All In The Mind

Our microbial bodies...

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-11-07T13:44:30+11:00

A team at the University of Colorado have just published a terrific, unique atlas in the journal Science.

It's a map that's very much of you.... though, not quite you.

This is the most complete map to date of the trillions of bacteria which occupy our every orifice... "from our foreheads and feet to our noses and navels". They report to have sampled from the "hair on the head, ear canals, nostrils, mouth, lower intestine, and 18 different skin sites ranging from foreheads and armpits, forearms, palms, index fingers, navels, the back of the knees and the soles of the feet".

All in the name of science.

And it seems bacteria like to live locally and parochially, with different types colonising specific parts of the body.

This week's show takes you on an audio adventure inside these bacterial archipelagos of the body with a timely replay of a feature from last year on bacteria and cognition. Cognition? Bacteria? Smart? Have I gone all kooky, spooky crystal gazing on you? No....

"Why wouldn't bacteria be as intelligent as an organism can be?", asks one of my microbiologist guests.

If you missed the show last year, hope it sparks your imagination in the way making it did for me. I took particular delight in digging into historical science texts and prose to pull out great pieces of microbial verse! The bacteroidal dance....a classic!

Here's the audio and transcript.

You can read and add to the comments posted from last year's broadcast of this feature here ...or below this post.

Meanwhile, I'm off to battle some microbes. A virus has been venturing down the corridors of the ABC office I'm in, and it decided to pay me a generous visit. Microbes are my friends, just not today. Razor blade throats don't make for good radio.

The eyes have it....

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-10-31T10:07:29+11:00

Dig deep into the function...form....and evolutionary history of any organ in our body...and there's a magical mystery tour to behold.

Why wasn't high school science this interesting? Squeezed of every last shred of surprise....

This week on All in the Mind our most spectacular sensory organ is under the lens. The EYE. The vertebrate eye of today, and the early effort of an eye 500 million years ago.

We have some help from this spectacularly gruesome looking specimen.

The Lamprey. Look at those flesh sucking FANGS.

And then there's this slimey little number.

The Hagfish is considered an aphrodisiac in South Korea. Whatever rocks your boat I guess. I can think of a zillion other aphrodisiacs I'd want to try first.

Both of these creatures are living "fossils" which vision scientist Trevor Lamb and colleagues argue reveal some secrets about our own spectacular seeing organ, despite what creationists like to say about the eye and an ethereal intelligent designer.

...tune in,there's more. Some modern tales about myopia too.

Audio, transcript and lots of refs as ever here

Enjoy your warm weekend if you're in Southern Hemisphere parts. Australian spring has sprung and is feeling distinctly summery today isn't it? Yip.

Addiction and the limits of free will

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-10-23T18:35:56+11:00

Did you hear the one about a Supreme Court judge, a philosopher and a psychiatrist...?

Well, they walked into a...

...radio studio....and...

...are my guests on All in the Mind this week in roundtable discussion, off the back of a symposium organised by Macquarie University and Melbourne University, called Addiction, Identity & Responsibility: Perspectives from Neuroscience, Social Science, Philosophy and Law (PDF of symposium)

The idea of the event was to bring different disciplines together in dialogue - science, the courts, policy, philosophy, politics, healthcare - all of which have a stake in one of the most vexing ethical realms in the brain sciences, but which rarely talk to each other.

My guests are considering some of what we know about the brain and addiction, how philosophy considers questions of agency, self control, free will and culpability, how the courts might grapple with findings in neuroscience in their rulings that involve people with addiction...and, then there's the question of whether we can really consider brains in isolation when thinking about the impact and implications of drug use. After all, we are daughters, sons, colleagues, parents, siblings, voters, legislators, workers, neighbours too....as well as brains.

The lived experience is really missing in the show, and that's for the blog I hope. Share your thoughts, and perhaps experiences - do they resonate with the issues considered by the guests?

Catch the show audio and the transcript of the show on the All in the Mind website here, or live on air (Saturdays and Mondays at 1pm on ABC Radio National, and on Radio Australia all over).

