This press release from Eurekalert from last month describes some discoveries about an ancient Peruvian observatory. I love observatories, and am fascinated by today’s huge telescopes, but there’s also something thrilling about the ancient sites where people began observing the sky and understanding the wider context of our lives, the cosmos in which we live. Archaeologists have recently discovered that the Chankillo site in Peru, long thought to be just a fortress, in fact contains what’s left of the oldest complete solar observatory in the Americas. A slightly curved row of 13 towers has been found to mark the position of the sun over the entire course of the year. The towers go back to the fourth century BC, which makes the history of astronomy in the Americas older than anyone had thought. There are a couple of photos in the press release, and you can also see a lovely satellite image of the Chankillo Observatory from NASA’s Earth Observatory.

I’ve always been amused by the rowdy wise-guy behavior of crows, and I greatly enjoyed David Quammen’s essay explaining bad-boy crows as classic cases of bright under-achievers who get into trouble because they’re bored. (The essay is called “Has success spoiled the crow?” and it’s in Quammen’s book Natural Acts.) This article from Spiegel Online describes some of the signs of intelligence exhibited by ravens, another and perhaps even brighter corvid.

I was particularly interested in the explanation for why ravens are so smart. Evidently blind instinct, which works so well for some other animals, would not do a raven much good, because it needs to be flexible in adapting to a variety of scavenging situations. They need to outwit the carnivores whose prey they appropriate for themselves (and who could eat them without much hesitation), and they need to outwit each other in hiding their stash of meat. Thus there is good reason for them to have developed the ability to understand what another animal is thinking. The article also describes some lab experiments that tested ravens’ problem-solving ability; the ravens did quite well. The next question to be addressed is how broadly they can apply their skills—i.e., whether they can use their intelligence outside of the context of getting and keeping food.

One rush hour morning in January, the Washington Post ran a little experiment: having renowned violinist Joshua Bell play at a Metro station with his open violin case in front of him, like any other street musician, during a weekday morning rush hour. They wanted to find out what would happen. Given that Bell (who was raised in Bloomington, by the way) is a masterful violinist and an international star who can command hefty ticket prices, and that Washington DC subway riders are a fairly sophisticated audience, you might guess that word would spread and a crowd would gather; those who planned the event even wondered what they would do if enough people gathered to disrupt pedestrian traffic and cause a ruckus.

I’ve heard Bell play three times here in Bloomington, and I can vouch for the technical beauty of his playing and the richness of his emotional interpretations. I’d like to think that if I’d been in the Metro station that day, I’d have stopped and enjoyed the music. But if I’d been riding the Metro on a weekday morning, particularly if I were a regular, I’d probably have been just like almost every one of the nearly 1,100 people who passed through the station: rushed, focused on the day ahead, and too busy to stop and listen. Amazingly, only a handful of people stopped, and many of the people who passed through paid little attention at all. One man, who passed within four feet of Bell, was wearing his iPod headphones and didn’t even know a musician had been playing there at all. This article from the Post describes the experiment and the results, including interviews with some of the people who passed through that morning; there are three video clips.

This story raises a number of questions. One interpretation of what happened is that people need the proper context to recognize and appreciate great art, and the setting just didn’t give most people what they needed. This in turn raises questions in my mind about the relevance and purpose of art. On the one hand, if it’s beautiful, shouldn’t it reach people in and of itself? One man who did stop to listen said the music made him “feel at peace”, and another, who showed the most striking reaction to the music (staying and listening for nine minutes), said that hearing Bell play was “a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.” On the other hand, maybe art is often a little (or a lot) beyond our ordinary everyday life, and while it has the power to enlarge and enrich our worlds, it often can’t do so unless the conditions are just right. (Of course classical music is probably not exactly the universal language that I feel it is, and not everyone reacts strongly to it. But still, out of a crowd that big in a city like DC, you’d expect more people to at least pay attention.)

