The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you’ve got millions of pals out there. Type in - ‘Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire’ and the computer will say, ‘Specify type of goat.’
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| — | Richard Jeni |
What experience and history teach us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it
TALKS
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: The mysterious workings of the adolescent brain
Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life. Back then, 15 years ago, we didn’t have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development across the lifespan. In the past decade or so, mainly due to advances in brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, neuroscientists have started to look inside the living human brain of all ages, and to track changes in brain structure and brain function, so we use structural MRI if you’d like to take a snapshot, a photograph, at really high resolution of the inside of the living human brain, and we can ask questions like, how much gray matter does the brain contain, and how does that change with age? And we also use functional MRI, called fMRI,to take a video, a movie, of brain activity when participants are taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or perceiving something.
So many labs around the world are involved in this kind of research, and we now have a really rich and detailed picture of how the living human brain develops, and this picture has radically changed the way we think about human brain development by revealing that it’s not all over in early childhood, and instead, the brain continues to develop right throughout adolescence and into the ’20s and ’30s.
So adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological, hormonal, physical changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual attains a stable, independent role in society. (Laughter) It can go on a long time. (Laughter) One of the brain regions that changes most dramatically during adolescence is called prefrontal cortex. So this is a model of the human brain, and this is prefrontal cortex, right at the front. Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area. It’s proportionally much bigger in humans than in any other species, and it’s involved in a whole range of high level cognitive functions, things like decision-making, planning, planning what you’re going to do tomorrow or next week or next year, inhibiting inappropriate behavior, so stopping yourself saying something really rude or doing something really stupid. It’s also involved in social interaction, understanding other people, and self-awareness.
So MRI studies looking at the development of this region have shown that it really undergoes dramatic development during the period of adolescence. So if you look at gray matter volume, for example, gray matter volume across age from age four to 22 yearsincreases during childhood, which is what you can see on this graph. It peaks in early adolescence. The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that’s probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there’s a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses. This is a really important process. It’s partly dependent on the environment that the animal or the human is in, and the synapses that are being used are strengthened, and synapses that aren’t being used in that particular environment are pruned away. You can think of it a bit like pruning a rosebush.You prune away the weaker branches so that the remaining, important branches, can grow stronger, and this process, which effectively fine-tunes brain tissue according to the species-specific environment, is happening in prefrontal cortex and in other brain regionsduring the period of human adolescence.
So a second line of inquiry that we use to track changes in the adolescent brain is using functional MRI to look at changes in brain activity across age. So I’ll just give you an example from my lab. So in my lab, we’re interested in the social brain, that is the network of brain regions that we use to understand other people and to interact with other people. So I like to show a photograph of a soccer game to illustrate two aspects of how your social brains work. So this is a soccer game. (Laughter) Michael Owen has just missed a goal, and he’s lying on the ground, and the first aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates is how automatic and instinctive social emotional responses are, so within a split second of Michael Owen missing this goal, everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and the same thing with their face, even Michael Owen as he slides along the grass, is doing the same thing with his arms, and presumably has a similar facial expression, and the only people who don’t are the guys in yellow at the back — (Laughs) —and I think they’re on the wrong end of the stadium, and they’re doing another social emotional response that we all instantly recognize, and that’s the second aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates, how good we are at reading other people’s behavior, their actions, their gestures, their facial expressions, in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states. So you don’t have to ask any of these guys. You have a pretty good idea of what they’re feeling and thinking at this precise moment in time.
So that’s what we’re interested in looking at in my lab. So in my lab, we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan, we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people, their minds, their mental states, their emotions, and one of the findings that we’ve found several times now, as have other labs around the world, is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex, which is shown in blue on the slide, and it’s right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head. This region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other peoplethan it is in adults, and this is actually a meta-analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world, and they all show the same thing, that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence. And we think that might be because adolescents and adults use a different mental approach, a different cognitive strategy, to make social decisions, and one way of looking at that is to do behavioral studies whereby we bring people into the lab and we give them some kind of behavioral task, and I’ll just give you another example of the kind of task that we use in my lab.
