There was an interesting article on memory the other week in the New York Times.  Basically, people who are faster at remembering certain things are also the ones who forget other things the fastest.  So the key to a shart memory is actually being selective and only remembering what is important.  Now I finally have an excuse for my terrible movie memory (I generally can’t even remember the plot of a movie the day after I see it).  But by not remembering movies, I am much better at remembering things I learned in class or readings.  Maybe that’s not a bad trade-off…

I recently read Republican Presidential candidate Sam Brownback’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining why he doesn’t believe in evolution. I have so many problems with it that I don’t know where to start. I think this whole evolution debate is very similar to the debate over whether the Earth revolved around the sun in the 1500s. It’s so important to some people that we be “special” and have a place at the center of the universe. In the previous debate, hundreds of years ago, they literally believed that we were at the center of the universe. And no matter how much evidence there was, people wanted to believe we were at the center of the universe. The same thing is going on today. It’s very hard for some people to accept that we’re not “special” and that we weren’t place here by “God” for some special purpose. I’m not really sure why people think this takes so much away from us. So we randomly evolved. Is that so terrible? We should just enjoy the fact that we’re here and savor every instant of our lives.

To go specifically into Sam Brownback’s op-ed, he makes a number of points that bother me. First he claims that “Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love.” So apparently without faith we can’t understand suffering, love, values, meaning, or purpose? I’m not sure why believing that we evolved instead of being created by some God would prevent us from understanding these things.

Then he goes on to say that evolution isn’t science but philosophy and that any “theory” that says we weren’t created by some guiding intelligence must be false.  Basically Brownback wants to reject the institute of science any time it conflicts with his pre-assumed beliefs.  Science is fine, but if it disagrees with what he believes, then its just “atheistic theology” instead of science.

Finally, Brownback gets the point that I brought up at the beginning of this post, that we must be unique and special. Specifically, he says “The unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded. I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.” Evolution does not undermine our dignity or uniqueness. We’ve evolved into what we are and we will continue to evolve and I don’t see anything wrong with that. If we were “willed into being and made for a purpose” what was that purpose? I understand how difficult it can be to accept reality and understand that we evolved. But it doesn’t make us any less special or mean we have any less capacity to love or suffer or find meaning in life. I would much rather believe and understand the truth of life and enjoy the great luck we have in being here than believing in a creation by some superior being for an unspecified purpose.

There was a really good article in The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago about a man trying to get off anti-depressants. Reading it made me realize how scary things are becoming with all the different drugs being prescribed for supposed brain dysfunction. The amount of these drugs being prescribed really worries me for a number of reasons. We don’t really know how any of these drugs work and what their actual effects are. And changing your brain chemistry is basically changing who you are.

Our brain is who we are. When we think of ’self’ and and our memories and our personality, thats all represented and contained in the neurons and synapses of our brain. Trying to say that being depressed or having difficulty focusing is a brain dysfunction is very close to saying that any kind of quirky personality is a brain dysfunction. But it is in pharmaceutical companies best interest to say these problems can be solved easily with a drug.

The problem is that we don’t have any good idea how these drugs work. Preventing the re-update of serotonin like the anti-depressants do, or adding more dopamine precursors like drugs for Parkinson’s disease do will have effects all over the brain. We don’t know what the effects are in the rest of the brain, and we only have vague notions of how these drugs work for the problems they’re prescribed.

If the essence of who we are and our personality is just the transfer of neurotransmitters in synapses between neurons, then changing this brain chemistry all over the brain seems like a big deal. You are changing who you are. Are you the same person on these drugs that you are off of them? Can you be the same person once you stop taking them? What other side effects are there? In the article, the author notices that he has more vivid feelings and perceptions once he stops taking the drugs. He also has side effects from withdrawal such as ‘brain zaps’.

Obviously these drugs are very helpful and sometimes necessary for lots of people. I just think we should be more careful about prescribing them since they have the capability to change who we are and we don’t understand their full effects.

There was a very interesting article in the New York Times on “cumulative advantage.” Basically some research was done showing that a major cause of different things becoming popular is their popularity. People are more likely to like a song or an artist if lots of other people already like it. The researchers in the article did experiments where they set up separate music downloading communities that showed counts of how many times each song had been downloaded and played. Different songs became hits in the different communities depending on which ones just happened to hit the right peak at the right time. In communities where download and play counts were not listed, the differences between hit songs and other songs were not as extreme.

So what does this mean? All the music industry executives and others who are out looking for the next big hit may be going about it all wrong. Instead of looking for the band with the perfect sound or perfect look, they may be better off trying to come up with new ways of marketing the bands to make them popular quickly and thats what will lead to even more popularity. This also means that the bands that do make it are not necessarily any better than the ones who don’t (although they are more popular).

This research is somewhat concerning in a sense though. Why is the popularity of a song or artist so much more important to us than the actual quality of the song? Can we not judge songs on our own? Do we feel the need to be the part of some herd mentality? How does this affect our views on other issues such as politics? This effect would seem to make it even harder for someone to stray from the majority, or to make their own decisions on the issues rather than just go with the crowd.

Here is a very interesting account by Scott Adams (the Dilbert creator) about his recovery from Spasmodic Dysphonia. As he explains it: “Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people.” Apparently depending on the context/type of speech being performed you are sometimes able to talk ok. For example, he was able to speak publicly, sing, or rhyme, but could not speak in normal conversation. Adams’ theorized that only one of the different brain pathways for speech were affected.  He tried to “re-map” the brain pathways or normal speech by practicing other similar methods of speech such as rhyming.

