Determined, page 64
*Uh, what’s this experiment about? The scared sweat came from swabbing the armpits of people after their first skydive. What’s the control group? Sweat from happy people who have just had an enjoyable jog in the park. Science is the best; I love this stuff.
*By the way, heterosexual women don’t start acting in equivalently stupid ways because of the proximity of some hunk. Another study showed that male skateboarders did riskier tricks, with more crashes, when in proximity of an attractive woman. (Just to show that all the science was rigorous, attractiveness was assessed by teams of independent raters. And in the words of the authors, “attractiveness ratings were corroborated by many informal comments and phone number requests from the skateboarders”).
*Minutia: not just in the ventromedial PFC but in the entire “medial PFC.”
*Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor.
*By the way, psychopathy and sociopathy are not the same, and I have the same challenge keeping them straight as I do with using that or which. There are crucial differences between the two. Nevertheless, barbarians that we are, we will focus on the similarities and use the terms interchangeably.
*Elevated rates compared with whom? Nobel Peace Prize winners? The comparison groups in this literature are demographically matched nonincarcerated subjects and/or matched controls in prison for nonviolent crimes.
*Just to recall something from chapter 3, frontocortical maturation during adolescence doesn’t consist of the last lap of building new synapses, neuronal projections, and circuits. Instead, the early-adolescent frontal cortex has more of those things, is proportionately bigger, than the adult frontal cortex. In other words, frontocortical maturation during this period consists of pruning away the superfluous, less efficient circuits and synapses, whittling down to your adult frontal cortex.
*Even though PFC development is not completed until the midtwenties, construction on it begins in fetal life.
*Which means that the vicious cycle noted earlier about adults applies to kids as well—elevated glucocorticoid levels make for a weaker developing PFC; insofar as part of what the PFC does is turn off glucocorticoid stress responses, this weakened PFC adds to glucocorticoid levels rising even higher.
*Influences from the world outside a child’s family are shown in a related literature: everything else being equal, growing up in an urban setting (versus suburban or rural) predicts less gray matter volume in the different parts of the PFC in adults, a more reactive amygdala, and more glucocorticoid secretion in response to social stress (where the bigger the size of the city in childhood, the more reactive the amygdala). Moreover, cortical brain development in newborns is predicted not only by familial social disadvantage but by neighborhood crime rates as well.
*The finding involved structural MRI imaging of the fetal brain. Note that these findings about fetuses and newborns consider only development of the cortex, rather than specifically in the frontal cortex. This is because it’s just too hard to discern the subregions in brain imaging at that age.
*As a calming reminder, these are major maternal stressors, not everyday ones. Moreover, the magnitude of these effects are generally mild (with an exception being if the adversity that the fetus experiences includes maternal alcohol or drug abuse).
*Note that the variability in a trait in a population is determined by the degree of variability in genes (i.e., a “heritability score”). This is a hugely controversial subject, often producing glass-half-empty/glass-half-full differences as to whether a result is indicating how important or how unimportant a gene is. For a detailed but nontechnical overview of the behavior genetics controversies, see chapter 8 in my book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
*For detail enthusiasts, the protein that removes serotonin is called the serotonin transporter; the protein that degrades serotonin is called MAO-alpha; the receptor is the 5HT2A receptor.
*Stress and adversity are bad for PFC development and, interestingly, this takes the form of accelerated maturation. Faster maturation equals the door being shut sooner on how much environment can foster optimal PFC growth.
*A few of the studies focused on Western Europeans rather than North Americans, with the same general differences from East Asian cultures.
*Reminding once again that these are differences in average degrees of traits, populational differences with lots of individual exceptions.
*Plus one other region, the rostrolateral PFC.
*By William Pène du Bois, Viking Books for Young Readers, 1947.
*James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science (first ed., Viking Press, 1987).
*The same strategy was used to first sequence the human genome. Suppose a particular stretch of DNA is nine units of length too long to systematically figure out its sequence—the lab techniques just aren’t up to it. Instead, cut that stretch into a series of fragments that are short enough to sequence, say, fragment 1/2/3, fragment 4/5/6, and fragment 7/8/9. Now take a second copy of the same stretch of DNA, and cut it into a different pattern: fragment 1, then fragment 2/3/4, then 5/6/7, then 8/9. Cut a third into 1/2, 3/4/5, and 6/7/8/9. Match up the overlapping fragments, and you now know the entire sequence.
*Weighting variables is the outcome of transitioning from “Add variables A and B together and you get decent prediction about whatever” to “Add variables A and B together . . . , and remember that variable A is more important than variable B” to “Add variable A and B together . . . and have variable A carry, say, 3.2 times as much weight in the equation as does variable B.”
