Ingenious Monkey - 20 two 5

Feynman: No Ordinary Genius

2012-01-21T15:52:00.002-06:00

hmmm...

Bayesians vs Frequentists: A Summary

2012-01-18T12:13:00.001-06:00

I really enjoyed this talk by Sharon McGrayne. Besides learning a lot about the history of Bayesian statistics, I also learned a valuable lesson about the dress code at Google (but you have to watch this all the way to the Q&A, to see what it may be).

The "New" Origami

2011-04-08T00:57:00.001-05:00

Robert Lang talks principles of Origami. The point that simple structure and a few governing laws give rise to basically endless complexity never seizes to amaze...

Live Eagle Cam

2011-04-06T17:56:00.002-05:00

Maybe a little late for this, but it's brilliant...

Video streaming by Ustream

http://blog.nwf.org/wildlifepromise/2011/04/eagle-cam-iowa-bald-eagle-eggs-hatching-live/

Choice and 60 Anagram Puzzles

2011-03-17T00:51:00.000-05:00

Sheena Lyengar delivers her research results wonderfully, as she takes a look at different cultural models of "choice" and how these different choice paradigms influence satisfaction.

The President on FOX

2011-02-07T02:38:00.000-06:00

President Obama is a class act. This is how you remain cool and composed while facing the personified annoyance that is Bill O'Reilly. Although the interview maybe doesn't offer a lot of substantive information, the psychological dynamic of this interaction is fascinating. I will watch it multiple times.

Jake's Ukulele Gently Weeps

2011-01-30T10:40:00.000-06:00

I was really impressed when I watched a recent TED video of Jake Shimabukuru performing Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody on his tiny ukulele. Then I went to google some of his other work, and came across the following rendering of George Harrsion's "While my guitar gently weeps"; one of my favorite Beatles songs. Enjoy, and be sure to check out Jake's TED performance also.

Words, words, words

2011-01-23T10:50:00.000-06:00

The video below accompanied WNYC Radiolab's episode on "words". The radio show was brilliant as always. The video is clever and beautiful...with all that these two words imply.

Oxytocin Art

2011-01-05T11:07:00.000-06:00

I just came across London-based artist Cordelia Cembrowicz webpage, and just love her drawings. Especially, the drawing that integrate humans into molecule structures for various neuropeptides are pretty much fantastic. Below are two examples, and the link to her online portfolio.
While I'm at it, you might also want to check out my latest PsychologyToday post about the "Other Side of Oxytocin".

Happy New Year...

2011-01-01T10:46:00.000-06:00

...why not start it with a cool Sir Kenneth Robinson presentation on education, and how the "one-size-fits-all" approach chokes creativity.

What's the Significance of P(SI)?

2010-10-28T01:38:00.002-05:00

Typically, I wouldn't send you through multiple links via RB.org, but somehow I cannot register my psychologytoday blog at researchblogging.org (any tech guys know why this is?). Still, I believe that this topic will interest some of you, which is why I'm linking it this way...
What's it all about? Another (this time serious) attempt at making sense of Bems upcoming PSI phenomena paper. Please leave comments. Especially the statistically minded...

Main Reference: Bem, Daryl (2010). Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect Journal of Personality and Social Psychology : 10.1037/a0021524

PSI Evidence of Science

2010-10-22T08:15:00.000-05:00

After/Before (what does it matter) reading this upcoming JPSP paper on supposed evidence of psi phenomena, I decided to invite renowned psychic "Calvin the Psychic" to guest blogger for me at Psychology Today.

Here is his post + a video to get you ready.

Look there, it's the Simpsons...and Banksy!

2010-10-11T09:21:00.001-05:00

British street artists/genius Banksy has a new video going viral across the internet. It's a morbid take on the intro to the popular cartoon show the Simpsons.
The excellent video takes Bartmania into a Chinese sweatshop then ends with the final cruelty that is drawing your attention to one horrible fact: The Simpsons (like so many other good TV shows) actually air on the FOX Broadcasting Network. Very distasteful indeed...

