The EPOXI mission of NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft took pictures of Earth late in May 2008 from 31 million miles away, with the goal of examining Earth as if it were an extrasolar planet and looking for signs that would indicate life. The result is some interesting observations and a stunning movie that shows a full rotation of Earth with the moon passing across the field of view. It’s one of the most spectacular views of Earth from space that I’ve ever seen. For information about the observations and links to a second video, visit the EPOXI transit press release.

I was surprised and equally delighted by another video that showed up as today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. It’s a little unusual for APOD, but when I thought about it, I realized that in a way, it makes for an interesting counterpart to the EPOXI video. It’s an example of what you might get if you could zoom in on that spinning blue planet: a video montage of people all over the world dancing along with Matt Harding, who has taken to the road with an informal, energetic dance he does, and has found that if you start dancing, people in many parts of the world are happy to dance along with you.

I was charmed by the video; there is something beautifully goofy and joyous in the sight of all these people sharing moments of happy commotion. The wide range of natural and man-made environments was also impressive. I’m not sure why I found this video so emotionally moving. On the whole I find human diversity fascinating; I still remember a line from the original Star Trek where Spock said something about IDIC (infinite diversity in infinite combinations) and “the ways our differences can combine to create meaning and beauty.” But we so often have a hard time dealing constructively or even non-destructively with our differences, on levels from the individual up to the national. Maybe I just needed a reminder that for all the things that divide humans, we share some things in common as well.

Humankind’s urge to seek patterns and ability to recognize them—or even to find them where they don’t exist—is well known and is arguably one of our prime survival skills. When faced with floods of information, be it sensory data, impressions of the personalities of those around us, or facts and figures, it’s easier to recall and use the information if we can fit it into some kind of pattern. A new theory of humor makes what strikes me as a surprising but fascinating connection between our pattern-recognition skills and our capacity for humor.

Science writer Alastair Clarke has come up with a pattern recognition theory of humor that in itself illustrates the ability to look beyond superficial differences in the content of humor to identify an underlying pattern for the phenomenon. The idea appears to be that pattern recognition is such an essential cognitive skill that our brains are wired to reward us for recognizing an unexpected pattern, and the response to such recognition is laughter. By looking beyond the content, which can vary from culture to culture and person to person, the theory applies broadly across the species while still offering a way to explain individual variation. And because pattern recognition is an important aspect of cognition, the theory is linked to other areas of study involving human evolution and cognitive science. You can read more in this article from PhysOrg.com. Thanks to Keith for passing this one along.

The New Yorker had a good article this week about the work of Irene Pepperberg, the researcher who worked with the African gray parrot Alex until his death last fall. I always enjoy learning more about avian intelligence, and this article does a good job of describing Pepperberg’s work in the context of other studies, historical and current, of animal cognition. And there are some nice stories about the birds, Alex and two others, Griffin and Arthur, that Pepperberg continues to work with. This one made me laugh:

[Pepperberg] told a story about the time an accountant was working on some tax forms near Alex’s cage, and was more or less ignoring him. Peering down at the visitor, he asked her, “Wanna nut?” No, she said, not looking up. Want some water? No. A banana? No. And so on, through his repertoire of nameable desires. At last, Alex asked, in a tone in which it was hard not to detect a note of impatience, “What do you want?”

My brother Vinny has been keeping birds, mostly parrots, for years, and he has told me lots of stories about his birds. (My favorite involves a time when Vinny was working at home, sitting at the computer with a bird on each shoulder, hanging out with him and watching what he was doing. One of the birds, Otis, said, “We are all buddies!” They’re social animals, part of a flock, just like each of us.) The most fascinating thing about my brother’s birds, or the research I’ve read about crows and other corvids, parrots like Alex, or other birds, is the sense that there’s somebody in there. Pepperberg’s work with Alex was motivated by the desire to learn what is going on in his mind, and who it was in there. Alex demonstrated impressive communication skills, but the point was not to teach him language; it was to communicate with him and learn about how his mind works. As exciting as it would be to discover extraterrestrial intelligence, I think we share this planet with other intelligences that we’ve only begun to understand.

