Out-of-body experience: Master of illusion
“Henrik Ehrsson uses mannequins, rubber arms and virtual reality to create body illusions, all in the name of neuroscience.
It is not every day that you are separated from your body and then stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife.
But such experiences are routine in the lab of Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who uses illusions to probe, stretch and displace people’s sense of self. Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, he has convinced me that I am floating a few metres behind my own body. As I see a knife plunging towards my virtual chest, I flinch. Two electrodes on my fingers record the sweat that automatically erupts on my skin, and a nearby laptop plots my spiking fear on a graph.
Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson’s repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person1, gained a third arm2, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions3. The storeroom in his lab is stuffed with mannequins of various sizes, disembodied dolls’ heads, fake hands, cameras, knives and hammers. It looks like a serial killer’s basement. “The other neuroscientists think we’re a little crazy,” Ehrsson admits.
But Ehrsson’s unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.”
Read more at Nature.com (Thanks Annette)
GCHQ challenges codebreakers via social networks
“UK intelligence agency GCHQ has launched a code-cracking competition to help attract new talent.
The organisation has invited potential applicants to solve a visual code posted at an unbranded standalone website.
The challenge has also been “seeded” to social media sites, blogs and forums.
A spokesman said the campaign aimed to raise the profile of GCHQ to an audience that would otherwise be difficult to reach.
“The target audience for this particular campaign is one that may not typically be attracted to traditional advertising methods and may be unaware that GCHQ is recruiting for these kinds of roles,” the spokesman said.
“Their skills may be ideally suited to our work and yet they may not understand how they could apply them to a working environment, particularly one where they have the opportunity to contribute so much.”
The competition began in secret on 3 November and will continue until 12 December.
GCHQ said that once the code was cracked individuals would be presented with a keyword to enter into a form field. They would then be redirected to the agency’s recruitment website.
The organisation said it was not worried that the problem’s answer might be spread around the internet.
It said it would still benefit because the resulting discussion would “generate future recruitment enquiries”.
However, it added that anyone who had previously hacked illegally would be ineligible. The agency’s website also states that applicants must be British citizens.”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks @siobha)
‘Jet Man’ Flies In Formation Over Alps
“A self-styled “jet man” has performed another death-defying stunt – flying alongside two Albatross aircraft above the Swiss Alps. Adventurer Yves Rossy flew in a custom-built jet suit over the mountain range in formation with the aircraft. Rossy, 51, launched himself from the side of a helicopter before taking his place alongside the two jets high above the Alps.
The daredevil – who used to fly fighter jets with the Swiss airforce – wears a jet suit which has a wing span of two metres. The pack weighs around 120lb and is fitted with four engines that enable him to travel at speeds in excess of 125mph. Once the flight was completed, the adventurer safely parachuted back down to the ground.
Rossy is still the first man in the history of aviation to fly with a jet-propelled wing, a feat he first achieved in 2006. In May 2008, he flew in his suit over the Swiss Alps for the first time and then crossed the English Channel later that year. Since then, he has worked on the design of his jet-pack which has led to his first formation flights and acrobatics.”
Read more at Sky (Thanks Annette)
What it means to donate your brain
“At 92 years old, Albert Webb is wandering through an exhibition in London’s trendy Shoreditch. In the underground warren of rooms, echoes of recorded voices mingle with the sounds of people’s conversations. The occasional burst of laughter bounces around the walls. Wearing a white sweater that he knitted himself, Webb leans in to tell me his story. When he smiles his eyes disappear into thin creases, giving him an air of gleefulness.
A grin may seem an odd response to the question I’ve just asked – why he chose to donate his brain to medical research – but after 17 years participating in a brain study led by the aptly named Carol Brayne of the University of Cambridge, Webb discusses his decision with ease. To him, donation secures a form of immortality.
He explains that he’d knit the sweater he’s wearing many years ago, before he lost his wife Ellen. Knitting was something they had done together. “When she died, I packed it in,” he says. She had dementia toward the end of her life. This Saturday marks the ninth anniversary of her death. They were married for 57 years.
It’s a poignant story in a fitting setting. We are standing in the middle of Mind Over Matter, an exhibition inspired by the research of Brayne and colleagues that is the result of a long collaboration between artist Ania Dabrowska and social scientist Bronwyn Parry. The exhibition focuses on 12 brain donors from Brayne’s studies – the stories of their lives and triumphs, and their reasons for donating.”
Read more at New Scientist (Thanks Annette)
The Obedience Experiments at 50
“This year is the 50th anniversary of the start of Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking experiments on obedience to destructive orders — the most famous, controversial and, arguably, most important psychological research of our times. To commemorate this milestone, in this article I present the key elements comprising the legacy of those experiments.
Milgram was a 28-year-old junior faculty member at Yale University when he began his program of research on obedience, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which lasted from August 7, 1961 through May 27, 1962.
As we know, in his obedience experiments Milgram made the startling discovery that a majority of his subjects — average and, presumably, normal community residents — were willing to give a series of what they believed were increasingly painful and, perhaps, harmful electric shocks to a vehemently protesting victim simply because they were commanded to do so by an authority (although no shock was actually given). They did this despite the fact that the experimenter had no coercive powers to enforce his commands and the person they were shocking was an innocent victim who did nothing to merit such punishment. Although Milgram conducted over 20 variations of his basic procedure, his central finding obtained in several standard, or baseline, conditions was that about two-thirds of the subjects fully obeyed the experimenter, progressing step-by-step up to the maximum shock of 450 volts.
