6. Magic & the Midwest

On page three of his Advice, Santiago Ramón y Cajal cites the German physicist Emil du Bois-Raymond, writing:

"We must resign ourselves to the state of ignoramus, or even the inexorable ignorabimus."

My Society for Neuroscience badge might as well have read Benjamin Ehrlich: Ignoramus. Instead, I received a yellow [no positive associations, after reading Dostoevsky], non-member badge with my comparatively lowly degree: BA. As I said, one ignoramus, among thirty thousand scientists. But, as one of my many basketball coaches over the years once told some of us kids, "God gave you two ears and one mouth. Do you know what that means? [No answer]. It means you should do twice as much listening as you talking." Today I listened at least twice as much as I talked, and scribbled more notes than I thought possible.

One of my religious school teachers once told me a story about his friend the College Philosophy Student. This fellow wrote a paper arguing that when you get on a plane, and the cabin rattles, and the shades are down, it is necessarily (that word again) taking off from the ground and flying through the air from Point A to Point B. The professor marked the paper an F. It is impossible to logically disprove even the absurd counterargument. But we can certainly imagine it. They close the windows, shake the cabin, and change the scenery. Philosophically speaking, then, flying could be an illusion. [Now, it can be validly argued that such an abstract technicality does not really matter. But that is another story entirely].

These are the types of questions I anticipated from the first lecture of the conference, called "Magic, the Brain, and the Mind." The two performers/speakers were Eric Meade, mentalist, and Apollo Robbins, thief. Meade spoke about manipulating remembrance by planting false memories [Proust is rolling in his grave]. Meade also mentioned the work of Elizabeth Loftus. But there was little science in his presentation; he ended by urging the audience to investigate some of the phenomena he and other magicians had noticed during their careers.

Robbins spoke about controlling attention and inducing lapses of focus. He claimed a "grift sense," a sort of biofeedback that allowed a good magician to receive information from his audience and adjust. The three aspects he noted were proximix/personal space [putting the mark on defense], movements [misdirecting], and interior dialogue [confusing]. He ended by misquoting Albert Einstein, saying "Reality is an illusion, but a good one." [Actual quote: Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one]. All in all, I would have rather just watched Les Mozarts des pickpockets. Neither presentation was so substantive.

Next, I attended the Public Symposium: In Celebration of Darwin: Evolution of Brain and Behavior. This was fascinating, although at times too technical for me [and many others, whom I noticed were bored or confused]. In the introduction, the speaker framed the event by altering the famous Theodosius Dobzhansky quote: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." The speaker proposed that the same could be said about neuroscience.

All presenters offered brilliant data for arguments about behavior, function, and evolution of the nervous system. All integrated the discoveries and conclusions of their peers. Molly E. Cummings from the University of Texas at Austin spoke about monogamy. Only 3% of species are monogamous. Ecology predicts monogamy; when resources are sparse, creatures bond in pairs. Something must cue the brain to the environment. That something is the neuropeptide arginine vasopressin [AVP], which acts is an antidiuretic hormone, affecting water balance. In voles, AVP corresponds with time spent huddling with partners. Then it got complicated [re: V1a receptor, 334 allele], but Cummings eventually used inter-specific analysis to draw sound conclusions about human behavior. Monogamous tendency is genetic. And our microsatellite region upstream of the AVP gene shows variation, as in voles. I was scribbling so fast I am still not sure that I understand, but it was awesome.

Lastly, as an example of intra-individual [within a lifetime, phenotypic] evolution, Cummings spoke about maternal care, citing the work of Michael Meaney with Norway rats. It seems that Lamarckian theory is making an "exciting" comeback in the field of evolutionary biology. FASCINATING! Parental investment is defined as "any investment that increases the offspring's chance for survival at the cost of the parent's ability to have more offspring." It is a question of now versus later. Data show that better quality mothers, rats who perform the behaviors licking and grooming of offspring with higher frequency, produce offspring that are in turn higher quality mothers. And genotype does not predict this; quality of the rearing mother does. Change is affected in the stress region of the brain upon emotions such as fear. The chemical process of methylation, which prevents gene transcription, occurs with high frequency in low quality mothers, and with low frequency in high quality mothers. It is variation in care of offspring that determines adult phenotype. Epigenetics allows for plasticity in environment without a DNA change. Again, I caught everything that I could.

Ralph Greenspan of The Neurosciences Institute spoke about fruit flies, with whom humans share genes, cellular mechanisms/pathways, and synaptic plasticity. He spoke about aggression, a behavior that underlies humans and fruit flies despite their different anatomies. One of the regulatory systems for fighting is called the Y system [in flies, NPF], which also governs courtship, sensitivity to alcohol, and feeding. The same suite of behaviors occurs in diverse species, a fact which, combined with a couple of other facts that I did not understand well enough to repeat [one has to do with EGFR ligand regulation of sleep/wake cycles, the other has to do with the hypothalamus and pars intercerebralis being "cousins"], leads Greenspan to conclude that there is a common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates. In fact, he concluded his talk with a poem by William Blake, "The Fly" [Greenspan stopped after the second stanza, I give here the entire poem:

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.


The evening lecture was called "Origins of Abstract Knowledge: Number and Geometry." It was delivered by Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University. It was brilliant; I have pages and pages of notes. Her goal is to arrive at a natural number and natural geometry, which would apply to everything, lie beyond perception and action, and be uniquely human. Her research, and the research of others in the field, is tireless and scrupulous. She revealed that there are two core systems of numbers [1-3 objects and sets, with approximate cardinal values] and two core systems of geometry [navigation and form analyses]. There were found to be five signatures of performance in human infants: ratio of dependence [newborn 1:3, 6 mo. 1:2, 9 mo. 2:3], modality and format invariance, addition equals comparison [by the same ratio as signature #1], the ratio in substitution is less than that of addition, and number is linked to length.

The same signatures are present in human adults. Ratio=approx. 7:8, all other signatures present. They are also present across cultures [i.e. remote Amazonians], which means that it is fair to say they are universal. In the brain, this corresponds to activity in a region of the parietal cortex hIPS [in humans]. Monkey IPS responds in the same way. Something theoretically big is building here.

Then Spelke talked about four important findings in humans. The first deals with symbolic arithmetic, during which fMRI testing shows activation in the same region [hIPS]. The second: better students are shown to have sharper nonsymbolic number representations [they tracked fourteen-year-old students from kindergarten and controlled for things like verbal ability]. Third: before kids learn symbolic arithmetic, they draw on the approximate number system to solve symbolic number problems. Last: children who are better at nonsymbolic arithmetic go on to greater achievement in first-year school math.

Non-human animals also have a system founded on nonsymbolics. But this system is inevitably incomplete because it has no exact cardinal values and no operation of "adding one." SO, enter the second core system of number, small, exact number of objects. There are limits: set sizes of only up to 3, must be cohesive objects [i.e. no piles of sand], and it offers no explicit cardinal values [ball and ball, not 2 balls].

Guess what? Studies show that children combine these systems when they master verbal counting. It is language that synthesizes abstract knowledge. Intuitive conclusion, but nonetheless cool for a writer to learn.

That's it. I'm exhausted. Thanks!