New York City hosted the second annual World Science Festival from June 10-14. The festival is founded by the husband and wife team of theoretical physicist and popularizer of science Brian Greene, and documentary film-maker Tracy Day. It includes panel discussions, lectures, presentations, the mathemagician, and a street fair in the hopes of making science understandable and interesting to the public. Natural Selections writers attended the festival and have the following reviews.



Time, the Familiar Stranger: Oliver Sacks and Friends
Felice Kelly

Dr. Oliver Sacks is a rock star in the pop science world. When your books have enchanted the audience before you even step on the stage, it may be inevitable that your actual presence will disappoint. I have to say, I was disappointed. This panel discussion about the perception of time was moderated by author Harold Evans and featured Sacks, psychologist Dr. Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness), and neuroscientist Dr. Warren Meck. The discussion touched on many interesting points, but it never explored any of them in enough depth to provide the audience with real insight into how our perception of time affects our lives.

Much of the evening’s discussion focused on prospection, the act of looking forward in time to consider or imagine the future. We use prospection to plan our lives—we look down the road and predict the consequences of our current actions. Gilbert thinks that this process is remarkable, but flawed, and flawed in part because we shorten the time scale of the future in our minds. In other words, when we imagine the future, we leave stuff out, and sometimes that stuff can be important in determining how happy we are when we get to the future. Of course, it’s necessary to leave details out, or it would take as long to imagine doing something as to actually do it. Planning is a bit of a temporal trap, and one that does seem to come up in the lab a lot: if we take the time to plan carefully enough to foresee what will actually happen, it takes as long, or longer, to plan it as to actually do it. Of course, in the lab it’s often worth the extra time to plan the experiment.

Dr. Sacks was largely quiet in the discussion. He contributed a few patient anecdotes, and spoke briefly about how both Turret’s and Parkinson’s syndromes can be interpreted as defects in time perception, and both syndromes involve a misregulation of dopamine, which is closely tied to our perception of time. He told a story about a Turret’s patient he had, who could easily catch flies in mid-air because he perceived them to be flying quite slowly. He also spoke about a patient who would get stuck in a moment of time, and when brought back to the present, she would insist that no time had passed, despite the evidence to the contrary.

One of the most interesting parts of the evening was when Meck performed an experiment on the audience to test our time perception. He first “trained” us on a given interval between the appearance of a red square and its change to a blue square. He then left the red square on the screen and asked everyone to raise their hand when they thought the square should change color. He said this was a demonstration of the sorts of experiments they do in the lab, and that the whole thing would be taped for later analysis by age, but didn’t tell us anything about the results they normally obtain.

The moderator, Evans, seemed a bit over-interested in drug options for changing time perception. In fact, it seemed to be an inside joke among the panelists throughout the discussion. Perhaps they did a little extra preparation for the evening, before walking on stage. All of the panelists seemed wary of going into any detail on any of these topics, I guess because they were afraid of losing the audience. The end result, though, was a conversation that never really seemed to get going. The total lack of structure led to a wandering thread of ideas, and left the audience with fun tidbits, but little else.



There is Something About Mind-Reading
Leah Kelly

I’m in a hall sitting a row away from Cameron Diaz, listening to Kraftwerk, wondering if I have come to the right place. The specially commissioned introductory visuals to the World Science Festival start, and I realize that indeed I have. I’m at the “Transparent Brain” session of the Festival. We’ve gathered to hear four panelists talk about whether we can read people’s minds, and perhaps more importantly if we can, should we?

National Public Radio’s (NPR) Brooke Gladstone oversaw the evening with grace and wit, and steered the experts from veering into jargon-laden monologues. On the panel we had: Professor John Donoghue, founding chairman of the Department of Neuroscience at Brown and currently the director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science; John-Dylan Haynes, Professor for Theory and Analysis of Large Scale Brain Signals at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin; Frank Tong, a cognitive neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University; Paul Root Wolpe, the Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University.

Each researcher spoke about their work, followed by a debate about the unavoidable ethical questions raised by this type of research that we will no doubt be facing in the next decade or two.

As a neuroscientist, I empathized with the researchers. They were clearly passionate about the brain and their work was aimed at figuring out more about its function. It’s easy to see though how the public could interpret their research as some sinister attempt at mind reading, and no doubt extrapolations of their findings could result in some dystopian nightmare.

John-Dylan Hayes first spoke about his research. Experiments involve presenting people with images of simple objects, then using fMRI to build individual image databases of brain scans in response to these different visual stimuli. From the personal image library, a specially designed computer program can then predict from a person’s brain image which object the individual is looking at. A form of mind reading you might think, but John is quick to point out that the more complicated the images become, the more subtle the differences are in the brain images. Also, these differences will vary across individuals as well, so we are far from being able to read another person’s mind. At the moment we can tell that a person is looking at the same picture of an orange that has previously been presented to them.

