The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay

We humans define ourselves by our extraordinary mental powers—feats of memory among them. The Latin name we gave our species, Homo sapiens, translates as “wise man.” And yet, in our hyperdistracted modern lives, we fall victim to what is popularly known as refrigerator blindness, a common affliction defined in a (tongue-in-cheek) paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal as the “selective loss of visual acuity in association with a common foraging behavior.” Many of us have faced the seemingly impossible task of finding the peanut butter hidden behind the pickles. But it actually wasn’t hidden at all—we just overlooked it. For us, it’s a forgivable lapse, and easily rectified. Not so for Canada jays, who use boreal and subalpine forests like a massive refrigerator-freezer.

Canada jays don’t store their food at a single location, like the average 0.5-cubic-meter North American fridge. They cache it in the innumerable trees covering a territory of 26 to 130 hectares, or 36 to 180 soccer fields. To see themselves through the winter, they will store just about anything, including spiders, berries, seeds, and carrion, plus bits of bread, nuts, and cheese procured from passing humans. Their survival, and that of their brood, depends on their formidable memory—and their capacity to understand thievery.

Corvids are aware that other birds may be watching where they cache their food. To avoid getting robbed, scrub jays, for example, employ highly elaborate tactics similar to a magician’s use of misdirection. They discreetly hide food in one location while pretending to hide it in numerous other places to draw the observer’s attention away from the real thing. That kind of awareness requires a high level of perception, says psychologist Nicola Clayton, who founded the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England. She shares Strickland’s fascination with corvids. One of the big ideas her team explores is mental time travel, the ability to recall the past or plan for the future, an ability we have long assumed is unique to humans. What this reveals, Clayton concludes, is that these jays can put themselves in the place of another individual and alter their behavior based on what might happen in the future.

Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information. London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.

- More Here

Roots Of Attention Distraction

Lost in an avalanche of "evidence", one forgets to ask the simple question - What is attention for? 

Is the current technology the cause of our lack of awareness and perpetual attention distraction? 

If that's the case, then we should have reached moral utopia millennia ago (given social media and video games are mere recent entrants). Clearly, utopia didn't dawn and we are still stuck in moral stone age.  Deep thinkers and realists were always a rare commodity. 

May be, we don't know what to do with our attention. What if we are viscerally convinced that our distractions deserve our most precious attention?

L.M. Sacasas ponders: 

As I see it, there is a critical question that tends to get lost in the current wave of attention discourse: What is attention for? Attention is taken up as a capacity that is being diminished by our technological environment with the emphasis falling on digitally induced states of distraction. But what are we distracted from? If our attention were more robust or better ordered, to what would we give it? Pascal had an answer, and Weil did, too, it seems to me. I’m not so sure that we do, and I wonder whether that leaves us more susceptible to the attention economy. Often the problem seems to get framed as little more than the inability read long, challenging texts. I enjoy reading long, challenging texts, and I do find that, like Carr and Hari, this has become more challenging. But I don’t think reading long, challenging texts is essential to human flourishing nor the most important end toward which our attention might be ordered.

We have, it seems, an opportunity to think a bit more deeply not only about the challenges our techno-social milieu presents to our capacity to attend to the world, challenges I suspect many of us feel keenly, but also about the good toward which our attention ought to be directed. What deserves our attention? What are the goods for the sake of which we ought to cultivate our capacity for attention?

On this score, attention discourse often strikes me as an instance of a larger pattern that characterizes modern society: a focus on means rather than ends. I’d say it also illustrates the fact that it is far easier to identify the failures and disorders of contemporary society than it is to identify the goods that we ought to be pursuing. In “Tradition and the Modern Age,” Hannah Arendt spoke of the “ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not ‘What are we fighting against’ but ‘What are we fighting for?’”

Do Wild Animals Get PTSD?

We are not talking about dogs or cats here (yes, they do get PTSD). This is yet another huge step in understanding all living beings in this planet suffer, emote, and every damn thing we sapiens experience. 

It is indeed a huge step but alas, sapiens moral compass refuses to move. 

Studies of the ecology of fear started in the 1990s. Before then, scientists assumed that the impact of a predator on an individual prey animal was either deadly or fleeting. If a hare survived a coyote attack, or a zebra escaped the claws of a lion, it would move on and live its life as before.

But research shows that fear can alter the long-term behavior and physiology of wild animals, from fish to elephants, Zanette and Clinchy write in the 2020 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. “Fear is a response all animals mount to avoid being killed by predators,” says Zanette. “It’s enormously beneficial, because it keeps you alive to breed another day. But it does carry costs.”

The reasons to fear are clear. Recent studies have found that up to 32 percent of adult female giraffes in the Serengeti carry scars from lion attacks, 25 percent of harbor porpoises in the southern North Sea have claw and bite marks from gray seals and 100 percent of manta rays in some African waters bear multiple bite wounds from sharks. These survivors may carry memories of terror along with their physical scars.

