Are You Putting Your Future Health At Risk? You Need To Know The Top 5 Overlooked Sports Injuries and Why They Shouldn't Be Ignored.

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The future of facial recognition: 7 fascinating facts

Technology TEDTalks What’s on the screen in this photo? All the information that can be gleaned just from an image of someone’s face. Alessandro Acquisti speaks at TEDGlobal 2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Alessandro Acquisti thinks we are about to have an Adam and Eve moment, where all of a sudden we realize that we aren’t wearing any clothes. Up until now, we have — for the most part — willingly offered up our personal information online without thinking too much about it. Alessandro Acquisti: Why privacy mattersBut as Acquisti puts it in today’s talk, “any personal information can become sensitive information.”

To illustrate what he means, he focuses our attention on facial recognition software and a study he conducted in 2010, when about 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook in a single month, many of them tagged. For the study, Acquisti and his fellow researchers snapped photos of students on a college campus and found that more than 30% of them were identifiable by off-the-shelf facial recognition software. From there, using data mining algorithms, the researchers were also able to identify the first five digits of many of these students’ Social Security numbers.

To hear about Acquisti’s latest research — which examines how employers judge the kind of information they find about potential employees online (hint: it’s not good) — watch this talk. Then below, take a closer look at the latest developments in facial recognition to see where this technology is headed.

Identifiable online daters. An important part of online dating is, of course, anonymity. You make up a screen name because you want an element of surprise when you meet someone — and because you don’t want creepers showing up at your office uninvited. In 2010, Acquisti published the study, “Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality.” He and his fellow researchers analyzed 6,000 online profiles on a dating site in the same US city. Using four cloud computing cores and the facial recognition software PittPatt, they were able to identify 1 in 10 of these anonymous daters. And remember, this technology has improved three-fold since then.
.Better tools for law enforcement. After the Boston Marathon bombing, the Boston police commissioner said that facial recognition software had not helped them identify Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, despite the fact that the two were in public records databases—and photographed at the scene. Only, those images were taken from far away, the brothers were wearing sunglasses and caps, and many shots of them were in profile — all things that make facial recognition difficult. Experts say that technology can overcome these difficulties. In an interview with Salon.com, Acquisti said that the increasing resolution of photos will help (hello, gigapixel!), as will the improved computational capabilities of computers and the ever-expanding mountain of data available from social networks. In a fascinating article via Yahoo, Paul Schuepp of the company Animetrics shares a more specific advance: software that turns 2D images into a simulated 3D model of a person’s face. In a single second, it can turn an unidentifiable partial snapshot into a very identifiable headshot. He claims the software can boost identification rates from 35 percent to 85 percent.
.Full body recognition? Allyson Rice of the University of Texas at Dallas has an idea for how facial recognition software could become even more accurate for law enforcement purposes — by becoming body recognition software. In a study published this month in Psychological Science, Rice and her fellow researchers asked college students to discern whether two photos — which had stumped facial recognition software — were indeed of the same person. They used eye-tracking equipment to discern how the participants were making the call. In the end, they found that students were far more accurate in their answers when the face and body of the subject was shown. And while participants reported judging based on facial features, their eyes were spending more time examining body build, stance, and other body features. “Psychologists and computer scientists have concentrated almost exclusively on the role of the face in person recognition,” Rice tells The Telegraph. “But our results show that the body can also provide important and useful identity information for person recognition.”
.A face scan for your phone. “Face Unlock” is a feature that allows you to unlock Android smartphones using your “faceprint,” i.e. a map of the unique structure of your face. This is just the beginning of face-as-security measure. In June, according to eWeek.com, Google patented a technology that would turn goofy facial expressions — a wink, a scrunched nose, a smile, a stuck-out tongue — into a code to unlock devices. The hope: that this would be harder to spoof than a faceprint. Turns out, apps such as FastAccess Anywhere, which uses your face as a password, can reportedly be fooled with a simple photo, says USA Today.
.Facial recognition as advertising. Could facial recognition technology be used to influence what we buy? Very likely. In 2012, an interactive ad for Choice for Girls was launched at bus stops in London. These billboards were able to scan passersby, judge their gender and show them appropriate content. Girls and women got a video, while boys and men got statistics on a subject. This ad was for a good cause, but this technology will no doubt expand — and could allow corporations and organizations to tap into our personal lives in unpredictable ways. Personalized ads as we walk down the street, a la the classic scene in Minority Report, yes. But as Acquisti notes in his talk, there’s a potentially more subtle application of this technology too: ads that can identify us and our two favorite friends on Facebook. From there, it’s a snap to create a composite image of a person who’ll star in an ad targeted just to us. For more in what’s coming in the facial recognition advertising realm, check out Leslie Stahl’s 60 Minutes segment “A Face in the Crowd: Say goodbye to anonymity.” Among other fascinating tidbits, it introduces us to FaceDeals — which notes when you’ve walked into an establishment, mines your Facebook likes and text messages a deal created just for you.
.Shattered Glass. As Acquisti notes in his talk, the fact that someone’s face can be used to find out private information is especially disconcerting given Google Glass’ emergence on the scene. In June, US lawmakers questioned Google about the privacy implications of the device and, in response, Google stressed that they “won’t be approving any facial recognition Glassware at this time.” But of course, it’s not completely up to them. In July, Stephen Balaban announced to NPR and the world that he had hacked Glass in order to give it facial recognition powers. “Essentially what I am building is an alternative operating system that runs on Glass but is not controlled by Google,” he said. On a similar note, one Michael DiGiovanni created a program called Winky for Glass that lets the wearer take a photo with a wink, rather than using the voice command.
.Your face as currency. In July, a Finnish company called Uniqul released a video of a project in the works, a pay-by-face authentication system. The idea? At a store, rather than paying with cash or a credit card, you give a “meaningful nod” to a scanner to make a purchase. A Huffington Post article describes this new tech, and also gives a peak at the Millennial ATM, which uses facial recognition as its primary security method.

Facial recognition is evolving rapidly. What here sounds cool and useful to you, and what sounds like a trip to Scarytown? For me, I may well be investing in these custom t-shirts, which claim to trip up facial recognition.

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The past and future of malaria: A Q&A with Sonia Shah

Global Issues TEDTalks At TEDGlobal 2013, Sonia Shah shares a surprising reason why we still haven’t ended malaria — that people in areas where it still exists have accepted it as a normal part of life. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Hundreds of thousands of people die from malaria every year. So why is it still around? In today’s talk, journalist Sonia Shah takes a look at the history of malaria and outlines some of the major challenges facing the end of one of the world’s deadliest diseases. Sonia Shah: 3 reasons we still haven’t gotten rid of malariaIt’s not simply that we need to improve our science, says Shah; we also face economic, cultural and political obstacles. One fascinating barrier: that people who live in the areas where malaria is a problem view the disease as a normal, though unfortunate, part of life — much like people in the developed world view the flu. Because they see it as a fact of life, they’re unlikely to go to great lengths to prevent it. Even sleeping with a bed net seems like overkill. Shah concludes her talk with a call to action to end “the malarious way of life” by fixing bad housing, drainage and roads, as England and the U.S. did when faced with malaria.

The TED Blog caught up with Shah to ask her a little more about her research and what comes next for malaria.

How did you research your book The Fever?

