SGU Episode 353

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Skeptical Rogues

• S: Steven Novella
• B: Bob Novella
• R: Rebecca Watson
• J: Jay Novella
• E: Evan Bernstein

Introduction (0:00)

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello, and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday April 16th 2012 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson.

R: Hello everyone.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Carpe dium.

S: To you too, Evan.

R: So I'm just going to quit the podcast now and go out for a bike ride.

S: Yeah, (inaudible) your life.

E: Should I have said Carpe Podcast?

R: Yeah, that's probably a little better.

E: I'm not sure that was a popular phrase back when, but.

S: Carpe diem tomorrow.

E: (laughs)

J: Carpe manyana.

E: Crape diem.

S: Carpe manyana.

This Day in Skepticism

The Surgeons Photo (0:48)

(April 21, 1934 - Surgeon's Photo of the Loch Ness Monster published)

R: Hey so, happy Loch Ness Monster Day, everybody.

S: Yeah, cool.

J: Thanks.

E: Oh, thanks, what did I win?

R: Uh huh, I bet you didn't know that was a national holiday.

E: What!?

R: It's not.

J: What do people do on that holiday?

R: It's not.

J: Oh.

R: Uh, they take photographs, blurry photographs of toys floating in water. Yes, it's not a national holiday but I'm campaigning to make it one.

J: (laughs)

R: Today is the day in 1934 the famous photograph of quote, unquote "The Loch Ness Monster" was published in a newspaper. Does anybody know what newspaper?

All: uuuh.

J: It was in Scotland wasn't it?

R: I'll give you a hint, the newspaper still exists today and is quite popular in the UK and has also published other similar, maybe hoxes and unbelievable claims.

E: The Sun, the Sun.

R: (laughs) Close, the Daily Mail.

J: Of course!

R: Our good friends, the Daily Mail were the first to publish this particular photo, supposedly taken by a gynaecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson. Wilson didn't want his name attached to the photo originally and so that's why it is well known as the surgeon's photograph. And it's the famous one, the one you think of when you think of Nessie. It looks like, you know maybe the neck of the monster rising out of the water, however there's absolutely nothing in the photo to give it any sense of scale except for the suspiciously small size of the ripples.

S: Yeah.

E: Oh yeah.

S: I've always thought that it looked like a hand. You know, the head, if you make that shape with your hand it kind of looks exactly like that.

E: Yeah.

R: Yeah I agree.

E: It does.

R: There have been a number of debunkings. I think the one that gained the most traction was published in as early as 1975 or so but it was claimed that this was a plot by the son in law of a big game hunter who was ridiculed by the Daily Mail and so this guy attempted to get revenge on the Daily mail by creating this hoax and by getting the surgeon to offer the pictures to the Daily Mail.

S: Was this Marmaduke Wetherell?

R: Marmaduke is correct, yes.

S: Marmaduke, I love it.

R: Such a great name, Marmaduke Wetherell.

S: Marmaduke!

B: My god, if he had any idea what he was creating with this one little hoax.

E: Quite amazing what, yeah.

B: An entire sub-genre of bullshit.

E: It's iconic.

R: Mmhmm.

E: This photograph.

S: Mmhmm.

R: I should say, Marmaduke Wetherell is the name of the aforementioned big game hunter.

S: Yeah, right.

R: And Christian Spurling is the son-in-law who supposedly built, it was apparently a toy submarine that had a head and neck attached with wood. That had been built by the son-in-law, Christian Spurling. And then the two of them got a few other people involved to get the photos to the Daily Mail.

J: Did you guys ever see the picture and think that it was like an elephant's trunk coming out of the water?

B: (laughs)

R: That was a common claim, mmhmm.

B: How'd an elephant get in there though?

J: Well that kind of thing, it doesn't have to be an elephant, it could be some type of sea creature sticking a tentacle out or whatever. When I look at the picture thinking that it's a dinosaur like they describe, it looks a lot more fake to me. It looks small to me then, it doesn't look... but when I think of it as an elephant's trunk type of appendage then it looks more real.

S: Well have you guys seen the original photo, not the cropped one that we're all familiar with?

J: Sure.

E: Yes, that's right.

B: Oh, I yeah but I forget, what was...

S: You could see how small it is in the loch.

E: Much better scale.

S: Yeah, the scale is much more apparent and you could see that it's a very tiny thing but then you zoom in on it and, I mean there were still anomalies that make you think that it's not a huge thing but you lose the ability to really see the scale.

J: This was one of those topics that we saw on that TV show "In Search Of" in the 70s.

S: Yeah.

E: Hmm.

B: That Spock was the host for.

