Momentary Language

Flashbulb memories and 9/11

Over at the Frontal Cortex blog, Jonah Lehrer has a post today that is basically one big shout-out to research done by my colleague, Jennifer Talarico, on the reliability -- and the perceived reliability -- of flashbulb memories.  (See also, more recently, here.)

What was he thinking?

I always thought Crick was the smart one. This proves it. (Here is a link to the Times of London, to which Watson first made his remarks.)

Out of my e-mail, quietly mocking ...

Obviously moved by my memorial to Rorty, one of my colleagues, Jen Talarico, sent me the following e-mail:

When I began watching TV seriously in the early 1980's, my introduction to contemporary science was Mr. Wizard -- particularly Mr. Wizard's World on Nickelodeon.

His breezy, seemingly superficial conversational style ... and, perhaps more significantly, his low-key excitement about what he perceived to be the magic and mystery of science ... made Herbert, in many ways, well-suited to be a popularizer of basic principles in science, especially the physical sciences like chemistry and meteorology. Furthermore, those very traits made for work that was always engaging, unfailingly provocative, and often brilliant.

As reported by the Mr. Wizard Studios Home Page, Herbert died on Tuesday, June 12, 2007. His voice will be missed.

"... the numbers themselves may actually hinder the psychological processes required to prompt action."

Paul Slovic, president of Decision Research and professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, has a fascinating short essay over at Foreign Policy about the ways in which the brain processes responsible for ratiocinative, calculating thought may interfere with those brain processes responsible for affective responses, resulting in an inability to act on perceptions of suffering or injustice.

Slovic describes the difficulty in this way:

The psychological mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes in which mass murder is neglected involves what’s known as the “dance of affect and reason” in decision-making. Affect is our ability to sense immediately whether something is good or bad. But the problem of numbing arises when these positive and negative feelings combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions. Psychologists have found that the statistics of mass murder or genocide—no matter how large the numbers—do not convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The numbers fail to trigger the affective emotion or feeling required to motivate action. In other words, we know that genocide in Darfur is real, but we do not “feel” that reality. In fact, not only do we fail to grasp the gravity of the statistics, but the numbers themselves may actually hinder the psychological processes required to prompt action.

What took so long?

According to eWeek (here), Frances E. Allen has become the first woman in the 41-year history of the Turing Award to win the prize, presented by the Association of Computing Machinery.

(See also the LA Times article on Allen's winning the Award.)

Traces of a many-hunekered soul

George Johnson is an exemplary science writer -- clear-headed, inquisitive, vivid, enthusiastic, and wide-ranging in his interests. Who better, then, to review a new book by Douglas Hofstadter, who exemplifies all of those traits as well -- and in spades!

Results of Science Panel's Hwang Investigation Released

Nicholas Wade reports in today's NY Times on the release of a panel report detailing ways in which the journal Science can improve its measures for preventing fraudulent research reporting on the level of the now-infamous case of the 2004 article in which Dr. Hwang Woo-suk claimed to have grown stem-cells from an adult human cell. The text of the panel report and a response from the editor of Science, as well as other documents involving the Hwang case, are here.

After only a cursory reading of the documents, I couldn't help but note this passage, the first of the panel's suggestions:

There should be a formal, required 'risk assessment' for papers that have been selected for publication. This assessment would be a new procedure, and would explicitly ask questions about the probability that the work might be intentionally deceptive, or just wrong, and the consequences for the reputation of Science and science, and for other issues (public policy, intellectual property, academic credit). Papers that are likely to have high visibility, for example in climate, energy, human health, etc., should get special scrutiny.

I was pleased to see how well this suggestion comports with my claim that scientific practice is self-regulating to the extent that those purported discoveries with greater practical import will receive correspondingly greater scrutiny, as argued in this blog here and here.

Potentially good news in Alzheimer's research

A release today at the ScienceDaily website suggests that two researchers at Stanford University might have discovered one of the mechanisms leading to the development of Alzheimer's disease:

Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, associate professor of neurology and a researcher at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System ... and Ina Tesseur, PhD, an instructor in the Department of Neurology, examined thin slices of the brains of Alzheimer's patients who had died, and discovered abnormally low levels of a molecule involved in controlling the body's response to infection. That molecule allows the brain to detect and respond to TGF-beta, or transforming growth factor, a protein teeming through our bodies, involved in fighting infection, stopping cancer and perhaps keeping brain cells alive.

