Encephalon #53: Out of Africa

Welcome to the 53rd edition of Encephalon, the premier blog carnival for cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience and other mindy / brainy -ology's. If I'm not mistaken, this is the very first Encephalon to be hosted from Africa. (Yay for globalization!). Cue a gratuitous stereotype-reinforcing picture of Africa:


With that safely out of the way, we can proceed with the fun...

First out of the blocks is Mo the Neurophilosoph[er] with the longest blog post I've ever seen (it's very good too). The post is a detailed history of the renowned neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and the invention of the Montreal Procedure.

Doctor Spurt of Effortless Incitement is recently big into chimps, he's got two great posts on our closest cousins. The first is on the surprising finding that chimps use self-distraction to counteract impulsivity and the second covers a cool PNAS paper on stress reduction via consolation.

Scicurious of Neurotic Physiology submitted a post related to my own research interests (bless her heart): she has the lowdown on a PLoS ONE paper that found culture influences how we process faces.

Chris of Ouroboros (as in the mythical serpent eating its own tail) has a post sure to get Aubrey de Grey excited: he covers a paper that found a way of counteracting age-related decline in neurological function. (In mice, alas).

Vaughn of Mind Hacks visited London's red light district recently. For research purposes. No, really.

Neuronism is a new blog that looks promising (check it out!). The author submitted two posts: the first covers the widely-reported Nature Neuroscience paper about predicting hits or misses in basketball from 'thin slices' and the second is about grid cells.

David of deadpopstar has a really odd name for his blog; which certainly doesn't explain why he knows a lot about Cochlear implants. (That, I suspect, may have something to do with his Ph.d...). Anyway, his post is about a couple of papers on ways of improving the implants.

Jake of Pure Pedantry is a veritable research blogging machine. (I'm not jealous of his work ethic or anything...). His latest piece is on an example of encoding diversity, namely, orthogonal encoding. I'm not at all sure I understand what's going on, but it looks pretty darn important.

Next is posts by two of the Neuroanthropology authors, Greg and Paul. The former disputes the notion that the difference in the variance in math ability between men and women has biological roots, and the latter produced a useful post listing some of the web's best neuroscience resources.

Jennifer Gibson, writing for Brain Blogger, has a fascinating piece about the new theory that the visual system generates images that predict one tenth of a second into the future. Crucially, the theory, dubbed "perceiving the present", seemingly explains how optical illusions arise.

Brain Stimulant, appropriately enough, submitted a post on transcranial magnetic stimulation as a treatment for Asperger's syndrome.

Finally, a trifecta of posts from Sharp Brains: Laurie Bartels with a list of resources related to neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, Adrian Preda on how the brain benefits from exercise, and Alvaro with a roundup of cognitive health news.

That's it! The next edition of the carnival will be hosted by the most excellent Neurophilosophy on September 15th. If you would like to contribute, send an email to {encephalon}{dot}{host}{at}{gmail}{dot}{com}.

Swedish lake monster vs. Hume

AFP is carrying the story that Sweden's answer to the Loch Ness monster, the so-called "Storsjöodjuret" or "Great Lake Monster", has been spotted at Lake Storsjön in the center of the country. (A sculptural representation is at left. Note: the AFP calls the creature "Storsjoe" for some reason). A group dedicated to finding Storsjöodjuret - and partially funded by the local government - is responsible for the story, and they've released footage on their website from an infrared camera they've installed on one of the lake's islets. (The ~$62,000 camera system the group has set up is described here). From what I gather, the creature itself is supposed to be six meters long, serpent-like, with humps on its back and the head of a dog or a cat. The footage, admittedly, is quite odd and depics a vaguely snake-like creature floating across the screen. However, the video is very low-resolution and indistinct so it's hard to make out what's going on. Moreover, there are no reference-markers, making it impossible to determine whether the thing in the footage is small and close-by or large and far away. (The same issue that came up in the "gas station ghost" case). A further problem is that it's not quite clear where the camera is installed - is it under water and pointing horizontally or above water and pointing diagonally downwards? My untrained eye suggests it's underwater, in which case a close-by snake, worm or other small creature are plausible candidates. Indeed, even if the camera is installed above water, a small and close-by serpentine creature known to science is sill a distinct possibility.