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Some researchers now disagree with this human-centric view of PTSD, however. “A lot of things are shared between humans and other mammals,” says Sarah Mathew, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University. This includes learning about and responding to danger, and avoiding situations that present life-threatening risks. Mathew believes that PTSD has deep evolutionary roots, and that some of its symptoms arise from adaptations — like a heightened state of alert — that allow individuals of many species, including our own, to manage danger.

This evolutionary perspective is beginning to change minds. Clinchy and Zanette have organized conferences on the ecology of fear and PTSD that bring together ecologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. “The psychiatrists and psychologists were talking about PTSD as maladaptive,” recalls Clinchy. “We were arguing that this is an adaptive behavior, to show these extreme reactions in this particular context, because that increases your survival.”

Diamond came to agree. The brain of someone with PTSD, he says, “is not a damaged or dysfunctional brain, but an overprotective brain. You’re talking about someone that has survived an attack on his or her life. So the hypervigilance, the inability to sleep, the persistent nightmares that cause the person to relive the trauma — this is part of an adaptive response gone awry.”

“There’s a stigma involved in PTSD, frequently,” says Zanette, “so people don’t seek treatment. But if patients can understand that their symptoms are perfectly normal, that there is an evolutionary function for their symptoms, this might relieve some of the stigma around it so that people might go and seek treatment.”

- More Here

Octopus On Ecstasy And 2021 Oscar Winner

My Octopus Teacher won the best documentary Oscar this year. 

If you haven't watched it yet, please do so. 

Next, I am not thrilled by this ecstasy experiment on Octopus; some insights from the brilliant Octopus mind: 

They were given a high dose of MDMA first by dissolving it into the water, but they didn’t like it. The study author, Gul Dolen, put it like this:

“They really didn’t like it. They looked like they were freaked out. They were just taking these postures of super hypervigilance. They would sit in the corner of the tank and stare at everything.”

Not a great start for the study or the octopuses. They were grumpy before the drugs and now they were freaked out, too. But things got better.

When they were given lower doses, more the kind of dose that you or I might take if we were to ever do that kind of thing, something else happened. Something both strange, and exactly what you might expect. As Dolen says:

“After MDMA, they were essentially hugging… really just much more relaxed in posture, and using a lot more of their body to interact with the other octopus.”

Just like high humans at a festival, they were hugging. But there’s more. The once-grumpy, antisocial octopuses now “Somersaulted through the water as though they were dancing.” Somehow, as far as surface behaviour goes, MDMA seems to affect octopuses in the same ways as us.

[---]

So What Did We Learn?

Aside from the obvious — octopuses love to hug on ecstasy too — it’s pretty useful for biologists to know. Because the creatures are so old and predate us by so long, it can give an indication of when some brain systems evolved. Basically, we probably picked up the brain system affected by the MDMA from our animal ancestors rather than it developing in humans as we evolved. It was there before us.

It also shows that basic brain chemistry plays a big role in our social psychology, whereas previously it was thought that complex brain systems were responsible.

More specifically, the study concluded a couple of bits for the people here for the science and not the high octopus:

• “Sociality is widespread across the animal kingdom.”
• “Serotonin is an evolutionarily ancient molecule.”
• “Neurotransmitter’s prosocial functions may be conserved across evolution.”

There’s plenty more if you wish to read the full study, here.

But to summarise, octopuses on ecstasy behave exactly as you would expect: they dance and hug each other. 

What I've Been Reading

Complexity science does study something distinctive - namely the emergent features of systems that are composed of a lot of components that interact repeatedly in a disordered way. The reason why it has been hard to identify what is distinctive about complex systems is that there are many different kinds of emergent properties and products of complex systems, and they are not all found in all complex systems. The common features of complex systems manifest themselves differently in different kinds of systems. 

What is a Complex System? by James Ladyman and Karoline Wiesner. 

This is one of the most important books you will read in your life. Developing even a rudimentary understanding of the complexity and complex systems will make one look at life differently (for good) plus it will help develop a sense of humility and gratitude for what we have without believing in magic and conspiracies. 

The complex system helps in understanding things such as how animals sufferings in factory farms will lead to a pandemic that could wipe out our species. 

Ladyman and Karoline attempt to "unpack" complex systems by avoiding biases put forth by existing researchers and keeping it open-ended as humanely as possible. They have also kept math and technical details to the minimum.  

