Challenging the link between the human microcephalin gene, evolution, and cognition.

Michael Balter writes an interesting account in Science Magazine over the controversy over the interpretation of data on the microcephalin gene, a gene that regulates brain size. (Microcephaly is the congenital or developmental disorder in which the circumference of the head is smaller than normal because the brain has not developed properly or has stopped growing. )

"...in two papers in Science last year, Lahn reported that variants of the two genes appear to have been strongly favored by recent natural selection (Science, 9 September 2005, pp. 1717 and 1720). That implies that the variants conferred a survival or reproductive benefit, perhaps a cognitive one. In media interviews, Lahn conceded that there was no real evidence natural selection had acted on cognition or intelligence. But both papers pointed out that the mutations arose when key events in human cultural development occurred: The microcephalin variant was dated to about 37,000 years ago, when the first art and symbolism showed up in Europe, and the ASPM variant to 5800 years ago, when the first cities arose.


Lahn's papers also reported the skewed geographic distribution of the genetic variants. Variants in microcephalin turned up in 75% or more of some Europeans and Asians Lahn studied, but in less than 10% of some African groups. The ASPM variant was also much less frequent in Africa. (click on graphic to enlarge).

Bloggers jumped on the news, trumpeting the papers as support for the idea that African Americans have lower intelligence than whites. Two months later, in the conservative National Review Online, columnist John Derbyshire wrote that the research implied that "our cherished national dream of a well-mixed and harmonious meritocracy … may be unattainable."

"Soon after the Science papers were published, Lahn set out to see whether the variants give a cognitive advantage. In one study, Lahn helped controversial psychologist Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, test whether people who carry the favored variants have higher IQs. Rushton is well known for his claims that African Americans have lower intelligence than whites, and Lahn had found that some genetic variants are common in Europeans and Asians but less frequent among sub-Saharan Africans. But Rushton reported last week at the annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research in San Francisco, California, that he had struck out: The variants conferred no advantage on IQ tests. "[We] had no luck," Rushton told Science, "no matter which way we analyzed the data." Lahn was not a co-author, but his group genotyped the 644 adults of differing ethnicity in the study."

Among some geneticists, there was consternation. "There was no evidence whatsoever that these [genetic variants] have any effect" on differences between people, Altshuler says, adding that the controversy over the work was "easily anticipated." Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin goes further, criticizing both Lahn and Science for publishing such speculative links to cultural advances. "These two papers are particularly egregious examples of going well beyond the data to try to make a splash," he says. And archaeologist Scott MacEachern of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, says the archaeological links in the papers are simplistic and outdated. The symbolic revolution, agriculture, and urbanism developed "over many thousands of years, and none was restricted to Europe and the Middle East," he says."

Actions speak louder than brain images.

There is growing concern over the pseudoscientific use of brain imaging to predict behaviors or assign a character type. Apoorva Mandavilli writes a short essay on this topic in the Dec. 7 issue of Nature Magazine.

"Can brain scans of a racist, liar or psychopath accurately tell whether that person will persecute, fib or kill? No, say experts in the ethics of neuroscience, who are increasingly concerned that such images will be used to make dangerous legal or social judgements about people's behaviour. They say it is time for scientists, lawyers and philosophers to speak up about the limitations of such techniques....interpreting brain scans, and correlating them to actions, is inaccurate at best. All we can really gain from such studies is a more nuanced understanding of behaviour...studies of behavioural or physical responses — for example, a person's reaction to different races in real life — should trump imaging every time...The legal and moral claims being made[ from imaging studies involving very few people] are far too extensive."

" In a landmark case in the US Supreme Court in March 2005, several leading scientific groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the National Mental Health Association, filed briefs to support the premise that teenagers are less rational than adults.

The data included a brain-imaging study showing that the prefrontal cortex, which governs impulse control and reasoning, develops late in adolescence (see Nature 442, 865–867; 2006), and could explain some irrational aspects of teenage behaviour."

"Many groups thought this study could help rule against the death penalty. But although the court ruled against the death penalty for those younger than 18, it chose not to cite the brain-imaging study, relying instead on behavioural studies that showed adolescents are more impulsive, more vulnerable to peer pressure and more affected by stress."

Brain self repair

Jan's laboratory at UCSF (Cell Volume 127, Issue 6, 15 December 2006) has looked at an area of the brain known as the subventricular zone (SVZ). They showed that a gene called Numb regulates how stem cells from the SVZ become neurons, and instructs these cells to maintain the walls of the lateral ventricles, the brain's central cavities.

