Shocking Behavior

One of the characteristics that many of us are proud of as humans, and would say that it is an essential prerequisite for a civilized society, is our predisposition for empathy or emotional contagion. So if we witness something unpleasant happening to someone else we have an emotional response. The level, of course, may depend on exactly what is happening to whom. This characteristic is important for such things as bringing up our children, interacting with customers and most of our social interactions.

We learn as babies to cry if we hear others cry and we carry on with this emotional contagion when, as kids, we scare each other with ghost stories or, as adults, when we panic buy when he hear that there is a shortage of some commodity.

Genuine empathy, though, goes somewhat deeper so that we understand the causes of our emotion and prosocial behavior results. Currently, the neuroscientists are still at the guessing stage in understanding how these responses are differentiating in the brain.

But before we become too smug about the proclivities of our species, we should be aware that mice and rats are also empathic beings. Atsak et al have presented a study showing this with rats (1).

If a rat wandering about in a cage gets an electric shock to its feet, it does two things. It gives an ultrasonic squeak and it freezes waiting to see what will happen next. Now, a rat witness to this event will also freeze if they have had a foot shock in their past lives. Ones who haven’t, wonder what all the fuss is about.

Things become more interesting. Once the victim sees its neighbor freezing with it, it freezes for longer. Just as we make more of an event when someone shows lots of sympathy. With the rats the squeaking didn’t do much. Experienced witnesses took no notice when recorded squeaks were played back, indicating that they were being empathic when they vicariously froze and weren’t showing emotional contagion.

We should keep this understanding of empathy in mind with our dealings with other animals as it’s a safe bet that empathy goes broader than people, rats and mice.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021855

Momentary Lapses


Leaving aside the Theory of Relativity (Special or General), most of us experience time as an elastic dimension. We have all, at one time or another, presented ourselves at a reception desk and been told “just a moment, sir/madam/ miss/ sonny or some such epithet”. But that moment is never properly defined.

It is the same when a family member has purloined you favorite gadget. You ask how long they will be using it for and you get the reply “how long is a piece of string?” Well, if someone hands me a piece of string, I know exactly how long it is, but your sibling is dissembling. What they really are saying is “how long is a piece of stretchy elastic?” A very different thing and the situation will often end badly.

Telephone robots are particularly good at handing you the flexible moment. “Please continue to hold, your call is very important to us” and then the same boring musak is pumped into your ear, is a common experience for most of us as we desperately wait for help from a technical service guru.

Let us now turn that situation around and look at the quandary from a robot’s point of view.

Don’t be unsympathetic, now. 

This can be a real problem for a service-bot. With aging populations in many countries, the future is for more of us to have home helps in the form of robots. Visualize the situation when our care-bot is about to serve our dinner and we tell it to “wait a moment” as we shuffle off to the bathroom. How long should it wait before it decides that there is a problem? Kennedy and Trafton of the Naval Research lab. address this  in a new paper (1).

Your care-bot has to substitute calculation for common sense. In the above example, it would have to know your shuffle rate, what you were up to in the bathroom and how long that should take. I can imagine that your magazines and crossword puzzles would disappear from that room in the house!

The algorithm is clearly complex with a decision tree so the care-bot just waits, puts your dinner back in the oven, in the refrigerator or into the dog while it goes on the back porch for a sulk. Or, finally, should it drop everything and rush to break down the door and shock you back into the real world?

  1. W.G.Kennedy & J.G.Trafton, Int. J. Soc. Robot. DOI: 10.1007/s12369-011-0098-7

To The Point

Telling our dog where the ball is after we’ve thrown it and it is still standing there with its tongue hanging out, looking at us with adoring and expectant eyes like we had magical powers to conjure it back into our hand, is one of the joys of communing with animals. It is only equaled when the dog delivers it back, well chewed and slippery for us to throw it away again.

After a frustrating morning of such doggy responses when we have had to retrieve half the balls ourselves, we go home and explain to our next visitor that our pet understands every word we say. But what does our average dog think when you point and say fetch or seek? Scheider et al have set out to seek an answer to this big question or something close to it. They studied dogs responses to pointing gestures and the tone of instructions in looking for hidden treats.

Forty-eight dogs took part and were asked to find food in a room. The tester pointed to where there should be food and told the dog “there” either in a high pitch friendly voice or a deeper bossy voice. As a control dogs were told with no pointing.