Holy Sensory Illusion, Batman

2010-09-29T09:44:00.001-05:00

I have a post about the McGurk Illusion up at PsychologyToday. Here is a video that describes the effect, but you should still click here to read the article.

And by the way - to the nerds: I realize that Batman, technically, does not possess super-human powers. But isn't that why the analogy works? ;-)

Jane Goodall's Journey

2010-09-07T15:12:00.002-05:00

Just came back from watching "Jane's Journey"; a new documentary on the fascinating life and humanitarian work of Jane Goodall. Dr. Goodall is of course famous for her work with chimpanzees, and I've always thought of her as an environmentalist. This movie, however, opened my eyes to how much broader Dr. Goodall's mission is. Besides drawing attention to the various great projects that Mrs. Goodall has initiated and developed over the years, the movie also illustrates the enthusiasm, tirelessness, care and love with which she seems to go about her work. Beautiful and inspiring.
Here's a trailer for the movie. No need to say that I highly recommend it:

Here's another nice chimpanzee movie :-)

Monkeys Find Hidden Camera

Rube Goldberg Machine in OkGo video

2010-09-01T16:15:00.001-05:00

This is a really cool music video with an elaborately designed Rube Goldberg machine. Very WOW! :-) There is more information on the creation of the video here.

The Emotional Timeline of 9/11

2010-08-31T15:35:00.002-05:00

I have a new blog post at Psychology Today. In it I look at a recent study which investigates a large wikileaks data set of pager intercepts from the 24 hour period around the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington DC.

The main conclusions of the short research report are aptly demonstrated in the graph featured below. You can read the article here.

Do you want the hot body, or the pretty face?

2010-08-25T03:48:00.002-05:00

As you've probably noticed, I've not been able to post a lot these days. I have, however, still posted here and there at Psychology Today, and just thought maybe I should at least link to those posts every now and then.

One post I published a couple of days back looks at an interesting experiment on how people assess potential romantic partners. The question the researchers ask is as follows: Suppose you were to assess a romantic prospect, but you could glean information from only one of two sources. Either by looking at the person's face, or by looking at the person's body. You can't do both. What would you do?

You can read the full article at the Pt.com website (here).

Random Monkey 10/08/09

2010-08-09T07:32:00.001-05:00

Long time no see! And speaking of seeing: Most of you know the concepts of (in)attention blindness, or change blindness. For those interested in decision theory "Choice Blindness" may be even more interesting. Enjoy the video:

Do Words Have a Shape?

2010-07-07T10:16:00.004-05:00

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet"

The above well-known musings of Shakespear's Juliet suggest that the names we ascribe to objects entail an element of arbitrariness. They imply that the name given to an object is a mere matter of convention. A name - Juliet explains - does not change any of an object's qualities, nor - she might philosophize - does a name possess any real connection to an object's inherent properties.

A rose is a rose because we agree to call it so, and if we agreed to call it by any other name, all that makes a rose will continue; albeit under a different name.

But is this really so? Or is there a deeper connection between name and entity; a deeper connection between what we label an object and our experience of this object?

One particular scientific viewpoint, likely to support a less Shakespearean view of the relation between labels and their referents, comes by the name of sound-symbolism. According to research in sound-symbolism there exists a naturally biased mode in which the human brain links phonological properties of names with perceptual properties of their referents. Most likely, this bias corresponds to the shape of the lips as we utter certain sounds.

For example, 2.5-year-old children have been shown to prefer nonsense words such as "maluma" or "bouba" to describe round-shaped objects and nonsense words such as "takete" or "kiki" for point words. That is, children prefer round vowels when describing round objects, and jagged vowels when describing pointy objects.

Besides this connection to shapes, research has also suggested a connection between the size of objects and the preferred sounds used in describing these objects: When given the choice between the sounds "mil" and "mal", most people will choose "mal" as the label for the larger object. A plausible explanation is that the "a" sound in "mal" is stretched more than the brief "i" in "mil".