With Numb knocked out, mice developed large holes in these walls. But, rather than worsening over time, the holes were repaired within 6 weeks. The team suggests that stem cells that escaped the knockout were able to shore up the walls. Such capacity for do-it-yourself repair might be harnessed to treat brain damage.

A bull market in Brain Fitness and Calisthenics

I've been meaning for some time to do a post on the avalanche of interest in aging baby boomers not loosing their marbles any faster than absolutely necessary. An article on this topic by Pam Belluck in the 12/27/06 New York Times prompts me to go ahead. We are seeing a blooming of blogs and start up companies that focus on techniques for preserving memory and mental acuity (Posit Science, Third Age, Vigorous Mind, Rocky Mountain Learning, Sharp Brains, Happy Neuron, My Brain Trainer, to mention just a few). The Developing Intelligence blog has a post that discusses the Sharp Brains company, and the Sharp Brains Blog and the Brain Reserves Blog are among several that focus on brain fitness.

There are positive individual testimonials to the effectiveness of brain exercises, and a number of group studies are underway, but we are still absent any hard data that brain exercises bring a benefit that is distinguishable from general cardiovascular exercise. Belluck notes "human studies have generally relied on observations of people with healthier brains, but have not tested whether a particular behavior improves brain health. Perhaps people with healthier brains are more likely to do brain-stimulating activities, not the reverse." She also makes the point: "Certainly most brain-healthy recommendations are not considered bad for people. They do not have the potential risks of drugs or herbal supplements... The challenge we have is it’s going to be a lot like the anti-aging industry: how much science is there behind this?"

Synchronies to bind our brains... check out the movie

A commentary by Sporns and Honey and an article by Bassett et al in PNAS delve into (quoting Spors and Honey) "explaining how functional brain states emerge from the interactions of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of brain regions, each containing millions of neurons. Much evidence supports the view that highly evolved nervous systems are capable of rapid, real-time integration of information across segregated sensory channels and brain regions. This integration happens without the need for a central controller or executive: It is the functional outcome of dynamic interactions within and between the complex structural networks of the brain... the study by Bassett et al. reveals the existence of large-scale functional networks in magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings with attributes that are preserved across multiple frequency bands and that flexibly adapt to task demands. These networks exhibit "small-world" structure, i.e., high levels of clustering and short path lengths. The authors' analysis reveals that the small-world topology of brain functional networks is largely preserved across multiple frequency bands and behavioral tasks."

From Bassett et al: "Coherent or correlated oscillation of large-scale, distributed neural networks is widely regarded as an important physiological substrate for motor, perceptual and cognitive representations in the brain...The topology of networks can range from entirely random to fully ordered (a lattice). In this spectrum, small-world topology is characteristic of complex networks that demonstrate both clustered or cliquish interconnectivity within groups of nodes sharing many nearest neighbors in common (like regular lattices), and a short path length between any two nodes in the network (like random graphs). This is an attractive configuration, in principle, for the anatomical and functional architecture of the brain, because small-world networks are known to optimize information transfer, increase the rate of learning, and support both segregated and distributed information processing."

"Magnetoencephalographic data were acquired from 22 subjects, half of whom performed a finger-tapping task, whereas the other half were studied at rest. Signals were recorded from a set of 275 points overlying the scalp surface, to provide a time-frequency decomposition of human brain activity... brain functional networks were characterized by small-world properties at all six wavelet scales considered, corresponding approximately to classical {delta} (low and high), {theta}, {alpha}, beta, and {gamma} frequency bands. Global topological parameters (path length, clustering) were conserved across scales, most consistently in the frequency range 2–37 Hz, implying a scale-invariant or fractal small-world organization. Dynamical analysis showed that networks were located close to the threshold of order/disorder transition in all frequency bands. The highest-frequency {gamma} network had greater synchronizability, greater clustering of connections, and shorter path length than networks in the scaling regime of (lower) frequencies. Behavioral state did not strongly influence global topology or synchronizability; however, motor task performance was associated with emergence of long-range connections in both beta and {gamma} networks. Long-range connectivity, e.g., between frontal and parietal cortex, at high frequencies during a motor task may facilitate sensorimotor binding. Human brain functional networks demonstrate a fractal small-world architecture that supports critical dynamics and task-related spatial reconfiguration while preserving global topological parameters."