J: Yeah, Leonard Nimoy hosted it, it's burned into my mind, like when I see that picture I hear his voice talking about it.

E: (laughs) I head that Bilbo Baggins song when I...

S: (laughs)

J: Oh god. I feel so bad for him because of that. Those of you who don't know, Leonard Nimoy recorded this song about Bilbo Baggins and he made a video, it had to be in 70s right? Some point in the 70s.

E: Oh yeah.

J: It's more embarassing than watching William Shatner sing about Mr Tambourine Man. That's how bad it is.

E: Yeah, or Rocket Man, yeah.

B: That's saying something, oh my god.

E: It is that bad, you cringe.

S: That's when Nimoy was trying way too hard to be not-Spock.

R: Yeah.

E: Right.

S: Yeah.

R: He kind of went in the wrong direction there.

E: His artsy phase, yeah. But eventually directed Three Men and a Little Lady, so.

R: Leonard Nimoy directed Three Men and a Little... and a Baby or whatever?

E: Yep. Yeah, Three Men and a Little Lady, is that what it was?

B: Yeah.

R: Wait, that was the second one. Did he do the first one or the second one?

J: Yes, no he did the first one I'm not sure if he did the second.

News Items

Life on Mars (6:03)

http://phys.org/news/2012-04-proof-life-mars.html

S: Well, Bob. Tell us about Life on Mars, is it possible that we've already discovered life on Mars but just didn't notice.

B: Well, I didn't see this one coming, and if it's true, it would be both historic and the height of lameness all at the same time.

E: (laughs)

B: A recent reanalysis of the Mars Viking data seems to point to the existence of microbial life on Mars. That means that we may have discovered life on another planet 35 or 36 years ago and didn't even notice. So what the hell, if this is true, I'm going to be really happy and really pissed. Now, researchers from a plethora of universities including Los Angeles, California, Tempe Arizona and Sienna, Italy have recently published a paper in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences (IJASS) in which they discussed their work using NASA's data from the old Viking mission. Now a little history about Viking, the twin Viking landers landed on Mars in the summer of '76 and their primary goal was to find signs of life, for example by examining the Martian dirt and looking for the hallmarks of biological activity.

E: Which is what?

B: They don't call Martian dirt regolith do they, is that just specific to the Moon?

S: No, I don't think so, it's anything that's not soil that's on the surface of a world.

B: Right.

S: It's not specific to the Moon.

B: OK. To do this, the probes had three experiments, three or four depending on your source, optimised for that task. One of these experiments was called the LR or Labelled Release apparatus. What this device did was it scooped up dirt and mixed it with some water that had nutrients tagged with radioactive carbon atoms. So if there were microbes in this dirt, they would metabolise the nutrients, and in essence they would breath out the carbon dioxide or methane gas which would then be detected by a radiation detector that was in the probe. So like all good scientists, of course, they also had a control sample, or multiple control samples in the experiment, and this consisted of isolating some of the samples of soil in the dark for months at a time, which would apparently just kill any photosynthetic bacteria or microbe-bacteria like organisms. Or, it would kill anything that relied of photosynthetic organisms to survive. But I also read another source that said that what they did was they just heated the sample to such a temperature that it would be enough to kill anything that was living inside of it. So, but after they performed these steps, the control samples were then fed the nutrients and examined again. Now when these active soil samples, the ones that weren't treated and could potentially have live organisms, when they were fed the water the detectors got hit with a pulse of like 10,000 counts of radioactive molecules. If you compare that to the normal background radiation found on Mars, it's usually about 50 counts or so, so clearly something interesting was happening. Perhaps it was even biological. If this were the end of the story then things, obviously I think, would have played out very, very differently. But unfortunately the other experiments did not agree with these results, including an experiment that used a mass spectrometer that didn't find any organic molecules at all which seems pretty damning to me. Therefore no discovery of life on Mars was made and the general consensus seems to have been that there was some geo-chemical reaction taking place in these LR experiments, or maybe there was some other fluke occurrence that happened. And this was kind of interesting, I came across a comment on one of these websites. Somebody named Richard Hallavese made a comment, he said that I worked on Viking back in the early 70s on the hydrogen flame ionisation detector and other experiments and the entire design team was dismayed when the purely political announcement was made denying our clear findings of microbial life on Mars. It was finally explained as people weren't ready to accept life on other planets. So in truth, some of the higher-ups weren't ready to be open minded and accept facts as they were. So, I mean I don't know who this guy is, I tried to google him and I couldn't find any evidence that he really, that he worked on these projects, so take that for what it's worth, but it's just, his perspective is a little interesting if it's even true, and I do tend to doubt it. I don't think that NASA's reaction would have been, at that time, oh people aren't ready to accept it. I mean come on, that would have been the finding, you know, one of the biggest findings in history and they were just going to put a lid on it? So I doubt that.