It was a combination of reportage — from Malawi, Cameroon, Panama, London and Alabama — and historical research. At the time I was doing my research, the Western world had pretty much forgotten its own history of malaria. Many of the critical books about malaria were long out of print, so tracking them down was a challenge. There was one really important book that I finally acquired by bidding on it on eBay. It had been discarded from a middle school library somewhere.

Was there anything in your research that genuinely surprised you about cultural attitudes toward malaria?

On my first trip to sub-Saharan Africa, I asked a local woman whether she’d ever had malaria. She looked at me like I had three eyes! It slowly dawned on me that that was like asking a New Yorker if she’d ever had a cold. I learned my lesson. After that, my question became, “When was the last time you had malaria?”

What you call for at the end of your talk — the destroying of the malarial way of life — is great, but a pretty tall order. It’s as big as getting rid of poverty itself. What are some concrete measures you’d like to see?

I don’t see myself as advocating a particular strategy in my work, actually. I’m trying to uncover the hidden history of the disease. But there are some lessons there. One is that once you start doing something to diminish malaria, you mustn’t stop until the parasite has been beaten into permanent submission. That will be hard now, with the current effort, as it relies on external financing, which is starting to dry up with the recession.

But it’s possible to fight malaria on a more grassroots level too, with environmental management and other methods. In Tanzania, for example, malaria’s been controlled by clearing garbage out of ditches, where mosquitos once bred; in Chinese rice fields, it’s been controlled by altering water levels in irrigation canals. Those are cheap, easy solutions! But they’re not one-size-fits-all. What’s needed is local expertise, which can create local solutions relevant to the local malarial ecology — and the local culture.

Is there anything ordinary citizens in non-malarious societies can do to help, or is this largely a problem for governments and aid organizations?

Don’t get me wrong: Supporting the current effort is important. As I mentioned above, once you start fighting this fire, you need to keep going. So go ahead and keep donating to the global program against malaria.

It seems to me that a lot more can be done to support African scientists, too. It’s great to have malaria experts at our universities in Cambridge and Seattle, but where they’re really needed is in Lagos and rural Malawi, for example. It’s African scientists and doctors and community health workers who will come up with lasting, local solutions. Let’s open the university doors and the virology labs and the drug development centers to them.

And below, see Shah’s answers to two questions that TED Curator Chris Anderson asked her on the TEDGlobal 2013 stage following her talk:

There’s a lot of people putting their heart and soul into bed net distribution. Is that work pointless? What would you say to that?

It’s a short-term goal. Those nets are only going to last, at best, three to five years. And then we have to do it again and again and again. If we start doing something against malaria now, we have to keep doing it. Malaria is like sitting on a spring. You have to keep sitting on that spring. If you get up — boing — it’s going to come right back up. Once we’ve started this bed net effort, we have to keep going to make a lasting gain against the disease.

Do any of the scientific initiatives we hear about — to engineer mosquitos to be sterile or create a non-infectious form of malaria — do any of those excite you?

Less than other people seem to be excited about it, because our problem with malaria is not technical. We’ve had good cures and tools to use against malaria for so long; the problem is not the technology. Also, with mosquitos, most people who live in malarious parts of the world, they already have enough mosquitos and I don’t think they’re going to be that interested in more mosquitos even if they are weird genetically engineered mosquitos. I think there are going to be ethical issues with that, too.

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23 Ways to Save Money for the Future That You’re Currently Missing Out On

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30sec Tip: You May Miss out on Future Opportunities

You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, but you may miss out on future opportunities.

We live in uncertain times. Global financial collapse, rapid relocation of industries, emerging markets, political unrest, and just the fast pace of change in the Information Era in general all mea that things you take for granted today might be completely different tomorrow.

In Uncertain Times, Prepare Yourself for New Opportunities

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Quote of the Day: The Dreams of the Future

Planning to plan your future is a waste of time. Has talking about planning ever been useful? Has it moved your life forward?

I think we can agree that’s a big “no”.

For me, I’ve found I’m happiest when I’m doing something…accomplishing something. By “something”, I mean anything that I feel is bettering my life in some way –- furthering a hobby, honing a job skill, learning a bit of knowledge, making travel plans, etc. The problem is that I’ve found it difficult to stop talking about what I’m hoping to accomplish and to actually make strides towards something actually happening.

Forward15: Your Future in 15 Minutes a Day

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Your future self already exists in the cloud

The Economist has a short but fascinating piece on the work of physicist Chaoming Song who creates mathematical models to predict your future location based on your mobile phone and online activity. His accuracy rarely drops below 80%.

Song Chaoming, for instance, is a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston. He is a physicist, but he moonlights as a social scientist. With that hat on he has devised an algorithm which can look at someone’s mobile-phone records and predict with an average of 93% accuracy where that person is at any moment of any day. Given most people’s regular habits (sleep, commute, work, commute, sleep), this might not seem too hard. What is impressive is that his accuracy was never lower than 80% for any of the 50,000 people he looked at.

If you think this sounds a little far-fetched the findings have already been published – one paper in Nature Physics and the other in Science.

Yes folks, we’re all unique. Just like everyone else.

Link to The Economist on Chaoming’s network echo location work.

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On our reading list: Al Gore takes a look at The Future

Global Issues

Al Gore: Averting the climate crisisAl Gore posits an intriguing question in his newest book, on shelves tomorrow, January 29: can we change the future? But this book isn’t about peering into a crystal ball.  In The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, Gore — who’s spoken at TED multiple times — breaks down the factors that are changing our world at an unprecedented pace, leaving many of us feeling something akin to temporal whiplash. As Gore outlines, these forces are: ever-increasing economic globalization, the development of a “global mind” via instant communication, a global balance of power with multiple centers, an economic compass pointing toward unsustainable growth, revolutions in the field of genomics and biotech,Al Gore: New thinking on the climate crisis and a disruption of the relationship between people and the earth’s ecosystems.

“What do you think about when you hear the phrase ‘the future?’ Is it a hopeful place? Is it a little scary? Does it seem like things are speeding up more than in the past?” Gore asks in a trailer for the book, above. “Well, they are. There are large forces that are shaping and reordering the world we’ve always known.”

But he promises that the tome isn’t all doom and gloom.Al Gore warns on latest climate trends

“No matter where in the world we live, we face a choice—either to be swept along by the powerful currents of technological change and economic determinism into a future that may threaten our deepest values. Or shape the future in ways that protect human dignity and reflect the aspirations of people and nations throughout the world,” he says. “Mapping the future is a risky undertaking. Perhaps the only thing riskier is doing nothing.”

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10 talks on predicting the future

We’re just a week into 2013, and the year seems filled with possibility. The turn of the New Year is generally an occasion to look back and reflect on the year that’s passed — the victories and defeats, the lives lost and the experiences found. But after we look back, we inevitably turn forward. We make resolutions and predictions for the year to come, taking educated guesses as we gaze into the abyss of the unknown. Here,10 TED Talks that offer visions for the future.

Ian Goldin: Navigating our global future
“This could be our best century ever, or it could be our worst,” says Ian Goldin. In this absorbing talk from TEDGlobal 2009, Goldin argues that the accelerating impact of globalization has the potential for miraculous human achievements, but also presents immense challenges — specifically in inequality. We may see incredible advances in technology, science and the quality of life, but will only the rich have access? Offering predictions for life in 2030, Goldin reminds us that “the rest of our lives will be in the future, so we need to prepare for it now.”

