Strange Loops

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.” –attributed to Albert Einstein

Our subjective experience of how fast time is passing depends on the situation we are in. Waiting for a pot to boil while you watch it can feel like a frustratingly long time, and watching a clock as it ticks down the last minutes of a long meeting or class can be excruciating. (In fact, studies consistently show that we perceive a watched clock to slow down or stop briefly when we first look at it, an effect known as chronostasis).

On the other hand, when immersed in enjoyable activities, we often lose track of time and are surprised to find out just how much time has really passed while we were so engaged. Time flies when you’re having fun, as the expression goes.
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Stephen Pinker has a pretty decent article up in the New York Times called My Genome, My Self about the topic of personal genomics, i.e. getting your DNA analyzed to discover your own ‘genetic code’. For example, having a certain set of alleles (versions of a gene) guarantees that your eyes will be a particular color. You may have genes that predispose you to various diseases, or that are associated with high intelligence. The more we learn about genetics, the more subtle and fine-grained become the predictions that accompany possession of particular alleles.

Some limited personal DNA profiles are now available for under $400 and people are worried that as this information becomes commonplace, it may be used against them. That is, we may find job discrimination based on genetic makeup: “Well, this candidate appears a good fit, but her profile shows a predisposition toward anger problems and a high chance of developing health problems that impair her ability to work or stay with the company.” Likewise, insurance companies may refuse to insure those with risky genes, or to make their coverage exorbitant. If someone has an allele that makes them 87% likely to develop M.S., an insurance company may deem them too risky to insure.
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When you think of intelligent non-human animals, you probably think of apes: they use tools, appear to have culture, can be taught language-like communication systems, and the list of uniquely human traits seems to be ever-shrinking thanks to them. Maybe you include dolphins in your list of smart animals.

When asked to imagine intelligence in the animal kingdom, it’s unlikely that the critters coming to mind would be octopuses, fish, birds or insects. But as a recent Scientific American article on comparative cognition points out, some branches of the tree of life that don’t normally get a lot of attention for their smarts have actually demonstrated some pretty impressive abilities.

In the sea, cephalopods (octopuses, squid, cuttlefish) are the mental badasses of the invertebrates. Octopuses, for example, are not only great problem solvers, but can learn to solve a problem simply from watching other octopuses do a task. Fish may be smarter than we give them credit for. Goldfish, for example, can orient their way through mazes (more efficiently than slime-mold, even). So can reptiles like turtles.
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Science and philosophy are traditionally considered very distinct disciplines. Certainly many scientists are philosophical, and there are many philosophers of science. But we think of the two domains as following very different methodologies. Scientists perform experiments: they manipulate variables and observe the outcome. Philosophers think: they perform thought experiments, manipulating concepts by pumping intuitions in one direction or another using words. Which is far from putting on a lab coat and collecting data, right?

Well, recently a subdomain of philosophy has appeared on the scene, called experimental philosophy. Philosophers have long pontificated about how people think, and base their thought experiments on the assumptions of “folk psychology” — naive, common-sense assumptions about our everyday behaviors and why we think and act the way we do. Until recently, philosophers have pulled from the work of scientists (at best) or just ignored the science (at worst).

But now, experimental philosophers are performing actual experiments, controlling variables and collecting data. Take, for example, the entertaining video below of comedian Eugene Mirman explaining a recent experiment:

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Researchers in the U.S. and Japan successfully synched up a monkey’s brain with a robot across the world, and after about an hour of practice the monkey could control the robot’s legs while it walked on a treadmill.

First the scientists trained the monkey to walk on a treadmill, and electrodes monitored her brain signals during the activity. The brain signals predicted her leg movement in such a way that they could translate the signals into instructions for a bipedal robot in Japan on a similar treadmill.

The monkey was shown a live video of the robot’s legs while both walked on their own treadmill, and the monkey’s brain soon ‘tuned in’ to the robot’s leg movements. In fact, when they turned off her treadmill and she stopped walking, she continued to concentrate on the video screen, and sure enough, her neurons kept firing, controlling the robot’s movement. The robot kept walking, controlled from across the seas by a stationary monkey’s brain.
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Over enough time, molecules released into the air disperse pretty evenly (this is why polluting smoke-stacks are so tall, avoiding local pollution by dispersing the output more widely). It’s reasonable to assume, then, that whenever you breathe out, eventually those molecules from your breath end up spaced fairly uniformly around the Earth’s atmosphere.

That’s also the case for historical figures (for whom enough time has passed to really disperse their breaths well). So if, for example, Caesar’s last breath is spread around the atmosphere pretty uniformly, then what are the chances you are breathing part of that in right now, in this very breath?