S: Yeah, that sounds like crap.

B: Now jump ahead 36 years and now, a mostly new generation of scientists and computational tools have resurrected this old data, and they disagree with the results that few people seem to have doubted for more than a generation. So what led them to this startling conclusion? It looks like one of the first things they did was to do away with this idea that the initial results was just this weird geochemical reaction. And apparently, when the LR experiment was repeated four or five months later, nothing happened. So if this were merely some chemical reaction with rocks or maybe some other elements in the dirt, then why would it not occur again months later? So what they did next then was to evaluate the data from a completely different perspective. They were looking at it in terms of complexity, and specifically how complex was the radioactive gas signal that was emitted by the dirt, and how did it change over time? And they did this obviously because in general biology is more complex than non-biology. If you closely examine the complexity then, it could give insight into whether it was caused by some biological process or not. So that is kind of where they were coming from. So this mathematical complexity analysis allowed them to compare it to the control sample signals in a way that made the differences kind of like really stand out and kind of put them on two ends of a spectrum. The interesting thing is though that they did similar analyses against earthly biological data. They, like for example they took temperature readings from a rat and they also took other clearly non-biological data from Earth and when they compared all this data together, everything from Voyager and everything from Earth sources, what happened was that the live soil samples from Mars clustered together with the rat data on one end and the Mars control data clustered with the Earth non-biological data on the other end. So to me, this makes their results a little bit more compelling, rather than if they had just looked at the Mars data. They, comparing it with, you know clear signals from Earth, things that we know are biological or non-biological to me makes it a little bit more compelling. Joseph Miller is a researcher with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, he recently said, on the basis of what we've done so far, I'd say I'm 99% sure there's life there. That's the one quote that really, really stands out and that you kind of read everywhere. I mean that's a hell of a confidence level. But still though, there's some scientists, I'm not sure how widespread this belief is, but I'm sure a lot of them are saying that we really need to replicate the technique that they used on more samples from Earth to verify that it really can distinguish biological data from non-biological data. I'm sure we're going to be hearing more about this in the future. But as to the immediate future, now you guys now the Curiosity Rover is set to land on Mars in August. NASA says that it doesn't have the specific tools to detect life, which is really annoying, but it could lend support to this latest experiment, and it would also support the one that was conducted 36 years ago on Viking. But guys, I mean why can't the Curiosity probe detect life, I mean what would be more powerful than if the Curiosity had just a microscope, just a silly microscope so that you could actually see, yup, look at that, that's some weird alien microbe, it's clearly nothing that, you know, it's clearly biological. I mean how hard would it be? I'm sure they've got really good reasons that they couldn't put something as definitive as that on there, and that's not really its goal, but it's still kind of annoying that we're sending these multi-, I don't know what it costs, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, these probes, and they can't definitively say, yep that's life right there, it's just a little bit annoying.

J: But now what do we do, like what's the next step here?

B: Well we'll see if the Curiosity rover can support, can lend any support to this new theory, and if it can, then I'm sure that it would warrant even more research and more tests, and just more verification of the specific technique that these guys used, you could do that on Earth, you don't need to do it on Mars. And then of course the next question would be, is it Earth derived, or is it purely, totally alien? I mean there could just be cross-seeding between Earth and Mars and back again, so it could be, you know, just like Earth life in terms of DNA and chirality, you know the way the proteins are oriented and all sorts of stuff that would let you think, yup this has go to be from Earth or maybe Earth life came from Mars in some way, but either answer would be fantastic, I don't care. I mean of course I would prefer completely alien DNA, but I'll take it any way that I can.

E: Right, Bob and they're confident it's not contamination from the Viking craft itself?

B: It could have been, I mean yeah, they actually talk about that as well. I think some of the images that they had from Mars showed these dark patches that kind of reminded some of the scientists of lichen and so what I think the Curiosity rover is going to have a really high-res camera that will be able to get a close look at that stuff, and that was just another thing that could be an interesting finding from the Curiosity rover but we'll see.

S: OK, thanks Bob.

Indian Skeptic Charged with Blasphemy (15:42)

http://boingboing.net/2012/04/13/indian-skeptic-charged-with.html

S: We have an update on one of our friends, a friend of the SGU, Sanal Edamaruku.

B: Sanal!

E: Yeah!

S: Sanal, Indian skeptic who was interviewed on our show before, you guys remember him from the...

B: Killing, killing, killing!

S: ...Tantric killing challenge, right. But Evan, he's got himself into another controversy.

