The Case Against Ball Lightning

by Steuart Campbell

Ball lightning (BL) is popularly described as a slowly-moving luminous ball not more than twelve inches (30 cm) in diameter occasionally seen at ground level during a thunderstorm. Scientists usually understand it as an electrical discharge phenomenon somehow associated with normal lightning.

The existence of BL is controversial with opinions and explanations changing over time. While many theories have been advanced to explain it, none of them account for all the reported characteristics, Further, it has not been created in laboratory conditions with all these characteristics, and reliable accounts of it are rare and often suspect. Because of perceptual and memory problems, anecdotal evidence is of doubtful value. There is no photograph, film or video recording that can be accepted unreservedly as showing BL. Many forget the null hypothesis, which has explained many postulated phenomena, such as phlogiston and the ether, that turn out to be nonexistent. The null hypothesis may also explains BL, which could be a chimera, a pseudo-phenomenon.

Skepticism regarding the existence of BL goes back at least to Michael Faraday and Francois Arago in the nineteenth century. In 1839 Faraday, while allowing that balls of fire might appear in the atmosphere, doubted that they had anything to do with lightning or atmospheric electricity (Barry, p.133). More recently, Karl Berger reported that, in over 20 years of study as a meteorologist and lightning investigator, he had never observed BL. He concluded that it did not exist (Barry, p.133). Other scientists have reached the same conclusion. James Lovelock put tales of BL in the same category as those of spontaneous human combustion and crop circles (Lovelock, p. 86). Even Barry allows that unbiased examination of reports leads to the conclusion that a great percentage are highly questionable and could be interpreted in several ways (op. cit. p.134). Among those ways is the persistence of vision theory proposed by Lord Kelvin in 1888. He claimed that the uniform size reported in many cases was ascribed to an illusion associated with the blind spot in the eye (Singer, p.19). Lovelock reported such a case after a lightning flash (p. 86). Other sources of deception proposed have been will-o’-the-wisp and owls with luminous wings, but the existence of both of these is itself doubtful. In recent years, some scientists have accepted the existence of BL, but with little evidence.

Reports of BL suffer from defects inherent in the human perceptual and memory systems. Because both perception and memory are reconstructive processes, what we perceive is not necessarily what the sense organs receive. This is demonstrated by various well-known optical illusions, such as the moon illusion. Distant stationary lights are subject to several movement illusions, all of which attribute movement to the light. The most famous is the autokinetic illusion, in which a stationary light (usually a star) will appear to move about at random.

The size or distance of an unknown object cannot be determined by observers without additional information. Observers usually make a guess about either the size or distance of an object and then determine the other parameter from their guess. In fact both can be wrong. The size of distant objects seen near the horizon can be exaggerated (the moon illusion), as can an object’s altitude (angle above the horizon). Nor can observers usually distinguish between change in size of an object and change in its distance, usually interpreting a change in size as a change in distance. A phenomenon called size constancy can interfere with size perception. Even estimates of time-span are unreliable; fascination tends to shorten it. Estimates of brightness are meaningless (it is a relative term) and observers tend to make false associations, drawing unwarranted conclusions from what they perceive. They may associate effects with the wrong cause. In the case of anomalous luminous phenomena, observers try to identify them by reference to the models they carry in their minds. Clearly they can only identify a phenomenon as BL if they have heard of it. Conversely they are likely to identify an anomalous object as BL simply because they have heard of it.

explain (Singer, p. 62). However such contradictions might be explained if the observers are reporting many different phenomena, none of which are actually BL. Among the objects mistaken for BL are bright astronomical objects at low altitude, sometimes seen in mirage (Campbell 1988a).

Because anecdotal reports are unreliable, so are illustrations based on these reports. However, it is more difficult to explain reports of physical damage and photographic evidence. It is sometimes alleged that BL can penetrate closed windows and the literature contains several alleged examples. When a mysterious hole appeared in a window of his department during a storm, a professor of meteorology in Edinburgh concluded that BL was the cause. However later investigation showed a simpler explanation—mechanical damage (Campbell 1981a). Almost circular cracks can appear in sheet glass when subjected to the appropriate sudden stress.

Reports of extensive damage such as fires or explosions may more easily be explained as the result of ordinary lightning strikes. Such reports are not clarified by the popular belief that lightning strikes are the result of something called a ‘thunderbolt’.

Barry demonstrated that a long-lived luminous ball phenomenon can be produced by spark-initiated combustion of low-density hydrocarbon gas at atmospheric pressure (p.108). This may explain the 1975 report from a housewife in Smethwick (English Midlands) that BL appeared over her gas cooker (Campbell 1988b). Normal lightning may ignite hydrocarbon gases in the atmosphere, producing similar phenomena, but this is not what is understood as BL.

Photographs alleged to show BL are as suspect as anecdotal reports and sketches. The camera cannot lie, but what it shows can be misinterpreted and the photographer can lie. Until the early 1970s, a photograph taken in 1961 at Castleford (Yorkshire, England) had been interpreted as showing the path of BL. Even New Scientist magazine described it as the ‘Path of a Thunderbolt’. But a decade later it was claimed that it showed the pulsed trace from a street lamp (Davies and Standler) and a decade after that it was demonstrated that this was correct (Campbell 1981b): the photographer incautiously moved the camera while the shutter was still open. A Russian photograph taken in 1957 had the same explanation, but not before a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences endorsed the picture on the basis of similar pictures he had seen in a 1939 US journal (Campbell 1987). He did not know that the pictures were all produced by lamps, presumably as hoaxes.

Many alleged pictures of BL are deliberate fakes. They appear to include the picture produced in 1966 by a former Canadian Air Force pilot, which misled the American editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology, who used it on the cover of his skeptical books on UFOs (Campbell 1988c).

Although it is fairly easy to take a photograph, or to fake one, which many mistakenly interpret as showing BL, it should be less easy to produce a film or video sequence that could fool anyone. However, in 1973 a film appeared that was claimed to show BL traveling slowly across the horizon near Aylesbury (England). It shows a bright ball of light moving on a steady horizontal course for twenty-three seconds until it suddenly vanishes. Because it was reported initially as a UFO, the film has been shown many times at UFO conferences and has featured in a BBC TV program about UFOs. But it was also thought that it showed BL. Later it was demonstrated that the ‘ball’ was burning fuel being dumped from a damaged US fighter-bomber; the aircraft itself, nearly four miles (6 km) away, was not visible beside the fireball and too far away to be heard (Campbell 1991).

In 1989 a TV station in south-east England screened a video of a smudgy spherical object with a hole which was captured accidentally as the videographer attempted to video normal lightning; he had not seen anything unusual during the recording. The videographer thought it might show BL and this explanation was initially endorsed by Professor Roger Jennison of the University of Kent (he has himself reported seeing BL). However, it was later demonstrated that the object in the sequence was a combination of an artifact of the camera itself and a distant street light (Bergstrom and Campbell).

IT SEEMS BIOLOGY (NOT RELIGION) EQUALS MORALITY

by Marc D. Hauser

For many, living a moral life is synonymous with living a religious life. Just as educated students of mathematics, chemistry and politics know that 1=1, water=H2O, and Barack Obama=US president, so, too, do religiously educated people know that religion=morality.

As simple and pleasing as this relationship may seem, it has at least three possible interpretations.

First, if religion represents the source of moral understanding, then those lacking a religious education are morally lost, adrift in a sea of sinful temptation. Those with a religious education not only chart a steady course, guided by the cliched moral compass but they know why some actions are morally virtuous and others are morally abhorrent.

Second, perhaps everyone has a standard engine for working out what is morally right or wrong but those with a religious background have extra accessories that refine our actions, fuelling altruism and fending off harms to others.

Third, while religion certainly does provide moral inspiration, not all of its recommendations are morally laudatory. Though we can all applaud those religions that teach compassion, forgiveness and genuine altruism, we can also express disgust and moral outrage at those religions that promote ethnic cleansing, often by praising those willing to commit suicide for the good of the religious "team".

None of my comments so far are meant to be divisive with respect to the meaning and sense of community that many derive from religion. Where I intend to be divisive is with respect to the argument that religion, and moral education more generally, represent the only — or perhaps even the ultimate — source of moral reasoning. If anything, moral education is often motivated by self-interest, to do what's best for those within a moral community, preaching singularity, not plurality. Blame nurture, not nature, for our moral atrocities against humanity. And blame educated partiality more generally, as this allows us to lump into one category all those who fail to acknowledge our shared humanity and fail to use secular reasoning to practise compassion.

