Jdopplegaenger

Libet’s classifc experiment on the neuroscience of free will tells us more about our intuition than about our actual freedom

It is perhaps the most famous experiment in neuroscience. In 1983, Benjamin Libet sparked controversy with his demonstration that our sense of free will may be an illusion, a controversy that has only increased ever since.

Libet’s experiment has three vital components: a choice, a measure of brain activity and a clock.

The choice is to move either your left or right arm. In the original version of the experiment this is by flicking your wrist; in some versions of the experiment it is to raise your left or right finger. Libet’s participants were instructed to “let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”. The precise time at which you move is recorded from the muscles of your arm.

The measure of brain activity is taken via electrodes on the scalp. When the electrodes are placed over the motor cortex (roughly along the middle of the head), a different electrical signal appears between right and left as you plan and execute a movement on either the left or right.

The clock is specially designed to allow participants to discern sub-second changes. This clock has a single dot, which travels around the face of the clock every 2.56 seconds. This means that by reporting position you are reporting time. If we assume you can report position accurately to 5 degree angle, that means you can use this clock to report time to within 36 milliseconds – that’s 36 thousandths of a second.

Putting these ingredients together, Libet took one extra vital measurement. He asked participants to report, using the clock, exactly the point when they made the decision to move.

Physiologists had known for decades that a fraction of a second before you actually move the electrical signals in your brain change. So it was in Libet’s experiment, a fraction of a second before participants moved, a reliable change could be recorded using the electrodes. But the explosive result was when participants reported deciding to move. This occurred in between the electric change in the brain and the actual movement. This means, as sure as cause follows effect, that the feeling of deciding couldn’t be a timely report of whatever was causing the movement. The electrode recording showed that the decision had – in some sense – already been made before the participants were aware of having taken action. The brain signals were changing before the subjective experience of taking a decision occurred.

Had participants’ brains already made the decision? Was the feeling of choosing just an illusion? Controversy has raged ever since. There is far more to the discussion about neuroscience and free will than this one experiment, but its simplicity has allowed it to capture the imagination of many who think our status as biological creatures limits our free will, as well as those who argue that free will survives the challenge of our minds being firmly grounded in our biological brains.

Part of the appeal of the Libet experiment is due to two pervasive intuitions we have about the mind. Without these intuitions the experiment doesn’t seem so surprising.

The first intuition is the feeling that our minds are a separate thing from our physical selves – a natural dualism that pushes us to believe that the mind is a pure, abstract place, free from biological constraints. A moment’s thought about the last time you were grumpy because you were hungry shatters this illusion, but I’d argue that it is still a persistent theme in our thinking. Why else would we be the least surprised that it is possible to find neural correlates of mental events? If we really believed, in our heart of hearts, that the mind is based in the brain, then we would know that every mental change must have a corresponding change in the brain.

The second pervasive intuition, which makes us surprised by the Libet experiment, is the belief that we know our own minds. This is the belief that our subjective experience of making decisions is an accurate report of how that decision is made. The mind is like a machine – as long as it runs right, we are happily ignorant of how it works. It is only when mistakes or contradictions arise that we’re drawn to look under the hood: Why didn’t I notice that exit? How could I forget that person’s name? Why does the feeling of deciding come after the brain changes associated with decision making?

There’s no reason to think that we are reliable reporters of every aspect of our minds. Psychology, in fact, gives us lots of examples of where we often get things wrong. The feeling of deciding in the Libet experiment may be a complete illusion – maybe the real decision really is made ‘by our brains’ somehow – or maybe it is just that the feeling of deciding is delayed from our actual deciding. Just because we erroneously report the timing of the decision, doesn’t mean we weren’t intimately involved in it, in whatever meaningful sense that can be.

More is written about the Libet experiment every year. It has spawned an academic industry investigating the neuroscience of free will. There are many criticisms and rebuttals, with debate raging about how and if the experiment is relevant to the freedom of our everyday choices. Even supporters of Libet have to admit that the situation used in the experiment may be too artificial to be a direct model of real everyday choices. But the basic experiment continues to inspire discussion and provoke new thoughts about the way our freedom is rooted in our brains. And that, I’d argue, is due to the way it helps us confront our intuitions about the way the mind works, and to see that things are more complex than we instinctively imagine.

This is my latest column for BBC Future. The original is here. You may also enjoy this recent post on mindhacks.com Critical strategies for free will experiments

Benjamin Libet’s experiment on the neuroscience of free will needs little introduction. (If you do need an introduction, it’s the topic of my latest column for BBC Future). His reports that the subjective feeling of making a choice only come after the brain signals indicating a choice has been made are famous, and have produced controversy ever since they were published in the 1980s.

For a simple experiment, Libet’s paradigm admits to a large number of interpretations, which I think is an important lesson. Here are some common, and less common, critiques of the experiment:

The Disconnect Criticism

The choice required from Libet’s participants was trivial and inconsequential. Moreover, they were specifically told to make the choice without any reason (“let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”). A common criticism is that this kind of choice has little to tell us about everyday choices which are considered, consequential or which are actively trying to involve ourselves in.

The timing criticism(s)

Dennett discusses how the original interpretation of the experiment assumes that the choosing self exists at a particular point and at particular time – so, for example, maybe in some central ‘Cartesian Theatre’ in which information from motor cortex and visual cortex come together, but crucially, does not have direct report of (say) the information about timing gathered by the visual cortex. Even in a freely choosing self, there will be timing delays as information on the clock time is ‘connected up’ with information on when the movement decision was made. These, Dennett argues, could produce the result Libet saw without indicating a fatal compromise for free choice.

My spin on this is that the Libet result shows, minimally, that we don’t accurately know the timing of our decisions, but inaccurate judgements about the timing of decisions doesn’t mean that we don’t actually make the decisions themselves that are consequential.

Spontaneous activity

Aaron Schurger and colleagues have a nice paper in which they argue that Libet’s results can be explained by variations in spontaneous activity before actions are taken. They argue that the movement system is constantly experiencing sub-threshold variation in activity, so that at any particular point in time you are more or less close to performing any particular act. Participants in the Libet paradigm, asked to make a spontaneous act, take advantage of this variability – effectively lowering their threshold for action and waiting until the covert fluctuations are large enough to trigger a movement. Importantly, this reading weakens the link between the ‘onset’ of movements and the delayed subjective experience of making a movement. If the movement is triggered by random fluctuations (observable in the rise of the electrode signal) then there isn’t a distinct ‘decision to act’ in the motor system, so we can’t say that the subjective decision to act reliably comes afterwards.

The ‘only deterministic on average’ criticism

The specific electrode signal which is used to time the decision to move in the brain is called the readiness potential (RP). Electrode readings are highly variable, so the onset of the RP is a statistical artefact, produced by averaging over many trials (40 in Libet’s case). This means we lose the ability to detect, trial-by-trial, the relation between the brain activity related to movement and the subjective experience. Libet reports this in his original paper [1] (‘only the average RP for the whole series could be meaningfully recorded’, p634). On occasion the subjective decision time (which Libet calls W) comes before the time of even the average RP, not after (p635: “instances in which individual W time preceded onset time of averaged RP numbered zero in 26 series [out of 36] – which means that 28% of series saw at least one instance of W occurring before the RP).

The experiment showed strong reliability, but not complete reliability (the difference is described by Libet as ‘generally’ occurring and as being ‘fairly consistent’, p636). What happened next to Libet’s result is a common trick of psychologists. A statistical pattern is discovered and then reality is described as if the pattern is the complete description: “The brain change occurs before the choice”.

Although such generalities are very useful, they are misleading if we forget that they are only averagely true, not always true. I don’t think Libet’s experiment would have the imaginative hold if the result was summarised as “The brain change usually occurs before the choice”.

A consistent, but not universal, pattern in the brain before a choice has the flavour of a prediction, rather than a compulsion. Sure, before we make a choice there are antecedents in the brain – it would be weird if there weren’t – but since these don’t have any necessary consequence for what we choose, so what?