E: He sure has, a big one. A big one that's making international headlines, which in a way is a good thing but you know, maybe it's not such a good thing. So as we know, Sanal is the founder and president of Rational International, and he's the president of the Indian Rationalists Association. He's authored many books and articles which deal mainly with rationalistic thoughts and anti-superstition, which is prevalent in India. And it's not small task considering India's population of over one billion people, many of which are steeped in a culture of belief in astrology, in ancient medicine, Tantric healers, reincarnators, miracle men and other fictions. But recently, Sanal made a trip to India's capital city of Mumbai and paid visit to the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni, a little Catholic church where a supposed miracle had taken place. A Jesus statue, at this church, started dropping water from its feet. And this was deemed by the faithful to be attributable to some level of divinity and higher power. People were actually collecting these drops of the Jesus foot water and touting it as holy water because, hey, let's face it, how could a wooden statue of Jesus all of a sudden start dripping water from its feet?

S: That's unpossible.

E: That's unpossible. I really don't understand why people are so impressed with that. I mean, if water had been dripping upwards maybe from the top of the statue's head, then maybe you could possibly call that a miracle, but that's not what happened. But surely there can be no other explanation other than a miracle of god, right? Well, that was until Sanal showed up. He wasn't alone because India TV channel 9 had invited Sanal to come along with them to help figure out an alternative explanation for the wet-foot miracle. And hats off to TV channel 9, right, for utilising this correct tool, namely a skeptic practised in the art of figuring out hoaxes and pointing out charlatans. So good for them.

B: So that was their goal though, it wasn't like, oh let's see the skeptic explain this one. Or did they really expect and hope that he would throw some light onto this? You know, of all the TV stints that he's done, he's a celebrity in his own right.

S: He's a celebrity, he was a draw by himself.

E: No doubt about it.

B: Yeah, I was wondering what their motivation was, OK.

E: And within minutes of arriving, and upon cursory inspection, Sanal was able to determine the source of the water, which was a drainage tube from a nearby washing room. And but perhaps more importantly, Sanal pegged the mechanism as the capillary action.

S: mmhmm.

E: Capillary action is the ability of a liquid to flow in narrow spaces without the assistance of forces such as gravity. Instead, there are forces such as adhesion, cohesion, surface tension that cause the movement of water within these porous spaces, these spaces of porous material. That's how water can apparently get from one place to another without actually pouring down. And so he picked this out right away and he went further than that. He accused the church of miracle mongering because church officials had been using this event as a means of drumming up support, both financial and otherwise.

S: Mmhmm.

E: And needless to say, the local church leaders and their faithful flock in attendance for the investigation were less than pleased with Sanal's opinion on the matter. They demanded that he apologise for his blasphemy and they went so far as to public threaten him with a blasphemy case, which is a real set of legal charges in India that can result in arrest, attention and punishment by the state. So, no joke. As of today, there are reportedly three petitions out for Sanal's arrest and the Mumbai police had announced they were interested in arresting Sanal, but as of today that has yet to officially transpire. We'll keep an eye on it and see what happens this week. But perhaps officials are thinking twice in some sort of momentary lapse of reason that they're having since this unfolded. Realising, maybe this isn't the right way to go about this. So perhaps they're taking a step back and kind of analysing things a little bit more critically which would be a good thing. But in the mean time the story went viral, skeptical communities around the world are following these events closely and what was pretty much an isolated little miracle case in India, of interest to the locals, is now making world headlines thanks to the efforts of Sanal and his group. Rationalists International has formed the Sanal Edamaruku defence committee and you can go there to help contribute to a little legal defence fund that has started to accumulate. In case he is arrested and going to be brought up on these charges he's going to need some help in that matter.

R: If he's not, let the guy buy a sweet new ride or something, he deserves it.

(laughter)

E: Right, or something.

S: He actually is welcoming the court case, he's like, hey this will be a great opportunity to, in a court of law, explain the evidence that shows that this is not a miracle and to show that the Catholic church in this instance is being deceptive. He's like yeah, bring it. He's welcome the attention, and this actually is playing right into his hands. Otherwise, so he debunked this miracle claim, who would hear about it, maybe it gets a little bit, a news flash on the TV. The Catholic church, by trying to get him arrested for blasphemy, is making this making this international news, they're drawing a lot of attention to the fact that they got totally showed up by a skeptic. He, according to their own reports, the rationalist reports, he completely kicked the butt of a Catholic bishop in a televised debate on this topic which is not a surprise given that he appears to have the facts on his side. So this is a classic example, in my opinion, of just drawing more attention to your own embarrassment.