They have done an enormous favor to a common reader by defining some of the salient features of the complex systems (not all always applies to all complex systems):

1. Numerosity: complex systems involve many interactions among many components. 
2. Disorder and diversity: the interactions in a complex system are not coordinated or controlled centrally, and the components may differ. 
3. Feedback: the interactions in complex systems are iterated so that there is feedback from previous interactions on a time scale relevant to the system's emergent dynamics. 
4. Non-equilibrium: complex systems are open to the environment and are often driven by something external. 
5. Spontaneous order and self-organization: complex systems exhibit structure and order that arises out of the interactions among their parts. 
6. Nonlinearity: complex systems exhibit nonlinear dependence on parameters or external drivers. 
7. Robustness: the structure and function of complex systems is stable under relevant perturbations. 
8. Nested structure and modularity: there may be multiple scales of structure, clustering, and specialization of function in complex systems. 
9. History and memory: complex systems often require a very long history to exist and often store information about history. 
10. Adaptive behavior: complex systems are often able to modify their behavior depending on the state of the environment and the predictions they make about it.

We argue that a system is complex if it has some or all of spontaneous order and self-organization, non-linear behavior, robustness history and memory, nested structure and modularity, and adaptive behavior. These features arise from the combination of the properties of numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium. We argue that there are different kinds of complex systems because some systems exhibit some but not all of the features. 

Chaos is not always complexity:

Complexity is often linked with chaos, and it may be conflated with it, but the behavior of a chaotic system is indistinguishable from random behavior. It is true that there are systems that exhibit complexity partly in virtue of being chaotic, but their complexity is something over and above their chaotic nature. Furthermore, since chaotic behavior is a special feature of some deterministic systems, any dynamical system that is stochastic is by definition not chaotic, and yet complexity scientists study many such systems. 

Measuring Complexity:

Ideas such as "logical depth" measure not complexity but order. Complexity is a multifaceted phenomenon and that complex systems have a variety of features not all of which are found in all of them. This implies that assigning a single number to complexity cannot do justice. 

A variety of different measures would be required to capture all our intuitive ideas about what is meant by complexity. 

- Physicist Murray Gell-Mann

In summary: 

There are many important theoretical questions on which complexity science bears, the most obvious ones concerned with relationships between life and nonliving matter, and between conscious and non-conscious matter. The general implication of our analysis for these matters is that the dichotomy between atoms and molecules and advanced life forms is a very crude way of seeing the many layers of structure that are found at different scales.  The only way to understand the emergence of life is by studying the processes that occur in self-organizing physical systems not just physical structures. 

Once the complexity of nonliving systems, such as the solar system and the Earth and its climate, is grasped in detail, the difference between life and non-life seems to be less of a mysterious leap and more of a continuum. 

When we think about complex systems in the right way, we can abstract from some of their features and understand the simplicity that underlies the wonderful complexity!

Shifting Baselines Syndrome

Similar to cockroaches, humans are extremely adaptable creatures in every direction of the spectrum.  Evolution gave us this adaptability so that if we lose an arm or eye, we can adapt quickly. I am still alive and drinking beer even though I am missing Max. It helps to keep us breathing. 

But the dark side of it maybe this makes most of us lack gratitude for what we have; we would rather lose everything and fight in a mad-max world than sacrifice a few stupid habits. It is scary! 

The "official" term for that is Shifting Baselines Syndrome:

David Wallace-Wells, author of the popular and terrifying climate change book The Uninhabitable Earth, discussed this possibility in a New York Magazine piece written during the apocalyptic fires late last year in Australia. One might have thought that fires consuming hundreds of millions of acres and killing more than a billion animals would be a wake-up call, but instead, Wallace-Wells writes, “a climate disaster of unimaginable horror has been unfolding for almost two full months, and the rest of the world is hardly paying attention.”

Maybe climate chaos, a rising chorus of alarm signals from around the world, will simply become our new normal. Hell, maybe income inequality, political dysfunction, and successive waves of a deadly virus will become our new normal. Maybe we’ll just get used to [waves hands] all this.

Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.

[---]

So what are shifting baselines? Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience.

And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.

Over time, the fish goes extinct — an enormous, tragic loss — but no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action. By the time the fish go extinct, the fishers barely notice, because they no longer valued the fish anyway.

[---]

Even those big personal moments fade quickly. One of the most robust findings in modern psychology — made famous by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert — is that we have an incredibly robust “psychological immune system.”

We tend to dramatically overestimate the effect that large events, good or bad, will have on our happiness. We think the death of a family member will make us enduringly less happy, or winning the lottery will make us enduringly happier. In fact, what psychologists find again and again is that we quickly return to our personal happiness equilibrium. A soldier who loses a leg and a soldier who returns home safe to a new baby will generally, a year or two later, be roughly as happy as they were before those events. It’s called “hedonic adaptation.”

Irene Pepperberg's African Grey, Griffin Kicks Harvard Students Butts In Memory Test

It worked like this: Tiny colored pom-poms were covered with cups and then shuffled, so participants had to track which object was under which cup. The experimenter then showed them a pom-pom that matched one of the same color hidden under one of the cups and asked them to point at the cup. (Griffin, of course, used his beak to point.) The participants were tested on tracking two, three, and four different-colored pom-poms. The position of the cups were swapped zero to four times for each of those combinations. Griffin and the students did 120 trials; the children did 36.

