Your Brain on Art: The Emerging Science of Neuroaesthetics Probes What Art Does to Our Brains

in Art, Science | October 9th, 2017

If you’ve fol­lowed debates in pop­u­lar philo­soph­i­cal cir­cles, you’ve sure­ly heard the cri­tique of “sci­en­tism,” the “view that only sci­en­tif­ic claims are mean­ing­ful.” The term doesn’t apply only in defens­es of reli­gious expla­na­tions, but also of the arts and humanities—long imper­iled by sweep­ing bud­get cuts and now seem­ing­ly upend­ed by neu­ro­science.

We have the neu­ro­science of music, of lit­er­a­ture, of paint­ing, of cre­ativ­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion them­selves…. What need any­more for those pedants and obscu­ran­tists in their ivory tow­er aca­d­e­m­ic cubi­cles? Sweep them all away for bet­ter MRI machines and sta­tis­ti­cal pro­grams! Who, gasp the oppo­nents of sci­en­tism, would hold such a philis­tine view? Maybe only a straw man or two.

For those in the emerg­ing field of “neu­roaes­thet­ics,” the goal is not to vivi­sect the arts, but to observe what art—however defined—does to the brain. Neu­roaes­thet­ics, notes the Wash­ing­ton Post video above, the­o­rizes that “some of the answers to art’s mys­ter­ies can be found in the realm of sci­ence.” As Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton Pro­fes­sor of Elec­tri­cal and Com­put­er Engi­neer­ing Jose Luis Con­tr­eras-Vidal puts it in the video below, “the more we under­stand the way the brain responds to the arts, the bet­ter we can under­stand our­selves.” Such under­stand­ing does not obvi­ate the mys­tery of art as, the Post writes in an accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cle, “the domain of the heart.”

The spec­ta­cle of per­form­ing artists, writ­ers, and musi­cians wear­ing skull­caps cov­ered with wires while in the midst of their cre­ative acts may look ludi­crous to us lay­folk. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton takes this research quite seri­ous­ly, how­ev­er, appoint­ing three visu­al artists-in-res­i­dence to work along­side many oth­ers on Pro­fes­sor Contraras-Vidal’s ongo­ing neu­roaes­thet­ic projects, which also include dancers and musi­cians. In addi­tion to study­ing artists’ brains, the NSF-fund­ed project has record­ed “elec­tri­cal sig­nals in the brains of 450 indi­vid­u­als as they engaged with the work of artist Dario Rob­le­to in a pub­lic art instal­la­tion.”

The Post sum­ma­rizes some of the pos­si­ble answers offered by this kind of research: arts such as dance and the­ater stim­u­late our desire to expe­ri­ence intense emo­tions togeth­er in a group as a form of social cohe­sion. See­ing live performances—and sure­ly even films, though that par­tic­u­lar art form is slight­ed in many of these accounts—trig­gers a “neur­al rush…. With our brain’s capac­i­ty for emo­tion and empa­thy, even in the word­less art of dance we can begin to dis­cov­er meaning—and a sto­ry.” This brings us to the impor­tance our brains place on nar­ra­tive, on move­ment, the “log­ic of art” and much more.

For bet­ter or worse, neu­roaes­thet­ics is—at least at an insti­tu­tion­al level—in some com­pe­ti­tion with those branch­es of phi­los­o­phy clas­si­cal­ly con­cerned with aes­thet­ics, though often the two endeav­ors are com­ple­men­tary. But using sci­ence to inter­pret art, or inter­pret the brain on art, should in no way put the arts in jeop­ardy. Seri­ous sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty about the old­est and most uni­ver­sal of dis­tinc­tive­ly human activ­i­ties might instead pro­vide justification—or bet­ter yet, fund­ing and pub­lic support—for the gen­er­ous pro­duc­tion of more pub­lic art.

via The Wash­ing­ton Post

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

How Bud­dhism & Neu­ro­science Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Best­selling Author Robert Wright

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Stress Can Change Your Brain: An Animated Introduction

in Health, Science, TED Talks | October 8th, 2017

We hear the mantra of “self-care” in ever-widen­ing cir­cles, a con­cept both derid­ed and cel­e­brat­ed as a “mil­len­ni­al obses­sion,” with the acknowledgment—at least in this NPR think piece— that self-care was cen­tral to the philoso­phies of antiq­ui­ty, from Aris­to­tle to the Sto­ics.