So imagine that you’re the participant in one of our experiments. You come into the lab, you see this computerized task. In this task, you see a set of shelves. Now, there are objects on these shelves, on some of them, and you’ll notice there’s a guy standing behind the setof shelves, and there are some objects that he can’t see. They’re occluded, from his point of view, with a kind of gray piece of wood. This is the same set of shelves from his point of view. Notice that there are only some objects that he can see, whereas there are many more objects that you can see. Now your task is to move objects around. The director, standing behind the set of shelves, is going to direct you to move objects around, but remember, he’s not going to ask you to move objects that he can’t see. This introduces a really interesting condition whereby there’s a kind of conflict between your perspective and the director’s perspective. So imagine he tells you to move the top truck left. There are three trucks there. You’re going to instinctively go for the white truck, because that’s the top truckfrom your perspective, but then you have to remember, “Oh, he can’t see that truck, so he must mean me to move the blue truck,” which is the top truck from his perspective. Now believe it or not, normal, healthy, intelligent adults like you make errors about 50 percent of the time on that kind of trial. They move the white truck instead of the blue truck. So we give this kind of task to adolescents and adults, and we also have a control condition where there’s no director and instead we give people a rule. We tell them, okay, we’re going to do exactly the same thing but this time there’s no director. Instead you’ve got to ignore objects with the dark gray background. You’ll see that this is exactly the same condition, only in the no-director condition they just have to remember to apply this somewhat arbitrary rule, whereas in the director condition, they have to remember to take into account the director’s perspective in order to guide their ongoing behavior.
Okay, so if I just show you the percentage errors in a large developmental study we did, this is in a study ranging from age seven to adulthood, and what you’re going to see is the percentage errors in the adult group in both conditions, so the gray is the director condition, and you see that our intelligent adults are making errors about 50 percent of the time, whereas they make far fewer errors when there’s no director present, when they just have to remember that rule of ignoring the gray background. Developmentally, these two conditions develop in exactly the same way. Between late childhood and mid-adolescence, there’s an improvement, in other words a reduction of errors, in both of these trials, in both of these conditions. But it’s when you compare the last two groups, the mid-adolescent group and the adult group where things get really interesting, because there, there is no continued improvement in the no-director condition. In other words, everything you need to do in order to remember the rule and apply it seems to be fully developed by mid-adolescence, whereas in contrast, if you look at the last two gray bars, there’s still a significant improvement in the director condition between mid-adolescence and adulthood, and what this means is that the ability to take into account someone else’s perspective in order to guide ongoing behavior,which is something, by the way, that we do in everyday life all the time, is still developing in mid-to-late adolescence. So if you have a teenage son or a daughter and you sometimes think they have problems taking other people’s perspectives, you’re right. They do. And this is why.
So we sometimes laugh about teenagers. They’re parodied, sometimes even demonized in the media for their kind of typical teenage behavior. They take risks, they’re sometimes moody, they’re very self-conscious. I have a really nice anecdote from a friend of mine who said that the thing he noticed most about his teenage daughters before and after pubertywas their level of embarrassment in front of him. So, he said, “Before puberty, if my two daughters were messing around in a shop, I’d say, ‘Hey, stop messing around and I’ll sing your favorite song,’ and instantly they’d stop messing around and he’d sing their favorite song. After puberty, that became the threat. (Laughter) The very notion of their dad singing in public was enough to make them behave.
So people often ask, “Well, is adolescence a kind of recent phenomenon? Is it something we’ve invented recently in the West?” And actually, the answer is probably not. There are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that sound very similar to the descriptions we use today.
So there’s a famous quote by Shakespeare from “The Winter’s Tale” where he describes adolescence as follows: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wencheswith child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” (Laughter) He then goes on to say, “Having said that, would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather?” (Laughter) So almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portrayingadolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today, but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.
So for example, take risk-taking. We know that adolescents have a tendency to take risks. They do. They take more risks than children or adults, and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they’re with their friends. There’s an important drive to become independent from one’s parents and to impress one’s friends in adolescence. But now we try to understand that in terms of the development of a part of their brain called the limbic system, so I’m going to show you the limbic system in red in the slide behind me, and also on this brain. So the limbic system is right deep inside the brain, and it’s involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing. It gives you the rewarding feeling out of doing fun things, including taking risks. It gives you the kick out of taking risks. And this region, the regions within the limbic system, have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults, and at the very same time, the prefrontal cortex, which you can see in blue in the slide here, which stops us taking excessive risks, is still very much in development in adolescents.
So brain research has shown that the adolescent brain undergoes really quite profound development, and this has implications for education, for rehabilitation, and intervention. The environment, including teaching, can and does shape the developing adolescent brain, and yet it’s only relatively recently that we have been routinely educating teenagers in the West.All four of my grandparents, for example, left school in their early adolescence. They had no choice. And that’s still the case for many, many teenagers around the world today. Forty percent of teenagers don’t have access to secondary school education. And yet, this is a period of life where the brain is particularly adaptable and malleable. It’s a fantastic opportunity for learning and creativity.
