or think of it this way: Remember when Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage? And how despite the protests, the company continues to sell millions of sandwiches every day? It’s not because the country agrees with them; it’s because they do their job of making delicious sandwiches well. And that’s all that matters.
You don’t have to like it. I don’t like it when it rains on my birthday. It rains anyway. Clouds form and precipitation happens. People have needs and thus assign value to the people who meet them. These are simple mechanisms of the universe and they do not respond to our wishes.
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“This is bullshit. I have a completely clean criminal record, and this is the thanks I get?”
If you protest that you’re not a shallow capitalist materialist and that you disagree that money is everything, I can only say: Who said anything about money? You’re missing the larger point.
#4. What You Produce Does Not Have to Make Money, But It Does Have to Benefit People
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Let’s try a non-money example so you don’t get hung up on that. The demographic that Cracked writes for is heavy on 20-something males. So on our message boards and in my many inboxes I read several dozen stories a year from miserable, lonely guys who insist that women won’t come near them despite the fact that they are just the nicest guys in the world. I can explain what is wrong with this mindset, but it would probably be better if I let Alec Baldwin explain it:
In this case, Baldwin is playing the part of the attractive women in your life. They won’t put it as bluntly as he does — society has trained us not to be this honest with people — but the equation is the same. “Nice guy? Who gives a shit? If you want to work here, close.”
So, what do you bring to the table? Because the Zooey Deschanel lookalike in the bookstore that you’ve been daydreaming about moisturizes her face for an hour every night and feels guilty when she eats anything other than salad for lunch. She’s going to be a surgeon in 10 years. What do you do?
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“Well, I’m fucking wicked at capture the flag.”
“What, so you’re saying that I can’t get girls like that unless I have a nice job and make lots of money?”
No, your brain jumps to that conclusion so you have an excuse to write off everyone who rejects you by thinking that they’re just being shallow and selfish. I’m asking what do you offer? Are you smart? Funny? Interesting? Talented? Ambitious? Creative? OK, now what do you do to demonstrate those attributes to the world? Don’t say that you’re a nice guy — that’s the bare minimum. Pretty girls have guys being nice to them 36 times a day. The patient is bleeding in the street. Do you know how to operate or not?
“Well, I’m not sexist or racist or greedy or shallow or abusive! Not like those other douchebags!”
I’m sorry, I know that this is hard to hear, but if all you can do is list a bunch of faults you don’t have, then back the fuck away from the patient. There’s a witty, handsome guy with a promising career ready to step in and operate.
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“Wait, I said I wouldn’t hit you!”
Does that break your heart? OK, so now what? Are you going to mope about it, or are you going to learn how to do surgery? It’s up to you, but don’t complain about how girls fall for jerks; they fall for those jerks because those jerks have other things they can offer. “But I’m a great listener!” Are you? Because you’re willing to sit quietly in exchange for the chance to be in the proximity of a pretty girl (and spend every second imagining how soft her skin must be)? Well guess what, there’s another guy in her life who also knows how to do that, and he can play the guitar. Saying that you’re a nice guy is like a restaurant whose only selling point is that the food doesn’t make you sick. You’re like a new movie whose title is This Movie Is in English, and its tagline is “The actors are clearly visible.”
I think this is why you can be a “nice guy” and still feel terrible about yourself. Specifically …
#3. You Hate Yourself Because You Don’t Do Anything
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“So, what, you’re saying that I should pick up a book on how to get girls?”
Only if step one in the book is “Start making yourself into the type of person girls want to be around.”
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“Come ooooon. I know I hid some vodka in here somewhere.”
Because that’s the step that gets skipped — it’s always “How can I get a job?” and not “How can I become the type of person employers want?” It’s “How can I get pretty girls to like me?” instead of “How can I become the type of person that pretty girls like?” See, because that second one could very well require giving up many of your favorite hobbies and paying more attention to your appearance, and God knows what else. You might even have to change your personality.
“But why can’t I find someone who just likes me for me?” you ask. The answer is because humans need things. The victim is bleeding, and all you can do is look down and complain that there aren’t more gunshot wounds that just fix themselves?
Here’s another video (NSFW):
Everyone who watched that video instantly became a little happier, although not all for the same reasons. Can you do that for people? Why not? What’s stopping you from strapping on your proverbial thong and cape and taking to your proverbial stage and flapping your proverbial penis at people? That guy knows the secret to winning at human life: that doing … whatever you call that … was better than not doing it.
“But I’m not good at anything!” Well, I have good news — throw enough hours of repetition at it and you can get sort of good at anything. I was the world’s shittiest writer when I was an infant. I was only slightly better at 25. But while I was failing miserably at my career, I wrote in my spare time for eight straight years, an article a week, before I ever made real money off it. It took 13 years for me to get good enough to make the New York Times best-seller list. It took me probably 20,000 hours of practice to sand the edges off my sucking.