In phi­los­o­phy, self-care exists as a set of ethics. The rea­sons for this may often be couched in high-mind­ed dis­cus­sions of civics, sex­u­al pol­i­tics, and exis­ten­tial self-actu­al­iza­tion. These days, doc­tors and researchers are mak­ing urgent appeals for our men­tal and phys­i­cal health, and the sci­ence of stress is an unsur­pris­ing­ly rich field of inves­ti­ga­tion at the moment.

It’s hard to over­state the neg­a­tive effects of stress on the body over time. Increased stress hor­mones have been linked in study after study to overeat­ing and obe­si­ty, low­ered immune response, drug use and addic­tion, mem­o­ry impair­ment, heart dis­ease, and many oth­er debil­i­tat­ing and life-threat­en­ing con­di­tions. “The long-term acti­va­tion of the stress-response sys­tem,” writes the Mayo Clin­ic, “and the sub­se­quent over­ex­po­sure to cor­ti­sol and oth­er stress hormones—can dis­rupt almost all your body’s process­es.” (The video below makes this har­row­ing point with some help­ful, ani­mat­ed com­ic relief.)

When we expe­ri­ence chron­ic stress, it rais­es our blood pres­sure and affects our car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem, increas­ing the chances of heart attack or stroke. The even worse news—reports the TED-Ed video at the top of the post—is that chron­ic stress weak­ens our abil­i­ty to make sound deci­sions about our well-being, by chang­ing the size, struc­ture, and func­tion of our brain.

We’re famil­iar with the symp­toms of chron­ic stress: “sleep­ing rest­less­ly,” becom­ing “irri­ta­ble or moody,” “for­get­ting lit­tle things,” and “feel­ing over­whelmed and iso­lat­ed.” Con­tin­u­ous stress, from our work lives, home lives, social and polit­i­cal lives, can cause shrink­ing in parts of the brain respon­si­ble for mem­o­ry, spa­tial recog­ni­tion… and stress reg­u­la­tion.

Research shows that high lev­els of cor­ti­sol and oth­er stress hor­mones can cause shrink­ing of the pre­frontal cor­tex, the part of the brain respon­si­ble for rea­son­ing and deci­sion-mak­ing. Stress can inhib­it neuroplasticity—the abil­i­ty of the brain to adapt to new circumstances—and neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis: the abil­i­ty to pro­duce new brain cells.

Con­verse­ly, stress increas­es the size of the amyg­dala, which acti­vates fight-or-flight respons­es, which in turn increase the strain on our heart and blood ves­sels.

All of these effects can set the stage in lat­er life for major depres­sion, forms of cog­ni­tive decline and demen­tia, and Alzheimer’s dis­ease.

Most unset­tling­ly, as the video notes, these effects can be passed down to the next gen­er­a­tion, fur­ther­ing the cycle of chron­ic stress in our chil­dren and theirs. Per­sis­tent stress “fil­ters down” to DNA, mak­ing it genet­i­cal­ly inher­i­ta­ble.

Giv­en the incred­i­ble amount of stress most peo­ple seem to be under, this sci­ence can seem like a diag­no­sis of doom. We all know that chron­ic stres­sors assail us all day long, with­out ask­ing whether we want them in our lives or not. An increas­ing amount of our dai­ly stress, I’d hypoth­e­size, may indeed come from the grow­ing real­iza­tion of how lit­tle con­trol we have over many stress­ful sit­u­a­tions.

But the TED explain­er ends with good news, and it’s been there all along—we can find it in the ancient Greeks, in Bud­dhist prac­tices, and many oth­er tra­di­tions, both active and con­tem­pla­tive. We can con­trol our respons­es to stress, and thus reverse and mod­u­late the effects of cor­ti­sol on our sys­tem. The best, proven, ways to do so are through exer­cise and med­i­ta­tion (and, I’d add, good nutri­tion).

These activ­i­ties will not erad­i­cate the con­di­tions of inequal­i­ty, injus­tice, or insta­bil­i­ty that stress us all out—a great many of us more than oth­ers. But prac­tic­ing “self-care” inas­much as we are able with stress-reliev­ing dis­ci­plines and prac­tices will bet­ter equip us to respond to the state of the world and the state of our lives by inter­rupt­ing the bio­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms that, over time, make things much worse. Find some help­ful resources below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

Med­i­ta­tion 101: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Beginner’s Guide

Philoso­pher Sam Har­ris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion

How to Get Start­ed with Yoga: Free Yoga Lessons on YouTube

Do Your­self a Favor and Watch Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (with Stan­ford Biol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky)

