Category: Science

When you are driving to a new place, it feels longer to get there than to return. No, you are not crazy, this is a confirmed perceptual bias. When taking the route for the first time, you are engaged in an act of problem solving. Subjective time passes more slowly (this has been validated by various experiments). On the way back, you know the route (you hope). Subjective time then passes more quickly. Jay Ingram puts it this way: “When your mind is focused on something other than the passage of time, you are fooled into thinking that less time has passed.”

Similarly, if you do two identical tasks, and they take the same time, you will judge your first attempt as having taken longer. But if you change the background context, such as by putting the people in a different room, this illusion tends to vanish.

There is also strong evidence that time seems to go faster as you get older. (Do we leave the problem-solving mode as we age?) Say you are forty and you will live to eighty. According to one set of calculations, your life, as subjectively perceived, is already seventy-one percent over. This is the most disturbing scientific fact I have heard in a long time. Your last twenty years will feel like no more than thirteen percent of your life. Another set of equations, harder to confirm, puts the age of seventeen and a half (!) as the midpoint of your subjectively experienced life. Occasionally patients with extreme brain damage will experience time as passing very very rapidly; the internal clock of one man seemed to be set at about four times regular speed.

For more information on these experiments, see Jay Ingram’s The Velocity of Honey.

Many scientists are hard at work trying to overcome aging; others are more pessimistic about how long we can live. But perhaps markets will look to another solution altogether. Why not also slow down subjectively perceived time? Might this be easier than stopping aging itself? Would it be nearly as good? In the meantime, what can you do to make your life feel longer?

OK, so here is the economists’ question: what is your marginal rate of substitution for real time vs. perceived time? Would you rather have one year that felt like two, or two years that felt like one?

My personal preferences tend toward objective time. Put aside family issues and matching what one’s partner or family does. I am curious about how history will run its course, how music will evolve, and which movies will come out. And what about the theory of quantum gravity? For this you need objective time more than subjectively perceived time. It’s worth a great deal to me just to get this information injected into my brain, even if I only receive a short extension of my life.

There may be less to empathy than meets the eye:

The ability to empathise is often considered uniquely human, the result of complex reasoning and abstract thought. But it might in fact be an incredibly simple brain process ­ meaning that there is no reason why monkeys and other animals cannot empathise too.

That is the conclusion of Christian Keysers of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and his colleagues. The team used a functional MRI scanner to monitor volunteers while their legs were touched and while they watched videos of other people being touched and of objects colliding.

To the team’s surprise, a sensory area of the brain called the secondary somatosensory cortex, thought only to respond to physical touch, was strongly activated by the sight of others being touched.

This suggests that empathy requires no specialised brain area. The brain simply transforms what we see into what we would have felt in the same situation. “Empathy is not an abstract capacity,” Keysers concludes. “It’s like you slip into another person’s shoes to share the experience in a very pragmatic way.”

Even more surprisingly, seeing objects collide generated the same activity. “We expected a big difference,” Keysers says, “but the results are not restricted to the social world. In a certain way we share experiences with objects.”

Other studies have produced comparable results: emotional faces activate emotional areas, for instance. It seems that the brain not only generates a visual sense of what we see, but also activates other sensory components to give us a complete “sense” or feeling for what we are observing.

This means we can feel empathy without building up complex theories about what others feel, Keysers says. Instead, after we have learned what feeling goes with being touched ourselves, our brains become conditioned to trigger the same feeling when we see others being touched.

“We do not need to assume a separate mechanism to understand the social world,” he says.

Here is the full story. Here is an earlier MR post on sympathy, here is another. Here is the home page of the researcher.

Philosopher Alfred Mele asks:

Suppose you learn of a kind of psycho-surgery that enables people to bring all of their beliefs about their positive and negative attributes into line with the facts. Suppose you also learn that only this psycho-surgery would eliminate all of your biased beliefs about yourself, that it is very expensive, and that it would probably cut ten years off your life. Would it be rational for you to sign up for the surgery? Obviously not.

I would go further, don’t even do it for free. Mele informs us:

There is a phenomenon called “depressive realism”. Depressed people tend to be significantly more accurate about their positive and negative attributes than do people who are not depressed. Whether depression is a cause of the accuracy or the accuracy is a cause of the depression is an open question. But should you want to cause yourself to be depressed so that you can be more accurate about yourself or work hard to be more accurate about yourself at the risk of causing yourself to be depressed?

Psychologists claim that the depressed are extremely unrealistic about at least one variable: their likelihood of remaining depressed forever. For the depressed, it feels as if the cloud will never lift. When it comes to the rest of us, our delusions [surely a familiar concept to most bloggers!] help motivate us and keep us happy.

So do you agree with my answer to the first thought experiment? Would you reject a free surgery that would lift your delusions? If so, do you feel bad about not being a truthseeker [N.B.: this link is now repaired]? Do you take this fact into account when debating passionately with others? Just my thought for the day.

One of my favorite “crank” theories is the view that early man was more technologically advanced than is usually believed. Here is good evidence that Stone Age Koreans were systematically hunting whales circa 6000 B.C.. Here is a post about ancient jewelry, most likely from 75,000 years ago.

