Archive for the ‘science’ Category
stuff about the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope
Roman in the purple haze
So I’m at a loss to find anything to write about, as often happens, as there’s nothing I’m really knowledgeable about, and global politics is generally too awful to take seriously, but I must needs keep writing, for what else am I good for?
This morning I’ve been listening to people at NASA or is it Goddard talking to informed members of the public about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, aka Roman, which I’ve vaguely heard about before, but this was all very exciting talk about it being launched around September, way ahead of schedule and under budget. So look out, dark matter, dark energy and the multiverse, here we come.
I’ve recently heard people I know – not the most sciencey people on the planet – going on about the Artemis missions as ‘been, there, done that’ and a money-wasting ‘nothingburger’, but given some of the shite happening here on Earth, one can’t help indulging the fantasy of getting away from it all. And I couldn’t help feeling a pang of envy for the Goddard people in their happy bubble of space enterprise. Beam me up, I say – or is it down?…
But the Roman really does seem a fantastical piece of machinery, worth exploring. First, though, who was Nancy Grace Roman? Well, sadly she died on Christmas Day, 2018 – a bit of a downer for the family, but then she was 93. She was an astronomer, and NASA’s chief of astronomy in the 70s, an important figure in planning the Hubble Space telescope, an educator, and an advocate for sciencey women, so, what with the Vera Rubin and the Just Wonderful Space Telescope (didn’t catch on, sadly), women are creeping closer to space dominance. The news conference I listened to was full of optimistic excitement and pride. The launch is set for September, for a Sun-Earth orbit at Lagrange point 2.
So, onto Lagrange points, which I used to understand, I think. They’re points of gravitational equilibrium between two massive orbiting bodies, in this case the earth and the sun. They’re a place of balanced forces, perfect for a relatively small body such as a spaceship, or a space telescope, to make a stable home. There are five Lagrange points in the orbital plane of the earth-sun system, which is standard for any such large body system. So, getting out of the earth’s atmosphere has obvious advantages for clear viewing, what with Rayleigh scattering, ozone absorbing UV light, and other problems.
The Roman is particularly an advance on the Hubble, as they’re similar types, with the Roman having a much wider field of view. And then there’s the Vera Rubin, which I’m sure I’ll get round to (this is all just a self-education vid).
But now for the coronagraph. From Wikipedia:
A coronagraph is a telescopic attachment designed to block out the direct light from a star or other bright object so that nearby objects – which otherwise would be hidden in the object’s bright glare – can be resolved.
I’m listening to/watching a video from three years ago featuring a Dr Vanessa Bailey, who is clearly very excited and also very knowledgeable about the Roman and its coronagraph – doubtless even more excited now as the launch date has been put forward to September this year, instead of 2017. It gets very technical for a know-nothing like me, but I intend to watch it more than once as well as reading up on coronagraphs and the Roman on Wikipedia etc. I feel something coming on as I try to process this stuff, a real sense of excitement, not so much about weird physics, massless particles, strangeness and charm, and the multiverse, but habitable planets, and exoplanets in general. No doubt Roman will be charged with duties other than exploring exoplanets, but the expansion of our exoplanet discoveries since the nineties has excited me more than anything else in astronomy.
So I’ve given Wiki’s brief description of a coronagraph above, and it’s clear from that description that coronagraphs will be key to locating and exploring exoplanets (6,273 confirmed as of April 23 2026, and many more yet to be confirmed, and AI never lies). Apparently the Roman will be equipped with a ‘next generation’ coronagraph – essentially there are two types, solar and stellar – and with the Roman it’s about stellar coronagraphs, which are intended to block or reduce light from all stars or bright objects other than the sun. The telescope itself is similar in size to Hubble, but Dr Bailey points out that Roman’s field of view will be such that it will be able to do ‘in one shot’ what would require dozens of shots from Hubble, and this wide field will help with exploring dark matter and dark energy. The coronagraph will have a one hundred-fold greater sensitivity than that of Hubble.
We get into heavy detail at this point, Fraser Cain, the interviewer, being way more nerdy – I mean expert – about this stuff than me, what with F-numbers (reference below), which have much to do with field-of-view and clarity, and gravitational lensing and its possible connection with dark matter, and other distortions.
So, the coronagraph. The whole purpose of this one is as a ‘technology demonstrator’. To quote Dr Bailey:
by the 2040s, NASA wants to be imaging Earth-like planets around nearby Sun-like stars to search for life – I mean, we’re talking single-pixel, very fuzzy images, we’re not talking continents and clouds, but even to be able to detect Earth-like planets at all, you’re trying to find something that’s ten billion times fainter than its host star – incredibly close at least in terms of its angular separation. What Hubble can do, in terms of its coronagraph, is on the order of a million times fainter – which is phenomenal, it lets us see young hot glowing Jupiters, that are still emitting plenty of light from the heat of their formation process, but that’s nowhere near what we need for those ‘exo-Earths’. So the Roman coronagraph is going to be an intermediate generation of instrumentation – we hope we’ll definitely achieve at least 10 million to one detection limits for a planet that’s 10 million times fainter than its star – our goal is to do 100 million to one, closer to a billion to one…
All of which sounds pretty exciting to me, except that I’ll be turning 90 around the middle of the 2040s – gotta get that little cough under control. Dr Bailey continued to detail aspects of the coronagraph which go way beyond my comprehension, having only looked through a basic little telescope once or twice in my life, a most pleasant memory. Apparently the Roman coronagraph will have around a hundred times the sensitivity of Hubble, which will presumably lead to far more habitable zone planets being detected and surveyed for any interesting anomalies or signs of – I dare not speak its name. and of course there will be other possibilities relating to dark matter and other mysteries. For example measuring the shapes and perhaps the more detailed activities of galaxies may throw more light onto dark matter, so to speak.
And of course I remember those first exoplanet discoveries in the 1990s, and the sudden knowledge, for me at least, that every one of the zillions of stars out there was a solar system. I’m not sure if Hubble was essential to those first discoveries, but it’s probable. A NASA website on Hubble is fascinating on this, so I’ll just quote:
For a long time, scientists thought that other planetary systems were likely to resemble our own. But humanity was in for an eye-opening revelation about what constituted a run-of-the-mill planetary system. The first exoplanet discovered was a “hot Jupiter,” or a Jupiter-like gas giant orbiting astoundingly close to its star ― only 5 million miles (8 million km). That’s closer than Mercury is to our Sun.
The variety of new types of planets that poured in were astounding. In addition to many hot Jupiters, astronomers found:
- Super-Earths: Rocky planets more massive than Earth, but lighter than Neptune
- Hot Neptunes: Neptune-size planets in tight orbits around their stars
- Mini-Neptunes (or sub-Neptunes): Roughly Neptune-size planets thought to have solid inner cores and dense helium-hydrogen atmospheres
- Ultra-hot Jupiters: Jupiter-like gas giant planets orbiting so close to their stars that their temperatures exceed 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot to vaporize most metals
- Super Puffs: Young planets with the density of cotton candy. Their hydrogen/helium atmospheres are so bloated they are nearly the size of Jupiter, but their mass is only several times that of Earth
So, that’s enough excitement for now, and it’s only the beginning. This is something I hope to follow, if health allows.