Results? If dogs had found a treat in the room previously, they searched diligently in the direction of the pointing finger. If there was no pointing, they just looked and waited for the tester to get their act together. They also worked harder when the friendly voice was used – don’t we all.

The interesting control was that the dogs that hadn’t had treats in the test room, didn’t think too much about the pointing. They just looked at the mad scientist and waited for the little black van to come and collect them. Before a dog will go running off in the direction of a pointing finger, it expects to know why – don’t we all.

Of course, you have to be consistent. If it expects food and all it finds is a soggy ball, it may instigate the call for the little black van. A dog does after all have its expectations as well a sense of entitlement.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021676

Put Your Thinking Cap On


Running around and doing what we like is what we associate with free will. What on earth were you thinking about when you did that is a question that we are sometimes faced with afterwards. Mostly, we don't have any idea. It all went with the moment.

Then as we sit like gods on Mount Olympus watching our lab mice or rats run about in our mazes trying to solve problems, we ask the same question: "what are they thinking?" We can make a start on this quest if we know which parts of their tiny minds are flashing electric pulses from neuron to neuron. The conventional solution is to stick electrodes into the brain and wire the beasties up to computers. However, running around and behaving normally must be hard to do with thick heavy cables hanging off your head.

A new solution is now available. A large multinational team have come up with mouse and rat-sized thinking caps (1). The electrodes are still obligatory, but the hats have multi-channel radio transmitters kitted out with re-chargeable batteries. So after a day or so of running around, the mouse or rat is simply plugged into the lab electricity supply for a while and they're all ready to go on the next set of experiments.

The hats are used to follow the brain activity of, to quote the authors, "freely behaving mice and rats." I'm not sure how freely behaving I would be if I was trying to solve problems with a big hat containing a radio transmitter and battery of the same relative size as their mice are wearing. I would be terribly self-conscious and feeling definitely geeky if not a tad exploited. Certainly, my compensation would have to be increased if I were to play ball.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022033

Robotic Dribbling


World Cup football, that is soccer, is back in the news. The tournament, with all its drama, with its tears of joy or disappointment, is being played out in Istanbul. It is time for the World RoboCup.

Disaster for the UK, though. They were knocked out during the early stages and didn’t make it into the final series. The good news is that the manager won’t be sacked. I would venture a thought. The team were all French nationals. They were in heavy training in Edinburgh, but nevertheless one might question their loyalty just a smidge.

This is four-a-side football and most are bipedal. There is a class for robots with wheels, but although it results in a faster game, it doesn’t quite have the magic of one biped shoving another over or diving to save a goal. They weren’t supposed to shove each other over any more than their human copycats are, and they are heavily penalized for it.

So far the kicking is fairly gentlemanly. In due course this will increase. It may take some time before they will “bend it like Beckam.” They have until 2050. That is THE DATE when the plan is for a team of robots to beat a FIFA people team. No money will be changing hands of course.

When I picture a team of robots trotting out onto the hallowed turf at Wembley and beating the pants off England, I feel the carpet moving. I think that we’ll need to focus on cricket. The laws of cricket (ah, you had forgotten that cricket has laws and not little things like rules) will confuse the robotic players. Also when they break for tea, they will have no end of trouble with the strawberry jam and Devonshire cream on their scones.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14103537

This Won't Hurt A Bit


A visit to the dentist’s surgery is one of our activities that is usually at the bottom of our ‘favorites list.’ So far I haven’t met the dentist who was the model for the dentist in “The Little Shop of Horrors,” but the adrenaline is released in quantity as I sit watching the tropical fish. So far none of the surgery tanks have been populated with piranhas, which is strange as they all have such good teeth and would thus represent a good advertisement.

I vividly recall when a young guy and in pain, that the usual end result was a trip to the local dental hospital to be sorted out by students – under supervision of course. There always seemed to be a plethora of hot female aspiring dentists, which provided some distraction. I have never been able to work out where they went to as all the dental surgeries that I’ve visited since have been staffed by muscular male dentists.

Dental training is about to move into the 21st century as reported in the New Scientist (1).  Showa U in Japan has set up a collaboration with Orient Industries to produce a robot with teeth problems. Her name is Hanako 2 and she is a very pretty young woman. As she should be, of course, as Orient are Japan's premier sex doll manufacturers.

The trainee dentists will have to be careful with her as she will cough and gag on them if their heavy handed. She will shake her head and sneeze too, just to keep them on their toes. I don’t think she has bitten anybody yet, though she will shut her mouth when she’s had enough and her jaw is starting to ache.