So what’s sometimes seen as the problem with adolescents — heightened risk-taking, poor impulse control, self-consciousness — shouldn’t be stigmatized. It actually reflects changes in the brain that provide an excellent opportunity for education and social development. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
What a Chimp Teaches Us About Humans
“Project Nim,” a documentary film examining the story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who learned to communicate with people using sign language, reveals more about people than other primates.
In a scene from “Project Nim, professor Herbert Terrace is seen driving with Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who learned to communicate through sign language. The film suggests that by studying chimps, we might learn more about human nature than we really want to know. (Susan Kuklin)
A cautionary tale about scientific hubris and overreaching that plays like a Planet of the Apes prequel, Oscar-winning (for Man On Wire) director James Marsh’s latest film, Project Nim, is about a chimp who learned to sign.
A major media story back in the late ‘70s, the story of Nim Chimpsky began when he was taken from his mother at a primate research center in Oklahoma and given to a New York family to be raised as a human. The experiment was the brainchild of Herb Terrace, a Columbia University psychology professor, who felt if the simian could be taught sign language, he might be able to express his thoughts and feelings.
Unfortunately, Nim was initially left with the family of Stephanie LaFarge, a former student (and lover) of Terrace’s, who didn’t seem to see surrogate motherhood as a scientific project but preferred to raise Nim in a chaotic, countercultural atmosphere (where he was given alcohol and allowed puffs on a joint) without bothering to provide any journals or logbooks charting his progress. “We enjoyed letting him hang out and see how it went,” says LaFarge of the way she parented Nim. But, she adds, in one of several “D’oh!” moments scattered throughout the film, “I wasn’t prepared for the wild animal in him.”
So Terrace took Nim from LaFarge and moved him to a Columbia facility where he was taught and nurtured by a series of scientists and sign language experts. His signing began “exponentially increasing” (Nim eventually learned 125 signs), and after New York magazine published a cover story titled “First Message From the Planet of the Apes,” so did his fame.
But as Nim grew, he became dangerous. He started biting people, at one point almost ripping off the entire right cheek of one of his teachers, which leads Laura-Ann Pettito, one of the chimp’s instructors, to note in the film that, “You can’t give human nurturing to an animal that can kill you.”
From that point on, Project Nim moves from cautionary tale to animal horror story. Nim’s aggressiveness, which was also becoming sexual — he started humping the humans and a pet cat — forced Terrace to close the experiment. Nim was shipped back to the Oklahoma facility, where he had to learn to socialize with other chimps. Then the primate center, strapped for cash, sold Nim to an NYU center that tested vaccines on animals, where the director readily admitted that “there’s no way to carry out research on animals and for it to be humane.”
Luckily, Nim had a human friend in a Bob Ingersoll, an Oklahoma student who had worked with him at the primate center and who convinced a slick trial lawyer to represent the chimp in an animal cruelty lawsuit. That case never went to court but led to Nim being sold to the noted animal rights activist Cleveland Amory, who shipped him to a Texas ranch primarily populated by abused equines.
Nim ultimately found peace in his old age with others of his kind and died in 2000 at the age of 26. But Project Nim lingers in the mind for all sorts of reasons, none more important than the ”playing God” aspects of the research and what seems to be a curious case of cluelessness on the part of the people involved.
Whether or not it’s important to find out if animals can be taught to communicate like humans is a question the film refuses to answer. It’s obvious we communicate with animals already, as anyone who has ever had a pet can attest. But what’s the ultimate goal of this research? To create simians as intelligent as Cornelius and Dr. Zira? To discover the difference between human and animal cognition? Or is it simply a way to justify a large research grant? There’s a certain hubristic zeal to the enterprise that comes off as distasteful.
Further, knowing that Nim would grow up to be large and aggressive — in other words, a normal chimp — puts the experiment in another light. Terrace admits “no one keeps a chimp for more than five years,” so treating him like a human, then dumping him when he’s of no further use, is not just insensitive, but it also looks like a sophisticated form of animal cruelty. Not that Terrace will cop to this — he ultimately describes Project Nim as a failure, noting blithely that “knowing words doesn’t mean you can string them together.”
You could also add that knowing how to teach an animal to sign doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to treat him humanely. In Planet of the Apes, head simian scientist Dr. Zaius declares that “to suggest that we can learn anything about the simian nature from a study of man is sheer nonsense.” But Project Nim suggests that by studying chimps, we might learn more about human nature than we really want to know.
Michael Norton: How to buy happiness
At TEDxCambridge, Michael Norton shares fascinating research on how money can, indeed buy happiness — when you don’t spend it on yourself. Listen for surprising data on the many ways pro-social spending can benefit you, your work, and (of course) other people.