*Which means that past and future are identical, that there is no direction of time, that events one second in the future are already the past of two seconds in the future. Which makes me feel queasy, reminding me that I’ve already died somewhere in the future.
*People in the field spend a lot of time debating whether exponential increases are occasional, probable, or inevitable, where the outcome depends on the finite-time Lyapunov exponent. I have no idea what that means, and this footnote is totally gratuitous. The differing opinions about exponentiality are reviewed by Wheaton College philosopher/mathematician Robert Bishop, who characterizes the view that chaotic systems always have exponential increases in unpredictability as laughable “folklore.”
*The oscillations of unpredictability around the predicted answer in a strange attractor show some dizzyingly interesting properties:
The first is an extension of Lorenz’s experience with his six decimal places. So the values in the chaotic oscillations never actually reach the attractor—they just keep dancing around it. You’re dubious of this chaos stuff, know that at some point, this weirdo set of results you’re getting will settle down to matching what is predicted. And that seems to happen—your nice linear predictions say that the observed value at some point should be, say, 27 units of something. And that’s exactly what you measure. Aha, so much for this system being unpredictable. But then a chaoticist gives you a magnifying glass, and you look closely and see that the observed value wasn’t 27. It was 27.1, in contrast to the predicted 27.0. “Okay, okay,” you say. “I still don’t believe this chaos theory stuff. All we’ve just learned is that we have to be precise out to one decimal place.” And then at some point in the future, when you’ve predicted that the measure should be, say, 47.1, that’s exactly what you actually observe; goodbye, chaos theory. But the chaoticist gives you an even bigger magnifying glass, and the observed value turns out to be 47.09 instead of the predicted 47.10. Okay, that doesn’t prove that the mathematical world has chaotic elements; we just have to be precise out to two decimal places. And then you find a discrepancy three decimal places out. And wait long enough, and you’ll find one that’s four decimal places out. And this goes on and on until you’re dealing with an infinite number of decimal places, and the results are still not predictable (but if you could get past infinity, things would become perfectly predictable; in other words, chaos only superficially shows that Laplace was wrong—what it is mostly showing is how long infinity is). Thus, the relative magnitude of chaotic oscillations around a strange attractor stays the same, regardless of the magnification at which you’re looking (something similar to the scale-free nature of fractals).
The oscillations around predicted values are the manifestation of their strange attraction to what is predicted. But the fact that the oscillations never actually precisely reach the predicted value (at a sufficient scale of magnification) shows that a strange attractor repels as well as attracts.
As a logical extension of these ideas, the pattern of oscillations around the predicted value never repeats either. Even if it looks like it oscillated to the same unpredicted point where it was at last week, look closer, and it will be slightly different. Same scale-free feature. When a dynamic pattern repeats over and over, it is referred to as being “periodic,” and the pattern’s infinity can be compressed into something far shorter, such as the statement “It goes like this forever” or “It alternates between these two patterns forever” (which is saying that the predictable shifting between multiple patterns is the pattern). In contrast, when the pattern of unpredictable oscillations around a strange attractor never repeats until the end of time, it is referred to as nonperiodic, as in the title of Lorenz’s paper. And with nonperiodicity, the only possible description of an infinitely long pattern has to be as long itself. (Jorge Luis Borges wrote a very short story [i.e., one paragraph long], “On Exactitude in Science,” in which a cartographer makes a perfect map of an empire, leaving out no detail; the map, of course, is as large as the empire.)
*Ray Bradbury anticipated all of this with his 1952 short story “A Sound of Thunder.” A man travels sixty million years back in time, being careful not to alter anything while there. Inevitably he does alter something, and returns to the present to find the world a different place—as Bradbury framed it, the man had knocked over a small domino that led to big dominoes falling and, eventually, gigantic ones. What was the infinitesimally small impact that he had in the past? He stepped on a butterfly. Mere coincidence that this was the metaphor suggested by Lorenz’s friend? I think not.
*The grid is 14 boxes wide; each box can be in one of 2 states; therefore, the total number of patterns possible is 214, or 16,384.
*A word pregnant with significance.
*Cellular automata were first studied and named by the Hungarian American mathematician / physicist / computer scientist John von Neumann in the 1950s. It’s virtually required by law to call him a genius. He was wildly precocious—at age six, he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and was fluent in ancient Greek. One day when von Neumann was six, he found his mother daydreaming and he asked her, “What are you calculating?” (This contrasts with the daughter of a friend of mine, who, finding her father lost in thought, asked, “Daddy, which candy are you thinking about?”)