However, the connection between sounds and meaning runs even deeper still: Not only do cross-linguistic studies show learners of a foreign language to be surprisingly adept at generalizing label-object mappings from their mother tongue to foreign languages, but studies also find an uncanny ability of experimental participants to guess the meaning of foreign words based on sound. Indeed, this finding has has lead some researchers - such as Vanja Kovic from the University of Noci Sad in Serbia - to consider the hypothesis that

"speech itself [may] have originated from imitative connections between sounds and meaning and that these connections [may be] universal."

Kovic and two colleagues from the University of Oxford in England recently published a paper in the journal Cognition, in which they report on behavioral research and analysis from brain activity recordings that further examines the sound-symbolist hypothesis.
Their study revolves around the question of how well participants would learn different labels for different schematic drawing, as those depicted below:

As you can see the left drawing is characterized by a larger number of round elements, while the drawing to the right is dominated by sharper - more pointy - elements.

In terms of the mentioned idea of sound-symbolism, one might therefore expect participants to be more adept at associating the name "mot" to the drawing on the left, than they would be at associating to it the name "riff". The other way around, "riff" should go better with the drawing on the right.

To see whether this is indeed the case, the experiment started with a training session, in which participants simply learned to associate either of the two nonsense words ("riff" & "mot" )with the kind of drawings shown above. Half of the subjects were trained to match congruently (round drawings = "mot") while the other half was trained on incongruent matches (round-drawing = "riff").

The training phase showed no significant differences in how long it took participants to learn these associations. However in the next phase of the experiment - a phase that might be viewed as an assessment of how well participants learned these associations - a clear pattern emerged: In this subsequent phase participants were now shown several drawings-plus-name pairs, and asked to identify whether what they were being shown matched what they had learned. I.e. a participant who had been trained in the congruent matching should rate a picture of the left drawing together with the label "mot" as correct, while a participant trained in the incongruent paradigm, would rate this same combination as incorrect.

Each participant was shown 160 parings with an equal number of the four possible combinations between drawing and name-label, and the researchers then measured the time it took each participant to identify different combinations as either "correct" or "incorrect". The results showed a clear pattern:

"Participants who had learned to categorize round featured objects as "mots" were significantly faster to respond "match" than the participants who had learned that the round-featured objects were labeled as "riff" [...] Thus participants were faster to accept a correct label-object mapping that was sound-symbolic than one that was not sound-symbolic.

[...] participants were slower to reject the label "mot" for the round-featured objects and "riff" for the pointy objects. [...] Thus, participants were slower to reject an incorrect label-object mapping that was sound symbolic than one that was not sound symbolic.
[...] Together, the match and mismatch results suggest that independent of the learned object label mappings, participants had a bias towards associating objects with sound-symbolically congruent labels."

Adding their brain data (ERP data) to the behavioral findings, the researchers conclude that participants showed earlier brain responses to word-object pairs that were in line with the sound-symbolism link; suggesting that there is truly a predisposition for associating certain sounds with certain object features.

These impressive findings aside, there do however remain unanswered questions and alternative explanations. For example, it is possible - since this study involved adults - that these inferred the spelling of the labels: The "o" in mot does not only sound round, but it is actually written as a circle. Who is to say that it is not the link between object property and the label's orthographic representation as a circle that is driving the effect?

Well, one thing that speaks against this alternative explanation, is the fact that similar studies with pre-literate children show comparable results, but repeating this study with subjects who do not possess orthographic knowledge of English, or repeating it with sounds that do not possess a similar orthographic similarity, might be better suited to rule out this alternative explanation.

