A couple of recent news stories describe recent work on how children learn language. One study looked at bilingual babies and monolingual babies and found somewhat different learning sequences in each case. In a laboratory setting, the monolingual babies who were learning English were able to distinguish two similar-sounding words a few months earlier than bilingual babies who were learning English and another language. Bilingual babies tend to reach the major milestones in language learning at about the same age as monolingual babies, so the relative delay evidently doesn’t slow them down. In fact, researchers think it’s helpful for the bilingual babies to focus for longer on associating words with the right objects without worrying about the finer details of how the words sound, because they’ve got twice as many words to associate with objects. This article from Science Daily has the details.

Another study examined the way that toddlers learn to tune out speech sounds that don’t occur in the language they’re learning. Babies are born with the ability to distinguish the finer phonological distinctions found in any human language, but as they grow up they retain only a sensitivity toward the sounds found in their own language. They must know the sounds of their native language so well that they can hear them pronounced in markedly different accents without thinking they are different sounds–for example, to know that a short sharp “Hey!” from a person you accidentally bump into is the same as the delighted, drawn-out “Heeeeyyyy!” from a friend who’s happy to see you.

Evidently children start learning these things at a very young age. An experiment with 18-month-old toddlers compared English learners and Dutch learners as they were taught made-up names for toys. The English learners didn’t distinguish between two names that differed only in the length of the vowel sound (as in the “Hey” example above), because they’ve figured out that in English, a vowel can differ in that respect without signifying something different. The Dutch babies, on the other hand, noted the difference and learned the two distinct words; in Dutch, the length of the vowel does affect meaning. The English learners were able to distinguish two words with vowels that differed in a way that conveys meaning in English (“hey” versus “who”, to follow up on my example above, although the babies were actually learning nonsense words). You can read more about it in this story from Science Daily.

Seems like it’s all about music this week at the Thinking Meat Project, which is a nice coincidence because the Lotus World Music Festival is in town (one of the high points of my year) and I’m enjoying a lot of great music this weekend.

Oliver Sacks has a new book out (Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain) that I’m eager to read. Several of his recent New Yorker essays have described people who also figure in the book (these include a profile of musicologist Clive Wearing, whose story I mentioned the other day). Wired has published an enjoyable report of its interview with Sacks.

I was very interested in what Sacks had to say about psychoactive substances and music. He describes an experience he had at the peak of a “a sort of pharmacological mountain” he had ascended, and a similar experience that was mediated solely by music rather than by drugs. I’ve never even smoked pot, much less experimented with anything more intense, so I can’t know what I’d feel if I ever did. However, music and some types of natural surroundings can evoke moments of insight and connectedness and profound spiritual emotion in me that seem to resemble the kind of thing people say they experience when they’re high. Since Sacks was able to compare his own experiences in the two different sets of circumstances, that lends some credence to my idea that maybe what I feel really is similar to some types of drug-induced emotions.

I was also struck by what he had to say about mystical experiences, mostly I suppose because I agree so strongly with it:

I intensely dislike any reference to supernaturalism, but I think there can be profound mystical feelings which do not have to call on fictitious agencies like angels and demons and deities. The whole natural world is bathed in wonder and beauty and mystery. The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological, and is conveyed very powerfully in music.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has written a haunting essay for the New Yorker about musician and musicologist Clive Wearing, a man who suffered a brain infection over 20 years ago and ever since has struggled with the worst known case of amnesia. It’s a terrifying story, because Wearing’s life sounds hellishly difficult: he can neither remember his past nor form new memories. He has developed some coping mechanisms to get himself from moment to moment, but after his illness he kept reliving an endless present of apparently just-regained consciousness. Even now it sounds like he is surrounded by a mental darkness that is liable to engulf him.

Two lights shine in the darkness, though: his love for his wife, whom he still recognizes and who still loves and cares for him, and his ability to perform and conduct music. Sacks explains how these attachments and accomplishments, which rely on memory, can persist in the absence of other kinds of memory. He talks about the difference between episodic memory (recalling the day your child was born, or remembering that you went out for pizza yesterday for lunch) and semantic or procedural memory (remembering how to brush your teeth or find and use the can opener in your kitchen). Amnesia typically destroys the former to one degree or another, but leaves the latter intact. Wearing, unable to remember from minute to minute who he is talking to, has learned through physical repetition how to get to the coffee cups in the kitchen, even though he couldn’t tell you where they are. He can also play the piano, sing, and conduct a chorus, apparently with a great deal of sensitivity and intellect.