If religion is not the source of our moral insights — and moral education has the demonstrated potential to teach partiality and, therefore, morally destructive behaviour — then what other sources of inspiration are on offer?

One answer to this question is emerging from an unsuspected corner of academia: the mind sciences. Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially. What's the evidence?

To experience what subjects in some of our studies experience, see the moral sense test . It asks for information about gender, age, nationality, education, politics and religion. Once logged in, there is a series of scenarios asking participants to judge whether a particular action is morally forbidden, permissible or obligatory.

Most of the scenarios involve genuine moral dilemmas. All are unfamiliar, for a reason. Unfamiliar and artificial cases have an advantage over familiar scenarios, such as abortion, euthanasia and charitable donations: no one has a well-rehearsed and explicit moral argument for such cases, and for all the cases we create, neither the law nor religious scripture provides any guidance.

For example, if five people in a hospital each require an organ to survive, is it permissible for a doctor to take the organs of a healthy person who happens to walk by the hospital? Or if a lethal gas has leaked into the vent of a factory and is headed towards a room with seven people, is it permissible to push someone into the vent, preventing the gas from reaching the seven but killing the one? These are true moral dilemmas — challenging problems that push on our intuitions as lay jurists, forcing us to wrestle with the opposing forces of consequences (saving the lives of many) and rules (killing is wrong).

Based on the responses of thousands of participants to more than 100 dilemmas, we find no difference between men and women, young and old, theistic believers and non-believers, liberals and conservatives. When it comes to judging unfamiliar moral scenarios, your cultural background is virtually irrelevant.

What guides your judgments is the universal and unconscious voice of our species, a biological code, a universal moral grammar. We tend to see actions as worse than omissions of actions: pushing a person into the factory vent is worse than allowing the person to fall in. Using someone as a means to some greater good is worse if you make this one person worse off than if you don't. This is the difference between an evitable and inevitable harm. If the person in the hospital or in the factory is perfectly healthy, taking his life to save the lives of many is worse than if he is dying and there is no cure. Distinctions such as these are abstract, impartial and emotionally cold. They are like recognising the identity relationship of 1=1, a rule that is abstract and content-free.

If this code is universal and impartial, then why are there are so many moral atrocities in the world? The answer comes from thinking about our emotions, the feelings we recruit to fuel in-group favouritism, out-group hatred and, ultimately, dehumanisation.

Consider the psychopath, Hollywood's favourite moral monster. Clinical studies reveal that they feel no remorse, shame, guilt or empathy, and lack the tools for self-control. Because they lacked these capacities, several experts have argued that they lack the wherewithal to understand what is right or wrong and, consequently, to do the wrong thing. New studies show, however, that this conclusion is at least partially wrong. Psychopaths know full well what is right and wrong but don't care. Their moral knowledge is intact but their moral emotions are damaged. They are perfectly normal jurists but perfectly abnormal moral actors. For the psychopath, other humans are no different from rocks or artefacts. They are disposable.

Here lies the answer to understanding the dangers of nurture, of education and partiality. When we fuel in-group biases by elevating and praising members of the group, we often unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, denigrate the "other" by feeding the most nefarious of all emotions, the dragon of disgust.

We label the other (the members of the out-group) with a description that makes them sub-human or even inanimate, often parasitic and vile, and thus disgusting. When disgust is recruited, those in the in-group have only one way out: purge the other.

When the Dalai Lama stated that the Chinese were attempting "cultural genocide" against the Tibetans by attempting to stop protests, he was not only making a statement about the Chinese per se but about a particular form of moral education, one that fails to acknowledge autonomy, preaches partiality and feeds disgust and dehumanisation. The Chinese must stop their attempt to purge the Tibetans of their cultural heritage and right of cultural expression. And the nations of the world, and their diverse peoples, must remain vigilant against any attempts at cultural decimation.

The good news about the psychology of prejudice, of creating distinctive classes of individuals who are in the tribe and outside of it, is that it is flexible, capable of change and — viewed from an evolutionary perspective — as abstract and content-free as the rules that enter into our moral grammar.

All animals, humans included, have evolved the capacity to create a distinction between members of the in-group and those in the out-group. But the features that are selected are not set in the genome. Rather, it is open to experience.

For example, we know from studies of child development that within the first year of life, babies prefer to look at faces from their own race to faces of a different race, prefer to listen to speakers of their native language over foreigners, and even within their native language prefer to listen to their own dialect. But if babies watch someone of another race speaking their native language, they are much more willing to engage with this person than someone of the same race speaking a different language.

These social categories are created by experience, and some features are more important than others because they are harder to fake and more indicative of a shared cultural background. But, importantly, they are plastic. Racial discrimination is greatly reduced among children of mixed-racial parents. And adults who have dated individuals of another race are also much less prejudiced. On this note, moral education can play a more nurturing role by introducing all children, early in life, to the varieties of religions, political systems, languages, social organisations and races. Exposure to diversity is perhaps our best option for reducing, if not eradicating, strong out-group biases.

Lest there be any confusion about the claims I am making, I am not saying that our evolved capacity to intuitively judge what is right or wrong is sufficient to live a moral life. It is most definitely not and for two good reasons.

For one, some of our moral instincts evolved during a period of human history that looked nothing like the situation today. In our distant past, we lived in small groups consisting of highly familiar and often familial individuals, with no formal laws. Today we live in a large and diffuse society, where our decisions have little-to-no impact on most people in our community but with laws to enforce those who deviate from expected norms. Further, we are confronted with moral decisions that are unfamiliar, including stem cells, abortion, organ transplants and life support. When we confront these novel situations, our evolved system is ill-equipped.

The second reason is that living a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be. And here is where nurture can re-enter the conversation. We need education because we need a world in which people listen to the universal voice of their species, while stopping to wonder whether there are alternatives. And if there are alternatives, we need rational and reasonable people who will be vigilant of partiality and champions of plurality.

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A Conversation with Robert Sapolsky

In the endless sort of struggle that neurobiologists have — in terms of free will, determinism — my feeling has always been that there's not a whole lot of free will out there, and if there is, it's in the least interesting places and getting more sparse all the time. But there's a whole new realm of neuroscience which I've been thinking about, which I'm starting to do research on, that throws in another element of things going on below the surface affecting our behavior. And it's got to do with this utterly bizarre world of parasites manipulating our behavior. It turns out that this is not all that surprising. There are all sorts of parasites out there that get into some organism, and what they need to do is parasitize the organism and increase the likelihood that they, the parasite, will be fruitful and multiply, and in some cases they can manipulate the behavior of the host.

Some of these are pretty astounding. There's this barnacle that rides on the back of some crab and is able to inject estrogenic hormones into the crab if the crab is male, and at that point, the male's behavior becomes feminized. The male crab digs a hole in the sand for his eggs, except he has no eggs, but the barnacle sure does, and has just gotten this guy to build a nest for him. There are other ones where wasps parasitize caterpillars and get them to defend the wasp's nests for them. These are extraordinary examples.

The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. If you're ever pregnant, if you're ever around anyone who's pregnant, you know you immediately get skittish about cat feces, cat bedding, cat everything, because it could carry Toxo. And you do not want to get Toxoplasma into a fetal nervous system. It's a disaster.

The normal life cycle for Toxo is one of these amazing bits of natural history. Toxo can only reproduce sexually in the gut of a cat. It comes out in the cat feces, feces get eaten by rodents. And Toxo's evolutionary challenge at that point is to figure out how to get rodents inside cats' stomachs. Now it could have done this in really unsubtle ways, such as cripple the rodent or some such thing. Toxo instead has developed this amazing capacity to alter innate behavior in rodents.

If you take a lab rat who is 5,000 generations into being a lab rat, since the ancestor actually ran around in the real world, and you put some cat urine in one corner of their cage, they're going to move to the other side. Completely innate, hard-wired reaction to the smell of cats, the cat pheromones. But take a Toxo-infected rodent, and they're no longer afraid of the smell of cats. In fact they become attracted to it. The most damn amazing thing you can ever see, Toxo knows how to make cat urine smell attractive to rats. And rats go and check it out and that rat is now much more likely to wind up in the cat's stomach. Toxo's circle of life completed.