You have to watch he wagging tongue. Both while you’re trying to drill and afterwards, as she can talk and gives feedback on your performance. This latter innovative technological skill probably won’t be incorporated in Orient’s sex doll robots any time soon.

  1. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/06/dental-robot-flinches-just-lik.html

Shaken And Stirred


When we feel depressed and anxious, we tend to take a pessimistic view of life and our decisions reflect that negative emotional state. Other animal species also show the “glass half empty” attitude when they are teed-off by their treatment.

Dogs, horse and birds have all been shown to show a pessimistic cognitive bias when they are anxious. The big question, then, is how universal is pessimism when you’re not too happy with your situation? Wright et al at Newcastle U set out to answer that with some diligent workers (1).

They selected some honeybees, cooled them down and fitted them out in little plastic straightjackets. Then the training began. They were given an odor to sniff and then offered a drink. One drink was a reward in the form of a sucrose solution. The other odor they were taught to associate with punishment as the drink was a nasty, bitter quinine solution. Little tongues were retracted as soon as they smelt the odor representing quinine.

Now they were ready for the great experiment. They were divided up into two groups. One group were strapped to a laboratory shaker and the bejesus shaken out of them for a minute, while the other group were used as the control. Next they were all asked to sniff 5 odors, 3 of which were new.  The anxious, shaken up group were reluctant to stick their tongues out for anything but sucrose. They weren’t going to trust those lab guys. But the unshaken group weren’t stirred up. They were much more adventurous and little tongues were stuck out to try the new drinks. Clearly not expecting punishment and seeing the world as a “glass half full.”

The experiment didn’t end well for any of the participating workers, though their expectations weren’t recorded. They all went into the meat grinder and had their hemolymph (the nearest thing that they’ve got to blood) analyzed. The shaken up ones had lower levels of those hormonal indicators of positive thinking, dopamine and serotonin, than the “happy” group had.

One is left to wonder how pessimistic the colony gets when they are just hunkering down for winter and we snatch nearly all their hard worked for stores and offer them a bland sugar solution as wages?

  1. M.Bateson, S.Desire, S.E.Gartside and G.A.Wright, J.Curr. Biol., 21, 1070, (2011).

Ah, The Broth Of A Bear!



Way back, before St. Patrick banished the snakes from the Emerald Isle, brown bears roamed from bog to bog and had a rare old time. Climate fluctuations brought changes in neighbors and all sorts of opportunities for shenanigans.

Just like today, that shining white, pillar of society, Ursus maritimus, was stamping his image across country. A study covering the last 120,000 years by a huge international team is published in the early edition of the Journal of Current Biology (1). They have been ferreting out the truth through the matriarchal lines using analysis of mitochondrial DNA.

Like so many of our US presidents, our current population of polar bears have Irish ancestors. With their liking for seals and cold weather, they left the Emerald Isle for where? – well Greenland, of course.

Currently, they are having to move south and are bumping into Grizzlie neighbors in Northwest Canada, where they have been getting up to their old Don Juan-like tricks. Some Grolars have been spotted wandering about the place.

  1. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.05.058

Thorny Problem


The elephant in the room has become one of those well-used expressions that we throw around without picturing what it would be really like to have to share your living space with a hungry pachyderm. Not everyone is so fortunate, though. The Kenyan farmers have to face this actuality more and more frequently.

Elephant conservation measures and the restrictions on the ivory trade have allowed the elephant population to increase, which is great news. However, elephants like to go where they like, and if you’re a farmer, the elephant in your field is not something that you can ignore. Even the accolade of three “trunks up” on the quality of the crop turned elephant fodder, won’t assuage your bank manager's ire at not getting paid interest on your loan.

Thick, thorny hedges are the usual answer, but not a very efficient one. Conservationists and farmers are working hard to come up with effective solutions at the same time as increasing elephant numbers is increasing pressure on normal elephant forage. King et al report an innovative solution to this elephantine problem at Turkana in the African Journal of Ecology (1).

A new type of fence has been devised. It consists of a mile and a half of fence with hanging bar-frame beehives at frequent interval. You see, elephants are afraid of bees and deliver a specific alarm call to tell their friends and family to take care. This new fence was only breached once by a single bull-headed bull elephant. At the same time, the thorn fences were breached 32 times by all and sundry.

The sweet ending is that 106 kg of honey were harvested as well as having protected, well pollenated crops.

  1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2028.2011.01275.x

School For Scandal?