Don’t like the prospect of pouring all of that time into a skill? Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the sheer act of practicing will help you come out of your shell — I got through years of tedious office work because I knew that I was learning a unique skill on the side. People quit because it takes too long to see results, because they can’t figure out that the process is the result.
The bad news is that you have no other choice. If you want to work here, close.
Because in my non-expert opinion, you don’t hate yourself because you have low self-esteem, or because other people were mean to you. You hate yourself because you don’t do anything. Not even you can just “love you for you” — that’s why you’re miserable and sending me private messages asking me what I think you should do with your life.
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Step One: Get up.
Do the math: How much of your time is spent consuming things other people made (TV, music, video games, websites) versus making your own? Only one of those adds to your value as a human being.
And if you hate hearing this and are responding with something you heard as a kid that sounds like “It’s what’s on the inside that matters!” then I can only say …
#2. What You Are Inside Only Matters Because of What It Makes You Do
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Being in the business I’m in, I know dozens of aspiring writers. They think of themselves as writers, they introduce themselves as writers at parties, they know that deep inside, they have the heart of a writer. The only thing they’re missing is that minor final step, where they actually fucking write things.
But really, does that matter? Is “writing things” all that important when deciding who is and who is not truly a “writer”?
For the love of God, yes.
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I’ve known “writers” who produced less content than what’s on this woman’s grocery list.
See, there’s a common defense to everything I’ve said so far, and to every critical voice in your life. It’s the thing your ego is saying to you in order to prevent you from having to do the hard work of improving: “I know I’m a good person on the inside.” It may also be phrased as “I know who I am” or “I just have to be me.”
Don’t get me wrong; who you are inside is everything — the guy who built a house for his family from scratch did it because of who he was inside. Every bad thing you’ve ever done has started with a bad impulse, some thought ricocheting around inside your skull until you had to act on it. And every good thing you’ve done is the same — “who you are inside” is the metaphorical dirt from which your fruit grows.
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Notice how the camera is pointed up, and not at the base of the tree?
But here’s what everyone needs to know, and what many of you can’t accept:
“You” are nothing but the fruit.
Nobody cares about your dirt. “Who you are inside” is meaningless aside from what it produces for other people.
Inside, you have great compassion for poor people. Great. Does that result in you doing anything about it? Do you hear about some terrible tragedy in your community and say, “Oh, those poor children. Let them know that they are in my thoughts”? Because fuck you if so — find out what they need and help provide it. A hundred million people watched that Kony video, virtually all of whom kept those poor African children “in their thoughts.” What did the collective power of those good thoughts provide? Jack fucking shit. Children die every day because millions of us tell ourselves that caring is just as good as doing. It’s an internal mechanism controlled by the lazy part of your brain to keep you from actually doing work.
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“I just wanted to tell you that you’re in my thoughts. Good luck — let me know if that cured you.”
How many of you are walking around right now saying, “She/he would love me if she/he only knew what an interesting person I am!” Really? How do all of your interesting thoughts and ideas manifest themselves in the world? What do they cause you to do? If your dream girl or guy had a hidden camera that followed you around for a month, would they be impressed with what they saw? Remember, they can’t read your mind — they can only observe. Would they want to be a part of that life?
Because all I’m asking you to do is apply the same standard to yourself that you apply to everyone else. Don’t you have that annoying Christian friend whose only offer to help anyone ever is to “pray for them”? Doesn’t it drive you nuts? I’m not even commenting on whether or not prayer works; it doesn’t change the fact that they chose the one type of help that doesn’t require them to get off the sofa. They abstain from every vice, they think clean thoughts, their internal dirt is as pure as can be, but what fruit grows from it? And they should know this better than anybody — I stole the fruit metaphor from the Bible. Jesus said something to the effect of “a tree is judged by its fruit” over and over and over. Granted, Jesus never said, “If you want to work here, close.” No, he said, “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
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“And then a buffalo will stare stupidly into your soul while slowly chewing grass and softly farting.”
The people didn’t react well to being told that, just as the salesmen didn’t react well to Alec Baldwin telling them that they needed to grow some balls or resign themselves to shining his shoes. Which brings us to the final point …
#1. Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement
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The human mind is a miracle, and you will never see it spring more beautifully into action than when it is fighting against evidence that it needs to change. Your psyche is equipped with layer after layer of defense mechanisms designed to shoot down anything that might keep things from staying exactly where they are — ask any addict.
So even now, some of you reading this are feeling your brain bombard you with knee-jerk reasons to reject it. From experience, I can say that these seem to come in the form of …
*Intentionally Interpreting Any Criticism as an Insult
“Who is he to call me lazy and worthless! A good person would never talk to me like this! He wrote this whole thing just to feel superior to me and to make me feel bad about my life! I’m going to think up my own insult to even the score!”