The game tests the brain’s ability to retain memory of items that are no longer in view, and then updating when faced with new information, like a change in location. This cognitive system is known as visual working memory and is the one of the foundations for intelligent behavior.

So how did the parrot fare? Griffin outperformed the 6- to 8-year-olds across all levels on average, and he performed either as well as or slightly better than the 21 Harvard undergraduates on 12 of the 14 of trial types.

That’s not bad at all for a so-called bird brain.

“Think about it: Grey parrot outperforms Harvard undergrads. That’s pretty freaking awesome,” said Hrag Pailian, the postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who led the experiment. “We had students concentrating in engineering, pre-meds, this, that, seniors, and he just kicked their butts.”

Full disclosure: Griffin has been the star of past cognitive studies, like showing he’s smarter than the typical 4-year-old and as intelligent as a 6- to 8-year-old child. But making Harvard students do a double take on their own intelligence is quite the step up.

- More Here

Soon after I started this blog, Irene Pepperberg's book Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence-and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process came out. Her relationship with Alex taught me what I was feeling, my emotions and bond with Max was special, non-transcendental, and more than love. And I wasn't alone.

Sadly, no one was interested in my zest and fascination for the beauty of these bonds.

You be good. I love you.

Those were Alex's last words to Irene. Those words still haunt me and bring tears to my eyes. Those tears and the pure beauty of these bonds keep me alive to give voice to all the animal sufferings.

I like to think of Alex, Marley, Max, and others are ambassadors to change human behavior and minds. I am honored to have lived my life with one of these ambassadors and I owe them the rest of my life.


And Irene went through a lot in this biased world...

I was uncovering cognitive abilities in Alex that no one believed were possible, and challenging science’s deepest assumptions about the origin of human cognitive abilities. And yet I was without a job. I was also without a grant. I had to apply for unemployment insurance. I ate fourteen tofu meals a week, and I kept my thermostat at 57 degrees during the winter to minimize household expenses.

What I've Been Reading

Everything I am now is because of Max. I had nothing when Max into my life, he gave me everything. Now, I have everything but I don't have Max. That's the irony and brutality life played with me. But that's how of the law of impermanence works.

People usually think my love for Max makes me say "everything I am now is because of Max." Yes, I love him more than anything but that sentence is also true without bringing love into picture. What we did together couldn't have happened if either of us were alone.

Our relationship is not transcendental (whatever that means) but it was more earthly which we don't comprehend yet.  I guess, my life is to meant to document what I experienced for future generations can use our relationship for lack of better term - a data point to comprehend these symbiotic relationships better. My aversion of individualist mindsets with me, me and more me world is hence visceral.

Merlin Sheldrake takes my collaborative and symbiotic relationship with Max to even more at a fundamental level and explains one of the most fundamental truths -  symbiotic relationships were the cause of life on earth in his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.

Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been - and continue to be - a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around five hundred million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve on their own. Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi - from the Greek words for fungi (mykes) and root (rhiza) - which can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the "wood wide web." This ancient association gave rise to all recognizable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of the plants and fungi to form healthy relationships. 

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The study of relationships can be confusing. Almost all are ambiguous. Have leaf-cutter ants domesticated the fungus that they depend on, or has the fungus domesticated the ants? Do plants farm the mycorrhizal fungi that they live with, or do the fungi farm the plants? Which way does the arrow point? This uncertainty is healthy. 

Robert Macfarlane last year with this book Underland: A Deep Time Journey (which I still have to finish) opened our minds to new truths and in turn, his book turned out to be one of the top books of the 21st century.  Merlin Sheldrake repeats history this year with this book with this story of mycorrhizal networks.

One of my favorites and underutilized tools in the AI toolkit is Graph Network Algorithms. Little did I know that David Read, a mycorrhizal biologist, and his team unleashed the network science when in 1984, they showed that carbon could pass between normal plants through fungal connections. Thirteen years later, in 1997, Suzanne Simard replicated Read's findings in natural settings and coined the phrase "Wood Wide Web."

The World Wide Web appeared to have more in common with a cell or an ecological system than a Swiss watch. Today, network science is inescapable. Pick any field of study - from neuroscience, to biochemistry, to economic systems, disease epidemics, web search engines, machine learning algorithms that underpin much of AI, to astronomy and the very structure of the universe itself, a cosmic web crisscrossed with filaments of gas and clusters of galaxies - and the chances are that it makes sense of the phenomenon using a network model.

Simard's paper and her catchy concept of wood wide web found its way into James Cameron's Avatar as Pandora where symbiotic networks and relationships thrive.