Kevin Kelly: The next 5,000 days of the web
At EG 2007, Keven Kelly noted that we had 5,000 days of the World Wide Web behind us. In this talk, he looks at what’s to come next. He foresees a smarter, more personalized and more ubiquitous web in the next 10 years, with the digital cloud forming the underpinnings of our physical environment. As the web doubles in power every two years, he shares why it’s expected to exceed human power by 2040.

Kirk Citron: And now, the real news
Projecting a “Long News” perspective onto the present, Kirk Citron analyzes the headlines at TED2010, trying to predict what will still be relevant in 10, 100 and 10,000 years. It’s not Michael Jackson’s death or the miraculous landing of a US Airways plane on the Hudson River that will matter, he says, but innovations in science. Why? Because research in 2010 paved the way for genetically modified food to feed the planet, for people to drink water on the moon, and for nanobees to enter the brain and zap tumors with bee venom. In the long run, Citron points out that some news stories are just more important than others.

Rob Hopkins: Transition to a world without oil
Rob Hopkins wants to tell a different story about the future. Not one of apocalypse or salvation but of transition — specifically, transition from our dependence on oil. As the founder of the Transition movement, he advocates for petroleum-free communities stripped of modern-day luxuries, but also free from the trappings of oil. Sustainability isn’t the solution, Hopkins says at TEDGlobal 2009, because we can’t simply invent our way out of oil dependence.

Martin Rees asks: Is this our final century?
Zooming in on the “tiny sliver of earth’s history” that has involved humans, and zooming out again to the full past, present and future of the universe, astronomer Sir Martin Rees explores the future of our planet. Highlighting the immense changes that will occur, he reminds the audience at TEDGlobal 2005 that when the sun extinguishes in 6 billion years, the creatures living on this earth will be as different from us as we are from bacteria.

Nicholas Negroponte, in 1984, makes 5 predictions
Danny Hills: Back to the future (of 1994)
This pair of talks from the TED archives highlights the challenges and successes of predicting the future. Nicholas Negroponte’s talk from TED1984 offers five eerily on-point predictions, ranging from touchscreen phones to the future of CD-ROMS. Ten years later, Danny Hills offers a timeless theory of technological evolution that mirrors our own biological trajectory.

Larry Burns on the future of cars
Computer-enhanced cars — that run on clean hydrogen and contribute to the energy grid — are just around the corner, says Larry Burns. You’ll even refuel your hydrogen-fueled car at home, he shares. At TED2005, GM vice president for research and design Larry Burns details his exciting task of reinventing the automobile.

Aubrey de Grey: A roadmap to end aging
You could live to see the next millennium, suggests researcher Aubrey de Grey. Arguing that we could live to be 1,000 years old, de Grey explains that if we simply extend our lives by 30 years right now, we can reach the “longevity escape velocity,” with the rate of life-extending discoveries outpacing our 30-year life extension. And, he says at TEDGlobal 2005, the tools to start this process exist right now.

Stewart Brand on the Long Now
“It would be helpful if humanity got into the habit of thinking of the now not just as next week or next quarter but the next 10,000 years,” notes Stewart Brand in this talk from TED2004. Disrupting our conception of time and space, Brand describes his current project to build a 10,000 year clock that would be able to withstand the wear and tear of deep time.

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BBC Future Column: Why is it so hard to give good directions?

My BBC Future column from last week. Original here.

Psychologically speaking it is a tricky task, because our minds find it difficult to appreciate how the world looks to someone who doesn’t know it yet.

We’ve all been there – the directions sounded so clear when we were told them. Every step of the journey seemed obvious, we thought we had understood the directions perfectly. And yet here we are miles from anywhere, after dark, in a field arguing about whether we should have gone left or right at the last turn, whether we’re going to have to sleep here now, and exactly whose fault it is.

The truth is we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves. Psychologically speaking giving good directions is a particularly difficult task.

The reason we find it hard to give good directions is because of the “curse of knowledge”, a psychological quirk whereby, once we have learnt something, we find it hard to appreciate how the world looks to someone who doesn’t know it yet. We don’t just want people to walk a mile in our shoes, we assume they already know the route. Once we know the way to a place we don’t need directions, and descriptions like “its the left about halfway along” or “the one with the little red door” seem to make full and complete sense.

But if you’ve never been to a place before, you need more than a description of a place; you need an exact definition, or a precise formula for finding it. The curse of knowledge is the reason why, when I had to search for a friend’s tent in a field, their advice of “it’s the blue one” seemed perfectly sensible to them and was completely useless for me, as I stood there staring blankly at hundreds of blue tents.

This same quirk is why teaching is so difficult to do well. Once you are familiar with a topic it is very hard to understand what someone who isn’t familiar with it needs to know. The curse of knowledge isn’t a surprising flaw in our mental machinery – really it is just a side effect of our basic alienation from each other. We all have different thoughts and beliefs, and we have no special access to each other’s minds. A lot of the time we can fake understanding by mentally simulating what we’d want in someone else’s position. We have thoughts along the lines of “I’d like it if there was one bagel left in the morning” and therefore conclude “so I won’t eat all the bagels before my wife gets up in the morning”. This shortcut allows us to appear considerate, without doing any deep thought about what other people really know and want.

“OK, now what?”

This will only get you so far. Some occasions call for a proper understanding of other people’s feelings and beliefs. Giving directions is one, but so is understanding myriad aspects of everyday conversation which involve feelings, jokes or suggestions. For illustration, consider the joke that some research has suggested may be the world’s funniest (although what exactly that means is another story):

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says “OK, now what?”

The joke is funny because you can appreciate that the hunter had two possible interpretations of the operator’s instructions, and chose the wrong one. To appreciate the interpretations you need to have a feel for what the operator and the hunter know and desire (and to be surprised when the hunter’s desire to do anything to help isn’t over-ruled by a desire keep his friend alive).

To do this mental simulation you recruit what psychologists call your “Theory of Mind”, the ability think about others’ beliefs and desires. Our skill at Theory of Mind is one of the things that distinguish humans from all other species – only chimpanzees seem to have anything approaching a true understanding that others’ might believe different things from themselves. Us humans, on the other hand, seem primed from early infancy to practice thinking about how other humans view the world.

The fact that the curse of knowledge exists tells us how hard a problem it is to think about other people’s minds. Like many hard cognitive problems – such as seeing, for example – the human brain has evolved specialist mechanisms which are dedicate to solving it for us, so that we don’t normally have to expend conscious effort. Most of the time we get the joke, just as most of the time we simply open our eyes and see the world.

The good news is that your Theory of Mind isn’t completely automatic – you can use deliberate strategies to help you think about what other people know. A good one when writing is simply to force yourself to check every term to see if it is jargon – something you’ve learnt the meaning of but not all your readers will know. Another strategy is to tell people what they can ignore, as well as what they need to know. This works well with directions (and results in instructions like “keep going until you see the red door. There’s a pink door, but that’s not it”)

With a few tricks like this, and perhaps some general practice, we can turn the concept of reading other people’s minds – what some psychologists call “mind mindfulness” – into a habit, and so improve our Theory of Mind abilities. (Something that most of us remember struggling hard to do in adolescence.) Which is a good thing, since good theory of mind is what makes a considerate partner, friend or co-worker – and a good giver of directions.