To my mind the demonstration that you can use fMRI to reproduce the Libet effect but with brain signals changing up to 10 seconds before the movement (and an above chance accuracy at predicting the movement made), only reinforces this point. We all believe that the mind has something to do with the brain, so finding patterns in the brain at one point which predict actions in the mind at a later point isn’t surprising. The fMRI result, and perhaps Libet’s experiment, rely as much on our false intuition about dualism as conclusively demonstrating anything new about freewill.

Link: my column Why do we intuitively believe we have free will?

Former Star Trek star William Shatner has made a slew of Trek documentaries in recent years, so when I saw he had a new one about the first few years of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I wasn’t sure if it was worth watching. But it totally was.

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The long-awaited independent report, commissioned by the American Psychological Association, into the role of the organisation in the CIA’s torture programme has cited direct collusion at the highest levels of the APA to ensure psychologists could participate in abusive interrogation practices.

Reporter James Risen, who has been chasing the story for some time, revealed the damning report and its conclusions in an article for The New York Times but the text of the 524 page report more than speaks for itself. From page 9:

Our investigation determined that key APA officials, principally the APA Ethics Director joined and supported at times by other APA officials, colluded with important DoD [Department of Defense] officials to have APA issue loose, high-level ethical guidelines that did not constrain DoD in any greater fashion than existing DoD interrogation guidelines. We concluded that APA’s principal motive in doing so was to align APA and curry favor with DoD. There were two other important motives: to create a good public-relations response, and to keep the growth of psychology unrestrained in this area.

We also found that in the three years following the adoption of the 2005 PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] Task Force report as APA policy, APA officials engaged in a pattern of secret collaboration with DoD officials to defeat efforts by the APA Council of Representatives to introduce and pass resolutions that would have definitively prohibited psychologists from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. detention centers abroad. The principal APA official involved in these efforts was once again the APA Ethics Director, who effectively formed an undisclosed joint venture with a small number of DoD officials to ensure that APA’s statements and actions fell squarely in line with DoD’s goals and preferences. In numerous confidential email exchanges and conversations, the APA Ethics Director regularly sought and received pre-clearance from an influential, senior psychology leader in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command before determining what APA’s position should be, what its public statements should say, and what strategy to pursue on this issue.

The report is vindication for the long-time critics of the APA who have accused the organisation of a deliberate cover-up in its role in the CIA’s torture programme.

Nevertheless, even critics might be surprised at the level of collusion which was more direct and explicit than many had suspected. Or perhaps, suspected would ever be revealed.

The APA have released a statement saying “Our internal checks and balances failed to detect the collusion, or properly acknowledge a significant conflict of interest, nor did they provide meaningful field guidance for psychologists” and pledges a number of significant reforms to prevent psychologists from being involved in abusive practices including the vetting of all changes to ethics guidance.

The repercussions are likely to be significant and long-lasting not least as the full contents of the reports 524 pages are fully digested.
 

Link to article in The New York Times.
Link to full text of report from the APA.

‘Researchers have found that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is roughly half as effective in treating depression as it used to be’ writes Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, arguing that this is why CBT is ‘falling out of favour’. It’s worth saying that CBT seems as popular as ever, but even if it was in decline, it probably wouldn’t be due to diminishing effectiveness – because this sort of reduction in effect is common across a range of treatments.

Burkeman is commenting on a new meta-analysis that reports that more recent trials of CBT for depression find it to be less effective than older trials but this pattern is common as treatments are more thoroughly tested. This has been reported in antipsychotics, antidepressants and treatments for OCD to name but a few.

Interestingly, one commonly cited reason treatments become less effective in trials is because response to placebo is increasing, meaning many treatments seem to lose their relative potency over time.

Counter-intuitively, for something considered to be ‘an inert control condition’ the placebo response is very sensitive to the design of the trial, so even comparing placebo against several rather than one active treatment can affect placebo response.

This has led people to suggest lots of ‘placebo’ hacks. “In clinical trials,” noted one 2013 paper in Drug Discovery, “the placebo effect should be minimized to optimize drug–placebo difference”.

It’s interesting that it is still not entirely clear whether this approach is ‘revealing’ the true effects of the treatment or just another way of ‘spinning’ trials for the increasingly worried pharmaceutical and therapy industries.

The reasons for the declining treatment effects over time are also likely to include different types of patients selected into trials, more methodologically sound research practices meaning less chance of optimistic measuring and reporting, the fact that if chance gives you a falsely inflated treatment effect first time round it is more likely to be re-tested than initially less impressive first trials, and the fact that older known treatments might bring a whole load of expectations with them that brand new treatments don’t.

The bottom line is that lots of our treatments, across medicine as a whole, have quite modest effects when compared to placebo. But if placebo represents an attempt to address the problem, it provides quite a boost to the moderate effects that the treatment itself brings.

So the reports of the death of CBT have been greatly exaggerated but this is mostly due to the fact that lots of treatments start to look less impressive when they’ve been around for a while. This is less due to them ‘losing’ their effect and more likely due to us more accurately measuring their true but more modest effect over time.

“Face It,” says psychologist Gary Marcus in The New York Times, “Your Brain is a Computer”. The op-ed argues for understanding the brain in terms of computation which opens up to the interesting question – what does it mean for a brain to compute?

Marcus makes a clear distinction between thinking that the brain is built along the same lines as modern computer hardware, which is clearly false, while arguing that its purpose is to calculate and compute. “The sooner we can figure out what kind of computer the brain is,” he says, “the better.”

In this line of thinking, the mind is considered to be the brain’s computations at work and should be able to be described in terms of formal mathematics.

The idea that the mind and brain can be described in terms of information processing is the main contention of cognitive science but this raises a key but little asked question – is the brain a computer or is computation just a convenient way of describing its function?

Here’s an example if the distinction isn’t clear. If you throw a stone you can describe its trajectory using calculus. Here we could ask a similar question: is the stone ‘computing’ the answer to a calculus equation that describes its flight, or is calculus just a convenient way of describing its trajectory?

In one sense the stone is ‘computing’. The physical properties of the stone and its interaction with gravity produce the same outcome as the equation. But in another sense, it isn’t, because we don’t really see the stone as inherently ‘computing’ anything.

This may seem like a trivial example but there are in fact a whole series of analog computers that use the physical properties of one system to give the answer to an entirely different problem. If analog computers are ‘really’ computing, why not our stone?

If this is the case, what makes brains any more or less of a computer than flying rocks, chemical reactions, or the path of radio waves? Here the question just dissolves into dust. Brains may be computers but then so is everything, so asking the question doesn’t tell us anything specific about the nature of brains.

One counter-point to this is to say that brains need to algorithmically adjust to a changing environment to aid survival which is why neurons encode properties (such as patterns of light stimulation) in another form (such as neuronal firing) which perhaps makes them a computer in a way that flying stones aren’t.

But this definition would also include plants that also encode physical properties through chemical signalling to allow them to adapt to their environment.

It is worth noting that there are other philosophical objections to the idea that brains are computers, largely based on the the hard problem of consciousness (in brief – could maths ever feel?).

And then there are arguments based on the boundaries of computation. If the brain is a computer based on its physical properties and the blood is part of that system, does the blood also compute? Does the body compute? Does the ecosystem?

Psychologists drawing on the tradition of ecological psychology and JJ Gibson suggest that much of what is thought of as ‘information processing’ is actually done through the evolutionary adaptation of the body to the environment.

So are brains computers? They can be if you want them to be. The concept of computation is a tool. Probably the most useful one we have, but if you say the brain is a computer and nothing else, you may be limiting the way you can understand it.
 

Link to ‘Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer’ in The NYT.

The New York Times recently covered a report by long-term critics of psychologists’ involvement in the CIA torture programme.

It includes a series of leaked emails which suggests something beyond what is widely noted – that the US security agencies have been handing out key contracts to high profile psychologists on the basis of shared political sympathies rather than sound scientific evidence. The result has been a series of largely ineffective white elephant security projects that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

To back up a bit, this new report claims, on the basis of the leaked emails, that there was collusion between the American Psychological Association and the CIA to make psychologists’ participation in brutal interrogations possible through engineering the written code of ethics.

The allegations are not new but as part of the coverage The New York Times includes the full text of the report which includes the full text of key emails.

The APA have commissioned an independent investigation and have released a statement, quite reasonably actually, saying they’re not going to comment until it’s concluded.