The above figure is a demonstration model by Sporns and Honey of the relationship of structural to functional connectivity networks consisting of a set of 1,600 modeled neural mean field units arranged on a sphere and engaging in noise-driven spontaneous activity. (A) The anatomical connection pattern, shown only for a few randomly selected neural units, consists of a mix of mostly local (clustered) connections and a few connections made over longer distances. (B) A snapshot and an EEG-like recording trace of the dynamical neuronal activity pattern. Neuronal dynamics is characterized by complex spatial and temporal structure across multiple scales [Click here to see a supporting movie]. (C) A functional connectivity network obtained from a thresholded correlation matrix calculated from the dynamics shown in B. In this example, both structural and functional connectivity patterns exhibit small-world attributes.

A review of MindBlog

A colleague recently pointed out this review of MindBlog, which I had completely missed. And to lay on another bit of self-promotion, let me remind you that "The Biology of Mind" has received good reviews and is a friendly read.

Thought without language - metacognition in Animals

The Dec. 15 issue of The New Scientist has an interesting article by Helen Philips, "The Known Unknown," about game playing in monkeys and dolphins that sheds light on their 'thinking about thinking' , knowing what they don't know - which appears to be a key step on the transition to full consciousnes. Here is a nice graphic from that article. (Click on the graphic to enlarge it).

In defense of order....

Check out this response by Jessica Duquette to the NY Times article on disorder that was the subject of yesterday's post. She argues "Neat is fluid and dynamic, not prissy and stuck." and cites another response to Green's NY Times essay: "There is a difference in a stagnate mess and an active mess. A desk with papers and notes changing daily shows activity. Mess that accumulates and stagnates is a sign of incompletion and unwillingness to go back over something, like cleaning up desk at the end of the day. I have found that things need to get moved around but also need a place to be so a person can find them when needed. That is a time saver, not a time waster. Not being able to find a tool to fix the light switch or hang a coat rack only adds to problem. Then you end up looking for your coat in dark when you’re in a hurry."

Disorder as the detritus of a creative mind...

This is the subtitle title of a recent essay in the New York Times, "Saying Yes to Mess", by Penelope Green. Being a tidy control freak (while my partner generates entropy and piles), I can't resist passing on some clips:

In the face of a booming home-organizing market (5.9 Billion last year), "An anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands. "

David Freedman and Eric Abrahamson, in their forthcoming book "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder," "describe the properties of mess in loving terms. Mess has resonance, they write, which means it can vibrate beyond its own confines and connect to the larger world. It was the overall scumminess of Alexander Fleming’s laboratory that led to his discovery of penicillin, from a moldy bloom in a petri dish he had forgotten on his desk....The book is a meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and the systems and individuals reaping those benefits, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mess-for-success tips include never making a daily schedule."

"In the semiotics of mess, desks may be the richest texts. Messy-desk research borrows from cognitive ergonomics, a field of study dealing with how a work environment supports productivity. Consider that desks, our work landscapes, are stand-ins for our brains, and so the piles we array on them are “cognitive artifacts,” or data cues, of our thoughts as we work.

To a professional organizer brandishing colored files and stackable trays, cluttered horizontal surfaces are a horror; to cognitive psychologists like Jay Brand, who works in the Ideation Group of Haworth Inc., the huge office furniture company, their peaks and valleys glow with intellectual intent and showcase a mind whirring away: sorting, linking, producing. (By extension, a clean desk can be seen as a dormant area, an indication that no thought or work is being undertaken.)

His studies and others, like a survey conducted last year by Ajilon Professional Staffing, in Saddle Brook, N.J., which linked messy desks to higher salaries (and neat ones to salaries under $35,000), answer Einstein’s oft-quoted remark, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?”

The giving season: food and money -an evolutionary link?

This short note from the Editor's choice section in the Dec. 22 issue of Science:

"Although the giving of gifts is a common activity at this time of year, giving a gift certificate has become an allowable substitute for giving money, which is generally regarded as unseemly. In order to explore whether money can serve not only as a useful instrument (for the purchase of material goods) but also as a valued resource, Briers et al. (Psychol. Sci. 17, 939 (2006) have carried out a series of experiments to see whether an unfulfilled desire for food (or money) might make one more tight-fisted (or more voracious). People who were hungry behaved less generously toward a charity (Médecins Sans Frontières) and in public goods games than those who had just eaten cake; conversely, people who were told to imagine being desirous of a substantial payoff (being in such a state was confirmed by how much their estimates of the size of a coin were skewed to be larger than actual) consumed more M&M's than those who were focused on a modest windfall. These results linking the rewarding character of food to that of money dovetail neatly with a recent study (Vohs et al., Science, Reports, p. 1154, 17 November 2006) that demonstrated money's value as a means of enhancing one's self-sufficiency and social independence.