Also , as Kovic and her colleagues point out

"it is also possible that the reported sound-symbolism effect reflects language-specific statistical tendencies, given that speakers of a particular language (in this case English) extract the sound-meaning mappings on the basis of the statistical regularities in the vocabulary. This possibility would beg the question whether sound-symbolism emerges from the statistical properties of (arbitrary) sound-meaning mappings in a language, or whether sound-symbolic sound-meaning mappings in a language develop because sound-symbolism is a factor in language evolution. Cross- linguistic comparisons can serve to answer this question"

Altogether, I find this line of research extremely intriguing; from a philosophical as well as a practical perspective. This being the case, I have recently come across some very cool studies on language and how the brain responds to the words we use, some of which I feel very compelled to link to at this point:

First off, there is a recent PNAS study on sign language and spatial cognition. You can find a good report of this study at Ed Yong's Not Exactly Rocket Science blog. Also Psychology Today recently welcomed a new blogger in Guy Deutscher who takes an interesting view on language at his blog Through the Language Glass.
Another interesting link comes from the Games with Words blog, which discusses the idea of language universals.
And finally, a current paper in the journal Cognition answers the long-discussed question of why a purple giraffe is faster than a purple elephant: Apparently phonology affects determiner selection ("a" vs an") in the English language.

All this being said, I will now concentrate on the words and sounds that will label today: Germany's fans shouting "Gooooaaaaal" ...

Main Reference: Kovic, V., Plunkett, K., & Westermann, G. (2010). The shape of words in the brain Cognition, 114 (1), 19-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.016

Reposted from Psychology Today

Green Monkey 09/06/10

2010-06-09T11:17:00.005-05:00

My attention span is seldom longer than 3 minutes, but I am glad I watched this one to the end...

For a "review" of the movie and some additional info, here's an entry at Slate magazine.

Appendix to Mate Choice Copying in Humans - Repeated-Measures ANOVA

2010-06-08T11:13:00.002-05:00

72 photographs, 36 men and 36 women, constitute the base element of Yorzinski and Platt’s photo data base for the mate choice copying experiment described here. However, these individual pictures are copied and combined in such a way that each photographed person appears on 4 separate pictures in the final data base. One picture shows the person on their own (Single Picture, SP) and the other’s show the person with an opposite-sex partner (note the hyphen!) (Couples Picture, CP). Couple’s pictures are additionally broken down according to the rated attractiveness of the opposite-sex partner into very attractive (VA), moderately attractive (MA), and less attractive (LA). The final photo-database therefore consists of 36x3=108 pictures.
Let’s look at only the attractiveness ratings that women assign to men in the different conditions: Whether a particular model's picture appears as either a SP or CP can be considered our treatment. Whether the CP treatment is LA, MA or VA is considered a condition. You are interested in the general difference between the mean ratings for SP and the CP treatment. Should you still use a simple ANOVA?
The thing to notice here is of course that the ratings we receive over the aggregate couples pictures may no longer be viewed independent of each other: Since each model has a LA, a MA and a VA picture, each model will appear exactly three times in the aggregate couples pictures. This gives us three ratings per person for this group. Assuming that the unobserved factors that enter your rating of a particular photograph have at least partially something to do with the intrinsic properties of the person being shown, the error for these three ratings will be correlated with each other. This violates one of our main assumptions for a simple ANOVA, namely the assumption of equal variances.

Repeated-Measures ANOVA is used in the mate choice copying paper, because it allows the researchers to drop the equal variance assumption and replace it with a Sphericity assumption; a fancy word for saying that the variance of difference scores need to be equal for any two conditions in our data. For example, if you take the difference between the VA and MA condition, and compared it to the difference between the MA and LA condition you should be able to expect equal variance in both difference sets. (Note that Sphericity is really only relevant for one-way ANOVAS; i.e. when we’re interested in only one outcome variable such as the attractiveness rating. Sphericity can also be controlled for, and you can test for Sphericity using e.g. a Mauchly Sphericity Test).

The null hypothesis in a repeated-measures ANOVA is simply one of no differences between population means, and it can be assessed with common test-statistics. To compare the variance in your two groups you may use F-ratios and interpret them the way you are used to in general ANOVA designs.

A good starting point for performing repeated-measures ANOVA in R can be found here.

Mate-Choice Copying in Humans

2010-06-08T11:00:00.006-05:00

One Short Announcement: Partly because I’ve been a little lazy of late, but also because my readership has changed quite a bit since starting my blog at Psychology Today, I have found myself a little negligent on the methods sections of my recent blog posts. I am uncomfortable with this, which is why I’m introducing a new format to my posts. Starting with this one.