And how much are we ourselves responsible for providing the context that makes it possible to enjoy or appreciate art? The only demographic group that unfailingly responded to the music with evident curiosity and a wish to stop was children, and they were all hurried along by their parents. That suggests to me that part of the correct context for appreciating beauty is flexibility and openness to experience on the part of the listener or viewer. There are obvious reasons that we need to learn when and how to shut down a certain amount of our curiosity and openness as we grow into adulthood, but is it really necessary to shut down to the extent that we can pass by a superb musician playing superb music without even pausing? Evidently being in a hurry, heading to a meeting or planning a hectic day or dropping the kids at day-care, doesn’t put most people in a frame of mind that allows much attention to something sweet and unexpected that appears in the midst of the rush.

So this story also says something about the way we have chosen to live. The article mentions the movie Koyaanisqatsi, which I happened to see for the first time recently and which struck me as essentially an indictment of western industrial society’s artificiality, monotony, and sterility. There are some things about western industrial society that I like very much (being able to blog, for example), but it does seem very sad that it creates conditions in which such beautiful music could be offered and largely ignored. This story haunts me for that reason. I’m not going to wax nostalgic for bygone days when the pace of life was slower, because life was also a lot more physically laborious back then for most people, and I wouldn’t really want to live in another time or place (visit, maybe, but not live in). I enjoy the incredible wealth that we have right now, which stands in stark contrast to what people in previous times had, or even what people in some other parts of the world have right now. But one of the most valuable riches we have is the incredible availability of books and music, not to mention the instant, easy global communication that brings us access to performances and art that originated far away. And what’s the point of having all these cultural riches if people in the capital of the richest country on earth don’t have the time to stop and enjoy them?

We’ve had a wave of unusually warm weather here over the past couple of weeks; the early spring flowers are in full bloom and the trees are starting to show their first green. It’s safe to say that spring has arrived. (Time to see if my wireless signal is strong enough out on the patio to work out there…) This article from Scientific American Mind talks about a possible biochemical basis for the physical manifestations of springtime in humans known collectively as spring fever. Although the phenomenon is not as obvious now as it was in earlier centuries, the number of human births shows a peaks in March, hinting at a peak of sexual activity in June (which is when luteinizing hormone production, linked to reproductive functioning in both sexes, also peaks). It’s not clear yet what causes this in humans; in other mammals, similar changes are triggered by the changing length of daylight.

There’s a little bit in the article about SAD (seasonal affective disorder) and how day length affects that. (Incidentally, I wrote this essay a year and a half ago that covers some research into the possible adaptive value of SAD.) I hadn’t realized that it’s the increase in morning daylight that is most important for driving off the winter blues; someone’s found that on the western edges of time zones, where the sun rises later, there’s more depression. Indiana is on the western edge of a time zone, and it’s always a big deal to me when, in late January, the sun here starts rising before 8am. The difference is mostly symbolic, but it matters to me to turn that particular corner. (This is one reason, by the way, that Daylight Saving Time makes less sense in Indiana; we tend to have darker mornings and lighter evenings anyway. There’s also a fundamental lunacy to DST that I will not go into here, but I’m generally willing to expound on the subject indefinitely for anyone who cares to listen.) Going clear back to an 8am sunrise when DST started in March this year was disheartening, to say the least. (See this article from the Los Angeles Times for more about DST and SAD.)

Sometimes an out-of-body experience (OOBE) accompanies a near-death experience (NDE); OOBEs also happen sometimes during the transition between sleeping and wakefulness. This press release describes a recent study that shows that the two types of OOBEs—those associated with the sleep transition and those associated with an NDE—are similar.

The study, which looked at the experiences of 55 people who had had NDEs, also found that the ones who had an OOBE during the NDE were more likely to have had times when elements of the sleeping state intruded upon their waking mind—or maybe it’s the other way around; in any event, there’s a mingling of the features of the two types of mental state, or what’s called REM intrusion. The arousal mechanism in the brain, which manages the shift from one level of consciousness to another, appears to be involved in both OOBEs and in REM intrusion, so maybe there’s something unusual about the arousal system in the brains of those who experience these phenomena.

This press release caught my eye because one form of REM intrusion is sleep paralysis, with which I’ve had numerous unpleasant experiences. Typically sleep paralysis happens when you shift either into or out of sleep; as I understand it, you’re asleep enough that your muscles are still paralyzed (as they are during REM sleep) but your brain is awake enough that whatever you’re seeing in your dreams is very vivid, more like a hallucination than a dream. It’s sort of a waking dream, or a waking nightmare. I’ve never had an OOBE though, which is probably just as well. I have to admit, though, that while I have no wish to go anywhere near death, I am curious about what an NDE feels like. If they ever figure out a way to induce the experience without any physical danger, I think it would be cool to see what it’s like. But maybe that’s just morbid.