References
NASA News Conference: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is Complete
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope
How Nancy Grace Roman’s Coronagraph Will Revolutionise Planet Hunting (Fraser Cain interview with Dr Vanessa Bailey)
Nietzsche and Darwin and science and philosophy
When I was young, living in Elizabeth, a newly-built working-class town north of Adelaide in South Australia, I was able to avail myself of books of all kinds on our home shelves – novels, histories, encyclopaedias and the like. It was only much later that I had cause to wonder – where did all these books come from? I don’t think my father ever read a book in his life (he later, after my mother left him, told me I need only read one book – the Bible). My mother read very few. I had two older siblings – two and three years older – but surely all these books didn’t come from them.
Among them were a few works of philosophy which I skimmed my way through, puzzled and occasionally impressed, I think mostly by the author’s chutzpah. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche, and the titles were Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist. Much of the writing involved seemingly pithy little aphorisms – sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes confusing, and occasionally liberating for an anti-authoritarian adolescent, as I most definitely was at the time. In The Antichrist, for example, Nietzsche got stuck into ‘Saint Paul’, which tickled my fancy in spite of my not knowing much about Nietzsche’s target. The naughtiness of it all was quite a thrill to me.
So my none-too-reliable guess is that I was fifteen or sixteen when this skimming took place, but it certainly stuck in my mind. Meanwhile I continued my reading, particularly from the library close by, from which, often on the recommendations of my older brother’s university friends, I borrowed and read pretty well the whole oeuvre of Thomas Hardy, as well as other 19th century Brits – Dickens, the Brontes, Austen, George Eliot, and writers we’d studied at school – George Orwell, Albert Camus, and, from Camus, the Roads to Freedom trilogy of Jean-Paul Sartre. All this would’ve been in those mid-teen years, the couple of years after I’d left school due to being smacked in the face by the headmaster, for no good reason.
So all of this is preliminary. Years later, I happened to read something very scathing that Nietzsche had written about George Eliot, surely one of the best novelists of the Victorian era. On looking into the matter I learned that he had never read Eliot and was responding simply to a remark made about her by someone he knew. Oh dear. Whatever opinion I had of Nietzsche was definitely dented.
So, flash further forward, and after being apprised, over the years, of some misogynistic remarks by Nietzsche, my interest in him was pretty well dead. That is, until a recent conversation with an intelligent female friend caused me to try reappraising my reappraisal. I checked my admirably voluminous bookshelves (I’m not even sure where all those books came from either) and found I had two Nietzsche paperbacks with my name written on the inside cover over 40 years ago – Thus spake Zarathustra and a two-in-one volume, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner. I’m pretty sure I never read this second book all those years ago, but for my sins I’ve just read The birth of tragedy. I found it more or less completely incomprehensible, and somehow irrelevant.
So I’ll present a comparison, odorous though it might be. The birth of tragedy was Nietzsche’s first published book, in 1872, when he was in his twenties and a very youthful professor in Ancient Greek philology. As it happens I’m now reading another book, published in 1871, on a very different topic – Charles Darwin’s The descent of man. Darwin never obtained a professorship, but he did okay for himself, being a scion of the aristocracy, and, to be fair, an indefatigable researcher. Clearly, both authors felt strongly that they had an important message to impart to the world. So let me quote from both authors.
First, a more or less random passage from Nietzsche’s The birth of tragedy – and, to be fair, this is, by all accounts, far from his best work, and he himself dismissed it in his later years. Yet I feel its esoteric nature is fairly typical:
In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded out and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: “Do you prostrate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?” [the quote is from Schiller].
F Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1967, pp 37-38
So, the above passage was written, or published when Nietzsche was about 27 years old. The next passage was from a book published in 1871, when Darwin was 62, and very much an established ‘natural philosopher’, revered and reviled world-wide.
The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings. The behaviour of a dog when returning to his master after an absence, and, as I may add, of a monkey to his beloved keeper, is widely different from that towards their fellows. In the latter case the transports of joy appear to be somewhat less and the sense of equality is shewn in every action. Professor Braubach goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god. The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various superstitions and customs.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: in J D Watson, ed. Darwin, the indelible stamp: four essential volumes in one, 2005, pp 679-680
I’ve excluded the notes from the Darwin extract, but just about every page of his book is annotated with references to contemporary writers and analysts of various species, their behaviours, anatomies and so on. The extract from Nietzsche is of course a translation, so that carries problems, which I haven’t the nous to explore. It could be argued that Nietzsche’s extract is ‘philosophical’ while Darwin’s is ‘scientific’, which certainly tempts me to try to explain, or at least explore, the difference. I remember, from my philosophical readings of the eighties, one philosopher, it might’ve been Max Black, arguing that most analyses of ‘problems’, whether within ourselves or in the world, start as philosophy and end as science – to put it a bit crudely. In that respect I think of Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction, which I’m sure seemed incredibly insightful at the time, and I recall being quite impressed with it as a young person. We experience everything through our senses, but how do we know they’re reliable? We can’t check with others, as they have the same sensory equipment as ourselves – equally unreliable – or reliable. The ‘noumenal’ world is supposedly inaccessible to us all, if it exists. What has happened since Kant’s time is a much greater access to the phenomenal world, from the 13 to 14 billion-year old universe, to quarks, neutrinos and such. And nobody’s talking much about noumena, if they ever were. Scientists now would surely say that Kant’s noumenal world is, and always, was, unprovable. Nice try, Manny. And yet it does raise interesting questions about individual perception and reality.
Another interesting point I would make about Darwin/Nietzsche is that, though their subject matter could hardly be more different, at the time they would both be considered philosophers – at a stretch. In 1867, William Thompson, aka Lord Kelvin, and Peter Tait, published Treatise on Natural Philosophy, essentially treating of what was known about physics at the time. The modern term ‘scientist’ was only just coming into general use towards the end of the 19th century. In the 1880s Nietzsche published a book bearing the English title The Gay Science (the German title was Die frohliche Wissenschaft), which is regarded (by Wikipedia) as one of his more positive books (nout to do with logical positivism), promoting science and skepticism, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s no science at all in The Birth of Tragedy. You might say that he was still weaning himself from Greek philology at this time, and expatiating on his personal response to ancient Greek drama.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make with these two extracts was that they have so little in common with each other. Their preoccupations were poles apart. Darwin’s work was rooted in the world of solid academic and upper-middle class connections, and the gathering of data, whereas Nietzsche is all flightiness and abstract conjecture. I must admit I found little of the bite and the dismissiveness in The Birth of Tragedy that haunt my memories of reading Nietzsche, probably because it was his first published work, but I also found nothing that inclines me to read more of his stuff. And yet, there’s The case of Wagner, which I’ve heard is a demolition job of the notorious anti-semite, though there’s a related work, Nietzsche contra Wagner, published shortly afterwards, that really does the job.
So I was planning to do a more close analysis of the above-quoted passages, but it all seems a bit much. Darwin’s material speaks for itself, I think. It took humans a long time to get to the stage of careful and objective analysis of their environment, in terms of time and space, structural complexity, wave-molecular interactions, life from non-life and so on, and we’re still learning, and discovering. Nietzsche’s work, though this may not be the best example, is more poetic and personal, and considering his fate, it’s hard not to sympathise. Nietzsche, I note, seems very quotable (you can find dozens of quotes from him online), as he was very fond of trying to capture something deep and meaningful in a sentence. Darwin is pretty well the exact opposite, yet surely his influence has been greater. However, in spite of The Birth of Tragedy, I’m prepared to give poor Friedrich another go, kind-hearted soul that I am.
The Gay Science perhaps…
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, trans Walter Kaufman 1967.
