You'd Better Believe It!


There are two types of dogs in this world, companion dogs and working dogs. Man has had working dogs for a very long time, but also quite likes having them around.  For their part, dogs mostly prefer having people around rather than other dogs. At a very early age, they learn visual cues from our voice, face and general body language for what we want from them. Of course, some of us are better at communicating than others, and we have dogs to match.

The sniffer dog has emerged over the last thirty years as a common sight in many public locations. That’s where we see the ones with small teeth like beagles or spaniels. The ones with big teeth, like Belgian malinois are more likely to be found with the military or police.

Explosives and drugs are the common target for the connoisseur’s nose, although diabetes and cancer are bringing them into the medical field. The problem is that they want to please us and a great way making us happy is to confirm our prejudices.  Lit et al (1) made a study of how the beliefs of the handlers affected their dog’s performance.

They took a church and used eighteen trained noses, with their handlers of course, to check out some side rooms for drugs or explosives. You and I know that there would be neither in such a place, but the handlers and dogs didn’t. Some rooms had decoys for the dogs consisting of Slim Jim sausages and a tennis ball, while decoys for the handlers were less interesting. These were little squares of red paper. The decoys were mixed and matched, and some rooms had neither.

Well, only 15% of the runs indicated that there were no drug or explosive caches in the church. The bits of red paper were a great attraction.  The sausages were also a bit of a distraction. Only one team got it right on two runs through.

Although sausages were difficult to resist for both parties, the bits of red paper were only important to the handlers and made them believe that there were illicit goods hidden somewhere. Wittingly or unwittingly, that belief was transmitted to their dog, which did it’s best to please.

The unwitting transmission of information is called the “Clever Hans Effect” after Wilhelm van Osten and his grumpy horse, Hans, who would do counting tricks for money back in the early 1900s (2). Professor Pfungst checked the horse out and found it only got the right answer if the questioner already knew the answer and the horse could see the questioner. He, the horse Hans, got very grumpy if he got it wrong and bit the poor Professor Pfungst for his pains.

  1. L.Lit, J.B.Schweitzer & A.M.Oberbauer, Animal Cognition, 14, 387, (2011).
  2. The New York Times. 1904-09-04

Woozled!


Scientific papers that appear in peer-reviewed journals are all carefully argued and documented with relevant citations with an objective discussion of the data. Aren’t they? Less and less so apparently. An international congress in Amsterdam pointed out the flaws that have crept into biomedical publications. Gambrill and Reiman of U Cal, Berkely have just published a study in which reviewers reviewed some papers twice. The first time was done as they would normally, but then they were given a “propaganda index” and asked to review them again.

The results were staggering. They noticed lots of phrases such as “everyone knows” or “it is generally agreed” in place of real data, but also a tendency to medicalize problems, so that common life-problems were presented as illnesses with them being underdiagnosed and undertreated.

So when you and I devour these pages, we believe weasel words such as “common” and start to feel the woozle effect. We are usually starting to worry about large frightening woozles and not smaller things like wizzles and end up in a Winnie the Pooh-like state with no Christopher Robin to point out reality.

An egregious example quoted by Gembrill and Rieman (1) particularly caught my eye: “Generalized social anxiety disorder is a chronic and insidious psychiatric disorder that first received widespread attention during the 1980′s. Social anxiety disorder has an early onset, typically between 14 and 16 years of age, and subsequently follows a chronic course that persists well into adulthood. Spontaneous recovery is possible, but it occurs gradually and only in about half of all sufferers.” That was scary enough to set me googling frantically.  At one time or another most of us would be considered candidates for treatment by the enthusiasts as we get nervous about going on a new date or giving a public speech.

That is just being normal though. Few of us are so shy that we lock ourselves away. I was picturing what would happen if the next time we feel embarrassed about making a mistake in public, we all rush of for a successful course of treatment, would we all turn into a version of Alexander the Great and march out to conquer the world? But it wouldn’t happen. Christopher Robin pointed out there aren’t enough psychiatrist’s couches to go round.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019516#s4

Barbie or Bigfoot – Size Matters


Most of us, whether we admit it or not, have played with dolls at some time in our lives. When we did this, we thought our way into that small world, but we rarely stopped and tried to imagine what our world would look like to Barbie and her friends. As an adult, we may have visited a house or a school that we haven’t seen since we were very small. The usual impression is that it’s much smaller than we remembered.

