Lone Gunman

Chil­dren learn a lot from imi­tat­ing the actions of adults, with recent research sug­gest­ing that infants as young as 14 months are selec­tive imi­ta­tors — tak­ing cues from our behav­iour in order to decide which of us adults to learn from and which to ignore.

In a study where researchers expressed delight before either pre­sent­ing an infant with a toy (the reli­able con­di­tion) or not pre­sent­ing the infant with a toy (the unre­li­able con­di­tion), they dis­cov­ered that infants detect “unre­li­able” peo­ple and choose not to learn from then, opt­ing instead for adults that appear con­fi­dent and knowl­edge­able — the reli­able group.

“Infants seem to per­ceive reli­able adults as capa­ble of ratio­nal action, whose novel, unfa­mil­iar behav­iour is worth imi­tat­ing,” the researchers said. “In con­trast, the same behav­iour per­formed by a pre­vi­ously unre­li­able adult is inter­preted as irra­tional or inef­fi­cient, thus not wor­thy of imitating.” […]

The new find­ing adds to a grow­ing body of research show­ing children’s selec­tiv­ity in who they choose to learn from. For exam­ple, chil­dren pre­fer to learn from adults as opposed to their peers, and they pre­fer to learn from peo­ple they are famil­iar with and who appear more cer­tain, con­fi­dent and knowledgeable.

If there’s one per­son I can think of who is qual­i­fied to pro­duce a movie glos­sary, it has to be Roger Ebert. And you know what? He did, it was pub­lished, and I had no idea until just now.

Inspir­ing fre­quent light gig­gles and the occa­sional guf­faw, Ebert’s glos­sary appears to have orig­i­nated as an article/chapter in Roger Ebert’s Video Com­pan­ion (that link leads to a probably-not-kosher mir­ror of the full sec­tion). An expanded ver­sion was later pub­lished as the stand­alone vol­ume Ebert’s ‘Big­ger’ Lit­tle Movie Glos­sary, with the won­drously descrip­tive sub­ti­tle of “a greatly expanded and much improved com­pendium of movie clichés, stereo­types, oblig­a­tory scenes, hack­neyed for­mu­las, shop­worn con­ven­tions, and out­dated arche­types” (and that link goes to the fairly exten­sive Google Books pre­view… for those of you who don’t want to buy it for the Kin­dle).

Five ran­dom terms that made me chuckle:

• Dirt Equals Virtue: In tech­nol­ogy movies, a small, dingy, clut­tered lit­tle lab and eccen­tric per­son­nel equal high prin­ci­ples; large, well-lighted facil­i­ties mask sin­is­ter motives.
• First Law of Funny Names: No names are funny unless used by W.C. Fields or Grou­cho Marx. Funny names, in gen­eral, are a sign of des­per­a­tion at the screen­play level. See “Dr. Hfuhruhurr” in The Man with Two Brains.
• Oblig­a­tory M & M Shot: Every movie that fea­tures a scene in an Arab or Islamic coun­try will begin the scene with a shot of a mosque tower (minaret), or the sound of the muezzin, or both.
• Prin­ci­ple of Selec­tive Lethal­ity: The lethal­ity of a weapon varies, depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion. A sin­gle arrow will drop a stam­ped­ing bison in its tracks, but it takes five or six to kill an impor­tant char­ac­ter. A sin­gle bul­let will always kill an extra on the spot, but it takes dozens to bring down the hero.
• Unmo­ti­vated Close-up: A char­ac­ter is given a close-up in a scene where there seems to be no rea­son for it. This is an infal­li­ble tip-off that this char­ac­ter is more sig­nif­i­cant than at first appears, and is most likely the killer. See the lin­ger­ing close-up of the under­cover KGB agent near the begin­ning of The Hunt for Red Octo­ber.

Recent research sug­gests that domes­tic dogs seem capa­ble of dis­play­ing a rudi­men­tary “the­ory of mind” — a very human char­ac­ter­is­tic whereby you are able to attribute men­tal states to oth­ers that do not nec­es­sar­ily coin­cide with your own (in a nut­shell). Stray domes­tic dogs, mean­while, do not dis­play this trait, sug­gest­ing that such men­tal attrib­utes are devel­oped through close con­tact with humans. That’s inter­est­ing, but not the main rea­son I’m shar­ing this infor­ma­tion with you.

