Shermer's column in Scientific American

In the May 2005 issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer wrote a column entitled Turn Me On, Dead Man where he gives an interesting explanation of why people get and believe absurd ideas. Examples of such absurd ideas are the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled toast (see image here), an oyster shell that looks like Jesus (see image here), that clues hidden in Beatles' songs indicate that Paul McCartney was killed in 1966 and replaced by a look-alike, or that it is possible to communicate with dead people through a tape recorder in what is called Electronic Voice Phenomenon. His explanation is that our brains evolved to become pattern-recognition machines able to detect signals that enhance our every day survival. We associate for example a smiling face with hapiness, percieve a scream as a sign of danger or can recognize if a building is a bank, church, school or a residence - this capability is association learning. Shermer argues that this pattern-recognition machine often finds nonexistent signals in the background noise of life. We have a signal-to-noise problem where false associations are made; as our pattern-recognition brains scan the world around us false patterns are found in the background noise.

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the author of a regular column in Scientific American called Skeptic.
He is a strong advocate of the skeptic point of view, although he is a historian rather than a scientist. His skepticism seems to have developed in reaction to his earlier credulity. Indeed, he was greatly involved in the religious community at a younger age and even gave Bible study courses himself. He attended the Church of Christ affiliated Pepperdine University with the intent of majoring in theology.

Links to some of the books written by Michael Shermer:
Science Friction
How We Believe
The Borderlands of Science
Why People Believe Weird Things

Typoglycemia

I received recently one of those chain e-mails that I found quite intriguing. Here it is (try to read it):

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, is taht it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Such a cdonition is arppoiately cllaed Typoglycemia :)-
Amzanig huh? Yaeh and yuo awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.

First of all, I couldn't find any information about such a study conducted at Cambridge University. It seems like it wasn't published in any academic journal nor could I find any detailed reference to it on the internet. It is however very interesting to see how easy it is to read these sentences, and makes one wonder how our brain is able to accomplish that?

One way to try to understand it is to imagine how a robot would have to be programmed in order to be able to "read" such words. Just like our brain has knowledge of the words that constitute our vocabulary, the robot must have a database of "known" words in its memory. Then, when a word like huamn is presented to it as an input, it would keep the first and last letters where they are and go through all possible combinations of the remaining letters untill it finds a match in its database. But when we read the above sentences we don't feel that we do all this processing but rather read the words spontaneously. I do believe however that our brain does at least to some extent a computation similar to that of the robot. Take the following two sentences for example:

Paesle rlpey to tihs mgssaee itlidaeemmy.

Plesae relpy to tihs mesasge immeidaetly.

It is evident that the second sentence is easier to read than the first one since it is orthographically more similar to the correct spelling of the words, and therefore less computation is required by our brain to recover the perceptual representation of each word.

Elsewhere, I find that such misspelled words must absolutely be placed in a meaningfull sentence in order to decipher them. For example, try reading the following words taken from the above text:

rdanieg, taotl, lteter

It is not nearly as easy to read them as it was initially when they were part of a meaningfull sentence. In this case, our brain must do the described robot-like computation in order to recover the perceptual representation of the words reading, total and letter. Therefore, the reason why we're able to read the misspelled text so easily is, I believe, because the presence of meaningfull sentences adds semantic knowledge about each word in addition to partial orthographic knowledge; whereas each word shown individually gives only orthographic information.

I found one functional neuroimaging study that attempts to recover brain regions involved in some way in retreiving word meaning. It is summarized that visual word processing involves activation of orthographic, but also phonologic and semantic codes in the brain. For example, the brain carries out the mapping between all three following perceptual representations of the word love with it's associated knowledge:

love, luv, I lvoe you

The three representations involve respectivelly orthographic, phonologic and semantic codes.

The reference of the mentioned study:
J. R. Binder, Kristen. A. McKiernan, M. E. Parsons, C. F. Westbury, E. T. Possing, J. N. Kaufman and L. Buchanan. (2003). Neural Correlates of Lexical Access During Visual Word Recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 372-393.
The abstract can be found here.

Favorite Bill Maher Quotes

"You hear about gas prices over two dollars a gallon and it makes you nearly choke on your four dollar latte."

"How come we have cars with GPS systems, satellite radio and voice activated web access, and we still have to power them with the black goop you suck out of the ground?"

"How come we [...] accept you can over-tax cigarettes because they're bad but burning oil into the atmosphere is ok? You can't smoke in a bar but you can drive-thru a restaurant?"

"It suddenly got less sexy to drive Hummers and other gas-guzzling fuck-you-mobiles now that it costs a hundred bucks to fill it up ... nobody's dick is that small!"

"Look at the air we breathe. I mean LOOK AT IT!"

"Don't pick a german pope the day before Hitler's birthday! I'm not saying it's anything but a coincidence but you've just given every consiparcy nut in the world a raging hard on."

"Jesus never said: let's have a pope, put a big crown on him, have him sit on a throne, live in a pallace and make him infallible."

"Fans of the cancelled tv series Star Trek Enterprise are trying to raise enough money on their own to pay for another season ... it's either that or go outside!"

"A human finger was found in a bowl of Wendy's chilli, [...] luckily it was only a finger, if it was a whole hand Congress would've voted to keep it alive."

Nicotine Vaccine

Cytos Biotechnology in Zurich, Switzerland completed phase II clinical trials of their vaccine candidate to treat nicotine addiction. A total of 341 male and female smokers aged 18 to 70 and who have been smoking between 10 and 40 cigarettes per day for at least 3 years received the vaccine treatment. One injection was given each month for a duration of 5 months. All treated patients developed an immunological response by producing anti-nicotine antibodies in their blood. Results showed a continuous abstinence from smoking in as many as 40% of the patients after 24 weeks after treatment. These are indeed very encouraging results, hopefully will this method soon find widespread and effecitve use in treating nicotine addiction. Lawyers and governments have long ago lost their battle against tobacco comapanies, perhaps science has a better chance.

You can read the full press release from Cytos as a PDF file. Interestingly, they are also developing an obesity vaccine.

More about the vaccine itself can be found here.

Check out the very popular thetruth.com, an excellent and entertaining anti-tobacco site.