As we sit around philosophizing in our armchairs, we say of course, we were small then, but we know better now that we have rulers to measure things properly. Now we know exactly how big something is. That horse over there is 16 hands, for example. But whose hands? My delicate, skinny ones or those belonging to that big guy over there whose hands are wider by at least half as much again?

Our size still effects our perception as van der Hoort et al from the Karolinska Institutet have shown (1). They took nearly two hundred willing and naïve participants and convinced them by using cameras and TV screens that their bodies were any size from Barbie to Beanstalk Giant size. I stress here that naïve is used in the psychological test sense and not in the sense that my Mom used when I bought my first car for twice as much as it was worth. These participants were all between twenty-five and thirty, so weren’t likely to be fooled by any used car salesman.

How were they convinced of their new body size? The cameras showed them the lower half of their bodies, that is, jeans and sneakers, while the experimenters were touching their ankles. The TV screens showed different size objects touching their ankles, thus convincing them that they were either from Lilliput or from Brobdingnag. The participants then had to judge the size and distance from them of a box-like object.

The results? In Barbie-mode the participants thought that the box was larger and farther away than it actually was. If in Beanstalk Giant-mode the box was thought to be smaller and closer than in the real world. The authors go on to indicate how this could have important applications in the field of tele-robotics. They ask us to imagine being a surgeon and having the full body illusion of being a microrobot inside their patient and hacking away at that person's internal organs. Anyone who has dug through a water main in the garden by mistake will shudder at the prospect of hitting a capillary.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020195


Chatterboxes


Deep in the bowels of the U of Queensland there are little robots running around and chatting to each other. They have a nice playroom with lots of offices around their main laboratory where they spend their time telling each other where to go. These little fellows are Lingodroids and they are too hoity-toity to speak English, or Australian, or anybody else’s language, come to that. Their game is to develop their own.

They have started by giving names to parts of their playroom. With a bit of give and take, they have come to an agreement on the location names. They have been assembled in a parliamentary democracy, so arriving at a consensus needed some debate.

This is the first step in settling on their Toponymic Lexicon. The next step is for them to do the Twitter thing and tersely text their topographical territories to each other with directions and distances. Some of their peregrinations and tweets, with Dr. Schulz’s translations of course, can be found at the link below.

So now these little droids can run around and tell each other about the place and even indicate that there is somewhere that they can’t get to because somebody has locked the door. If the door is subsequently opened and a different droid is asked to check it out, they will happily run off and get the job done.

At the moment we can listen in and so can keep up with their language development. But imagine what could happen at weekends or during a vacation. They could get together and abandon droid 1 as their primary language and develop droid 2.0. Imagine how uncomfortable it would become to have your droids gossiping about you without you being able to understand what they were suggesting that you do with your program!


  1. http://itee.uq.edu.au/~ruth/Lingodroids.htm

A Hand To Mouth Existence


Last Thursday, my post reported on some studies of the effects on the facility with mental arithmetic of clenching our teeth when faced with difficult sums. The conclusion was that it didn’t help our calculations. But now the plot thickens. Lets come back to the picture of our trying to draw something and our tongue surreptitiously starts to poke out of the side of our mouth as we concentrate.  Maybe what we are doing with our mouth may not improve our math, but does it improve what we are doing with our hands?

The movements of our hands are effected by those of our mouth, and vice versa, according to the new work by Gentilucci and Campione of the Italian Inst. Of Tech. at Parma (1). They had some participants grab candies with their mouths while they were doing things with their hands, as well as doing things with their mouths while the were grasping with their hands. Their results showed a clear interaction between the mouth and hand actions. 

The idea follows that speech and gestures are unconsciously correlated. Italians are well known for doing a lot of “talking with their hands,” especially when something important is being discussed. It would be interesting to see if the results are the same with other cultures, perhaps, with a group from a more dour culture from cold, northern climes.

An interesting subsidiary finding was that vocalization did not correlate with foot motion. I guess this is pointing to the origin of the “foot in mouth” problem.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019793


Betting On Certainties


The link between science and superstition is interesting. We often say, “I believe this to be why such a thing happens.” Does this mean that we have clear, incontrovertible evidence for the event? Or does it mean that it’s our best guess? Well, it usually means the latter, based on the evidence that we have currently at our disposal. At some point, we will have made the decision as to how much evidence to gather.

Abbott and Sherratt of Carleton U discuss this rather nicely in their recent paper (1) titled “The Evolution Of Superstition Through Optimal Use Of Incomplete Information.” Our decision-making is like tackling the ‘two-armed bandit problem’ where we have a gambling machine with two levers. We first think that we see a causal relationship. Then we have to decide if we are going to exploit that effect to get a big pay-off (one lever), or investigate things further to be more certain (other lever).