R: The Streisand Effect.

S: Yeah, this is a dumb move on the part of the local representatives of the Catholic church. I mean, really, arrested for blasphemy, you think that's a good move? And apparently there's a law on the books, it's against the law to injure somebody's religious beliefs, that's what they mean by blasphemy.

R: Yeah, I wonder how much of that is one of those laws like we have here in the US where you get these old laws that just sort of sit and rot until...

S: Yeah.

R: ...you know, someone actually tries to press the issue and then finds that its...

S: Yeah, it's like sodomy laws in states in states in the United States, like 200 year old laws that nobody really enforces until somebody makes a case out of it and tries to make a case out of it and tries to enforce it, yeah.

E: I'll make a federal out of it. Yyyeah.

S: Yeah... (laughs)

B: I wonder if that's even the case though, who knows maybe that isn't such an old thing that that is disregarded and laughed at in India.

S: Yeah, I don't know.

B: Maybe, for all I know, maybe it's not. Maybe he can get nailed with that. I mean if they could, if all they have to do is prove that he injured somebody's belief then maybe the truth won't even matter.

R: Well I don't mean to suggest that just because it's an old law that isn't enforced any more doesn't mean that there isn't a real danger for those who are prosecuted by it, so even if it is an outdated law there is still some risk there and he'll probably have to have to spend all this money defending himself, it's still a huge problem.

E: Yeah, you're still at the mercy of actual people whether it be a judge or a jury, I'm not sure how the system works there, but hey it just takes a few of them to share a belief in this sort of stuff that might skew things really against him, so you're right Rebecca, there is a risk here. Sanal Edamaruku had a good quote and sort of summed things up when he said, "it's nothing new that the Catholic bishops try to sentence their opponents to the stake when they run out of arguments. But try as they may, they cannot stop me to stand for reason, science and historic facts. And I am not alone. Freedom of expression is under attack, and we are going to defend it." Hear hear. I'll say.

R: That's awesome.

J: You know, in a country where it's so unpopular, it's so, in such the minority and it's got to be an insanely difficult environment to navigate through, and he does it steadfast and with his head raised high and I'm always excited to hear what he does.

S: Well, good luck Sanal and we will pass along any updates we get on the story.

Multitasking (24:39)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17693737

S: So how do you guys think you are at multitasking?

E: Terrible.

R: I'm sorry, what?

S: Multitasking.

J: (laughs)

S: I'm sorry were you doing something else?

(laughter)

J: I am freakishly bad at multitasking.

S: Well that's good to hear you say that because people who think they're good at multitasking are actually worse than people who don't think that they're good. And people who multitask frequently are worse at multitasking that people who don't. There's a new study about multitasking but I'm going to use this as an opportunity to give a summary of the research, what do we know so far? Multitasking is attempting to do more than one thing at once, essentially, as the name strongly implies. And it turns out that our brains are simply not evolved to do that. We don't have multi-core processors or multi-threading. We have the ability to really only play deep or focussed attention to one thing at a time. You could think of our attention as being either broad and superficial or shallow, or the more we focus it down the deeper it could get but the narrower it has to be. And it's a finite resource right? Like Data, right, we can't pay deep or full attention to multiple things at once.

B: Yeah, that's cool.

