I am a regular reader of the magazine, New Scientist, and it regularly contains articles and other items of interest. My intention here is simply to provide an index to some of these so I know where to find them again.
| • | Deadly rationality |
| • | Down in Flames |
| • | Evolving gods |
| • | Fearlessness may be linked to crime |
| • | The time machine in your head |
28 November 2009, 53.
Review by Michael Bond of Radical, Religious and Violent by Eli Berman (MIT Press).
Looking at religious terrorism. "While other authors have focussed on the obvious but peripheral issue of how religion inspires individual attackers - it is rarely the primary motivation, as many studies have shown - Berman tackes the pertinent question of what makes radical religious organisations so much more deadly than other groups... one key measure of the potential effectiveness or lethality of a group... is the extent to which it provides social services within its community."
"Those whose jobs it is to protect citizens from such attacks should note his conclusion: that the groups behind them are rational operators whose tactics are best countered socially, economically and politically, not with violence."
4 November 2006, 42-45.
This contains the worrying news that many fires have been wrongly identified as being caused by arson, as many features the experts associated with arson turn out to be produced in accidental fires as well.
It also contains the fascinating detail that you can't set fire to a pool of petrol by dropping a lit cigarette into it, despite what you may have seen in numerous films.
28 November 2009, 53.
Review by Amanda Gefter of The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade (Penguin).
"Wade argues that in early human societies religion was the best solution to lawlessness within a group and warfare from without, motivating individuals to put society's needs before their own. It's a compelling idea, but it requires natural selection to act on groups as well as individuals - an idea that remains controversial."
"Wade sees a future in which religion serves only its societal functions, stripped of obsolete beliefs in the supernatural. It's hard to reconcile with today, when those who cling to superstition and those who turn to reason seem more polarised than ever."
And it is hard to see how religion can have any function if it is stripped of belief in the supernatural. If you believe there is no God, how do you practice a religion which requires that belief, and how does such a faith motivate you to sacrificial love of your fellow creatures?
This is the key issue Sartre and his fellows struggled with. The best solution they found? "Life is meaningless, but we must live as though it has meaning." But where does this 'must' come from, if morality is only something we invent to make ourselves feel better? You just have to pretend hard enough, and maybe you can convince yourself it is true, even though you know it's not...
21 November 2009, 18.
Even at the tender age of 3, children who later go on to be convicted of a crime are less likely to learn to link fear with a certain noise than those who don't. This may mean that an insensitivity to fear could be a driving force behind criminal behaviour.
Adrian Raine of the University of Pennsylvania looked at the data from a study of 1800 3 year olds in the 1970s. They found that 137 of them now had criminal records, and these people had showed significantly less fear than those who did not go on to become criminals, compared to subjects of a similar race, gender, and so on.
24 October 2009, 32-37.
We all know the 'waggon wheel illusion' in which the wheels on waggons in films appear to go the wrong way at certain speeds. But the same effect occurs in real life, because our brains sample visual images at around 13 frame per second. Continuity of movement is a visual illusion.
Even more strangely, when overlapping shapes spin at around that rate, people often see one pattern reverse independently of the other - so we are not just taking visual snapshots of the world, but processing information about discrete objects within the world as distinct units of mental activity.
Our brains must handle simultaneous input from different senses and interpret them correctly. One aspect of this is to create building blocks of consciousness: if two events fall inside the same block, they are perceived as simultaneous, and if they fall into different blocks, they are preceived as sequential.
But our brains process different signals at different speeds, and it is possible for the timing to get mismatched. The suggestion is that schitzophrenia may arise from a mismatch in the timekeeping and coordinating function of the brain, so that the normal perception of cause preceding effect may be at times reversed.
Experiments also show that our perceptions do not actually speed up when we are under stress, but the memories we capture at such times are 'denser' - we store more memory, so it appears with hindsight that the event lasted longer.