That’s the self-appointed topic of philosopher Michael Sandel. What if we could genetically engineer ourselves to be far “better” human beings? What would be wrong with that? Here is his answer, writ short:

A lively sense of the contingency of our gifts–a consciousness that none of us is wholly responsible for his or her success–saves a meritocratic society from sliding into the smug assumption that the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. Without this, the successful would become even more likely than they are now to view themselves as self-made and self-sufficient, and hence wholly responsible for their success. Those at the bottom of society would be viewed not as disadvantaged, and thus worthy of a measure of compensation, but as simply unfit, and thus worthy of eugenic repair. The meritocracy, less chastened by chance, would become harder, less forgiving. As perfect genetic knowledge would end the simulacrum of solidarity in insurance markets, so perfect genetic control would erode the actual solidarity that arises when men and women reflect on the contingency of their talents and fortunes.

Here is the longer argument.

In other words, Sandel is saying that if we bring about a world where everything is the result of genes, people will be less caring. Social solidarity will diminish.

I doubt this. If you want to drum up sympathy, hold up a picture of a young child with birth defects.

And at what margin is contingency good for us? Would it also increase social solidarity to have our lives “contingent” upon diarrhea, malaria, and tuberculosis?

Going out on a limb:

The future of solidarity may be up for grabs, but for different reasons than Sandel recognizes. The real question is whether parents will prefer to genetically engineer children with more or less social solidarity. I’ll predict more. The benefits of sexual selection (attracting a quality mate) will outweigh the shorter-run benefits from greater selfishness. Don’t parents already scold their children to have a stronger social conscience? Wouldn’t caring kids also be more…obedient? Now you might try to breed a kid who loves only his spouse and children, and cares about no one else. How good a job will this person get? Remember, this future world may also allow us to test for what genes people have. What better for a job interview than to take a piece of hair and see how much the person is a cooperator? I expect genetic engineering to increase the gains from trade. As for politics, imagine if candidates had to reveal their genetic profiles.

Genetic engineering also will accelerate the pace of evolution. Given that birth control is cheap, the women on the future will love children more than do the women of today.

Maybe not. According to some recent research it is shaped like a funnel or a medieval horn. The link offers a useful picture. This would be big news indeed:

This model would force scientists to abandon the “cosmological principle”, the idea that all parts of the cosmos are roughly the same. “If one happens to find oneself a long way up the narrow end of the horn, things indeed look very strange, with two very small dimensions,” says Holger Then, a member of the team.

At an extreme enough point, you would be able to see the back of your own head. It would be an interesting place to explore – but we are probably too far from the narrow end of the horn to examine it with telescopes.

Ponder that if you want some distraction from your taxes. The universe would be finite as well. This might eliminate the paradoxical notion that I have a near-double out there somewhere, writing a blog called MarginalCounterRevolution.

But are we sure of the result? Of course not:

Both of the crucial observations are still ambiguous, however, and may be statistical flukes. Over the next year or so, WMAP and other experiments will test whether large blobs really are lacking and whether small ones really are elliptical.

The bottom line: When I hear more on this, I’ll let you know.

“Very few researchers have asked whether humans can learn to communicate like another animal,” says Dr Laurie Santos, director of the Primate Cognition Lab at Yale University.

“Most of the research on animal communication consists of mostly failed attempts to see if animals can use human language. Researchers spent decades and lost many fingers trying to teach chimpanzees to speak, manually moulding their mouths into the right positions. So this is a neat twist on an old question.”

Here is the full story. I’ll predict that humans are not very good at communicating with animals in this manner, for many of the same reasons that animals cannot speak English very well.

In a move unprecedented in the Bay Area, the city’s traffic engineers have created a traffic signal with attitude. It senses when a speeder is approaching and metes out swift punishment.

It doesn’t write a ticket. It immediately turns from green to yellow to red.

Here is the full story, thanks to the ever-vigilant Geekpress.com.

My take: This will succeed in reducing speeding. By making the decision calculus more uni-dimensional (time vs. time, rather than time vs. speeding ticket), individiuals are more likely to see the folly of driving at unsafe speeds.

Here is a general introduction to framing effects. Here is a short article about framing effects in Alice in Wonderland. Here is Daniel Davies on how framing effects matter.

But what about civil liberties? One commentator opined: “It’s depriving you of another one of your liberties — going fast”.

Addendum: Tim Worstall writes in:

“The anti speeder traffic light ?
Been around for years.
Here in Portugal they’re all over the place.
And they work very well, just as advertised.”

The highest suicide rate in the world has been reported among young women in South India by a new study. The research is of major importance, according to the World Health Organization, as it brings to light Asia’s suicide problem.

The average suicide rate for young women aged between 15 to 19 living around Vellore in Tamil Nadu was 148 per 100,000. This compares to just 2.1 suicides per 100,000 in the same group in the UK.

The global suicide rate stands at 14.5 deaths per 100,000, with suicide the fourth leading cause of death in the 15 to 19 age group. However, in the Tamil Nadu study, suicide was the number one cause of death among these adolescents.

Notably, young women were much more likely to kill themselves than young men – the reverse of the rest of the world. In Western countries, men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women.

Here is the full story. Here is an NBER paper on the determinants of teenage suicide in the United States. Earlier Alex wrote about suicide as a social phenomena involving tipping and multiple equilibria.

Freeman Dyson introduces us to Littlewood’s Law of Miracles:

Littlewood was a famous mathematician who was teaching at Cambridge University when I was a student. Being a professional mathematician, he defined miracles precisely before stating his law about them. He defined a miracle as an event that has special significance when it occurs, but occurs with a probability of one in a million. This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word “miracle.”

Littlewood’s Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch [co-author of the book Dyson is reviewing] tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood’s Law.

The law echoes a comment I’ve seen attributed to another mathematician, Persi Diaconis. Diaconis supposedly said that if you study a large enough population over a long enough time period, then “any damn thing can happen.”