S: Yeah, so you could sort of keep your attention wide and be alerted to many different sources of sensory input but you can't be, again, paying detailed attention to all those things. Or you focus down narrow and you block out other sensory stimuli. But it's also interesting to think of the brain as having multiple types of finite resources. Attention is a finite resource. Memory is a finite resource, and sensory perception is a finite resource. And all of those things conspire together to mean that we're actually pretty significantly limited in what we can do in terms of engaging cognitively in tasks. So what are people doing when they are multitasking? Generally what they're doing is they're switching back and forth between or among the various tasks that they're engaged in and that means that, if you are let's say trying to do two tasks simultaneously, you're going to be switching from one to the other. You're going to do worse than half as well at each of those tasks because some of your finite resources are being used for switching back and forth, so it's not just that you're dividing your resources in half and giving half to each task, you are doing that but then a certain amount of those resources are then going to the very task of switching from one to the other, you're having to load information into your working memory, and then swap it out. You're shifting your attention, shifting your focus, getting back mentally to where you were with one task before you had switched to the other one. So that results in what's called interference, doing one task interferes with your ability to do another task. This is very well documented. There's also a special category of multitaskers, and this is, there's a new study about this specific thing, and that's called multi-media or media multitaskers. And this is becoming increasingly common and perhaps we all do this to some degree, and that is the task of consuming multiple sources of media at the same time. Such as watching TV while texting your friend and watching something on your iPad. Essentially, paying attention to dividing your attention among multiple media sources at the same time. People who do that a lot, so called heavy media multitaskers, tend to be worse at multitasking than low media multitaskers. The suspected reason, again there really isn't evidence to show us cause and effect so we don't know if consuming media multitasking causes people's brains to work this way or if people who already tend to operate this way are more drawn towards or tolerant of media multitasking, but heavy media multitaskers tend to have superficial attention that is broadly distributed as opposed to focussed attention that they can direct at one thing. So they're not as good at filtering out information that is not relevant to the task that they're engaged in. Interestingly, even when they're instructed in an experiment to focus their attention on task-specific information and to ignore task-irrelevant information, they're still worse at it. They don't do it well, than low media multitaskers. Again, this raises the question, why is that? And what's going on in their brains that makes them bad at this and what's the cause and effect. So a string of experiments have shown that heavy media multitaskers perform worse on all kinds of cognitive tasks. The new study is the first one, according to the authors and as far as I could find, the first one to show a potential advantage to being a heavy media multitasker in a way that also kind of makes sense. What the researchers did was they gave subjects, they first divided them into heavy versus light media multitaskers. They gave them each task to, you're looking at a computer screen and you have a target shape, and then you have to find the target shape among a lot of closely related or similar shapes that are popping up on the screen. So you have to pay close attention to what's happening on the screen and find the target. So that was one task and then in a similar related version of the task, an audio signal drew attention to the target shape. So if you were able to pay attention to the visual and the audio information at the same time you would have an advantage. Heavy media multitaskers did better when the audio signal was there, than the light multitaskers. But when it wasn't there, the light media multitaskers did better than the heavy media multitaskers.

B: That makes sense.

S: Yeah it all kind of makes superficial sense, if you think of being a multitasker means that you're spreading your attention out amongst multiple things but not focussing down on anything specific and not being able to filter out extraneous information, that explains all of the research results. It also goes along with this new results, was OK, there's a little advantage in there in that you're better at simultaneously processing different sources of sensory information than somebody who's not used to doing that. Again, with no data indicating what the arrow of cause and effect is. You have to think, OK so from a practical point of view, how good is that advantage? When does that come up? That you need to integrate multiple different sensory modalities. I'm sure there are instances. People will be able to send us examples of when it would be useful but, given the number of experiments that show a huge disadvantage to being a heavy media multitasker, this is probably just a slight advantage in the other direction and doesn't really counterbalance all the negative. You know and it raises an interesting question of what is the ultimate societal effect of all of this going to be? You know, we're increasingly bombarded with multimedia and with multiple things to pay attention to. We're already seeing it's problem for drivers, you know who might have a radio or mp3 player and a cell phone, sometimes complicated instrumentation of the car itself, you know, the environmental system and everything, and it absolutely, and again there have been multiple experiments showing this, it absolutely degrades driving performance, leading to more accidents. What's the end result of all of this going to be? Are we going to create a generation of people with a form of ADHD? You know these, difficulty in paying close attention to a task at hand and filtering out distracting or extraneous information? Or is this just a manifestation of the adolescence of our interaction with multimedia? And is this going to be something that's going to define the current generation but not necessary extrapolate into the future where people will learn how to cope with it a little more maturely? I don't know, what do you guys think?

J: Steve, do you think that we evolved to focus down on one thing? Or why wouldn't we evolve to have our attention be split up among different stimuli?

S: Well, no you can do that, you can divide your attention. It's as if, you know if you want to put it into an evolutionary situation, you could think if you're on the plains of Africa and you need to be alert to threat coming at you from any direction, you can sort of pay attention to your whole environment but you're not getting a lot of detail about any one thing in your environment. You're just spreading out that finite attention to everything so if anything comes at you from any direction you can respond to it, but imagine you're carefully studying something in your environment, whether it's a plant or you're looking at animal tracks, and now you're not paying attention to everything, you're filtering out extraneous information. This is related, of course, to inattentional blindness, you know.

B: Mmm.

J: Yep.

S: Which we're familiar with, or change blindness. You actually don't perceive things. There's a lot of interesting sub-questions here too. One thing that's really interesting that I found when I was going through the research on this is that if you give somebody a task that requires a lot of sensory processing, they become less distractable, or the interference phenomenon tends to go away. And that's because they've saturated their perceptual capacity, they have no more capacity with which to be distracted. Interesting, it's kind of paradoxical. If you make the perceptual task really hard then they're no longer distractable because they don't have any resources left to notice anything distracting.

J: mmm.

R: mm.