But looking at the emails, you can see that the CIA was buddies with a select group of high profile psychologists who later get big money contracts from the US Government. You may recognise the names.

One email from Kirk Hubbard, Senior Behavioral Scientist for the CIA, notes that “I have been in contact with Ekman and he is eager to do work for us”, seemingly with regard to a forum on the science of deception. This is Paul Ekman famous for his work on facial emotions and micro-expression.

Hubbard notes that Martin Seligman, famous for his work on learned helplessness and later positive psychology, “helped out alot over the past four years”. Seligman hosted a now well-documented meeting in December 2001 for “a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers” who “gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism”.

This meeting included James Mitchell, of the now notorious Mitchell Jessen and Associates, who developed the CIA’s brutal interrogation / torture programme.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Ekman and Seligman were directly involved in CIA interrogations or torture. Seligman has gone as far as directly denying it on record.

But there is something else interesting which links Ekman, Seligman and Mitchell: lucrative multi-million dollar US Government contracts for security programmes based on little evidence that turned out to be next to useless.

Ekman was awarded a contract to train ‘behavior detection officers’ at US airports using a technique called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques) based on detecting facial expressions – part of a $900 million programme. It was widely criticised as lacking a scientific foundation, there has been not one verified case of a successful terrorist detection, and evaluations by the Department of Homeland Security, the Government Accountability Office and the Rand Corporation were scathing.

Seligman was reportedly awarded a $31 million US Army no-bid contract to develop ‘resilience training’ for soldiers to prevent mental health problems. This was surprising to many as he had no particular experience in developing clinical interventions. It was deployed as the $237 million Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme, the results of which have only been reported in some oddly incompetent technical reports and are markedly under-whelming. Nicholas Brown’s analysis of the first three evaluative technical reports is particularly good where he notes the tiny effects sizes and shoddy design. A fourth report has since been published (pdf) which also notes “small effect sizes” and doesn’t control for things like combat exposure.

And famously, Mitchell and Jessen won an $81 million contract to develop the interrogation programme, now officially labelled as torture, and which the Senate Intelligence Committee suggested was actually counter-productive in gathering intelligence.

Applying psychology to improve airport security screening, soldiers’ well-being and interrogation are all reasonable aims. But rather than reviewing the evidence to see what’s possible and contracting relevant specialists to develop and evaluate programmes where possible, they seem to have contracted supporters of the ‘war on terror’ for work that lacked an applied evidence base.

The outcome has been expensive and ineffectual.
 

Link to full text of critical report, full text of emails in Appendix.

Men just want sex more than women. I’m sure you’ve heard that one. Stephen Fry even went as far as suggesting in 2010 that straight women only went to bed with men because sex was “the price they are willing to pay for a relationship”.

Or perhaps you’ve even heard some of the evidence. In 1978 two psychologists, Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, did what became a famous experiment on the topic – not least because it demonstrated how much fun you can have as a social psychologist. Using volunteers, Clark and Hatfield had students at Florida State University approach people on campus and deliver a pick-up line.

The volunteers always began the same “I’ve noticed you around campus. I find you to be very attractive”, they said. They varied what they said next according to one of three randomly chosen options. Either “would you go out tonight?”, or “will you come over to my apartment?”, or “would you go to bed with me?” (if these phrases sound familiar, it may be because they form the chorus of Touch and Go’s 1990s Jazz-pop hit “Would You Go To Bed With Me” – probably the only pop song whose lyrics are lifted entirely from the methods section of a research paper).

In Clark and Hatfield’s research, both men and women were approached (always by volunteers of the opposite sex). The crucial measure was whether they said yes or no. And you can probably guess the results: although men and women were equally likely to accept the offer of a date (about half said yes and half said no), the two sexes differed dramatically in how they responded to the offer of casual sex. None of the women approached took up the offer of sex with a complete stranger. Three-quarters of the men did (yes, more than were willing to just go on a date with a complete stranger).

A matter of interpretation

But since this experiment, controversy has raged about how it should be interpreted. One school of thought is that men and women make different choices because of different sex drives, sex drives which are different for deeply seated biological reasons to do with the logic of evolution. Because, this logic goes, there is a hard limit on how many children a women can have she should be focused on quality in her sexual partners – she wants them to invest in parenting, or at the very least make a high-grade genetic contribution. If she has a child with the wrong partner, she uses up one of a very limited number of opportunities to reproduce. So she should be choosy.

A man on the other hand, shouldn’t be so concerned about quality. There’s no real limit on the number of children he can have, if he has them with different women, so he should grab every sexual opportunity he can, regardless of the partner. The costs are low, there are only benefits.

This evolutionary logic, relentlessly focused as it is on reproduction and survival, does provide a consistent explanation for the differences Clark and Hatfield observed, but it isn’t the only explanation.

The problem is that the participants in this experiment aren’t abstract representatives of all human men and women. They are particular men and women from a particular place and time, who exist in a particular social context – university students in American society at the end of the 20th century. And our society treats men and women very differently. So how about this alternate take: maybe men and women’s sex drives are pretty similar, but the experiment just measures behaviour which is as shaped by society as much as biology.

Taking out the social factor

This month, new research published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, gives a vital handle on the question of whether women really don’t want sex as much as men do.

Two German researchers, Andreas Baranowski and Heiko Hecht, replicated the original Clark and Hatfield study, but with some vital changes. First they showed that the original result still held, even among German university students in the 21st century – and they showed that it still held if you asked people in a nightclub rather than on campus. But the pair reasoned that one factor in how women respond to invitations to sex may be fear – fear of reputational damage in a culture which judges women’s sexual activity differently from men’s, and fear of physical harm from an encounter with a male stranger. They cite one study which found that 45% of US women have experienced sexual violence of some kind.

So, in order to find out if women in these experiments were held back by fear, they designed an elaborate cover scenario designed to make the participants believe they could accept offers of sex without fear of anyone finding out, or of physical danger. Participants were invited into a lab under the ruse that they would be helping a dating company evaluate their compatibility rating algorithm. They were presented with ten pictures of members of the opposite sex and led to believe that all ten had already agreed to meet up with them (either for a date, or for sex). With these, and a few other convincing details, the experimenters hoped that participants would reveal their true attitudes to dating, or hooking up for sex with, total strangers, unimpeded by fear of what might happen to them if they said yes.

The results were dramatic. Now there was no difference between the dating and the casual sex scenarios, large proportions of both men and women leap at the chance to meet up with a stranger with the potential for sex – 100% of the men and 97% of the women in the study chose to meet up for a date or sex with at least one partner. The women who thought they had the chance to meet up with men for sex, chose an average of slightly less than three men who they would like to have an encounter with. The men chose an average of slightly more than three women who they would like to have an encounter with.

Men are from Earth – and so are women

The study strongly suggests that the image of women as sexually choosy and conservative needs some dramatic qualification. In the right experimental circumstances, women’s drive for casual sex looks similar to men’s. Previous experiments had leapt to a conclusion about biology, when they’d actually done experiments on behaviour which is part-determined by society. It’s an important general lesson for anyone who wants to draw conclusions about gender differences, in whatever area of behaviour.

There was still a gender difference in this new experiment – men chose more partners out of ten to meet up with, but still we can’t say that the effect of our culture was washed out. All the people in the experiment were brought up to expect different attitudes to their sexual behaviour based on their gender and to expect different risks of saying yes to sexual encounters (or of saying yes and then changing their minds).

Even with something as biological as sex, when studying human nature it isn’t easy to separate out the effect of society on how we think, feel and act. This new study gives an important update to an old research story which too many have interpreted as saying something about unalterable differences between men and women. The real moral may be about the importance of completely alterable differences in the way society treats men and women.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Super Villains, they're the foils of our heroes and are nearly always up to no good. But what if they were the protagonists of the film? Would you want to see a film starring villains?

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A few extreme cases show that people can be missing large chunks of their brains with no significant ill-effect – why? Tom Stafford explains what it tells us about the true nature of our grey matter.

How much of our brain do we actually need? A number of stories have appeared in the news in recent months about people with chunks of their brains missing or damaged. These cases tell a story about the mind that goes deeper than their initial shock factor. It isn’t just that we don’t understand how the brain works, but that we may be thinking about it in the entirely wrong way.