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BBC Future column: Why we love to hoard

Here’s last week’s column from BBC Future. The original is here. It’s not really about hoarding, its about the endowment effect and a really lovely piece of work that helped found the field of behavioural economics (and win Daniel Kahneman a Nobel prize). Oh, and I give some advice on how to de-clutter, lifehacker-style.

Question: How do you make something instantly twice as expensive?

Answer: By giving it away.

This might sound like a nonsensical riddle, but if you’ve ever felt overly possessive about your regular parking space, your pen, or your Star Wars box sets, then you’re experiencing some elements behind the psychology of ownership. Our brains tell us that we value something merely because it is a thing we have.

This riddle actually describes a phenomenon called the Endowment Effect. The parking space, the pen and the DVDs are probably the same as many others, but they’re special to you. Special because in some way they are yours.

You can see how the endowment effect escalates – how else can you explain the boxes of cassette tapes, shoes or mobile phones that fill several shelves of your room… or even several rooms?

No trade

To put a scientific lens on what’s going on here, a team led by psychologist Daniel Kahneman carried out a simple experiment. They took a class of ordinary University students and gave half of them a University-crested mug, the other half received $6 – the nominal cost of the mug.

Classic economics states that the students should begin to trade with each other. The people who were given cash but liked mugs should swop some of their cash a mug, and some of the people who were given mugs should swop their mugs for some cash. This, economic theory says, is how prices emerge – the interactions of all buyers and sellers finds the ideal price of goods. The price – in this case, of mugs – will be a perfect balance between the desires of people who want a mug and have cash, and the people who want cash and have a mug.

But economic theory lost out to psychology. Hardly any students traded. Those with mugs tended to keep them, asking on average for more than $5 to give up their mug. Those without mugs didn’t want to trade at this price, being only willing to spend an average of around $2.50 to purchase a mug.

Remember that the mugs were distributed at random. It would be weird if, by chance, all the “mug-lovers” ended up with mugs, and the “mug-haters” ended up without. Something else must be going on to explain the lack of trading. It seems the only way to understand the high-value placed on the mugs by people who were given one at random is if the simple act of being given a mug makes you value it twice as highly as before.

This is the endowment effect, and it is the reason why things reach a higher price at auctions – because people become attached to the thing they’re bidding for, experiencing a premature sense of ownership that pushes them to bid more than they would otherwise. It is also why car dealers want you to test drive the car, encouraging you in everyway to think about what it would be like to possess the car. The endowment effect is so strong that even imagined ownership can increase the value of something.

Breaking habits

The endowment effect is a reflection of a general bias in human psychology to favour the way things are, rather than the way they could be. I call this status quo bias, and we can see reflections of it in the strength of habits that guide our behaviour, in the preference we have for the familiar over the strange or the advantage the incumbent politician has over a challenger.

Knowing the powerful influence that possession has on our psychology, I take a simple step to counteract it. I try to use my knowledge of the endowment effect to help me de-clutter my life. Perhaps this can be useful to you too.

Say I am cleaning out my stuff. Before I learnt about the endowment effect I would go through my things one by one and try to make a decision on what to do with it. Quite reasonably, I would ask myself whether I should throw this away. At this point, although I didn’t have a name for it, the endowment effect would begin to work its magic, leading me to generate all sorts of reasons why I should keep an item based on a mistaken estimate of how valuable I found it. After hours of tidying I would have kept everything, including the 300 hundred rubber bands (they might be useful one day), the birthday card from two years ago (given to me by my mother) and the obscure computer cable (it was expensive).

Now, knowing the power of the bias, for each item I ask myself a simple question: If I didn’t have this, how much effort would I put in to obtain it? And then more often or not I throw it away, concluding that if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t want this.

Let this anti-endowment effect technique perform its magic for you, and you too will soon be joyously throwing away things that you only think you want, but actually wouldn’t trouble yourself to acquire if you didn’t have them.

And here’s the thing… it works for emails too. If someone sends me a link to an article or funny picture, I don’t think “I must look at that”, I ask “If I hadn’t just been sent this link, how hard would I endeavour to find out this information for myself?”. And then I delete the email, thinking that however fascinating that article on the London sewerage system sounds or that funny picture of a cat promises to be, I didn’t want them before the email was in my possession, so I probably don’t really want them now.

That’s my tip for managing my clutter. If you have any others, let me know.

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BBC Future column: Why I am always unlucky but you are always careless

My most recent column for the BBC Future website, the original is here

From lost keys to failed interviews, we blame other people for mishaps but never ourselves, because assuming causes helps us to make sense of the world.

When my wife can’t find her keys, I assume it is because she is careless. When I can’t find my keys I naturally put it down to bad luck. The curious thing is that she always assumes the opposite – that she’s the one with the bad luck, and I’m the careless one.

When we observe other people we attribute their behaviour to their character rather than to their situation – my wife’s carelessness means she loses her keys, your clumsiness means you trip over, his political opinions mean that he got into an argument. When we think about things that happen to us the opposite holds. We downplay our own dispositions and emphasise the role of the situation. Bad luck leads to lost keys, a hidden bump causes trips, or a late train results in an unsuccessful job interview – it’s never anything to do with us!

 This pattern is so common that psychologists have called it the fundamental attribution error. And there’s a whole branch of psychology that investigates how we reason about causes for things called attribution theory. The fundamental attribution error is a good example of a quirk in the way we reason about causes, but it isn’t the only one. Despite the name, it may not even be the most fundamental.

Seeking causes

Psychologists are interested in attribution of causation because it tells us important things about how the mind works. To illustrate this, imagine you see a man asleep under a tree, and a leaf fluttering down to land on his head. As the leaf touches his head he wakes up and shouts “Yikes”. Anyone watching this scene would assume the man woke up because of the falling leaf.

 But this simple statement is remarkably difficult to prove – you have no direct access to the cause, just the before (a leaf) and after (“Yikes”). We automatically assume the cause. We talk about it like it is a thing – somehow in the middle between the leaf and the man, but really it is just an assumption, not a thing. And indeed, some new information could come along and force us to reconsider our assumptions. We might find out later that a philosophically-minded ant had come along and, just at that minute, decided to bite the sleeping man’s hand.

 So our causes are assumptions, based on what we perceive but with an extra bit of imagination. They are necessary assumptions. Without looking for causes we would be stuck with a confusing picture of the world. Rather than say “the falling leaf caused the man to wake up”, we have to take everything into account and say the following. “The leaf fell. The grass did the same as before. A bird flew between two trees one hundred and thirty yards away. I lost my keys. My Romanian aunt’s clock in my Romanian aunt’s house continued ticking (on and on and on). The man woke up.”

 Assuming causes in this way lets us make sense of the world. Not only is it easier to describe, the descriptions tell you how to make things happen (or avoid them – for instance, if you want the man to stay asleep next time, catch the leaf). In this way, attributions are psychological magic that help us control the future. No wonder psychologists find them interesting.

Built on sand

 The fundamental attribution error is just a continuation of a wider pattern: we blame individuals for what happens to them because of the general psychological drive to find causes for things. We have an inherent tendency to pick out each other as causes; even from infancy, we pay more attention to things that move under their own steam, that act as if they have a purpose. The mystery is not that people become the focus of our reasoning about causes, but how we manage to identify any single cause in a world of infinite possible causes.