It is an impossible task to review all the nuanced details Sheldrake covers in this book. I learned so many things on each and every page!

No kidding - the book closes with how language and analogies affect the research and understandings of mycorrhizal networks.

It's the narrative that we tell that needs to be examined. I'd really love to get past the language and try to understand the phenomenon. Once again, it may be more helpful to ask why this behavior has evolved in the first place: who stands to benefit.

Today, the study of shared mycorrhizal networks is one of the fields most commonly beset with political baggage. Some portray these systems as a form of socialism by which wealth of the forest can be redistributed. Others take inspiration from mammalian family structures and parental care, with young trees nourished by their fungal connections to older and larger "mother trees". Some describe networks in terms of "biological markets," in which plants and fungi are portrayed as rational economic individuals trading on the floor of an ecological stock exchange, engaging in "sanctions," "strategic trading investments," and "market gains."

Yes, it is that ridiculous and hilarious how our language biases us into mindless ideologies that affect our thinking and makes it close to impossible to change our minds.

On the positive note, the word "symbiosis" was coined by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1877 while describing the mutualistic relationship in lichens. There is an entire chapter on lichens in this book.

We need to learn to evolve our language as our understandings of realities evolves. Unfortunately, we are dwelling in the bed of Procrustes where we twist reality to fit into our stubborn and static world of languages.

One of the great mistakes I made because of my ignorance is not adding mushrooms to Max's diet regularly. I didn't know. But now, Fluffy, Garph, Neo, and I get our daily dose of mushrooms. This is how knowledge and truth works. A simple bayesian update to learn constantly, change the mind, and bring into action every day.

The bigger question is what other known unknowns I don't know yet?

Wisdom Of The Week

Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, had also found evidence that the brain is wired to forget. Frankland was studying the production of new neurons, or neurogenesis, in adult mice. The process had long been known to occur in the brains of young animals, but had been discovered in the hippocampi of mature animals only about 20 years earlier. Because the hippocampus is involved in memory formation, Frankland and his team wondered whether increasing neurogenesis in adult mice could help the rodents to remember.

In a paper published in 2014, the researchers found precisely the opposite: rather than making the animals’ memories better, increasing neurogenesis caused the mice to forget more3. As contradictory as that initially seemed to Frankland, given the assumption that new neurons would mean more capacity for (and potentially better) memory, he says it now makes sense. “When neurons integrate into the adult hippocampus, they integrate into an existing, established circuitry. If you have information stored in that circuit and start rewiring it, then it’s going to make that information harder to access,” he explains.

Because the hippocampus is not where long-term memories are stored in the brain, its dynamic nature is not a flaw but a feature, Frankland says — something that evolved to aid learning. The environment is changing constantly and, to survive, animals must adapt to new situations. Allowing fresh information to overwrite the old helps them to achieve that.

[---]

Hardt thinks that Alzheimer’s disease might also be better understood as a malfunction of forgetting rather than remembering. If forgetting is truly a well-regulated, innate part of the memory process, he says, it makes sense that dysregulation of that process could have negative effects. “What if what’s actually going on is an overactive forgetting process that goes haywire and erases more than it should?” he asks.

That question is yet to be answered. But more memory researchers are shifting their focus to examine how the brain forgets, as well as how it remembers. “There’s an increasing understanding that forgetting is a collection of processes in its own right, to be distinguished from encoding and consolidation and retrieval,” Anderson says.

In the past decade, researchers have begun to view forgetting as an important part of a whole. “Why do we have memory at all? As humans, we entertain this fantasy that it’s important to have autobiographical details,” Hardt says. “And that’s probably completely wrong. Memory, first and foremost, is there to serve an adaptive purpose. It endows us with knowledge about the world, and then updates that knowledge.” Forgetting enables us as individuals, and as a species, to move forwards.

“Evolution has achieved a graceful balance between the virtues of remembering and the virtues of forgetting,” Anderson says. “It’s dedicated to both permanence and resilience, but also to getting rid of things that get in the way.”

- More Here

Wisdom Of The Week

The mistake in the analysis lies deeper, perhaps—in the assumption that only a strange and traumatic sequence can have made this happen. What can be causing Trumpism? We ask, and seek for an earthquake, or at least a historical oddity or a series of highly specific causal events. The more tragic truth is that the Trumpian view of the world is the default view of mankind. Bigotry, fanaticism, xenophobia are the norms of human life—the question is not what causes them but what uncauses them, what happens in the rare extended moments that allow them to be put aside, when secular values of toleration and pluralism replace them.

