the evolving mind

Is the Internet sort of super crossroads that is causing and will cause an increase in the speed of intellectual innovation and cultural evolution? I think so.

A study out of the University of College London has tagged past population density as the key trigger to “cultural explosions.”

Increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human behaviour.

This seems sensible to me, for, as the authors note, the signs of modern civilization appeared multiply tens of thousands of years after the modern brain had already appeared. And where do we find the first signs? Not deep in the jungle in a tribe that has existed there for eons, undisturbed.

But does a significantly large-enough population density alone cause a tipping point to human progress to be reached? I would guess there is more to it than that, as the news release about the study briefly addressed. But while they mention the migration between high-skill and low-skill groups as playing a role, I wonder if they also considered the likely essential roles of trade, surplus, and exposure to multiple groups of people.

Back to the “cyberspace explosion” we are currently experiencing. It seems to me that an information superhighway doesn’t really go anywhere if all its minds are doing and thinking the same thing. Thankfully, the Internet is not one highway, but truly a web of millions of roads, all crossing . . . to humanities betterment, I bet.

Technorati Links: intelligence, media, technology

Pioneering family therapist Virginia Satir once wrote something to this effect: Because each person in a family has a different position in it, their perceptions and experiences will significantly differ from other family members.

Perspective influences perception influences experience. As the ankle-level perspective of a yard plant above likely results in a different perception than had a used I ladder to snap a shot looking down on the 6ft plant.

Word use can also shape our perceptions/cognitions (there is a fine line between these) and experiences. Yesterday I mentioned an article that went by this title: People who wear rose-coloured glasses see more. When we are in a good mood our visual field is wider: we take in more information. But I wonder how my perception, cognition, and experience of the article would have differed if worded like this: People without rose-colored glasses more focused . . . Probably quite a bit, I imagine.

Technorati Links: cognition, flora, perception

I’ve recently encountered two articles that highlight the importance of friendly relationships: one on humans, the other baboons.

In the first, by cognitive psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, the researchers looked at the cognitive/perceptual elements of a close friendship. They discovered that an important component is not what you receive from others, but what you perceive to be their “ranking” of you.

friendship rankings were most strongly correlated with individuals’ own perceived rank among their partners’ other friends.

In other words, we tend to rank someone as a very good friend when we perceive that they perceive us as very close, relative to their other friends and associates. What does this have to do with alliances? In the least, the two are intertwined. Co-author Robert Kurzban said, “”Friendships are about alliances.” He elaborated,

In a way, one of the main predictors of friendship is the value of the alliance. The value of an ally, or friend, drops with every additional alliance they must make, so the best alliance is one in which your ally ranks you above everyone else as well.”

Interesting. Next we turn to the baboons. And that study actually helps shed more light on this one.

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Technorati Links: relationships, status

Because I am interested in the influence of mood on perception and cognition, and vice versa, this article interested me:

People who wear rose-coloured glasses see more.

Of course, a critical reading of the article should provide an answer to this query: do they really see “more”? According to researcher Adam Anderson,

“our study shows that when in a positive mood, our visual cortex takes in more information, while negative moods result in tunnel vision.”

Examining their experimental methods, I would agree. But is it possible that the “more” of a wider visual field–basically what they measured–is offset by the “less” of something else, such as fine detail, or some sort of depth? I wonder.

Still, a very interesting finding.

Technorati Links: perception

This is pretty cool looking, if you ask me. I can’t tell you the identity of it just yet, because I don’t recall the name and am going to have to look it up. The pic is at x200. Any ideas? Answer and another photo below the fold.

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Technorati Links: flora, microscope, puzzle

“Where the boundary is between the quantum and classical worlds, no one really knows.”

So says John Jost from the University of Colorado and member of a research team with a scientific breakthrough. The have demonstrated quantum entanglement in what they are calling a “mechanical system.”

If two objects are entangled, then manipulating one instantaneously affects the other, no matter how far away it is.