Earlier this year, a case was reported of a woman who is missing her cerebellum, a distinct structure found at the back of the brain. By some estimates the human cerebellum contains half the brain cells you have. This isn’t just brain damage – the whole structure is absent. Yet this woman lives a normal life; she graduated from school, got married and had a kid following an uneventful pregnancy and birth. A pretty standard biography for a 24-year-old.

The woman wasn’t completely unaffected – she had suffered from uncertain, clumsy, movements her whole life. But the surprise is how she moves at all, missing a part of the brain that is so fundamental it evolved with the first vertebrates. The sharks that swam when dinosaurs walked the Earth had cerebellums.

This case points to a sad fact about brain science. We don’t often shout about it, but there are large gaps in even our basic understanding of the brain. We can’t agree on the function of even some of the most important brain regions, such as the cerebellum. Rare cases such as this show up that ignorance. Every so often someone walks into a hospital and their brain scan reveals the startling differences we can have inside our heads. Startling differences which may have only small observable effects on our behaviour.

Part of the problem may be our way of thinking. It is natural to see the brain as a piece of naturally selected technology, and in human technology there is often a one-to-one mapping between structure and function. If I have a toaster, the heat is provided by the heating element, the time is controlled by the timer and the popping up is driven by a spring. The case of the missing cerebellum reveals there is no such simple scheme for the brain. Although we love to talk about the brain region for vision, for hunger or for love, there are no such brain regions, because the brain isn’t technology where any function is governed by just one part.

Take another recent case, that of a man who was found to have a tapeworm in his brain. Over four years it burrowed “from one side to the other“, causing a variety of problems such as seizures, memory problems and weird smell sensations. Sounds to me like he got off lightly for having a living thing move through his brain. If the brain worked like most designed technology this wouldn’t be possible. If a worm burrowed from one side of your phone to the other, the gadget would die. Indeed, when an early electromechanical computer malfunctioned in the 1940s, an investigation revealed the problem: a moth trapped in a relay – the first actual case of a computer bug being found.

Part of the explanation for the brain’s apparent resilience is its ‘plasticity’ – an ability to adapt its structure based on experience. But another clue comes from a concept advocated by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. He noticed that biological functions are often supported by multiple structures – single physical features are coded for by multiple genes, for example, so that knocking out any single gene can’t prevent that feature from developing apparently normally. He called the ability of multiple different structures to support a single function ‘degeneracy’.

And so it is with the brain. The important functions our brain carries out are not farmed out to single distinct brain regions, but instead supported by multiple regions, often in similar but slightly different ways. If one structure breaks down, the others can pick up the slack.

This helps explain why cognitive neuroscientists have such problems working out what different brain regions do. If you try and understand brain areas using a simple one-function-per-region and one-region-per-function rule you’ll never be able to design the experiments needed to unpick the degenerate tangle of structure and function.

The cerebellum is most famous for controlling precise movements, but other areas of the brain such as the basal ganglia and the motor cortex are also intimately involved in moving our bodies. Asking what unique thing each area does may be the wrong question, when they are all contributing to the same thing. Memory is another example of an essential biological function which seems to be supported by multiple brain systems. If you bump into someone you’ve met once before, you might remember that they have a reputation for being nice, remember a specific incident of them being nice, or just retrieve a vague positive feeling about them – all forms of memory which tell you to trust this person, and all supported by different brain areas doing the same job in a slightly different way.

Edelman and his colleague, Joseph Gally, called degeneracy a “ubiquitous biological property … a feature of complexity”, claiming it was an inevitable outcome of natural selection. It explains both why unusual brain conditions are not as catastrophic as they might be, and also why scientists find the brain so confounding to try and understand.

My BBC Future column from before Christmas. The original is here. Thanks to everyone on twitter who chipped in on the plural of cerebellum

Dejobaan have launched their first literary game and this time it will be up to you to provide the literature itself -- just as the trailer above suggests. Elegy for a Dead World, you see, asks that you use your keyboard to craft words and stories, while travelling through three wonderful, strange and ancient societies and then share your creations. Become a most imaginative archaeologist if you will.

Elegy for a Dead World is available for Windows, Mac and Linux on Steam and DRM-free on the Humble Store.

A psychology experiment recruited mock jurors to read through a transcript of a murder trial. After a key piece of evidence came up in court, the jury was told to "disregard" it, just the way they might in a real trial. That's where the problems started.

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How much money would you pay to prevent a complete stranger from being administered an electric shock? And how would that compare to what you'd give up to prevent your own pain? A fascinating new experiment suggests we may be more altruistic than we think.

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I’ve been puzzling over this tweet from Jeff Rouder:

Surely, I thought, psychology is built out of effects. What could be wrong with focussing on testing which ones are reliable?

But I think I’ve got it now. The thing about effects is that they show you – an experimental psychologist – can construct a situation where some factor you are interested in is important, relative to all the other factors (which you have managed to hold constant).

To see why this might be a problem, consider this paper by Tsay (2013): “Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance”. This was a study which asked people to select the winners of a classical music competition from 6 second clips of them performing. Some participants got the audio, so they could only hear the performance; others got the video, so they could only see the performance; and some got both audio and video. Only those participants who watched the video, without sound, could select the actual competition winners at above chance level. This demonstrates a significant bias effect of sight in judgements of music performance.

To understand the limited importance of this effect, contrast with the overclaims made by the paper: “people actually depend primarily on visual information when making judgments about music performance” (in the abstract) and “[Musicians] relegate the sound of music to the role of noise” (the concluding line). Contrary to these claims the study doesn’t show that looks dominate sound in how we assess music. It isn’t the case that our musical taste is mostly determined by how musicians look.

The Tsay studies took the 3 finalists from classical music competitions – the best of the best of expert musicians – and used brief clips of their performances as stimuli. By my reckoning, this scenario removes almost all differences in quality of the musical performance. Evidence in support for this is that Tsay didn’t find any difference in performance between non-expert participants and professional musicians. This fact strongly suggests that she has designed a task in which it is impossible to bring any musical knowledge to bear. musical knowledge isn’t an important factor.

This is why it isn’t reasonable to conclude that people are making judgments about musical performance in general. The clips don’t let you judge relative musical quality, but – for these equally almost equally matched performances – they do let you reflect the same biases as the judges, biases which include an influence of appearance as well as sound. The bias matters, not least because it obviously affects who won, but proving it exists is completely separate from the matter of whether the overall judgements of music, is affected more by sight or sound.

Further, there’s every reason to think that the conclusion from the study of the bias effect gives the opposite conclusion to the study of overall importance. In these experiments sight dominates sound, because differences due to sound have been controlled out. In most situations where we decide our music preferences, sounds is obviously massively more important.

Many psychological effects are impressive tribute to the skill of experimenters in designing situations where most factors are held equal, allowing us to highlight the role of subtle psychological factors. But we shouldn’t let this blind us to the fact that the existence of an effect due to a psychological factor isn’t the same as showing how important this factor is relative to all others, nor is it the same as showing that our effect will hold when all these other factors start varying.

Link: Are classical music competitions judged on looks? – critique of Tsay (2013) written for The Conversation

Link: A good twitter thread on the related issue of effect size – and yah-boo to anyone who says you can’t have a substantive discussion on social media

UPDATE: The paper does give evidence that the sound stimuli used do influence people’s judgements systemmatically – it was incorrect of me to say that differences due to sound have been removed. I have corrected the post to reflect what I believe the study shows: that differences due to sound have been minimised, so that differences in looks are emphasised.

Deceptively solid-looking when seen from either side, the delicacy of these paper sculptures is revealed if you simply shift your position to view them straight on. Korean artist Ho Yoon Shin coats strips of paper with urethane and attaches them to each other with paper joints to create Buddhas, replicas of famous sculptures and other human figures.

The translucency of the sculptures is a commentary on what Shin sees as the vacancy of modern society, relating social and political conditions in Korea to Buddhism’s philosophy of emptiness.

“I am interested in social phenomena and approached the essence of it,” says Shin. “I realized that the closer I approached it, I realized there is no essence. I think it is already intrinsic in me or in you, being judged and evaluated by the inherent values in our things. Therefore, if examined in that viewpoint, I begin to understand why the power group of Korea has wanted to split all kinds of social systems – the right and the left, social classes divided on its economic structure, dominance and subordination, etc.”