More interestingly, when the database is built from brain images made during a decision-making task, the program can predict which decision a person will make based on brain activity, before the individual is actually conscious of making the decision—our pattern of brain activity gives away the decision, before we know it ourselves!

Frank Tong is asking similar questions with his research. He wants to know when people are looking at something, what part of the image are they really focusing on? By recording images from human brains when their attention is focused on different orientations (for example: lines), he can use brain scans in the individual’s library to predict the part of the image that person is focusing on in a complex scene. Also what is striking is that, from these brain scans, he can tell about an object that the person is imagining, completely independently of any actual visual stimulus. This is one step closer to reading people’s thoughts rather than just reading out a response to the presentation of an image.

These findings are still mainly confined to laboratory research, shedding light on the way the brain responds to stimuli and processes information. However, Gladstone was keen to highlight how these tools could, and probably will be applied in the everyday world, from job recruitment to courts of law.

Some of the research presented is already dramatically affecting peoples’ lives, providing the basis for some undeniably useful applications. Donaghue and colleagues have developed technology that enables people who are paralyzed through stroke or spinal cord injuries to move prosthetic limbs, or even a wheelchair, via an electrode that reads out the spiking of neurons and translates this information into movement. These studies are in early stages: although only four people were analysed, he seems confident that this will develop into movement of real limbs via implantation of tiny electrodes and wires. The age of the bionic man is upon us. Are we ready for it?

Paul Root Wolpe doesn’t think we are. He says we need to be thinking about how we want this technology to be used in society and how the law should be changed accordingly. Do we own our own thoughts? Will the police have thought warrants? How much can we rely on these mind reading machines? Will people have to testify through a computer? Will underlying bigotry be exposed, maybe bigotry that we ourselves are not even aware of?

It’s hard not to default to Orwellian clichés at this point. Wolpe’s take-home message is clear: although we’re not there yet, technology is progressing fast and we need to be vigilant as a society about where we want to set the boundaries and who gets to set them.



Be Kind, Read This Article
Anna Magracheva

Humans aren’t the only animals to exhibit cooperation, so how are we different from other animals? On June 12, as part of the second World Science Festival, Alan Alda moderated a discussion called “What it Means to be Human: The Enigma of Altruism” at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York university.
The panelists included Rob Boyd, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles; Sarah Hardy, anthropologist and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Davis; Dominic Johnson, who combines degrees in evolutionary biology and political science to study the role evolution plays in human behavior; Xavier Le Pichon, Professor and Chair of the Department of Geophysics at the College de France in Aix en Provence; and Edward O. Wilson, noted sociobiologist and Pulitzer Prize winner. The panel opened by defining altruism.

To define what makes us human and determine what made us that way, we have to start by finding a working definition of altruism. The panel agreed that altruism is not exactly the same as cooperation, since with cooperation both parties benefit. E.O. Wilson pointed out that the question of altruism in humans is more complicated than in animals because of the role genetics plays. There must be a point where altruism evolved.

The first social insects appeared during the Jurassic Period, and once creatures with a forebrain appeared, evolution of social creatures really took off. The research of our own Rockefeller University professor Donald Pfaff is an example. Also, it seems that some degree of altruism is innate, as Alda illustrated with a video where kids watched adults struggle to pick up something out of reach. The kids, not yet able to talk, would spontaneously walk over and pick the item up for the adult. Monkeys exhibited the same behavior, as well as cooperation when it was necessary for both monkeys in a cage to pull together on a rope to get a treat. Evidence of human altruism reaches back as far as 40,000-70,000 years. A skeleton of a blind, crippled man was found buried in Iraq dating back to that period. Because the man was in his 40s it meant that the society took care of him when he was alive, as well as giving him a proper burial.

The panel still wanted a boom moment, a point in time to which you could pinpoint the beginning of altruism. The “boom” moment that was introduced was in insect evolution. Out of many radiating lines of evolution one had a mutation that led to a nest that was better, and as a result the young did not leave the nest, meaning the mother didn’t have to rebuild the nest later. The insects pool resources and remain in one area. Now they are collaterally related, and exist as a group. The selective pressure of the group overcomes selfish tendencies. But leave it to E.O. Wilson to come up with an example from the insect world.
An explanation of the development of altruism has to reconcile individual benefits versus benefits to the group. It takes the development of empathy, cooperation, and self-monitoring. There’s no doubt that altruism is a complex trait, which is why it is so rare, even among those that have already developed it.



Science, Faith, and Religion
Leah Kelly

“We don’t think enough about God to talk about him” spouted Lawrence Krauss. A slightly more diplomatic take perhaps than the ever-controversial Jim Watson proclaimed at the opening gala for the World Science Festival: “There is no reason to believe in God.”