How Mind­ful­ness Makes Us Hap­pi­er & Bet­ter Able to Meet Life’s Chal­lenges: Two Ani­mat­ed Primers Explain

How Bak­ing, Cook­ing & Oth­er Dai­ly Activ­i­ties Help Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness and Alle­vi­ate Depres­sion and Anx­i­ety

Allen Gins­berg Teach­es You How to Med­i­tate with a Rock Song Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan on Bass

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Can We Know What is True? And What Is BS? Tips from Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman & Michael Shermer

in Philosophy, Science | September 22nd, 2017

Sci­ence denial­ism may be a deeply entrenched and enor­mous­ly dam­ag­ing polit­i­cal phe­nom­e­non. But it is not a whol­ly prac­ti­cal one, or we would see many more peo­ple aban­don med­ical sci­ence, air trav­el, com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy, etc. Most of us tac­it­ly agree that we know cer­tain truths about the world—gravitational force, nav­i­ga­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy, the germ the­o­ry of dis­ease, for exam­ple. How do we acquire such knowl­edge, and how do we use the same method to test and eval­u­ate the many new claims we’re bom­bard­ed with dai­ly?

The prob­lem, many pro­fes­sion­al skep­tics would say, is that we’re large­ly unaware of the epis­temic cri­te­ria for our think­ing. We believe some ideas and doubt oth­ers for a host of rea­sons, many of them hav­ing noth­ing to do with stan­dards of rea­son and evi­dence sci­en­tists strive towards. Many pro­fes­sion­al skep­tics even have the humil­i­ty to admit that skep­tics can be as prone to irra­tional­i­ty and cog­ni­tive bias­es as any­one else.

Carl Sagan had a good deal of patience with unrea­son, at least in his writ­ing and tele­vi­sion work, which exhibits so much rhetor­i­cal bril­liance and depth of feel­ing that he might have been a poet in anoth­er life. His style and per­son­al­i­ty made him a very effec­tive sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor. But what he called his “Baloney Detec­tion Kit,” a set of “tools for skep­ti­cal think­ing,” is not at all unique to him. Sagan’s prin­ci­ples agree with those of all pro­po­nents of log­ic and the sci­en­tif­ic method. You can read just a few of his pre­scrip­tions below, and a full unabridged list here.

Wher­ev­er pos­si­ble there must be inde­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion of the “facts.”

Encour­age sub­stan­tive debate on the evi­dence by knowl­edge­able pro­po­nents of all points of view.

Argu­ments from author­i­ty car­ry lit­tle weight — “author­i­ties” have made mis­takes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Per­haps a bet­ter way to say it is that in sci­ence there are no author­i­ties; at most, there are experts.

Spin more than one hypoth­e­sis. If there’s some­thing to be explained, think of all the dif­fer­ent ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­prove each of the alter­na­tives.

Try not to get over­ly attached to a hypoth­e­sis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way sta­tion in the pur­suit of knowl­edge. Ask your­self why you like the idea. Com­pare it fair­ly with the alter­na­tives. See if you can find rea­sons for reject­ing it. If you don’t, oth­ers will.

Anoth­er skep­tic, founder and edi­tor of Skep­tic mag­a­zine Michael Sher­mer, sur­rounds his epis­te­mol­o­gy with a sym­pa­thet­ic neu­ro­science frame. We’re all prone to “believ­ing weird things,” as he puts it in his book Why Peo­ple Believe Weird Things and his short video above, where he intro­duces, fol­low­ing Sagan, his own “Baloney Detec­tion Kit.” The human brain, he explains, evolved to see pat­terns every­where as a mat­ter of sur­vival. All of our brains do it, and we all get a lot of false pos­i­tives.

Many of those false pos­i­tives become wide­spread cul­tur­al beliefs. Sher­mer him­self has been accused of insen­si­tive cul­tur­al bias (evi­dent in the begin­ning of his video), intel­lec­tu­al arro­gance, and worse. But he admits up front that sci­en­tif­ic think­ing should tran­scend indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties, includ­ing his own. “You shouldn’t believe any­body based on author­i­ty or what­ev­er posi­tion they might have,” he says. “You should check it out your­self.”

Some of the ways to do so when we encounter new ideas involve ask­ing “How reli­able is the source of the claim?” and “Have the claims been ver­i­fied by some­body else?” Return­ing to Sagan’s work, Sher­mer offers an exam­ple of con­trast­ing sci­en­tif­ic and pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic approaches—the SETI (Search for Extrater­res­tri­al Intel­li­gence) Insti­tute and UFO believ­ers. The lat­ter, he says, uncrit­i­cal­ly seek out con­fir­ma­tion for their beliefs, where the sci­en­tists at SETI rig­or­ous­ly try to dis­prove hypothe­ses in order to rule out false claims.