Well, I’m back from a wonderful trip to the Southwest, and the first thing I saw when I went to EurekAlert was this press release about dictionaries and brains. An analysis of the way language is structured (how many words at different levels of complexity, for example) shows that dictionaries have apparently arrived at a state of optimal organization. Specifically, dictionaries are arranged in the most economical manner so as to minimize their size, mirroring the way the human brain organizes its internal lexicon in such a way as to minimize the mental machinery it requires to retrieve word meanings. In this respect dictionaries are similar to other technologies—e.g., writing—that are tailored toward reducing the mental effort required to use them.

What’s fascinating about this is that no one, as far as I know, ever sat down to study how to make a dictionary maximally efficient; I’m assuming it just happened over generations of dictionary creation and tinkering. Anyone who has had to help design or present, or for that matter use, online information or services, can vouch for the fact that there are many ways to go wrong. Perhaps there is an evolutionary process at work that weeds out the bad approaches, and eventually we’ll have a maximally useful web page/web application design, but in the meanwhile we have to sit in meetings and argue over how to organize information so people can find it. Do you suppose the early dictionary makers worried about usability studies?

I’m going to be away from the blog for a few days, so I’ll leave you a few big things to chew over this weekend.

First, from Edge.org, this article from complexity guru Stuart Kauffman, suggests a way to mend the rift between science and religion by giving up our reliance on reductionism and grasping the creativity of the emergent properties of the universe. I need to chew it over a bit more myself before I know what I think about everything he says, but some of it really rings true for me, and is beautifully expressed to boot, for example:

“Is it, then, more amazing to think that an Abrahamic transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient God created everything around us, all that we participate in, in six days, or that it all arose with no transcendent Creator God, all on its own? I believe the latter is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe. It is this view that I hope can be shared across all our religious traditions, embracing those like myself, who do not believe in a Creator God, as well as those who do. This view of God can be a shared religious and spiritual space for us all.”

I really like that he uses the word “gratitude”. I have felt the gratitude that he’s speaking of, but I’ve had people tell me that it makes no sense to call that feeling gratitude, because for gratitude to make sense, there needs to be a personal recipient at the other end. I’ve had a hard time coming up with counter-arguments, but it still feels like gratitude to me, even without a personal entity that I feel grateful to.

OK, the other brain fodder for the weekend is this piece from NPR about the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris. The book covers the ways that we rationalize the choices we’ve made or actions we’ve taken even if they don’t turn out all that great, in an effort to avoid the cognitive dissonance that arises when our view of our own beliefs, competency, and abilities is thrown into doubt. In other words, it’s about the ways our brains put a positive spin on our actions. You can read an excerpt from the book online, or listen to a half-hour interview with Aronson from the show Talk of the Nation. Thanks to Jay for passing this one along.

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me fulminate about the mad proliferation of choices we face when shopping. Do we really need a dozen flavors of Cheez-Its (although even one may be too many), or half a dozen kinds of macaroni and cheese, or multiple varieties of each brand of toothpaste? Awhile back I found that the house brand of ice cream at Marsh supermarkets comes in three different flavors of vanilla. That’s too many. And I think it was Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, who told a story of going to buy blue jeans and being baffled by the sudden explosion of styles and colors, and asking the clerk for the kind you used to get when there was only one kind. I understand entirely what he was up against.

Well, perhaps my complaints about having too many options have some rational basis. A recent study looked at behavior in a variety of venues and found that decision-making seems to sap people’s ability to focus on a task and stay undistracted. Some of the work was done in the lab, where people either had to make a choice about something or simply evaluate information on the same topic; the former task was more likely to make it harder for people to complete a goal-oriented task. Another part of the study involved querying shoppers in a mall about the decisions they had made and checking their ability to solve simple math problems; the more decisions they’d made (and these were self-motivated decisions), the worse their performance (after correcting for other factors like gender, age, and time spent shopping). The study also looked at the performance of students preparing for a math test, and found that performance was degraded in those who had had to make choices about their courses, with more time frittered away in distractions rather than studying.

All three lines of inquiry seem to indicate that some reservoir of mental energy is drained by the process of choosing between alternatives. This story from Science Daily has the details. So maybe I’m not the only one worn down by the process of shopping, evaluating health care options, etc. It’s not that I want to go back to the days when you could get any color of Ford you wanted as long as it was black, but I certainly wouldn’t mind having the kind of vanilla ice cream you got when there was only one kind.