Musical performance presents fascinating questions about the memories involved. The memory of how to play or conduct a piece is similar to the memory of how to ride a bicycle or perform any other physical task, but musical performance seems to call on capabilities beyond the automatic following of physical procedures. Sacks gives a very moving description of the kind of creativity and engagement with life that Wearing finds in following a piece of music and letting it organize his perception of consciousness with its logic and shape his reality for as long as it lasts.

In Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination, Robert Jourdain attributes the magic of music to exactly this type of shaping and organizing of conscious experience. Music presents us with an artificial world where we can grasp the subtle structure and relationships embodied in the music, and “…our brains are able to piece together larger understandings than they can in the wokaday external world…”.

“It’s for this reason that music can be transcendent. For a few moments it makes us larger than we really are, and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and that the world is more than it seems. That is cause enough for ecstasy.”

It’s happiness enough that music can do all that for ordinary people with ordinary lives, but it’s a great wonder that it can also do that for someone whose life has been deeply changed by such fundamental losses. When I first started reading the article it seemed like a story of unrelieved sadness, so as I continued reading it was good to see that love and music can still offer sustenance even in very difficult circumstances.

Terry Bisson’s short story “They’re Made Out of Meat” describes the incredulous and dismissive reaction of a non-meat-based intelligence to the existence of us humans with our brains, etc., made totally of meat. As a sort of a real-world follow-up, here’s an article from Reason Online about the possible fate of humans in a hypothetical future world containing artificially intelligent robots. The article covers the second annual Singularity Summit, organized by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Singularity is defined as a point in the future beyond which the capabilities of information technology, broadly and variously defined, utterly change human life. (I am not sure I believe in the Singularity, and I’m certain I don’t believe it’s near, but I could be wrong.)

The article describes the thoughts of a number of AI experts and Singularity thinkers on the ramifications for humans if we do develop artificially intelligent robots, in particular if they have capabilities far beyond our own. Would they be tremendously helpful, tremendously harmful, or perhaps as dismissive of us as the non-meat-based aliens in Bisson’s story? Should we even create such a thing? And if we do, how could we not only make it smart, but make it benign? The possible answers to these questions provide plenty of food for thought.

One of the things that struck me me is the idea that AIs might be able to solve our problems for us. In particular, Peter Voss, founder of Adaptive A.I. (a company working on “the world’s first general intelligence software engine”) believes that AIs could not only accelerate research into things like human longevity, but could also help us to be better people. I deeply believe in the application of reason and intelligence to moral problems, but I’m not convinced that an AI could convey to us from outside the answers to such problems in ways that would be helpful. In other words, I think the way that reason and intelligence can improve behavior is when they are exercised by the person whose behavior is under scrutiny. And in many cases, it’s clear what we should do; the hard part is doing it. Would an AI help with that?

What an AI would have to do to help us be better people, individually or collectively, is to understand not just how human psychology works, but how to manipulate it for positive ends. Leaving aside the questions of whether we want to submit ourselves to the manipulations of AIs, even for our own good, I’m not sure that an AI would be any better than we are at figuring out how to bring about the behavioral changes necessary to decrease humankind’s immoral behavior. Would an AI figure out how to persuade people to stop killing each other in the name of xenophobia and/or religious mania? Or how to persuade everyone to make the necessary changes in their behavior to keep global warming from becoming a catastrophe? (I consider that a moral question too because to me it’s morally wrong to leave the planet a worse place for future generations than we found it.) I have my doubts.

I also wondered about whether an AI would have to experience something like human emotions in order to make useful decisions. It’s tempting sometimes to suppose that a dispassionate intelligence, a Vulcan controlled entirely by reason and logic and not emotion, would make better decisions, but as I recall from reading Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error, our emotions are an integral part of our decision-making apparatus, not to mention our values and our morality. Certainly emotions make the solution of many of our worst problems much harder, or in fact create the problems in the first place, but I don’t think even a stupendously smart AI can help resolve human problems without a deep understanding of emotions.

In short, I have a hard time envisioning the kind of help that those optimistic about AIs think they will provide. But maybe that’s the whole point of the singularity: we just can’t imagine what it will be like on the other side. But that makes it very difficult to think effectively about how to create the conditions that will lead to the singularity, which is probably why I’ve never had a lot of patience with the concept in the first place.