“In the end, it’s a story about the situation and a point where we fill a surface that doesn’t exist… and console and satisfy ourselves.”

In addition to his human figures, Shin’s paper work includes large-scale installations of highly detailed, curtain-like sheets of paper, including ‘Imegrated Flowers,’ which filled an entire hallway at the Kobe Biennale.

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Eminent biologist E.O. Wilson says that most biologists now reject the "selfish gene" theory. Predictably, Richard Dawkins is upset and says that Wilson needs to re-read one of Dawkins' books from the early 1980s in order to understand what's happening in 2014.

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Ancient Europeans were lactose intolerant for 5,000 years after switching over to agriculture. DNA extracted from skulls dating from 5,700 BC to 800 BC shows that Europeans carried the genes for lactose intolerance. But that didn't stop them from eating dairy products like milk and cheese for 4,000 years. The study shows that genomes can shift as new technologies emerge.

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You may think you know your own mind, but when it comes to memory, research suggests that you don’t. If we’re trying to learn something, many of us study in ways that prevent the memories sticking. Fortunately, the same research also reveals how we can supercharge our learning.

We’ve all had to face a tough exam at least once in our lives. Whether it’s a school paper, university final or even a test at work, there’s one piece of advice we’re almost always given: make a study plan. With a plan, we can space out our preparation for the test rather than relying on one or two intense study sessions the night before to see us through.

It’s good advice. Summed up in three words: cramming doesn’t work. Unfortunately, many of us ignore this rule. At least one survey has found that 99% of students admit to cramming.

You might think that’s down to nothing more than simple disorganisation: I’ll admit it is far easier to leave things to the last minute than start preparing for a test weeks or months ahead. But studies of memory suggest there’s something else going on. In 2009, for example, Nate Kornell at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that spacing out learning was more effective than cramming for 90% of the participants who took part in one of his experiments – and yet 72% of the participants thought that cramming had been more beneficial. What is happening in the brain that we trick ourselves this way?

Studies of memory suggest that we have a worrying tendency to rely on our familiarity with study items to guide our judgements of whether we know them. The problem is that familiarity is bad at predicting whether we can recall something.

Familiar, not remembered

After six hours of looking at study material (and three cups of coffee and five chocolate bars) it’s easy to think we have it committed to memory. Every page, every important fact, evokes a comforting feeling of familiarity. The cramming has left a lingering glow of activity in our sensory and memory systems, a glow that allows our brain to swiftly tag our study notes as “something that I’ve seen before”. But being able to recognise something isn’t the same as being able to recall it.

Different parts of the brain support different kinds of memory. Recognition is strongly affected by the ease with which information passes through the sensory areas of our brain, such as the visual cortex if you are looking at notes. Recall is supported by a network of different areas of the brain, including the frontal cortex and the temporal lobe, which coordinate to recreate a memory from the clues you give it. Just because your visual cortex is fluently processing your notes after five consecutive hours of you looking at them, doesn’t mean the rest of your brain is going to be able to reconstruct the memory of them when you really need it to.

This ability to make judgements about our own minds is called metacognition. Studying it has identified other misconceptions too. For instance, many of us think that actively thinking about trying to learn something will help us remember it. Studies suggest this is not the case. Far more important is reorganising the information so that it has a structure more likely to be retained in your memory. In other words, rewrite the content of what you want to learn in a way that makes most sense to you.

Knowing about common metacognitive errors means you can help yourself by assuming that you will make them. You can then try and counteract them. So, the advice to space out our study only makes sense if we assume that people aren’t already spacing out their study sessions enough (a safe assumption, given the research findings). We need to be reminded of the benefits of spaced learning because it runs counter to our instinct to relying on a comforting feeling of familiarity when deciding how to study

Put simply, we can sometimes have a surprising amount to gain from going against our normally reliable metacognitive instinct. How much should you space out your practice? Answer: a little bit more than you really want to.

This my BBC Future article from last week. The original is here

I have a new paper out in Frontiers in Psychology: The perspectival shift: how experiments on unconscious processing don’t justify the claims made for them. There has been ongoing consternation about the reliability of some psychology research, particularly studies which make claims about unconscious (social) priming. However, even if we assume that the empirical results are reliable, the question remains whether the claims made for the power of the unconscious make any sense. I argue that they often don’t.

Here’s something from the intro:

In this commentary I draw attention to certain limitations on the inferences which can be drawn about participant’s awareness from the experimental methods which are routine in social priming research. Specifically, I argue that (1) a widely employed definition of unconscious processing, promoted by John Bargh is incoherent (2) many experiments involve a perspectival sleight of hand taking factors identified from comparison of average group performance and inappropriately ascribing them to the reasoning of individual participants.

The problem, I claim, is that many studies on ‘unconscious processing’, follow John Bargh in defining unconscious as meaning “not reported at the time”. This means that experimenters over-diagnose unconscious influence, when the possibility remains that participants were completely conscious of the influence of the stimili, but may not be reporting them because they have forgotten, worry about sounding silly or because the importance of the stimuli is genuinely trivial compared to other factors.

It is this last point which makes up the ‘perspectival shift’ of the title. Experiments on social priming usually work by comparing some measure (e.g. walking speed or reaction time) across two groups. My argument is that the factors which make up the total behaviour for each individual will be many and various. The single factor which the experimenter is interested in may have a non-zero effect, yet can still justifiably escape report by the majority of participants. To make this point concrete: if I ask you to judge how likeable someone is on the 1 to 7 scale, your judgement will be influenced by many factors, such as if they are like you, if you are in a good mood, the content of your interaction with the person, if they really are likeable and so on. Can we really expect participants to report an effect due to something that only the experimenter sees variation in, such as whether they are holding a hot drink or a cold drink at the time of judgement? We might as well expect them to report the effect due to them growing up in Europe rather than Asia, or being born in 1988 not 1938 (both surely non-zero effects in my hypothetical experiment).

More on this argument, and what I think it means, in the paper:

Stafford, T. (2014) The perspectival shift: how experiments on unconscious processing don’t justify the claims made for them. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1067. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01067

I originally started writing this commentary as a response to this paper by Julie Huang and John Bargh, which I believe is severely careless with the language it uses to discuss unconscious processing (and so a good example of the conceptual trouble you can get into if you start believing the hype around social priming).

Full disclosure: I am funded by the Leverhulme Trust to work on a project looking at the philosophy and psychology of implicit bias. This post is cross-posted on the project blog.

Subtle racism is prevalent in US and UK universities, according to a new paper commissioned by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and released last week, reports The Times Higher Education.

Black professors surveyed for the paper said they were treated differently than white colleagues in the form of receiving less eye contact or requests for their opinion, that they felt excluded in meetings and experienced undermining of their work. “I have to downplay my achievements sometimes to be accepted” said one academic, explaining that colleagues that didn’t expect a black woman to be clever and articulate. Senior managers often dismiss racist incidents as conflicts of personalities or believe them to be exaggerated, found the paper.

And all this in institutions where almost all staff would say they are not just “not racist” but where many would say they were actively committed to fighting prejudice.

This seems like a clear case of the operation of implicit biases – where there is a contradiction between people’s egalitarian beliefs and their racist actions. Implicit biases are an industry in psychology, where tools such as the implicit association test (IAT) are used to measure them. The IAT is a fairly typical cognitive psychology-type study: individuals sit in front of a computer and the speed of their reactions to stimuli are measured (the stimuli are things like faces of people with different ethnicities, which is how we get out a measure of implicit prejudice).

The LFHE paper is a nice opportunity to connect this lab measure with the reality of implicit bias ‘in the wild’. In particular, along with some colleagues, I have been interested in exactly what an implicit bias, is, psychologically.

Commonly, implicit biases are described as if they are unconscious or somehow outside of the awareness of those holding them. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been shown to be the case (in fact the opposite may be true – there’s some evidence that people can predict their IAT scores fairly accurately). Worse, the very idea of being unaware of a bias is badly specified. Does ‘unaware’ mean you aren’t aware of your racist feelings? Of your racist behaviour? Of that the feelings, in this case, have produced the behaviour?