Yet it remains the case that many people—and not all of them in good faith—think they’re using sci­ence when they aren’t. Anoth­er pop­u­lar sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor, physi­cist Richard Feyn­man, rec­om­mend­ed one method for test­ing whether we real­ly under­stand a con­cept or whether we’re just repeat­ing some­thing that sounds smart but makes no log­i­cal sense, what Feyn­man calls “a mys­tic for­mu­la for answer­ing ques­tions.” Can a con­cept be explained in plain Eng­lish, with­out any tech­ni­cal jar­gon? Can we ask ques­tions about it and make direct obser­va­tions that con­firm or dis­con­firm its claims?

Feyn­man was espe­cial­ly sen­si­tive to what he called “intel­lec­tu­al tyran­ny in the name of sci­ence.” And he rec­og­nized that turn­ing forms of know­ing into emp­ty rit­u­als result­ed in pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic think­ing. In a won­der­ful­ly ram­bling, infor­mal, and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal speech he gave in 1966 to a meet­ing of the Nation­al Sci­ence Teach­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, Feyn­man con­clud­ed that think­ing sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly as a prac­tice requires skep­ti­cism of sci­ence as an insti­tu­tion.

“Sci­ence is the belief in the igno­rance of experts,” says Feyn­man. “If they say to you, ‘Sci­ence has shown such and such,’ you might ask, ‘How does sci­ence show it? How did the sci­en­tists find out? How? What? Where?’” Ask­ing such ques­tions does not mean we should reject sci­en­tif­ic con­clu­sions because they con­flict with cher­ished beliefs, but rather that we should­n’t take even sci­en­tif­ic claims on faith.

For elab­o­ra­tion on Sher­mer, Sagan and Feyn­man’s approach­es to telling good sci­en­tif­ic think­ing from bad, read these arti­cles in our archive:

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

Richard Feynman’s “Note­book Tech­nique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detec­tion Kit: What to Ask Before Believ­ing

 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Map of Computer Science: New Animation Presents a Survey of Computer Science, from Alan Turing to “Augmented Reality”

in Computer Science, Science, Technology | September 8th, 2017

I’ve nev­er want­ed to start a sen­tence with “I’m old enough to remem­ber…” because, well, who does? But here we are. I remem­ber the enor­mous­ly suc­cess­ful Apple IIe and Com­modore 64, and a world before Microsoft. Smart phones were sci­ence fic­tion. To do much more than word process or play games one had to learn a pro­gram­ming lan­guage. These ancient days seemed at the time—and in hind­sight as well—to be the very dawn of com­put­ing. Before the per­son­al com­put­er, such devices were the size of kitchen appli­ances and were hid­den away in mil­i­tary instal­la­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, and NASA labs.

But of course we all know that the his­to­ry of com­put­ing goes far beyond the ear­ly 80s: at least back to World War II, and per­haps even much far­ther. Do we begin with the aba­cus, the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, the astro­labe, Ada Lovelace and Charles Bab­bage? The ques­tion is maybe one of def­i­n­i­tions. In the short, ani­mat­ed video above, physi­cist, sci­ence writer, and YouTube edu­ca­tor Dominic Wal­li­man defines the com­put­er accord­ing to its basic bina­ry func­tion of “just flip­ping zeros and ones,” and he begins his con­densed his­to­ry of com­put­er sci­ence with trag­ic genius Alan Tur­ing of Tur­ing Test and Bletch­ley Park code­break­ing fame.

Turing’s most sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to com­put­ing came from his 1936 con­cept of the “Tur­ing Machine,” a the­o­ret­i­cal mech­a­nism that could, writes the Cam­bridge Com­put­er Lab­o­ra­to­ry “sim­u­late ANY com­put­er algo­rithm, no mat­ter how com­pli­cat­ed it is!” All oth­er designs, says Walliman—apart from a quan­tum computer—are equiv­a­lent to the Tur­ing Machine, “which makes it the foun­da­tion of com­put­er sci­ence.” But since Turing’s time, the sim­ple design has come to seem end­less­ly capa­ble of adap­ta­tion and inno­va­tion.