If you put a crowd of young people together, as in school or university for example, we can watch the courting process in action. Of course, the teaching challenge is to make the subject of the moment more interesting than the object of the moment sitting a few feet away. Not always easy. The larger the group, the more difficult it is, but even in small groups the tension is there regardless of the fact that while we are dispensing our pearls of wisdom, we are happy in our illusion of holding our students attention. If not rapt, then at least focused.

Apparently, as it is with well brought up children, it is with well-bred horses. In a recent study, Janczarek and Kędzierski evaluated the heart-felt response of young horses training in single sex and mixed groups.  These were 2½-year old Arabian colts and fillies who were being taught to get their workouts on a horse-sized treadmill. Half were trained in single sex groups and the other half in mixed sex groups.

On checking their pulses when going to and from their workout location and stables, the mixed group of colts and fillies were rather more excited. We don’t know who was whispering what in who’s ear, but there was definitely something going on. Their pulses were distinctly faster. The authors conclude that it’s not a good idea to train young horses in mixed classes, but that there should be separate classes for fillies and colts.

This conclusion has a distinct retro feel about it. There wasn’t evidence that the fluttering of the heart strings in going to class or back to their stables had any effect on their learning attainments. It might even have made them more eager to go to class if they knew that they could flirt on the way. Before making a definitive judgment, perhaps we should wait and take a look at their final grades.  

  1. I. Janczarek and W. Kędzierski, J. Appl. Animal Welfare, Sci., 14, 211, (2011).

It's Not In Your Genes


As faster and cheaper genomic analysis rushes forward, we see more and more groups checking for genome correlations with particular conditions. Some of these have been spectacularly successful. Others have not. Sometimes I’m glad that this is the case.

Clearly, that you may have a predisposition to develop breast cancer, can ensure proper monitoring and that is a good thing. To know or not to know is then a personal choice. The knowledge can weigh heavily.

The studies that I’m glad don’t give good correlations are ones such as the enquiry into a genetic link to criminal violence, for example.

The latest good news is from the study by the large team of Lewis et al from the UK. They looked at the genomic analysis of a little over 2,000 patients suffering from depression. They were classified in terms of suicidal behavior to see if a genetic predisposition to suicidality was present.  The classification went from suicidal thought, through to attempts and finally completion.

The great good news is that there isn’t a clear genomic set-up that means that we should stay away from tall buildings, high cliffs or train lines. A genetic predisposition for suicide would be enough to bring on a bout of depression and make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once we think that we may be programmed, it is easy to slip into a fatalistic frame of mind.

I see these negative answers as a most positive result and as important as the ones that do come up with correlations. We have enough trouble moving towards equal opportunity, as it is without having to be reading our genome like the astrology pages.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020690


Thinking Your Way Uphill


New technology is exciting, usually. It is also good to see some big corporations encouraging the small guys out there rather than gobbling them up like piranhas in the amazon. Toyota, famous for their engineering process outlined in their book The Toyota Way, are running a series of Toyota Prius Projects. Prius Project number 11 is all about the concept bike (1).

Putting aside the idea that the Prius will become very expensive to run if gas prices keep escalating and that Toyota might be thinking about moving into bikes, the part of this project that caught my attention was the effort from Deeplocal of Pittsburgh.

The innovation here was to get rid of that business of having to change gear by fiddling with levers or twistgrips. The first step was to set up the gear change by radio control (2). The controller was your smartphone (or your competitors if they’ve hacked your phone.) Coming to a hill and fumbling for your phone, then swiping and thumbing it doesn’t sound easy, but it’s certainly an unusual idea.

Before I seem to be knocking it, let me rush to say I’m open minded and recognize a steppingstone in the route forward when I see it. The next step that they took was closer to my heart. It was to put the whole thing in the helmet and then we’re back to the computer brain interface (CBI) that I’ve posted about recently. The CBI is being actively used to control things like wheelchairs.

Now we can have a truly hands-free riding experience! I can see a much brighter future here, though, than just changing gear with your arms folded.

Picture your real Prius concept bike with an electric motor as well as pedals. Its speed and gearing are controlled by your thoughts and as you go down hill and pedal, the battery is charged. So gravity and pedals do the equivalent job to that of gas in the Prius.