This was reported by a group in the UK about half a dozen years ago. Not a whole lot was known about what Toxo was doing in the brain, so ever since, part of my lab has been trying to figure out the neurobiological aspects. The first thing is that it's for real. The rodents, rats, mice, really do become attracted to cat urine when they've been infected with Toxo. And you might say, okay, well, this is a rodent doing just all sorts of screwy stuff because it's got this parasite turning its brain into Swiss cheese or something. It's just non-specific behavioral chaos. But no, these are incredibly normal animals. Their olfaction is normal, their social behavior is normal, their learning and memory is normal. All of that. It's not just a generically screwy animal.

You say, okay well, it's not that, but Toxo seems to know how to destroy fear and anxiety circuits. But it's not that, either. Because these are rats who are still innately afraid of bright lights. They're nocturnal animals. They're afraid of big, open spaces. You can condition them to be afraid of novel things. The system works perfectly well there. Somehow Toxo can laser out this one fear pathway, this aversion to predator odors.

We started looking at this. The first thing we did was introduce Toxo into a rat and it took about six weeks for it to migrate from its gut up into its nervous system. And at that point, we looked to see, where has it gone in the brain? It formed cysts, sort of latent, encapsulated cysts, and it wound up all over the brain. That was deeply disappointing.

But then we looked at how much winds up in different areas in the brain, and it turned out Toxo preferentially knows how to home in on the part of the brain that is all about fear and anxiety, a brain region called the amygdala. The amygdala is where you do your fear conditioning; the amygdala is what's hyperactive in people with post-traumatic stress disorder; the amygdala is all about pathways of predator aversion, and Toxo knows how to get in there.

Next, we then saw that Toxo would take the dendrites, the branch and cables that neurons have to connect to each other, and shriveled them up in the amygdala. It was disconnecting circuits. You wind up with fewer cells there. This is a parasite that is unwiring this stuff in the critical part of the brain for fear and anxiety. That's really interesting. That doesn't tell us a thing about why only its predator aversion has been knocked outwhereas fear of bright lights, et cetera, is still in there. It knows how to find that particular circuitry.

So what's going on from there? What's it doing? Because it's not just destroying this fear aversive response, it's creating something new. It's creating an attraction to the cat urine. And here is where this gets utterly bizarre. You look at circuitry in the brain, and there's a reasonably well-characterized circuit that activates neurons which become metabolically active circuits where they're talking to each other, a reasonably well-understood process that's involved in predator aversion. It involves neurons in the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and some other brain regions getting excited. This is a very well characterized circuit.

Meanwhile, there is a well-characterized circuit that has to do with sexual attraction. And as it happens, part of this circuit courses through the amygdala, which is pretty interesting in and of itself, and then goes to different areas of the brain than the fear pathways.

When you look at normal rats, and expose them to cat urine, cat pheromones, exactly as you would expect, they have a stress response: their stress hormone levels go up, and they activate this classical fear circuitry in the brain. Now you take Toxo-infected rats, right around the time when they start liking the smell of cat urine, you expose them to cat pheromones, and you don't see the stress hormone release. What you see is that the fear circuit doesn't activate normally, and instead the sexual arousal activates some. In other words, Toxo knows how to hijack the sexual reward pathway. And you get males infected with Toxo and expose them to a lot of the cat pheromones, and their testes get bigger. Somehow, this damn parasite knows how to make cat urine smell sexually arousing to rodents, and they go and check it out. Totally amazing.

So on a certain level, that explains everything. Ah ha! It takes over sexual arousal circuitry. This is utterly bizarre. At this point, we don't know what the basis is of the attraction in the females. It's something we're working on.

Some extremely nice work has been done by a group at Leeds in the UK, who are looking at the Toxo genome, and we're picking up on this collaboratively. Okay, Toxo, it's a protozoan parasite. Toxo and mammals had a common ancestor, and the last they did was God knows, billions of years ago. And you look in the Toxo genome, and it's got two versions of the gene called tyrosine hydroxylase. And if you were a neuro-chemistry type, you would be leaping up in shock and excitement at this point.

Tyrosine hydroxylase is the critical enzyme for making dopamine: the neurotransmitter in the brain that's all about reward and anticipation of reward. Cocaine works on the dopamine system, all sorts of other euphoriants do. Dopamine is about pleasure, attraction and anticipation. And the Toxo genome has the mammalian gene for making the stuff. It's got a little tail on the gene that targets, specifies, that when this is turned into the actual enzyme, it gets secreted out of the Toxo and into neurons. This parasite doesn't need to learn how to make neurons act as if they are pleasurably anticipatory; it takes over the brain chemistry of it all on its own.

Again that issue of specificity comes up. Look at closely related parasites to Toxo: do they have this gene? Absolutely not. Now look at the Toxo genome and look at genes related to other brain messengers. Serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, and so on, and you go through every single gene you can think of. Zero. Toxo doesn't have them, Toxo's got this one gene which allows it to just plug into the whole world of mammalian reward systems. And at this point, that's what we know. It is utterly cool.

Of course, at this point, you say well, what about other species? What does Toxo do to humans? And there's some interesting stuff there that's reminiscent of what's going on in rodents. Clinical dogma is you first get a Toxo infection. If you're pregnant, it gets into the fetal nervous system, a huge disaster. Otherwise, if you get a Toxo infection, it has phases of inflammation, but eventually it goes into this latent asymptomatic stage, which is when these cysts form in the brain. Which is, in a rat, when it stops being anything boring like asymptomatic, and when the behavior starts occurring. Interestingly, that's when the parasite starts making this tyrosine hydroxylase.

So what about humans? A small literature is coming out now reporting neuropsychological testing on men who are Toxo-infected, showing that they get a little bit impulsive. Women less so, and this may have some parallels perhaps with this whole testosterone aspect of the story that we're seeing. And then the truly astonishing thing: two different groups independently have reported that people who are Toxo-infected have three to four times the likelihood of being killed in car accidents involving reckless speeding.

In other words, you take a Toxo-infected rat and it does some dumb-ass thing that it should be innately skittish about, like going right up to cat smells. Maybe you take a Toxo-infected human and they start having a proclivity towards doing dumb-ass things that we should be innately averse to, like having your body hurdle through space at high G-forces. Maybe this is the same neurobiology. This is not to say that Toxo has evolved the need to get humans into cat stomachs. It's just sheer convergence. It's the same nuts and bolts neurobiology in us and in a rodent, and does the same thing.

On a certain level, this is a protozoan parasite that knows more about the neurobiology of anxiety and fear than 25,000 neuroscientists standing on each other's shoulders, and this is not a rare pattern. Look at the rabies virus; rabies knows more about aggression than we neuroscientists do. It knows how to make you rabid. It knows how to make you want to bite someone, and that saliva of yours contains rabies virus particles, passed on to another person.

The Toxo story is, for me, completely new terrain — totally cool, interesting stuff, just in terms of this individual problem. And maybe it's got something to do with treatments for phobias down the line or whatever it is to make it seem like anything more than just the coolest gee whiz thing possible. But no doubt it's also a tip of the iceberg of God knows what other parasitic stuff is going on out there. Even in the larger sense, God knows what other unseen realms of biology make our behavior far less autonomous than lots of folks would like to think.

With regard to parasite infections like Toxo in humans, there is a big prevalence in certain parts of the world. There's a higher prevalence in the tropics, where typically more than 50 percent of people are infected. Lower rates in more temperate zones for reasons that I do not understand and do not choose to speculate on. France has really high rates of Toxo infection. In much of the developing world, it's bare feet, absorbing it through soil, where cats may have been. It's food that may not have been washed sufficiently and absorption through hands. It's the usual story that people in the developing world are more subject to all sorts of infectious stuff.

A few years ago, I sat down with a couple of the Toxo docs over in our hospital who do the Toxo testing in the Ob/Gyn clinics. And they hadn't heard about this behavioral story, and I'm going on about how cool and unexpected it is. And suddenly, one of them jumps up, flooded with 40-year-old memories, and says, "I just remembered back when I was a resident, I was doing a surgical transplant rotation. And there was an older surgeon, who said, if you ever get organs from a motorcycle accident death, check the organs for Toxo. I don't know why, but you find a lot of Toxo." And you could see this guy was having a rush of nostalgic memories from back when he was 25 and all because he was being told this weird factoid ... ooh, people who die in motorcycle accidents seem to have high rates of Toxo. Utterly bizarre.

