The article continues:

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

That right there almost seems like a neurological explanation for the invention of religion (and art): The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.”

Read the full article — it goes on to cite a study where a group of test subjects who first read “The Country Doctor” by Kafka performed a letter-string matching test 30 percent better than a control group that read a more linear non-Kafka story.

This latest quest by science is trying to show that “nonsense makes sense”, which, paradoxically, would make it non-nonsense, right?

Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories [or religion -- a weeping Virgin Mary statue, anyone?], for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

That’s too bad — John Cage should be added to the school curriculum regardless of the prematurity of these findings.

Uh-oh, I feel the grip of the uncanny overcoming me as I type. Will the urge for odor satisfy itself with me?

Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.

I’ll think to that, ye uncanny drinkers!

Image created by Perry Hung, who explains:

This is a visualization I made for funsies of a linux boot sequence where each function is a node and each edge represents a function call, direct branch, or indirect branch. Nodes are laid out using an unweighted force-directed layout algorithm, where each node is simulated as if it were electrically repulsive and had springs between nodes.

The little “lobe” on the left is made up the interrupt processing routines (irq vectors, irq_svc, etc). The tail at the top is the bootloader. The main thing in the middle is the linux boot sequence.

The entire graph represents a call chain from the bootloader up until it jumps into userspace to a shell prompt

edit: this picture was intended to be “art” and not something with a whole lot of utility. yes, you can zoom in and see individual nodes and control flow. yes, there are better layouts for this information. I have collected much of this information to find commonly executed parts of the kernel to optimize aggressively.

My irq vectors are in a tizzy!

Whatever this thing does, it does it beautifully.

“Nano-Explosions Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of an overflowed electrodeposited magnetic nanowire array (CoFeB), where the template has been subsequently completely etched. It’s a reminder that nanoscale research can have unpredicted consequences at a high level. (Image: Fanny Beron, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Canada)”

Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.

In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don’t want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.

In a way, you can’t really blame either scientists or editors for backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance,” is how one cosmologist put it. “Many who have visited it have been cut and bloodied by the experience.”

…

So what is it about science that makes them [editors] uneasy? Surely it is more than the obvious fact that it’s hard to understand things that aren’t (yet) understood. In science it can be just as hard to understand what is understood. Relativity and quantum mechanics have been around for nearly a century, yet they remain confusing in some sense even to those who understand these theories well. We know they’re correct because they’ve been tested so thoroughly in so many ways. But they still don’t make sense.

On the other hand, why should they? Humans evolved to procreate, eat, and avoid getting eaten. The fact that we have learned to understand what atoms are all about or what the universe was doing back to a nanosecond after its birth is literally unbelievable. But the universe doesn’t care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn’t speak our language, so there’s no reason it should “make sense.”

That’s why science depends on evidence.

…

Science is also innately uncertain. What makes science strong is that these uncertainties are out there in the open, spelled out and quantified.

Embrace uncertainty, in science, in art and in life. As the Talking Heads sang, stop making sense.

]]> http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2006/08/the-joy-of-uncertainty-and-senselesness-in-science-and-art/feed/ 0 http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2006/06/how-a-slug-breathes/ http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2006/06/how-a-slug-breathes/#comments Thu, 22 Jun 2006 21:00:34 +0000 jay http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2006/06/how-a-slug-breathes/ Everything you ever wanted to know about gastropod respiration but were afraid to ask. This is expecially engrossing:

“If you watch a slug long enough, you will notice that its pneumostome rhythmically opens and closes, in other words, you will witness the slug breathing. The rate of breathing of a slug is probably determined by the metabolic rate and the state of hydration of the slug as well as the ambient temperature and humidity.”

If you watch a slug long enough.

]]> http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2006/06/how-a-slug-breathes/feed/ 0 http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2006/01/spiders-on-speed/ http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2006/01/spiders-on-speed/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:56:05 +0000 jay http://www.jurisich.com/blog/?p=9 Too much coffee today? The Wikipedia entry on caffeine has a great picture showing what can result from sharing your morning cup with a drowsy spider:

Think about this next time you reach for another pot of joe to help you muddle through a particularly complex problem.

Of course, people are different from spiders, so the worst you might experience from coffee is

…restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushed face, diuresis, muscle twitching, rambling flow of thought and speech, cardiac arrhythmia or tachycardia, and psychomotor agitation, gastrointestinal complaints, increased blood pressure, rapid pulse, vasoconstriction (tightening or constricting of superficial blood vessels) sometimes resulting in cold hands or fingers, increased amounts of fatty acids in the blood, an increased production of gastric acid…mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, loss of social inhibition, delusions, hallucinations and psychosis….”

Then again, how bad can it be for you if your company brews it and your boss encourages you to consume all the free coffee you want?

Drink up!

]]> http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2006/01/spiders-on-speed/feed/ 0 http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2005/11/darwins-first-tree-of-life/ http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2005/11/darwins-first-tree-of-life/#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2005 15:00:48 +0000 jay http://www.jurisich.com/blog/?p=13 “Tree of Life: the first-known sketch by Charles Darwin of an evolutionary tree describing the relationships among groups of organisms.”

From the American Museum of Natural History’s Darwin exhibition, November 19, 2005 to May 29, 2006.

]]> http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2005/11/darwins-first-tree-of-life/feed/ 0 http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2005/03/benjamin-fry-data-visualization/ http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2005/03/benjamin-fry-data-visualization/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2005 22:14:53 +0000 jay http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2003/03/benjamin-fry-data-visualization/ Beautiful visualizations by Benjamin Fry: “There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. My research focuses on developing approaches to such data, in particular, the human genome.”

]]> http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2005/03/benjamin-fry-data-visualization/feed/ 0 http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2004/01/itos-turtles-all-the-way-down/ http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2004/01/itos-turtles-all-the-way-down/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:21:39 +0000 jay http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2004/01/itos-turtles-all-the-way-down/ A game of Rashomon, anyone?

- – - – - – - – - -

In A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books, 1988), Stephen Hawking tells the story of an elderly woman who confronted Bertrand Russell at the end of a lecture on orbital mechanics, claiming she had a theory superior to his. “We don’t live on a ball revolving around the Sun,” she said, “we live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle.” Wishing to humor the woman Russell asked, “And what does this turtle stand on?” “On the back of a second, still larger turtle,” was her confident answer. “But what holds up the second turtle?” he persisted, now in a slightly exasperated tone. “It’s no use, young man,” the old woman replied, “it’s turtles all the way down.”

- – - – - – - – - -

Stephen Hawking in BriefHistoryOfTime starts with the same anecdote. A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady atthe back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a gianttortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What isthe tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,”said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”

- – - – - – - – - -

A Brief History of Time begins with a striking image and a wonderful true story: An elderly lady attended a public lecture given by an astrophysicist on how the Earth goes around the Sun and how the Sun circles about with countless other stars in our galaxy the Milky Way. During the question and answer session, the woman stood up and told the distinguished scientist that his lecture was nonsense, that the Earth is a flat disk supported on the back of an enormous tortoise. The scientist tried to outwit the lady by asking, “Well, my dear, what supports the tortoise?” To which she replied, “You’re a very clever young man, but not clever enough. It’s turtles all the way down!”

]]> http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2004/01/itos-turtles-all-the-way-down/feed/ 0 http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2003/10/richard-feynman-and-the-connection-machine/ http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2003/10/richard-feynman-and-the-connection-machine/#comments Tue, 28 Oct 2003 23:07:59 +0000 jay http://www.jurisich.com/blog/2003/10/richard-feynman-and-the-connection-machine/ Danny Hillis: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

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