Blogs / The Loom

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog while I’ve been off visiting grandparents in other states this past week. But in the meantime, Slate has published a piece I wrote for them on the beguiling mystery of octopus brains. I wonder if this guy would find it enlightening.

Update: A couple readers pointed out to me that I should have said octopuses jet water, not air. Sorry for the slip–it should be fixed shortly.

A couple weeks ago I spoke at Downstate Medical Center in New York about some of my articles in the New York Times that revolve around how the mind evolved. We can learn from bacteria, fruit flies, hyenas, and our own kids. You can now see the whole lecture with surprisingly clear slides on blip.tv. Click on the screen below, or go to the page on blip.tv. Warning: the sound drops out briefly around 13:00.

Today on bloggingheads, I talk to Gary Marcus, NYU psychologist and author of the new book Kluge, about all the telling ways in which our minds let us down, and what those shortcomings tell us about how it evolved.

A new map of some of the connections neurons make in the frontal cortex of a monkey’s brain. From PLOS Computational Biology. Bigger image here.

My newest “Dissection” column is up at Wired.com. This time around, I take a look at how our brains relay signals. They turn out to do a terrible job. What’s impressive is how they clean up their own mess. Check it out.

[Image via Vesalius Gallery]

(update 4.4.08 9:30 am: link fixed)

When one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience is helping you plumb the mysteries of consciousness, the self, free will, and the two minds that coexist in our skulls, it helps every now and then to touch your nose. To understand why touching your nose is such a profound experience, check out my talk today on bloggingheads with Mike Gazzaniga.

(And if you want to see what Mike was like as a young post-doc 50 years ago, check out this video from the early1960s about his split brain research. It’s also evidence of how much science documentaries have changed…)

For years, fellow scienceblogger PZ Myers has taught us all well why we ought to adore squid, octopuses, and other cephalopods. But I came to a new degree of appreciation when I traveled up to Woods Hole to spend some time with the biologist Roger Hanlon. Hanlon studies how cephalopods disguise themselves, and boy do they ever. Right in front of your eyes, sitting in a little tub of water, the animals can practically disappear. Or, if they want to scare you, they turn a chocolately brown with bright stripes.

After my visit, I wrote a " onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19camo.html?ex=1361077200_amp_en=e3de8998edddc558_amp_ei=5124_amp_partner=permalink_amp_exprod=permalink_br_/');">profile of Hanlon, which is the lead article in tomorrow’s Science Times in the New York Times. Along with the article, you can also check out a video made by Erik Olsen, who joined me up in Woods Hole. (I gawk, the cuttlefish perform…)

The story is bigger than cephalopods (all due respect to PZ)–Hanlon believes that the same fundamental rules of camouflage followed by cephalopods govern all animals that hide from other animals. I’m curious to see where Hanlon goes with this hypothesis. We even got to talking about Monet, Anselm Adams, and other artists, and Hanlon showed how they use the same tricks as cuttlefish to create a rich, three-dimensional experience from a flat picture.

If you’re hankering for more, here are a few links…

Hanlon’s awesome pirated octopus camouflage video

A man-made gel that mimics cuttlefish skin

Hanlons’s three-category model of camouflage (pdf)

[Photograph courtesy of Roger Hanlon]

My fellow bloggingheads John Horgan and George Johnson took some time on their latest science talk to dissect my New York Times article on swarms (you can jump to that section here). John wonders if I’m just discovering all the complexity stuff he and George were writing about back in the 1990s. I think it’s always good for John to keep everyone aware of the dangers of hype, of the need to ask how important or new scientific research really is. He’s been particularly tough on the science of complexity, if there is such a thing. In 1995 he wrote a piece in Scientific American that practically brought tears to the eyes of many scientists who thought complexity was the Next Big Thing.

While John makes some decent points, I think he ends up playing a game of bait-and-switch. He doesn’t have anything to say in particular about the research of Iain Couzin, the subject of my article, such as his investigations of army ants or locusts. He’s not actually interested in ants or locusts, as far as I can tell–the complex systems “we’re really interested in,” as he puts it, are human societies, economies, etc. In other words, if some scientists make a big deal about how they’ve discovered the hidden rules of human societies but don’t have more than simple computer models, then I guess the whole field becomes tainted. Everything becomes a simulation with a vague resemblance that could be a coincidence.

If John is not particularly interested in real swarms, so be it. If he doesn’t think it’s useful to figure out the rules that help trigger locust invasions that destroy vast areas of cropland, c’est la vie. But I think he needs to look more closely at Couzin’s actual research before decrying the failure of complexity to become the next Newtonian revolution. It’s true that scientists in the 1990s were trying to understand swarming behavior, as they are now. But does that mean that nothing’s changed? No. Just compare Couzin’s work to Craig Reynlod’s work in the 1980s on “boids.” While these flocking simulations were provocative and intriguing, they were simple and didn’t correspond precisely to any real species.

Now people like Couzin are learning how to go into the field, observe real animals, extract the rules they follow, create simulations on computers with the help of new mathematical equations, and come up with experiments to test predictions of those simulations. So now it’s possible to figure out how Mormon cricket swarms are fundamentally different from locust swarms. The latter are just trying to move together. The former are on a cannibalistic forced march. That’s not just vague resemblances or coincidences. That’s the real, albeit slow advance of science.

Not much blogging this week–I’m heading out to California to receive the National Academies prize I wrote about a while back. In the meantime, let me direct your attention to my lead article in this week’s Science Times section of the NY Times. I wrote about swarms, herds, schools, gaggles, and other crowds of animals, focusing on one of the scientists who studies them, Iain Couzin. If you want to find out more about his quest to find the underlying rules of swarm intelligence, check out his web site.

It’s a brave new world for us book authors. Today’s case in point: PZ Myers assigned some of his students to ready my book Soul Made Flesh, which chronicles how humanity figured out what the brain is for. Some of his students have bravely agreed to post their reports on the book on Myers’s blog Pharyngula (here and here). The comment thread has turned into a wide-ranging book-club discussion. I’m chiming in from time to time too (here and here, for example). I’m definitely enjoying it and will check in as long as the discussion goes.

There’s been a small, but stunning, step forward in the quest to help people who have suffered consciousness-impairing injuries. Scientists inserted electrodes into the brain of a man in a minimally conscious state. They used the electrodes to stimulate parts of the brain believed to be crucial for binding together the brain into an aware state. As the doctors hoped, the stimulation made the man more responsive. He was able to name objects and to hold a cup to his lips. The details of the experiment appear in this week’s issue of Nature.

One experiment on a single subject is a far cry from a clinical trial. But I was still very impressed by it. Perhaps that’s because I spent some time with these particular scientists a few years ago, back when they were just trying to figure out how to understand what was going on in the heads of their patients. I wrote an article about the experience for the New York Times Magazine in 2003, which I’ve posted here. If I remember correctly, it was the first account of their research to appear in the press. Consider it the prequel.

[ Image credit: from animation created by the Cleveland Clinic]

The article I wrote for Scientific American in 2005 on the self has been anthologized in a new book: The Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrows’ Brain. Check out the book’s line-up, which Oliver Sacks calls, “an irresistible guide to this new territory.”