What is the bottom line on this? Well, it depends; if you want to overcome some of your inhibitions, Toxo might be a very good thing to have in your system. Not surprisingly, ever since we started studying Toxo in my lab, every lab meeting we sit around speculating about which people in the lab are Toxo-infected, and that might have something to do with one's level of recklessness. Who knows? It's very interesting stuff, though.

You want to know something utterly terrifying? Here's something terrifying and not surprising. Folks who know about Toxo and its affect on behavior are in the U.S. military. They're interested in Toxo. They're officially intrigued. And I would think they would be intrigued, studying a parasite that makes mammals perhaps do things that everything in their fiber normally tells them not to because it's dangerous and ridiculous and stupid and don't do it. But suddenly with this parasite on board, the mammal is a little bit more likely you go and do it. Who knows? But they are aware of Toxo.

There are two groups that collaborate in Toxo research. One is Joanne Webster, who was at Oxford at the time that she first saw this behavioral phenomenon. And I believe she's now at University College London. And the other is Glenn McConkey at University of Leeds. And they're on this. She's more of a behaviorist, he's more of an enzyme biochemist guy. We're doing the neurobiology end of it. We're all talking lots. (I'm not quite sure what the previous paragraph adds, so I'd be happy to see it cut, if you're looking to save some space).

There's a long-standing literature that absolutely shows there's a statistical link between Toxo infection and schizophrenia. It's not a big link, but it's solidly there. Schizophrenics have higher than expected rates of having been infected with Toxo, and not particularly the case for other related parasites. Links between schizophrenia and mothers who had house cats during pregnancy. There's a whole literature on that. So where does this fit in?

Two really interesting things. Back to dopamine and the tyrosine hydroxylase gene that Toxo somehow ripped off from mammals, which allows it to make more dopamine. Dopamine levels are too high in schizophrenia. That's the leading suggestion of what schizophrenia is about neurochemically. You take Toxo-infected rodents and their brains have elevated levels of dopamine. Final deal is, and this came from Webster's group, you take a rat who's been Toxo-infected and is now at the state where it would find cat urine to be attractive, and you give it drugs that block dopamine receptors, the drugs that are used to treat schizophrenics, and it stops being attracted to the cat urine. There is some schizophrenia connection here with this.

Any time Toxo's picked up in the media, and this schizophrenia angle is brought in, the irresistible angle is the generic crazy cat lady, you know, living in the apartment with 43 cats and their detritus. And that's an irresistible one in terms of Toxo psychiatric status: cats. But God knows what stuff is lurking there.

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Which modern enviro concepts are throwbacks to the past?

Imagine a city where the main boulevard has been converted to a greenway, replete with thousands of trees, birdsong, and even a creek. Battery-powered buses and free bicycles stationed at each corner replace cars, which are banned. For intercity travel, high-speed magnetic trains transport passengers as fast as a plane—in fact, the trains are made by Boeing, which abandoned the polluting business of air travel long ago. The city’s food waste, sewage, and garbage are composted for fertilizer. All the produce is organically grown. The livestock are free-range. Scientists provide third-party review of foods, keeping companies honest. And everything from clothes to containers is biodegradable in keeping with the overarching principle of sustainability. At night in the city, you can look up and see the stars for the first time in more than a century.

Sound like a modern green fantasy, designed by a team of hotshot urban planners and enviro activists? In fact, the city dates from 1975. It is a vision of San Francisco from the landmark novel Ecotopia, which embodied the ideas of the environmental movement at the time—ideas, of course, that are very similar to the up-and-coming designs of today.

With all the talk about a new green revolution, new energy paradigms, and climate change, it’s easy to overlook how many of the pillars of modern environmentalism are not, in fact, new. A whole host of these dynamic, forward-looking ideas were born in the 60s and 70s.

Biologists Howard and Eugene Odum developed the modern image of the Earth as an intricate tracery of biological systems in the 1960s. They were also the first to point out that crops are in some sense made of oil, in that it takes oil to fertilize them, harvest them, and transport them. In the 60s and early 70s, Robert MacArthur helped transform the natural history-based ecology of the past into the systemic, ahistorical science of today. In 1977, solar power made its first serious move towards the mainstream as President Jimmy Carter famously installed panels on the White House roof and provided the first solar incentives to individuals. And iconoclasts like Buckminster Fuller were designing for sustainability long before that.

What are the best ideas—be they technologies, concepts, legal policies, or states of mind—that have been revived from the first wave environmental movement? Which forgotten ideas should be revisited? And are there any ideas you’re glad have been left to the past?

What ideas in the interim have really changed the game?

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Climate Change Was Not Even on the Radar

Denis Hayes was the founding head of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory during the Carter administration and the national coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1975. Having served on dozens of boards, he is now the president and CEO of The Bullitt Foundation.

This question seems best suited to a list!

The best technologies revived from the 1960s and 1970s:

• Solar photovoltaic cells to produce safe, clean distributed power.
• Integrated circuits allowing us to make everything “smart.”
• Plug-in serial hybrid autos. (John Reuyl was hand-building them by 1978, but he had only lead-acid batteries to use. Porsche had actually tried them six decades earlier.)
• Integrated pest management.
• Super-efficient passive solar buildings.

The best concepts and laws:

• The air, waters, and ground are not public dumps into which anyone can pour unlimited toxic materials.
• Citizens have the right to enforce environmental laws when governments fail to act.
• The Endangered Species Act (and the Marine Mammal Protection Act)—protecting life whether or not it directly serves a human purpose. Perhaps the most selfless laws ever passed.
• The National Environmental Policy Act, requiring that we assess the environmental impacts of major projects before proceeding.

The best states of mind:

• The Earth is finite. Nothing can grow forever on a globe.
• In our democracy, an informed, aroused citizenry can still overcome huge odds to end a war, advance human rights, and protect the biosphere. “Who says you can’t save the world?”
• Environmental values lead to sustainable jobs. This was understood early on—the largest source of financial support for the first Earth Day was organized labor, and I helped found a group called “Environmentalists for Full Employment” back in 1971. The natural alliance was forgotten in the heat of the “jobs versus owls” debate and with the collapse of Detroit. However, today, under the banner of “green jobs,” it is reemerging as an important idea.

The ideas that should be revisited:

• The Earth has a finite long-term carrying capacity for Homo sapiens. That carrying capacity relates to affluence and technological choices. It could support 10 billion people for a long time if everyone lived like Chinese peasants, but not even Chinese peasants want to live that way. If humanity aspires to, say, a Swedish or Japanese standard of living, it already has at least twice as many humans as it can support. Zero population growth is inadequate; we need negative population growth to avoid calamity.
• Recycling is serious business in a resource-limited world. We are lagging behind Europe, and even Europe is not having much success with electronics recycling.
• Solar access laws that provide people who install solar collectors the right not to have their equipment shaded by later development.

The ideas best left to the past:

• Some things we thought were true have been shown to be simply wrong. For example, we thought the greatest threat to the ozone layer came from oxides of nitrogen whereas it turned out to be from CFCs.
• Some of the wilder greens had ideas that never proved very persuasive, e.g. carrying small cloths with you, and washing them daily, to use instead of toilet paper. I’m happy to leave that one in the past.
• Recycling started with people carting their paper, glass, and cans to centralized recycling centers. By 1990, it was clear that this made no sense and we began pushing for curbside recycling.

The ideas since the first wave that have really changed the game:

• Climate change was not an issue on anyone’s mind at the time of the first Earth Day. It wasn’t until 1979, when the National Academy of Sciences produced a report saying that that evidence warranted action, that it began filtering outside the atmospheric sciences community.
• In 1970, CFCs would have been on a lot of lists as a true triumph of industrial chemistry—nontoxic, nonflammable, nonexplosive compounds with myriad valuable uses. A few years later, we discovered that they were a threat to life on Earth and must be banned.
• With the success of Patagonia, Interface, Whole Foods, and many others, there is now a recognition that “environmentalists” don’t have to work for the Sierra Club. Environmentalism is a set of values, and environmentalists need to carry those values throughout industry and government if we are to succeed.

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Revive Faith in Our Ingenuity

Mary Nichols brought the first litigation under the Clean Air Act of 1970. Among many other appointments, she has served as the California Secretary of Resources and as the Assistant Administrator of Air and Radiation for the EPA. She is currently the chairman of the California Air Resource Board.