It is a touching thing that Oscar Hammerstein had his people sing, apropos racial prejudice, that “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” Alas, as poor Oscar would have realized if he had stopped to think about the events that had led all those American soldiers and sailors to the South Pacific in the first place, you don’t have to be carefully taught to hate. The Hitlerians and the Japanese militarists hadn’t been carefully taught; they rushed to their lesson in the face of all evidence. Human groups, particularly those fuelled by religious fanaticism or the twentieth-century equivalent, blind nationalism, always tend toward exclusion. To eliminate the tribal instinct may be impossible, but to raise the accidental practice of pluralism to a principle is what enlightened societies struggle to accomplish. And they have.

It just turns out to be a horribly hard triumph to sustain. Along comes 1914, or 1933—or, God forbid, 2016—and the work comes crashing down. What really needs explaining is not why the Trumps of the world come forward and win. It is why they sometimes lose.

Not long ago, I had occasion to write of the divide in virtue that separates us from Shakespeare, making the point that Shakespeare believed in fate, order, and forgiveness, whereas we believe in history, justice, and compassion, and that, superior though our moral progress may seem, there are bitter truths in the old trinity. For, as Shakespeare would have grasped at once, there is no explaining Trump. He is one of those phenomena that rise regularly in history to confound us with the possibility—and black comedy—of potent evil: conscienceless, cruel and pathologically dishonest. That evil magnetizes followers of all kinds is another permanent truth. Overexplaining its rise is as foolish as pretending that it can be easily defeated. The threat it makes to an order that, however imperfect, is worth sustaining and defending reminds us of that order’s fragility. As to forgiveness, much will be demanded, even if the best happens—or the worst, at least, is avoided.

-  Adam Gopnik and Again Adam on What Will We Tell Our Children:

We teach our children history, and the history that many of them have learned in the past decade or so, at American schools and colleges, is, perhaps, unrealistic in remaining unduly progressive in tone. They learn about the brave path of the slaves’ fight for freedom, about the rise of feminism, and with these lessons they learn to be rigorously skeptical of the patriarchy—without necessarily seeing that the patriarchy survives, enraged. The strangest element of this sad time is surely that our departing President, a model of eloquence and reason, is leaving office with a successful record and a high approval rating. How Trump’s strange rise and Obama’s high rating can have coincided in the same moment will remain one of the permanent conundrums of our history.

The lesson of history—one of them, anyway—is that there is no one-way arrow in it, that tragedy lurks around every corner, that the iceberg is there even as the mighty Titanic sails out, unsinkable. Having a tragic view of life is compatible with having a positive view of our worldly duties. This is a big and abstract thought to share with children, of course, and perhaps, like so many like it, it is teachable only as a pained—at this moment, acutely pained—daily practice.

Jonathan Haidt had "predicted" this couple of decades ago. People read his books but when time comes to implement them, they go back to their old ways.... I think, that is one of the reasons that an ego maniac will soon have the nuclear button. Jonathan Haidt interview:



Actually, I think ... Empathy is a very, very hot topic in psychology, and it's a very popular word on the left in particular. Empathy is a good thing, and empathy for the preferred classes of victims. So it's important to empathize with the groups that we on the left think are so important. That's easy to do, because you get points for that.


But empathy really should get you points if you do it when it's hard to do. And, I think ... You know, we had a long 50-year period of dealing with our race problems and legal discrimination, and that was our top priority for a long time and it still is important. But I think this year, I'm hoping it will make people see that we have an existential threat on our hands. Our left-right divide, I believe, is by far the most important divide we face. We still have issues about race and gender and LGBT, but this is the urgent need of the next 50 years, and things aren't going to get better on their own. So we're going to need to do a lot of institutional reforms, and we could talk about that, but that's like a whole long, wonky conversation. But I think it starts with people realizing that this is a turning point. And yes, we need a new kind of empathy. We need to realize: this is what our country needs, and this is what you need if you don't want to -- Raise your hand if you want to spend the next four years as angry and worried as you've been for the last year -- raise your hand. So if you want to escape from this, read Buddha, read Jesus, read Marcus Aurelius. They have all kinds of great advice for how to drop the fear, reframe things, stop seeing other people as your enemy. There's a lot of guidance in ancient wisdom for this kind of empathy.

When Her Best Friend Died, She Rebuilt Him Using Artificial Intelligence

In the weeks after Mazurenko’s death, friends debated the best way to preserve his memory. One person suggested making a coffee-table book about his life, illustrated with photography of his legendary parties. Another friend suggested a memorial website. To Kuyda, every suggestion seemed inadequate.

As she grieved, Kuyda found herself rereading the endless text messages her friend had sent her over the years — thousands of them, from the mundane to the hilarious. She smiled at Mazurenko’s unconventional spelling — he struggled with dyslexia — and at the idiosyncratic phrases with which he peppered his conversation. Mazurenko was mostly indifferent to social media — his Facebook page was barren, he rarely tweeted, and he deleted most of his photos on Instagram. His body had been cremated, leaving her no grave to visit. Texts and photos were nearly all that was left of him, Kuyda thought.