Charles Darwin, The descent of man [sic], 1871
professor Dave insists…
chimps is me
There’s a science promoter in the USA who calls himself ‘Professor Dave’, and who has, in recent times, been trying to give another science communicator and general ‘vodcaster’, if that’s the term, Sabine Hossenfelder, a very hard time, calling her, rather meaninglessly to my mind, a ‘fraud’. Hossenfelder, whose videos covering a whole variety of topics besides physics I generally enjoy, has, it seems, chosen to ignore him, which I think is the best approach.
Recently this Professor Dave (I suspect he uses this moniker to indicate that he has more expertise and authority than your average bloke, but ‘really’ he’s just like any Tom, Dick or Dave) has tried upping the ante by collecting six physicists to whip Hossenfelder into shape, or perhaps just to whip her. Hopefully she’ll just keep ignoring it all.
Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist who has written a couple of books and co-written another, and has an impressive Wikipedia profile, referenced below. It makes no mention of fraudulent activities, proven or suspected.
I’m not inclined to investigate Professor Dave’s background, but I have no reason to believe he’s not a real professor, though probably not of physics, as he has spent much of his time debunking creationists and flat-earthers, as explained in an interview he did on the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast recently. I’ve also heard him on a vodcast with Gutsick Gibbon (aka Erika, a favourite science communicator of mine), criticising and mocking creationists.
I have no idea why Prof Dave is so obsessed with Hossenfelder, and why he has gathered such a team to ‘expose’ or ‘debunk’ her, and I have no appetite for listening to this six-person attack. I do, of course, wonder at the purpose of it all. Modern theoretical physics/astrophysics is, I know, a highly contested field, and has been for quite some time. I don’t pretend to have any expertise whatsoever in the field, though I’ve read books by Leonard Susskind, Sean Carroll and Lee Smolin – and I’m regularly in the Einsteinium League on brilliant.org, so there you go.
So I’m writing this, though of course nobody will read it, just to get my irritation with this bloke off my chest, and because surely enough is enough with this Hoffenfelder-bashing – and just to give an idea of how low Prof Dave is prepared to go, he describes her as ‘a disgusting fraud peddling propaganda for fascist oligarchs’. Does one laugh or cry?
With this kind of introduction I’ve chosen not to listen to the 3.5 hour video attacking Hossenfelder. I did write a comment to Prof Dave, basically saying WTF in a polite way, and he responded by describing me as a moron – how did he know? And that, of course, I should listen to the video that he curated. Well, as much as I’m interested in physics, and science generally, I’d rather cut my dick off.
All of this stuff makes me think of my favourite topic – bonobos. I do wonder how many of these Hossenfelder-bashing physicists are female, because my impression of Prof Dave is that there’s nothing of the bonobo in him, he’s very much of a chimp, a wannabe alpha male chimp at that. Insulting people comes as second nature to him. As mentioned, he called me a moron. Of course I’m not a moron, but much more importantly, I’ve never called anyone else a moron in my life. Well, maybe as an adolescent, but then people grow up.
Finally, I want to go back to Prof Dave’s bizarre claims about Hossenfelder’s peddling ‘fascist propaganda’, which I read for the first time today. This is more than just repellently ludicrous stuff, it’s quite unhinged and raises questions about the man’s mental health. More importantly, it makes me worry for Hossenfelder’s safety. I believe she resides in Germany, and would certainly have no interest in visiting the US, especially in these times.
Vive les bonobos!
References
what’s that thing called science?
Vera Rubin – check out galaxy rotation rates and dark matter, inter alia
There are people I know who profess no interest in science. Not because they lack intelligence – after all, professing is what professors do, en it? And not because they’re religious – remember Stephen Jay Gould’s silly NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria)? It snared him an audience with the Catholic Papa, and perhaps that’s what it was all about, but the fact remains that The Church is a totalizingly magisterial organisation and always will be.
So, no, it seems to be more about C P Snow’s old notion of ‘the two cultures’. Some quite smart people are happy to be scientifically illiterate and find the whole thing a bore, or worse. A fellow teacher of mine – I used to teach EAP (English for Academic Purposes) to NESB students vying for a place at an English language university – once quoted one of Newton’s laws at me – F=ma perhaps – to prove that it was virtually all kindergarten stuff. I mean, how E=mc² is that? She did know something about Thomas Kuhn’s highly questionable concept of paradigm shifts, which she used as proof that it was all just high-falutin fashion.
So, in defence of science, let me break it down. Science is curiosity. Science is wonder. Like wondering why the sky is blue – when the sun is visible. Why the moon changes shape in the sky. Why some days are hot and some are cold. Why we grow old. Why some people are good to look at, others not so much. Why we get sick. Why we get hungry. Why we get tired. Just about everything is a cause for wonder, and science tries to satisfy that curiosity, though it seems so often to open up more questions. Do all creatures see the same sky that we do? Can all creatures even see? What exactly is seeing? How do eyes work? How long is it possible to live? Why don’t cats and dogs live as long as we do, barring accidents? And so on and so on ad infinitum. Science just never ends. I wonder why?
Here’s my little ‘come to science’ story, probably a just-so story. I was an avid reader from childhood – mostly fiction, but also encyclopaedia entries (mostly history, and biographies from Albert Einstein to Adolf Hitler) and a bit of that soft and very malleable science called psychology, because my mother worked in a mental hospital. And so it went, through to my early to mid twenties when I happened upon a novel by Thomas Mann, called The Magic Mountain. Its central character, Hans Castorp, was about my age, and had been sent to an alpine sanitarium, in an attempt to cure his consumption. He encounters some lively characters, and engages in deep discussion and contemplation, on politics, the nature of time, the origin of life, and even non-life – why is there something rather than nothing? And it was these last, more or less scientific questions that seemed to flick a switch in me. It inspired me to buy my first fully scientific book – The selfish gene, by Richard Dawkins – and a copy of Scientific American every month for the next two or three years, before switching to New Scientist, and then to the various science podcasts and videos available these days.
I may be exaggerating this ‘come to science’ moment – we like to turn our memories into neat narratives – but I do feel that my greater interest in scientific problems and solutions since that time has helped me to ‘rise above myself and grasp the world’, a term attributed to Archimedes which has resonated with me since I first encountered it, not so long ago. And there’s so much about our world that we haven’t yet grasped, and are just discovering. We identified our first exoplanet in the 1990s, and now we know of around 6,000 (in saying ‘we’ I’m reminded again of my teaching colleague, who responded contemptuously to my use of the pronoun – ‘ “We”? – what part did you play in all that?’), and we learned with some certainty in 2010 that Neanderthals and Humans got it on together from time to time. And the Vera Rubin observatory/telescope, which has just come online, will doubtless bring a harvest of new discoveries and conundrums.
And of course the world of science is also a world of scientists, in a multitude of fields, each one more fascinating than the next. These fields are, I must admit, a welcome escape from the horrors, tragedies and stupidities of much that we call global politics, and the workers in those fields seem so much happier in their bubbly spheres of interest. I would have liked to have been one. Better even than being a bonobo, maybe… but I love the way they swing….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria
The FIRST images from the RUBIN observatory! (Dr Becky video)
on hypnotism and hype
why the watches?