Here is a longer, rawer version of the discussion if you want to dig a little further:

Addiction_free_will_AllintheMind_ABC_pt1

Addiction_free_will_AllintheMind_pt2

Hearing voices: stories from the coalface

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-10-17T11:25:00+11:00

This week's program is a feature prepared by an ABC colleague, Tom Tilley, who reports for our youth network Triple J and their fantastic daily current affairs show, Hack.

You'll meet 25 year old Mel, whose experience of hearing voices, one persecutory voice in particular, is profoundly harrowing and debilitating, and who shares her story with overwhelming candour and rawness. You'll also meet Kat, who shares a different experience of working with the voices within.

Our hearts goes out to Mel and her family, as they navigate the possibilities for finding the most suitable support, care and approach to helping her.

Tune into the show on the All in the Mind website here, and we've posted a stack of extra resources and links there too.

As promised, here's a special video production from Tom to accompany the audio feature.

Warning: This story contains disturbing material.

A reminder that Lifeline operates a free, 24 hour counselling line in Australia. The nation-wide number is 131114.

SANE Australia also operates a helpline 1800 18 SANE (7263) for those in need of mental health advice.

We'd love to hear your thoughts and stories here on the All in the Mind blog (click on the comments link, or fill out the comments form below. Email addresses are not made public).

There've been a flurry of thoughtful responses and caring words for Mel and her family over on the Triple J site too (here and here and here).

Moving... hard...just plain hard.

Awaye! - indigenous health - what next?

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-10-12T21:56:53+11:00

Longtime radio producer (ex ABC) Tony Collins always makes impressive programs, and has recorded in Australian indigeneous communities for many years, decades in fact. He was the Top End reporter Triple J for many years, and continues to make superb radio.

He has a two parter coming up on ABC Radio National's AWAYE! program this week

The Will to Live (Part 1 of 2) - Saturday 17th 6pm and Monday 20th October 3pm

The global movement to bring about health equality within a generation led in Australia to a grass roots campaign to CloseThe Gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous life expectancy. The campaign achieved bi-partisan support from Parliament and a 1.6 billion dollar commitment from the Rudd government. The question that remains is how to do it. In this week's program, the first of a two-part series on Indigenous health, Tony Collins talks to a range of health workers and academics who are looking for the answer.

I'm looking forward to tuning in....

P.S AWAYE! means 'listen up' in the Arrernte language of central Australia.

You are Not Your Brain Scan! - video of public lecture

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-10-12T10:31:00+11:00

In July I gave a public lecture at the 2009 Adelaide Festival of Ideas titled "You Are Not Your Brain Scan!".

The folk at ABC Fora and Slow TV filmed a range of sessions at the fest.

The lecture is here on the Slow TV website.

P.S Always slightly cringeworthy seeing oneself 'um and er' on video of course ...it's been a while since I reported with ABC TV's Quantum program (now called Catalyst). Radio is so much nicer that way! Actually, thinking about Thomas Metzinger's interview on the show this week, I think there's something distinctly disconcerting about seeing oneself as the rest of the world sees you, but as you yourself rarely do. How often do we see ourselves gesticulating or speaking, or from angles other than front on in the bathroom mirror? It's like looking at stranger speaking...some other "Self model" (as Thomas puts it) altogether! Kooky.

You are NOT a Self! Thomas Metzinger...

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-10-09T19:00:00+11:00

The Self.

What is it?

Discuss.

This week, I've got a world leading philosopher of the mind on the show, Thomas Metzinger, who visited our shores for the Australasian Society of Cognitive Science conference at Macquarie University.

His new book is The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind, and the Myth of the Self, and we're dissecting the nature of feeling "Selfy" on the show. Selfy? Tune in for more.

The show is here (full audio by Saturday, transcript by Wednesday, lots of links already there).

And here are two extra titbits just for the blog (click on them and they will play). A little bit of cross over with the first excerpt, but not much.

Thomas_Metzinger_on_new_consciousness_ethics_ABC_RN (where Thomas elaborates on his call for a new 'ethics of conciousness', in light of rapidly advancing understanding and applications related to the brain).

Thomas_Metzinger_on_anarchic_hand_syndrome_ABC_RN (where Thomas discusses a limb acting as if it has a 'mind of its own', and the nature of free will).

Oh, just to explain (because we don't in the show) "the Ego Tunnel" is Metzinger's metaphor for our conscious experience.