Here is the abstract from Briers et al.:
This report attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation for humans' motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. We propose that people's desire for money is a modern derivate of their desire for food. In three studies, we show the reciprocal association between the incentive value of food and of money. In Study 1, hungry participants were less likely than satiated participants to donate to charity. In Study 2, participants in a room with an olfactory food cue, known to increase the desire to eat, offered less money in a give-some game compared with participants in a room free of scent. In Study 3, participants' desire for money affected the amount of M&M's® they ate in a subsequent taste test, but only among participants who were not restricting their food intake in order to manage their weight.

During sleep: a brain memory dialogue

It has been known for some time that specific patterns of nerve firing in "place cells" of the rat hippocampus occur during learning a visual maze and that these patterns are replayed during sleep, apparently as a part of memory consolidation. Wilson's laboratory at M.I.T. (reporting in Nature Neuroscience) have now studied multicell spiking patterns in both the visual cortex and hippocampus during slow-wave sleep in rats. As Nicholas Wade notes in the NYTimes, the recordings capture dialogue between the hippocampus, where initial memories of the day's events are formed, and the neocortex, the sheet of neurons on the outer surface of the brain that mediates conscious thought and contains long-term memories.

Ji and Wilson found that spiking patterns not only in the visual cortex but also in the hippocampus were organized into frames, defined as periods of stepwise increase in neuronal population activity. The multicell firing sequences evoked by awake experience were replayed during these frames in both regions. Furthermore, replay events in the sensory cortex and hippocampus were coordinated to reflect the same experience. These results imply simultaneous reactivation of coherent memory traces in the cortex and hippocampus during sleep that may contribute to or reflect the result of the memory consolidation process. Because the fast rewinds in the neocortex tended to occur fractionally sooner than their counterparts in the hippocampus, Wilson thinks the dialogue is probably being initiated by the neocortex, and reflects a querying of the hippocampus's raw memory data.

Wade's review quotes comments from Wilson:
“The neocortex is essentially asking the hippocampus to replay events that contain a certain image, place or sound...The neocortex is trying to make sense of what is going on in the hippocampus and to build models of the world, to understand how and why things happen...These models are presumably used to direct behavior...They are able to generate expectations about the world and plausibly fill in blanks in memory.

Though the neocortex learns from the hippocampus, the raw memory traces, from childhood onward, are not transferred and are probably retained in the hippocampus... If so, the forgetfulness of age would arise because of problems in accessing the hippocampus, not because the data has vanished.

The subject matter of the neocortex-hippocampus dialogue in rats seems mostly to concern recent events. This is consistent with what people report when awoken from nondreaming sleep — usually small snatches of information about recent events. Dr. Wilson also said that the new findings, by showing activity in the visual neocortex, confirmed that rats had humanlike dreams with visual imagery, a possibility some researchers had doubted."

Mind Wars

I would like to recommend to you an interesting, authoritative, and well written book on the massive amount of research being conducted by the United States defense establishment on brain research relevant to:

- "bulding better humans" (for war purposes)
- controlling human behaviors through chemical or other means (DARPA funded early LSD experiments and Darpanet was the first name for the internet)
- "mind-reading" using imaging techniques
- brain-machine interfaces, 'borgs' (machine-human hybrids)
- improving battefield survivabiliy, making "sleepless" soliders, etc. etc.

The book is "Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense" by Jonathan D. Moreno, who holds a chair professorship and is Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. He does not argue for a separation of the academic research world and the national security establishment, but thinks that much more effort should go into formulating an "ethics of neurosecurity and neurodefense."

Abolishing pain with a single sodium channel mutation

Even though this blog is mainly about nervous systems, brains, and behaviors, I'm occasionally drawn back to my roots as a molecular biologist by a particularly outstanding example of how a single molecule can determine what we take to be a very complex experience - in this case the experience of pain. Cox et. al. have found that a mutation in the gene for a particular sodium channel subunit that is strongly expressed in the pain sensitivie endings of nociceptive (pain sensing and transmitting) neurons can abolish the ability to feel pain. The rare mutation was found in several individuals from a family in northern Pakistan who were unable to experience pain. This work should stimulate the search for novel analgesics that selectively target this sodium channel subunit.