Coming on the heels of the great bigfoot hoax, it seems mythical creatures are the flavor of the moment. So let's be entirely clear: cryptozoology is utter bollocks. While there is absolutely no doubt that there are numerous undiscovered species, the chances that the classic cryptids - Bigfoots, the various lake monsters, griffins, yetis, unicorns, etc. - exist is vanishingly small. (It's not impossible, certainly, but enormously unlikely). I will explain presently why this is the case, but for now consider the following. The minimum viable population of a large (and thus likely k-selected) animal is hundreds or thousands of individuals. With billions of people running around equipped with many millions of cameras, it's nearly inconceivable that no compelling evidence would exist if there really were thousands of individuals of some large undiscovered species. (And, if there are large cryptids they must have evolved, so where is the fossil evidence?). Moreover, the pattern-seeking human mind seems especially prone to inventing lake monsters: Wikipedia's "List of Reported Lake Monsters" is huge, including 20+ 'species' from Sweden. Even the most ardent cryptozoologist has to admit that the chances of all these stories being true is infinitesimal, which means that even true believers have to invoke the normal skeptical explanations of misidentification, hoaxing, false memories, and the general unreliability of eyewitness testimony. But, given the lack compelling evidence (like high-resolution, clearly unhoaxed video or a live specimen or a dead body), it's unclear why any of the stories ought to be taken seriously. That is, the skeptical explanations of cryptids is a bit like Daniel Dennett's universal acid: once invoked, they eat through all the purported cases.

Carl Sagan's quote "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is justly famous. But too few skeptics realize that the principle behind Sagan's line goes back to the great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. (Indeed, it might go back even further), In the chapter "Of Miracles" in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume writes:

The plain consequence [of the preceding argument] is... ‘that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.’ When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

While Hume frames his discussion in terms of miracles, they're not crucial to the argument; the principle is generalizable and even formalizeable. Basically, Hume argues that whenever we're confronted with some body of evidence, call it E, for the truth of some proposition, P, we must weigh the evidence against the probability, given everything else we know, that P is true. So let's apply this logic to the Storsjöodjuret case. The point of the previous paragraph was to establish that, in this case, the prior probability of P being true is extremely low. That is, there is only a very small chance, given everything else we know, that there are previously unknown 6-meter serpentine monsters with dog-like heads in a particular Swedish lake. And how about the evidence? Well, we have a low-resolution, indistinct video of a snake-like thing and some anecdotes. So what's the greater 'miracle'? That hundreds or thousands of huge snake-like creatures with no known ancestors live in a Swedish lake and happen never to have been filmed clearly, caught or washed up on shore? Or that the video is of something else, that well-documented human biases deceived the eyewitnesses, and that the local people (and government) are telling tall-tales to attract tourists?

Make up your own mind, but I'm with Hume on this one.

Facebook for Academics

Richard Price, a philosopher at All Souls College, Oxford, has just launched Academia, a social networking-type site for academics. The site aims to display every academic in the world - from graduate students to emeritus professors - in a tree-like structure of universities, colleges, departments and so on. The idea is for each academic to create a personal page on the site (here's mine, here's my supervisor's), which then lists her research interests, websites, papers, conference presentations, and so on. There is also the equivalent of Facebook's "friending": you can add someone as a "contact", which, like Facebook, then sends that person an email to confirm the connection. All this information is then browseable via the above mentioned tree, which displays how people are connected to their departments and colleagues. It's a bit hard to explain so have a look at UKZN's slot on the tree.

By the way... I haven't yet mentioned Academic Blogs, a wiki for listing academic blogs and thus a great way to find serious reading material. Ionian Enchantment is listed under Neuroscience / Cognitive Science and even has its own page.

Video: Slow-motion bursting water balloon

Ok, so this is totally random and has nothing whatsoever to do with this blog, but you just have to see the video embedded below (or click here). It's awesome.

Skeptics' Circle #94

Hot on the heels of the 1st Carnival of the Africans, the 94th edition of the Skeptics' Circle is out at Reduce to Common Sense. Recommended: Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes on the latest silliness emanating from AiG; Breaking Spells on pareidolia and anthropomorphism; and Skelliot’s Weblog on Ray Comfort (of "The Atheist's Nightmare" fame) and the argument from design.