"Conscious experience is like a tunnel; extremely selective, what we see, hear, feel, smell is only a small fraction of what exists out there", he says. "The ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality".

"..The brain constantly creates the experience that I am present in the world outside my brain..." and "...ultimately our Ego is an activation pattern in your central nervous system".

But wait, there's more. Lend your ears to the show and enjoy the existential adventure.

Image: Picasso's 'The Acrobat'

Mothers...others...and more still.

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-10-02T20:43:13+10:00

Primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is my guest on All in the Mind this week, who's just been in Australia for the special Charles Darwin Symposium at Charles Darwin University...in, you guessed it...Darwin. Perfect place to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday wouldn't you agree?

We're catching up on her new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolution of Mutual Understanding, which picks up from her last, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species.

It's timely, with exciting research just reported in Science today on an extraordinary stash of 4.4 million year old fossils in Ethiopia of 'Ardi' - Ardipithecus Ramidus - a hominid which sheds new light on our own ever perplexing ancestral lineage. I recorded the interview with Professor Hrdy before news of the Science papers was available to me, but the connections are obvious in our conversation. Check out Discover Magazine's Carl Zimmer's take on the Ardipithecus findings. And Jamie Shreeve in National Geographic magazine writes:

"The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes — would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior— long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors — is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings".

Hrdy's rigorous field research over 30 years has had an immense influence on evolutionary biology, challenging many assumptions we've had about sex, reproductive strategies and the evolution of human nature...and most especially of maternal nature (she's studied infanticide, monogamy and much else in non-human primates, with often confronting conclusions).

Her career kicked off in the heady and controversial era when sociobiology really captured the popular imagination, spearheaded by Harvard biologists Robert Trivers and E.O Wilson, who alongwith, Irven DeVore, were her PhD dissertation supervisors. She's been in the thick of it ever since!

Read more about her legacy here, and here.

You might also like to check out Sarah Hrdy's Tanner Lectures from 2001, titled The Past, Present and Future of the Human Family.

Download the show or read the transcript on the All in the Mind website here.

For the sake of completion, I've also uploaded the podcast of the full show here to the blog.

Aim_03102009

And, as promised, audio EXTRAS just for the blog that aren't in the show include:

Sarah_Blaffer_Hrdy_Alllinthemind_Extra_Prt_1 (empathy, mirror neurons, cooperative breeding came before big brains...and why us, but not other apes?)

Sarah_Blaffer_Hrdy_Alllinthemind_Extra_Prt_2 (what happens if empathy is evolved out of us in future generations?)

Enjoy.

NB: I have rendered, rendered and rerendered these audio clips and still the last words are clipped! Grrrr to gremlins. Last words in the first clip are: "older female kin could play, in provisioning offspring, and those that did were more likely to survive". Last words in the second clip are: "just so much sound and fury and undulations over nothing, unless the children survive".)

Side show science spectacle

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-09-26T00:00:42+10:00

The adults only Dark Science gigs I MC'ed at the Powerhouse Museum for the Ultimo Science Festival a few weeks back have, after much exertion this week, been squeezed and scrunched into a single show for this weekend....

Tune in on-air and online here

And a few pics from the nights have been popped into a photo gallery too here (warning: hooks and flesh in some).

We're pushing the limits of fear, pain, pleasure and phobias in interesting ways...Although I didn't manage to keep in the interview with the self confessed sadist from San Francisco who had some thoughts to offer spontaneously from the audience on the night! And then there were all the women in the crowd who I got to share their painful birth stories on the spot ...

Share your thoughts about what Ben, Rob, Bernadette, Gretchen, Stephen, Lorimer, Monica and Warwick and co have to say in the show....Connect with any of your experiences?

And thanks to Derek Williamson and his Powerhouse colleagues.

What on earth is The Singularity...

Natasha Mitchell — 2009-09-17T15:32:50+10:00

(Cartoon from http://www.toothpastefordinner.com )

This week,

All in the Mind is contemplating the coming, or not, of the technological singularity.

The what?

Well, the answer to that depends on who you ask.

Next month, thinkers worldwide will gather at the Singularity Summit in New York, and you can see from the speakers that the scene is a curious mix of transhumanists (who want to use technological knowledge to live forever...and forever), futurists (who contemplate the possibilities of what might happen if we did), technologists and computer scientists (who could potentially make it happen), philosophers of mind (what will happen to our minds if we do?), and perhaps a few lifestyle evangelists thrown into the mix.