S: But there's also memory saturation, and also executive function. Executive function sort of controls what you're paying attention to and how you're switching between tasks, and the timing and the tactics with which you do things. That's a finite resource too. There's also a phenomenon known as automaticity.

B: Cool word.

S: Yeah, automaticity. If you become really...

E: It sounds like you're mispronouncing a word.

S: No I mean it's the same root as automatic, but it's when...

E: I heard.

S: ... a task becomes so learned...

B: Internalised.

S: ...that it becomes, yeah, that the amount of resources that it takes to do that task becomes much less.

E: Uh, driving a car.

S: Well, yeah, on autopilot right? So you can go through the motions of driving a car completely disengaged from your attention and executive function, right, so people have that experience or you're thinking about something and you're on quote, unquote "autopilot", you're not using a lot of your cognitive resources. But you're also not like necessarily controlling where you're driving. You end up some place, well how did I get here? Because you weren't paying attention to where you were driving.

B: Oh my god yeah.

E: (laughs)

S: that's why people are terrible drivers, because it requires maintaining a certain level of attention, for a prolonged period of time, and people are not really good at that. You know our attention tends to drift and we tend to focus on other things.

R: That's why I don't drive.

S: It's perfect for a computer. I mean computers can infinitely maintain their attention on a specific task so that's why I think that having like collision avoidance systems, you know, computers essentially looking over your shoulder and paying attention for you will be hugely advantageous in driving.

B: Well even cars that are completely driven by computers. And they've gone so far with that technology.

S: Yeah.

B: there are some car companies that are making cars now that will be able to perform that in at least a limited way.

S: Yeah.

R: Well, we talked about this, Google has already made the cars, they've been driving on our streets for the last, what, year, year and a half, two years?

S: Yeah, so I think the bottom line of all of the research is, don't fool yourself into thinking that you can multitask. You simply can't. Your performance will degrade significantly at anything you try to do. If something is important, give it your undivided attention, try to minimise distracting elements in your environment. It really does matter, and if you don't think it does, there's research shows you're just fooling yourself and you're probably even worse at it than somebody that isn't fooling themselves about it.

B: Yeah.

Monkeys Recognize Words (37:49)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17676129

S: All right. Well, talking about cognitive ability, we have some monkey news. We're partial to monkey news on the SGU.

J: Monkey.

S: Monkey.

R: That's right.

S: Rebecca.

R: Monkeys have bested birds again.

J: Come on.

S: Well there were no birds in the study, I'd just like to point that out.

E: (laughs)

R: Steve, show me a bird that can read. Oh, what you've got nothing? OK then I'll just move on.

S: These monkeys can't read either.

R: Hey, hey, shut your mouth, OK?

E: Do they speed read?

R: These, well first of all, they are baboons. They are very intelligent baboons. They are baboons at a facility in France, who despite being in France, have been "learning to read English". I like the study because, first of all because it's a study on animals where, animals in captivity where you don't have to feel bad for the animals because it sounds like a pretty chilled place so the baboons are hanging out and at any time, they can independently decide that they want to go and take this test. And when they do, they just wander into a little room where there's a computer set up, the computer automatically recognises them and starts up this program that they then play. And they get treats. And then they go back to doing whatever they were doing.

B: Yay. They got any openings?

R: Yeah, exactly, this is my ideal professional situation.

B: (laughs)

R: Hanging out, picking nits off your buddy, going in for some treats, so...

E: Sweet. The baboons always had it better than us.

R: Yeah, so here's what the computer program does: it shows the baboon a series of four letters. And the letters can either form an English word like k-i-t-e, or it could be gibberish, like e-k-t-i.

E: Ekti.

R: Ekti, exactly. And the Baboon can choose to either click a plus sign if it's not a word, and a circle if it is a word. The baboons went through thousands and thousands of tests like this, and of course, each time they get it right, they get a treat. So they go through thousands of tests and eventually they learn the words. So they don't know that kite means a thing, a toy that you fly in the sky attached to a string, but they do know that kite is the thing that matches with the circle and that ekti is the thing that matches with the plus. So right now you're probably thinking well, that doesn't sound that impressive because, you know it too thousands of test and eventually they just learned that one series of letters equals treat, you know if you push this button and another series of letters equals treat if you put this other button. However, the really interesting thing, and I agree, they're not reading as we understand it, where you read words and you associate them with real-life things and you understand what the words mean on multiple levels, that's not what they're doing. But this part is really interesting, the baboons, after a while, after a few thousand tests, the baboons were able to recognise an English word that they hadn't seen before, with apparently a pretty high degree of efficiency.

B: that's awesome.

R: So, for instance... I can't think of a four letter word that's not a curse word.