  1. http://www.toyotapriusprojects.com/#/011
  2. http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/01/toyota-prius-projects-concept-bike-lets-you-shift-gears-with-yo/

Sticks And Stones


Accurate throwing and speech require excellent timing, as those who have been unfortunate enough to indulge in energetic spousal debates will know well enough. The same structures in the brain are involved in both of these activities. This is discussed in a recent paper by Zhu and Bingham (1). They point out that just as our speaking abilities make us human, so does our ability to throw things long distances. Indeed, put these two things together and we have the start of an army, or a hunting party at the very least.

We have built in perceptual biases that help us make sense of the baby talk that we hear from admiring adults. The concept proposed by Zhu and Bingham is that we have perceptual biases built in which help us find the right stone to throw at, well, we had better restrict it to prey.

From a very early age we learn to associate size and weight and if we had wanted to knock over our woolly mammoth, we would have chosen a large heavy stick (sharp of course.) This size-weight judgment is so strongly ingrained that we assume bigger things to be heavier, even when they aren’t. Apparently this goes right back to our bias which helps us find the optimal thing to throw.

We learn to throw early, as we learn to talk early. These days we are usually discouraged from indulging this passion too widely. Pitching a baseball or throwing a javelin on the sports field is acceptable, but leaves us with a fairly limited choice and keeps us civilized. There are no such restrictions on our use of speech, though. On occasion, it seems difficult to not use the former in response to the latter.

  1. Q.Zhu and G.P.Bingham, Evolution & Human Behavior, 32, 288, (2011)

Only The Lonely


With the US Independence Day holiday well under way and with the sun shining down on us all, it is a good moment to take time out from the celebrations and contemplate our continental solidarity. At these times we feel a connection with our fellows as we dig into our barbecue, or sit back and watch the fireworks. The warmth is both interpersonal and physical as we stand in the yard, slathered in sunscreen, downwind from the smoke, chatting with our friends and neighbors.

It is interesting to note that feeling warm decreases any feelings of loneliness according to Bargh and Shalev in the most recent issue of the journal Emotion (1), they describe how physical warmth can enhance the feeling of social warmth, but the inverse is also true. Shivering in your apartment over the winter holidays will take your feelings of being lonely and abandoned to great heights.

The authors of the study record that those people with a marked feeling of chronic loneliness had a greater tendency to take lots of hot baths or showers. Their participating subjects were scored on their feelings of loneliness, cooled off extensively and re-scored. Their loneliness had increased after they had been left clutching large cold packs for a while.

After being asked to think back to their big rejection experience in their life and rate how they felt thinking about that, they were allowed to cuddle a warm pack for a bit. They felt comforted. Their feelings of loneliness caused by the rejection subsided. Hugging your dog will likewise help you come to terms with your feelings after being dumped.

In their final study, they showed that people did not associate taking lots of warm baths with loneliness. Of course being all scrubbed and smelling nice will make you a welcome guest at the barbecue. If you’ve been working hard and haven’t bathed for a week so that you overpower the smell of cooking from the grill, you may end up in the corner with an acute attack of loneliness.

doi: 10.1037/a0023527

Bred In The Bone


A large number of species form monogamous pair bonds. It may not be until death does them part, but for a while anyway. The evolutionary advantages look simple and clear, as jobs such as defending their patch and bringing up offspring are shared. But not everything is as straightforward as it appears on the surface.

In many of these harmonious families, males outside the pair have fathered a considerable number of the offspring. Forstmeir et al from the Max Planck in Seewiesen have been watching the surreptitious dalliances of female zebra finches with various birds about town (1). This behavior doesn’t appear to hold any advantage for the females. Indeed, it could be disadvantageous to the bond.

The research has shown that there is a hereditary element. The propensity of the finches to get together outside the pair is in the genes of both sexes and then a fraction of the young males will have a positive selection to grow up to be Latharios with a very persuasive manner.

The genetic basis of choice of mate took on an additional flavor with the work of BeBruine et al from the Us of Aberdeen and Stirling (2). Apparently women with brothers make different mate choices than women without. Not, I hasten to add, because of approval or otherwise from the brother(s). Having a brother makes the woman feel less attracted to a man who has any resemblance to herself, thus, helping her to hook up with someone right outside the family.

Having a younger brother is a greater safeguard against inbreeding than an older one. Yes, well, younger brothers are always a pain, aren’t they? Women without brothers don’t have this pressure. They can be as narcissistic as they wish.

The perception of trustworthiness is not effected, however. Perceiving a man who looks like you as being trustworthy is not a function of having a brother or not. So I guess that, on balance,  a younger brother might be a good thing for a girl to have.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/26/10608
  2. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/23/1105919108.abstract