Wal­li­man illus­trates the com­put­er’s expo­nen­tial growth by point­ing out that a smart phone has more com­put­ing pow­er than the entire world pos­sessed in 1963, and that the com­put­ing capa­bil­i­ty that first land­ed astro­nauts on the moon is equal to “a cou­ple of Nin­ten­dos” (first gen­er­a­tion clas­sic con­soles, judg­ing by the image). But despite the hubris of the com­put­er age, Wal­li­man points out that “there are some prob­lems which, due to their very nature, can nev­er be solved by a com­put­er” either because of the degree of uncer­tain­ty involved or the degree of inher­ent com­plex­i­ty. This fas­ci­nat­ing, yet abstract dis­cus­sion is where Walliman’s “Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence” begins, and for most of us this will prob­a­bly be unfa­mil­iar ter­ri­to­ry.

We’ll feel more at home once the map moves from the region of Com­put­er The­o­ry to that of Com­put­er Engi­neer­ing, but while Wal­li­man cov­ers famil­iar ground here, he does not dumb it down. Once we get to appli­ca­tions, we’re in the realm of big data, nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing, the inter­net of things, and “aug­ment­ed real­i­ty.” From here on out, com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy will only get faster, and weird­er, despite the fact that the “under­ly­ing hard­ware is hit­ting some hard lim­its.” Cer­tain­ly this very quick course in Com­put­er Sci­ence only makes for an intro­duc­to­ry sur­vey of the dis­ci­pline, but like Wallman’s oth­er maps—of math­e­mat­ics, physics, and chem­istry—this one pro­vides us with an impres­sive visu­al overview of the field that is both broad and spe­cif­ic, and that we like­ly wouldn’t encounter any­where else.

As with his oth­er maps, Wal­li­man has made this the Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence avail­able as a poster, per­fect for dorm rooms, liv­ing rooms, or wher­ev­er else you might need a reminder.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

How Ada Lovelace, Daugh­ter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Com­put­er Pro­gram in 1842–a Cen­tu­ry Before the First Com­put­er

Watch Break­ing the Code, About the Life & Times of Alan Tur­ing (1996)

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Trigonometry Discovered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Babylonian Tablet

in History, Math, Science | September 6th, 2017

One pre­sump­tion of tele­vi­sion shows like Ancient Aliens and books like Char­i­ots of the Gods is that ancient people—particularly non-west­ern people—couldn’t pos­si­bly have con­struct­ed the elab­o­rate infra­struc­ture and mon­u­men­tal archi­tec­ture and stat­u­ary they did with­out the help of extra-ter­res­tri­als. The idea is intrigu­ing, giv­ing us the huge­ly ambi­tious sci-fi fan­tasies woven into Rid­ley Scott’s revived Alien fran­chise. It is also insult­ing in its lev­el of dis­be­lief about the capa­bil­i­ties of ancient Egyp­tians, Mesopotami­ans, South Amer­i­cans, South Sea Islanders, etc.

We assume the Greeks per­fect­ed geom­e­try, for exam­ple, and refer to the Pythagore­an the­o­rem, although this prin­ci­ple was prob­a­bly well-known to ancient Indi­ans. Since at least the 1940s, math­e­mati­cians have also known that the “Pythagore­an triples”—inte­ger solu­tions to the theorem—appeared 1000 years before Pythago­ras on a Baby­lon­ian tablet called Plimp­ton 322. Dat­ing back to some­time between 1822 and 1762 B.C. and dis­cov­ered in south­ern Iraq in the ear­ly 1900s, the tablet has recent­ly been re-exam­ined by math­e­mati­cians Daniel Mans­field and Nor­man Wild­berg­er of Australia’s Uni­ver­si­ty of New South Wales and found to con­tain even more ancient math­e­mat­i­cal wis­dom, “a trigono­met­ric table, which is 3,000 years ahead of its time.”

In a paper pub­lished in His­to­ria Math­e­mat­i­ca the two con­clude that Plimp­ton 322’s Baby­lon­ian cre­ators detailed a “nov­el kind of trigonom­e­try,” 1000 years before Pythago­ras and Greek astronomer Hip­parchus, who has typ­i­cal­ly received cred­it for trigonometry’s dis­cov­ery. In the video above, Mans­field intro­duces the unique prop­er­ties of this “sci­en­tif­ic mar­vel of the ancient world,” an enig­ma that has “puz­zled math­e­mati­cians,” he writes in his arti­cle, “for more than 70 years.” Mans­field is con­fi­dent that his research will fun­da­men­tal­ly change the way we under­stand sci­en­tif­ic his­to­ry. He may be over­ly opti­mistic about the cul­tur­al forces that shape his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives, and he is not with­out his schol­ar­ly crit­ics either.