That’s the weirdness that many have said is confined to the realm of the subatomic. But now it has been shown to occur in a mechanical system. But no, there were no gears or levers or pulleys involved. This was the mechanical system:

The research, described in the June 4 issue of Nature, involves a bizarre intertwining between two pairs of vibrating ions (charged atoms) such that the pairs vibrate in unison, even when separated in space.

Fascinating. And yes, they did detect quantum spookiness at a new level. But mechanical system? And does a vibrating ion constitute something in the classical world? I don’t know. Physicists likely have a different understand of those words, but . . . .

Or course, I’d be careful not to assume the boundary will continue to slide toward the macroscopic and perhaps beyond. I’m doubtful that one day an experiment will reveal that slapping a twin on one continent causes the twin on another to feel pain. But as to where the boundary finally finds a home, who knows.

[source]

Technorati Links: physics, quantum, semantics

We have a cabbage palm in our yard. It is recognizable by the crosshatch pattern of protrusions left on the trunk by old growth. (Trimmed in the above photo.)

The coconut-like fruit it produces are tiny. Tiny. Not even suitable for a bauble to throw in cocktails. As far as I know, there is nothing edible about it. Why the name? When I think cabbage I think “vegetable.” Another name for the tree is “sabal” palm. Why sabal, why cabbage?

To better understand something new I often look into they etymology of its name. As a recorded, live practice of this, why not do that now?

Sabal: nothing at the online etymology dictionary. As for a definition, it seems to purely signify a class of fan palms.

Cabbage: this word appears to originate in the French word, “caboche,” meaning “head.” Which makes sense for the vegetable, but not so much for the tree.

And so we arrive back where we started. At the state tree of Florida. The things are everywhere down here. Doing very well. If they were easily converted to a tasty dish for humans, I don’t know if that would be the case. Except on farms.

Maybe in a few minutes I’ll have some cabbage for lunch as I munch beneath a cabbage palm, mulling over the meaning of words thanks to the brain in my head.

Technorati Links: environment, personal, semantics

There has been some dispute over the years whether the laugh-like sounds in other primates is analogous to human laughter. With a new study on ape laughter the dispute should lessen.

In research that is sure to bring an Ig Nobel nomination, the feet of infant and juvenile primates of a range of species (human, chimp, bonobo, orangutan, gorilla) were tickled and the sounds emitted recorded and analyzed. The results? The similarity of the sounds nicely reflected the amount of genetic similarity on the primate branch of the evolutionary tree.

“the acoustic and phylogenetic results provide clear evidence of a common evolutionary origin for tickling-induced laughter in humans and tickling-induced vocalizations in great apes.”

Interesting. Could one now say that not ontogeny but comedy recapitulates phylogeny?

I will end on the authors’ confident bottom line:

At a minimum, one can conclude that it is appropriate to consider ‘laughter’ to be a cross-species phenomenon, and that it is therefore not anthropomorphic to use this term for tickling-induced vocalizations produced by the great apes.”

Technorati Links: behavior, chimpanzees, primates

Sometimes it seems the threshold for a set of thought/feelings/behaviors to qualify as a mental disorder has been lowered to the floor. Sure, human beings are remarkable complex, therefore the ways we can go insane is nearly limitless. But certainly there is a sensible way to differentiate the seriously ill from those significantly unhappy and/or poorly functioning. Isn’t there?

Hysteria sells. And sometimes it is outright funny, as in the case of this Onion headline and lead paragraph:

Report: More U.S. Soldiers Suffering From Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder

NORFOLK, VA—Pre-traumatic stress disorder, a future-combat-related psychological condition previously thought to afflict only young soldiers drafted against their will, is now found in growing numbers among National Guard members, Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force reservists, semi-retired officers, and the newly recruited, according to a government study released Monday.

But what about those other times? Are the major news outlets driving us certifiably insane?

Technorati Links: media, mental health

Saturn. Its rings. Its moon, Titan. Thanks to the Cassini space probe, we all see farther.

[pic courtesy of NASA]

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