*Back to our set of instructions for rule 22: Just look at the first row. As we saw, there are eight possible trios. Each trio can result in two possible states in the next generation, namely open or filled. For example, our first trio, where all three boxes in the trio are filled, could lead to either an open row 2 box (as we would get when applying rule 22) or one that is filled (as with other rules). Thus, two possible states for each of the eight trios means 28, which equals 256, the total number of possible rules in this system.
*As with von Neumann, it is impossible to mention Wolfram without noting that he is a major-league genius. Wolfram had written three books on particle physics by the time he was fourteen years old, was a professor at Caltech by age twenty-one, produced a computer language and a computing system called Mathematica that is widely used, helped create the language that the aliens communicated with in the movie Arrival, generated Wolfram’s atlas of cellular automata, which allows you to play with the 256 rules, etc., etc. In 2002, he published a book called A New Kind of Science, which explores how computational systems like cellular automata are foundational to everything from philosophy to evolution, from biological development to postmodernism. This generated a great deal of controversy, built around the question of whether these computational systems are good ways to generate models of things in the real world, or to actually generate the complicated things themselves (as one piece of the critique, things in nature don’t progress in discrete, synchronized “time steps” as in these models). Lots of people also weren’t thrilled about the grandiosity of the claims in the book (starting with the title) or about a perceived tendency of Wolfram’s to claim every idea in the book as his own. Everyone bought a copy of it and discussed it endlessly (and hardly ever actually read the entire thing, as it was 1,192 pages long—yeah, me included).
*This study produced the now legendary 1984 paper by Robert Shaw, The Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System, Science Frontier Express Series (Aerial Press, 1984).
*In cardiology, healthier cardiovascular systems show more chaotic variability in the time intervals between heartbeats; in neurology, insufficient chaoticism is a marker of neurons that wind up firing at abnormally high rates in abnormally synchronized waves—a seizure. At the same time, other neuroscientists have explored how chaoticism can be exploited by the brain for enhancing some types of information transmission.
*The popularization of the latter has also led to a proliferation that I’ve noted in the locations of the butterfly effect, with the different citations placing the butterfly in the likes of the Congo, Sri Lanka, the Gobi Desert, Antarctica, and Alpha Centauri. In contrast, the tornado almost always seems to be in Texas, Oklahoma, or, evoking Dorothy and Toto too, Kansas.
*As a reminder from earlier in the book, Laplace was the eighteenth-century philosopher who stated the rallying cry of scientific determinism, namely that if you understand the physical laws shaping the universe and know the exact position of every particle in it, you could accurately predict what had happened during every moment since the start of time, and what would happen in every subsequent moment until the end of time. Which means that whatever happens in the universe was destined to happen (in a mathematical rather than theological sense).
*With a reminder from chapter 3 that it is very rare for a single gene to be deterministic in this way. To reiterate, almost all genes are about potential and vulnerability, rather than inevitability, interacting in nonlinear ways with environment and other genes.
*I’ve observed a great example of this. Near the equator in Kenya is Mount Kenya, the second-highest mountain in Africa, at more than seventeen thousand feet. Among the cool things about it, the climate is equatorial African at the base and glacial on top (at least it’s glacial for a little while longer—melting fast), with completely different ecosystems every few thousand feet higher. There are some odd-looking plant species in the montane zone at about fifteen thousand feet. I was once chatting with a plant evolutionary biologist in his office, and there were some pictures of one of those plants. “Hey, nice, I see you’ve been up Mount Kenya,” I said. “No, I took those in the Andes.” The Andean plant was completely unrelated to the Kenyan one yet looked virtually the same. Apparently, there are only a few ways to be a high-altitude plant on the equator, and these very different plant species, on opposite sides of the globe, had converged on these solutions. Implicit in this is a great quote from Richard Dawkins: “However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead”—there’s a very finite number of ways to be alive, with each living species having converged on one of them.
*Note to self: check to see if Versailles is made of bricks.
*This concept was invoked by chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1996 when he famously lost a match to IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. Referring to the sheer power of the computer, arising from its ability to evaluate two hundred million positions on the board per second, he explained, “What I discovered yesterday was that we are now seeing for the first time what happens when quantity becomes quality” (B. Weber, “In Kasparov vs. Computer, the Chess Scorecard Is 1–1,” New York Times, February 12, 1996). This principle was first stated by Hegel and greatly influenced Marx.
*Check out Ohio State’s marching band doing the Michael Jackson shtick at www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhVAga3GhNM.
*Anderson gives a wonderful example of this idea, quoting an exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway: “Fitzgerald: The rich are different from us. Hemingway: Yes, they have more money. Everything else about rich-ness just emerges from that.”