Recognizing that the larger share of my audience is more interested in the general story of a research paper than any of its scientific details, I want to try splitting my posts into two sections. One section will be a fun piece like the one below, the other will be (an even more fun) appendix that discusses one particular methodological aspect of the particular research paper for that post. For this post, I look at the basics of Repeated Measures ANOVA that Yorzinski and Platt use on their mate-choice copying data. The Appendix can be found here.

Mate-Choice Copying in Humans:

Guppies are small fish with brains of only a few millimeters in width, and so one wouldn't expect them to make complex mating decisions: Take for example the typical female Guppy who has to choose between two males; one a little drab, the other brightly colored. For the typical female this situation presents a simple - practically hard-wired - call, and she will generally choose the brightly colored male. This is simply how things work in the Guppies' underwater world. (Note: Fish are much smarter than we usually give them credit for, so I'm cringing a little at my own use of the term "hard-wired" here...don't take it too literal).

Things do change sometimes in Guppy-world, however. For example, if another female enters the picture and, for some unspecified reason, this other female seems to favor the drab male.
When this happens, our typical Guppy female will often change her mate preference based on the simple observation that another female is actually mating with the previously undesired male. Seeing that another female wants this particular male seems to make him more attractive. A phenomenon called mate-choice copying, which takes place not only with Guppies:

A number of studies on human mate selection suggest that we might also engage in our fair share of mate-choice copying when faced with our version of having to choose between the brightly colored vs. the sadly drab potential mate. However, until recently only relatively little was known about the mechanisms that guide this type of mate-copying behavior. Surprising, given the potentially quite fascinating influence this type of behavior may possess for the evolution of sexually selected traits in populations.

An interesting study, trying to develop a better understanding of what cognitive processes may be driving mate-choice copying is one by Jessica Yorzinski and Michael Platt that was recently published in the academic journal PLoS ONE.
For their study Yorzinski and Platt invited thirty men and thirty women to rate pictures of potential mates. The pictures that each participant was given to rate were specifically photographed for this study, and they typically showed either a single man or woman, or a man and women together.

In the case that a man and women were shown together, the researchers played around with Photoshop a little, so that each male and each female model would appear on exactly three different "couples-pictures" in the study's photo-database. On one of these couples-pictures, the model was matched with a highly attractive person, on another the match was a moderately attractive person, and on the third matching was performed with a less attractive person.

Yorzinski and Platt now wanted to see whether attractiveness ratings, and even the invited rater's reported willingness to engage in a romantic relationship with the photographed models, would be influenced by whether pictures showed models on their own, or together with another person (since the study included all reported heterosexuals, couples pictures always included two opposite sex models).

Additionally, Platt and Yorzinski used a so-called eye tracker to collect data on where participating raters directed their gaze while viewing the pictures. In the case of female raters, they wanted to know whether female raters - when making a decision regarding a male model in a couple's picture-, would spend significant time viewing the female model that appeared in the picture, but more importantly, whether the presence of another female in the picture increased the attention given to the image of the male model. For men, the analog questions were of interest.
The graph below demonstrates one of Platt and Yorzinski's main findings: When participants of either sex rated the attractiveness of a potential mate in a "couples-photo", how attractive they perceived the potential mate to be increased with the attractiveness of his or her fellow-model in the photograph. The same person, when shown together with a very attractive person looked more desirable than when shown alone. However, when shown with a less attractive person the potential mate appeared to loose desirability.

The eye-tracking data also showed interesting results. For one, female spent more time looking at a man when he was shown next to a very attractive woman. Men did not show this type of bias to a statistically significant degree. However, Yorzinski and Platt also found that

"men and women differed in their gaze patterns while they evaluated the same-sex partners. The amount of time spent looking at partners influenced the women's mating decisions but the number of times looking back and forth between the partner and mate affected the men's mating decisions."