 Even the way I described cause-seeking as an “inherent tendency” is part of this pattern. I have no direct access to what causes the results of experiments that have made me think this, just as I would have no direct access to what caused the man to wake as the leaf fell. I assume a thing, hidden, somehow, underneath the experiments – an inherent tendency for humans to identify each other as causes – which I then rely on to tell you what I’m thinking.

 That thing might not exist, or might have a reality very different from how I describe it, but we are forced to rely on assumptions to make sense of the world, and these assumptions create a reality of causes and essences that seems solid, despite its uncertain foundation.

 This all might sound overly philosophical, but once you are switched on to this tendency to invent essences you’ll hear them everywhere. Generalisations or stereotypes such as “women can’t do maths” or “Americans don’t have a sense of humour” also rely on an invented essence of a sex, or of a nationality, a term that some psychologists have called ultimate attribution error. These views don’t have a concrete existence. They are based in imagination, and are subject to all the psychological forces that are at play there.

 In more prosaic domestic moments, when it feels like such bad luck that I can’t find my keys, yet my wife seems so careless when she can’t find hers, I know I’m performing psychological magic. I’m observing the myriad events in the world and imagining things – my bad luck, her carelessness – which I use to explain the world with.

 With the knowledge that these explanations can only ever be built on sand, I know to be a bit more careful about how I use them.

View the original article here

BBC Future column: why are we so curious?

My column for BBC Future from last week. The original is here.

Evolution made us the ultimate learning machines, and the ultimate learning machines need to be oiled by curiosity.

I hate to disappoint you, but whatever your ambitions, whatever your long-term goals, I’m pretty sure that reading this column isn’t going to further them. It won’t stop you feeling hungry. It won’t provide any information that might save your life. It’s unlikely to make you attractive to the opposite sex.

And yet if I were to say that I will teach you a valuable lesson about your inner child, I hope you will want to carry on reading, driven by nothing more than your curiosity to find out a little more. What could be going on in your brain to make you so inquisitive?

We humans have a deeply curious nature, and more often than not it is about the minor tittle-tattle in our lives. Our curiosity has us doing utterly unproductive things like reading news about people we will never meet, learning topics we will never have use for, or exploring places we will never come back to. We just love to know the answers to things, even if there’s no obvious benefit.

From the perspective of evolution this appears to be something of a mystery. We associate evolution with ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ traits that support the essentials of day-to-day survival and reproduction. So why did we evolve to waste so much time? Shouldn’t evolution have selected for a species which was – you know – a bit more focussed?

Child’s play

The roots of our peculiar curiosity can be linked to a trait of the human species call neoteny. This is a term from evolutionary theory that means the “retention of juvenile characteristics”. It means that as a species we are more child-like than other mammals. Being relatively hairless is one physical example. A large brain relative to body size is another. Our lifelong curiosity and playfulness is a behavioural characteristic of neoteny.

Neoteny is a short-cut taken by evolution – a route that brings about a whole bundle of changes in one go, rather than selecting for them one by one. Evolution, by making us a more juvenile species, has made us weaker than our primate cousins, but it has also given us our child’s curiosity, our capacity to learn and our deep sense of attachment to each other.

And of course the lifelong capacity to learn is the reason why neoteny has worked so well for our species. Our extended childhood means we can absorb so much more from our environment, including our shared culture. Even in adulthood we can pick up new ways of doing things and new ways of thinking, allowing us to adapt to new circumstances.

Exploration bonus
In the world of artificial intelligence, computer scientists have explored how behaviour evolves when guided by different learning algorithms. An important result is that even the best learning algorithms fall down if they are not encouraged to explore a little. Without a little something to distract them from what they should be doing, these algorithms get stuck in a rut, relying on the same responses time and time again.

Computer scientists have learnt to adjust how these algorithms rate different possible actions with an ‘exploration bonus’ – that is, a reward just for trying something new. Weighted like this, the algorithms then occasionally leave the beaten track to explore. These exploratory actions cost them some opportunities, but leave them better off in the long run because they’ve gain knowledge about what they might do, even if it didn’t benefit them immediately.

The implication for the evolution of our own brain is clear. Curiosity is nature’s built-in exploration bonus. We’re evolved to leave the beaten track, to try things out, to get distracted and generally look like we’re wasting time. Maybe we are wasting time today, but the learning algorithms in our brain know that something we learnt by chance today will come in useful tomorrow.

Obviously it would be best if we knew what we needed to know, and just concentrated on that. Fortunately, in a complex world it is impossible to know what might be useful in the future. And thank goodness – otherwise we would have evolved to be a deadly-boring species which never wanted to get lost, never tried things to just see what happened or did things for the hell of it.

Evolution made us the ultimate learning machines, and the ultimate learning machines need a healthy dash of curiosity to help us take full advantage of this learning capacity.

Or, as Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

View the original article here

The wide open future of the art museum: Q&A with William Noel

At TEDxSummit, Walters Art Museum curator William Noel gave this fascinating talk on revealing the lost codex of Archimedes. The TED Blog caught up with him to talk about the digital future of a traditionally closed institution: the art museum.

As with the Archimedes codex, the Walters Art Museum’s online collection operates under the Creative Commons license. I can’t imagine that many museums join the Walters in this respect; why did the museum decide to opt for that license as opposed to something more restrictive?

The decision was actually driven by our experiences with the Archimedes manuscript and making all that data available under a Creative Commons license. When we started imaging our manuscripts at the Walters, we did the same. We just think that Creative Commons data is real data. It’s data that people can really use. It’s all about access, and access is about several things: licensing and publishing the raw data. Any data that you capture should be available to be the public. For our manuscripts, that’s what we’ve done.

The other important thing is to put the data in places where people can find it — making the data, as it were, promiscuous. That means putting it on Flickr, Pinterest, that sort of thing; these are forums people are used to using and commenting on, which they already use to build datasets of their own.

The Walters is a museum that’s free to the public, and to be public these days is to be on the Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free. And the great thing about digital data, particularly of historic collections, is that they’re the greatest advert that these collections have. So: Why on Earth would you limit how people can use them? The digital data is not a threat to the real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original, so there just doesn’t seem to be any point in putting restrictions on the data. There is the further fact that the data is funded by taxpayers’ money. So it didn’t seem fair to limit what taxpayers could do with the data that they paid for.

I’m not in a position to speak for other institutions, but sometimes you can’t digitize your collections because you don’t have the money, and that’s fair enough. But what I would say is that getting the public, both scholars and the general public, to pay for digital images … this is sort of an open secret, but in the vast majority of cases, this is not a business model that works. There really wasn’t a reason not to do a Creative Commons license, and it was foundational to what we wanted to do. One of the issues is that a lot of people who are in a position to make decisions vis-à-vis a special collection don’t really understand the difference between a digital object and the real object. That’s a structural problem that will change; I really passionately believe this.

One last thing: Data is going to die if it’s not used, so you want your data to be as easily usable as possible, and a Creative Commons license is an integral part of that.

You ask in your talk “what’s in it for the institution?” Being a publicly funded institution means something a lot different than being privately funded. Can you expand on what you think is “in it” for the institution to use Creative Commons licensing?