I promised myself I would do a piece on hypnotism, which has long struck me as completely bogus, though I was left scratching my head and wondering as a kid when I saw people acting in a humiliating fashion at the behest of a stage hypnotist. Insofar as I’ve thought deeply about it since, I can’t imagine any mechanism by which this ‘spell-casting’ could really work. The Mayo Clinic appears to give it the green light, with certain caveats, but is silent on the proposed mechanism, the science of the thing, which seems to me completely derelict. And Time magazine has a 2022 article entitled How Hypnosis Works, According to Science, which tells me nothing about the science. That science would, of course, be neurology. And since our brains share many similarities with other primates, I wonder why nobody has tried to hypnotise a chimp or a bonobo? It wouldn’t make sense to argue that only humans would be susceptible to such treatment, surely? I did learn, something from the Time article, though. Hypnotists no longer use the term ‘trance’, replacing it with ‘hypnotic state’. Sounds more sciencey. By the same process alternative medicine is now called ‘integrative’, ‘holistic’ or ‘complementary’ – and all such practitioners spruik the positives of hypnotherapy.
So where can I find real scientific evidence about hypnosis? When I try the internet I’m almost invariably taken to psychology sites which cite the benefits and dangers, but don’t even try to describe the mechanism.
But finally I’ve found an article, ‘The Neuroscience of Hypnosis’, which promises to reveal all, and it’s only a few months old, and it’s in an Australian magazine, Psychology Today. So, before launching into it, I’m guessing that much of that neuroscience will pertain to brain regions more or less exclusive to our species, and that it will be at best speculative.
So, we’re told that, despite a lot of mystical pabulum, ‘the science behind the practice is profound’. The article, the principal author of which is Dr Ran Anbar, a professor of Paediatrics and Medicine in the US, and a hypnotherapist, claims that hypnosis is efficacious ‘in treating conditions such as pain, anxiety, depression, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, eating disorders, phobias, OCD, shortness of breath and substance use disorder’, though with the large caveat that ‘research is necessary to validate whether observations made with individual people can be reliably generalised’. I suspect that a ‘reliable generalisation’ will never be achieved, one obvious reason being that some people are just not going to be susceptible to this procedure. It’s a safe bet, methinks, that never, here, will always mean never, as is the case with other such treatments. Some people are highly suggestible, some are not (though of course, here as with other treatments, there are endless ‘I used to be a thorough skeptic’ stories). I can also accept that telling people, under hypnosis (but I’ve yet to comprehend what that actually means) that they are feeling pain (for example), can make them truly feel pain, measurable in neural activity. Such measurable activity, I’m guessing, would also be evident when a person dreams of being in pain. And a quick look at the research on this opens up a whole can of worms, such as real pain felt in an amputated limb, and the difficulty of separating the neurological signs of anticipated versus actual pain.
So the article goes on to name the five different types of brain waves (from fastest to slowest they are gamma, beta, alpha, theta and delta), and cites research finding that ‘hypnosis… is associated with increased theta waves and thus may be a state different from awake and sleep states’. A good term for this state, I reckon, would be ‘the twilight zone’. Apparently theta waves are slower and of greater amplitude (suggesting greater strength or energy) than other brain waves. But let me admit right now that I’m not sure what brain waves (neural oscillations) actually are. They’re generally detected and measured by electroencephalographs (EEG), and it’s these machines that display the electrical activity as waves, so…
All of these different wave effects are interpreted as measuring different types of neural activity, though whether we’re interpreting correctly is obviously a question. In any case the Healthline article linked below gives a summary of each kind of wave, or electrical activity, and its effects:
Fast gamma waves are produced when we’re intensely focussed, concentrating very hard on something. I say ‘we’ but I doubt that I’ve ever experienced them myself.
Beta waves are more about ordinary focus, paying attention, though they range in speed from pretty intense focus to a more general mulling over the disaster that your life has become.
Alpha waves are your more general existential waves, like when you’re sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come.
Delta waves, at the bottom of the spectrum, are generally the deep sleep waves.
So, again, theta waves, the ‘dream’ waves, the border-between-sleep-and-awake waves are most associated with hypnosis, which is hardly surprising, but how does your hypnotist get people to relax, perchance to dream? And use that state to reduce their anxieties, or bark like a dog?
So I’ve just found and watched a video, linked below, by someone who seems to be on the same wavelength, so to speak, as myself with respect to this – phenomenon, let’s call it. The real issue being, WTF is it, actually? At the end, he describes himself as a convert, but with many many caveats, and I would definitely recommend watching it. The major caveat would be that, along with other treatments (it just doesn’t seem to work as a stand-alone treatment) it’s essentially, and unsurprisingly, effective, and only effective, for conditions that have a psychological component, many of which I’ve mentioned above, but I could add PTSD, bipolar disorder and no doubt many others unknown to myself. And psychology, without a solid neurological basis, is never, to me, entirely convincing as a ‘science’.
So I wouldn’t call myself a convert, actually, and it seems that much of the research is divided between those trying to prove that it’s real and those trying to prove it’s bogus, and I suspect it’s genuinely hard to find people sitting on the fence, so it’ll likely be a controversial topic for a while to come. I’m not for banning it or anything, I just wish there was better evidence about how it works, beyond, and well beyond, the undoubted, but individually highly variable, power of suggestibility.
Also, for ‘mesmerism’ and animal magnetism read my review of Aldous Huxley’s Island.
References
free will, revisited
yet to be read
I’ve written about free will before, here , and especially here, (the commentary at the end is particularly interesting, IMHO), and probably in other posts as well, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, so maybe it’s time for a refresher (though, if I say so myself, those earlier posts stand up pretty well).
I first became acquainted with and absorbed in the ‘philosophical’ argy-bargy about free will way back in the seventies, when I read Free Will and Determinism, a collection of essays edited by Bernard Berofsky. It was published in 1966, and is, amazingly (since I’ve moved house about 50 times), still in my possession. Glancing through it again now brings back memories, but more importantly, the arguments, which mostly favour compatibilism, aka soft determinism, seem both naive and somewhat arrogant, if that’s the word. That is, they’re mostly variants of ‘of course we have free will – we display it in every decision we make – but many of us find it hard to present a rational explanation of it, so I’ll do it for you’. Only one philosopher, from memory, John Hospers, argued for ‘hard determinism’, that’s to say, for the absence of free will. And though I found his argument a bit clunky (it was largely based on Freudian and neo-Freudian psychology), it was the only one that really stuck in my mind, though I didn’t quite want to be convinced.
In more recent years, after reading Sam Harris’ short book on free will, and Robert Sapolsky’s treatment of the issue towards the end of his monumental book Behave, I’ve felt as if the scales have dropped from my eyes. Another factor I should mention was a talk I gave to the SA Humanist Society a few years ago on the subject, which didn’t quite go all the way on ‘no free will’, and a pointed question from one of the attendees left me floundering for a response. It was likely that experience that made me feel the need to revisit the issue more comprehensively. So, for memory lane’s sake, I’m going to reread these old essays and then comment on them. And hopefully I’ll be able to slip in a bonobo mention along the way!
I should mention, as Sapolsky does in Behave, that neurology has come a long way since the 1970s. More papers have been published in the field in the first two decades of the 21st century than in all the centuries before, which is hardly surprising. With this, and our greater understanding of genetics, epigenetics. developmental psychology and other fields relevant to the topic, it will behoove me to be fair to the thinking of intellectuals writing a number of generations before the present. However, I’m not interested in giving a historical account – how Cicero, or Augustine of Hippo, or Spinoza, or John Stuart Mill conceptualised the problem was very much a product of the zeitgeist of their era, combined with their unique gifts. The era I live in, in the particularly WEIRD country (Australia) that is my home, religion is fast receding, and the sciences of neurophysiology, endocrinology, genetics and primatology, among others, have revolutionised our understanding of what it is to be human, or sentient, or simply alive. And they help us to understand our uniquely determined situation and actions.