The racist behaviours reported in the paper – avoiding eye-contact, assuming that discrimination is due to personalities and not race, etc – could all work at any or all of these levels of awareness. Although the behaviours are subtle, and contradict people’s expressed, anti-racist, opinions, the white academics could still be completely aware. They could know that black academics make them feel awkward or argumentative, and know that this is due to their race. Or they could be completely unaware. They could know that they don’t trust the opinions of certain academics, for example, but not realise that race is a factor in why they feel this way.

Just because the behaviour is subtle, or the psychological phenomenon is called ‘implicit’, doesn’t mean we can be certain about what people really know about it. The real value in the notion of implicit bias is that it reminds us that prejudice can exist in how we behave, not just in what we say and believe.

Full disclosure: I am funded by the Leverhulme Trust to work on project looking at the philosophy and psychology of implicit bias . This post is cross-posted on the project blog. Run your own IAT with our open-source code: Open-IAT!

A forced relocation is underway as thousands of squatters are moved by authorities out of their homes and the city of Caracas, some of whom have called the infamous half-finished Tower of David home for as long as seven years.

Rumors began a few weeks back as Chinese bankers expressed interest in purchasing the unfinished structure in Venezuela, with the intention of turning it back toward the (official and licensed) commercial and office uses for which it was originally intended. Currently, however, over 1,000 families live and work in the first few dozen floors of this 44-story skyscraper.

With surprising speed over the past week, the government has already shifted over 100 of these to a settlement outside of town (three floors a time) and is set to displace everyone living in the building, primarily to Valles del Tuy in the state of Miranda.

The tower was originally abandoned mid-construction in 1990 and eventually taken over by informal inhabitants who created not just homes but stores, offices, gyms, groceries, tailors, factories, churches tattoo parlors and even internet cafes within its walls.

Without an elevator (and with missing windows on the top levels), its most prized spaces for occupants have been on the lower floors, with scooter taxis that ferry people up ramps to some levels adjacent to the parking structure. Like Kowloon Walled City, the place has its own rules and informal systems of bringing in and sharing resources, including limited water and power.

The Urban Think Tank, which spent years studying the building (and writing Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities), has weighed in on the significance of the building and its occupants as well as its sudden shift in direction: “What we found was neither a den of criminality nor a romantic utopia. Torre David is a building that has the complexity of a city. It merges formal structure and informal adaptation to provide urgently needed solutions, and shows us how bottom-up resourcefulness has the ability to address prevailing urban scarcities.”

More from UTT: “When dealing with informal settlements, infusions of money for major public works and other approaches that involve large-scale rapid change – such as the razing of slums and relocation of poor populations – have generally failed in the complex setting of the city. The commercial housing market simply does not supply enough homes. There are too few units of social housing, and the majority of these are far beyond the reach of low-income families.”

“The dire asymmetries of capital in the global south do little to help; yet various forms of structural neglect have not always diminished great entrepreneurial vigor. Shunned by governments and the formal private sector, city dwellers, like those in Torre David, have devised and employed tactics to improvise shelter and housing.” Images via The Atlantic and Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities.

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By Tom Stafford, University of Sheffield

The headlines

The Australian: Male and female brains still unequal

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: Gender disparities in cognition will not diminish

The Economist: A variation in the cognitive abilities of the two sexes may be more about social development than gender stereotypes

The story

Everybody has an opinion on men, women and the difference (or not) between them. Now a new study has used a massive and long-running European survey to investigate how differences in cognitive ability are changing. This is super smart, because it offers us an escape from arguing about whether men and women are different in how they think, allowing us some insight into how any such differences might develop.

What they actually did

Researchers led by Daniela Weber at Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis analysed data collected as part of the European Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement. This includes data analysed in this study from approximately 31,000 adults, men and women all aged older than 50. As well as answering demographic questions, the survey participants took short quizzes which tested their memory, numeracy and verbal fluency (this last item involved a classic test which asks people to name as many animals as they could in 60 seconds). Alongside each test score, we have the year the participant was born in, as well as measures of gender equality and economic development for the country where they grew up.

What they found

The results show that as a country develops economically, the differences in cognitive ability between men and women change. But the pattern isn’t straightforward. Differences in verbal fluency disappear (so that an advantage on this test for men born in the 1920s over women is not found for those born in the 1950s). Differences in numeracy diminish (so the male advantage is less) and differences in memory actually increase (so that a female advantage is accentuated).

Further analysis looked at the how these differences in cognitive performance related to the amount of education men and women got. In all regions women tended to have fewer years of education, on average, then men. But, importantly, the size of this difference varied. This allowed the researchers to gauge how differences in education affected cognitive performance.

For all three abilities tested, there was a relationship between the size of the differences in the amount of education and the size of the difference in cognitive performance: fewer years of education for women was associated with worse scores for women, as you’d expect.

What varied for the three abilities was in the researchers’ predictions for the situation where men and women spent an equal amount of time in education: for memory this scenario was associated with a distinct female advantage, for numeracy a male advantage and for verbal fluency, there was no difference.

What this means

The thing that dogs studies on gender differences in cognition is the question of why these differences exist. People have such strong expectations, that they often leap to the assumption that any observed difference must reflect something fundamental about men vs women. Here, consider the example of the Australian newspaper which headlined their take on this story as telling us something about “male and female brains”, the implication being that the unequalness was a fundamental, biological, difference. In fact, research often shows that gender differences in cognitive performance are small, and even then we don’t know why these differences exist.

The great thing about this study is that by looking at how gender differences evolve over time it promises insight into what drives those difference in the first place. The fact that the female memory advantage increases as women are allowed more access to education is, on the face of it, suggestive evidence that at least one cognitive difference between men and women may be unleashed by more equal societies, rather than removed by them.

Tom’s take

The most important thing to take from this research is – as the authors report – increasing gender equality disproportionately benefits women. This is because – no surprise! – gender inequality disproportionately disadvantages women. Even in the area of cognitive performance, this historical denial of opportunities, health and education to women means, at a population level, they have more potential to increase their scores on these tests.

Along with other research on things like IQ, this study found systemmatic improvements in cognitive performance across time for both men and women – as everyone’s opportunities and health increases, so does their cognitive function.

But the provocative suggestion of this study is that as societies develop we won’t necessarily see all gender differences go away. Some cognitive differences may actually increase when women are at less of a disadvantage.

You don’t leap to conclusions based on one study, but this is a neat contribution. One caveat is that even though indices such as “years in education” show diminished gender inequality in Europe, you’d be a fool to think that societies which educated men and women for an equal number of years treated them both equally and put equal expectations on them.

Even if you thought this was true for 2014, you wouldn’t think this was true for European societies of the 1950s (when the youngest of these study participants were growing up). There could be very strong societal influences on cognitive ability – such as expecting women to be good with words and bad with numbers – that simply aren’t captured by the data analysed here.

Personally, I find it interesting to observe how keen people are to seize on such evidence that “essential” gender differences definitely do exist (despite the known confounds of living in a sexist society). My preferred strategy would be to hold judgement and focus on the remaking the definitely sexist society. For certain, we’ll only get the truth when we have an account of how cognitive abilities develop within both biological and social contexts. Studies like this point the way, and suggest that whatever the truth is, it should have some surprises for everyone.

Read more

The original research: The changing face of cognitive gender differences in Europe

My previous column on gender differences: Are men better wired to read maps or is it a tired cliché?

Cordelia Fine’s book, Delusions of gender: how our minds, society, and neuro-sexism create difference

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Writing strong exposition in speculative fiction (or SF, the umbrella term for fantastical fiction genres such as science fiction, fantasy, paranormal and horror) is a balancing act. It’s like watering a plant. Too little water and it dries up and dies; too much water and it rots and drowns. Information is to your audience what water is to a plant—it’s the life of the story, and yet you have to keep it in balance. Too much raw information up front and the reader can’t keep it all straight; too little information and the reader can’t figure out what’s happening. The result in either case is confusion, impatience and boredom.

This balance is key in any kind of storytelling, but is especially difficult to achieve in science fiction and fantasy because our stories take place in worlds that differ from the known world. We not only have to introduce characters and immediate situations, we also have to let readers know how the rules of our universe differ from the normal rules and show them the strangeness of the place in which the events occur.