Having lucky mascots, lucky shirts or lucky socks are all examples of us trying to exploit a non-existent causal relationship. For example, “I hit a hole in one wearing these socks, so I always wear them in golf competitions. And I won’t wash them” is the type of superstition that takes hold when the pay-off is large. Hit a hole in one again wearing those socks and that belief is written in stone.

It is particularly sad that we are so easily tempted by the possibility of a big pay-off that we carry out very little enquiry into cause and effect. Many times it seems that we are terrible gamblers. The bigger the potential pay-off, the fewer questions we’ll ask.  Of course, it should be the other way round. We should carry out more detailed research to ensure that we maximize the bigger pay-off.


  1. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.04.002

The Sweet Smell Of Success


Sweet Smell of Success

Two papers were published this week on the brains of early mammals – of our mouse-like ancestors. CT scans revealed the exciting development of the sections of the brain that we associate with the smelling of roses.

The thesis is that as our odorant receptors improved, we required bigger brains to process the data efficiently. So to enhance the olfaction satisfaction of noseworthy information, the head cases had to become bigger to house the fast growing data storage and faster processing equipment.

Dr. Rowe put it more eloquently: "The origin of crown Mammalia saw a third pulse of olfactory enhancement, with ossified ethmoid turbinals supporting an expansive olfactory epithelium in the nasal cavity, allowing full expression of a huge odorant receptor genome."

It is important to remember that these were small creatures who had to share the planet with lots of carnivores and herbivores with large feet. Hence, it was much better to be on the night shift to avoid being eaten or stepped on.

Sensitive whiskers may help to find food when you are very close to it, but a good odorant receptor is a longer range device. Of course, its not just food that is important to young creatures. It is also finding a mate, and if you have chosen to have four little legs instead of wings, screeching and making a spectacle of yourself in order to advertise to your partner, is not a good idea. A good nose means that a stealth approach is possible under cover of darkness, almost as good as a smart phone.

When I look at my dog and see the size of her nose, I can know see why she thinks that she is brighter than I am as I run to the store for dog-food and  after her in the park with a plastic bag.

  1. T.B.Rowe, T.E.Macrini & Z-X Luo, Science, 332, 955, (2011)
  2. R. Glenn Northcutt, Science, 332, 926, (2011)

Fighting for Success


Stand and fight often means more than stand your ground. Many species who walk on all fours will often stand up on their rear leg to fight. Grizzly bears, for example look pretty ferocious on all fours, but become positively awe-inspiring after they rear up to attack. Carrier of the U of Utah in a paper published on Wednesday (1) suggests that gaining a fighting advantage by waling on each other from our hind legs may be a reason that our ancestors became bipedal.

There is a big advantage in the force delivered by a blow if we are standing and striking down compared to that when we are on all fours and striking up or sideways. In addition when you become good on your two hind legs, you can in the words of Ali “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”

Everybody likes a winner, don’t they? Carrier goes on to propose that as we get taller, our advantage in striking force and reach gives us an advantage and that in turn makes us more attractive to the females of the species. Apparently tall men get more responses in dating advertisements than short men, and also have more children than short guys. Now where did I put those cowboy boots with the big heels? I know they're here somewhere.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019630

Zombie Apocalypse


Do you know what to do or have on hand in the advent of a zombie apocalypse occurring? No?  Well, the Center for Disease Control is giving us some advice in what we need to have in our emergency pack and what to include in our emergency plan when faced with a zombie apocalypse (1).

The pack includes the sort of things that those wise people amongst us would have their people keep in order for them, in case they need to get out of town fast. “Getting out of town fast” is one of the emergency actions that are flagged up in the plan advice. The CDC warns that if you don’t, those hungry critters will gobble your brains. Hence you need to have multiple routes planned to avoid losing your mind.

The CDC promises to investigate any outbreak of zombies as they would any other plague or infestation. The news media are starting to talk about the 2012 US elections and the caucuses and primaries, with candidates opting in and opting out. We are soon going to have to keep a wary eye out for the infestation of bodies wanting your vote without using your brain. I hope the CDC is vigilant.

I guess we need to get those emergency packs ready today, though. We have one more day left to do this if we listen to the Rev. Camping who tells us that Judgment Day is May 21, 2011 (2). The next 5 months of terrible tribulations will start when the ground will give up the dead. I’m not sure if the CDC have time to get ready to start their investigation.

