Bag of Worms Yet Words

126. Why Do Dogs Run In Front of Cars in a Street?

I dealt with this issue in a flippant way earlier, theorizing that dogs were committing suicide. Now I have a more serious theory, based in canine phenomenology. Basically, dogs are unaware of automobiles' existence. The dog's phenomenal world is constructed out of powerful smelling, tasting, and hearing sensations. Though we think of some dogs as "sight hounds", visual perception is less important by far than smelling. What a dog smells is cued by genetic inheritance (all the biochemical sensing involved in smelling other dogs, smelling prey, smelling predators, smelling food) and experience. Experience is framed by the genetically loaded sensory perception. I don't know of any empirical experimentation on dog's perception of automobiles, but I would guess that to the extent that a dog experiences an automobile as an object of perception, it is the smelling cues associated with aromas of family members in the automobile, of the food they carry into the car, and some memory associations connecting the car to pleasant experiences, such as visits to locales where others dogs are present. The auto itself as a bundle of smells--gasoline, grease, plastics, etc.--is probably not even perceived by the dog. When the dog is interested in crossing a street--perhaps to investigate an aroma located on the other side of the street--with cars passing along the street, the dog is not even aware that the cars are there. For the dog, the street is empty and poses no threat (or pleasure or reward). So it bounds into the street fixated, without caution, on the pleasure awaiting it on the other side. Cars per se are not valuated in the dog's experience. They do not benefit from the tragic consequences of being hit by a car, because generally they do not live to have learned from it.

125. Can There Be Coincidences In A Dog's World?

What kind of a mental world does a dog have to have to experiences coincidences? Coincidences are more than surprises and odd juxtipositioning of events, objects, and beings. Coincidences imply, don't they, that there is a order to the world independently of the mind experiencing the coincidences. A dog would have to be able to stand aside from events in order to experience them as coincidences. Might a dog have to be able to have a mental thought of a future event, in order that that coincidences near that event would be apparent? For instance, might a dog bury a bone, with the expectation of a future event of eating the bone, anticipating the pleasure it would give to relief its hunger then? Would coincidences be similar to ironies? How could we determine whether a dog can stand aside from the world, separating "the world" from "its world"? How could we test such a proposition? My assumption is that a dog is fully "in its world now" and therefore couldn't stand aside. So that the dog's world has no coincidences, just a journey defined by following scents, in which surprises occur, but no coincidences.

124. Neandertals Might Not Have Made Art Objects and Jewelry Attributed To Them

New radiocarbon dating of objects found in French caves, previously tentatively attributed to Neadertals, proves them to have been created long after Neandertals died out. (Michael Balter, "A Setback for Neandertal Smarts", Science Mag Daily, October 19, 2010.)

Whatever the current evidence, I think that eventually Neandertals and prehuman primates will be found to have had capability to create objects with symbolic significance. The Neandertals had far too much brain power for symbolic behavior to have been out of their reach. Current studies of primates and high mammals are on the verge of demonstrating this capability now. A purely darwinian view of evolution of humans would find in prehumans traces of human capabilities--continuity, not discontinuity, is the rule.

123. Marc Hauser, Harvard, Found Guilty of Misuse of Data and Use of Bogus Data

Hauser is a leading proponent of the scientific theory that basic maxims of morality, e.g., fairness, are structrually inborn in humans and present in the primate descendents of our common primate ancestors. Research assistants and a graduate student alleged to the university administration that he used bogus data. Professor Hauser is on leave. Scientific articles in professional journals in which the faulty data were used are being corrected or withdrawn.

I have briefly corresponded with Hauser regarding his book, Moral Minds, which I reviewed on the Web and which has been cited in this blog.

Tom Bartlett, "Harvard Find Psychology Researcher 'Solely Responsible' for Scientific Misconduct," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20, 2010.

Gideon Gil, "Hauser found "responsible' for eight instances of misconduct", Boston Globe, August 20, 2010. Dean Michael Smith's letter to the faculty, announcing the findings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Committee on Professional Conduct that investigated the allegations, is reprinted in the article.

Carolyn Y. Johnson, "Harvard to recify journal works", Boston.com, August 13, 2010. 

122. Sound Technology Can Create An Aural Landscape That Is Seen By Blind Hearers

A technological device scans a scene visually. The spatially distributed visual landscape is translated, so to speak, by the technology into spatially distributed  sounds. This sound-landscape or soundscape is then sent to the blind hearer's ears. Over time, with practice, the hearer, listening to the sound, can experience it as a visual landscape, with objects in their places (where they would be seen in visual experience through the eyes) and recognizably distinct from other objects.

The research with this sound offers a new sensation paradigm, suggesting that sensations from the modal senses are not perceived in a hardwired receiver in one section of the brain, but may be created by features of the sensations not previously examined.