I graduated from law school in 1971 and began my career as an environmentalist at the same time the basic US environmental protection statutes (NEPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act) were coming into force. I think of myself as an urban environmentalist, in contrast with many in the movement who are agrarians at heart. I believe that we humans can think and invent our way out of most of the problems we have created, but it becomes harder as the scale and complexity of pollution requires social and economic cooperation at a scale previously unknown.

What worked and deserves to come back: performance-based regulations that are crafted with knowledge of what technology can do if we demand it. What did not work and should be consigned to the dust heap of history: a belief that if you don’t build it they won’t come. Litigation and political pressure to limit or reduce density of housing, transportation, sewage treatment, and other infrastructure cannot reduce the environmental impact of cities.

The progressive engagement of chemistry, biology, the social sciences, urban planning, architecture, moral philosophy, and religion in solving our environmental dilemmas have each been game changers in their time, but I am still waiting for the insights that can only come from music and art.

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Don’t Forget about Population

Described by the Washington Post as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers,” Lester Brown is the founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, where he also serves as president. His most recent book is Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

I wouldn’t necessarily call this a forgotten idea, but it has slipped off the radar a bit: population. In the early days of the environmental movement, a number of us spoke about the dangers of unchecked population growth. The planet is now trying to support 6.7 billion people. Humanity’s collective demands surpassed the Earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Today our demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by an estimated 25 percent. In addition, the world now has more than 1 billion
chronically hungry and malnourished people. We are setting ourselves up for
collapse unless we ratchet down our population.

A number of great ideas have changed the game since the environmental movement began. I’ll focus on renewable energy, which has gone through a huge revolution, especially in the last year. There isn’t enough space here to detail the number of huge projects currently underway for wind, solar, and geothermal power, but we are seeing a significant increase in renewable energy projects that will make it possible to considerably cut carbon emissions quickly. For instance, the enormous number of wind projects under development in Texas, on top of the 9,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in operation and under construction, will bring Texas to more than 50,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants) when all these wind farms are completed. This will more than satisfy the needs of the state’s 24 million residents.

Nationwide, new wind-generating capacity in 2008 totaled 8,400 megawatts while new coal plants totaled only 1,400 megawatts. The annual growth in solar generating capacity will also soon overtake that of coal. The United States has led the world in each of the last four years in new wind-generating capacity, but China appears set to blow by the United States in 2009.

China, with its Wind Base program, is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with generating capacities that range from 10,000 to 30,000 megawatts, for a total of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the hundreds of smaller wind farms built or planned. Wind is not the only option. In July 2009, a consortium of European corporations led by Munich Re, and including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, and ABB, in addtion to an Algerian firm, announced a proposal to tap the massive solar thermal generating capacity in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Solar thermal power plants in North Africa could economically supply half of Europe’s electricity. The Algerians have enough harnessable solar energy in their desert to power the world economy. The soaring investment in wind, solar, and geothermal energy is being driven by the exciting realization that these renewables can last as long as the Earth itself.

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Hard Times—Whenever They Are—Breed Environmental Responsibility

Henry Pollack has been a professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan for more than 40 years, travels regularly to Antarctica, and has conducted scientific research on all seven continents. The author of the forthcoming A World Without Ice, he now serves as a science adviser to Al Gore’s Climate Project.

Some of the core concepts of the environmental first wave, in the 60s and 70s, were actually practiced by earlier generations in times of hardship, and it might take more hardship, rather than simply ideology, for them to truly be implemented.

A short time ago I came across a brief survey about attitudes toward recycling in different age groups. The question posed was something like this: Which age group shows the greatest willingness to recycle household paper, plastic, glass, and cans? There were only three choices: under 35, 35–70, and over 70. My first reaction was to choose the youngest group, feeling that they were the generation that grew up during the rise of the modern environmental movement. They were the generation that participated in Earth Days, that were urged to turn down the thermostat and turn off the lights, that heard the mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Indeed, the survey results showed that this group displayed a high level of willingness, but to my surprise they did not lead the survey. The most willing age group was the over-70s.

In retrospect, it should not have been a surprise. These senior citizens were the folks that grew up during World War II and were asked to collect and recycle paper, tin and aluminum foil, rubber bands and scrap metal as part of the war effort. They felt good about contributing to conservation of materials that were necessary to supply our troops with the equipment they needed to defend the nation. In last place in this survey were the baby boomers, those in the gap between the old-timers and the young generation. The boomers grew up in a time of apparently unbounded affluence, a time when the landfill became the destination for unwanted household items, many used for only a short time. It was a time of “planned obsolescence.”

Recycling is an old idea, practiced by today’s seniors when they were young and by today’s youth and young adults. It was an idea temporarily forgotten in the boomer era. World War II also made today’s seniors early practitioners of what has become the “locavore” movement. With the planting of ‘victory gardens’ on residential land, many citizens and neighborhoods grew vegetables that augmented the national food supply with the most local food production possible.

The parallels between the conservation efforts during World War II and the conservation efforts of today are clear. During World War II the very existence of the nation was under military attack. Today the habitat of all of humanity is under environmental attack. Our senior citizens showed that when people are properly motivated to save something, they can rise to the occasion. Let us hope that today’s generation is motivated to respond with similar determination.

What particularly caught my interest was the idea of calling civilization, and even the social networks between people, facilitated by communication technology (anywhere from verbal and gestural communication, to the internet), can be observed as a single organism, using the metaphor of the cells in our body making up the moving, talking, thinking construct that we call ourselves. Dan Dennet, in his

TED talk on consciousness (I have yet to read his book on his interpretation of consciousness), made a similar point: all of the neurons interacting with each other as interconnected, yet individual organisms, and unaware of their collective product, generate the perception of consciousness, though we consider the neurons themselves unconscious. Within the cell as well, the systems can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts.

Taking the example of the brain, the individual nodes making up the whole are not fully 'aware' of their collective society, and that that society seems to imagine itself as conscious, we can apply it to human society in the same way, and we humans, mere cells in the system, cannot fully understand what the 'consciousness' of the complete system may be. As is well covered in these posts, the information transfer rate is accelerating, and increasingly more effective means of information and goods transfer are evolving, as a trend of culture and technology. It seems almost inevitable that in a not so distant future, every one of us will be linked intimately with every single other, through modes of technology not yet foreseen, but that would allow for instantaneous, effective, and adapting information flow in the collective network of the human species. Forms of life, made up of all the humans in existence today, perceive and exist in planes that we literally cannot imagine. As is often useful to do when discussing evolutionary systems such as this, the phenomenon can be described as having intention and desire: "What does technology want?" Obviously, evolution has no intentions or desires, but merely trends, that within certain fractal scales of time and space, are relatively constant.

Links:

http://www.celldeath.de/encyclo/index.html

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/03/civilizations_a.php

Hack your brain

Text by Johan Lehrer, graphics by Javier Zarracina

DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn't it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it's easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.

The first thing to know is that the mind isn't a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn't real - tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.

5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness

By Joe DB

Much of the brain is still mysterious to modern science, possibly because modern science itself is using brains to analyze it. There are probably secrets the brain simply doesn't want us to know.

But by no means should that stop us from tinkering around in there, using somewhat questionable and possibly dangerous techniques to make our brains do what we want.

We can't vouch for any of these, either their effectiveness or safety. All we can say is that they sound awesome, since apparently you can make your brain...

#5.

Think You Got a Good Night's Sleep (After Only Two Hours of Actual Sleep)

So you just picked up the night shift at your local McDonald's, you have class every morning at 8am and you have no idea how you're going to make it through the day without looking like a guy straight out of Dawn of the Dead, minus the blood... hopefully.

"SLEEEEEEEEEP... uh... I mean... BRAAAIIIIINNNSSS..."

What if we told you there was a way to sleep for little more than two hours a day, and still feel more refreshed than taking a 12-hour siesta on a bed made entirely out of baby kitten fur? No more sneaking naps at the fry station for you!

Holy Shit! How Do I Do It?

It's called the Uberman Sleep Schedule, and besides having a totally badass name, it's a way to get the maximum amount of essential sleep for your body without wasting hours of precious time you could be using to work or drink or farm for World of Warcraft gold. The schedule consists of taking six, 20-30 minute power naps, every four hours during the day. Of course, this new sleep pattern blows donkey-dick to get used to, but it's a price you have to pay to basically extend your waking life by several years.