The New York Times has a good article on frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and creativity. FTD is a rare disorder, or perhaps more accurately a cluster of related disorders, that affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. As the frontal lobes begin to lose function, other areas of the brain, particularly those related to creative activity, can become stronger. There’s no treatment and no cure, but the odd thing about the disease is that it can result in a wonderful outpouring of creative work. The article talks about Anne Adams, a woman with FTD who was strongly driven to begin painting in the early stages of the illness, after leaving a career in science due to a family emergency. The article describes her work (including a painting she did that renders the structure of Ravel’s Bolero visually; Ravel also suffered from FTD) and talks about what can be learned about brain function from studying patients with FTD. Check out the links at the end to look at samples of Adams’s work. Thanks to Patrick for telling me about this one.

This story from New Scientist describes the latest news about the intelligence of birds in the crow family, in this case rooks. Pairs of birds were able to figure out the cooperative behavior needed to get food. The setup involved a tray of food that was visible but inaccessible to the birds; a string ran behind the tray with a loose end extending on either side of the tray. If a bird pulled on one loose end, he simply pulled the string out from behind the tray; if he got a buddy to simultaneously pull on the other end, however, they could jointly pull the tray out and get the food.

They figured it out without too much training when another bird was around, but they didn’t seem to get the hang of waiting for a partner to help. When another bird was on the way but delayed, a lone bird would generally pull on the string by itself and lose the chance to get the food. This differs from chimp behavior; chimpanzees can both solve problems like this and also understand that they need to wait for a partner to help them. It’s still too early to say why chimps get that aspect of it and the rooks don’t seem to. It may be linked to the fact that interactions between mature crows are fairly limited, so their social instincts are not as finely honed as those of animals that interact more. At any rate, it’s cool, as always, to see smart birds learning the ropes. The New Scientist article includes a video.

This is the second year in which Daylight Saving Time in the US began at the new, earlier date of the second Sunday in March. I hate the whole concept of DST, and, living as I do on the western edge of a time zone, I take exception to the statement in this Live Science article that DST lowers energy bills because electric lighting is not as necessary. This may be true in some areas, but it is not a universal truth. When the sun rises at 8:05 A.M., as it did this morning in Bloomington, you need the lights on in the morning instead of the evening, but you still need them. There is no extra daylight. The human social schedule has just been shifted an hour with respect to the amount of daylight available.

And therein lies the main point of the article: Early morning sunlight is crucial for keeping circadian rhythms in tune. For people who are prone to depression during the winter, effectively getting up an hour earlier after DST starts means that it’s darker when they get up and go through the earliest parts of their day. Other than the idiocy of believing that the whole world should be forced to shift its clocks rather than individuals and businesses shifting their schedules if they choose to, this is the thing that bugs me the most about DST.

It’s always a red-letter day for me in late January when the sun finally starts rising before 8 A.M. and the mornings start getting lighter, and now here we are back to those dark January mornings all over again. Bah. I ordered a dawn simulator alarm clock and I hope maybe that helps. (And it is good that the days are lengthening now much more quickly than they were in January. But still.) My brain will be happier if Indiana someday decides to end the madness and drop back off of DST again. Sorry about the splenetic post; chalk it up to insufficient daylight this morning.

One standard piece of advice to novice writers is to try to separate the production and editing phases of writing. In other words, when you’re creating new material, try to put your inner critic on hold and let the words come together in your mind and flow out onto the page or the screen, saving the review and editing for another time. Otherwise, you can wind up unintentionally blocking your own writing process. A study of jazz musicians has revealed what the brain looks like when the inner critic is turned off.

The musicians were scanned with fMRI while they performed two distinct musical tasks, the very familiar task of playing a scale, or the more creative activity of improvising on a tune. (Given the constraints of fMRI, by the way, it’s fairly impressive that the researchers were able to devise a setup that allowed this to work.)

When the musicians were improvising, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the frontal lobes that is important in self-monitoring of performance, dropped, while another part of the frontal lobes, the medial prefrontal cortex, became more active. The medial prefrontal cortex is important for self-initiated behaviors. Another finding, odd but interesting, is that sensory areas of the brain also ramped up their activity during improvisation, even though there was no major difference in the sensory input for, e.g., touch and sight. All in all, researchers got a very interesting look at the creative brain in action. I thought it was pretty cool that they could see so clearly the way the self-monitoring part of the brain turned off when the musicians started to improvise.