Eleanor Rob­son, an expert on Mesopotamia at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don has not pub­lished a for­mal cri­tique, but she did take to Twit­ter to reg­is­ter her dis­sent, writ­ing, “for any his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment, you need to be able to read the lan­guage & know the his­tor­i­cal con­text to make sense of it. Maths is no excep­tion.” The trigonom­e­try hypoth­e­sis, she writes in a fol­low-up tweet, is “tedious­ly wrong.” Mans­field and Wild­berg­er may not be experts in ancient Mesopotami­an lan­guage and cul­ture, it’s true, but Rob­son is also not a math­e­mati­cian. “The strongest argu­ment” in the Aus­tralian researchers’ favor, writes Ken­neth Chang at The New York Times, is that “the table works for trigo­nom­ic cal­cu­la­tions.” As Mans­field says, “you don’t make a trigo­nom­ic table by acci­dent.”

Plimp­ton 322 uses ratios rather than angles and cir­cles. “But when you arrange it such a way so that you can use any known ratio of a tri­an­gle to find the oth­er side of a tri­an­gle,” says Mans­field, “then it becomes trigonom­e­try. That’s what we can use this frag­ment for.” As for what the ancient Baby­lo­ni­ans used it for, we can only spec­u­late. Rob­son and oth­ers have pro­posed that the tablet was a teach­ing guide. Mans­field believes “Plimp­ton 322 was a pow­er­ful tool that could have been used for sur­vey­ing fields or mak­ing archi­tec­tur­al cal­cu­la­tions to build palaces, tem­ples or step pyra­mids.”

What­ev­er its ancient use, Mans­field thinks the tablet “has great rel­e­vance for our mod­ern world… prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions in sur­vey­ing, com­put­er graph­ics and edu­ca­tion.” Giv­en the pos­si­bil­i­ties, Plimp­ton 322 might serve as “a rare exam­ple of the ancient world teach­ing us some­thing new,” should we choose to learn it. That knowl­edge prob­a­bly did not orig­i­nate in out­er space.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A New Animation Explains How Caffeine Keeps Us Awake

in Animation, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Science | September 4th, 2017

Let’s pref­ace this by recall­ing that Hon­oré de Balzac drank up to 50 cups of cof­fee a day and lived to the ripe old age of … 51.

Of course, he pro­duced dozens of nov­els, plays, and short sto­ries before tak­ing his leave. Per­haps his caf­feine habit had a lit­tle some­thing to do with that?

Phar­ma­cist Hanan Qasim’s TED-Ed primer on how caf­feine keeps us awake top loads the pos­i­tive effects of the most world’s com­mon­ly used psy­choac­tive sub­stance. Glob­al con­sump­tion is equiv­a­lent to the weight of 14 Eif­fel Tow­ers, mea­sured in drops of cof­fee, soda, choco­late, ener­gy drinks, decaf…and that’s just humans. Insects get theirs from nec­tar, though with them, a lit­tle goes a very long, poten­tial­ly dead­ly way.

Caffeine’s struc­tur­al resem­blance to the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter adeno­sine is what gives it that spe­cial oomph. Adeno­sine caus­es sleepi­ness by plug­ging into neur­al recep­tors in the brain, caus­ing them to fire more slug­gish­ly. Caf­feine takes advan­tage of their sim­i­lar mol­e­c­u­lar struc­tures to slip into these recep­tors, effec­tive­ly steal­ing adenosine’s park­ing space.

With a bioavail­abil­i­ty of 99%, this inter­lop­er arrives ready to par­ty.

On the plus side, caf­feine is both a men­tal and phys­i­cal pick me up.

In appro­pri­ate dos­es, it can keep your mind from wan­der­ing dur­ing a late night study ses­sion.

It lifts the body’s meta­bol­ic rate and boosts per­for­mance dur­ing exercise—an effect that’s eas­i­ly coun­ter­act­ed by get­ting the bulk of your caf­feine from choco­late or sweet­ened soda, or by dump­ing anoth­er Eif­fel Tower’s worth of sug­ar into your cof­fee.

There’s even some evi­dence that mod­er­ate con­sump­tion may reduce the like­li­hood of such dis­eases as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and can­cer.

What to do when that caf­feine effect starts wear­ing off?

Gulp down more!