Go forth and read!

Neuropod podcast

Nature Neuroscience's monthly podcast, Neuropod, is just superb and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology. Perhaps the coolest thing about Neuropod is that it mostly consists of interviews with the actual authors of notable recent papers. This month's edition is particularly good, it features interviews with the authors of:

1. The awesome recent Nature article that tracked the development of altruism in children and how it may be related to parochialism
   
2. A fascinating essay in Nature on the role of imprinted genes in mental illnesses such as autism and schizophrenia
3. A Nature Neuroscience paper, with very promising future applications, on the role of the neurotransmitter GABA in obesity in mice, and
   
4. An awesome Nature Reviews Neuroscience piece (coauthored by Teller and James Randi!) on how magicians can help neuroscience research (and possibly vice versa).

As I said, just awesome. Check it out!

Pop-sci book meme, Or, I don't read enough

So Jennifer of Cocktail Party Physics has put together a fun popular science book meme and, since it's Friday and I'm procrastinating, I thought I'd join in. This is a bit embarrassing... I've only read 9 of the book on Jennifer's list. Although, honestly, I'm not that into physics.

Here are the rules:
1. Highlight those you've read in full
2. Asterisk those you intend to read
3. Add any additional popular science books you think belong on the list
4. Link back to me [i.e. Jennifer]... so I can keep track of everyone's additions.

The list:
1. Micrographia, Robert Hooke
2. The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
3. Never at Rest, Richard Westfall
4. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
5. Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney
6. The Devil's Doctor, Philip Ball
7. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
8. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye
9. Physics for Entertainment, Yakov Perelman
10. 1-2-3 Infinity, George Gamow
11. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
12. Warmth Disperses, Time Passes, Hans Christian von Bayer
13. Alice in Quantumland, Robert Gilmore
14. Where Does the Weirdness Go? David Lindley
15. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
16. A Force of Nature, Richard Rhodes
17. Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne
18. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
19. Universal Foam, Sidney Perkowitz
20. Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman
21. The Code Book, Simon Singh
22. The Elements of Murder, John Emsley
23. *Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer
24. Time's Arrow, Martin Amis
25. The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson
26. Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman
27. *Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter (I've read big chunks of it)
28. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine
29. A Matter of Degrees, Gino Segre
30. *The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss
31. E=mc², David Bodanis
32. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife
33. Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman
34. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin
35. Warped Passages, Lisa Randall
36. Apollo's Fire, Michael Sims
37. *Flatland, Edward Abbott
38. Fermat's Last Theorem, Amir Aczel
39. *Stiff, Mary Roach
40. Astroturf, M.G. Lord
41. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
42. Longitude, Dava Sobel
43. *The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
44. The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle
45. The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio
46. Math and the Mona Lisa, Bulent Atalay
47. This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin
48. The Executioner's Current, Richard Moran
49. *Krakatoa, Simon Winchester
50. Pythagorus' Trousers, Margaret Wertheim
51. Neuromancer, William Gibson
52. The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios
53. The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, Sandra Hempel
54. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Katrina Firlik
55. Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps, Peter Galison
56. The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
57. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
58. *The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
59. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
60. Consilience, E.O. Wilson
61. *Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould
62. Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
63. Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel
64. The Life of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
65. Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris
66. Storm World, Chris Mooney
67. The Carbon Age, Eric Roston
68. The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind
69. Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
70. From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne
71. Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson
72. Chaos, James Gleick
73. *Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos
74. The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky
75. Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais

My ten picks for what should be added to the list:

1. Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Carl Zimmer
2. Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
3. The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
4. Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett
5. How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker
6. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
7. Power and Prosperity, Mancur Olson (yes, it's social science but it's damn good social science).
   
8. Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science, Martin Gardner
9. Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst
10. Pluto's Republic, Peter Medawar
    

(Via PZ).