No other researchers had seen this change before, so Tesseur and Wyss-Coray set out to investigate whether it had some connection to Alzheimer's disease. They hypothesized that by protecting neurons, TGF-beta may help prevent Alzheimer's disease. If the TGF-beta pathway is turned off, the brain becomes more susceptible to a toxic buildup of proteins.

"We tried to see what happens if we block neurons from getting this beneficial signal," said Wyss-Coray.

...

"Our study offers the possibility that if you have a reduction in this pathway, then you can accelerate the pathology," said Wyss-Coray. The flip side is that activating the TGF-beta pathway may offer a treatment for Alzheimer's, he said.

Making visible the collective work of science

In an essay in today's Sunday Book Review, "Twilight of the Idols," Peter Dizikes notes that the "great-man" view of history implied by the traditional science biography is being made obsolete by the current, highly collaborative structures of contemporary scientific practice:

Contemporary science is ... far more collaborative than non-scientists may imagine. A giant new particle collider soon to open in Switzerland, for example, will have more than 7,000 physicists participating in its experiments. “If you try to understand that kind of work through a biography,” Peter Galison, a historian of science at Harvard, said in a recent interview, “you’re really cutting the wood against the grain, and you can easily end up making invisible the collective work that’s so crucial for that kind of accomplishment.”

Nor, Dizikes suggests, is the phenomenon of widespread collaboration observable only among experimentalists:

This trend applies even to theorists, who, in the mode of Newton or Einstein, still tackle problems in relative isolation. “The main difference today is there are so many people working on these deep problems,” the physicist Brian Greene said recently. In one 15-page span of his best-selling book “The Elegant Universe” (1999), Greene mentions 24 scientists whose work prefigured a rich period in the development of string theory, the dominant idea in theoretical physics for the past 20 years. Faithfully untangling these various threads makes it harder for any writer to create a linear narrative of discovery, in which a few key influences on one scientist lead to a singular insight.

These observations seem, perhaps, unsurprising to anyone who has surveyed contemporary scientific practice. What I found most interesting, however, were historians' recent reappraisals of the role of collaboration in some of the earlier revolutionary periods in the history of science:

Indeed, science biography has sometimes distorted its subject by ignoring the communal aspects of scientific thought. Geology once had a great-man history in which 18th- and 19th-century British iconoclasts like James Hutton and William Smith discerned the antiquity of the earth, an idea that was absorbed in turn by the geologist Charles Lyell, and then set the stage for Darwin’s theory of evolution. But as the historian of science Martin Rudwick has shown, a whole network of European scientists was advancing geological research in this period. Daniel Kevles, a historian of science at Yale, said recently, “What’s happened in the last 15 or 20 years is that we’ve learned how even the very greatest scientists — Newton, Darwin, Einstein — were always engaged in collaboration of a very important, fundamental nature with their contemporaries.”

Oddly enough, Dizikes's presentation of the example of the development of 18th and 19th century geologic science as culminating in Darwin's theory of evolution seems at least to imply that -- despite Rudwick's research on the geologists' practices -- Darwin himself was still a lone revolutionary. This implication, however, would be false, as we now know. Recent studies of Darwin's life -- such as Janet Browne's Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, to cite one prominent, and excellent, example -- have demonstrated that Darwin himself was at the center of a massive network, spanning the globe, of researchers, explorers, amateur naturalists, all of whose investigations were instrumental for Darwin in the completion of his own work.

A Personal Portrait of Alzheimer's

Today's science section of the NY Times contains a series of the American artist William Utermohlen's self-portraits, chronicling his descent into Alzheimer's disease. Although it is, of course, hard to separate one's aesthetic judgments of the work from one's knowledge of the process by which it was created, it is difficult to deny the power of many of the paintings -- particularly the final two in the sequence seemed, to me, very strong.