As with many drugs, pro­longed usage dimin­ish­es the sought-after effects, caus­ing its devo­tees (or addicts, if you like) to seek out high­er dos­es, neg­a­tive side effects be damned. Ner­vous jit­ters, incon­ti­nence, birth defects, raised heart rate and blood pres­sure… it’s a com­pelling case for stick­ing with water.

Ani­ma­tor Draško Ivez­ić (a 3‑lat­te-a-day man, accord­ing to his studio’s web­site) does a hilar­i­ous job of per­son­i­fy­ing both caf­feine and the humans in its thrall, par­tic­u­lar­ly an egg-shaped new father.

Go to TED-Ed to learn more, or test your grasp of caf­feine with a quiz.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wake Up & Smell the Cof­fee: The New All-in-One Cof­fee-Mak­er/Alarm Clock is Final­ly Here!

Physics & Caf­feine: Stop Motion Film Uses a Cup of Cof­fee to Explain Key Con­cepts in Physics

This is Cof­fee!: A 1961 Trib­ute to Our Favorite Stim­u­lant

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Margaret Hamilton, Lead Software Engineer of the Apollo Project, Stands Next to Her Code That Took Us to the Moon (1969)

in Gender, Science, Software, Technology | August 30th, 2017

Pho­to cour­tesy of MIT Muse­um

When I first read news of the now-infa­mous Google memo writer who claimed with a straight face that women are bio­log­i­cal­ly unsuit­ed to work in sci­ence and tech, I near­ly choked on my cere­al. A dozen exam­ples instant­ly crowd­ed to mind of women who have pio­neered the very basis of our cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy while oper­at­ing at an extreme dis­ad­van­tage in a cul­ture that explic­it­ly believed they shouldn’t be there, this shouldn’t be hap­pen­ing, women shouldn’t be able to do a “man’s job!”

The memo, as Megan Molteni and Adam Rogers write at Wired, “is a species of dis­course pecu­liar to polit­i­cal­ly polar­ized times: cher­ry-pick­ing sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to sup­port a pre-exist­ing point of view.” Its spe­cious evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy pre­tends to objec­tiv­i­ty even as it ignores real­i­ty. As Mul­der would say, the truth is out there, if you care to look, and you don’t need to dig through clas­si­fied FBI files. Just, well, Google it. No, not the pseu­do­science, but the careers of women in STEM with­out whom we might not have such a thing as Google.

Women like Mar­garet Hamil­ton, who, begin­ning in 1961, helped NASA “devel­op the Apol­lo program’s guid­ance sys­tem” that took U.S. astro­nauts to the moon, as Maia Wein­stock reports at MIT News. “For her work dur­ing this peri­od, Hamil­ton has been cred­it­ed with pop­u­lar­iz­ing the con­cept of soft­ware engi­neer­ing.” Robert McMil­lan put it best in a 2015 pro­file of Hamil­ton:

It might sur­prise today’s soft­ware mak­ers that one of the found­ing fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they con­sid­er why the gen­der inequal­i­ty of the Mad Men era per­sists to this day.

Hamil­ton was indeed a moth­er in her twen­ties with a degree in math­e­mat­ics, work­ing as a pro­gram­mer at MIT and sup­port­ing her hus­band through Har­vard Law, after which she planned to go to grad­u­ate school. “But the Apol­lo space pro­gram came along” and con­tract­ed with NASA to ful­fill John F. Kennedy’s famous promise made that same year to land on the moon before the decade’s end—and before the Sovi­ets did. NASA accom­plished that goal thanks to Hamil­ton and her team.

Pho­to cour­tesy of MIT Muse­um

Like many women cru­cial to the U.S. space pro­gram (many dou­bly mar­gin­al­ized by race and gen­der), Hamil­ton might have been lost to pub­lic con­scious­ness were it not for a pop­u­lar redis­cov­ery. “In recent years,” notes Wein­stock, “a strik­ing pho­to of Hamil­ton and her team’s Apol­lo code has made the rounds on social media.” You can see that pho­to at the top of the post, tak­en in 1969 by a pho­tog­ra­ph­er for the MIT Instru­men­ta­tion Lab­o­ra­to­ry. Used to pro­mote the lab’s work on Apol­lo, the orig­i­nal cap­tion read, in part, “Here, Mar­garet is shown stand­ing beside list­ings of the soft­ware devel­oped by her and the team she was in charge of, the LM [lunar mod­ule] and CM [com­mand mod­ule] on-board flight soft­ware team.”