The ususual human situation that permitted this work is described: "The index case for the present study was a ten-year-old child, well known to the medical service after regularly performing 'street theatre'. He placed knives through his arms and walked on burning coals, but experienced no pain. He died before being seen on his fourteenth birthday, after jumping off a house roof. Subsequently, we studied three further consanguineous families in which there were individuals with similar histories of a lack of pain appreciation, each originating from northern Pakistan and part of the Qureshi birdari/clan. All six affected individuals had never felt any pain, at any time, in any part of their body...All had injuries to their lips (some requiring later plastic surgery) and/or tongue (with loss of the distal third in two cases), caused by biting themselves in the first 4 yr of life. All had frequent bruises and cuts, and most had suffered fractures or osteomyelitis, which were only diagnosed in retrospect because of painless limping or lack of use of a limb. The children were considered of normal intelligence by their parents and teachers, and by the caring physicians."

When the "why?" isn't crucial...

I would like to point you to a brief article by Sally Satel in today's New York Times Science Section that mirrors my own sentiments about the usefullness of insight into how a maladaptive behavior, such as drug use or over-eating, might have originally started. Insisting on finding a cause can be an excuse for not working on changing a maladaptive behavior, and knowing a cause doesn't guarantee that behavior will change. There is no convincing data for the effectiveness of insight therapy, while there is such data for cognitive therapy - which trains one to note what isn't working when it starts up and choose to do something else. Satel says "It is time to retire the myth that insight is a prerequisite for change," and she offers two case studies:

"...the grail-like search for insight can backfire when it becomes a way for patients to avoid the hard work of change. This was my experience with Joe, a 24-year-old heroin addict. At every session, Joe would talk about his childhood relationship with his father, seeking new clues for how it damaged him and drove him to heroin...When I tried to change the topic to on-the-job stresses, which he linked to heroin craving, he said he’d rather “do psychotherapy.” Joe was forestalling the need to make practical changes. The many-layered drama with his dad doubled as an excuse for using heroin, absolving him of the responsibility to quit. When I proposed that possibility to him, he said, “Maybe you’re right.” But nothing really changed. He died of an accidental overdose a few months later."

"..insight has no guaranteed relationship to change. A colleague of mine treated a 45-year-old woman, Joan, who came for therapy because she hated her chunky body. Joan firmly believed that once she discovered The Reason for her overeating she would stop...After a few months, Joan told my colleague that her father had developed cancer the year she went off to college...“You know, I never made the connection until now,” she announced triumphantly, “but I started overeating when he began to waste away. It’s like I was trying to nourish him through myself.” ..A poignant metaphor, yes, but months later she hasn’t lost a pound."

An auditory-motor 'mirror" system is engaged by positive emotions.

More on mirror systems from Warren et al in Journal of Neuroscience. Edited clips from their paper:

Social interaction relies on the ability to react to communication signals. Although cortical sensory–motor "mirror" networks are thought to play a key role in visual aspects of primate communication, evidence for a similar generic role for auditory–motor interaction in primate nonverbal communication is lacking.

In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, the authors investigated cortical regions responsive to both the perception of human vocalizations and the voluntary generation of facial expressions. In four auditory–perceptual conditions, subjects listened passively, without overt motor response, to nonverbal emotional vocalizations conveying two positive-valence emotions, amusement and triumph, and two negative-valence emotions, fear and disgust. Use of nonverbal, rather than verbal, vocalizations optimized recognizability of emotional content and avoided confounds of phonological and verbal content. In a facial movement condition, subjects performed voluntary smiling movements in the absence of auditory input. They hypothesized that cortical regions showing combined auditory–perceptual and motor responses would be located within premotor and motor cortical regions.


Figure legend: Brain regions demonstrating auditory–motor mirror responses. A shows regions (red) displaying a significant modulatory effect of emotion category on perceptual activation. B shows regions (light green) displaying significant activation during voluntary facial movements (motor > baseline). C, A masked inclusively in B shows regions (dark green) displaying both a significant modulatory effect of emotion category on perceptual activation and significant activation during voluntary facial movements.