This cog­ni­tive dif­fer­ence between stray domes­tic dogs and their house­bound brethren was uncov­ered by test­ing whether or not they under­stood the very human action of point­ing (y’know, with your index fin­ger). What struck me most in this dis­cus­sion was this brief the­ory of how the action of point­ing evolved:

Go ahead, let your wrist go limp and look at your hand from the side, or if you’re too inse­cure in your own sex­u­al­ity, just pic­ture Adam’s limp wrist at the moment of cre­ation in Michelangelo’s mas­ter­piece on the Sis­tine Chapel’s ceil­ing. See how even in this relaxed state the index fin­ger is slightly extended? By con­trast, when chimps do this […] their index fin­ger falls nat­u­rally in line with their other fin­gers. Povinelli and Davis rea­son that this sub­tle evo­lu­tion­ary change in the mor­phol­ogy of our hands, which occurred after humans and chim­panzees last shared a com­mon ances­tor five mil­lion to seven mil­lion years ago, is at least par­tially respon­si­ble for the fact that human point­ing with the index fin­ger is so cul­tur­ally ubiq­ui­tous today.

The argu­ment goes some­thing like this. When young infants begin reach­ing for objects just out of their range, adults are most likely to respond to those reach­ing attempts and to retrieve the item for the baby when the latter’s index fin­ger is more promi­nently extended. That is to say, ini­tially, the adult mis­tak­enly reads into the child’s reach­ing attempt as a com­mu­nica­tive ges­ture on the part of the child. Over time, this dynamic between the child and adult serves to fur­ther “pull out” the index fin­ger because the child implic­itly learns the behav­ioral asso­ci­a­tion, so that it slowly becomes a gen­uine point­ing gesture.

Start­ing at 10^–25 sec­onds after the start of the uni­verse (infla­tion) and end­ing 10¹⁵ years later (with the ulti­mate fate of the uni­verse), the time­line of the uni­verse is an incom­pre­hen­si­bly long and fas­ci­nat­ing one. To help under­stand the forces that led to life as we know it and to get an idea of what’s going to hap­pen in the (dis­tant) future, the­o­ret­i­cal astro­physi­cist Ethan Siegel has bro­ken down the details in a won­der­fully acces­si­ble and enlight­en­ing com­plete his­tory of the uni­verse (with pictures!).

Those last cou­ple of steps on the time­line are par­tic­u­larly humbling:

100 bil­lion years: the Uni­verse has expanded so much that our local group, hav­ing merged into a giant ellip­ti­cal galaxy, is the only one left in the vis­i­ble Uni­verse!

We’ve got a long time left of stars going through the great cos­mic life-cycle, burn­ing their fuel, explod­ing, trig­ger­ing star for­ma­tion, and burn­ing their new fuel. But this is lim­ited; there’s only a finite amount of hydro­gen and other ele­ments to burn via nuclear fusion. The skies will even­tu­ally go com­pletely dark, as the last of the dim, red dwarf stars (the longest-lived ones) exhaust their fuel.

10¹⁵ years: the last bit of hydro­gen is burned up, and our entire Uni­verse goes dark, being pop­u­lated only by black holes, neu­tron stars, and degen­er­ate dwarf stars, which even­tu­ally them­selves cool, fade, and turn black.

And that’s the entire Uni­verse, from the very begin­ning of what we can sen­si­bly say about it to the far dis­tant future!

via @Foomandoonian

Whether caf­feine serves any pur­pose other than remov­ing with­drawal symp­toms is a topic of study with con­flict­ing results, but if you’re an opti­mist as well as a fan of caf­feine in any of it’s many forms you’re most likely con­sum­ing it sub-optimally.

Why not improve your caf­feine knowl­edge and learn­ing about the opti­mal way of con­sum­ing the world’s most-used stim­u­lant; caf­feine:

• Con­sume in small, fre­quent amounts: Between 20-200mg per hour may be an opti­mal dose for cog­ni­tive function.
• Play to your cog­ni­tive strengths: Caf­feine may increase the speed with which you work, may decrease atten­tional lapses, and may even ben­e­fit recall — but is less likely to ben­e­fit more com­plex cog­ni­tive func­tions, and may even hurt oth­ers. Plan accordingly.
• Play to caffeine’s strengths: Caffeine’s effects can be max­i­mized or min­i­mized depend­ing on what else is in your sys­tem at the time.
• Know when to stop — and when to start again: Although you may not grow strongly tol­er­ant to caf­feine, you can become depen­dent on it and suf­fer with­drawal symp­toms. Bal­ance these con­cerns with the cog­ni­tive and health ben­e­fits asso­ci­ated with caf­feine con­sump­tion — and appro­pri­ately timed resumption.

So that’s one cup of reg­u­lar cof­fee — with sugar and/or soy milk — every hour when per­form­ing rel­a­tively sim­ple cog­ni­tive tasks.