  1. http://emergency.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp
  2. http://www.familyradio.com/index2.html

A Calculated Risk


What do you do when you are concentrating really, really hard? You know, when you are drawing something, trying to get the right words of a story down or are doing difficult sums. As kids we would unconsciously stick our tongues out. The more difficult the problem, the farther out our tongues would go. If it was really difficult, we might even screw our faces up.

Clenching our teeth wasn’t something that I remember doing in the face of difficult sums. However, there may well be cultural differences in clenching proclivities in different nationalities. Mizumori at al of U of Osaka have investigated  the effect of clenching on the results in mental arithmetic tests of twenty young adults.

The tests went like this. The participants were given sets of hundred-square calculations to do mentally, four times in all. One of the test series was carried out with the participants clenching and un-clenching their teeth in a rhythmic fashion. The activity of the left jaw muscle (the masseter muscle) was monitored electronically to ensure that clenching activity was absent or rhythmic as appropriate.

The result? Well, clenching doesn’t help with mental arithmetic. Interestingly, the conclusion drawn was that “the results indicate that it may not be harmful for clinicians to encourage their patients to refrain from clenching their teeth.”

It certainly wasn’t harmful to the arithmetic test result and exercise is usually good for the muscles, so maybe it was considered harmful to the teeth. So maybe the best compromise is that if you must clench rhythmically, do it on chewing gum.

  1. doi:10.1016/j.jpor.2010.12.004 

Playing Polly Politics


Why is it surprising to many people that animals that live in groups will co-operate when it comes to something as important as food? We are all familiar with the co-operative hunting practices of groups of predators, and of the highly organized co-operative lifestyle of insect species such as bees and ants. Surely if a species is hanging together for the common good, they are already co-operating in some aspects of their life.

If we put them into the laboratory and train them to do tricks to obtain food, then maybe we should expect them to have some facility to work together. Péron et al, U of Paris ONLD have published a study on three African Grey parrots (1,2) that showed that they could co-operate to get food treats. Two had to work together in pulling strings to gain their just rewards.

In the first experiment, two birds had to simultaneously pull strings to slide some treats on a tray out from under a set of bars. In a second experiment, one bird had to jump on a perch to release the tray pulled by the other. So far, so good. The birds had the experimenters well trained putting goodies on the tray so they could stuff themselves with treats. No surprises here. Chimps can do it, as can elephants and crows. Even humans are good at pulling strings to help each other.

This is where it gets interesting, though. Just like in our offices where personality comes into play, so it is with parrots. The bird that had got the job of jumping on the perch to release the tray couldn’t/wouldn’t re-train to become a mere puller of strings.

Even more fun in terms of parrot prison political personality propensity to work together was the final experiment where they could work on their own to get some food, or choose to work with a colleague to get twice as much for each.

Well Shango was a loner. Zoe had a long-standing affair with Leo and would only work with him. She would have nothing to do with Shango. Leo was the pragmatic one. He would work with anybody who would give him twice as much. Leo is obviously destined for high office.



  1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/j7r6473t145xh05h/
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12913981

But On The Other Hand


Take a look at your hands. There is far more information about you hidden there than most of us would like to think. The palms and calluses only tell what you have been doing with them, or not doing with them if they are soft and delicate. There is much more telling information available, though. Get a ruler out and measure your fingers. Just the index and the ring fingers will do. Some of your traits can be seen there. Built in at birth, are our tendency to be physically aggressive, to suffer from attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder, alcoholism, our ability to perform in examinations and, not so bad, our tendency to be left-handed.

This very scary piece of information is the result of a study by Kornhuber et al carried out in Germany (1). The ratio of the lengths of our index to our ring fingers is crucial. An added indicator is the difference between the two hands.

These finger ratios are smaller in males and reflect the prenatal exposure to hormones, mainly testosterone. The right hand is the prime indicator and the closer the ratio is to 1 the less likely you are to have an alcohol problem. Apparently, because women tend to have digit ratios closer to 1 than men, they are less likely to become alcoholics.

Examination marks for guys with ratios closer to 1 are generally higher than those for guys with a ratio close to 0.95. Women didn’t fit this model, though. But it is interesting to note that women in academia tend to have ratios closer to the male population than the general female population. (Nails don’t count of course.)