The best way to start it off is to just jump right in. Get to sleep at 8pm, set your alarm for 8:30. Get up, play some Call of Duty, sleep again at 12, alarm at 12:30, and so on. After three or four days of this you will start to get high as fuck because of sleep deprivation, and might just want to kill yourself, but don't do it! That would be absolutely counter-productive.

By day 10 or so, your brain will say, "Fuck! FINE, we'll do it your way," and will adapt to your new superhuman sleep schedule.

How Does It Work?

When you sleep normally, your body gets only about an hour and a half of REM sleep, the kind of sleep that is thought to be the most important to keeping your brain sharp. While other stages of sleep help your body to heal and grow, the REM sleep is what makes you feel rested.

The first few days of adjusting are tough because your body isn't getting ANY of this REM sleep, and your brain hates you for it. After the third day, or so, your brain figures out that you mean business, and every time you lay down for one of these naps, dives directly into REM sleep in an attempt to compensate for the deprivation. Do some quick math and that's two full hours of REM sleep, while those who are sleeping normally are only getting an hour and a half.

Before you know it, while the rest of the world snores away, you'll be up and drawing dicks on their faces.

#4.

Hallucinate Like You Just Took LSD, Legally

Yes, that's right kids! Tell your dealer goodbye and worry no more about winding up naked on the roof of an office building after a bad trip. Now you can be stoned out of your mind by building a homemade deprivation chamber out of some regular, completely harmless household objects.

Holy Shit, How Can I Do It!

You are going to need three things: a ping-pong ball, a radio with headphones and a red light.

Step 1: Turn the radio to a station with just white noise (static), and put on your headphones.

Step 2: Cut the ping-pong ball in half and tape each half over your eyes.

Step 3: Turn the red light so it's facing your eyes.

Step 4: Sit there for at least a half an hour.

Step 5: Follow Ben Franklin and your new friend, Harold the unicorn, into the gumdrop forest, and live happily ever after.

How Does It Work?

It's called the Ganzfeld effect, and it works by blocking out most of the signals that go to your brain. It's the same kind of effect you get when looking into a soft light for a while and lose vision, except at a larger scale.

The sound of the white noise and the light from the outside of the ping pong ball are eventually ignored by your brain. With all those signals out of the picture, your brain has to create its own, and this is where the hallucinations come in. We can't guarantee they won't involve, say, the ghost of Lizzie Borden trying to hack off your scrotum with an ax, but that's the risk you take, dammit.

Now, if you want a little more control over your hallucinations...

#3.

Dream Whatever You Want to Dream

What if we told you there was a way to make all your fantasies come true? You could have that sports car you've always wanted and the daily threesome with Sarah Palin and Cannonball Run-era Burt Reynolds. Hell, we'll even throw in a few superpowers for your enjoyment.

Welcome to the wonderful world of lucid dreaming.

Holy Shit, How Can I Do It?

Most of you reading this have had a lucid dream before. Every once in a while you wind up in a dream but somehow recognize it as a dream, and you may have found yourself able to pretty much program the dream to your specifications. While there are plenty of tips and tricks to make this happen on purpose, we've narrowed it down to what seems like the most useful, so that you can be riding dinosaurs with Gary Coleman in your sleep in no time:

1. Keep a Dream Journal

As soon as you wake up from a dream, write down every little thing you can remember about it. Supposedly by writing it down, your brain recognizes certain patterns that only occur in a dream (since most dreams are immediately forgotten) and if they are on paper, you can recall them easily.

2. Think about exactly what you want to dream right before you fall asleep. Makes sense. For instance you've probably fallen asleep watching MythBusters before and immediately dreamed you were flying through the air, using a giant version of Jamie's mustache as a hang glider.

Just us?

3. The best time to have a lucid dream is either right before you regularly wake up, or right after. Studies have shown that more people have lucid dreams when they take a nap shortly after they first wake up in the morning.

So you can do all that, or if you are the lazy type, get yourself something like the NovaDreamer, a device that detects when you've entered REM sleep and then makes a noise that's supposed to be not quite enough to wake you up, but enough to raise your awareness to, "Hey, this is totally a dream I'm having!" levels.

How Does It Work?

Obviously the big difference between a dream and real life is that if the Hamburglar came bursting out of your refrigerator right now and started screaming at you in Vietnamese, your first thought would be "This is a strange and unusual event that is occurring right now, and I should question my perceptions." If the same thing happens in a dream, you just go with it.

In a dream state, your mind mostly loses the ability to criticize anything that's happening because dreaming just doesn't involve the critical part of your brain. You're all worried that you're at work in your underwear, and don't even blink at the fact that your boss is a dragon who speaks in the voice of your old middle school gym coach.

But if you change your mental state ever so slightly, that critical part of your brain can keep functioning even while in dreamland. If you can perfect the technique of dreaming while not all the way asleep, the next thing you know you're ordering up a Smurf orgy.

#2.

Learn More While You Sleep

So say you haven't followed that first step up there and choose to continue sleeping like other mere mortals. A very minor change in your schedule can still let you use your sleep patterns to your advantage, by making you smarter.

Holy Shit, How Can I Do It?

No, we're not talking about those scams where they have you put a tape recorder under your pillow and let it teach you Spanish while you're asleep. What scientists have found out is if you need to remember a bunch of information (say, for a big exam), do NOT study right up until time for the exam. Study at least 24 hours before, and sleep on it.

Note: "Sleep on it" is simply an expression. You can sleep in a bed.

They did a study at Harvard that proved this technique works. Participants were separated into three different groups after being shown images that they were told to memorize. One of the groups was tested on the memorization after 20 minutes, the other after 12 hours and the last after 24 hours. You would expect that the ones who were tested just 20 minutes later would do best, but that would, of course, make a really shitty story.

No, the participants who slept on it and had 24 hours for the information to fester in their brain did the best on the test, while those who only had 20 minutes did the worst.

How Does It Work?

Scientists say the ability your brain has to retain information works in three different ways: acquisition, consolidation and recall. While the first and last occur while you're awake, it's the middle-man that is important during sleep.

When you sleep, your brain is constantly processing information that you couldn't have processed with everything going on up there during the day. This works to strengthen your neurological bonds in the brain. Think of it like downloading something on a computer. When you go to download something while your porn is up, it takes longer, right? Close up any applications that are running and you have a smoother, quicker download. Yeah, kind of like that... maybe.

So does this technique work with the "sleep two hours a day" system we mentioned earlier? We're not sure anyone has tried it, but by our calculations such a person would immediately gain mental superpowers, possibly including telekinesis. Somebody in the comments try it and let us know.

#1.

Believe Something Happened (That Totally Didn't)

Stop for a moment and recall your fondest childhood memory. Or your worst. In either case, there's a really good chance that it's total bullshit.

Memory is a funny thing. Research has consistently found that our memories from when we were kids are either extremely inaccurate, or didn't happen at all. They are just elaborate constructions of a memory storage system that isn't very good at distinguishing real memories from fake ones.

Are you positive this didn't happen?

So what if we told you that there was a way to do this on purpose? To hack your brain into believing (and "seeing" vividly) a completely made-up event that never actually happened?

Holy Shit! How Do I Do It?

The trick is you need somebody else to do it for you (or to you). But it takes very little effort, and no Total Recall-style brain-hacking machines.

For instance, in a study in 1995 researchers sat down a group of people and mentioned four incidents from their childhood (gathered from family members) and asked subjects how well they remembered them. What they didn't mention was that one of the stories (a tale of them being lost in a specific shopping mall) was utter bullshit.

It didn't matter. Twenty percent came back with sudden memories of the event that, in reality, never happened. The sheer act of asking them if it did, caused them to manufacture the memory, filling in details on the fly.

Remember when Bruce Campbell was President?

Researchers knew they could up that 20 percent figure. In another test, an unsuspecting group of people who had visited Disneyland in the past were placed in a room with a cardboard cutout of Bugs Bunny and/or were shown fake ads for Disneyland featuring Bugs. Afterwards, 40 percent claimed they vividly remembered seeing a guy in a Bugs Bunny costume when they were at Disneyland. They didn't, of course (Bugs isn't a Disney character).

Another study took it a step further, and actually Photoshopped a picture of each subject riding in a hot air balloon. When asked if they recalled this non-event, 50 percent said they did. Other experiments successfully convinced people they had at one time nearly drowned, been hospitalized or been attacked by a wild animal.

How Does It Work?