As Yorzinski and Platt write

"We found that proxy mating decisions made by people were strongly influenced by the attractiveness of partners depicted with potential mates. Specifically, men and women were more likely to express interest in a long-term relationship with a potential mate when that mate was paired with an attractive partner [...] We found that men and women differed slightly in their mate-choice copying behavior. Women showed an overall greater reliance on the decisions of same-sex partners than did men, although both were influenced by partner attractiveness. This pattern was especially prominent when the attractiveness of the same-sex partner was low: women were less interested in engaging in a long-term relationship with the mate while men's interest in the mate was not different from their initial evaluations. Because females are generally more selective in their choice of mates compared to men (due to differential parental investment) they may be more skeptical of mates paired with unattractive partners while males may have a high baseline interest in all potential mates."

Regarding their eye-tracking data and the observed gaze pattern differences, Yorzinski and Platt offer interesting possible explanations:

"[...] gaze differences could reflect differences between men and women in processing visual social information. Because men can process information about attractiveness faster than women, they may be able to gather information about same-sex partners with brief gaze shifts. Alternatively, shifting gaze could reflect men's vigilance, which may vary with the presence of a partner and his attractiveness, and thus index intrasexual competition."

...

On a closing note, I really hope that the guys from OKcupid read this and then take a look at what their admirable dataset says. Then again, I doubt that many people put pictures up onto online dating sites that show them with their attractive opposite-sex friends...

Note also that the original study includes a number of controls not mentioned here. It also goes into further detail regarding the interaction effects between attractiveness of the associate in the couples-pictures and reported willingness to enter into a relationship. The paper is available at PLoS One, and linked to below.

Main Reference:

Yorzinski JL, & Platt ML (2010). Same-sex gaze attraction influences mate-choice copying in humans. PloS one, 5 (2) PMID: 20161739

A Coffee Drinkers Nightmare: Caffeine Loses It's Kick

2010-06-05T23:11:00.003-05:00

Caffeine is a ~~hell of a~~ popular drug. Coffee, tea, various sodas, chocolate covered coffee beans, everybody loves caffeine. Often I will enjoy a cup of coffee merely for the taste sensation of it, but more often than not my reason for drinking coffee is that I'm trying to pick myself up. (I seriously started drinking coffee in grad school, only because I was getting print stains on my forehead from falling asleep over my books so much).

For most people coffee consumption (especially your morning cup of coffee) is motivated by the belief that coffee increases alertness and reverses fatigue.

But the scientific truth is that there may be no true alertness benefit from coffee. Instead, the kick that frequent coffee drinkers get out of their caffeine drink may be little more than relief from their acute caffeine withdrawal (do you ever have those "need-caffeine-headaches"?). Add to this the fact that caffeine has undesirable effects such as increased anxiety and increased blood pressure, and suddenly I'm really annoyed that there is research on this: Damn you scientists! I like coffee. Leave it alone!

Of course nobody really listens to me, so a group of researchers from the University of Bristol is now about to publish a paper in the journal Neuropharmacology that takes a look at the (non-existent) net alertness benefits of caffeine intake:

By comparing alertness, anxiety and headache syndromes for a stratified sample of caffeine users, and additionally investigating genetic variation in caffeine consumption and caffeine effects, the researchers show that indeed there seems to be little to no net alertness benefits from your morning dose of caffeine.

This is of course not to say that caffeine is not a stimulant. It is. But, as it appears, people quickly build tolerance to the inherent stimulating effect of caffeine, after which it no longer increases alertness. Once this happens, what really keeps frequent coffee drinkers coming back for their fix is avoidance of the negative effects of withdrawal. In other words, instead of the nice push from your early coffee drinking days, all you are left with after you have become tolerant, is the hope of getting rid of that lousy feeling that you get when you haven't had your coffee yet. Coffee now merely gets you back to normal.

On the brighter side, tolerance also seems to build for the (anyway modest) anxiety increasing effects of caffeine, so it's not all bad.

Still, this is sad news to me, and as I now make my way to my local coffee ~~dealer~~ shop I might consider practicing these words: "I am Daniel, and I am an addict".