Through clever studies, Michael Norton studies how we feel about what we buy and spend. Full bio »
What would Earth be like to us if it were a cube instead of spherical? Is this even possible?
Physicist: The Earth is really round. It’s not the roundest damn thing ever, but it’s up there. If the Earth were the size of a basketball our mountains and valleys would be substantially smaller than the bumps on the surface of that basketball. And there’s a good reason for that. Rocks may seem solid, but on a planetary scale they’re squishier than soup. A hundred mile column of stone is freaking heavy, and the unfortunate rocks at the bottom are going to break in a hurry. Part of what keeps mountains short is erosion, but a bigger component is that the taller a mountain is the more it tends to sink under its own weight. So as a planet gets bigger, and gets more gravity, the weight of the material begins to overwhelm the strength of that material, and the planet is pulled into a sphere. Phobos (left), a very small moon, isn’t big enough to generate the gravity necessary to crush itself into a sphere. Unlike its host planet Mars (right). So a tiny planet could be cube shaped (it’s not likely to form that way, but whatev’s). Something the size of the Earth, however, is doomed to be hella round. This Cube-Earth is a lot more livable than it should be. Life on a cubic Earth would be pretty different. Although gravity on the surface wouldn’t generally point toward the exact center of the Earth anymore (that’ a symptom of being a sphere), it will still point roughly in toward the center. So, the closer you are to an edge, the more gravity will make it feel as though you’re on a slope. So, although it won’t look like it, it will feel like each of the six sides forms a bowl. This has some very profound effects. If you walk around the Earth’s equator (left) your altitude says almost perfectly even. If you walk around the cube-Earth’s equator, cutting four of the faces in half, you’d experience “altitudes” as high as 2,600km (Everest is 8.8km). The 8 corners of the cube would be 4,700km higher than the centers of each face. The seas and atmosphere would flow to the lowest point they can find and as such would puddle in a small region in the center of each face, no more than a thousand miles or so across. However, both the seas and atmosphere would be several times deeper. Which doesn’t count for as much as you might think. Here on Earth (sphere-Earth), if you’re around 5km above sea level most of the air is below you. The vast majority of the Earth would take the form of vast, barren expanses of rock, directly exposed to space. If you were standing on the edge of a face, and looked back toward the center, you’d be able to clearly see the round bubble of air and water extending above the flat surface. I strongly suspect that it would be pretty. All life (land based life anyway) would be relegated to a thin ring around the shore of those bubble seas a couple dozen miles across. Cross-section of a face: Gravity still points roughly toward the center of the cube-Earth. As a result the water (blue) and air (light blue) flows “downhill” and accumulates at the center of each face. The only land that could be inhabited is the land surounding the sea, where the air meets the ground (green lines). This picture is way out of scale. There is no where near this much air and water on our Earth. Assuming that the cube was oriented in the way most people are probably imagining it right now, with the poles in the center of two of the faces, then two of those bubble seas would take the form of solid ice cap blocks. What’s really cool is that the cube-Earth would have 6 completely isolated regions. There’s no good reason, beyond some kind of “local panspermia“, for the life on each face to be related to the life on each of the other faces. If the biospheres took different routes you could even have a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on some faces (like we have) and a hydrogen/nitrogen/carbon-dioxide atmosphere on others (like our old atmosphere 3 billion years ago). The small area would also affect (end) large-scale air and water movement. You wouldn’t have to worry about hurricanes, but the cube-Earth would also have a really hard time equalizing temperature. If you’ve jumped into the Pacific Ocean on the west coast (of the United States) you’re familiar with the teeth-chattering horror of the Arctic currents, and if you’ve been in the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast (USA again) you’re no doubt familiar with the surprisingly pleasant equatorial currents. Point is: there’s a lot of thermal energy being carried around by the air and water. On cube-Earth you’d have to deal with huge seasonal temperature fluctuations. If I had to guess; it’s unlikely that complex life would evolve on a cube Earth. However! If it did, then their space program would be as easy as a long walk, and their handsomest physicists would spend their time pondering what a round Earth would be like. By the by, the cube earth photo is by “Altered Realities“.Q: What would Earth be like to us if it were a cube instead of spherical? Is this even possible?
Humanity 101 of the Day: Vlogbrother Hank Green presents visiting aliens with a time-saving primer on humans.
What I want people to realize is, this isn’t a video about talking to aliens, it’s a video about understanding ourselves. We are stuck inside of humanity…it is the only way we have of experiencing things. Attempting to explain humanity to an imaginary, ignorant, intelligent being, actually sheds a great deal of light on the knowledge that we take for granted.
