Brain Food

Intriguing ideas in short form along with some recommended sensory inputs for your curious brain.

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Our brains perform a magical task. They take who we are, what we have experienced in the world, and combine it with that most human cognitive trick: imagining worlds that don’t exist and experiences that might have been. In the process, we invent ideas, recast our identities, and produce the most unexpected insights about our baffling, complex world.

But, in a less romantic sense, our brains are also input/output machines, in which what we produce with our cognition relies on what we feed our thoughts, whether through exploring the world or reading about it. So, every so often, I provide a completely biased, utterly subjective list of the delights that have nourished my brain. May some of them nourish some of yours!

ARTICLES

Older monkeys, like older humans, DGAF

One of the most well-documented findings in social science research is that humans tend to experience a happiness curve that follows a U-shape. We tend to, on average, be happiest in our 20s, then it declines (reaching a low point in our late 40s), before swooping back up to another high point by the time we reach our 70s.

There are many theoretical explanations for this, but one of the predominant ideas is that our 20s are a period in which the world feels like our oyster and everything seems possible; that we realize in mid-life that some of our hopes and dreams won’t be realized; and then eventually, we accept our lives as they are and grow incredibly content with the life we’ve lived. For some people, that fits, for others, it sounds completely at odds with their own subjective experience. But the data are really robust about the average shape of a human happiness curve.

It turns out it’s not just humans, either. Chimps follow the same happiness curve, because apparently you can reliably measure non-human primate happiness (who knew?).

But new research has just dropped that shows that humans and monkeys follow another process through aging: as we grow older, we become increasingly attuned to positive stimuli and are more willing to ignore status and threat displays. In human terms, this means that “relative to younger adults, older adults attend to and remember positive information more than negative information.” (Elderly curmudgeons are excluded, presumably).

But this positivity effect across aging also means that we are less attuned to people who proverbially beat their chest, or try to show off, or jockey for status. This makes sense; the schoolyard hierarchy and the toxic high school social cliques seem less important the further we move away from them through life.

This research study shows that the same thing happens in monkeys.

When monkeys are faced with a neutral expression from another monkey, or a lipsmack—a subtle social clue that monkeys use in a variety of contexts—there are limited age-related differences in behavior. Old and young are alike.

But when it comes to status-related threatening behavior, younger monkeys are hyper-attuned to it, whereas older monkeys are mostly indifferent. This leads to the hypothesis that there are evolutionary reasons for this behavioral shift, put in science speak as “both older humans and non-human primates are less metabolically efficient in recovering from affective stressors, resulting in increased allostatic load and subsequent negative health consequences.” (The flowery prose just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?).

Maybe it’s more important to worry about status when you’re younger. But I’d suggest a different wording: older people and older monkeys DGAF and that’s wonderful.

Ant Geopolitics, Aeon

Ants, like wasps and bees, are insects that exhibit eusociality, the highest level of social complexity on our planet. They are widely studied because individually they aren’t very smart, but collectively, they can produce extraordinary feats. In this article, which laces ant history with the globalization of ant colonies, you get a glimpse of the sheer influence that ants have on our world. An excerpt:

The more I learn, the more I am struck by the ants’ strangeness rather than their similarities with human society. There is another way to be a globalised society – one that is utterly unlike our own. I am not even sure we have the language to convey, for example, a colony’s ability to take bits of information from thousands of tiny brains and turn it into a distributed, constantly updated picture of their world. Even ‘smell’ seems a feeble word to describe the ability of ants’ antennae to read chemicals on the air and on each other. How can we imagine a life where sight goes almost unused and scent forms the primary channel of information, where chemical signals show the way to food, or mobilise a response to threats, or distinguish queens from workers and the living from the dead?

As our world turns alien, trying to think like an alien will be a better route to finding the imagination and humility needed to keep up with the changes than looking for ways in which other species are like us.

The Kristi Noem Dog-Killing Story is Actually Worse in Context (New York Magazine)

I hate Kristi Noem. I’m sorry—I know I shouldn’t hate people—but I hate her.¹ Not for her terrible policies or craven political cynicism (though those are both loathsome) but because she boasted about murdering a puppy for political cred.

If you have the distinct pleasure of not knowing who Noem is, I apologize for ruining that for you: she’s the Governor of South Dakota. She was tipped as a leading contender to become Trump’s pick for Vice President.

Most politicians use books as tactical instruments to launch their national political ambitions. These are usually carefully considered, strategic documents, intended to introduce an obscure politician to the country, paving the way for national stardom. But Noem had an unconventional strategy, and her thought process must have been something like this:

“Wouldn’t it be a bold move to tell America—a famously dog-loving country—how I murdered my puppy because it was too happy and energetic? Wouldn’t it be exactly the kind of story that shows authenticity and guts? And what if I throw in a story about how I shot a goat because it was guilty of a crime universal to all goats: it failed to be fragrant. There is no way that this would backfire in any possible way. To the presses!”