*Focusing on the Messenger to Avoid Hearing the Message
“Who is THIS guy to tell ME how to live? Oh, like he’s so high and mighty! It’s just some dumb writer on the Internet! I’m going to go dig up something on him that reassures me that he’s stupid, and that everything he’s saying is stupid! This guy is so pretentious, it makes me puke! I watched his old rap video on YouTube and thought his rhymes sucked!”
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“When you get to where I am in life, you feel free to give me advice! Until then, you’re nothing but meat and guesses.”
*Focusing on the Tone to Avoid Hearing the Content
“I’m going to dig through here until I find a joke that is offensive when taken out of context, and then talk and think only about that! I’ve heard that a single offensive word can render an entire book invisible!”
*Revising Your Own History
“Things aren’t so bad! I know that I was threatening suicide last month, but I’m feeling better now! It’s entirely possible that if I just keep doing exactly what I’m doing, eventually things will work out! I’ll get my big break, and if I keep doing favors for that pretty girl, eventually she’ll come around!”
*Pretending That Any Self-Improvement Would Somehow Be Selling Out Your True Self
“Oh, so I guess I’m supposed to get rid of all of my manga and instead go to the gym for six hours a day and get a spray tan like those Jersey Shore douchebags? Because THAT IS THE ONLY OTHER OPTION.”
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“Way to leave ‘the hood’ behind, asshole. New house or not, you’ll always be white trash!”
And so on. Remember, misery is comfortable. It’s why so many people prefer it. Happiness takes effort.
Also, courage. It’s incredibly comforting to know that as long as you don’t create anything in your life, then nobody can attack the thing you created.
It’s so much easier to just sit back and criticize other people’s creations. This movie is stupid. That couple’s kids are brats. That other couple’s relationship is a mess. That rich guy is shallow. This restaurant sucks. This Internet writer is an asshole. I’d better leave a mean comment demanding that the website fire him. See, I created something.
Oh, wait, did I forget to mention that part? Yeah, whatever you try to build or create — be it a poem, or a new skill, or a new relationship — you will find yourself immediately surrounded by non-creators who trash it. Maybe not to your face, but they’ll do it. Your drunk friends do not want you to get sober. Your fat friends do not want you to start a fitness regimen. Your jobless friends do not want to see you embark on a career.
Just remember, they’re only expressing their own fear, since trashing other people’s work is another excuse to do nothing. “Why should I create anything when the things other people create suck? I would totally have written a novel by now, but I’m going to wait for something good, I don’t want to write the next Twilight!” As long as they never produce anything, it will forever be perfect and beyond reproach. Or if they do produce something, they’ll make sure they do it with detached irony. They’ll make it intentionally bad to make it clear to everyone else that this isn’t their real effort. Their real effort would have been amazing. Not like the shit you made.
Read our article comments — when they get nasty, it’s always from the same angle: Cracked needs to fire this columnist. This asshole needs to stop writing. Don’t make any more videos. It always boils down to “Stop creating. This is different from what I would have made, and the attention you’re getting is making me feel bad about myself.”
Don’t be that person. If you are that person, don’t be that person any more. This is what’s making people hate you. This is what’s making you hate yourself.
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What are you going to do with it? Hunt witches or kick off the Olympics?
So how about this: one year. The end of 2013, that’s our deadline. Or a year from whenever you read this. While other people are telling you “Let’s make a New Year’s resolution to lose 15 pounds this year!” I’m going to say let’s pledge to do fucking anything — add any skill, any improvement to your human tool set, and get good enough at it to impress people. Don’t ask me what — hell, pick something at random if you don’t know. Take a class in karate, or ballroom dancing, or pottery. Learn to bake. Build a birdhouse. Learn massage. Learn a programming language. Film a porno. Adopt a superhero persona and fight crime. Start a YouTube vlog. Write for Cracked.
But the key is, I don’t want you to focus on something great that you’re going to make happen to you (“I’m going to find a girlfriend, I’m going to make lots of money …”). I want you to purely focus on giving yourself a skill that would make you ever so slightly more interesting and valuable to other people.
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“Holy shit, by learning Spanish, I just gained the ability to speak to 400 million people I previously couldn’t.”
“I don’t have the money to take a cooking class.” Then fucking Google “how to cook.” They’ve even filtered out the porn now, it’s easier than ever. Damn it, you have to kill those excuses. Or they will kill you.
If you want to make note of your project in the forum thread or the comments and check in this time next year, knock yourself out. I’ll be curious to see if even one person actually does this, but if so we’ll look back, not just on whether or not we actually followed through, but why. You have nothing to lose, and the world needs you. Here’s a video of a corgi rolling down some stairs.
