IdeaFestival

Lemon-scented ethics

Can that nice smell make you more ethical?

That’s the provocative suggestion of a recent study in the journal Psychological Science. A team of researchers found that when people were in a room recently spritzed with a citrus-scented cleanser, they behaved more fairly when playing a classic trust game. In another experiment, the smell of cleanser made subjects more likely to volunteer for a charity.

While Proctor and Gamble is unlikely to hire one to market its brands, philosophers have long discussed the phenomenal character of experience, largely focusing on sight and its non-reductive character. The famous thought experiment featuring "blind Mary," or our inability to correlate the thrill of seeing our significant other with a molecule-for-molecule brain state point to the special nature of experience and its unique contribution to knowing. As it turns out, scent, too, has a place in that literature.

"What it is to be like" under the influence of recently spritzed citrus-scented cleanser? Only you really know. And armed with a lemon zester, someone, somewhere has a plan.

Wayne

"There are endless ways to be irrational"

What would highways look like if they were designed by economists?

First of all, there would be no shoulder at the side of the road, because why would you ever pave something where nobody is supposed to drive anyway? And those raised ‘bubble lines’ that indicate to a driver that he is leaving his lane? Why would you need those either, because people know they are supposed to drive within the lines. Indeed, we might not have any lanes or speed limits, because why restrict people like that? What I am describing is a situation in which you assume that people are perfectly rational beings who know what they are doing, so you build-in no room for error. While this is an extreme example, this is the basic idea of perfect economic rationality.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of the book, Predictably Irrational, contrasts the role of rationality in economic theory with real-world decision-making in the Forbes India piece linked above.

Hat tip: Putting People First.

Wayne

Finding order

The two videos below explore the idea of order in different and striking ways. The first features Tom Shannon, whose sculpture and painting present a world in dynamic and illuminating tension, lawful, but having the accompanying freedom to be what it will be. The second video presents Ursus Wehrli, who sees that tension and recoils.

Wayne

Depression changes how we see the world

Sufferers from depression are more likely to focus on the big picture:

People who have suffered from major depression are significantly better than other people at seeing a metaphorical forest, while the non-depressed are more alert to the trees, according to this study published a few months back in The Journal of Neuroscience... The paper suggests that depression isn't just a disease of emotion and thought--that it also alters perception.

Full post at the Big Think is here.

Wayne

Chess intelligence, a 1,000 year song and the "Calculus of Friendship"

Links from my feed reader today:

• Former world champion, Garry Kasperov describes what kind of intelligence it takes to master chess.
• What might your speech intonations be telling the listener? Empathy is like music to the ears.
• "An infinite piece repeating every thousand years," the 1,000 year song by Longplayer has now been making music for over 10 years. You can listen here.
• TierneyLab discusses how monkeys and humans tend to rationalize their choices.
• Inferred only over large cosmological distances, could dark energy be detected in the lab?
• Two of the most supple thinkers about information and networking, Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger, blog Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen's recent presentation to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The video is here.
• It takes "quite a lot of phonological awareness to turn 'l8r' into 'homework' or 'hmwrk'". How does texting affect learning?
• Hunkering down for the planet's winter, has the Martian rover Spirit become a lander after five years?
• The secret to happiness could be an hourly wage.
• What do physicists dream - and worry - about?
• SEED writes about the poignant relationship between math teacher and pupil documented in the new book, "The Calculus of Friendship." You can listen to one exchange in this recording.
• The image above taken by the robotic explorer Cassini is of the Saturn moon Tethys appearing behind Titan. The atmosphere of a very hydrologically active Titan can clearly be seen. Click to enlarge.

Wayne

Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

Louisville to host Star Stryder

Noted astronomer Pamela Gay will be in Louisville on Friday, April 2 to talk about the discovery of hundreds of new worlds, the possibility of finding life as well as another Earth, and the emergence of "citizen scientists," a bottom-up movement of people contributing their time and clock cycles to advancing the science in fields as diverse as ornithology, particle physics and, through projects like Galaxy Zoo, astronomy.

Pamela Gay is well known and very active in the astronomical and science community, and blogs under the pseudonym "Star Stryder," where the IdeaFestival first encountered her. You may also follow Pamela @starstryder on Twitter.

She also answered "Five Questions" in a 2008 email interview posted elsewhere on the IdeaFestival blog that you might find interesting.

More information about her April appearance will be forthcoming, so mark that date on your calendar. And for the very latest, follow us @ideafestival on Twitter.

Wayne

How much, or little, would a second Earth look like ours?

[Cross-posted from Kentucky Space] In this video Sixty Symbols explains the technique Kepler is using to look for evidence of second Earth's transiting their host stars in the Milky Way, and the clever way in which the radius of our own was calculated. Given the reference to the "Nerf" planet recently pinpointed by Kepler, the video has only recently been filmed.

In the 15 years since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet, 424 have been discovered, and current and planned observatories are adding to that list at a rapid pace.

Wayne

Writing Eden's music to a wall

Similar in concept if not execution to the Allosphere, the light sculpture in front of the Niels Bohr Institute takes live data from the work being done at the Large Hadron Collider and writes it to the side of a building. Think allegory.

According to the English language version of the "Colliderscope" page,

What you see on the front face of the Institute is a transmission of particle collision as they are seen by one of the accelerator's four detectors. The signal is reproduced with a broad spectrum of tones and varied impact strength as if the accelerator was a kind of giant musical instrument. Maybe you can see the work as a kind of visual translation of the music that sounded at the birth of the Universe.

"A kind of visual translation of the music that sounded at the birth of the Universe?" I like that. For a fuller description of the sculpture and the how data is being passed to it, see this page. Hat tip: Symmetry Magazine

Wayne

Jonah Lehrer on the science of art: Better questions

Filmed shortly before his presentation at the 2008 IdeaFestival, Jonah Lehrer describes how through a process of experimentation and intense curiosity artists have anticipated discoveries about the mind later confirmed by science. Sure, were he alive today Proust wouldn't synthesize the next miracle drug, but his investigation and subsequent art musters something more vital to the human experience - the right question asked at the right time. Have a listen.

Wayne

"You really shouldn't have!"

How would you like to have been able to read minds this holiday season as your gifts were opened? How about, instead, having your mind read?

Useful of course as a diagnostic tool, a downsized MRI might be employed in the future to communicate with sufferers from ALS or others who are otherwise physically unable to describe what they are thinking. The technology has been used recently to connect certain brain states with thoughts, and now the technique is getting better, incorporating predictive software that researchers can use to "read" minds, or make predictions about subsequent meditations instead of simply correlating current brain states with mental states.

David Chalmers, perhaps the best known thinker about thinking, describes such efforts as one halting step toward understanding the deepest of human mysteries, conscious reflection.

Wayne