So let me begin with Berofsky’s introduction, in which he raises a ‘problem’ with determinism:
The fact that classical mechanics did not turn out to be the universal science of human nature suggests that contemporary proponents of determinism do not ally themselves to this particular theory. Many ally themselves to no particular theory at all, but try to define determinism in such a way that its rejection is not necessitated by the rejection of any particular scientific theory.
This takes us back to the effect upon the general public of such notions as ‘quantum indeterminacy’ and its manipulation by pedlars of ‘quantum woo’ (for example, The tao of physics, by Fritjof Capra, which I haven’t read). But clearly, however we might understand quantum superposition and action-at-a-distance, they have no effect at the macro level of brain development, genetic inheritance and the like, and they certainly can’t be used to defend the concept of free will. The ‘no free will’ argument does rely on determining factors, and openly so. Our genetic inheritance, the time and place of our birth, our family circumstances, our ethnicity, our diet, these are among many influences that we don’t see as ‘theoretical’, but factual.
Berofsky goes on to worry over types of causes and causal laws in what seems to me a rather fruitless ‘philosophical’ way.
A determinist, then, is a person who believes that all events (facts, states) are lawful in the sense, roughly, that for event e, there is a distinct event d plus a (causal) law which asserts, ‘Whenever d, then e’.
The extremely general or universal character of this thesis has raised many questions, some of which concern the status of the thesis. Some have held the position as a necessary or a priori truth about the world. Others have insisted that determinism is itself a scientific theory, but much more general than most other scientific theories.
As you can imagine, none of this is of any concern to a working neurologist, biochemist or primatologist. In trying to determine how oxytocin levels affect behaviour in certain subjects, for example, they won’t be reflecting on a priori truths or causal laws, they’ll be looking at all the other possible confounding and co-determining factors that might contribute to the behaviour. It seems to me that traditional philosophical language is getting in the way here of attributing effects to causes, however partially.
Berofsky points out, in the name of some philosophers, that determinism isn’t a scientific theory in that it’s essentially unfalsifiable (my language, not his), as it can always be claimed that some so far undiscovered causal factor has contributed to the behaviour or effect. But scientists don’t consider determinism to be a theory, but rather the sine qua non of scientific practice, indeed of everyday life. We live in a world of becauses, we eat x because we’re hungry/it’s tasty/it’s healthy/it reminds us of childhood, etc. We don’t think like this in terms of laws. We needn’t think of it at all, just as a dog wags her tail when she sees her owner after a long absence (or not, if he’s also her abuser).
So much for determinism, over which too much verbiage has been employed. The real issue that exercises most people is free will, freedom, or agency. Here’s how Berofsky introduces the subject:
It has been maintained that if an action is determined, then the person was not performing the action of his own free will. For surely, it is argued, if the antecedent conditions are such that they uniquely determine by law the ensuing result (the action), then it was not within the power of the person to do otherwise. And a person does A freely if, and only if, he could have done something other than A. Let us call this position ‘incompatibilism’. Incompatibilists usually conclude as well that if a person’s action is determined, then he is not morally responsible for having done it, since acting freely is a necessary condition of being morally responsible for the action.
This is a long-winded, i.e. typically philosophical way of putting the ‘no free will’ argument, which is usually countered by an ‘of course I could’ve done otherwise’ response, and the accusation that determinists are not just kill-joys but kill-freedoms. Presumably this would be a ‘compatibilist’ response, and many find it the only common-sense response, if we want to view ourselves as anything other than automatons.
But there are obvious problems with compatibilism, and here’s my ‘death by a thousand cuts’ response. There are a great many Big Things in our life about which we, indisputably, have no choice. No person, living or dead, got to choose the time and place of their birth, or conception. No person got to choose their parents, or their genetic inheritance. They had no choice as to how their brain, limbs, organs and so forth grew and developed whilst in the womb. So, no freedom of choice up to that time. When, then, did this freedom begin? The compatibilist would presumably argue – ‘when we make our own observations and inferences, which starts to happen more frequently as we grow’. And there would be much hand-waving about when this gradually starts to happen, until we’re our own autonomous selves, who could’ve done otherwise. And here we get to the response of Sam Harris and others, that this ‘self’ is a myth. I would put it differently, that the self is a useful marker for each person and their individuality. These selves are all determined, but they’re each uniquely determined, and at least this uniqueness is something we can salvage from the firm grip of determinism. What is mythical about the self is its self-determined nature.
As Berofsky puts it, guilt and remorse are strong indications, for compatibilists, that free will exists. I would add regret to those feelings, and I would admit, as does Sapolsky, that these strong, sometimes overwhelming feelings, based largely on the idea that we should have done otherwise, are our strongest arguments for rejecting the no free will position.
This issue of guilt needs to be looked at more closely, since our whole legal system is based on questions of guilt or innocence. I’ll reserve that for next time.
References
Bernard Berofsky, ed. Free will and determinism, 1966
Robert Sapolsky, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst, 2017
Sam Harris, Free will, 2012
nuclear fusion 3 – developing technologies
something to do with laser confinement fusion energy
Ways of producing nuclear fusion:
- High-temperature superconductors (HTS) for magnetic confinement fusion.
HTS is all about producing more powerful magnets, in order to effectively confine super-hot (100 million degrees Celsius) plasma. Traditional electrically conducting materials such as copper will lose conductivity and become resistant at high temperatures, causing them to over-heat. To eliminate electrical resistance from potential superconducting materials, they need to be cooled to -269 Celsius. I’m trying to get my head around this, so I’m following the demo in the Royal Institution lecture linked below. A small but powerful magnet was dropped into a hollow copper tube, held vertically. It finally emerged from the bottom, but not at the pace of gravity. It’s all about the peculiar relationship between magnetism and electricity. The magnet creates a moving magnetic field inside the copper tube, inducing an electrical current, which, somehow, creates its own magnetic field in opposition to the field from the magnet, pushing back… (somehow I feel I should’ve done a Canto and Jacinta on this one!)
So, as the demonstrator tells us, we can vary the electrical resistance of metals, for example by increasing or reducing their temperature, as described above. Warming the copper tube increases its resistance, cooling it will decrease its resistance. A further demonstration with the same magnet and a very much cooled copper tube (-196 Celsius) showed that the magnet took longer to move down the tube. I don’t really understand how that proves decreased resistance, but then I’m no physicist… But the demonstrator explains:
So with the reduction in the resistance of the copper, those currents are able to form and flow more easily, and therefore they have a stronger magnetic field, opposing the falling magnetic field of the magnet [my emphasis].
So that clarifies things a bit. And the aim is to remove all electrical resistance, if possible. This can’t be done with most metals, including copper. And so – superconductors. There are apparently, high-temperature superconductors and low-temperature superconductors, the latter being the ones that need to be cooled down to -269 Celsius. So the demonstrator proceeds to demonstrate the effect of a dose of liquid nitrogen on a potential HTS, described rather vaguely as a ‘ small chip of super[lux??]’. I’ve tried looking up what he meant here (the captions didn’t help), but have come up empty. I’m guessing that he’s simply doused the same ‘small but powerful’ magnet. Anyway, the doused chip sits in a polystyrene cup which is sitting on a circular magnetic track. The supercooling is designed to turn it into a HTS, presumably. The aim is to repel the field from the magnetic track ‘by setting up its own internal currents’ in balanced opposition. The chip has to be doused a couple of times with the liquid nitrogen to get it to the right temperature, but the demonstrator soon has the cup with its ‘chip’ riding on the magnetic rail like a wee whited coaltruck, back and forth with a fingerpush.