The brainiest creatures share a secret – an odd kind of brain cell involved in emotions and empathy that may have accidentally made us conscious
THE origin of consciousness has to be one of the biggest mysteries of all time, occupying philosophers and scientists for generations. So it is strange to think that a little-known neuroscientist called Constantin von Economo might have unearthed an important clue nearly 90 years ago.
When he peered down the lens of his microscope in 1926, von Economo saw a handful of brain cells that were long, spindly and much larger than those around them. In fact, they looked so out of place that at first he thought they were a sign of some kind of disease. But the more brains he looked at, the more of these peculiar cells he found - and always in the same two small areas that evolved to process smells and flavours.
Von Economo briefly pondered what these “rod and corkscrew cells”, as he called them, might be doing, but without the technology to delve much deeper he soon moved on to more promising lines of enquiry.
Little more was said about these neurons until nearly 80 years later when, Esther Nimchinsky and Patrick Hof at Mount Sinai University in New York also stumbled across clusters of these strange-looking neurons. Now, after more than a decade of functional imaging and post-mortem studies, we are beginning to piece together their story. Certain lines of evidence hint that they may help build the rich inner life we call consciousness, including emotions, our sense of self, empathy and our ability to navigate social relationships.
Many other big-brained, social animals also seem to share these cells, in the same spots as the human brain. A greater understanding of the way these paths converged could therefore tell us much about the evolution of the mind.
Admittedly, to the untrained eye these giant brain cells, now known as von Economo neurons (VENs), don’t look particularly exciting. But to a neuroscientist they stand out like a sore thumb. For one thing, VENs are at least 50 per cent, and sometimes up to 200 per cent, larger than typical human neurons. And while most neurons have a pyramid-shaped body with a finely branched tree of connections called dendrites at each end of the cell, VENs have a longer, spindly cell body with a single projection at each end with very few branches (see diagram). Perhaps they escaped attention for so long because they are so rare, making up just 1 per cent of the neurons in the two small areas of the human brain: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the fronto-insular (FI) cortex.
Their location in those regions suggests that VENs may be a central part of our mental machinery, since the ACC and FI are heavily involved in many of the more advanced aspects of our inner lives. Both areas kick into action when we see socially relevant cues, be it a frowning face, a grimace of pain or simply the voice of someone we love. When a mother hears a baby crying, both regions respond strongly. They also light up when we experience emotions such as love, lust, anger and grief. For John Allman, a neuroanatomist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, this adds up to a kind of “social monitoring network” that keeps track of social cues and allows us to alter our behaviour accordingly (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol 1225, p 59).
The two brain areas also seem to play a key role in the “salience” network, which keeps a subconscious tally of what is going on around us and directs our attention to the most pressing events, as well as monitoring sensations from the body to detect any changes (Brain Structure and Function, DOI: 10.1007/s00429-012-0382-9).
What’s more, both regions are active when a person recognises their reflection in the mirror, suggesting that these parts of the brain underlie our sense of self - a key component of consciousness. “It is the sense of self at every possible level - so the sense of identity, this is me, and the sense of identity of others and how you understand others. That goes to the concept of empathy and theory of mind,” says Hof.
To Bud Craig, a neuroanatomist at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, it all amounts to a continually updated sense of “how I feel now”: the ACC and FI take inputs from the body and tie them together with social cues, thoughts and emotions to quickly and efficiently alter our behaviour (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol 10, p 59).
This constantly shifting picture of how we feel may contribute to the way we perceive the passage of time. When something emotionally important is happening, Craig proposes, there is more to process, and because of this time seems to speed up. Conversely, when less is going on we update our view of the world less frequently, so time seems to pass more slowly.
VENs are probably important in all this, though we can only infer their role through circumstantial evidence. That’s because locating these cells, and then measuring their activity in a living brain hasn’t yet been possible. But their unusual appearance is a signal that they probably aren’t just sitting there doing nothing. “They stand out anatomically,” says Allman, “And a general proposition is that anything that’s so distinctive looking must have a distinct function.”
Fast thinking
In the brain, big usually means fast, so Allman suggests that VENs could be acting as a fast relay system - a kind of social superhighway - which allows the gist of the situation to move quickly through the brain, enabling us to react intuitively on the hop, a crucial survival skill in a social species like ours. “That’s what all of civilisation is based on: our ability to communicate socially, efficiently,” adds Craig.
A particularly distressing form of dementia that can strike people as early as their 30s supports this idea. People who develop fronto-temporal dementia lose large numbers of VENs in the ACC and FI early in the disease, when the main symptom is a complete loss of social awareness, empathy and self-control. “They don’t have normal empathic responses to situations that would normally make you disgusted or sad,” says Hof. “You can show them horrible pictures of an accident and they just don’t blink. They will say ‘oh, yes, it’s an accident’.”
