Editor's pick: Take care when suggesting people outsmart the brain
Caroline Williams says that we are more likely to make bad choices when we are more stressed (27 July, p 34). She positions this in the context of choices we make about our health, between behaviours geared towards long-term goals, such as eating vegetables and exercising, and the short-term pleasures of chocolate, beer and fun.
I would like to know how this works for people with obsessive-compulsive tendencies or restrictive behaviours. I have observed in a significant number of cases that such people respond to stress not by seeking easy thrills, but by following their pleasure-denying, goal-oriented behaviours more intensely.
Does stress produce a directly opposite effect in these individuals? Is this different response due to genetics? Or is it learned?
Williams also assumes that the majority will favour short-term pleasures over healthy long-term goals, and argues that we must monitor ourselves. A rhetoric of being “tricked” by our brains and our bodies into being unhealthy could be damaging to those unable to allow themselves pleasures because they are too focused on long-term goals. Discourses around restraint could have a significant adverse effect on this minority.
Computational terms are a lens in neuroscience
David Fitzgerald worries that the frequency of computer terms in neuroscience indicates a bias in research methods (Letters, 13 July). Rest assured that most neuroscientists are careful to make a distinction between the models we use to understand our data and the metaphors we use to explain our work to the general public. For example, computationalism, one philosophy for understanding the mind, is today widely seen as a “lens” to view the brain.
Party poopers should look to their own helium waste
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s lovely article on the origins and scarcity of terrestrial helium reminds me of a tour I had, about five years ago, around the chemistry lab of a leading UK university (13 July, p 22). It had very impressive, high-performance nuclear magnetic resonance machines. We asked our guide whether the liquid helium in the superconducting magnets in these was recovered and recycled.
We were told that both the university management and funding agencies would rather pay for the helium as a consumable than invest in the kit needed to recover it. A few months later, a senior academic from that department was interviewed and took the opportunity to condemn the use of helium in children’s party balloons as a waste of a valuable non-renewable resource. He seemed oblivious to the irony.
Figures on the use of helium in entertainment products vary, but are a fraction of that consumed by research and medicine.
In search of more whispering in the wild
You report that certain whales whisper to their calves to avoid alerting predators (27 July, p 17), and that mother orangutans instruct their offspring to move on with a loud scratch (20 July, p 19). I wonder how many other animals use similar anti-predator tactics.
I know the deer around my house produce a barely audible, low-frequency moo to “talk” to their fawns and to adults within their social group. I think they use it to rein in a hyperactive fawn that has wandered too far. A mother also uses it to call a fawn from its nesting area after she has returned from foraging and is ready to give milk. I need to be pretty close to hear the call. I assume the fawn’s ears have evolved to detect the sound from quite a distance.
Language could arise out of the mouths of babies
David Robson presents several ideas for how language might have begun (4 May, p 34). There are two more facts to consider.
Twin babies often create languages. When left alone together for long periods, they spontaneously babble. This acquires form and meaning and becomes a private language 鈥� usually abandoned as they learn their parents’ tongue.
Secondly, only children are really good at learning to speak a language like a native speaker.
So isn’t it likely that children created the first language? Many of today’s hunter-gatherer societies share childcare. Early humans are likely to have done the same, meaning several babies might be left in the care of elders.
But any genetic mutation that caused babies to babble would alert predators to tender meals and so would be selected out. Until, that is, the discovery and use of fire to keep predators away, allowing babies to babble with impunity. So language wouldn’t have arisen before we had fire.
Further, if language arose in a cohort of young children, its members would have been able to communicate at a much more complex level with each other than with the rest of the group. It seems reasonable to suppose that they would pair with each other, not with non-speakers. That could produce a genetic bottleneck and a new species.
Because the wind is low it blows that argument
You say each proposed wind farm hub in the North Sea will power up to 12 million UK homes (20 July, p 10). You don't mention how many days of the year there is enough wind for it to power that number, nor how much fuel will be consumed by power stations standing by to take over when the wind drops.