E: (laughs)

R: (laughing) I seriously just came up blank. So let's say r-o-a-d shows up on the screen and the baboon has never seen it before, however he chooses that it's a real word more often than not. So what this experiment maybe shows is, not just the ability of baboons to recognise patterns that they've seen, but to recognise a pattern of the English language, like an overall pattern that they are using and applying to new situations. This ties in with how little kids, for instance, can look at a word that they've never seen before and get that it's English. Previously it was guessed that they, that little kids were figuring that out because they could sound out the word and it sounded like a word that they had heard before. However, this goes to show that it might be something a bit more complicated and more interesting, that it's actually a sort of object recognition, pattern recognition that is happening in the brain and this could also have consequences for research into dyslexia because it suggests that the problem of dyslexia might be happening in a completely different part of the brain than we originally thought. There's the part of the brain that processes language and there'e the part of the brain that identifies objects. So this study suggests that it might be a problem in the latter category as opposed to the former. So no, they're not picking up novels just yet and reading them and understanding them, but it is an interesting, apparently quite well done study, and I really enjoyed it because the baboon life sounds pretty awesome.

S: Yeah, I think the connection to dyslexia is a little speculative, that seemed like a real leap to me.

R: Oh yeah.

S: There's a lot a dyslexia research that wouldn't necessarily comport with this, but yeah I think, again it's one study, you know, we need to see that this result is real, this effect is real. But also, the interpretation is going to require lots of other studies to say, to test it, and to see if it's really true or it's better than other interpretations, the notion that primates and even up to and including humans may be using a non-language mechanism of recognising when a clustering of letters is s word as opposed to a random clustering of letters. It's really fascinating but this is not enough evidence to conclude that that's in fact the case. Yeah.

R: Yeah. Not enough to conclude, but enough to...

S: Hypothesise, hypothesise.

R: ... say hmmm, that's interesting.

S: Yeah, exactly.

R: Hey, someone on twitter has just asked for a quickie with bob.

S: Really.

B: Ha!

R: Yes, dlandandcole who is also on youtube, I know him, because I tweeted while Steve was blah, blah, blahing about multitasking, media multitasking.

S: Excuse me, I was pontificating, thank you.

R: (laughs)

B: (laughs)

R: Well I was tweeting during that, I don't actually remember what you said, so I mentioned that you were talking about that on SGU, so yeah dlandandcole responded and asked for a quickie with bob.

J: That whole explanation was longer than the quickie with Bob.

(laughter)

R: That's true.

S: And Jay, and now I just made it longer still.

R: So meta.

Quickie With Bob

Cosmic Superwind (45:04)

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/04/11/Mystery-of-cosmic-superwinds-solved/UPI-21491334185002/

B: All right David, this is your quickie with Bob. I will do this, but just this once or twice.

Who's That Noisy?

Answer to last week: Ice chimes

Questions and Emails

Titanic Correction

Need to be careful believing the official position of white star lines. The Issue relates to PR using language to convey a message to the public that was generally believed before the event.: From snopes: Claim: The Titanic was never advertised using the word "unsinkable." : FALSE ...However, claiming (as White Star did) that although others may have used the word, White Star itself did not describe the Titanicas "unsinkable" in its advertising is a bit disingenuous. The February 1993 issue of The Titanic Commutator unearthed a White Star promotional flyer for the Olympic and Titanic that claimed "as far as it is possible to do, these two wonderful vessels are designed to be unsinkable." I never trust advertising to be fact ;) Nigel Underhill

Advanced Dinosaurs

Just wondering if you guys had stumbled upon this little gem http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/04/weekend-feature-intelligent-advanced-versions-of-earths-dinosaurs-may-have-evolved-elsewhere-in-univ.html Good example of horrendous journalism. Eric Rosinski Arkansas

Science or Fiction

Item #1 Medical researchers have demonstrated that a form of carbon nanotubes can function as an effective chemotherapeutic agent again several types of solid tumors. http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=24842.php Item #2 Researchers have developed a form of carbon nanotubes that form into durable sponges that can float on water and soak up 100 times their weight in oil. http://news.rice.edu/2012/04/13/nanosponges-soak-up-oil-again-and-again/ Item #3 Scientists have successfully created a form of graphene that can act as a semiconductor - previously known forms are either conductors or insulators. http://www..uwm.edu/news/2012/04/13/uwm-discovery-advances-graphene-based-electronics/ Item #4 Researchers have discovered that carbon nanotubes more than double the growth rate of plant cells in culture. http://esciencenews.com/articles/2012/04/04/carbon.nanotubes.can.double.growth.cell.cultures.important.industry

Skeptical Quote

"Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts." --Leo Rosten