Your brain kind of plays it fast and loose when it stores memories, and for good reason: Usually the details don't matter. You remember your best friend's phone number but don't remember exactly where and when he told you. You remember that you hate zucchini, but don't remember what day of the week you tried it. Your brain breaks up memories into a stew of general lessons learned and important stuff you'll need later.

The problem is that same process makes it very difficult to distinguish real memories from fake ones since the source of a memory is so often discarded in the stew. A fact you think you read in a newspaper might in reality have been read in a fictional novel, or heard from a friend, or dreamed, or implanted by somebody who's fucking with you.

So not only could somebody do this for you (though it would have to be set up so that you don't know where and when) but it seems like you could run a pretty successful business just implanting happy childhoods for people.

You know, like that time you found out you were adopted, and that your real parents were the Thundercats.

Is saving our atmosphere killing our seas? Biofuels may stifle global warming, but scientists warn that agricultural runoff causes new problems.

Each year in April and May as farmers in the central US fertilize their crops, nearly 450 thousand metric tons of nitrates and phosphates pour down the Mississippi River. When these chemicals reach the Gulf of Mexico, they cause a feeding frenzy as photosynthetic algae absorb the nutrients. It’s a boom-and-bust cycle of epic proportions: The algae populations grow explosively, then die and decompose. This process depletes the water of oxygen on a vast scale, creating a suffocating “dead zone” the size of Massachusetts where few, if any, animals can survive.

The EPA has been working to reduce the size of the dead zone, with a goal of shrinking it to about 5,000 square kilometers—a quarter of its current size—by 2015. But a new study in Environmental Science & Technology shows that other efforts to preserve the environment may be exacerbating the dead zone. Kristopher Hite, a graduate student in biochemistry at Colorado State University, explains the implications of the study on his blog, Tom Paine’s Ghost.

The study examined the implications of a 2007 law that requires the US to annually produce 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. Barring major biofuel production breakthroughs from sources like algae or microbes, most of this fuel will come from crops grown in the central US; the fertilizers and other agricultural waste they produce will flow straight down the Mississippi and feed the dead zone. Hite says the study, led by Christine Costello, found that meeting this goal will make it impossible for the EPA to reach its target reduction in the size of the dead zone. Even if fertilizer-intensive corn is replaced with more eco-friendly crops like switchgrass, the vast increase in agricultural production will cause the dead zone to grow unless preventive measures are taken.

So what can be done about it? The Society for Conservation Biology suggests that increasing the size of wetlands or other buffer zones around the source of the pollution—the farms themselves—could help.

Unfortunately, artificial wetlands have their own negative ecological side effects. As this post at Conservation Maven shows, some created wetlands are dominated by invasive species. Apparently, the heavy equipment used to build the sites also compacts the soil in a way that makes it more difficult for native species to flourish.

But not all human-made wetlands are bad. Conservation Maven also points to a Swedish study which found that less-diverse wetlands dominated by tall plants are actually more efficient at removing nitrogen from runoff than many other sites. So creating wetlands can be a very effective means of removing pollutants from water, even if local biodiversity suffers. The current pace of biofuel development, however, exceeds the capacity of available wetlands.

Hite remains an optimist, pointing to new technology that uses fungi to convert the cellulose in wood chips, corn stalks, and other agricultural “waste” into biofuels. If this can be done efficiently, we could eventually harvest several times more energy from the same amount of cropland. Even while acknowledging that we may still face problems like the Gulf’s dead zone, Hite believes that ultimately technology can help us prevent greater ecological disasters like global warming.

But should Hite even be making this case? How do we decide whether it’s ecologically sensible to produce biofuels or build wetlands? Some have argued that the advocacy of scientists like Hite and websites like Conservation Maven is misplaced. Shouldn’t scientists just be interested in giving us the facts, staying removed from policy decisions and letting the general public and politicians decide how to act? Doesn’t becoming an advocate introduce bias into the scientific process, potentially tarnishing results?

James Hrynyshyn is a freelance journalist and unapologetic environmental advocate who says that many of the best scientists, from Albert Einstein, to Carl Sagan, to NASA’s James Hansen, have also been important policy advocates. On his blog, The Island of Doubt, Hrynyshyn cites a May paper in Conservation Biology by Michael Nelson and John Vucetich, who argue that scientists’ advocacy positions can easily be separated from scientific truths. For instance, late in his life the great chemist Linus Pauling damaged his reputation by peddling vitamin C as a cure-all, but that didn’t take away from his earlier scientific contributions, for which he won two Nobel prizes.

More importantly, Hrynyshyn says, it’s unfair and unwise to restrict individuals—who are interested citizens as well as working scientists—from participating in the political process, especially when those individuals have knowledge and expertise that applies directly to important problems. Conservation biologists can both alert us to potential ecological disasters and offer insight into how to solve them. Why not tap their expertise to help form policy decisions?

There’s much more discussion of ecology—and ecologists’ role in creating environmental policy—at ResearchBlogging.org.

Optical illusions may seem to deceive, but they actually reveal truths about how our brains construct reality

Stare at the red dot in the center of the figure for a minute or two. Before long, the green ring will disappear—it simply seems to fade into the white background. There are no tricks: This is a simple, static image file. The effect has been known for more than two centuries and is named for its discoverer, Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler (1780–1866), a Swiss physician and philosopher. “Troxler fading” is actually related to what you experience when you get “dizzy”: You become so habituated to a phenomenon (spinning in a circle or seeing a green ring in your peripheral vision) that you stop noticing it’s there. Or, rather, you don’t realize that your perceptual system has begun actively ignoring it. It’s only when your circumstances change that you see what the phenomenon has done to your perceptual system. When you stop spinning, the world seems to continue, in reverse. When you look away from the green ring, you see a red ring in the same part of your visual field.

Occasionally an illusion attracts widespread notice online, perhaps because it was posted by a popular blogger, but it’s rare that we see a scientific explanation of how the illusion works. That’s beginning to change. Each year, at the meeting of the Visual Science Society, the Neural Correlate Society holds a contest where vision scientists share their latest, greatest optical illusions. This year’s winner is entitled “The Break of the Curveball” and was created by Arthur Shapiro, Zhong-Lin Lu, Emily Knight, and Robert Ennis. Shapiro, an associate professor of psychology at American University, is also a blogger and an avid baseball fan. (He once referred to pro football games in the early fall during the baseball playoffs as “preseason games that count.”) He has a full explanation of the illusion on his blog, but to my mind an even more impressive illusion is this one. (Click and watch this before continuing!)

When you shift your focus from the red dot to the yellow dot, the motion of the balls rotating around the dots appears to reverse. Again, Shapiro explains the effect on his blog. As with Troxler fading, the effect is due to our perceptual system’s limited ability to process information outside of a central focal region. When you look directly at the red dot, you can see that the surrounding circles are moving in one direction as the shaded patterns inside the circles are moving the opposite direction. But you can’t process all the information about the circles ringing the yellow dot in your peripheral vision, so the pattern moving inside the circles dominates.

But our perception of the world doesn’t rely solely on vision. We use all our senses to build a representation of what the world is really like. Many illusions occur because what we perceive with one sense conflicts with another. Varun Sreenivasan, a graduate student at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, has written an amazing account of a 2003 study on the “rubber hand effect.” The basic premise is this: If your real hand is hidden behind a screen and you see a fake hand in its place, then you can “feel” it when a researcher touches the fake hand. Neuroscientists K. Carrie Armel and V.S. Ramachandran wanted to see when the illusion broke down.

First, they asked volunteers to place one hand behind a screen. An experimenter scratched the table in front of the screen while either scratching or not scratching the hidden hand. The participants reported “feeling” a scratch on their real hand whether or not it was actually being scratched.

They also experimented with an extremely unrealistic rubber hand and arm, much longer than a real arm. The researchers bent one of the fake fingers back to what would be a very painful position while lifting the volunteer’s real (hidden) finger only slightly. The participants said they felt real pain, which was only slightly less intense with the extra-long rubber arm than with a realistic rubber arm. A measure of skin conductance showed a dramatic a physiological response in the volunteers as well. Clearly the effect of seeing a finger being bent contributes greatly to our experience of pain.

These illusions are not only fascinating to observe and experience, they also tell us a great deal about how our perceptual system functions. We receive so many inputs from the environment that the brain must prioritize which inputs to trust. Illusions represent the boundaries between conflicting inputs to the perceptual system, and by uncovering them—and often explaining them on their blogs—researchers can also uncover how the brain itself works. You can follow that conversation at ResearchBlogging.org.