When you want to burn something to the ground, it’s best to be thorough. Don’t just use little bits of kindling; spray it with lighter fluid, then use a flamethrower. And that’s the approach Noem used to incinerate her political career.

Now, let’s hear her out. What was Cricket—her puppy’s—crime?

Within an hour of walking the first field, Cricket had blown past the group, gotten too far ahead, and flushed up birds out of range. She was out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life. The only problem was there were no hunters nearby to shoot the birds she scared up.

I called her back to no avail. I hit her electronic collar to give her a quick tone to remind her to listen. I then hit the button to give her a warning vibration that told her to come back to me. No response.

After boasting that she shot a goat for smelling bad and murdered a puppy for “chasing birds” and “having the time of her life,” Noem proceeded to invent a meeting with the world’s most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Un. This wasn’t a tiny little white lie that’s difficult to check, such as falsely claiming you already ate when someone offers you food that looks disgusting. This was a huge, grotesquely pulsating lie that was extremely easy to debunk. You can’t just pop over to North Korea and shake hands with Kim Jong-Un without anyone noticing.

But by far the funniest bit of this saga was how Noem tried to salvage the flaming wreck of her political career with the stupidest possible denial. She said that her invented account of a meeting that never happened was removed “as soon as this was brought to my attention.” Since I doubt that Noem was making a broadly epistemological point about our inability to truly know things about the world, it’s rather surprising that she wouldn’t know about a meeting she said she attended, in a book she said she wrote, mere weeks after speaking the words aloud for the audiobook.

What a dirty trick the lamestream media played on her—asking her basic questions about the words in her own book!

Finally, this gives me the opportunity to share with you one of the most ridiculous American political advertisement of all-time (a truly crowded field). This is from Noem’s campaign for the House a little over a decade ago. Just watch it. And I reiterate: this is an ad for Noem, not her extremely cool opponent.

TV/FILM

Detectorists (BBC)

I’m a decade late to discovering Detectorists, which was a hit in the United Kingdom, but didn’t make nearly as big a splash across the pond. Let me get straight to it: this was my favorite show I’ve watched in the last five years.

Now, in saying that, I’m aware that some of you will hate this show. It’s slow. It’s very British. And it’s about two main characters who live basic, unexceptional lives, in pursuit of their core hobby: metal detecting. Most of the time, they find nothing—or junk.

But Detectorists is, as one critic said, a show about nothing and a show about everything. If you like plot-driven action, steer clear. You’ll hate it and hate me for recommending it. If you like shows that are slow burns but are beautifully written, perfectly acted, and that subtly but effectively showcase what really matters in life, watch it immediately. (The Detectorists soundtrack, by Johnny Flynn, is also exceptional. The theme track to the show is incredibly beautiful. Have a listen).

Last Breath (Netflix)

I’m a sucker for disaster documentaries about the thrill of human ingenuity in a tragedy or a crisis. Last Breath delivers precisely that. It’s about a world that I knew nothing about—saturation divers. They live in weird, pressurized cabins onboard a ship (with high, squeaky voices from the helium they breathe) for days or weeks at a time so that their bodies can tolerate diving at great depth for extended periods.

In this case, the divers are working in the choppy waves of the North Sea when the ship’s technology fails. I won’t spoil the story, but it’s a powerful documentary, not least because it relies predominantly on actual footage from the event itself.

BOOKS

Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World by J. Doyne Farmer

J. Doyne Farmer is a fascinating guy—trained in physics, schooled in poker and later used rudimentary wearable computers to beat the house in roulette, and now is a complex systems economist at Oxford. But he’s no ordinary economist—and many ordinary economists will hate this book.

I’m planning to eventually write a standalone piece that engages with some of the ideas in Making Sense of Chaos, but I suspect that Doyne’s critique of mainstream economics—which is one I share and that I also articulated in Fluke—is going to upend many of the bedrock (incorrect) assumptions of social science in the coming decades.

George Box famously quipped that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” The problem, of course, is that many models in social science are both wrong and useless. Sometimes, they’re worse than useless, because they give us a false sense of certainty in the wrong direction. This isn’t because social scientists are idiots, but rather because modeling the most complex phenomena in existence—8 billion human brains interacting in a dynamic social environment embedded on an ever-changing planet—is effectively impossible. We will never develop Laplace’s Demon for social systems. But there are better and worse ways to go about it.

Farmer points to a series of smart lessons for how we can think more carefully about these difficult problems—and draw far more on the lessons of interdisciplinary complexity science—and less on the dogma of economic theory. If you’ve never come across complex systems before, this is a great place to start.

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1. This is, I admit, an intellectually incoherent position for me to hold because I don’t believe in free will, for reasons I explain in one of the later chapters of Fluke.