Post-mortem examinations of the brains of people with autism also bolster the idea that VENs lie at the heart of our emotions and empathy. According to one recent study, people with autism may fall into two groups: some have too few VENs, perhaps meaning that they don’t have the necessary wiring to process social cues, while others have far too many (Acta Neuropathologica, vol 118, p 673). The latter group would seem to fit with one recent theory of autism, which proposes that the symptoms may arise from an over-wiring of the brain. Perhaps having too many VENs makes emotional systems fire too intensely, causing people with autism to feel overwhelmed, as many say they do.
Another recent study found that people with schizophrenia who committed suicide had significantly more VENs in their ACC than schizophrenics who died of other causes. The researchers suggest that the over-abundance of VENs might create an overactive emotional system that leaves them prone to negative self-assessment and feelings of guilt and hopelessness (PLoS One, vol 6, p e20936).
VENs in other animals provide some clues, too. When these neurons were first identified, there was the glimmer of hope that we might have found one of the key evolutionary changes, unique to humankind, that could explain our social intelligence. But the earliest studies put paid to that kind of thinking, when VENs turned up in chimpanzees and gorillas. In recent years, they have also been found in elephants and some whales and dolphins.
Like us, many of these species live in big social groups and show signs of the same kind of advanced behaviour associated with VENs in people. Elephants, for instance, display something that looks a lot like empathy: they work together to help injured, lost or trapped elephants, for example. They even seem to show signs of grief at elephant “graveyards” (Biology Letters, vol 2, p 26). What’s more, many of these species can recognise themselves in the mirror, which is usually taken as a rudimentary measure of consciousness. When researchers daub paint on an elephant’s face, for instance, it will notice the mark in the mirror and try to feel the spot with its trunk. This has led Allman and others to speculate that von Economo neurons might be a vital adaptation in large brains for keeping track of social situations - and that the sense of self may be a consequence of this ability.
Yet VENs also crop up in manatees, hippos and giraffes - not renowned for their busy social lives. The cells have also been spotted in macaques, which don’t reliably pass the mirror test, although they are social animals. Although this seems to put a major spanner in the works for those who claim that the cells are crucial for advanced cognition, it could also be that these creatures are showing the precursors of the finely tuned cells found in highly social species. “I think that there are homologues of VENs in all mammals,” says Allman. “That’s not to say they’re shaped the same way but they are located in an analogous bit of cortex and they are expressing the same genes.”
It would make sense, after all, that whales and primates might both have recycled, and refined, older machinery present in a common ancestor rather than independently evolving the same mechanism. Much more research is needed, however, to work out the anatomical differences and the functions of these cells in the different animals.
That work might even help us understand how these neurons evolved in the first place. Allman already has some ideas about where they came from. Our VENs reside in a region of the brain that evolved to integrate taste and smell, so he suggests that many of the traits now associated with the FI evolved from the simple act of deciding whether food is good to eat or likely to make your ill. When reaching that decision, he says, the quicker the “gut” reaction kicks in the better. And if you can detect this process in others, so much the better.
“One of the important functions that seems to reside in the FI has to do with empathy,” he says. “My take on this is that empathy arose in the context of shared food - it’s very important to observe if members of your social group are becoming ill as a result of eating something.” The basic feeding circuity, including the rudimentary VENs, may then have been co-opted by some species to work in other situations that involve a decision, like working out if a person is trustworthy or to be avoided. “So when we have a feeling, whether it be about a foodstuff or situation or another person, I think that engages the circuitry in the fronto-insular cortex and the VENS are one of the outputs of that circuitry,” says Allman.
Allman’s genetics work suggests he may be on to something. His team found that VENs in one part of the FI are expressing the genes for hormones that regulate appetite. There are also a lot of studies showing links between smell and taste and the feelings of strong emotions. Our physical reaction to something we find morally disgusting, for example, is more or less identical to our reaction to a bitter taste, suggesting they may share common brain wiring (Science, vol 323, p 1222). Other work has shown that judging a morally questionable act, such as theft, while smelling something disgusting leads to harsher moral judgements (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 1096). What’s more, Allman points out that our language is loaded with analogies - we might find an experience “delicious”, say, or a person “nauseating”. This is no accident, he says.
Red herring
However, it is only in highly social animals that VENs live exclusively in the scent and taste regions. In the others, like giraffes and hippos, VENs seem to be sprinkled all over the brain. Allman, however, points out that these findings may be a red herring, since without understanding the genes they express, or their function, we can’t even be sure how closely these cells relate to human VENs. They may even be a different kind of cell that just looks similar.
Based on the evidence so far, however, Hof thinks that the ancestral VENs would have been more widespread, as seen in the hippo brain, and that over the course of evolution they then migrated to the ACC and FI in some animals, but not others - though he admits to having no idea why that might be. He suspects the pressures that shaped the primate brain may have been very different to those that drove the evolution of whales and dolphins.