So why have this panel? Why have a discussion about God at a science festival? A cynical view might be that this is America and certain sponsors needed to be pleased. “We may as well have a panel on science and pornography,” Krauss continued. This joke and metaphor was revisited throughout the discussion by all panel members. The fact is, it is a common and perpetuated view that science and religion need to be pitted against each other. By bringing a scientific believer, a Jesuit Ph.D., an atheist philosopher, and an agnostic scientist together, the goal for this panel discussion was to demonstrate that science and religion can exist in harmony side by side. Even if this was not the original intention of the debate, or even if the debate had an intention, it’s the conclusion that emerged. Believer or non-believer, we are all just looking for answers and I think the debate was successful in highlighting that.

The panel consisted of the Catholic cell biologist: Kenneth R. Miller, Professor of Biology, Royce Family Professor for Teaching Excellence at Brown University; the Jesuit cosmologist Brother Guy Consolmagno earned undergraduate and masters degrees from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona, he was a researcher at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught physics at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, before entering the Jesuits in 1989; the atheist philosopher Colin McGinn, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, his research interests include the philosophy of the mind (particularly consciousness, intentionality, and imagination), as well as ethics, and philosophical logic; the non-believing scientist Lawrence Krauss, Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University.

The debate was hosted by journalist Bill Blakemore who has been with ABC News since 1970, and has been ABC’s Vatican correspondent throughout the papacy of Pope John Paul II, and was ABC’s Rome Bureau Chief for six years.

The panelists were very self aware that they were very white, and very male, engaged in clever banter with an openness and a begrudging acceptance of each other’s views. It was a rhetoric of language and metaphor, with talk of Popper, irrationality, evolution, and Santa Claus, but they also knew it was probably futile to expect to change anyone’s opinion on personal faith or lack of it dramatically.

I think it was apparent to the audience that if everyone of faith were as intelligent and well-educated as the panelists, then none of the negative extreme behavior associated with religion would exist. The point everyone agreed on was that education was key. Miller said “I believe in God because evolution is right.” I left with a positive feeling that people could believe what they wanted without imposing on the progression of science and vice versa.

Miller summed it up: “Science is understanding seeking truth, and Faith is truth seeking understanding.” Both science and faith are about asking questions. But the real question was—where was Richard Dawkins? Maybe he will be on the 2010 panel on science and pornography.



Free Willing Along
Anna Magracheva

Moderator Sir Paul Nurse, who needs no introduction, started off questioning if his presence as the moderator was an exercise of free will. “Yours to Decide, Fate, Free Will, Neither or Both?” was held June 13, at the 92nd Street Y. The panel began by defining free will. Patrick Haggard, a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London defined it as the ability to respond when it is not obvious what the response is, something entirely different from reflexes. Alfred Mele, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University describes it as being a rational decision, made without coercion, and executed without pressure, while it is possible that another decision could have been made. The third panelist, Daniel M. Wegner, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, jokingly pointed out that the panelists had all sat down and crossed their legs in the same fashion, therefore defining free will as that which seems to be lacking on stage.

If the world is deterministic and you can use information you have to accurately predict what will happen next, then free will can’t exist. If we look at the world through quantum mechanics, which says that the world is probabilistic, we can have free will. However, does randomness lead to free will? If you think of quantum mechanics as a roulette wheel in the brain, then making a decision by spinning the roulette wheel would be random, but would not equal free will. The panelists’ definition of free will really equated more to complexity of a decision than to what many people define as free will, a completely independent decision.
When it comes to moral responsibility and free will there is a lot to explore, and the panel was only able to skim the surface. We worry that morality will go away if we define brain workings like those of a machine, since philosophers say free will is required for moral responsibility. Will we have to adjust the law to accommodate genetic and biochemical explanations of the mind? Roman law required mens rea, or a “guilty mind.” But does it exist in an individual like Phineas Gage, whose personality changed completely after a metal rod destroyed his frontal lobe, or in someone who claims that they aren’t responsible for the crime they committed because they were born homozygous for the U allele of the tryptophan hydroxylase gene? There is a need for neuroethics to be developed to deal with these issues.

It is important to differentiate between free will in thoughts versus actions. While chaos and random events lead to actions, free will can’t be simply about acting randomly. It has to be a self controlled action. In closing out the discussion, Paul Nurse asked the three panelists point blank if there is free will or not. Alfred Mele related the question of free will to the question of what level of control is needed to be held accountable for an action. Patrick Haggard said that the interesting topic of research is into how the brain handles situations where there is not an obvious answer. Daniel Wegner pointed out that the real question when it comes to free will isn’t whether we have it or not, but what gives rise to the feeling of free will?