Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently:

• Your nose knows death is imminent

  Losing the sense of smell predicts death within five years, according to new research.

  According to new research, the sense of smell is the canary in the coalmine of human health. A study published today in the open access journal PLOS ONE, shows that losing one's sense of smell strongly predicts death within five years, suggesting that the nose knows when death is imminent, and that smell may serve as a bellwether for the overall state of the body, or as a marker for exposure to environmental toxins.

  ... The tip of the olfactory nerve, which contains the smell receptors, is the only part of the human nervous system that is continuously regenerated by stem cells. The production of new smell cells declines with age, and this is associated with a gradual reduction in our ability to detect and discriminate odours. Loss of smell may indicate that the body is entering a state of disrepair, and is no longer capable of repairing itself.

• We Are All Confident Idiots

  The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise.

  In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psycholog, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize - scratch that, cannot recognize - just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers - and we are all poor performers at some things - fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
  What's curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

• Past Climate Change Was Caused by the Ocean, Not Just the Atmosphere, New Rutgers Study Finds

  The study published in Science provides a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of climate change today.

  In their study, the researchers say the major cooling of Earth and continental ice build-up in the Northern Hemisphere 2.7 million years ago coincided with a shift in the circulation of the ocean - which pulls in heat and carbon dioxide in the Atlantic and moves them through the deep ocean from north to south until it's released in the Pacific.

• What Schizophrenia Can Teach Us About Ourselves

  Some scientists are arguing that our new understanding of a particular network in the brain is allowing neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists - even artists and writers - to understand each other in ways that wouldn't have made sense ten years ago. Called the default mode network, or DMN, it's a set of brain regions that are typically suppressed when a person is engaged in an external task (playing a sport, working on a budget), but activated during a so-called "resting state" (sitting quietly, day-dreaming).
  ...
  "We should be wary of seeing a schizophrenic person as someone with a kind of deficiency," Woods says. Rather, it may be just another part of what it means to be human. A person might simply process language differently or ruminate on social interactions for too long. His or her inner speech might be more fragmented or circuitous. Individual differences in DMN activity account for the diverse ways the human mind freely wanders.

• Something Is Dangerously Wrong at the New York Fed

  The Federal Reserve Board of Governors is a public institution, which writes banking rules and enacts monetary policy. But the 12 regional banks, which carry out regulatory examinations, are privately run. The local banking industry and other corporate interests choose the majority of the regional bank boards, who subsequently select a president. Unsurprisingly, those presidents often reflect the business management perspective of those who choose them. Bill Dudley, the New York Fed president, spent his career as chief economist for Goldman Sachs.
  This public/private hybrid leads to a lack of transparency about the regional banks and their activities. The New York Fed, which because of the presence of Wall Street has by far the most power of the regional banks, routinely exempts itself from public disclosure requirements.

• The Problem With Positive Thinking

  Why doesn't positive thinking work the way you might assume? As my colleagues and I have discovered, dreaming about the future calms you down, measurably reducing systolic blood pressure, but it also can drain you of the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals.
  ...
  Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we've already attained our goal, slackening our readiness to pursue it.
  ...
  What does work better is a hybrid approach that combines positive thinking with "realism." Here's how it works. Think of a wish. For a few minutes, imagine the wish coming true, letting your mind wander and drift where it will. Then shift gears. Spend a few more minutes imagining the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing your wish.

• Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

  In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Julian Assange describes his encounter with Google's Eric Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.

• Why Inequality Matters

  Bill Gates on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

• Real-time rumor tracker

  It's part of a research project with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University that focuses on how unverified information and rumor are reported in the media. It aims to develop best practices for debunking misinformation.

• The Immigrant Sport: What Ping-Pong Means In America

  Article about the U.S. Open of Table Tennis in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A plug for my favorite sport.

• Freedom From Religion Foundation

  Protecting the constitutional principle of the separation of state and church

  The Freedom From Religion Foundation's ad featuring Ron Reagan describing himself as "an unabashed atheist" has been rejected for airing by CBS, not only by "60 Minutes," the desired placement, but for any CBS TV show. Watch it: CBS, '60 Minutes,' reject Ron Reagan's `unabashed atheist' ad

  We need more prominent people to come out as atheists. Laws won't change until public opinion does, just like for women's rights, gay rights, etc.