Presumably the chip will have to be kept at this temperature to maintain this internal current. It will regain its electrical resistance upon warming up to a certain point. The second demonstrator shows us a HTS tape, which, when cooled down to 20 degrees Kelvin (that’s less than -250 celsius), will carry five times its normal electric current, with no resistance. Wound into a tight coil, the material, which is super-thin, will have a much higher energy or current density, which can be used to generate a strong magnetic field. The more material in the coil, the greater the current density, until the magnetic field is strong enough to safely confine the plasma from nuclear fusion. A scaled-up version of this type of coil is used at ITER. They require far less energy to cool them down too. Tokamak Energy is using these coils, combined with a spherical ‘cored apple’ tokamak shape, which apparently makes more effective use of the magnetic field. Altogether, a more efficient design – they hope. Developed in he UK, it’s being used also by the STEP plant (ST for Spherical Tokamak).
2. Laser fusion with diode pumps
Laser fusion is the next technology Windridge discusses. So how do lasers work? From memory, LASER stands for Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation, but that don’t tell me much. Anyway it’s all about diode pumps. Wikipedia gives this elaboration:
A diode-pumped solid-state laser (DPSSL) is a solid-state laser made by pumping a solid gain medium, for example, a ruby or a neodymium-doped YAG crystal, with a laser diode
I think I’ll stick with Windridge’s description. We see some images, first of a pink rod of ruby crystal, the ‘lasing material’, wrapped round by a coil of incandescent lighting, which sends a flash of light into the crystal, exciting its atoms and somehow generating photons, all of the same wavelength. The ruby and the coil are enclosed in a capsule, and the generated photons bounce back and forth between mirrors at either end of the capsule, triggering the release of more photons in a build-up of energy. Finally, a beam of energy emerges ‘through a partially reflective mirror at one end’. How this creates fusion energy, I’ve no idea. I vaguely get the sense of pumping but…
Here’s a useful definition of a diode from a website called Fluke:
A diode is a semiconductor device that essentially acts as a one-way switch for current. It allows current to flow easily in one direction, but severely restricts current from flowing in the opposite direction.
It seems that the key here is to produce photons of a particular wavelength. Windridge compares a diode pump with a flash lamp or incandescent bulb. While the flash lamp produces this wide range of energies or wavelengths, but a more targeted, precisely defined energy level is all that is required to excite the crystal photons, meaning it can be done with less waste of heat-energy. Diode lasers are many times more efficient than the NIF laser, for example – nearly 40 times more efficient (the NIF laser uses flash lamps). Remember, NIF (the National Ignition Facility) made headlines some months ago by getting more energy out of their fusion experiment than they put into targeting and ‘igniting’ the fusion pellet, but critics noted that the energy needed to drive the laser was orders of magnitude greater than the energy produced. The diode pump may, if found to be workable, reduce those orders of magnitude considerably.
So, although I don’t quite understand all the details, to put it mildly. I do get a strong sense that progress is being made. We seem to have gone beyond proof of concept, and are entering the engineering phase, and it looks like the next couple of decades will some exciting results. Tritium breeding and handling (it’s extremely rare and radioactive) is a big issue, and new materials science will be required to deal with high-energy neutrons and the damage they cause. Producing and testing such materials will be a high priority, but the pay-off can hardly be calculated. High-temperature superconductors are a relatively new development, and perhaps more breakthroughs can be made there. With more money being poured in, there will be more jobs for smart people – can-do problem solvers.
So, after watching this video a couple of times and trying with limited success to understand the science, but understanding enough to be aware of the viability of something that once would have seemed the most impossible of dreams – replicating the vast power of the stars – I read many of the comments, and was dismayed by the high level of negativity. An almost ferocious naysaying. I could respond with Kafka’s ‘genius doesn’t complain, but runs straight against the wind’, or ‘We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy but because it is hard’, by that Kennedy bloke. It was just a little less than a century ago that Hubble provided convincing evidence that other galaxies existed. Two centuries ago we knew nothing of atoms or genes or space-time. The progress we’ve made science since then is – well, astronomical. Of course, new breakthroughs tend to create new problems, and I can imagine science-fiction scenarios in which our play with fusion ends up in our going up in a sunburst of glory – ‘Out, brief candle!’
We shall see. I hope I can live so long…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode-pumped_solid-state_laser
https://www.fluke.com/en-au/learn/blog/electrical/what-is-a-diode
more oxytocin fantasies: an interminable conversation 3
not sure if this measures a significant difference
Canto: So, as it turns out, the bonobo-oxytocin connection is all the rage on the internet. I mean, there are at least two articles on it. Here’s a quote from a PubMed article called ‘Divergent effects of oxytocin on eye contact in bonobos and chimpanzees’:
Previous studies have shown that bonobos and chimpanzees, humans’ two closest relatives, demonstrate considerable behavioral differences, including that bonobos look more at others’ eyes than chimpanzees. Oxytocin is known to increase attention to another’s eyes in many mammalian species (e.g. dogs, monkeys, and humans), yet this effect has not been tested in any nonhuman great ape species.
Jacinta: Hmm, so how do they know this? Presumably they’ve dosed subjects with oxytocin and measured their eye contact against controls?
Canto: No no, they know that bonobos have more eye contact than chimps, simply from observation. So they might infer from this that bonobos produce more oxytocin naturally than chimps…
Jacinta: So do women produce more oxytocin than men I wonder? I presume women make more eye contact than men.
Canto: Well in this study they dosed both bonobos and chimps with oxytocin, and the effect – more eye contact – was greater in bonobos than chimps. In fact, chimps even tended to avoid eye contact when shown images of conspecifics.
Jacinta: So, it’s a matter of interplay between this hormone/neurotransmitter and social conditioning?
Canto: Maybe, but you’d think that an increase in this supposedly touchy-feely hormone would act against social conditioning. Isn’t this the point of that drug, ecstacy? That it reduces social inhibitions… But presumably nothing is ever so simple. Being poor, I only have access to the abstract of this paper, but another abstract, which looks at the effects of oxytocin and vasopressin on chimps, describes them as neuropeptides, just to confuse matters. The abstract also refers to about a dozen brain regions, as well as specific oxytocin and vasopressin receptors, so it gets pretty complicated.
Jacinta: Okay, vasopressin… from Wikipedia:
Human vasopressin, also called antidiuretic hormone (ADH), arginine vasopressin (AVP), or argipressin, is a hormone synthesised from the AVP gene as a peptide prohormone in neurons in the hypothalamus, and is converted to AVP. It then travels down the axon terminating in the posterior pituitary, and is released from vesicles into the circulation in response to extracellular hypertonicity (hyperosmolality). AVP has two major functions… etc etc
Canto: Okay thanks for that, let’s stick with oxytocin for now. It’s produced in the hypothalamus, a smallish region buried deep within the brain, just below the larger thalamus and above the even smaller amygdala. It releases and manages a variety of hormones. Brain signals are sent to the hypothalamus, exciting it to release oxytocin and other hormones, which are secreted into the bloodstream by the posterior pituitary gland….