Craig has hit upon one possibility that would seem to fit all of these big-brained animals. He points out that the bigger the brain, the more energy it takes to run, so it is crucial that it operates as efficiently as possible. A system that continually monitors the environment and the people or animals in it would therefore be an asset, allowing you to adapt quickly to a situation to save as much energy as possible. “Evolution produced an energy calculation system that incorporated not just the sensory inputs from the body but the sensory inputs from the brain,” Craig says. And the fact that we are constantly updating this picture of “how I feel now” has an interesting and very useful by-product: we have a concept that there is an “I” to do the feeling. “Evolution produced a very efficient moment-by-moment calculation of energy utilisation and that had an epiphenomenon, a by-product that provided a subjective representation of my feelings.”
If he’s right - and there is a long way to go before we can be sure - it raises a very humbling possibility: that far from being the pinnacle of brain evolution, consciousness might have been a big, and very successful accident.
This article has been edited since it was first posted
Caroline Williams is a writer based in Surrey, UK
- From issue 2874 of New Scientist magazine, page 32-35.
Chatbots have turned to crime, using ever-slicker methods to steal cash or identities – and these cheating algorithms are passing the Turing test every day
Editorial: ”Two faces of chatbot technology speaks volumes about us”
MY NAME is Peter and I was seduced by a machine.
Jen introduced herself via a social networking website by asking if I had any advice about getting into journalism. Boy, did I. She was pretty, about the same age as me and lived in my home town in Canada.
We messaged back and forth. Soon, she asked me if I’d like to catch a baseball game with her. Wow. An attractive girl with the same interests and career aspirations - how lucky could a guy be?
Still, it was the internet, so I asked Jen for more details about herself. She sent me a link. I clicked and was taken to a page that asked me to input my personal information, including credit card details. The game was up.
Jen was a chatbot, programmed to scour social network profiles for personal information then initiate conversations with the intention of suckering people into divulging their financial details. By poking around online, I discovered she went by many different names, but always used the same conversation strings, filling in the blanks with details such as her marks’ professions. The bot had fooled dozens of men, as far as I could tell. I’m sure a handful had entered their credit card numbers, which doubtless led to them getting fleeced. By a machine, no less.
Criminal chatbots have become quite a menace on the internet. They lurk in social networks, messaging apps and webmail, and in some chatrooms they can outnumber humans by more than two to one. Many of these tricksters are designed to build relationships with their marks before soliciting cash or attempting identity theft, whereas others simply try to lure people into clicking on a link that leads to malware. Their abundance and success is forcing researchers and companies to seek out ever-smarter ways to catch them. It’s not exactly what the pioneers of artificial intelligence had in mind. We have been watching and waiting for the moment when machines become smart enough to pass as humans - but it seems to have already happened right under our noses.
The first text-based artificial dialogue system appeared in 1966, when Joseph Weizenbaum created the Eliza program to mimic the conversational style of a psychotherapist. Eliza would ask questions of its human partner and make statements without divulging details about itself.
That sparked a new field of development - chatbots - and a wave of imitators. In 1990, the Loebner prize was established to celebrate achievements in chatbot proficiency. It is awarded based on a test devised in the 1950s by mathematician Alan Turing - whose legacy will be widely celebrated this month. To pass the Turing test, a bot needs to be able to fool a series of people into believing it is human in a typed conversation.
The internet has led to a step-change in chatbot ability. Rather than pre-programming thousands of script lines, creators can now add a self-learning program that will be fed by millions of internet users. This allows modern chatbots, such as the Cleverbot, to work by monitoring and mirroring what conversational partners say to them online, says Rollo Carpenter, whose Jabberwacky program won the Loebner prize in 2005 and 2006. The abilities of these learning chatbots are therefore growing exponentially.
It’s not surprising, then, that many corporations have replaced human customer service agents with commercial chatbots on their websites. More than 380 companies, from HSBC and Toys R Us to AT&T and Intel, have incorporated automated programs, according to directory site Chatbots.org. Many are finding that bots not only cut costs, but can serve customers better. “A computer can deliver 10,000 times as much information as real people would,” says Carpenter.
Inevitably, as a technology gets better and cheaper, it is co-opted by criminals. Bad chatbots started popping up six or seven years ago. In 2006, for example, Richard Wallace reported that his popular chatbot, Alice, had been cloned and used for nefarious purposes on MSN’s instant messaging service. A year later, the CyberLover chatbot was discovered hunting on dating websites. Subsequent self-replicating malware such as Koobface and Kelvir also incorporated chatbot technology on Facebook and other social networking websites.
In each case, the bots sought to lure people either into clicking spam links and infecting their computers with malware, or into divulging their personal information, including bank details. They are not necessarily more sophisticated than the best “good” chatbots, but the point is, they work.