"The traditional view is that the brain takes data from the different sensory organs- in the case of sight, the retina- and, for each sense, processes it in separate regions to create a picture of the outside world. But that cannot explain how someone can have a visual experience from purely auditory information.

"As such, O'Regan [ J. Kevin O'Regan, a psychologist at Descartes University in Paris, France] says our definition of what it means to see needs to change. Our senses, he argues, are defined by the way the incoming information changes as we interact with the environment. If the information obeys the laws of perspective as you move forward and backward, we will experience it as "seeing"- no matter how the information is being delivered. If you have a device that preserves these laws, then you should be able to see through your ears or your skin, he says.

"If O'Regan is on the right track, we will have to reconsider long-held ideas of how the brain is organised to deal with incoming information. Traditionally, the brain is considered to be highly modular, with the occipital, temporal and parietal cortices handling inputs from the eyes, ears and from the skin and deep tissues, respectively. According to O'Regan, however, these regions may actually deal with certain types of information- shape or texture, for example- irrespective of which sense it comes from."

Bijal Trivedi, "Sensory hijack: rewiring brains to see with sound," NewScientist, 17 August 2010, issue no. 2773.

121. When Male Mice Cry It Turns Female Mice On

"Crying isn't sexy—unless you're a male mouse. Researchers have found that a previously-identified pheromone in male mouse tears, known as ESP1, makes female mice arch their back, lift their hind region, and stay put when the males approach them to mate. (Female mice not in the mood tend to run away.) Scientists have found mouse pheromones in urine before; pheromones in tears may have evolved because tear fluid lingers in the fur, and female mice often groom the faces of other mice, the team will report tomorrow in Nature. Women don't have the receptor for this pheromone, however, so hold back on those tears for now, guys."

ScienceShot: "Tears Put Female Mice In The Mood."

The article should probably say, scientists have not yet discovered a receptor for the ESP1 pheromone in the human female, rather than that there is no receptor. Frankly, I think a similar phenomenon exists in humans. (See post 104.) Why would evolution discard such a useful trait? And, gosh, isn't this what sensitive metrosexuality is all about? The sensitive metrosexual guy slips in and scores with the girl while the Neandertal is thumping his chest at the frat house.

120. Ovulation Hormones Increase Women's Perception Of Faces

June 29, 2010. New Scientist.

"THE size of a woman's brain changes throughout her menstrual cycle, with some areas growing by as much as 2 per cent in the run-up to ovulation, when women are at their most fertile.

"So say Belinda Pletzer and colleagues at the University of Salzburg, Austria, who took MRI scans of the brains of women during their monthly cycles.

"In women not taking the pill, the team found an increase in the volume of grey matter in the right parahippocampal and fusiform gyri, areas of the brain involved in spatial location and facial recognition (Brain Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2010.06.019).

"This boosts women's abilities to recognise faces, bodies and landscapes, says Pletzer, adding that this may help them to locate a high-quality mating partner.

"The team found that the effect is short-lived, however. After ovulation, rising levels of progesterone cause the gyri to shrink back.

"The team also found that women on the pill had a bigger hippocampus and cerebellum, associated with memory and movement, compared to controls. "The pill may exaggerate typical female behaviours such as superior language skills and memory," says Pletzer."

119. Voice Pitch Determines Whether Sentence Will Be Declarative or Interrogative

An MIT linguist has discovered that a shift in voice pitch identifies whether a sentence will be a statement or a question. Babies learn whether a stream of words is to be declarative or interrogative from the pitch order.

118. Women Can Judge A Man's Upper Body Strength By His Voice Alone

In a scientific experiment, women judged men's upper body strength by listening to recordings of their voices. There was no correlation (200 male subjects from three countries) between men's upper body strength and the timbre or pitch of their voices. The women made the evaluations nearly as snap judgments, without thought.

Such ability to intuit men's upper body strength from voice must be genetically hardwired in women. The ability probably evolved in lower primates and was passed along, perhaps enhanced, up the evolutionary tree to humans. It provides evidence of the ability of genetics to encode environmental stimulus. By analogy, to encode values.

117. Rats Have Inborn Navigational Brain Neurology

Scientists at Norwegian University in Trondheim have determined that rats have at birth three kinds of neurons that establish navigation for the new born animals:

direction neurons

place neurons

grid neurons

When the animal moves, direction neuron fires. Place neurons fire at a location. Grid neurons fire at regular intervals as the animal moves, establishing something like a spatial grid.

The article, cited above, compares this finding to Kant's theory of innate knowledge of space; but it is quite different. The rat's navigational knowledge is created by activity in the world. It is existential, in comparison to transcendental.

Presumbly humans have the same equipment, at least.

We can see a congruity between these navigational neurons and the primordial values I hypothesize as the basis of valuated geography, that is, a landscape.