We're taking the time for a number of things (1)
Daniel Cossins says the search for answers to the mysteries of time “takes us into the strange borderlands between neuroscience and physics” (6 July, p 32). He should include philosophy in that map. The philosopher Peter Geach argued in Mental Acts for the necessity of philosophy in such cases, saying that no experiment can either justify or straighten out a confusion of thought: “if we are in a muddle when we design an experiment, it is only to be expected that we should ask Nature cross questions and she return crooked answers”.
A simple analysis of the different uses of the word “time” reveals ambiguities. When we use it, for example, to refer to the quantity measured in seconds, we are talking about two related but distinct quantities: lapse and duration. Unless we use the tools of analytic philosophy to sort out such matters, our efforts to solve these difficult problems are doomed to be mired in muddle.
We're taking the time for a number of things (2)
When a ball bounces, it converts kinetic energy to heat energy by deformation, so each bounce is lower than the one before. The laws of physics are generally reversible in time, but, as Cossins discusses, those involving heat, or thermodynamics, are not.
Heat is an “emergent” thing: a phenomenon that appears only when we look at a minimum number of particles, so only at a minimum size. As a result, physicists such as Carlo Rovelli speculate that time may not exist below a minimum scale of size. On this basis, time isn’t an illusion at our level, more like an approximation. We should be wary of assuming that what applies at our scale of size applies at all scales.
Constant cussed changes in a cosmic constant
Anil Ananthaswamy reports that two different ways of measuring the present-day expansion of the universe produce different values of the Hubble constant (20 July, p 34). This brings to mind the principle that measurement changes the phenomenon observed at the quantum scale.
The current mess of string theory suggests this may be happening on a cosmic scale. Every time we approach an explanation, the universe confounds us with another inexplicable twist. Some entities just don’t like being understood!
Workplace surveillance for you and you too
You report Andrew Campbell and his colleagues developing a system for employers to snoop on staff, including when they were at their desk and details about their sleep, heart rate and stress levels (6 July, p 9).
Their algorithm – with an accuracy characterised as “still quite low” – classifies employees as “higher” or “lower” performing. Since the scientists are apparently comfortable with this, I assume they have subjected themselves to it. And since their work is funded by the US government, I look forward to all data on their performance being posted online for taxpayers to peruse. We can then classify each as “higher” or “lower” performing and make their grant renewal conditional upon those metrics. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
An appeal for analogue moon computer archives
I love all your articles about the 1969 moon landing (13 July, p 36). I was a close observer at that time at , a company that helped it happen.
Digital computers of that time weren't fast enough to do the critical calculations determining the time to ignite the engines and the duration of this ignition for the return flight from the moon. Analogue and analogue/digital hybrid computers were up to 100 million times faster, although with limited accuracy. Now many of the mathematical techniques used in these hybrid computers are in danger of being lost.
I ask all with information on the programs, techniques or equipment used, or knowledge of surviving analogue computer systems, to contact me, through 快猫短视频.
New Zealand had its own version of a giant ostrich
I read with great interest that Europe once had its own version of a giant ostrich (6 July, p 17). I treasure a book given to me by Alice Margaret Leaker, the granddaughter of Alice McKenzie. She recalled being the last person on our planet to see a live moa, under a flax bush in 1888 when she was about 7 years old.
Communicate credit for this film's facts, please
Simon Ings observes that The Hummingbird Project is scripted and filmed like a true-life story, and asks who would make up a thriller about high-frequency trading infrastructures (13 July, p 30). He says the film springs entirely from the head of writer-director Kim Nguyen.
Has Nguyen not read ? In this, in 2014, Michael Lewis showed us multiple facets of high-frequency trading, opening with plans to install optical fibre in as straight a line as possible between New York/New Jersey and Chicago. Ings also recommends The Big Short 鈥� the film of . The person who so elegantly brought these factual accounts to light deserves credit.
For the record 鈥� 17 August 2019
鈥� Mixed messages: one air food mile is the equivalent of over 75 food shipping miles (August, p 24).