—by Orson Scott Card

The trick is to reveal information very carefully, and usually by implication. The best way to tell you what I mean is to show you, using the opening line of Octavia E. Butler’s novel Wild Seed. (I’ve chosen this book because nobody handles exposition better than Butler—and also because it’s a terrific novel that you ought to read for the sheer pleasure of it.)

Here’s the first sentence:

Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages.

You have just been given an astonishing amount of information—but it has been done in such a way that you probably aren’t aware of how much you already know.

Let’s take a look at some factors to consider at your own story’s opening.

[Did you know there are 7 reasons writing a novel makes you a badass? Read about them here.]

Naming

In this classic example from Butler, we first know the name of the viewpoint character: Doro. Later in the novel we’ll learn that Doro has many names, but Butler gives us the name by which he thinks of himself—and whenever we’re in Doro’s viewpoint that’s the only name used for him. Lesser writers might have kept changing the name of that viewpoint character, thinking they’re helping us by telling us more information:

The starship captain walked onto the bridge. Bob glanced over and saw the lights were blinking. “What are you thinking of, Dilworth?” said the tall blond man.

Is Bob the starship captain? Or is Bob Dilworth? And is it Bob or the starship captain who is the tall blond man? One tag per character, please, at least until we know them better. Above all, don’t coyly begin with pronouns for the viewpoint character and make us wonder who “he” or “she” is—give us a name first, so we have a hook on which to hang all the information we learn about that character.

Second, we know that Doro will discover “the woman,” and we assume that this discovery will be important to the story. Because Butler is a first-rate writer, that assumption is correct—she would never mislead us by placing a trivial character so portentously in the opening sentence. Yet she doesn’t name the woman yet. In part this is because naming two characters immediately is often confusing. Too many names at once are hard to keep track of and may make it unclear who the viewpoint character is. Another reason for not naming “the woman,” however, is because at this exact moment in the story—as Doro goes to see what is left of a village—he doesn’t know her name. The narrator knows it, of course, but at this point Doro does not, and so it’s right not to give that information to the reader.

Abeyance

What else do we learn from Butler’s opening sentence? Doro didn’t intend to meet the woman. His purpose at the time was to see what was left of—what? A “seed village.”

What in the world is a seed village?

We don’t know what a seed village is. And Butler doesn’t tell us—because Doro, who knows perfectly well what a seed village is, wouldn’t stop and think about that information right now. But in due time we will find out what a seed village is. So we readers hold that question in abeyance. We have a hook with the label “seed village” over it; we trust that the author will let us know in due course what information should be hung on that hook.

This principle of abeyance is one of the protocols of reading speculative fiction that makes it difficult for some people who aren’t familiar with the genre to grasp what’s going on. Experienced SF readers recognize that the author doesn’t expect them to know what a seed village is—this is one of the differences, one of the things that is strange in this created world, and the author will in time explain what the term means.

But the reader who is inexperienced in SF might think that the author expects him to already know what a seed village is. He stops cold, trying to guess what the term means from its context. But he can’t guess, because there isn’t enough context yet. Instead of holding the information in abeyance like a small mystery, he is just as likely to think that either the writer is so clumsy that she doesn’t know how to communicate well, or that this novel is so esoteric that its readers are expected to know uncommon terms that aren’t even in the dictionary.

This is one of the real boundaries between SF and non-SF writing. Science fiction and fantasy writers handle exposition this way, by dropping in occasional terms as the viewpoint character thinks of them and explaining them only later. The SF reader doesn’t expect to receive a complete picture of the world all at once. Rather he builds up his own picture bit by bit from clues within the text.

[Get your creative juices flowing by trying this 12-Day plan of simple writing exercises.]

Implication

Butler is not being obscure; she is being clear. While the term “seed villages” goes unexplained, we are told that this is merely one of them and that Doro thinks of more than one seed village as “his.” Furthermore, “seed village” is not a wholly obscure term. We know what a village is; we know what seed means when it’s used as an adjective. Seed potatoes, for instance, are small potatoes or parts of potatoes that are planted in the ground to grow into larger ones. By implication, Doro is somehow using villages as seed—or perhaps he has the villagers growing seeds for him. We aren’t sure, but we do know that Doro is working on growing something and that he has more than one village involved in it.

This, again, is one of the protocols of reading SF. The reader is expected to extrapolate, to find the implied information contained in new words. The classic example is Robert A. Heinlein’s phrase “The door dilated,” from Beyond This Horizon. No explanation of the technology; the character doesn’t exclaim, “Good heavens! A dilating door!” Instead, the reader is told not only that doors in this place dilate like irises, opening in all directions at once, but also that the character takes this fact for granted. The implication is that many—perhaps all—doors in this place dilate and that they have been doing it for long enough that nobody pays attention to it anymore.

The SF writer is thus able to imply far more information than he actually states; the SF reader will pick up most or all of these implications. This is one reason why you must be so rigorous about creating your worlds to quite a deep level of detail, because your readers will constantly be leaping past what you actually say to find the implications of what you’re saying—and if you haven’t thought things through to that level, they’ll catch you being sloppy or silly or just plain wrong.

Literalism

The protocols of abeyance and implication, which give you a great deal of power, also remove one of the tools that mainstream writers rely on most heavily: metaphor. Especially at the beginning of a speculative story, all strange statements are taken literally. “Seed village” isn’t a metaphor, it’s what the village actually is.

I think of a story by Tom Maddox that appeared some years ago in OMNI. In the first or second paragraph he had passengers taken from their airplane to the terminal on what he called a “reptile bus.” I was teaching an SF literature course at the time, and my students were pretty evenly divided between those who had been reading SF for years and those who had never read it before that semester.

The majority of the experienced SF readers reported the same experience I had: At least for a moment, and often for quite a way into the story, we thought that Maddox wanted us to think that reptiles were somehow being used for airport transportation. We pictured a triceratops with a howdah perhaps, or an allosaurus towing a rickshaw. It was an absurd sort of technology, and it would have strained credulity—but many SF stories use such bizarre ideas and make them work. Maddox might have been establishing a work in which bioengineers had created many new species of very useful but stupid dinosaurs.

Those who had never read SF, however, were untroubled by such distraction. They knew at once that “reptile bus” was a metaphor—that it was a regular gas-burning bus with several sections so it snaked across the tarmac in a reptile-like way.

This is one of the key differences between the SF audience and any other. When confronted with a strange juxtaposition of familiar words, both groups say, “What does the author mean by this?” But the SF audience expects the term to be literal, to have a real extension within the world of the story, while the mainstream audience expects the term to be metaphorical, to express an attitude toward or give a new understanding of something that is part of the known world.

When an SF writer says, “She took heavy mechanical steps toward the door,” there is always the possibility that in fact her legs are machinery; the mainstream writer assumes this metaphorically expresses the manner of her walking and would regard that word usage as a grotesque joke if she did have artificial legs.

This doesn’t mean that you, as an SF writer, are forbidden to use metaphor. But it does mean that early in a story, when the rules of your created world are not yet fully explained, you should avoid metaphors that might be confusing to experienced SF readers. Later, when the rules are firmly established, your readers will know that terms that imply things that are not possible in your world should be taken metaphorically.

Recall the difference between metaphor, simile and analogy. Similes and analogies, which explicitly state that one thing is like another thing, are still available; only metaphors, which state that one thing is another thing, are forbidden. “You could treat Howard Merkle like dirt, and he’d still come fawning back to you, just like a whipped dog,” is a simile that would be perfectly clear and usable in speculative fiction, whereas the metaphor “Howard Merkle was a dog, always eager to please no matter how you treated him,” would be problematic early in a speculative fiction story because it could be taken literally.