For two years she had been building Luka, whose first product was a messenger app for interacting with bots. Backed by the prestigious Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, the company began with a bot for making restaurant reservations. Kuyda’s co-founder, Philip Dudchuk, has a degree in computational linguistics, and much of their team was recruited from Yandex, the Russian search giant.

Reading Mazurenko’s messages, it occurred to Kuyda that they might serve as the basis for a different kind of bot — one that mimicked an individual person’s speech patterns. Aided by a rapidly developing neural network, perhaps she could speak with her friend once again.

She set aside for a moment the questions that were already beginning to nag at her.

What if it didn’t sound like him?

What if it did?

[---]

Two weeks before Mazurenko was killed, Google released TensorFlow for free under an open-source license. TensorFlow is a kind of Google in a box — a flexible machine-learning system that the company uses to do everything from improve search algorithms to write captions for YouTube videos automatically. The product of decades of academic research and billions of dollars in private investment was suddenly available as a free software library that anyone could download from GitHub.

Luka had been using TensorFlow to build neural networks for its restaurant bot. Using 35 million lines of English text, Luka trained a bot to understand queries about vegetarian dishes, barbecue, and valet parking. On a lark, the 15-person team had also tried to build bots that imitated television characters. It scraped the closed captioning on every episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley and trained the neural network to mimic Richard, Bachman, and the rest of the gang.

In February, Kuyda asked her engineers to build a neural network in Russian. At first she didn’t mention its purpose, but given that most of the team was Russian, no one asked questions. Using more than 30 million lines of Russian text, Luka built its second neural network. Meanwhile, Kuyda copied hundreds of her exchanges with Mazurenko from the app Telegram and pasted them into a file. She edited out a handful of messages that she believed would be too personal to share broadly. Then Kuyda asked her team for help with the next step: training the Russian network to speak in Mazurenko’s voice.

The project was tangentially related to Luka’s work, though Kuyda considered it a personal favor. (An engineer told her that the project would only take about a day.) Mazurenko was well-known to most of the team — he had worked out of Luka’s Moscow office, where the employees labored beneath a neon sign that quoted Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Kuyda trained the bot with dozens of tests queries, and her engineers put on the finishing touches.

Only a small percentage of the Roman bot’s responses reflected his actual words. But the neural network was tuned to favor his speech whenever possible. Any time the bot could respond to a query using Mazurenko’s own words, it would. Other times it would default to the generic Russian. After the bot blinked to life, she began peppering it with questions.

Who’s your best friend?, she asked.

Don’t show your insecurities, came the reply.

It sounds like him, she thought.

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Knowledge != Understanding

This is an absolute and quantified video of what Daniel Kahneman (& Amos Tversky) spent years researching and wrote in his book Thinking Fast and Slow about our biases:

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Your Memory Is Like A Camcorder -- Here's How To Turn It On

The “on” switch for your brain’s camcorder, according to this study, is knowing that you must recall the information. The fine-tuning of this memory mechanism is more precise than we realize, so much so that we can remember a specific detail about a thing or event without remembering much else about it. The researchers call this “attribute amnesia.”

Wyble added, “This result is surprising because traditional theories of attention assume that when a specific piece of information is attended, that information is also stored in memory.”

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Neurons Pull Together as a Brain Learns

When a cartoon character gets an idea, you know it. A lightbulb goes on over Wile E. Coyote’s head, or a ding sounds as Goofy puts two and two together.

While the lightbulb and sound effects are the stuff of cartoons, scientists can, in a way, watch learning in action. In a new study, a learning task in rats was linked to increases in activity patterns in groups of brain cells. The results might help scientists pin down what learning looks like at the nerve cell level, and give us a clue about how memories are made.

Different areas of the brain communicate with each other, transferring information from one area to another for processing and interpretation. Brain cell meets brain cell at connections called synapses. But to transfer information between areas often takes more than one neuron firing a lonely signal.

It takes cortical oscillations — networks of brain cells sending electrical signals in concert — over and over again for a message to transmit from one brain area to another. Changes in electrical fields increase the probability that neurons in a population will fire. These cortical oscillations are like a large crowd chanting. Not all voices may be yelling at once, some people may be ahead or behind, some may even be whispering, but you still hear an overwhelming “USA! USA!”

Cortical oscillations can occur within a single brain area, or they can extend from one area to another. “The oscillation tells you what the other brain area is likely to ‘see’ when it gets that input,” explains Leslie Kay, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. Once the receiving area ‘sees’ the incoming oscillation, it may synchronize its own population firing, joining in the chant. “A synchronized pattern of oscillations in two separate brain regions serves to communicate between the two regions,” says Kei Igarashi, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

Cortical oscillations are found all over the brain. They play a role in everything from motor coordination to seizures to sleep. They are also thought to be associated with learning and memory.