Institutions with special collections, particularly museums — libraries perhaps less so — want to improve their brand and raise visitorship. One way in which they can do that is through advertising. And what better way to advertise than by making instantly available, or as available as possible, images of their collections? Because that’s how they get known. What I say in a very abbreviated form in my talk is that people go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason people might not be going to an institution is because they don’t know what’s in your institution. Digitization is a way to address that issue, in a way that with medieval manuscripts, it simply wasn’t possible before. People go to museums because they go and see what they already know, so you’ve got to make your collections known. Frankly, you can write about it, but the best thing you can do is to put out free images of it. This is not something you do out of generosity, this is something you do because it makes branding sense, and it even makes business sense. So that’s what’s in it for the institution.

The other main reason to do it is to increase the knowledge of and research on your collection by the people, which has to be part of your mission at least, even in the most conservative of institutions. People can find out more about your materials, work on them, and add knowledge to your collections. And that’s good for everybody, not just institutions. That’s what history is, and that’s what makes history alive.

These days we’re not trying to preserve Archimedes’ intellectual property. When do you think a piece of art or text becomes the property of the public, as opposed to belonging to the author or the artist?

There are plenty of legal precedents for establishing the estate of authors and painters and that sort of thing. One of the great luxuries of being a fan of the Middle Ages, like me, is that I don’t have to worry about it. I only have to make sure that the digital images that I capture of these things are available under free licensing and there’s no restrictive copyright on the images. I’m just very glad I’m not advocating for this in the 20th century. Institutions that have modern collections are in a fundamentally different position.

The right of the artist is one reason people might resist the “freeing” of data.

My answer to that is sure, but of course it shouldn’t be applied to the Middle Ages! Actually libraries containing special collections of medieval materials are normally very careful to write restrictive copyright on their materials. Part of this is historical; that is to say, when images of these manuscripts were published in books, it didn’t have to behave like digital data, and it didn’t have to be free for people to use in all sorts of ways and in different contexts. The images were just reproduced in other books. But those days are fast running out, and digital images need to be free, so that people can do what they need to do with them and what they want to do with them. That’s the great thing about digital data!

So part of that is historical: You used to restrict the use of your books to try and make money off reproductions in other books. It was expensive, but it wasn’t crippling. Today these copyright restrictions are now crippling scholarship and access by the general public. The other thing is that a lot of these collections are in national institutions, university libraries, and they are the prized cultural heritage of these institutions. The policymakers in those institutions don’t like the idea that reproductions of these images can be available for free. It feels to them like you are denigrating your greatest asset. That’s a state of mind that belongs to my grandfather — for whom I have great affection, but to whom I don’t listen much anymore.

When you can access something for free, a piece of music or a piece of text, what is the incentive to pay for it, to get in your car to go see something?

Because you want something that is not a collection of ones and naughts made sense out of a style sheet. You want to go to something that is made literally of flesh, rather than organized energy that is going to disappear at the press of a keystroke. There is nothing like touching history, smelling history, reading it from a 700-year-old book. There are lots of things that digital data can do, things that medieval manuscripts cannot do — aggregating, virtually putting together a medieval library of things which are not disparate, searching it once it’s been transcribed — but there’s a lot digitizing an object can’t do. And for that, people are going to have to go and consult or see the original. (But the way the public is going to see that the original is there is by first seeing a digital avatar on the web. That’s the point.)

Do you think there’s a place in the future for that mentality which wants to preserve cultural heritage by keeping it behind closed doors?

It’s not over. Much more survives from the Middle Ages than people think, and the job of digitizing our medieval heritage is truly enormous, so it’s going to take time. At the end of the day there might be some holdouts, but they’re going to be utterly marginalized and, frankly, derided. And they won’t be allowing their great cultural treasures to contribute to the course of historical study.

Where is the Archimedes palimpsest now?

The vast majority of it has been returned to its owner, who is anonymous. An exhibition opens in Hildesheim, Germany on Sunday, June 3, and several leaves of the palimpsest will be there. In early 2014 there’s going to be a exhibition including 20 leaves at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.

What’s the next step for you?

We’re still digitizing our medieval manuscripts. We just got a new grant to digitize 100 manuscripts of Flemish treasures. One of the things that we’re going to do is try and make our data as promiscuous as possible, to advocate for it, to integrate it with other initiatives that are being built on the user end. And my personal goal for the future is to make as much medieval data as possible available in its raw form to be used for any non-commercial purpose.

View the original article here

BBC Future column: Hypnic Jerks

Here’s my column at BBC Future from last week. You can see the original here. The full listof my columns is here and  there is now a RSS feed, should you need it

As we give up our bodies to sleep, sudden twitches escape our brains, causing our arms and legs to jerk. Some people are startled by them, others are embarrassed. Me, I am fascinated by these twitches, known as hypnic jerks. Nobody knows for sure what causes them, but to me they represent the side effects of a hidden battle for control in the brain that happens each night on the cusp between wakefulness and dreams.

Normally we are paralysed while we sleep. Even during the most vivid dreams our muscles stay relaxed and still, showing little sign of our internal excitement. Events in the outside world usually get ignored: not that I’d recommend doing this but experiments have shown that even if you sleep with your eyes taped open and someone flashes a light at you it is unlikely that it will affect your dreams.

But the door between the dreamer and the outside world is not completely closed. Two kinds of movements escape the dreaming brain, and they each have a different story to tell.

Brain battle

The most common movements we make while asleep are rapid eye-movements. When we dream, our eyes move according to what we are dreaming about. If, for example, we dream we are watching a game of tennis our eyes will move from left to right with each volley. These movements generated in the dream world escape from normal sleep paralysis and leak into the real world. Seeing a sleeping persons’ eyes move is the strongest sign that they are dreaming.

Hypnic jerks aren’t like this. They are most common in children, when our dreams are most simple and they do not reflect what is happening in the dream world – if you dream of riding a bike you do not move your legs in circles. Instead, hypnic jerks seem to be a sign that the motor system can still exert some control over the body as sleep paralysis begins to take over. Rather than having a single “sleep-wake” switch in the brain for controlling our sleep (i.e. ON at night, OFF during the day), we have two opposing systems balanced against each other that go through a daily dance, where each has to wrest control from the other.

Deep in the brain, below the cortex (the most evolved part of the human brain) lies one of them: a network of nerve cells called the reticular activating system. This is nestled among the parts of the brain that govern basic physiological processes, such as breathing. When the reticular activating system is in full force we feel alert and restless – that is, we are awak

Opposing this system is the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus: ‘ventrolateral’ means it is on the underside and towards the edge in the brain, ‘preoptic’ means it is just before the point where the nerves from the eyes cross. We call it the VLPO. The VLPO drives sleepiness, and its location near the optic nerve is presumably so that it can collect information about the beginning and end of daylight hours, and so influence our sleep cycles. As the mind gives in to its normal task of interpreting the external world, and starts to generate its own entertainment, the struggle between the reticular activating system and VLPO tilts in favour of the latter. Sleep paralysis sets in.

What happens next is not fully clear, but it seems that part of the story is that the struggle for control of the motor system is not quite over yet. Few battles are won completely in a single moment. As sleep paralysis sets in remaining daytime energy kindles and bursts out in seemingly random movements. In other words, hypnic jerks are the last gasps of normal daytime motor control.