First and foremost, the obedience experiments taught us that we have a powerful propensity to obey authority. Did we need Milgram to tell us this? Of course, not. What he did teach us is just how strong this tendency is — so strong, in fact, that it can make us act in ways contrary to our moral principles.
Milgram’s findings provided a powerful affirmation of one of the main guiding principles of contemporary social psychology: That often it is not the kind of person we are that determines how we act, but rather the kind of situation we find ourselves in. To perceive behavior as flowing from within — from our character or personality — is to paint an incomplete picture of the determinants of our behavior. Milgram showed that external pressures coming from a legitimate authority can make us behave in ways we would not even consider when acting on our own.”
Continue reading at APS (Thanks Annette)
A ‘self’ portrait of an artist with memory loss
“She finished the books and wanted more. Before her mother could fetch some, Lonni Sue started making grids with words hidden in them. Thousands of puzzles poured out of her. Wearing thin the pages of a paperback dictionary, she created elaborate word lists, then puzzles from the lists and then images from the puzzles. A grid of words for things that hang in the closet took the shape of a coat hanger. Words related to trousers formed a pair of pants. Her vocabulary seemed to open a new door for her creativity.
Enter Barbara Landau. She had gone to high school with Lonni Sue in the Princeton, N.J., area. (“She was brilliant,” Landau remembers.) Today, Landau is an expert on cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University. She had followed Lonni Sue’s career as an artist for years and now, with Hopkins colleague Michael McCloskey, she explored Lonni Sue’s amnesia intensively. It was Landau who brought Lonni Sue’s art to the Walters.
Scientists often work with people who have lost the use of part of the brain to learn how the normal brain works.
After working with Lonni Sue, Landau concludes: “If we think that art and creativity have to be rooted in what we know about ourselves or what we remember about ourselves, that clearly is not the case.”
Lonni Sue has been full of surprises. She can remember how to fly an airplane — “It’s like dancing in the sky,” she said in an interview — but she can’t remember the death of her father.
She can’t recognize art she treasured before her illness — “Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh, for example. Yet she can instantly recognize her own past work.
She can’t remember that she was married for 10 years, but she can remember how to play Bach suites on her viola. But if, as she’s putting her instrument away, her mother thanks her for playing, she’s likely to look astonished and say, “Oh, did I play?”
She cannot produce the kind of finished art she once drew, but her work shows flashes of her old skill as well as her characteristic whimsy and puns.
“When you draw a drawing, you can draw people in,” she says.”
The Washington Post (Thanks Annette)
Trial, error and the God complex (video)
Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems — and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.
Serbia wants U.N. to honor Tesla birthday
Serbia says it will ask the United Nations to declare the birth date of scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla International Science Day.
In 2010 Serbia declared Tesla’s birthday, July 10, as Science Day in Serbia with events drawing attention to Tesla’s accomplishments, the news agency Tanjug reported.
Tesla was born in the region of Austria-Hungary that is today Croatia and built his career in the United States.
Best remembered for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Tesla was an important figure in the early days of commercial electricity, whose patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power systems.
Full Story at upi
Nikola Tesla at Wikipedia
The autobiography of Nikola Testla
The Horizon Guide: Moon with Professor Brian Cox
Professor Brian Cox (who has recovered from the neck injury shown above) takes a look through nearly 50 years of BBC archive at the story of man’s relationship with the Moon.
From the BBC’s space fanatic James Burke testing out the latest NASA equipment to 1960s interviews about the bacon-flavoured crystals that astronauts can survive on in space, to the iconic images of man’s first steps on the Moon and the dramatic story of Apollo 13, Horizon and the BBC have covered it all.
But since President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s was reached, no one has succeeded in reigniting the public’s enthusiasm for space travel and lunar voyages. Why?
On his journey through the ages, Professor Brian “Lovely” Cox explores the role that international competition played in getting man to the Moon and asks if, with America no longer the world’s only superpower, we are at the dawn of a bright new space age.
Available now at iPlayer
Myth-busting: As you get older your mind deteriorates, tell that to the man who just got his PhD at 82
“Cognitive fitness” is defined as the results of the overall functioning of brain processes such as comprehension, decision-making, problem-solving, learning and retention of knowledge. Most interesting are the capacities of abstraction, generalization, and meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) – which all aid in the ability to assess our environment, solve problems creatively and act decisively.
Roderick Gilkey and Clint Kilts claimed in Harvard Business Review—”Cognitive fitness is a state of optimized ability to remember, learn, plan, and adapt that is enhanced by certain attitudes, lifestyle choices, and exercises. The more cognitively fit you are, the better you will be able to make decisions, solve problems, and deal with stress and change.”
Evidence of very strong mental ability in later life can be seen in the likes of Arthur C Clarke who at 90 was still giving advice on the future, David Attenborough (85) continues to produce excellent books and TV programs and Noam Chomsky (82) is one of the most quoted intellectuals alive today and is quickly approaching his 200th book publication.
Also joining the list of brilliant octogenarians is 82-year-old Moreshwar Abhyankar. He has a string of degrees and diplomas to his credit, including a masters in arts, business administration, LLB, MMS and diplomas in journalism and social work.
It took Abhyankar nine years to complete the PhD on the subject ‘Impact of training interventions on the development and competencies of employees in private sector units in Pune’.
Abhyankar, who retired in 1988, chose this particular topic for his thesis because of his teaching experience of over 50 years.
“During my experience in training and teaching, I often wondered if the training programmes designed and conducted by the companies helped these employees at practical level.”
More on Abhyankar Times of India
Arthur C. Clarke
David Attenborough
Noam Chomsky
Feel free to list any other 80+ year brilliant old minds in the comments.