I have to go for my annual physical today, and will try and keep my hands firmly in my pockets in case I come away with prescriptions for Ritalin and Naltrexone, just because we shook hands. Sympathy for my exam results wouldn’t go amiss though.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019332

A Drop Too Much And Too Often


Whether you are a man or a mouse, or a rat come to that, drinking too much alcohol is bad for you. Many of us have observed at first or second hand the effects of ethanol on the central nervous system. Those effects are over a broader spectrum than we realize. One interaction is with the μ-opioid receptor giving a feel good effect from an increase in dopamine. A study by He and Whistler of U of California (1) has shown a downside to this in that a tolerance to morphine (the μ in μ-opioid) can result.  

The study was carried out with a team of alcoholic rats. These were indulged with an open bar on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when booze equivalent to 50/50 vodka/water was available. Plain water was always on tap as well, of course. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they were on the wagon. Curiously, no mention was made of their drinking habits over weekends. I guess gentlemen wouldn’t ask about that, after all, they wouldn’t be working and would be on their own time.

The analgesic effect of morphine was checked on both teetotal and alcoholic rats by shining a heat lamp on their tails and measuring the time it took them to flick it out of the way. A maximum of 10 seconds was allowed so as not to produce damage for those enjoying a morphine high.

The first item of bad news for the alcoholic rats is that all that booze reduces the effect of morphine, so they felt the heat. The other item of bad news is that the primary therapeutic for mending alcoholics, naltrexone, is also blocked so they’d be going cold turkey for longer. However, that didn’t end up as their problem; their destiny was elsewhere.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019372

Put 'em Up


We are told that animals will fight over things ‘worth fighting for’ such as food, water, nest sites or mates. These are all demonstratively important resources to the animals involved. We, on the other hand, suffer from ‘big brain syndrome’, and will readily fight over ideologies, especially those that include religion and honor. Of course, that doesn’t preclude us from fighting over resources, just like the all the rest of our cousins out there.

The question to ask, at least I hope that we ask it, is “what is the value of the resource that we are going to fight over?” As you are squaring off, your perception of the value may be incorrect. You perception can change with your recent situation. For example, you might fight over a pile of dollar bills if you were broke, but might not value the pile very highly if you had just won the lottery. And you can see that when it comes to fighting over a potential mate, that the decisions become clouded in the mists of one imagination.

The Dugatkins from Louisville have just published a study on fighting decisions (1). They use food as the ‘resource’ to be fought over, and instead of have a class of students duking it out over beer and burgers, they used a computer simulation so that the results would be applicable to other species, whether more enlightened or not. They set up the rules to include over or underestimation of the value of the resource as well, as decisions made on a full or empty belly. The results were analyzed on the will to fight, and a random curve ball was thrown in in the form of whether a unit was a winner or a loser.

The key factor in success was the overestimation of the value of the resource. Those units that consistently overvalued the resources at stake, whether hungry or not, fared best in the predicted outcome of the model fights. 

Now I really, really like chocolate chip cookies, so if there is only one left on the plate, look out!

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019924

Up In The Air


Generations of kids, both human and goat, play climbing games to occupy the high point on the mound. The understanding that occupying the high ground gives one an advantage is genetically coded into us, so that we can skip over that part when studying Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” Occupying ‘the moral high ground’ is also something that we all rush to do, whether or not it can be validated.

But it seems that being elevated actually makes us more virtuous. Sanna and his colleagues from several US Universities has just published a paper (1), which gives experimental confirmation of this. Studying the results is well worth our time and enjoyment, especially as the experiments were conducted on that strange animal, the ‘mall shopper’.

Charitable giving was found to be elevated when donors were ascending the escalators from the upper reaches of shopping heaven, compared to those who were emerging into the light from the bowels of store below. The difference was a factor of two, and this was Christmas!

A group of participants were either taken up steps onto a stage or down into the orchestra pit and then asked to help with a task. Those who climbed up, stayed helping almost twice as long as those who went down.

The famed ‘Hot Sauce Test,’ my favorite, was utilized to measure compassion handed down or up. In this experiment, a very hot sauce mixture is doled out into a cup by a participant and given to another poor soul to drink. Those who had to climb up to carry out the task, handed out less than half the amount of hot sauce that those who had climbed down into the pit gave to their charges to drink.

Cooperation was also improved by elevation, as was shown by performance of the participants after being shown a video of looking out of an airplane or a car.

Clearly, preaching hell fire and brimstone from a raised pulpit is contraindicated. A much better plan would be to show heavenly videos in an iMax theater configuration. Next time I climb up the hill to feast on roast beef with my betters, I shall make sure that it is they that dole out the horseradish.


  1. L.J.Sanna, E.C.Chang, P.M.Micel & K.B.Lundberg, J. Exptl. Social Psych. 47, 472-476, (2011).