the evolving mind

Florida is such a weird state. After 10+ years here I’m still getting used to it.

Two things happened yesterday that in the three previous states I have resided (MA, VT, NM), wouldn’t have made sense:

1. I mowed the front lawn for the last time this year. Grass growth is apparently triggered by daylight hours. It always surprises me how long it takes for grass “wake up” time in spring, despite the temperatures. Likewise with fall “sleep time.” While we’ve got roughly three months before our first threat of frost, the grass has started to go dormant.

2. I spied new leaves sprouting out of the soil in our autumn vegetable garden.

So, is it a season for vegetative dormancy or growth? I guess it depends what species you are talking about.

Technorati Links: flora, florida, photography

“A monkey or ape is most likely to select as a grooming partner an individual with who he (or she) already has a close, supportive relationship, or with whom a better relationship would be advantageous. And the chosen partner will reciprocate, or not, for similar reasons.”
- Jane Goodall (29)

Reassuring touch is a potent social tool. Physical touching of this type we call “grooming.” Humans, however, don’t do much of this; yet we do use words to reassure others. We assure them that they are loved, that help is near, that we care, that they are number one to us. Often it is not the actual words that count, but the delivery, the non-verbal elements. What do we call this sort of behavior?

“You look nice today.”

Gossip? Chit-chat?

Grooming, whether physical or vocal, forges and maintains relationships. Among chimpanzees, it is an essential social tool.(30) Primates in general forge and maintain important relationships with grooming. It is a preeminently social activity.(31) Of all the great apes (besides ourselves) chimpanzees and bonobos alone — our closest genetic kin — engage in mutual grooming.(32) An individual can please and reassure another while being pleased and reassured itself. Brilliant. Fear and anxiety is diminished; trust is built.

Jane Goodall, in The Chimpanzees of the Gombe: Patterns of Behavior, made a number of observations about chimpanzee social behavior, as it pertains to grooming.(33) These include:

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This xkcd comic is a riot.

Am I mistaken to think that in previous times philosophical and scientific discourse was dominated by the few who had risen to the lofty stage of widespread exposure? Has the Internet changed all that? By lowering the threshold of exposure, is public discourse more of a roar of many, many voices? And, very importantly, is this a good thing? Can/will it be?

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This morning I encountered this pic over at. PZ called it adorable, saying its the large eye that makes it so. I agree.

My psychological self wonders why. Do smaller eyes tend to be found behind partially drawn lids (to offer protection in possibly ensuing aggression)? Is vulnerability relatively “cute” . . . easier/safer to approach? Why does our brain make these particular assumptive short-cuts in perception?

When I look at the above photo I see a face with awfully odd, dangling lips. But of course, that’s no squid face. That’s an eye with appendages hanging from the body where my mind expects lips to be. And so I see them. Mistakenly.

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[photo source: Cephalopods: A World Guide, by Mark Norman, via Pharyngula]

Technorati Links: perception, psychology

I’m skeptical of a lot of things. One of those is photographic images. As a person with a little experience with digital photo-manipulation software, I understand how images can be “enhanced” to an extreme. And I sometimes wonder about the ethics of this behavior. When does visual fact become fiction?

Take the above NASA photo of the Butterfly Nebula. It has been enhanced by including normally invisible ultraviolet light.

Cool, sure. But this is my question to you: Is the above the real Butterfly Nebula? Careful, you could go down a rabbit’s hole metaphysics . . . akin to answering the question, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?” If a nebula emits ultraviolet radiation, but no one has eyes capable of perceiving it, does the brightness exist?

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P.S. For more ruminations by skeptical minds, I suggest checking out the The 119th Skeptics’ Circle. During my lunch break that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

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Bad science writing can obscure, exaggerate, and mislead. Sometimes it is just plain stupid. Sorry for my red-lined level of snark, but it boggles my mind that someone likely got paid to write this title:

Flips, Flops And Cartwheels: Gecko Tail Has A Mind Of Its Own, Scientists Discover

Groan. Seeing that both EurekAlert and ScienceDaily went with the same title, my guess is one of the study authors — Anthony Russell of the University of Calgary and Tim Higham of Clemson University in South Carolina — or one of their respective university publicity departments, is responsible for the crime of bad writing.

So, a raspberry to them. Beyond being a lame play on words, is it possible that the title could, in a small way, perpetuate the human propensity to engage in animism and anthropomorphism? I wonder.

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I have no idea what kind of flower the above is. The leaf looks a bit hibiscus-like, but the blossoms don’t match at all. I do know the butterflies love it. Well, not all butterflies. Each species seems to have a preferred food. Does the taste of nectar differ all that much from flower species to species? Or is it merely the shape and color that attracts them, like the shape and color of fast-food signs attracts the eyes of humans? There it is; there’s my restaurant.

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At one time it was standard developmental psychology material to profess that seniors lose up to 10% of their brain mass. I recall teaching it myself. I was wrong. Yikes. Seems you can’t even trust textbooks!

Scratch that. You shouldn’t have full confidence in everything in a textbook. Particularly those in the “softer” sciences.

One thing is for certain — science is exciting.

So how was this error made?

The belief that healthy older brains are substantially smaller than younger brains may stem from studies that did not screen out people whose undetected, slowly developing brain disease was killing off cells in key areas, according to new research. As a result, previous findings may have overestimated atrophy and underestimated normal size for the older brain.

Rather than normal aging causing a startlingly large change in brain mass, it seems that the pathological changes in the brains of a proportion of the elderly threw off the results. Minus those with some form of dementia (cognitive loss), the average loss is much smaller. So no, age itself won’t cause your braincase to become, in effect, one size too large.

[source]

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Any idea what the above is?

Hint: 60x magnification. Answer below the fold.

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Every normal individual has a sense of personal space. You bump into an associate in a parking lot and strike up a conversation. If that person stands too far away (say, five feet nose-to-nose), you would perceive it on some level and perhaps feel/think that’s odd. Were the person to stand too close (one foot) you would likely feel/think that’s weird.

New research out of Caltech claims to have pinpointed the region of the brain responsible for this class of perception. And they may well have.

The article: Caltech neuroscientists find brain region responsible for our sense of personal space.

For 20 “normal” subjects they discovered that the average preferred personal space distance was roughly two feet. For one special-case, brain-damaged individual, the distance was half that. About a foot. And so it was concluded (hypothesized?) that the brain area in question (the amygdala) is responsible for everyone’s sense of personal space.

Should the title writer have added a crucial qualifier — that the neuroscientists found the likely brain region? While they studied 20 normal subjects, they had only one special case. Fortunately, there is other, supporting data.

Previous studies of humans never had revealed an association between the amygdala and personal space. From their knowledge of the literature, however, the researchers knew that monkeys with amygdala lesions preferred to stay in closer proximity to other monkeys and humans than did healthy monkeys.

I think it is very likely the Caltech team found/confirmed the area of the brain responsible — at least in part — for our sense of personal space. Interesting.

The above finding got me thinking about consciousness. Some people believe that consciousness is now and forever will be a mystery — that the “seat” of it will never be uncovered. Yet is it possible that what we call consciousness is an aggregate of elements? Is it not possible that one by one we may come to understand the elements that comprise our senses of awareness?

Maybe. Likely?

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