According to common calculations, the chances are really good. Each breath you take, in fact, has a high chance of having some of Caesar’s last breath in it! (And the exhalations of Shakespeare and Hitler and Plato and the first human beings and…). How do we make such a calculation?
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At the Primate Research Institute in Japan, Ai is a chimpanzee in her thirties who has been involved in cognition research for decades. She’s well-known for learning to use our familiar numerals (1, 2, 3…) to appropriately label sets of objects (5 bananas, etc.), and she’s done some other really cool things with numerals and numbers.

What I didn’t know until recently is that she has a son, Ayumu, and he too is becoming quite the research superstar. A recent study demonstrated his talent for remembering an array of randomly mixed numerals on a computer screen, after they were very briefly flashed to him and then masked by white boxes. He had to touch each of the hidden numerals in order without a single mistake in order for a trial to be considered a success. This seems to show a pretty impressive working memory for visuo-spatial layouts, but does that mean Ayumu has something like eidetic memory (”photographic memory”)?

I don’t have the full article. However, previous studies with other chimps (including Biro and Matsuzawa’s 1999 study with his mother Ai) have shown that they “queue up” action sequences in a task like this, such that if the targets change/move in the middle of a trial, their fingers still briefly travel toward where the right answer would have been. Perhaps this is a demonstration of a pre-planned motor sequence, rather than anything like photographic memory.

One way to test this might be to remove one or more of the number locations completely (including the white box masking where it originally was flashed). If the chimp has a photograph-like visual of the layout in memory, then he should be able to continue the sequence by skipping over the missing numeral. But if he has pre-planned his actions in advance (as mother Ai did for a set of 3, 4 or 5 numerals), then his finger should still move to where the missing numeral disappeared.

Either way, if the task sounds easy, try it for yourself. (even with only 5 numerals, it’s pretty tough at first). The study compared college students’ performance to that of Ayumu, and the chimp won. Note that without access to the paper, it’s hard to know if the setup was truly the same. Ayumu almost certainly had a lot more practice than the college students (but then this is necessary to teach him what the task is, whereas humans can have instructions explained to them). Also, Ayumu’s numerals aren’t masked until he touches the first one (usually very quickly), but the college students’ might have been masked immediately after flashing (as the website demo with fewer numerals does).

At any rate, the experiment is a very impressive demonstration of a larger memory span than has been seen before in a setup like this. However that information is stored, it’s cool that he can do it.

[Thanks to Primatology.net for the game link]

The Telegraph (Dec 2007) has a story on Liz Hawkins’ research into dolphin communication which claims they might be using language.

Basically, they used different whistles and clicks depending on environmental and behavioral context. Not exactly a surprise: many species do this. Vervets monkeys are well-known for making distinct alarm calls to their fellows based on the type of predator spotted. But is this enough to call it language?

Linguists have identified a handful of general properties of human language which give it its expressive power. Some of the crucial ones:

• Arbitrariness: the sounds, letters or hand-signals used do not directly resemble the objects or ideas they refer to. The word cheetah does not look or sound like a big cat, and a vervet’s alarm call when eagles and hawks are around does not sound like a bird.
• Productivity: can create new strings (combinations of sounds or words) from smaller pieces, i.e. can say something that has never been said before, and people will understand.
• Displacement: allows reference to the past or future, or things out of immediate sight/experience. We can talk about yesterday’s weather and events that never happened.
• Duality: has two levels — meaningless sound pieces (phonemes) and semantic meaning (morphemes, words, etc.) — operating at the same time. That is, mouth sounds like the ‘b’-, ‘a’- and ‘t’-sounds in “bat” mean nothing alone, but in the proper sequence they refer to an animal.

Whether all of these (and other important properties) are necessary to classify communication as strictly linguistic, it is clear that what we normally mean by language (i.e. human-like communication) is much more complex than simply producing different sounds or signals in distict contexts. So they’ve got a long way to go in establishing that dolphin communication is a “language” in anything close to the same sense by which we apply that term to human communication.

Certainly, other researchers have done work investigating dolphins’ communicatory abilities (including linguistic precursors like equivalence classes), but as of yet, most scientists in the field would probably not be comfortable calling it language. That’s one problem with popular media science writing: the writer tends to go for catchy, succinct headlines and descriptions that at best over-simplify scientific results, and at worst present outright falsities. It is important to spread scientific knowledge, but we must also spread scientific literacy in order for that knowledge not to be corrupted.

At any rate, the Telegraph article ends with a quote from Liz Hawkins: “Dolphin communication is much more complicated than we thought.” Fair enough, but perhaps she should replace the word ‘complicated’ with ‘flexible’. Making different whistles when feeding versus traveling is not exactly complicated.

There’s still a lot of research to be done, but this is a really exciting area because dolphins provide a rich source of data from an evolutionary line rather distinct from primates (the target of most animal language research in the last half of the twentieth century). Nice to see that field work is complementing the controlled experimental work.