More on illusion at Researchblogging.org:

• The Hollow Mask Illusion: An incredible phenomenon which makes hollow faces look solid. The Neuroskeptic shows how it works. Dave Munger elaborates on the same research at Cognitive Daily.
• The Waterfall Illusion: The Neurophilosopher shows how a classic visual illusion can also be experienced through the sense of touch.
• Is “déjà vu” an illusion? Christian Jarrett explains how a recent study shows that déjà vu may be caused a fleeting (but recent) glimpse of a scene.

Studying the Strangest Man

Paul Dirac (left) and Richard Feynman. From The Strangest Man. Photograph by A. John Coleman, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today collection.

For more than five years, former physicist Graham Farmelo devoted himself to unlocking the secrets of one of the most important and curious figures of 20th century science, Paul Dirac. He was born in 1902 and died in 1984, and though lionized by his peers for his fundamental work in quantum mechanics (among other things, he predicted the existence of antimatter and won a Nobel Prize when he was only 31), Dirac’s legacy has fared poorly among the general public. During his research, Farmelo found that most residents of the “famous” physicist’s hometown of Bristol didn’t even know who Dirac was. Unquestionably, this is due to Dirac’s reclusive and taciturn behavior; his social quiescence was so extreme that it inspired his fellow physicists to invent an unofficial unit of measure for the minimal number of words a person could speak in polite company: a “Dirac,” roughly one utterance per hour.

But as Farmelo delved deeper into Dirac’s life for his new biography, The Strangest Man, he discovered surprising complexity and contradiction that gives new appreciation to the physicist’s character: Despite what many perceived as a lack of empathy, Dirac married, raised children, and forged several close lifelong friendships. Despite his professed distaste for unscientific reasoning, in his later life he became increasingly obsessed with philosophical, even religious, questions. And despite his love for the rarefied subject of theoretical physics, Dirac also had a passion for “lowbrow” cartoons and comic books.

Farmelo spoke with Seed’s Lee Billings about the process of researching the book and his astonishing hypothesis that could explain, once and for all, Dirac’s enigmatic behavior.

Seed: What motivated you to spend five years writing a book about Paul Dirac?
Graham Farmelo: I used to be a theoretical physicist, and I can say that everyone in that profession is interested in Dirac. He’s often said to be “the first really modern theoretician” or “the theorist’s theorist.” I remember as an undergraduate coming across my first taste of Dirac’s physics, something called Fermi-Dirac statistics, which governs the transistors and electron flow in your computer. I was blown away, a bit like a young music student listening to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Dirac’s first papers on quantum mechanics still look modern, more than those of any of his fellow pioneers. The mathematical imagination and beauty of those articles is amazing. I wanted to write a biography of him to try to communicate the power and scope of his work to non-specialists who are nevertheless curious about science, and to try to understand his remarkable personality.

In my time in physics, I met quite a few “Dirac fanatics,” people who are obsessive about him. I’m speaking to you from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and I’ve spent several lunchtimes recounting to the physicists here some new “Dirac stories.”

Seed: “Dirac stories?” Can you give me some examples?
GF: Certainly. At the end of a lecture, Dirac agreed to answer questions. Someone in the audience piped up: “I didn’t understand the equation on the top right of the blackboard, professor.” Dirac was silent for more than a minute. When the moderator asked him if he’d like to answer the question, Dirac shook his head and said, “That wasn’t a question. It was a comment.”

Here’s another: Over dinner one evening at Saint John’s College, Cambridge, an American visitor who was desperate to meet the formidable Dirac steeled himself to ask, “Are you going on vacation this summer, professor?” Silence. About 20 minutes later, Dirac turned to the visitor and said, “Why do you ask?”

Seed: He sounds like quite a deep, literal thinker. Did Dirac have any interests outside physics?
GF: Yes, a lot, but he just didn’t talk about them. He read widely, from Tolstoy to John le Carré. Among artists, he loved Rembrandt and Salvador Dali. Like Einstein, Dirac’s taste in music was mainly classical, but in later life he had a thing about Cher. To settle a dispute with his wife, he bought a second television so that he could watch a Cher special while she watched the Oscars.

Seed: The book includes several revelatory passages documenting Dirac’s personal life. How did you research and verify that material?
GF: I devoted a lot of time tracking down Dirac’s surviving friends, people who knew him very well. The most important one I found was his last great friend, Leopold Halpern, an expert on relativity who slept in the open air, refused to wash with soap, and liked to slice open baked potatoes with a karate chop. A few years ago, when Halpern was at death’s door with prostate cancer, he flew across the country to Florida, where Dirac spent the latter part of his life, just so he could row me up Wakulla Springs. He and Dirac used to go rowing every weekend. That was a special trip for me: Even now I’m looking at my arm and there are goose bumps. He showed me places where they talked, even where they went skinny dipping. Two and a half months later, Halpern died.

I spent several months consulting the Dirac archive at Florida State University in Tallahassee, which was virtually untouched. Dirac was an FSU professor for the last 14 years of his life. I found amazing things, not just letters from great physicists like Heisenberg and Schrödinger but also an amazing cache of weekly letters from Dirac’s mother, spanning almost 20 years. Many historians would’ve probably turned their noses up at these, but I found in them a dramatic story that illuminates Dirac’s home life and upbringing. I was also blessed with beginner’s luck when I happened to meet Dirac’s younger daughter at a centenary celebration of his birth. We hit it off well, and one day in her kitchen while I was visiting her, she showed me something like 120 private letters between Dirac and his first serious girlfriend, later his wife. Keep in mind, this man hardly spoke a word, and here he was opening up, writing whole pages—epics for him. I couldn’t believe my luck. Here was Dirac talking about his father with whom he didn’t get along at all, and about what it felt like to be someone conscious, that he was unlike most other people, unable to empathize with them. This is just my opinion here, but I believe he demonstrated many symptoms of what we now call autism, though that condition had not been identified at the time.

Seed: You think Dirac had undiagnosed autism?
GF: I did not go into this book project thinking Dirac was autistic in any way. When I started researching him all those years ago, I barely even knew what the term “autism” meant, and certainly didn’t apply it to Dirac. But as I researched, I encountered rumors about Dirac being autistic, about Einstein being autistic, and speculations that autism was more prevalent in scientists and mathematicians. So during one of my stays at Cambridge, I went to see Simon Baron-Cohen, who is arguably Britain’s leading expert on autism. He knew nothing about Dirac, but, to my amazement, he began describing patterns of behavior that exactly correspond to Dirac’s. Let me stress that this is just a hypothesis, and that I’m personally very skeptical of attempts to psychoanalyze people who are dead. This isn’t theoretical physics; I can’t do a slam-dunk experiment to prove it.

Seed: What were some of the behavioral indicators?
GF: There are many of them: inability to empathize, extreme taciturnity and literal-mindedness, a passion for a routine, narrow interests, a lack of physical coordination, dislike of sudden loud noises, and so on. Many of the “Dirac stories” told by physicists are, in my opinion, actually autism stories. When people are laughing at these things, they forget what they’re actually doing is mocking.

Seed: Do you think those traits might have helped him in his work or given him a unique perspective?
GF: Well, he was certainly as focused as a laser and as logical as a computer. He also had a fascinating way of looking at mathematics. He had a phrase, “My equation is smarter than I am.” He really did think that a good equation could be more intelligent than its creator. There’s a kind of mysticism in that. In the last 15 or 20 years of his life, he became obsessed with the philosophy that, for a piece of mathematics to be useful in fundamental physics, it must be beautiful. For instance, he thought the theory of photon and electron interactions—what we call quantum electrodynamics—was ugly, so he wouldn’t accept it. He had this extremely rigorous sense of beauty, and saw each successive revolution in physics progressing through increasingly beautiful mathematics.

Dirac, to his dying breath, pursued this quest for mathematical beauty. For him, everything apart from that principle was just details. The job of the fundamental theorist was to look for mathematically beautiful laws. That’s why the string theorists are on the right track, even though there aren’t experiments to bear them out at the moment.

Seed: So Dirac would be a fan of string theory, you think?
GF: Well, when people get old, they tend to basically think that everything’s gone to the dogs, and there was an element to that in Dirac, who took virtually no interest in the latest findings in his field. But if you apply his idea about sticking to mathematically beautiful generalizations of past theories and to hell with experiments in the short term, then this philosophy should embolden string theorists, yes.