From everything I’ve read about the brain, this makes a lot of sense to me. All the functions of the body are controlled by the brain. And a lot of seemingly physical ailments may really be in the brain. And a change of thought processes or mental states could affect these ailments. It’s interesting that Adams was able to practice mentally and re-map his brain to function correctly.  But I think your mental state, confidence, happiness, etc can affect your health greatly.  I believe there has been some research showing that your mental state can help with blood pressure, hypertension, and other similar ailments.

I just read a great article from the edge on synthetic biology and genetic engineering.  Basically they are now trying to develop bio-fabrication labs so that it will be easy for anyone to program new organisms.  These organisms could be drought-resistant crops, they might produce building materials, etc.  But he makes an interesting analogy to computers.  Everyone has free access to program computers.  It has created tons of great things and advances but you also have the computer viruses and spam emails and things like that.  If everyone is given access to program their own organisms, the results could be much more dramatic.  Hackers could be writing deadly human viruses, but also researchers could develop lots of extremely beneficial things.

I’ve been reading a great blog on the New York Times by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson. It’s got me thinking about lots of things relating to evolution. One thing is that evolution occurs faster when there is more death. Death is essential to evolution. If no one dies and everyone can reproduce then there is no evolution, if a few die, there is a little evolution, and if only a few survive then there is very fast evolution (the genes of these few are quickly selected).

If you get into a state where there is very little death and nearly everyone can reproduce, then you can end up in de-evolution (DEVO). When mutations occur to the genes there are no longer any pressures to eliminate them. Our civiliziation may be approaching this state (or be in it). Medications allow many diseases to be survivable, artificial insemination allows couples that wouldn’t be able to conceive normally to do so, and cesarian sections allow women with small hips to still have babies. Of course any new diseases that pop up, or perhaps an ability to live in higher temperatures (with global warming) will create new pressure to evolve. But otherwise, what does this mean for humans? Mutations can start collecting up in our genomes, will be survivable with modern medicine and technology, and will continue in our genome. Might we reach some point where these mutations become too much and we die out? Hopefully some sort of technological solution will be found through genetics research (rather than going back to letting these diseases and things kill tons of people).

I just read a New York Times Article on how a lot of personality is likely genetic. It didn’t seem like much of a surprise to me. Smart parents have smart children, skinny parents have skinny children, risk-taking parents have risk-taking children, etc. etc. What I find interesting is that if personalites are inherited then that means they are selected through the evolutionary process just like the rest of our genes. What’s interesting is that the only thing that our genes are selected on is our ability to procreate. If you had the choice to control what criteria different genes are selected on (like in the design of genetic algorithms), I would think you would choose something better than simply the ability to find a mate and live long enough to procreate. Things like selecting non-violent personalities, creative personalites, etc, would seem like better choices.

A few random things:

I’m trying to figure out what the “focus” of my blog should be.  There’s lots of interesting articles that I read, but I don’t want to just be posting links to articles.  And then there’s the fact that I’m talking about science, politics, AI, etc.  Thankfully no one reads this blog so it doesn’t matter too much.

There was an interesting article by Jaron Lanier on the Edge a few weeks ago about wikipedia and the “hive mind.”  Basically, in the hive no is held responsible or accountable (good in these times of lawsuits) but no one has the responsibility either.  Lanier suggests the danger of this but I think in the form of wikipedia its ok.  What I found interesting was how a bunch of random people can add small bits of information and you get a huge wealth of knowledge.  I wondered how that compares to the brain with tons of “dumb” neurons that together form an intelligent brain.  Is wikipedia intelligent or conscious?  Surely not.

There was a good article in the Washington Post about college students taking Ritalin and other drugs to help them be smarter and perform better on tests.  The people they interview for the article said that something like 50 to 70% of their friends did the drugs.  I never saw anything like that at Northeastern, I suppose its more of an Ivy League thing were people are obsessed with improving their 3.8 GPA’s to a 4.0.  It is concerning that we are giving so many kids these drugs without any serious testing.  But its only first rain before the flood.  As we learn more about the brain there will be all kinds of drugs, surgeries, implants, etc to improve our intelligence, and our bodies in general for that matter (steroids).  There will certainly be a debate over the consequences of things like these and whether its really good for our society to be so dependent on these things.

Finally, the Edge posted a talk by quantum physicist (and mechanical engineering professor) Seth Lloyd about the complexity of the universe.  He basically says that the universe is a giant computer and that the random quantum fluctuations that were input to the computer after the big bang (and today to a lesser extent) are what resulted in the complexity and structure of the universe and life that we know today.  His analogy is that if you had monkeys typing at computers (instead of typewriters, as in the classis story), eventually something structured would come out since a small random program can produce structured and complex results. So similarly random quantum fluctuations that were input to the computer developed the structure that produced life here.  This also reinforces my thought that the big bang was almost certainly just a quantum fluctation somewhere.  Perhaps some quantum fluctuations in our universe are exploding into new universes all the time as well.

Finally, just a quick link to an article from the LA Times about the Electoral College.  Since passing a Constitutional Amendment would be very difficult, a number of states are passing laws that would give their electoral votes to the candidate who won the national popular vote so as to make the election decided by popular vote.  It’s a good idea and I hope enough states pass it to make it the way elections are decided.  It would be so much different if elections were decided on a popular vote.  Normally there are probably 20 states that are definitely voting Republican and 20 that are voting Democrat and the candidates spend all their time in the remaining 10 states, discussing obscure issues that most of the country may not care about.  With an election based on a popular vote, getting a few more percent out of states that are very much for or against the candidate would matter.  It would be an entirely different election, involving the nation as a whole instead of just a few states.

Since this is related to a lot of stuff I’ve posted about on here, I figured I’d post the link.  It’s an article about spaceships being developed with artificial intelligence to remove the long delays of getting commands from people back on earth:

NYT: Intelligent Beings in Space!