Beware also of analogies that remove the reader from the milieu of the story and remind him of the present time. The sentence “The aliens had facial structures like eyebrows, only arched in an exaggerated way, so they walked around looking like a McDonald’s advertisement,” would be fine in a near-future story about contact with aliens; McDonald’s would presumably still be around. But the same description would be jarring if the story were set in a time and place so different from our own that the characters do not have McDonald’s restaurants as part of their daily experience. In that case, such a sentence is clearly the writer talking to the contemporary American reader, not the narrator creating the experience of another time and place. And it’s almost worse if you try to compensate for this dislocation by making it explicit: “The aliens’ eyebrows arched like the logo of that ancient fast-food restaurant, McDonald’s, which Pyotr had seen once in a history book about the 20th century on Earth.” This sort of thing throws the reader right out of the story. There’s a natural impulse to compare something strange to something that will be familiar to the reader—but as a general rule you should use only similes and analogies that would also be available to the characters in the story, so that the entire experience of reading contributes to the illusion of being in the story’s milieu.

Pique Your Readers’ Interest

It’s important, especially at the beginning of your novel, to reveal information that promises your reader an interesting story to come. Those promises must be honest ones that you intend to keep. Because Doro is set up as the kind of character who can somehow “own” villages, we see him as a bit larger than life—Butler definitely will deliver on this promise. And the concept of seed villages is absolutely central to the story; it isn’t a trivial bit of strangeness to be tossed in and thrown away. In other words, Butler isn’t just giving us random but interesting information to fool us into going on—she’s giving us interesting information that is vital to the story.

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Brian A. Klems is the online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.

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A surreal testimony to the excesses of underground construction in London, developers have been intentionally burying still-functioning digging machines used to excavate subterranean extensions below expensive city homes – an estimated 500 to 1000 to date.

Property values coupled with height restrictions have driven ultra-rich clients underground in a search for ever-more space. Expanding beneath the surface, however, means using machines to tunnel – ones that are not always deemed worth the complexity and cost of retrieving.

As Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG describes the absurdity of the situation, “London is thus becoming a machine cemetery, with upwards of £5 million worth of excavators now lying in state beneath the houses of the 1% …. [These] sacrificial JCBs have excavated the very holes they are then ritually entombed within, turning the city into a Celtic barrow for an age of heroic machinery.”

In most cases, the spaces created by these machines are luxury additions, ranging from multistory wine cellars and climbing walls to pool halls and bowling alleys. When a machine’s cavern-creating tasks are completed, their masters give them one final suicide mission: carving out their own grave, to be filled with dirt, concrete and themselves, all becoming a permanent fixture of the site’s foundations.

How does this strange set of circumstances come about? As Ed Smith of the New Statesment reports, “The difficulty is in getting the digger out again. To construct a no-expense-spared new basement, the digger has to go so deep into the London earth. Initially, the developers would often use a large crane to scoop up the digger, which was by now nestled almost out of sight at the bottom of a deep hole.”

It was only a matter of time before the analysts took over: “Then they began to calculate the cost-benefit equation of this procedure. First, a crane would have to be hired; second, the entire street would need to be closed for a day while the crane was manoeuvred into place. Both of these stages were very expensive, not to mention unpopular among the distinguished local residents.”

In the end, economics won out and developers concluded that rescuing a piece of a machinery worth thousands from a pit under a house worth millions was just not important. This practice has gone on long enough for a new problem to arise: diggers encountering their concrete-encased cousins on subsequent excavations. And as if that were not odd enough, imagine the reactions of future archaeologists, wondering at the strange burial practices of London urbanites in centuries yet to come. (Images via London Basement).

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Artificial environments designed for space have thus far remained totally utilitarian, but what if more aesthetic considerations were brought into the mix? These design concepts range from constantly morphing art galleries for the International Space Station to a moon base built using existing 3D printing technology and designed by a renowned architecture firm.

Tate in Space: Cultural Center for the International Space Station

Artists, designers and other creatives haven’t exactly been included in the process of space exploration thus far, but this project by ETALAB aims to change that with an outer space gallery where artists, curators and visitors interact with works of art and architecture in zones of zero and partial gravity. Docked at the International Space Station, ‘Tate in Space’ features a flexible ‘envelope’ made from a smart material based on biomechanics that enables the space to constantly shift in shape.

Olympic Stadium for the Moon

Designed as part of the ‘MARS ONE’ project that aims to start colonizing Mars and other locations in space within a matter of mere years, SILO (Stadium International Lunar Olympics) is a stadium for the moon complete with a hotel, restaurants and a solar electric system as well as seats for 100,000. The designers say, “Within the lunar colonies of the future, recreational activities will arise and evolve to take advantage of the moon’s micro-gravity. The sports we know today will be modified, and brand new sports will be invented. Lunar sports associations will be created, teams will be sponsored, games will be televised, and people from all over the globe will watch as the best of the best compete in an arena in which all the rules have changed.”

Mars Colonization by ZA Architects

Solar-powered robots could excavate dwellings for humans on Mars before the people ever arrive in this concept by ZA Architects. Choosing areas where the basalt rock has formed into hexagonal columns, which can be easily removed to create cathedral-like spaces, the robots would weave web-like structures from basalt fibers to create floors at various levels within the caves.

Self-Assembling House for the Moon

A crowd-funding initiative will send a self-assembling house to the moon in October 15th on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 spacecraft. The building, designed by American aerospace company Astrobotic, will be made from a thin sheet of specially developed cloth stretched over a carbon frame. Once it’s placed on the lunar surface, it will fill up with gas and stand erect within five to fifteen minutes.

Russian Space Station Hotel

Russia’s plans for a space hotel would house seven guests in four cabins, 217 miles above the surface of the Earth. The hotel would also function as accommodations for scientists on space-related missions, and as an emergency blowhole for astronauts aboard the International Space Station. A five-day stay will set guests back $100,000 in addition to the half-million it costs to get to space in the first place.

Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea

This series of fantastical images doesn’t even try to be technically correct or scientifically possible, but it was commissioned by NASA all the same to represent a vision of existence on Mars. The artists used photo-mosaic panoramas of expeditions by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity as backdrops for surreal scenes.

3D Moon Base by Foster + Partners

Architecture firm Foster + Partners, responsible for many iconic buildings on Earth, have designed a four-person lunar base that uses 3D printing technology to ‘print’ a protective layer of locally-sourced lunar soil over an inflatable dome. Commissioned by the European Space Agency, the project takes a look at the feasibility of actually building such a structure using currently existing technology.

Moon Dwelling by Royal Haskoning Architects

A transparent sphere houses living spaces for lunar residents in this concept by Royal Haskoning Architects, offering inhabitants unlimited views of the awe-inspiring setting if not a whole lot of privacy. But then again, who needs privacy when you live on the moon? A protective screen rotates around the sphere to protect the inside from the harsh rays of the sun. The sphere is envisioned as a mini-Earth with its own oxygen supply and various levels that inhabitants can simply float between rather than taking the stairs.

Martian Base by Janek Kozicki

Husband and wife design team Janek Kozicki and Joanna Kozicka have created a number of concept designs for Martian bases generally powered by either a radio-isotope generator or a small nuclear power plant, along with practical architectural guidelines for building on other planets. The design pictured above, by Kozicki, is a modular setup that would start with a single pod and grow with subsequent trips to and from Earth to ultimately accommodate several dozen people.

Inflatable Pods by Joanna Kozicka

Kozicka’s solutions include inflatable pods that are lightweight, easy to deploy, and ultimately offer a bigger payoff in terms of square footage for the size of the load sent to Mars. The designs address the sociopsychological problems that the couple identified in relation to living on another planet, avoiding isolated and confined environments in favor of large, comfortable spaces that let in sunlight and allow contact with nature.

Shackleton Crater Lunar Outpost

NASA’s Lunar Architecture Team is working on a design for a permanent lunar outpost that could be set up the next time humans land on the moon. Designed for Shackleton Crater, located at the south pole of the moon, the habitat would consist of larger modules sent ahead of time on a cargo lander.

Luna Ring Concept

The Luna Ring concept would put permanent solar collectors around the moon’s equator like a belt, with solar cells collecting energy that would then be beamed back to Earth via microwave power transmission antennae. A team of astronauts would supervise the robot construction workers carrying out the installation process.

Fractal Lunar Architecture

A fractal design for a lunar base by Hatem Al Khafaji of Dubai makes it easy to expand the available space as needed using a system of seven modular components of living pods, air locks, corridors and connectors. Layers of these modules would be placed around a central ‘heart’ and continuously stacked by teams of robots and human workers.

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