Dream triggers

Some people report that hypnic jerks happen as they dream they are falling or tripping up. This is an example of the rare phenomenon known as dream incorporation, where something external, such as an alarm clock, is built into your dreams. When this does happen, it illustrates our mind’s amazing capacity to generate plausible stories. In dreams, the planning and foresight areas of the brain are suppressed, allowing the mind to react creatively to wherever it wanders – much like a jazz improviser responds to fellow musicians to inspire what they play.

As hypnic jerks escape during the struggle between wake and sleep, the mind is undergoing its own transition. In the waking world we must make sense of external events. In dreams the mind tries to make sense of its own activity, resulting in dreams. Whilst a veil is drawn over most of the external world as we fall asleep, hypnic jerks are obviously close enough to home – being movements of our own bodies – to attract the attention of sleeping consciousness. Along with the hallucinated night-time world they get incorporated into our dreams.

So there is a pleasing symmetry between the two kinds of movements we make when asleep. Rapid eye movements are the traces of dreams that can be seen in the waking world. Hypnic jerks seem to be the traces of waking life that intrude on the dream world.

View the original article here

BBC Future column: Does the internet rewire your brain?

My column for BBC Future from a few days ago. The original is here. Mindhacks.com readers will have heard most of this before, thanks to Vaughan’s coverage of the Baroness and her fellow travellers.

Being online does change your brain, but so does making a cup of tea. A better question to ask is what parts of the brain are regular internet users using.

This modern age has brought with it a new set of worries. As well as watching our weight and worrying about our souls, we now have to worry about our brain fitness too – if you believe the headlines. Is instant messaging eroding the attention centres of our brains? Are Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools preventing you from forming normal human bonds? And don’t forget email – apparently it releases the same addictive neurochemicals as crack cocaine!

Plenty of folk have been quick to capitalise on this neuro-anxiety. Amazon’s virtual shelves groan with brain-training books and games. (I confess I am not entirely innocent myself). You can fight the cognitive flab, these games promise, if you work that grey matter like a muscle.

But is this true? Are sudoku puzzles the only thing stopping the species turning into a horde of attention-deficient, socially-dysfunctional, email addicts – part human, part smartphone?

Fear not, there is some good news from neuroscience. But first, it is my duty to tell you the bad news. You may want to put down your phone and take note, this is the important bit.

The truth is that everything you do changes your brain. Everything. Every little thought or experience plays a role in the constant wiring and rewiring of your neural networks. So there is no escape. Yes, the internet is rewiring your brain. But so is watching television. And having a cup of tea. Or not having a cup of tea. Or thinking about the washing on Tuesdays. Your life, however you live it, leaves traces in the brain.

Brain workout

Worrying about the internet is just the latest in a long line of fears society has had about the changes technologies might bring. People worried about books when they first became popularly available. In Ancient Greece, Socrates worried about the effect of writing, saying it would erode young people’s ability to remember. The same thing happened with television and telephones. These technologies did change us, and the way we live our lives, but nothing like the doom-mongers predicted would stem from them.

But is the internet affecting our brains in a different, more extraordinary way? There is little evidence to suggest harm. Here we are, millions of us, including me and you, right now, using the internet, and we seem okay. Some people worry that, even though we cannot see any ill-effects of the internet on our minds, there might be something hidden going on. I am not so worried about this, and I’ll tell you why

We regularly do things that have a profound effect on our brains – such as reading or competitive sports – with little thought for our brain fitness. When scientists look at people who have spent thousands of hours on an activity they often see changes in the brain. Taxi drivers, famously, have a larger hippocampus, a part of the brain recruited for navigation. Musicians’ brains devote more neural territory to brain regions needed for playing their instruments. So much so, in fact, that if you look at the motor cortex of string players you see bulges on one side (because the fine motor control for playing a violin, for example, is only on one hand), whereas the motor cortex of keyboard players bulges on both sides (because piano playing requires fine control of both hands).

So practice definitely can change our brains. By accepting this notion, though, we replace a vague worry about the internet with a specific worry: if we use the internet regularly, what are we practicing?

Get a life

In the absence of any substantial evidence, I would hazard a guess that the majority of internet use is either information search or communication, using email and social media. If this is so, using the internet should affect our brains so that we are better at these things. Probably this is already happening, part of a general cultural change which involves us getting better and better at dealing with abstract information.

Internet use would only be a worry if it was getting in the way of us practicing some other life skill. If Facebook stopped people seeing their friends face to face that could have a harmful effect. But the evidence suggests this is not the case. If anything, people with more active internet lives have more active “meat-space” lives. Most of us are using the internet as a complement to other ways of communicating, not as a substitute.

So there is no magic extra risk from the internet. Like TV before it, and reading before that, it gives us a way of practicing certain things. Practice will change our brains, just like any habit. The important thing is that we are part of this process, it is not just something that happens to us. You can decide how much time you want to put into finding pictures of funny cats, bantering on Facebook or fitting your thoughts into 140 characters. There will be no sudden damage done to your brain, or great surprises for your brain fitness. You would be a fool to think that the internet will provide all the exercise your brain needs, but you would also be a fool to pass up the opportunities it offers. And those pictures of funny cats.

View the original article here

BBC Future column: earworms

From a couple of weeks ago, my column from BBC Future, about everyday brain quirks (as I’ve mentioned previously). Thanks to Maria Panagiotidi for help with this one.

“Earworms”, some people call them. Songs that get stuck in your head and go round and round, sometimes for days, sometimes for months. For no apparent reason you cannot help yourself from humming or singing a tune by Lady Gaga or Coldplay, or horror upon horrors, the latest American Idol reject.

To a psychologist – or at least to this psychologist – the most interesting thing about earworms is that they show a part of our mind that is clearly outside of our control. Earworms arrive without permission and refuse to leave when we tell them to. They are parasites, living in a part of our minds that rehearses sounds.

We all get these musical memories, and people appear to have different ones, according to a team at Goldsmiths University in London, who collected a database of over 5,000 earworms. True, the songs that we get stuck with tend to be simple and repetitive, but it seems we are not all singing the same number one song at the same time.

Lost in music

Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in his book Musicophilia that earworms are a clear sign of “the overwhelming, and at times, helpless, sensitivity of our brains to music”. Music is defined by repetition, just like earworms, and this might make earworms so hard to shake – they are musical memories that loop, say a particular verse or a hook, forever repeating rather than running to completion. Some people report that singing an earworm to the end can help get rid of it (others report in frustration that this does not work at all).

As well as containing repetition, music is also unusual among the things we regularly encounter for being so similar each time we hear it. Fences are visually repetitive, for example, but each time you see the same fence you will look at it from a different angle, or in different light. Put a song on your stereo and the sound comes out virtually identical each time. Remembering is powerfully affected by repetition, so maybe the similarity of music engraves deep grooves in our mind. Grooves in which earworms can thrive.

Another fact about earworms is that they often seem to have something interesting or usual about them. Although they will often be simple and repetitive bits of music, tunes that become earworms have a little twist or peculiarity, something that makes them “catchy”, and perhaps this is a clue as to why they can take hold in our memory system. If there was nothing unique about them they would be swamped by all the other memories that sound similar too.