Figure legend: Correlations with emotional valence and arousal in brain regions demonstrating auditory–motor mirror responses. Left, Regions (green) displaying both a significant modulatory effect of emotion category on perceptual activation and significant activation during voluntary facial movements as shown in the figure above. Right, Regions demonstrating a significant positive correlation between hemodynamic responses and emotional valence (red), emotional arousal (blue), or both (purple).

The authors demonstrated that a network of human premotor cortical regions activated during facial movement is also involved in auditory processing of affective nonverbal vocalizations. Within this auditory–motor mirror network, distinct functional subsystems respond preferentially to emotional valence and arousal properties of heard vocalizations. Positive emotional valence enhanced activation in a left posterior inferior frontal region involved in representation of prototypic actions, whereas increasing arousal enhanced activation in presupplementary motor area cortex involved in higher-order motor control. Their findings demonstrate that listening to nonverbal vocalizations can automatically engage preparation of responsive orofacial gestures, an effect that is greatest for positive-valence and high-arousal emotions. The automatic engagement of responsive orofacial gestures by emotional vocalizations suggests that auditory–motor interactions provide a fundamental mechanism for mirroring the emotional states of others during primate social behavior.

Motor facilitation by positive vocal emotions suggests a basic neural mechanism for establishing cohesive bonds within primate social groups.

Sleep deprivation slows the generation of new nerve cells

An interesting finding from Mirescu et al.... It is known that prolonged sleep deprivation is stressful, has adverse effects on cognitive performance and health, and raises corticosterone levels. Their work looks at new nerve cell formation (neurogenesis) in the rat hippocampus, which is central to cognitive performance. They show "that sleep deprivation inhibits adult neurogenesis at a time when circulating levels of corticosterone are elevated. Moreover, clamping levels of this hormone prevents the sleep deprivation-induced reduction of cell proliferation. The recovery of normal levels of adult neurogenesis after chronic sleep deprivation occurs over a 2-wk period and involves a temporary increase in new neuron formation. This compensatory increase is dissociated from glucocorticoid levels as well as from the restoration of normal sleep patterns. Collectively, these findings suggest that, although sleep deprivation inhibits adult neurogenesis by acting as a stressor, its compensatory aftereffects involve glucocorticoid-independent factors."

The Meerkat wars and synchronicity

It is the year of the Meerkats. These engaging foot long denizens of the Kalahari desert show behaviors that mirror the best and the worst in our society (they steal, they fight, they cheat on their partners), and they have been the subjects of numerous television programs. Now, the Sunday NYTimes points out, just as we have had two Truman Capote movies within a short interval, two full length documentary films on Meekats are about to appear in competition, one from Discovery Films with Animal Planet, the other from BBC Films and the Weinstein company.

The decline of civility and etiquette on the web.

Having been the recipient of some rather amazing invective comments on this blog (which I didn't permit to be published), not to mention that the majority of comments on the blog are now spam which I have to prevent from being posted, I have to pass on this piece in David Pogues weekly emailing associated with the circuits section of the NY Times.

Whatever Happened to Online Etiquette?

"Dear David, first off i would like to tell you that you are full of **** and did not research the zune enough to know your facts.

(Here follows a list of 'mistakes' made by Pogue)

Pogue then writes:

The deeper we sail into the new online world of communications, the sadder I get about its future. I'm OK with criticism, I'm fine with disagreement, I'm perfectly capable of handling angry mail. That's not the issue here (although my teenage correspondent above was, in fact, wrong about every single one of his points). I've even accepted personal attacks as part of the job. I'm a columnist; the heat comes with the kitchen. But what's really stunning is how hostile *ordinary* people are to each other online these days. Slashdot and Digg.com are extremely popular sites for tech fans. Each discussion begins with the presentation of an article or Web page--and then opens up the floor for discussion.

Lately, an increasing number of the discussions devolve into name-calling and bickering. Someone might submit, say, this item to Digg:

685 diggs. "AWESOME astronomy poem." (posted by MetsFan 3 days ago) Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.

Before long, the people's feedback begins, like this:

by baddude on 12/11/06
What's yr problem, moron. You already said it's a star, why would you then wonder what it is. Get a clue, or a life.
by neverland2 on 12/11/06
Dugg down as inaccurate. Stars do not twinkle. It's the shifting atmosphere that causes an apparent twinkle. Or were you stoned all through science class?
by mrobe on 12/11/06
yo neverland2--It's a poem, idiot. Nobody's claiming that stars twinkle. Ever heard of poetic license? Honestly, the intellectual level of you people is right up there with a gnat's.
...and so on.