Here's how the conference describes the concept:

"The Singularity represents an "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development past which present models of the future may cease to give reliable answers, following the creation of strong AI or the enhancement of human intelligence".

Futurist Ray Kurzweil writes:

"What, then, is the Singularity? It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian or dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the Singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one's view of life in general and one's own particular life".

So....the interviews for this week's show were done by Mike McRae (pictured) who's a Canberra based science educator, communicator, cartoonist and skeptical thinker, trying his hand at some radio with us too.

He offers these reflections on the theme.

"I've recently found a third topic to exclude from dinner conversations, alongside politics and religion. The singularity. While I’m rarely one to dichotomise people, in this case I’ve found you’re either excited by the idea, or you do your best to stifle a smirk and offer me another slice of roast beef.

There is something about the idea that makes it seem at once like complete fantasy and a distinct possibility. Throughout history, we’ve dreamed of finding somebody to talk to who isn’t one of us. Angels, aliens, and now AI…we’re eager to know we’re not alone, making it perfect fodder for a good tale. Throw in for good measure the question of imminent salvation or destruction, and it’s easy to see why the concept of the singularity looks so mythological.

However, we can’t deny that technology is improving year by year. Even if we dismiss attempts to quantify our progress, leading to speculations of exponential growth curves and technological explosions, it seems likely that there lie ahead of us discoveries that will surely speed up innovation.

For my money, I think it’s far too easy to get lost in the assumption that the trick to speeding up innovation lies in smarter minds. Progress is inhibited more by social concepts such as ethics, resource allocation and effective communication. Sure, a few bright boffins mightn’t hurt in the search for academic solutions, but if a super intelligent computer were to seek permission to dissect a living foetus in its search for more information, I hesitate to think it would get the public tick of approval.

Still, who knows? Maybe, just maybe our own 'Deep Thought' isn't far off, ready to provide us with the answer to life, the universe and everything. How would we respond if it did answer, '42'?"

Ah, the ubiquitous 42. If only it was the answer to every question, life would certainly be simpler and yet so very dull. Thanks Mike!

Tune in ...and then let it rip....What do you think?

And as promised, here's an extended version of the interview Mike recorded with science fiction writer Richard Morgan . In addition to what you'll hear on the show, they go onto contemplate why the prospect of cloning humans and especially the sci fi prospect of cloning our minds gives many the creeps (hint: Morgan has a theory about the spectacle often made of identical twins).

Richard_morgan i/v (mp3 file. Dur: 16 mins. Right click to Save).

Check out Richard Morgan's account of his visit to Australia this year. And find out more about what Mike McRae does for his day job here . A great newsletter for kid folk.

Update: Of further interest, I also wanted to mention Australia's COSMOS Magazine published an excellent feature by top MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks (an ex-Adelaide boy, pictured) earlier this year which expands on many of the questions raised in this week's All in the Mind .

"I don't think there is going to be one single sudden technological 'big bang' that springs an artificial general intelligence (AGI) into life. Starting with the mildly intelligent systems we have today, machines will become gradually more intelligent, generation-by-generation. The singularity will be a period, not an event.

This period will be a time when we will invent, perfect and deploy, in fits and starts, ever more capable systems, driven not by the imperative of the singularity itself but by the usual economic and sociological forces.

And Brooks goes on to say:

"We need not fear our machines because we, as human-machines, will always be a step ahead of them, the machine-machines, because we will adopt the new technologies used to build those machines right into our own heads and bodies.

We're going to build our robots incrementally, one after the other, and we're going to realise which traits we like in our robots – humility, empathy and patience; and traits we don't – megalomania, unrestrained ambition and arrogance.

By being careful about what we instil in our machines, we simply won't create the specific conditions necessary for a runaway, self-perpetuating artificial-intelligence explosion that runs beyond our control and leaves us in the dust."

COSMOS editor, Wilson da Silva (a former ABC colleague), also writes on the issue in Tipping Point?

And, here's an old interview I did with Rodney Brooks on Artificial Life.

Oops, this post got WAY too long.

Enjoy.