Main Reference:

Rogers PJ, Hohoff C, Heatherley SV, Mullings EL, Maxfield PJ, Evershed RP, Deckert J, & Nutt DJ (2010). Association of the Anxiogenic and Alerting Effects of Caffeine with ADORA2A and ADORA1 Polymorphisms and Habitual Level of Caffeine Consumption. Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology PMID: 20520601

BTW: If you're interested in genetics there is a lot of interesting caffeine related information in this forthcoming Neuropharmacology paper, but I'm not the one who is going to review it for you. Therefore from the abstract:

“Results showed greater susceptibility to caffeine-induced anxiety, but not lower habitual caffeine intake (indeed coffee intake was higher), in the rs5751876 TT genotype group, and a reduced anxiety response in [medium/high users (MH)] MH vs [non/low users (NL)] NL participants irrespective of genotype. Apart from the almost completely linked ADORA2A SNP rs3761422, no other of eight ADORA2A and seven ADORA1 SNPs studied were found to be clearly associated with effects of caffeine on anxiety, alertness, or headache. Placebo administration in MH participants decreased alertness and increased headache. Caffeine did not increase alertness in NL participants. With frequent consumption, substantial tolerance develops to the anxiogenic effect of caffeine, even in genetically susceptible individuals, but no net benefit for alertness is gained, as caffeine abstinence reduces alertness and consumption merely returns it to baseline.”

An Almost Book Review: Eating Animals

2010-06-02T23:02:00.003-05:00

For a while now Jonathan Safran Foer has been my favorite author. So much so, that when I email friends about how much I enjoy reading his books, the Gmail ads that customize to the content of my emails actually mistake me to be gay.

This is a problem.

It is a problem, not because of the google ads, but because of this: Jonathan Safran Foer is in his early 30s and he has written three best-selling books so far. Chances are high he will write more books over the next couple of years, and chances are even higher that each time one of his books is scheduled to appear I will be terribly nervous about the likely possibility of extreme disappointment. Think about it: If you like Thomas Mann, and you've read all his works, you might be sad that there isn't anything more forthcoming, but you don't have to fear being let down. For me, with this author, I am always running this risk!

This being the case, when the Eating Animals appeared in November 2009, you might guess that I was particularly on edge, because unlike his earlier works Everything is Illuminated or Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close, Eating Animals was going to be a piece of non-fiction.

As I wrote in a different blog post some months back, I was actually avoiding the book, because I was not convinced my favorite writer's voice would adapt to this new genre. I couldn't help myself from thinking about whether Eating Animals might turn into 300+ pages of stale moralizing about becoming vegetarian. Or it might high-jack what little time I have to read non-academic papers and force me into digesting a lecture on this 30 year-olds food philosophy.

Why - when you're such a brilliant story teller - would you write a non-fiction book, Jonathan?!

...now that about to finish reading the book, I almost laugh at these questions: Eating Animals is well-researched non-fiction, but it is still also a story. It is a story about what we eat and how it is produced. It is a story about our personal relation to food, and what it means to who we are. It is a story about a young father trying to make the best decisions for his son, and it is a story about why our food choices matter.

Eating animals is not meant to turn you vegetarian, but asks of you to take just a little time to think about the one choice you will continue to make throughout your life; namely what type of foods you will eat. In return for your time, this book offers you insightful entertainment, intelligent humor and the type of stimulating reading experience I have come to expect in Mr. Foer's work.
In summary: Although I had exceedingly high expectations, I was not let down, and I may continue to say that Jonathan Safran Foer is my favorite author. So much so that...

The book's official website can be found here, and the authors "Project Museum" is linked to here.

I've also posted a video of Mr Foer reading the first chapter of Eating Animals.

The next book on my reading list is Bonobo Handshake by fellow Ptblogger Vanessa Woods.

If you care to share what you are reading at the moment, leave a comment below or blurt it out on twitter, as it's always nice to learn more about who is actually reading this. (I know my mother used to read my earlier posts, but I think that is no longer the case ;-) )