The positive psychology movement, which studies happiness, is not really all that old, but it’s old enough for some of its findings to have become so widely accepted that you run into them everywhere. One of these is the set point, a level of happiness that varies from person to person (perhaps due to genetic causes) and tends to persist throughout a person’s lifetime. The idea is that life events may nudge you away from your set point in one direction or the other, but sooner or later you’ll adapt to even major changes in your circumstances. This press release from EurekAlert describes some recent work that found that it’s not that clearcut. A review of the data from two large studies showed that some events are more easily adjusted to than others, and there’s also a good deal of individual variation. We do still adapt, but the phenomenon is more nuanced than a simple individual set point that people invariably return to.

This press release from EurekAlert describes some research into how communication strategies evolve among social creatures. This is a difficult area to study by observing the creatures themselves, but a group of researchers looked at the behavior of virtual robots with virtual genomes that evolved over time due to recombination and mutation. They ran multiple generations of these robots under different conditions in an environment that included food sources and poison sources and was set up to more or less realistically present the same evolutionary pressures—costs and benefits for signalling the location of food, for example—as the real world does for real live social organisms. The conditions that the researchers varied included whether selection was stronger at the group or the individual level, and whether the colonies of robots were genetically similar or not. After running the simulations, they used the genomes from the simulations in real robots, and the real ones behaved as the virtual ones had.

The press release noted that the circumstances that favored rapid evolution of communication are those in which group-level selection was stronger and those in which the robots in a group were genetically similar. Another finding that really struck me is that once a communication strategy was in place, it tended to limit any possibilities for enhancing communication; the cost of disrupting signalling to change things, even for the better, was steep enough that even a sub-optimal system was fairly stable. To quote from the full paper in Current Biology (by Dario Floreano, Sara Mitri, Stéphane Magnenat, and Laurent Keller):

“Importantly, our results show that once a given system of communication has evolved, it may constrain the evolution of more efficient communication systems because it would require going through a stage where communication between signalers and receivers is perturbed. This finding supports the idea of the possible arbitrariness and imperfection of communication systems, which can be maintained despite their suboptimal nature. Similar observations have been made about evolved biological systems, which are formed by the randomness of the evolutionary selection process, leading, for example, to different dialects in the language of the honey-bee dance.”

Contingency and imperfection…the stuff of life.

This news story is related to some comments in response to the review of the Richard Dawkins book that I posted the other day. The comments have turned to the question of the relationship between religion and aggression, and this press release describes some recent research into that very thing. A psychologist at the University of Michigan led a group that looked at students at Brigham Young University and at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam; a much higher percentage of the BYU students reported a belief in God and in the Bible, as you would expect. The students read a story from the King James Bible describing a nasty incident involving torture, murder, and revenge; some of them were told it came from the Bible but others were told that it came from a scroll found at an archaeological site. For some participants in each of those two groups (the Bible group and the scroll group), the story was augmented with an additional verse about God instructing Israel to chasten its brothers before the Lord. After reading the story, the students paired up for an interactive test that measured aggression (the winner of a competition got to assault the eardrums of the loser with a loud noise, at a volume the winner chose, up to about the volume of a fire alarm).

The results are very interesting. The BYU students displayed more aggression if they thought the story came from the Bible than if they thought it came from some random scroll, and also if they got the extra verse about chastening their brethren. The students from Amsterdam also were more aggressive if they got that extra verse, although they weren’t as strongly influenced as the BYU students by what they thought the source of the story was. (It’s especially interesting that even the non-believers were apparently influenced by that verse about God urging Israel to fight its brothers.) The closing paragraph of the press release discusses what the results of the study might have to do with the roots of religious terrorism.

Of course many people who read the Bible ignore the more violent verses, but there’s a surprising amount of strong language about what God will do to unbelievers even in the supposedly kinder, gentler New Testament. The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible lists relevant passages (there’s also an annotated Quran and an annotated Book of Mormom).