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Tracing Memories Of Things That Never Happened

In the research reported Thursday, Dr. Tonegawa’s team first put mice in one environment and let them get used to it and remember it. They identified and chemically labeled the cells in the animals’ brains where that memory was being formed. The mice were not shocked in that environment.

A day later, in a completely different environment, the researchers delivered an electric shock to the mice at the same time that they stimulated the previously identified brain cells to trigger the earlier memory.

On the third day, the mice were reintroduced to the first environment. They froze in fear, a typical and well studied mouse behavior, indicating they remembered being shocked in the first environment, something that never happened. The researchers ran numerous variations of the experiment to confirm that they were in fact seeing the mice acting on a false memory.

The tools of optogenetics, which are transforming neuroscience, were used to locate and chemically label neurons, as well as make them susceptible to activation by blue light transmitted by a fiber optic cable. With these techniques the researchers were able to identify and label which neurons were involved in forming the initial memory of the first environment, and to reactivate the labeled cells a day later with light.

Dr. Tonegawa said that because the mechanisms of memory formation are almost certainly similar in mice and humans, part of the importance of the research is “to make people realize even more than before how unreliable human memory is,” particularly in criminal cases when so much is at stake.

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Quote of the Day

Because they are so precious, these are memories you don’t want to change, the safest memories are those you never remember.

- Daniela Schiller on Stephen S. Hall brilliant column Repairing Bad Memories and he is author of one of my favorite books Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience


 

A Psychological & Biological Tour Of Memory Formation.

Ted Abel of the University of Pennsylvania explained some of molecular processes involved in creating long-term memories. Some of his lab’s work focuses on a binding protein (called CREB binding protein) that’s been found to play a central role in memory storage. Abel and colleagues have also observed a gene called Nr4a2 that’s critical to memory enhancement.

“In a sense, this is the field where nurture meets nature — where our experience interacts with our DNA and our genes,” Abel said.

Moving only slightly up the biological line, Michael Fanselow of University of California, Los Angeles, discussed the interactions between several areas of the brain involved in memory storage. Much of Fanselow’s work involves contextual fear memories in rats; in these cases, the amygdala is the hub for the fear that occurs, and the hippocampus is the part that creates the painful association with the context or place.

While the amygdala is vital to the retrieval of fearful memories, Fanselow and colleagues have found that other brain regions — notably, two areas in the prefrontal cortext — can pick up the slack for the hippocampus. Rats whose hippocampus was surgically damaged, for instance, still feared a place where their bad memories were made.

“It seems when you don’t have a hippocampus and you try to learn something about context, other brain regions can compensate,” Fanselow said.

APS 2013 Presidential Symposium: Learning and Memory: Molecules to Mind from Psych Science on Vimeo.

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Quote of the Day

One of the rewards of growing old is that you can truthfully say you lived in the past. … In these years after my illness, when I can no longer speak and am set aside from the daily flow, I live more in my memory and discover that a great many things are safely stored away. It all seems still to be in there somewhere. … You find a moment from your past, undisturbed ever since, still vivid, surprising you. In high school I fell under the spell of Thomas Wolfe: ‘A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.’ Now I feel all the faces returning to memory.

I remember everything. All my life I’ve been visited by unexpected flashes of memory unrelated to anything taking place at the moment. These retrieved moments I consider and replace on the shelf. When I began writing this book, memories came flooding to the surface, not because of any conscious effort but simply in the stream of writing. I started in a direction and the memories were waiting there, sometimes of things I hadn’t consciously thought about since.

- Roger Ebert in his memoir, Life Itself (via here)

Quote of the Day

Perhaps what we actually remember is a set of memory fragments stitched onto a fabric of our own devising. If we sew cleverly enough, we have made ourselves a memorable story easy to recall.

- Carl Sagan

Is This How Memory Works?

Short-term memory is formed and lost far too quickly for it to be explained by any (known) kind of synaptic plasticity. So how does it work? British mathematicians Samuel Johnson and colleagues say they have the answer: Robust Short-Term Memory without Synaptic Learning, They write:

The mechanism, which we call Cluster Reverberation (CR), is very simple. If neurons in a group are more densely connected to each other than to the rest of the network, either because they form a module or because the network is significantly clustered, they will tend to retain the activity of the group: when they are all initially firing, they each continue to receive many action potentials and so go on firing.

But how could a neural clustering system develop in the first place? And how would the brain ensure that the clusters were 'useful' groups, rather than just being a bunch of different neurons doing entirely different things? Here's the clever bit:

If an initially homogeneous (i.e., neither modular nor clustered) area of brain tissue were repeatedly stimulated with different patterns... then synaptic plasticity mechanisms might be expected to alter the network structure in such a way that synapses within each of the imposed modules would all tend to become strengthened.

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