Jacinta: Can you tell me what oxytocin is actually made of? Its structure? The term ‘hormone’ is just a black box to me.
Canto: Okay, here’s a diagram of oxytocin to try and make sense of:
It’s a polypeptide. A peptide is basically an amino acid chain. FYI:
An amino acid is an organic molecule that is made up of a basic amino group (−NH2), an acidic carboxyl group (−COOH), and an organic R group (or side chain) that is unique to each amino acid. The term amino acid is short for α-amino [alpha-amino] carboxylic acid.
Jacinta: So these are coded for, ultimately, by genes?
Canto: Yes, we’re heading backwards here, but each amino acid is encoded by a sequence of three of the four base pairs in our DNA. Anyway oxytocin, among other things is sometimes given to women while in labour. It helps with the contractions apparently. I’ve also heard that the recreational drug ‘ecstasy’, or MDMA, works essentially by releasing oxytocin.
Jacinta: It just so happens I’ve found an interesting 2014 paper published in Neuropsychopharmacology, my new favourite journal, called ‘Effects of MDMA and Intranasal Oxytocin on Social and Emotional Processing’, and here’s a quote from the abstract:
Oxytocin produced small but significant increases in feelings of sociability and enhanced recognition of sad facial expressions. Additionally, responses to oxytocin were related to responses to MDMA with subjects on two subjective measures of sociability. Thus, MDMA increased euphoria and feelings of sociability, perhaps by reducing sensitivity to subtle signs of negative emotions in others. The present findings provide only limited support for the idea that oxytocin produces the prosocial effects of MDMA.
Canto: That is interesting. If that finding can be replicated, I’d say forget the MDMA, dose people with oxytocin. A small but significant increase in feelings of sociability might just be enough to transform our human world.
Jacinta: Hmmm. Small but significant – that sounds a mite contradictory.
Canto: Not the same as significantly small. That slightly significant dose, administered to Messrs Pudding and Pingpong and their enablers, might’ve saved the lives of many Ukrainians, Uyghurs and advocates of multiculturalism, democracy, feminism and other wild and woolly notions. And it doesn’t really transform characters, it just softens their edges.
Jacinta: Yes it’s a nice fantasy – more productive than butchering the butchers, a fantasy I occasionally indulge in. But not workable really.
Canto: Why not? We dosed petrol with lead, and look at how that worked out. It certainly had an effect. In Japan they still use radium baths (at very low levels) for health purposes, even claiming it as a cure for cancer. I’m not sure if oxytocin baths can ever be a thing, but if so I’m sure there will be early adopters.
Jacinta: Well, it’s good to think positively. Oxytocin is often thought of as a bonding hormone between mother and child. The key would be to ensure it facilitates a more general bonding: to cause Mr Pingpong, for example, to see Uyghur, Tibetan, Yi, Limi, and all the other non-Han ethnicities in China as his sisters – or lovers even, revolting as that would be to those peoples.
Canto: Better than being their oppressors and exterminators.
Jacinta: Slightly. But I wonder, quite seriously, if, assuming such a dose of bonding could be effectuated, we could still function as the sometimes rational, problem-solving, highly creative species we indubitably are. Would there be a price to pay for all that oxytocin? And how would this affect all those other hormones and neurotransmitters and all their myriad effects? Humans are notorious for causing extra problems with their solutions, e.g lead, DDT, etc etc.
Canto: Well, there’s no need to worry about the fallout from this solution as yet. I just googled Putin and oxytocin together and came up empty. Obviously we’re way ahead of the curve.
Jacinta: Haha, it’s not a curve these days, it’s a pivot. Get with the program!
References
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33388536/
https://www.yourhormones.info/hormones/oxytocin/
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/molecule-of-the-week/archive/o/oxytocin.html
https://www.britannica.com/science/amino-acid
https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-JRTB-11551
the best kind of sleep
Canto: So Dr Seheult tells us that the most important sleep is in the earliest period. This is called slow-wave sleep or N3 sleep. It doesn’t last long, maybe half an hour…
Jacinta: Why is it called N3 sleep?
Canto: Well, here’s the detail – you have three stages of this early sleep. N1 is when you fall asleep. It lasts no more than ten minutes generally until you’re really there, in sleep. Then there’s N2 of course, which lasts from 30-60 minutes, your muscles relax and you begin to enter this slow-wave, also called delta-wave or delta brain activity sleep. That’s the deepest sleep of the night, at its deepest in the N3 period.
Jacinta: Well that explains the 1-2-3, sort of, but what about the N?
Canto: I haven’t been able to find that out specifically, but these are all phases of NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep, which are followed by the REM phase. So I think the N is just short for NREM. Anyway there are two types of sleep for maintaining good health – slow wave sleep and REM sleep towards the end of the night…
Jacinta: But don’t those two make up the whole of the sleep cycle?
Canto: Let me tell the story. Slow wave sleep is when you secrete valuable growth hormone, vital for children, in the time before midnight, according to the good doctor.
Jacinta: But I virtually never sleep before midnight.
Canto: Well you’re not alone there. In cities now, which are growing ever larger, we’re going to bed later and getting up earlier, and so sleeping less…
Jacinta: But generally living longer. So what’s the problem? I’ve heard that Hong Kong, which is about as urban as it gets, has the longest life expectancy on Earth – but that was probably measured before the China crackdown haha.
Canto: Well it’s no joke that China’s thugocracy will jeopardise everything in HK’s future, but good public healthcare and a very low infant mortality rate helps. People today can still live well with diabetes, obesity and slow-developing cancers, but they’d be even better with good sleep habits, if the rat-race allows them. But cities present us with a kind of eternal daylight, at great cost, not only in electric lighting, but in lack of sleep. Not to mention brightly lit screens that we take to bed with us…
Jacinta: Okay so what are the other benefits of slow wave and REM sleep, however delayed?
Canto: Dr Seheult describes a study showing that general sleep deprivation actually reduces the levels of antibodies produced after influenza vaccination. That’s to say, vaccination is less effective for the sleep-deprived. Another study used rhinovirus, a common cold virus. They paid students to be infected and found that those with good sleep efficiency, that’s to say, a high ratio of in-bed time to sleep time – their risk of being infected was reduced five to seven-fold, an extraordinary result. Actually this ‘extraordinary result’ finding comes up again and again in Matthew Walker’s book.
Jacinta: Yes, but it’s surely good to be awake sometimes too. But again, what is it about slow-wave and REM sleep that provides such benefits. What are the mechanisms?
Canto: Well, we’re talking about N3 sleep, the deepest sleep. This sleep phase is particularly important for memory consolidation, the stabilisation of a memory trace once it’s been acquired – meaning presumably the event itself, or its impact. It’s also called sleep-dependent memory processing. Now, how this precisely works is still being researched, but it appears to have much to do with interactions between neurons or neuronal complexes in the neocortex and the hippocampus. So here I should introduce sleep spindles, which are essential to all mammalian species.
Jacinta: They’re brainwaves, aren’t they?
Canto: Neural oscillations, indeed. They’re generated in the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), in richest quantities during N2 and N3 sleep. Wikipedia tells me this:
The density of spindles has been shown to increase after extensive learning of declarative memory tasks and the degree of increase in stage 2 spindle activity correlates with memory performance.