• Belief in Free Will Not Threatened by Neuroscience

  A key finding from neuroscience research over the last few decades is that non-conscious preparatory brain activity appears to precede the subjective feeling of making a decision. Some neuroscientists, like Sam Harris, have argued that this shows our sense of free will is an illusion, and that lay people would realize this too if they were given a vivid demonstration of the implications of the science.

  ... However, in a new paper, Eddy Nahmias, Jason Shepard and Shane Reuter counter such claims. They believe that Harris and others (who they dub "willusionists") make several unfounded assumptions about the basis of most people's sense of free will.

  I was hoping for a better argument.

Some links about how your brain sometimes fails so that what you think is true may not be right.

• Brain's limits lead to unconscious choices in what we see and remember

  The brain has limited capacity to perceive and remember, and it makes choices we're not aware of

  How much we can visually take in and what we remember are subject to limitations in signal capacity and storage space. The brain adapts by making a lot of choices outside of our conscious awareness, new research shows.
  
  "Forgetting seems disadvantageous, but plays an essential role in maintaining the efficiency of memory operations," the researchers wrote.

• Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain)

  What you know influences what you see.

  Once you interpret visual stimulus in a certain way, you'll continue to interpret it in the same way now and the next time you encounter the stimulus

  You're not only seeing what is actually before you; you're seeing what your brain is telling you is there.

• When Beliefs and Facts Collide

  TheUpshot, Brendan Nyhan

  This finding helps us understand why my colleagues and I have found that factual and scientific evidence is often ineffective at reducing misperceptions and can even backfire on issues like weapons of mass destruction, health care reform and vaccines. With science as with politics, identity often trumps the facts.

• YourMorals.Org

  Learn about your own morality, ethics, and/or values, while also contributing to scientific research

  Why do people disagree so passionately about what is right? Why, in particular, is there such hostility and incomprehension between members of different political parties?

  If you think your moral values are about logic or facts, think again.

• Our biases make it really hard to see things clearly.

  ... people understand the world in ways that suit their preexisting beliefs and ideological commitments. Thus in controlled experiments both conservatives and liberals systematically misread the facts in a way that confirms their biases.

• How reliable is eyewitness testimony? Scientists weigh in

  As Loftus puts it, "just because someone says something confidently doesn't mean it's true." Jurors can't help but find an eyewitness's confidence compelling, even though experiments have shown that a person's confidence in their own memory is sometimes undiminished even in the face of evidence that their memory of an event is false.
  . . .
  One thing the report comes out solidly in favor of is treating the lineup as a double-blind scientific experiment-neither the witness nor the presiding officer should know in advance whether the suspect is in the lineup. "Double-blinding is central to the scientific method because it minimizes the risk that experimenters might inadvertently bias the outcome of their research, finding only what they expected to find," the report concludes. But it leaves the question of exactly how police departments should implement double-blind lineups unanswered.

• Think You're Immune to False Memory? You're Not.

  The most disconcerting aspect of human memory is not that we forget things; it's that we falsely remember them.

  We know for a fact that at least 225 men and women have been convicted of serious crimes because witnesses convincingly, yet mistakenly, named them as the culprits.
  . . .

  Overall, the results of the study further substantiate the idea that human memory is not recorded but constructed. We recall events and details by association, using basic emotional, tactile, and visual cues to piece together a memory. Sometimes, that process manufactures jumbled falsehoods.

• Think by Numbers

  You have a total of three brains: the reptilian brain, the paleo-mammalian brain, and the rational brain.

  Your mind has been infiltrated. Your logical and conscious prefrontal cortex is ever thwarted by powerful saboteurs hiding within the dark realm of your subconscious. The usurpers of your decision-making processes are none other than the ignorant reptilian brain stem and emotional limbic system. They torture you with sadness for the slightest defiance. They drug you with narcotic neurochemicals to reward your obedience. This diabolical duo is responsible for all forms of irrational human behavior, such as racism, war, and marriage. Your only defense against these illogical bastards is to base your decisions on cold, hard numbers.