Carnival of the Africans #1

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Carnival of the Africans! The carnival is an outgrowth of an initiative I launched a while ago to foster better cooperation and communication between South African skeptical or science bloggers. A specifically South African carnival, however, struck me as far too narrow - there are very few African science bloggers (AFAIK) and part of the point of the carnival is to encourage people to start their own blogs or existing bloggers to cover science. Moreover, Africa as a whole needs science: it needs science to develop, to prosper, and to grow the reality-based community. So, as you'll see if you look at the guidelines, this carnival has an Africa-wide mandate: it covers any science or skeptical topic related to Africa and any science blogging by Africans. The aim, ultimately, is to promote the skeptical and scientific world view, but more concretely, to stimulate discussion, disseminate good blogging and to cultivate a greater sense of community among the small number of science-minded African bloggers.

A quick note on carnivals for the uninitiated. A carnival is a kind of blog event that brings together in a single place various bloggers' good posts on a specific topic. For example, once a month the Carnival of the Africans brings together science and skeptical posts on or by Africans. The point, again, is to highlight our best posts, to allow discussion and engagement, to create a community among African science bloggers and to attract readers to our blogs. As I've noted before, participating in carnivals is a really good idea. I encourage everyone, by the way, to link to this edition to spread the word. Also, carnivals only work if there is active participation - I've had to forage for posts to include here, I strongly encourage active submissions in future.

Without further ado, this month's Carnival of the Africans...

First out of the gate is "Captain" Owen Swart of 01 and the universe with two posts: the first is on quackery about chronic-fatigue syndrome (aka ME) and the second is a lactose eating session homeopathic suicide attempt! (Also check out his follow-up)... No prizes for guessing he survived.

Effortless Incitement has a substantive post about an awesome recent study in PNAS that concluded non-verbal displays of pride and shame are innate. That Darwin fellow sure was on to something...

George Claasen, founder of Sceptic South Africa and author of the blog Prometheus Unbound, is probably South Africa's most prominent skeptic, so it's certainly appropriate to include a post by him. Back in July George produced a particularly noteworthy post combining criticism of Angus Buchan (who allegedly has 'faith like potatoes') with a report on a recent survey he did on South Africans' belief in bollocks. Depressingly, large majorities buy into ESP, alien visitation, telepathy, and young earth creationism. South African skeptics clearly have work to do.

the little book of capoeira might be the blog with the world's least descriptive title but Wim produced a good post outlining the basics of the skeptical toolkit. He takes recent events in South Africa as an example of why a functional and well-honed baloney detector is indispensable.

Amanuensis is, admittedly, a blog that focuses on the lesser science of economics, but let's be inclusive. Simon has a daunting but fascinating three-part series of posts on University of Chicago economist John List. The posts, in order, are "List-onomics", "The Interpretation of Giving", and "Homo Economicus evolves, or not". These aren't for the faint-hearted, but they certainly repay careful reading.

Next up is Angela of The Skeptic Detective with a thoughtful post about discovering her doctor is a crank. On that score, my doctor routinely prescribes antibiotics when I have the flu. She knows antibiotics don't attack viruses, but she has some sort of convoluted explanation I didn't really follow. I really should get round to emailing Steve Novella about this...

Hugo of thinktoomuch submitted a post summarizing his criticisms of the Creation Ministries International's seminar series at Stellenbosch University. Oh man creationists annoy me - can't they at least leave universities alone?

Danie Krugel. Sigh. When will this guy go away? Well, let's hope the following two posts will help that along a bit... The excellent subtle shift in emphasis has long attacked Krugel's nonsense, and has two recent posts on the latest developments. The first piece deals with silly and irresponsible academics partly endorsing Krugel's device and the second with Krugel's most recent failure.

The new Yet Another Sceptic's Blog has already produced some great material, particularly, a post on the tragedy in Krugersdorp arguing death metal is not to blame.

Finally, my own contribution, also on the events in Krugersdorp. I take the same line as Yet Another Sceptic's Blog and argue there is little reason to think heavy metal music was causally involved.

That's it! The next edition of the carnival is scheduled for September 28th and will be hosted by Wim over at the little book of capoeira. If you'd like to contribute, please check out the guidelines and then email Wim at {wim}{dot}{louw}{at}{gmail}{dot}{com}. (Removing the brackets and replacing 'dot' and 'at' with the appropriate symbols). If you'd like to volunteer to host the carnival in the future, please email Mike at ionian.enchantment@gmail.com.