Lately I’ve had several chances to go out stargazing. In addition to relishing the sight of a lunar eclipse or a distant galaxy, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to stop and think about my place as a very small mammal in a very big universe. It’s funny how the contemplation of the vast impersonal reaches of the universe can call up feelings that shift uncannily between serenity, exaltation, and joy on the the one hand, and loneliness or fear on the other. It’s like looking at one of those ambiguous images, a Necker cube or the faces/vase image. Either it’s amazing and inspiring that animals such as we have learned such an amazing amount about the far-away universe and our own place in it (it’s a cliche by now but we really are made of star stuff), or else it’s enough to scare you silly that we’re out here all alone in the cold dark universe on a fragile tiny oasis.

A quote from Gale Christianson’s biography of Edwin Hubble captures this ambivalence:

[After Hubble died] Edith Sitwell recalled that … he showed her plates of “universes in the heavens” millions of light-years away. “How terrifying!” she had remarked. “Only at first,” he replied, “when you are not used to them. Afterwards, they give one comfort. For then you know that there is nothing to worry about—nothing at all!”

(From Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae, Gale Christianson, 1995.)

This essay by Timothy Ferris from the New York Times closes with a similar anecdote. Ferris is writing on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1, which visited Jupiter and Saturn. With its sister craft, Voyager 2 (which also visited Uranus and Neptune), Voyager 1 taught us a great deal about the outer reaches of the solar system—or rather, the outer reaches of what might perhaps be called the inner solar system. The two spacecraft continue to head outward; Voyager 1 will leave the heliosphere, the bubble of space where the solar wind blows, in 2015, assuming all goes well, and will then cross into interstellar space.

The Voyagers are still listed as active missions on JPL’s web site. Thirty years after their launch, both spacecraft continue to transmit signals back to their home planet (tiny signals, but still detectable; the modest power levels of digital watch batteries are twenty billion times stronger than those of the Voyager transmissions). They are our envoys, heading out into the universe for us. In addition to writing about the Voyager missions, Ferris writes about the gold-plated phonograph record carried by each Voyager spacecraft, which he helped create. The content was chosen by a committee led by Carl Sagan. Ferris’s article gives a little bit of the background behind the creation of the record, which was very nearly omitted from the mission.

It’s worth digging around a bit on the JPL site describing the golden records; there’s a listing of all the images, all the music, and all the sounds of Earth that are recorded on the disks, and links to some of the images and sounds. It’s like seeing humankind at its best, putting on its company face (especially if you listen to some of the friendly greetings sent out into the universe, in many languages including one or two no longer spoken); it makes us look endearing and big-hearted. Which we are, of course, but we’re so many other things as well. I guess you’re bound to leave things out when you try to sum up an entire planet in one relatively small store of information. The very act of doing so reflects an optimism that I hope may be appreciated if the disk is ever found and deciphered.

This article from American Scholar is one of the most haunting pieces of autobiographical writing I’ve ever read. Paul West, author of 50+ books and totally immersed in the world of words, had a stroke in 2003 that damaged the two main areas of the brain involved in producing and understanding language, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. He was left immediately after the stroke with a condition called global aphasia. It sounds like hell for anyone, and it’s hard to imagine a more nightmarish fate for one who lives for words.

However, through tremendous effort, he was able to recover enough language ability to resume writing; since the stroke, he’s produced a memoir, The Shadow Factory (find in a library), of which the American Scholar article is an excerpt, and a novel. His wife, Diane Ackerman, wrote an introduction to this piece that provides some context; the title I chose for this post comes from her brief essay.

It gives me the heebie-jeebies to think about losing the ability to use language. The very nature of the experience would seem to preclude reading a first-hand report of what it feels like to enter that state, which makes this essay extraordinary. I don’t know specifically the ways in which West’s years of writing shaped his brain and how he was able to somehow regain some of the territory he lost in the stroke, but it strikes me as a very moving example of neuroplasticity, determination, love, and courage.