As Hank Green tells it in his con­densed his­to­ry above, Hamil­ton “rose through the ranks to become head of the Apol­lo Soft­ware devel­op­ment team.” Her focus on errors—how to pre­vent them and course cor­rect when they arise—“saved Apol­lo 11 from hav­ing to abort the mis­sion” of land­ing Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon’s sur­face. McMil­lan explains that “as Hamil­ton and her col­leagues were pro­gram­ming the Apol­lo space­craft, they were also hatch­ing what would become a $400 bil­lion indus­try.” At Futur­ism, you can read a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with Hamil­ton, in which she describes how she first learned to code, what her work for NASA was like, and what exact­ly was in those books stacked as high as she was tall. As a woman, she may have been an out­lier in her field, but that fact is much bet­ter explained by the Occam’s razor of prej­u­dice than by any­thing hav­ing to do with evo­lu­tion­ary deter­min­ism.

Note: You can now find Hamil­ton’s code on Github.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Tech­nol­o­gy Behind Wi-Fi & Blue­tooth Dur­ing WWII

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

How Ada Lovelace, Daugh­ter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Com­put­er Pro­gram in 1842–a Cen­tu­ry Before the First Com­put­er

NASA Puts Its Soft­ware Online & Makes It Free to Down­load

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Neil deGrasse Tyson is Creating a New Space Exploration Video Game with the Help of George R.R. Martin & Neil Gaiman

in Astronomy, Games, Science | August 25th, 2017

Although Neil deGrasse Tyson is some­what hes­i­tant to go in on plans to ter­raform and col­o­nize Mars, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t like a good ol’–yet science-based–video game. Sev­er­al out­lets announced recent­ly that the videogame Space Odyssey, spear­head­ed by deGrasse Tyson–one of America’s main defend­ers of log­ic and Enlightenment–has sur­passed its Kick­starter fund­ing goal. The game promis­es to send play­ers on “real sci­ence-based mis­sions to explore space, col­o­nize plan­ets, cre­ate and mod in real time.”

In the game, accord­ing to deGrasse Tyson, “you con­trol the for­ma­tion of plan­ets, of comets, of life, civ­i­liza­tion. You could maybe tweak the force of grav­i­ty and see what effect that might have.” It will be, he says, “an explo­ration into the laws of physics and how they shape the world in which we live.”

The game has been form­ing for sev­er­al years now, and most impor­tant­ly to our read­ers, has called in sev­er­al sci-fi and fan­ta­sy writ­ers to help cre­ate the var­i­ous worlds in the game, as they have apt­ly demon­strat­ed their skills in doing so on the print­ed page. That includes George R.R. Mar­tin, cur­rent­ly ignor­ing what­ev­er HBO is doing to his cre­ation Game of Thrones; Neil Gaiman, who cre­ates a new uni­verse every time he drops a new nov­el; and Len Wein, who has had a hand in cre­at­ing both DC’s Swamp Thing and Marvel’s Wolver­ine. Also on board: deGrasse Tyson’s bud­dy Bill Nye, for­mer NASA astro­naut Mike Mas­simi­no, and astro­physi­cist Charles Liu.

The idea of world/­galaxy-build­ing is not new in video games, espe­cial­ly recent­ly. No Man’s Sky (2015) fea­tures “eigh­teen quin­til­lion full-fea­tured plan­ets” and Minecraft seems lim­it­less. But Space Odyssey (still a tem­po­rary title!) is the first to have deGrasse Tyson and friends work­ing the con­trols in the back­ground. And a game is as good as the vision­ar­ies behind it.

 

Accord­ing to the Kick­starter page, the raised funds will go into “the abil­i­ty to have this com­mu­ni­ty play the game and engage with it while the final build is under­way. As the Kick­starter gam­ing com­mu­ni­ty begins to beta test game-play and pro­vide feed­back, we can begin to use the funds raised via Kick­starter to incor­po­rate your mod­ding, map­ping and build­ing sug­ges­tions, togeth­er build­ing the awe­some gam­ing expe­ri­ence you helped to cre­ate.”

DeGrasse Tyson will be in the game him­self, urg­ing play­ers onward. There’s no indi­ca­tion whether Mr. Mar­tin will be pop­ping up, though.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Because of Pink Floyd, I’ve Spent Decades Undo­ing the Idea That There’s a Dark Side of the Moon”

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

Are We Liv­ing in a Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion?: A 2‑Hour Debate with Neil Degrasse Tyson, David Chalmers, Lisa Ran­dall, Max Tegmark & More

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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