Slave to the rhythm

If you have got a particularly persistent earworm you can suffer an attack of it merely by someone mentioning the tune, without having to hear it. This proves that earworms are a phenomenon of long-term memory, rather than merely being a temporary “after-image” in sound.

But this is not the whole story. Human memory researchers have identified so called “slave systems” in our short-term memory, components of the mind which capture sights and sounds, keeping them alive for a short time while we focus on them.

One slave system is the “mind’s eye”, capturing visual information, another is the “inner ear”, the part we use for remembering phone numbers, for instance. It is this second part that seems to get infected with earworms. Rather than rehearse our plans for the day, idle thoughts, or lists of things to remember, the inner ear gets stuck on a few short bars of music or a couple of phrases from a song. A part of us that we normally do not have to think about, that should just do what we ask, has been turned against us, tormenting us with a jukebox request that we never asked for.

That our minds are not a unity is one of the basic insights of modern psychology – it is the story Dr Freud was telling, and, although it differs on many of the details, modern cognitive neuroscience says a similar thing. The sense of our selves is not the only thing going on in our minds, psychology says. The mind is an inner world which we do not have complete knowledge of, or have control over.

Mind games

Fortunately psychology can provide some vital intelligence on how to deal with an unruly mind. Consider the famous “don’t think of a white bear” problem, which as it implies involves trying not to think about white bears. Try this yourself, or you can set it as a challenge for a loved one you would like to torment. This problem is a paradox: by trying not to think of a thing you constantly have to be checking if you are still thinking of it – re-invoking precisely the thing you are trying not to think of.

The general solution for the white bear problem is to do something else, to avoid both thinking of the white bear and not thinking of the white bear. For earworms, the solution may be the same. Our inner ear, a vital part of our cognitive machinery for remembering and rehearsing sounds, has become infected with an earworm. This is a part of ourselves which is not under our control, so just sending in instructions to “shut up” is unlikely to be of much help (and has been shown to make it worse). Much better is to employ the inner ear in another task, preferably something incompatible with rehearsing the earworm.

If earworms survive because of their peculiarity, the hook that makes them catch, then my prediction for ridding yourself of an earworm is to sing songs that are similar. If your mind is poisoned by Brittany Spears’ Toxic, for instance, then try singing Kylie Minogue’s appropriately titled Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. By my theory this will erode the uniqueness of the memory habitat that lets the earworm survive. Let me know if it works!

Link: My columns at BBC Future
Link: UK readers – you’ll have to try it via here

View the original article here

The future of fMRI

Nature has an article looking at the future of fMRI brain scanning in light of its long-lasting hype and recently discovered problems.

Brain scanning has become massively popular both in the scientific community and in the media, in great part because the pictures it produces seem quite intuitive: images of the brain with colours on it which apparently represent neural activity when we’re doing something.

However, the current situation with fMRI is nicely but inadvertantly captured in the article:

It has turned psychology “into a biological science”, says Richard Frackowiak…

[two sentences later]

Perhaps the biggest conundrum in fMRI is what, exactly, the technique is measuring.

fMRI has indeed turned much of psychology into a biological science but it hasn’t really given us a fundamentally deeper understanding of neuropsychology largely due to the measurement problem.

Recent revelations that fMRI studies are not as reliable as we thought and that some common ways of analysing data may be flawed have made many people question the utility of the technique – or at least, many of the past studies that may not have been well controlled.

The Nature article looks at where the science will go next, although I can’t help thinking that if it became less expensive the gloss would rub off – and then at least we could assess it a little more reasonably.

Sadly, scientists are no less attracted to bling.

Link to Nature article ‘Brain imaging: fMRI 2.0'

View the original article here

Neurohacks column at BBC Future

The quite lovely BBC Future has launched (‘the home of new trends in the worlds of Science, Technology, Environment and Health’) and yours truly has a column there: Neurohacks (‘Neuroscience and the psychology of the everyday’). You can find it in the ‘Brain‘ section.

At this point any UK-based surfers who have followed the above links will be staring in frustration at a corporate holding page. BBC Future is only visible outside of the UK, due to it being funded by advertisements rather than our licence fee. Non-UK readers – hello! UK readers – despair not, there are workarounds.

At BBC Future I’ll be recruiting neuroscience and experimental psychology to help us understand conundrums and curiosities of everyday life. Things such as Why recalling names is so vexing (UK readers, try here) and questions like Do we all see the same colours?’ (UK readers).

Those are the topics of my first two columns, at least. I do take requests, incidentally, so if there is some phenomenon that has always bugged, or that you think neuroscience or psychology should be able to help with, get in touch (by email or twitter – see the right bar for details). I may be able to provide you with an entertaining and evidence-based answer.

Link: Neurohacks column at BBC Future

Check out the rest of BBC Future while you’re there. It’s a great clear site with a stellar cast of columnists.

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New TED Book envisions the ‘living’ cities of the future

What will the urban areas of tomorrow look like? More like an ever-changing and vibrant garden than a static set of buildings and blocks. In our new ebook Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives, British designer and architect Rachel Armstrong re-imagines the world’s cities and argues that in order to achieve sustainable development of the built environment — and help countries like Japan recover from natural disasters — we need to rethink how we approach architecture. By genetically modifying biological systems  and studying such things as protocells — nongenetic self-organizing molecules that exhibit movement and sensitivity to their surroundings — we could create more responsive and dynamic structures. The result is a new kind of architectural practice where cities behave more like an evolving ecosystem than a lifeless machine. We recently spoke with Armstrong.

What do you mean by ‘living architecture’?

It’s a way of using ecological solutions to urban problems. Living architecture works by applying new materials and engineered systems that harness some of the unique properties of ‘life.’ Living technology is more robust and environmentally responsive than traditional materials, and can deal with unpredictability in a way that current technologies cannot.

How?

Our future cities will be designed more like gardens than machines. Buildings will perform functions that we currently attribute to the plant world, such as carbon capture. They will also contribute to the health of residents by removing pollution or providing food and energy. Living architecture is not a panacea to urban problems, but propose an alternative approach to making buildings  that may help alleviate these problem. Our cities, as they currently exist, as seen as inert barriers to the natural world. But these barriers are inevitably breached in the event of a natural disaster. What might happen if everyday buildings were designed with the seeds of regeneration?

What developments in biotech will make a difference?

Protocells, for one thing. Protocells are a very interesting technology in this new portfolio as they are not strictly speaking ‘alive’ – since they do not possess a biological set of instructions, such as DNA – but they do behave in a life-like manner. They can sense and move around their environment through chemical means. They can function together in groups and can be chemically programmed to lay down solid materials. They are one kind of living technology that will be part of a whole new portfolio of materials that architects will have at their disposal as they develop of our cities. These materials will literally transform inert, non-living building surfaces into dynamic, life-like ones that carry out a set of functions normally associated with ‘life,’ such as, growth, self-repair or recycling resources, like oil and water.

How far out are these concepts? When will we start to see them in play?

These technologies already exist in the laboratory and in prototype model form, although they still need research and development to turn them into widely available products. The ideas may seem outlandish but they are based on real technology that exists today. All applications of scientific research in the laboratory remain speculative until they are transformed into products. But we are heading that way.

Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives is part of the TED Books series, which is available for the Kindle and Nook as well as on Apple’s iBookstore.

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