Month: June 2013

Psychology professor Shigeru Watanabe researches aesthetic preference in pigeons, sparrows, and mice:

In general mice did not display a painting preference except for two mice: one preferred Renoir to Picasso, and the other preferred Kandinsky to Mondrian. Thereafter, I examined discrimination of paintings with new mice. When exposure to paintings of one artist was associated with an injection of morphine (3.0 mg/kg), mice displayed conditioned preference for those paintings, showing discrimination of paintings by Renoir from those by Picasso, and paintings by Kandinsky from those by Mondrian after the conditioning. … [R]esults suggest that mice can discriminate not only between an artist’s style but also among paintings of the same artist.

Allison Meier questions the point of such experiments:

Why bother with this rather whimsical research? Well, the idea that art and the appreciation of aesthetics is a human thing is one that Watanabe is confronting with these studies, where the cognition that something is beautiful or ugly, or “good” or “bad” with art can reflect sensory experiences in other species, as well as show that the experience of art is tied to the experience of pleasure.

While the mice got morphine and the birds got food for their either spending more time with a painting or choosing it with the tap of a button (for the judging pigeons), humans get this … in a less food-based way. However, rodents are even more interesting being that they’re not considered as visual as birds, and in the end they mostly didn’t really seem to care if they were with Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” Kandinsky’s “Mondo Blue,” Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror,” or Renoir’s “Rowers at Argenteuil”…

(Image: Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), 1912, Wassily Kandinsky)

Christopher Snowdon protests the recent decision by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to regulate e-cigarettes as medicinal products:

The fledgling e-cigarette industry has no desire to move its tanks onto Big Pharma’s lawn. … If forced down the route of medical trials, a well-funded e-cigarette company could gather the empirical evidence to demonstrate their product’s efficacy as a smoking cessation aid and its relative safety as a consumer product. The question is how long that process would take and whether e-cigarette users would be pushed back on to tobacco in the meantime. As former ASH director Clive Bates has noted, if the regulatory obstacles can be overcome, the likely result will be that prices will rise, innovation will be stifled and the current, diverse crop of e-cigarettes will be replaced by ‘dull but perfectly safe medicalised products that no-one wants to use’. This dismal outcome is arguably the best-case scenario. The prohibitionists who are busy manufacturing myths about children using e-cigarettes as a ‘gateway’ to smoking may yet use medical regulation as a way of forcing a precautionary ban, as has happened in several other countries.

The Economist has an overview of the e-cig’s opponents. Previous Dish on the subject here.

Perhaps we overrate his tortured works:

Kafka felt that his talent was “for portraying my dream-like inner life.” But dreams, however gripping they can be, are aesthetically unsatisfying, especially in their endings. Kafka himself did not find the ending of “The Metamorphosis,” his greatest story, satisfying, and it isn’t. Perhaps for the same reason, he was unable to complete his novels: dreams, especially nightmares, want for artistic endings. …

In the end, Henry James wrote in an essay on Turgenev, what we want to know about a writer is, “How does he feel about life?” Kafka found it unbearably complicated, altogether daunting, and for the most part joyless, and so described it in his fiction. This is not, let us agree, the best outlook for a great writer. Great writers are impressed by the mysteries of life; poor Franz Kafka was crushed by them.

Jonathan Franzen talks about how his passion for bird-watching has changed him:

Do you find that you look at landscapes differently now?

My whole conception of what is beautiful has changed because I’ve come to love birds so much. I respond to landscapes that have birds in them, that are friendly to birds. A dismal swamp behind a rail yard now has a kind of beauty for me that a bird-free beach in the Mediterranean doesn’t.

Love changes your idea of beauty inevitably. When you love a person, you are not thinking in terms of magazine beauty or newscaster good looks. A deeper kind of beauty comes into play. That is very much what happens when you begin to pay attention to birds and you begin to love them.

Franzen’s new piece on songbirds in Egypt is here.

(Photo of a Little Ringed Plover by Ferran Pestaña)

Maria Konnikova says yes:

[We] know that much of what we associate with creativity—whether writing a sonnet or a mathematical proof—has to do with the ability to link ideas, entities, and concepts in novel ways. This ability depends in part on the very thing that caffeine seeks to prevent: a wandering, unfocused mind.

Caffeine also interferes with sleep, another ingredient in creative thought. Then again, your increased concentration could all be in your head:

Some research has found that attributes like increased alertness and focus can be replicated by the placebo effect. In a 2011 study at the University of East London, a group of psychologists examined the effects of caffeine on problem-solving ability and emotional responses. In the double-blind study, eighty-eight habitual coffee drinkers were given cups of caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee at random. Half were told that they were receiving regular coffee, and half were informed that they were given decaf. Each participant then completed tasks that measured things like reaction time, self-control, reward motivation, and mood. In the Stroop task, which measures reaction time, improved accuracy was observed in subjects who believed they had ingested caffeinated coffee, even if they had only consumed decaf. Subjects who received caffeine and were told they were drinking decaf did not show an improved reaction time.

Daniel Suarez sees fully autonomous weapons as a threat to democracy:

Such weapons scare the hell out of most Americans:

As these break-out charts detail, this finding is consistent across the political spectrum, with the strongest opposition coming from both the far right and the far left. Men are slightly more likely than women to oppose the weapons; women are likelier to acknowledge they don’t have sufficient information to hold a strong opinion. Opposition is most highly concentrated among the highly-educated, the well-informed, and the military. Many people are unsure; most who are unsure would prefer caution. Very few openly support the idea of machines autonomously deciding to kill.

Marilynne Robinson riffs on her advice that young writers must learn to “trust the peripheral vision of our mind”:

I think it’s probably a lot like meditation—which I have never practiced. But from what I understand, it is a capacity that develops itself and that people who practice it successfully have access to aspects of consciousness that they would not otherwise have. They find these large and authoritative experiences. I think that, by the same discipline of introspection, you have access to a much greater part of your awareness than you would otherwise. Things come to mind. Your mind makes selections—this deeper mind—on other terms than your front-office mind. You will remember that once, in some time, in some place, you saw a person standing alone, and their posture suggested to you an enormous narrative around them. And you never spoke to them, you don’t know them, you were never within ten feet of them. But at the same time, you discover that your mind privileges them over something like the Tour d’Eiffel. There’s a very pleasant consequence of that, which is the most ordinary experience can be the most valuable experience. If you’re philosophically attentive you don’t need to seek these things out.