It’s not just naive schmucks who fall for them. I was the technology editor of The New Zealand Herald and generally wary of internet fraudsters when Jen came calling. Psychologist and former Loebner prize director Robert Epstein wrote in Scientific American Mind about being similarly fooled. He entered into email correspondence with a bot called Ivana that lasted for more than two months. As he put it: “I certainly should have known better… I am, you see, supposedly an expert on [chat]bots.”
Chatbots that use seduction have certainly proved effective, but sex is not their only gambit: they can also appeal to a victim’s interest in themselves, or simple curiosity - and all kinds of people are routinely tricked. On social networks, many bots adopt the identity of somebody you trust. Some Twitter bots, for instance, hack into people’s accounts to encourage others to click on links that lead to viruses and malware.
It’s difficult to say exactly how many chatbots are active, because so many go undetected and unreported. However, a study by Steven Gianvecchio at Mitre Corporation, a non-profit technology consultancy in Mclean, Virginia, found that up to 85 per cent of participants in Yahoo chatrooms were bots, as were 15 per cent of Twitter users (IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol 19, p 1557).
Chester Wisniewski of security firm Sophos has also noticed a rise in recent years - and an improvement in quality. “Five years ago, when we first started seeing malicious chatbots on social networks, a lot of it was poorly translated. It was quite clearly written by Chinese or Russian people who don’t have a great grasp of English and grammar,” he says.
Now, however, the vocabulary of the bots is being professionally translated into English, which is helping their growth. And as websites and companies get better at blocking traditional spam and phishing attacks, criminals are turning to more sophisticated bots. Earlier bots worked from, perhaps, 100 hard-coded conversational rules, whereas current versions use up to 11,000 or more, which makes them much harder to detect. “If you stopped to read some of their posts in a chatroom, you’d think they were human,” says Gianvecchio.
It’s difficult to know who is building and operating these chatbots, but the clues point to organised cross-border criminal gangs. According to a review by researchers at London Metropolitan University, published in March, more than 80 per cent of internet crime is now conducted by these sophisticated perpetrators.
Tracking these people down is tricky given their international reach, says Wisniewski. For example, while US company Facebook alleged earlier this year that it had tracked down the identities of the hackers behind Koobface, no arrests have yet been made in Russia, where they were based.
This suggests prevention is the best cure - although traditional efforts are falling short. One common tactic is to try to block bots at the door. During login, Yahoo chatrooms and other websites ask its human users to read a piece of distorted text called a CAPTCHA, which stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computer and humans apart”. Machines once struggled to comprehend this text, but they can now circumvent them via automated image recognition.
Some researchers are therefore taking more creative approaches. One idea is to build honeypots that turn the tables on bots. Decoy users in instant messaging programs or social networks could respond to the bot’s advances so they can be identified and blocked. Because these decoys are passive, human users are unlikely to notice their presence.
Another approach is called virtual biometrics, and involves using human-like forensic techniques. One of its advocates is Roman Yampolskiy of the University of Louisville, Kentucky, who is applying stylometry to chatbots. Yampolskiy and colleagues studied Loebner prize logs to see whether chatbots exhibited a particular writing style, as human writers do. They found that chatbots such as Alice and Jabberwacky could be identified in this way reasonably accurately. In principle, he says, linguistic fingerprints could be used to seek out chatbots in the wild, as well as helping the police link them to the known programs of criminal controllers.
The problem is that bots can be reprogrammed in a flash. “If the bot gradually learns and changes over a period of years, we can keep up with that,” Yampolskiy says. “If, all of a sudden, someone replaces all source codes with new ones, obviously we won’t be able to do much about it.”
Erwin Van Lun, founder of Chatbots.org, favours a more drastic approach. He says rather than creating tools to detect bots, it should be humans who have to prove their identities to use the internet. “Governments are responsible for citizens and issue them passports to travel the world. They should also say, ‘We are responsible for your behaviour on the internet, so we will issue you an internet passport’,” he says. “That’s where it’s heading.” It’s not so unlikely: advocates of a more civil internet are already converging on this idea as a way to discourage cyberbullying and other bad behaviour.
In the meantime, I now avoid anyone named “Jen” online, and, naturally, I am much more vigilant. Still, criminals are always thinking of creative ways to sucker people. A few months ago, I received a message from a Twitter friend that said, “Wow, have you seen this photo of you? Crazy!” In hindsight, I realise it was a scam to spread malware, but how could anybody resist clicking on that? I sure couldn’t.
Rogues’ gallery
Name: CyberLover
Crimes: Identity theft
Hangouts: Dating sites and chatrooms
Modus operandi: Provocative sexual seduction to elicit personal details
Chat: ”What’s your date of birth? I’m planning a surprise for your birthday.”