What's worse is that the concentration of the nasty people increases as the civil ones get fed up and leave.

What's going on here?
My current theories:
* On the Internet, you're anonymous. Since you don't have to face the person you're dumping on, you don't see any reason to display courtesy.
* On the Internet, you're anonymous. You worry that your comments might get lost in the shuffle, so you lay it on thick to enhance your noticeability.
* The open toxicity is all part of the political climate. We've learned from the Red state-Blue state talking heads that open hostility can pass for meaningful conversation.
* Young people who spend lots of time online are, in essence, replacing in-person social interactions with these online exchanges. With so much less experience conversing in the real world, they haven't picked up on the value of treating people civilly. That is, they haven't yet hit the stage of life when getting things like friends, a spouse and a job depend on what kind of person you are.
* Many parents haven't been teaching social skills (or haven't been around to teach them) for years, but Web 2.0 is suddenly making it apparent for the first time. ("Web 2.0" describes sites like Digg and Slashdot, where the audience itself provides material for the Web site.)
I'd give just about anything to hear what 15-year-old Josh's parents would say if they knew how little respect he holds for adults (let alone the English language). Then again, maybe they wouldn't be surprised a bit.

The real shame, though, is that the kneejerk "everyone else is an idiot" tenor is poisoning the potential the Internet once had. People used to dream of a global village, where maybe we can work out our differences, where direct communication might make us realize that we have a lot in common after all, no matter where we live or what our beliefs.

But instead of finding common ground, we're finding new ways to spit on the other guy, to push them away. The Internet is making it easier to attack, not to embrace.

Maybe as the Internet becomes as predominant as air, somebody will realize that online behavior isn't just an afterthought. Maybe, along with HTML and how to gauge a Web site's credibility, schools and colleges will one day realize that there's something else to teach about the Internet: Civility 101.

A "mind reading" prosthesis for autistic people?

Another clip from the NYTimes Magazine "Ideas" issue:

"The Emotional-Social Intelligence Prosthesis, developed by Rana el Kaliouby and Rosalind Picard, consists of a small camera mounted on a cap or glasses that monitors a conversation partner’s facial expressions and feeds the data into a hand-held computer. Software tracks the movement of facial features and classifies them using a coding system developed by the psychologist Paul Ekman, which is then correlated with a second taxonomy of emotional states created by the Cambridge autism researcher (and Ali G cousin) Simon Baron-Cohen. Almost instantaneously, the computer crunches each raised eyebrow and pucker of the lips, giving a whispered verdict about how the person is feeling. (Another version of the device, meant to be used separately, points back at users, allowing them to better understand — and perhaps modify — the face they present to the world.)" (CLICK to enlarge image below).

Sporno

I can't resist passing on David Haskell's piece in the NYTimes magazine "Ideas" issue in its entirety.

When approached to write an article about the homoerotic subtext of sports for Out magazine this spring, the journalist Mark Simpson feared the subject was old news. “There wasn’t much of a point,” he says, “since sport was already the new gay porn.” Indeed, with the publication of a Dolce & Gabbana underwear campaign featuring Italian soccer players glistening in a dank locker room, the phenomenon had gone well beyond subtext. All that was lacking was a name, and it didn’t take Simpson very long to invent it: sporno.

Sports, of course, have always celebrated physical form. What has changed, Simpson argues, is how we look at men. Thanks to what might be called the Abercrombie effect, the male body has become increasingly aestheticized — or “metrosexualized,” as Simpson would have it (he invented that term too) — and male imagery, particularly in fashion advertising, has become more overtly sensual. Considering that sports is visual, masculine and (like porn) geared mostly to men, Simpson was not surprised to find male athletes — even, or perhaps especially, heterosexual ones — grooming their physical image and “fetishizing themselves.”

The arrival of what Simpson calls “equal opportunity flirts” like the soccer players David Beckham and Freddie Ljungberg, who dabble in gay iconography and openly embrace their gay fans, lends sporno a celebrity cachet. (Simpson calls sporno stars like Ljungberg, whose physical assets are abundantly featured in Calvin Klein underwear ads, “young hustlers.”) Among professional sports organizations, the French national rugby team has pursued its sporno status most aggressively. The team’s annual calendars, Simpson notes, include photo shoots in which “there is no pretense that this is anything but hyperhomoerotic.” Indeed, some images are but a few soap bubbles away from pure pornography.