David Robson

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“The Memory Was Very Vivid…Yet It Was Completely False”

May 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

We think we’re the captains of our own vessels, but then our brains remind us we’re merely passengers. 

Some experience this phenomenon of being prone to our own heads in an even more pronounced way. In his latest excellent piece for BBC Future, David Robson writes of a man whose illness left him with a brain that created fictional “memories” for him. The effect is called “confabulation,” with the organ alternating between narratives true and untrue, with the “reader” left to fathom what’s what.

The opening:

A few months after his brain surgery, Matthew returned to work as a computer programmer. He knew it was going to be a challenge – he had to explain to his boss that he was living with a permanent brain injury.

“What actually happened at the meeting was that the employers said, ‘How can we help you, how can we make you fit back into work and get back on your feet again?’” Matthew explains. “That’s what they said. But my recollection the next day was that they were going to fire me – there was no way they could allow me back into work.”

The memory was very vivid – he says – just as believable as anything that had actually happened. Yet it was completely false. Today, Matthew knows it was one of the first signs that he was suffering from “confabulation” as a result of his brain injury. Confabulators don’t mean to lie or mislead, but some fundamental problems with the way they process memories mean they often struggle to tell fact from a fiction concocted by their unconscious mind.

The discovery was another painful blow to Matthew (whose name has been changed to preserve his privacy). “I was really scared – I thought I can’t trust what’s actually happened.”

His dilemma, although extreme, can help us all to understand the frailties of our memories, and the ways our minds construct their own versions of reality.•

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“Aging Is A Surprisingly Plastic Process That Can Be Manipulated”

September 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s too late to save ourselves, but one gift we could give to people of the future, should they exist, is to explore and map the genomes of those creatures given to remarkably long lives. They’ve somehow developed internal methods for suppressing tumors and other flaws in the DNA that normally accompany aging. Such mysteries, once solved, may allow us to make the human lifespan more elastic.

It’s certainly not just size that matters, as David Robson explains in his BBC Future article “The Secrets of Living to 200 Years Old,” since there are both rats and whales able to grind nature’s inexorable march to a relatively slow crawl. An excerpt: 

Several lines of evidence suggest there are brakes that can slow [the aging] progress. For instance, a common diabetes drug, metformin, can modestly slow ageing in mice. And simply changing one gene involved in cell metabolism in a roundworm can lead it to live many times longer than its parents; while it is unlikely the same changes would help more complex organisms, it hints that ageing is not beyond our control. “Ageing is a surprisingly plastic process that can be manipulated,” [the University of Liverpool’s Joao Pedro] de Magalhaes says.

Scientists like de Magalhaes and [Harvard’s Vadim] Gladyshev are now on the hunt for other candidates, using real-life Methuselahs as their guide. Across mammals alone, expected lifespan can vary 100-fold, from shrews that live for no longer than 1.5 years to the bowhead whales that can live for more than 200. It is as if, for various reasons, natural selection has somehow pushed certain creatures to evolve their own elixir of life.

“Metformin extends lifespan in mice modestly, but when you look at different species, the capacity of natural selection to extend lifespan is incredibly more powerful,” says de Magalhaes. “They will have probably evolved entirely different ways of living longer, and resisting cancer and other age-related diseases.” And each of those could lead to better medicine. Or as Gladyshev puts it: “Nature changes lifespan all the time, so the question is, how does it do it? And can we target those mechanisms, thereby increasing human longevity?”

The most interesting creatures are the extreme outliers; single species that seem to outlive even their closest relatives.•

 

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“We Confabulate To Explain Our Choice”

March 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Card-shuffling McGill psychiatry student Jay Olson thinks our will may not be as free as we’d like to believe–in fact, it might often be an illusion straight out of a magic act. We’re nudged and cajoled constantly, primed and prodded, not just by our own memories and experiences and not only when suggestions are discrete and identifiable. Persuasion is everywhere. From David Robson at the BBC: 

Consider when you go to a restaurant for a meal. Olson says you are twice as likely to choose from the very top or very bottom of the menu – because those areas first attract your eye. “But if someone asks you why did you choose the salmon, you’ll say you were hungry for salmon,” says Olson. “You won’t say it was one of the first things I looked at on the menu.” In other words, we confabulate to explain our choice, despite the fact it had already been primed by the restaurant.

Or how about the simple task of choosing wine at the supermarket? Jennifer McKendrick and colleagues at the University of Leicester found that simply playing French or German background music led people to buy wines from those regions. When asked, however, the subjects were completely oblivious to the fact.

It is less clear how this might relate to other forms of priming, a subject of long controversy. In the 2000 US election, for instance, Al Gore supporters claimed the Republicans had flashed the word “RATS” in an advert depicting the Democrat representative. 

Gore’s supporters believed the (alleged) subliminal message about their candidate would sway voters. Replicating the ad with a made-up candidate, Drew Westen at Emory University, found that the flash of the word really did damage the politician’s ratings, according to subjects in the lab. Whether the strategy could have ever swayed the results of an election in the long term is debatable (similarly, the supposed success of subliminal advertising is disputed) but it seems likely that other kinds of priming do have some effect on behaviour without you realising it.

In one striking result, simply seeing a photo of an athlete winning a race significantly boosted telephone sales reps’ performance – despite the fact that most people couldn’t even remember seeing the picture. And there is some evidence showing that handing someone a hot drink can make you seem like a “warmer” person, or smelling a nasty odour can make you more morally “disgusted” and cause you to judge people more harshly.•

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“150 Years Ago, Jules Verne’s Visions Of A Moon Landing Must Have Seemed Outlandish”

December 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

David Robson’s new BBC piece examines five space missions far more menacing than landing a craft on a comet. One such proposition is a trip to Alpha Centauri. My best guess is that we never make it out of our solar system, but I hope I’m wrong. An excerpt:

“Interstellar travel

Never mind Jupiter’s moons or far-flung asteroids. How about a trip to Alpha Centauri? People born today may witness this giant leap for humankind within their lifetime, if the 100 Year Starship project has its way. A joint venture between NASA and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 100YSS aims to create a framework that will allow humans to travel to another star within the next hundred years. They are considering every possible mechanism at the moment – including hypothetical anti-matter propulsion – as well as strategies to overcome the ravages of space travel on the human body. Admittedly, the chances of it working seem infinitesimal, given today’s science. But 150 years ago, Jules Verne’s visions of a moon landing must have seemed outlandish; at that time, humans hadn’t even flown in a plane. Christopher Nolan’s latest film may not be so far-fetched after all.”

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