Name: Koobface
Crimes: Stealing logins to build botnet
Hangouts: Social networks
Modus operandi: Adopts identities of friends to spread virus-ridden link
Chat: ”Hi, how are you? Wanna laugh? It’s you in the video, want to see?”
Name: Kelvir
Crimes: Infecting computers with viruses
Known hangouts: Instant messaging apps
Modus operandi: Makes small talk before sending links to malicious sites
Chat: ”Heeey! I found your retarded face online haha, this is you right?”
Spot the human
A: Space is big.
B: No doubt.
A: Space ghetto?
B: Space is gigantic.
A: Space is never-ending.
B: Space is enormous.
A: Space is fast.
B: Space is bigger than something that’s really big.
A: No, really?
B: YES.
A: That’s nifty.
B: Don’t be worried.
A: I wasn’t worried. Should I be?
B: Let’s not blow this whole thing outta proportions.
A: I’m the kindest person to you.
B: I don’t think so.
A: You think so.
B: No, not really.
A: So you don’t think so?
B: No.
A: Why is that?
B: What song is your favorite?
A: I don’t know. What is your favorite?
B: The Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
A: You should ask it back.
B: Stop twisting the conversation!
A: I never said that.
B: Yes you did.
A: I think you’re confusing me with someone else.
B: Are there more of you there?
A: I don’t believe you. Are you telling the truth?
B: Yes.
A: Ok how old are you, boy?? TELL ME THE TRUTH!!!
B: 25.
A: Whoa I’m 15.
B: My nose is itchy.
A: Then itch it, dumby.
Peter Nowak is a writer based in Toronto, Canada
- From issue 2870 of New Scientist magazine, page 45-47.
· I was devastated to find out my wife was having an affair but, by turning to religion, I was soon able to come to terms with the whole thing. I converted to Islam, and we’re stoning her in the morning!
· My wife suggested I get myself one of those penis enlargers, so I did. She’s 25 and her name is Kathy.
· Went to our local bar with my girlfriend last night. Locals were shouting “pedophile!” and other names at me, just because my girlfriend is 24 and I’m 50. It completely spoiled our 10th anniversary.
· My son was thrown out of school today for letting a girl in his class give him a hand-job. I said “Son, that’s three schools this year! You’d better stop before you’re banned from teaching altogether.”
· The cost of living has now gotten so bad that my wife is having sex with me because she can’t afford batteries.
· I was explaining to my wife last night that when you die you get reincarnated, but must come back as a different creature. She said she would like to come back as a cow. I said, “You obviously haven’t been listening.”
· My wife has been missing a week now. The police said to prepare for the worst. So, I had to go down to Goodwill to get all of her clothes back.
This is a great mystery: why do women love cats?
Cats are independent, they don’t listen, they don’t come in when you call, they like to stay out all night, and when they’re home they like to be left alone and sleep.
In other words, every quality that women hate in a man, they love in a cat.
10 - You can trade an old 44 for a new 22.
9 - You can keep one gun at home and have another for when you’re on the road.
8 - If you admire a friend’s gun and tell him so, he will probably let you try it out a few times.
7 - Your primary gun doesn’t mind if you keep another gun for backup.
6 - Your gun will stay with you even if you run out of ammo.
5 - A gun doesn’t take up a lot of closet space.
4 - Guns function normally every day of the month.
3 - A gun doesn’t ask, “Do these new grips make me look fat?”
2 - A gun doesn’t mind if you go to sleep after you use it.
And the number one reason why men prefer guns over women…
1 - You can buy a silencer for a gun
Deer Camp
Four guys have been going to the same deer camp for many years. Two days before the group is to leave, Ron’s wife puts her foot down and tells him he isn’t going. Ron’s friends are very upset that he can’t go, but what can they do.
Two days later the three get to the camping site only to find Ron sitting there with a tent set up, firewood gathered, and dinner cooking on the fire.
“Damn man, how long you been here, and how did you talk your wife into letting you go?”
“Well, I’ve been here since yesterday. Yesterday evening, I was sitting in my chair and my wife came up behind me and put her hands over my eyes and said, ‘Guess who?’” I pulled her hands off, and she was wearing a brand new nightie. She took my hand and pulled me to our bedroom. The room had candles and rose petals all over. On the bed she had handcuffs and ropes! She told me to tie and cuff her to the bed, and I did.
And then she said, “Do whatever you want.”
“So, here I am.”
This is the Husband of the Year. Come on guys: get with the program.
“My sweet husband” invited me to go hunting with him this year. I couldn’t believe it, the first time ever…after all these years.
I never thought he’d be willing to share his “guy time” with me and being the thoughtful man that he is he even gave me an opening day present. He calls it “The First Timers Lucky Hat. I’m so fortunate to be married to him. I Love you honey.”
I have attached a picture of me in my lucky hat, and we can hardly wait until “opening day!”