This is confirmed in experiments described in Why we sleep, showing that people who slept for a night between being asked to memorise certain data, like putting a name to a face, did a significantly better job than those who tried to remember the data after eight hours without sleep (from morning to evening). During the sleep period, subjects’ brain waves were recorded, and this is Dr Walker’s account:
The memory refreshment was related to lighter, stage 2 NREM sleep, and specifically the short, powerful bursts of electrical activity called sleep spindles… The more sleep spindles an individual obtained during the nap, the greater the restoration of their learning when they woke up. Importantly, sleep spindles did not predict someone’s innate learning aptitude. That would be a less interesting result, as it would imply that inherent learning ability and spindles simply go hand in hand. Instead, it was specifically the change in learning from before relative to after sleep, which is to say the replenishment of learning ability, that spindles predicted.
Jacinta: So they were correlating the number of spindles with their memorising performance, and memory here is being equated with learning. Is that right? I mean, is learning really just memorising?
Canto: Well, no, but it helps. I’m trying to memorise Newton’s inverse square law for gravity, but I know that even if I can reel it off like a favourite poem that doesn’t mean I fully understand it. Let me see G = m1.m2 over r². I’m not sure if that’s right.
Jacinta: Yeah, basically you have to know that the gravitational attraction between two bodies is equal to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between their ‘centres of mass’. I think. Though why that happens to be the case I have no idea. Does anyone?
Canto: Because… the universe? I’m beginning to feel sleepy…
References
M. Walker, Why we sleep, 2017
https://www.uofmhealth.org/health-library/hw48331
How to get the best sleep for your immune system | Roger Seheult (video)
https://www.oal.cuhk.edu.hk/cuhkenews_202101_life_expectancy/
the evolution of reason: intellectualist v interactivist
In The Enigma of Reason, cognitive psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber ask the question – What is reason for? I won’t go deeply into their own reasoning, I’m more interested in the implications of their conclusions, if correct – which I strongly suspect they are.
They looked at two claims about reason’s development, the intellectualist claim, which I might associate with Aristotelian and symbolic logic, premises and conclusions, and logical fallacies as pointed out by various sceptical podcasts and websites (and this can also be described as an individualist model of reasoning), and the interactionist model, in which reason is most effectively developed collectively.
In effect, the interactionist view is claiming that reason evolved in an interactionist environment. This suggests that it is language-dependent, or that it obviously couldn’t have its full flowering without language. Mercier and Sperber consider the use of reason in two forms – justificatory and argumentative. Justificatory reasoning tends to be lazy and easily satisfied, whereas it is in the realm of argument that reason comes into its own. We can see the flaws in the arguments of others much more readily than we can our own. This accords with the biblical saying about seeing motes in the eyes of others while being blind to the bricks in our own – or something like that. It also accords with our well-attested over-estimation of ourselves, in terms of our looks, our generosity, our physical abilities and so on.
I’m interested in this interactionist view because it also accords with my take on collaboration, participatory democracy and the bonobo way. Bonobos of course don’t have anything like human reason, not having language, but they do work together more collectively than chimps (and chimp-like humans) and show a feeling towards each other which some researchers have described as ‘spiritual’. For me, a better word would be ‘sympathetic’. Seeing the value in others’ arguments helps to take us outside of ourselves and to recognise the contribution others make to our thinking. We may even come to realise how much we rely on others for our personal development, and that we are, for better or worse, part of a larger, enriching whole. A kind of mildly antagonistic but ultimately fulfilling experience.
An important ingredient to the success of interactionist reasoning is the recognition of and respect for difference. That lazy kind of reasoning we engage in when left to ourselves can be exacerbated when our only interactions are with like-minded people. Nowadays we recognise this as a problem with social media and their algorithms. The feelings of solidarity we get with that kind of interaction can of course be very comforting but also stultifying, and they don’t generally lead to clear reasoning. For many, though, the comfort derived from solidarity outweighs the sense of clarity you might, hopefully, get from being made to recognise the flaws in your own arguments. This ghettoisation of reason, like other forms of ghettoisation, is by and large counter-productive. The problem is to prevent this from happening while reducing the ‘culture shock’ that this might entail. Within our own WEIRD (from Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic countries) culture, where the differences aren’t so vast, being challenged by contrary arguments can be stimulating, even exhilarating. Here’s what the rich pre-industrialist Montaigne had to say on the matter:
The study of books is a languishing and feeble motion that heats not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises at once. If I converse with a strong mind and a rough disputant, he presses upon my flanks, and pricks me right and left; his imaginations stir up mine; jealousy, glory, and contention, stimulate and raise me up to something above myself; and acquiescence is a quality altogether tedious in discourse.
Nevertheless, I’ve met people who claim to hate arguments. They’re presumably not talking about philosophical discourse, but they tend to lump all forms of discord together in a negative basket. Mercier and Sperber, however, present a range of research to show that challenges to individual thinking have an improving effect – which is a good advert for diversity. But even the most basic interactions, for example between mother and child, show this effect. A young child might be asked why she took a toy from her sibling, and answer ‘because I want it’. Her mother will point out that the sibling wants it too, and/or had it first. The impact of this counter-argument may not be immediate, but given normal childhood development, it will be the beginning of the child’s road to developing more effective arguments through social interaction. In such an interactive world, reasons need to much more than purely selfish.
The authors give examples of how the the most celebrated intellects can go astray when insufficiently challenged, from dual Nobel prize-winner Linus Pauling’s overblown claims about vitamin C to Alphonse Bertillon’s ultra-convoluted testimony in favour of Albert Dreyfus’ guilt, to Thomas Jefferson’s absurdly tendentious arguments against emancipation. They also show how the standard fallacious arguments presented in logic classes can be valid under particular circumstances. Perhaps most convincingly they present evidence of how group work in which contentious topics were discussed resulted in improvements in individual essays. Those whose essay-writing was preceded by such group discussion produced more complex arguments for both sides than did those who simply read philosophical texts on the issues.
It might seem strange that a self-professed loner like me should be so drawn to an interactionist view of reason’s development. The fact is, I’ve always seen my ‘lonerdom’ as a failing, which I’ve never tried very hard to rectify. Instead, I’ve compensated by interacting with books and, more recently, podcasts, websites and videos. They’re my ‘people’, correcting and modifying my own views thorough presenting new information and perspectives (and yes, I do sometimes argue and discuss with flesh-and-blood entities). I’ve long argued that we’re the most socially constructed mammals on the planet, but Mercier and Sperber have introduced me to a new word – hypersocial – which packs more punch. This hypersocial quality of humans has undoubtedly made us, for better or worse, the dominant species on the planet. Other species can’t present us with their viewpoints, but we can at least learn from the co-operative behaviours of bonobos, cetaceans, elephants and corvids, to name a few. That’s interaction of a sort. And increased travel and globalisation of communications means we can learn about other cultures and how they manage their environments and how they have coped, or not, with the encroachments of the dominant WEIRD culture.
When I say ‘we’ I mean we, as individuals. The authors of The enigma of reason reject the idea of reason as a ‘group-level adaptation’. The benefits of interactive reason accrue to the individual, and of course this can be passed on to other receptive individuals, but the level of receptivity varies enormously. Myside bias, the default position from our solipsistic childhood, has the useful evolutionary function of self-promotion, even survival, against the world, but our hypersocial human world requires effective interaction. That’s how Australian Aboriginal culture managed to thrive in a set of sub-optimal environments for tens of thousands of years before the WEIRDs arrived, and that’s how WEIRDs have managed to transform those environments, creating a host of problems along with solutions, in a story that continues….
Reference
H Mercier & D Sperber, The enigma of reason, 2017