When Daniel Dennett visited Indiana University last year, one of his talks included frequent references to magic. Not the “real magic” that doesn’t really exist (e.g., truly making something materialize out of thin air), he said, but the only kind of magic that really does exist: conjuring tricks that make us believe what isn’t so. His point was that just as a magician doesn’t really have to make objects materialize out of the air, or whatever, but simply to make us think it happened, the human brain doesn’t really have to do anything all that mysterious to create consciousness. My notes say (and I’m guessing this is a paraphrase of what Dennett was saying): “The ‘magic of consciousness’, like stage magic, defies explanation only so long as we take it as face value. Once we appreciate all the non-mysterious ways in which the brain can create benign ‘user illusions’, we can begin to imagine how the brain creates consciousness.” In this view, neuroscience is the effort to reverse-engineer the magic show that is consciousness.

Whether you agree with Dennett or not, you might find this article from the New York Times interesting. It’s about a symposium called The Magic of Consciousness that was held recently in that hub of illusion and home of the ersatz, Las Vegas. The article discusses identity, consciousness, reality, and some of the connections and disjuncts between objective reality and human experience. There are quotes from several noted scholars in the field of consciousness studies, including Dennett. I liked his idea about how we use words to try to fix in memory our otherwise fleeting sensory experiences–that words are “like sheepdogs herding ideas.”

A recent study indicates that clinically depressed people have a harder time than their healthy counterparts in controlling their emotional response to negative situations. Depressed and non-depressed subjects were given troublesome images to view; they had to try to consciously turn their negative responses around by thinking of the situation in a different light (e.g., imagining a happier ending or thinking of it as acted and not real).

For the healthy subjects, their efforts were reflected in both an upswing in activity in the prefrontal cortex, in areas associated with control of the emotions, and a downswing in activity in the amygdala and other areas where the emotions are processed. In a sense, the researchers could see them stepping on the emotional brakes and also see the emotional machinery slowing down. In the depressed people, on the other hand, you could see them stepping on the brakes (more activity in the prefrontal cortex), but the amygdala didn’t slow down. This press release from EurekAlert has the details.

The next step, I hope, will be to find out what’s happening differently in the brains of the depressed to stymie the efforts at emotional control. This obviously has a lot of potential for helping to find or improve treatments for depression. I’ve had experience with being clinically depressed, and I’d certainly find it interesting to know if something like this is going on in my brain when I’m depressed.

I’m familiar with the frustrating feeling of being haunted by lingering sadness or anxiety despite my best efforts to reason my way out of it or reassure myself (or be reassured by others), or even just to accept that sometimes life is sad and move on. Sometimes the sadness feels like bedrock; even if it’s inexplicable why it should be there, any efforts to convince myself that it’s not there or not warranted seem delusional. I’ve found that the best thing is to seek out the things that I know have comforted me in the past (time with people I love, music or words that have great meaning for me, long walks, time among the trees in a favorite park) and trust that they will work their slow subtle magic no matter how pointless it may feel in the moment.

[Postscript, December 28, 2023: These days I’d question the entire idea of emotional control and reasoning yourself out of feelings. I’m not sure I understand emotions any better than I did in 2007, but I certainly understand them differently.]

New Caledonian crows are a fascinating species. The corvids tend to be relatively smart birds anyway (some people think they’re smarter than most people; Henry Ward Beecher wrote “Give men wings, and reduce their smartness a little, and many of them would be almost good enough to call crows”). New Caledonian crows, native to several south Pacific islands, are particularly clever tool-makers, fashioning twigs and leaves into bug-gathering utensils that are among the most complex animal-made tools known. Research suggests that their tool-making abilities extend to adapting existing tools for new uses, and sharing these innovations with each other.

Some recent research at the University of Auckland shows that these crows can perform problem-solving feats more typical of great apes and humans than of other animals. They apparently reason by analogy that if they can use a tool to get at food, when the situation requires it they can use one tool to get at another tool that will then allow them to access the food. When a piece of meat was placed out of the birds’ reach in a container, the birds were given a short stick—too short to reach the meat—and a longer stick that would do the job but that was not immediately accessible. Right away they figured out that if they used the shorter stick to poke the longer stick into reach, they could then use the longer stick to get the food. This article from the BBC has more information and also a video showing one of the birds solving the problem and getting the meat. Thanks to Tom for sending this story my way.

If you want to learn more about New Caledonian crows, you might enjoy the crow tool use page maintained by the Behavioural Ecology Research Group at Oxford. The Wikipedia page on New Caledonian crows looks pretty good too.