Can bacteria make you smarter?

It is hard enough in the social sciences to disentangle cause and effect as it is. Now this - Can bacteria make you smarter?

The copycat's whiskers

From the May 1, 2010 edition of the Spectator. Bevis Hillier reviews Nicolas Barker's Horace Walpole's Description of the Villa at Strawberry Hill in an article, Strawberry Hill Forever. What a marvelous club.

The book is produced by the Roxburghe Club, of which William Waldegrave is a member. It is perhaps the most exclusive club one can belong to - more so than White's, Boodle's, Pratt's or the Athenaeum. It was founded in 1812 by a group of patrician bibliophiles after the sale of the bankrupt Duke of Roxburghe's collection, the first English sale at which a book was sold for more than £1,000 (the Valdorfer Boccaccio, 1471, bought by the Marquess of Blandford for £2,260). The first president was the second Lord Spencer, but the idea of the Club came from the Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, author of Bibliomania (1809).

The club is restricted to 40 members. The present membership includes a French prince, 13 peers (Waldegrave among them), three North American members and one South American member. They tend to be inheritors or custodians of important libraries. They meet for dinner, normally combined with a visit to a library, once a year in June: the 'anniversary dinner', that is, of the Roxburghe sale. There is also a 'business' dinner in the autumn. Members are expected to publish a book to be presented to each of their fellow members. Every member has his or her name printed in red in his or her copy; a limited number of extra copies is issued for sale - of which the book under review is one. The price may seem exorbitant; but you can be pretty sure that your copy, in its half-morocco binding, will become a bibliophile's treasure. This facsimile is the copycat's whiskers.

General Systems Thinking

I read Gerald Weinberg's An Introduction to General Systems Thinking years ago in college. It was not an assigned book for a course but I came across it at my favorite used bookstore, the Red Cross bookstore in Washington, D.C. where they had the marvelously straight-forward pricing system: Hardbacks - $1, Paperbacks - 50 cents.

With a title as intriguing as An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, it could not be left neglected on the shelves. It appears to be out of print now. I can't have absorbed but 10% of it's insights way back then. I simply had not yet lived long enough. I am reminded of General Systems Thinking from an entry at The Neglected Books Page. Some of the gems:

A state is a situation which can be recognized if it occurs again. But no state will ever occur again if we don't lump many states into one 'state.' Thus, in order to learn at all, we must forego some potential discrimination of states, some possibility of learning everything. Or, codified as The Lump Law:

If we want to learn anything, we musn't try to learn everything.

The Lump Law of course mirrors E.D. Hirsch's observation "In some of our national moods we would like the schools to teach everything, but they cannot. There is a pressing need for clarity about our educational priorities."

Then there is Weinberg's Used Car Law:

1.A way of looking at the world that is not putting excessive stress on an observer need not be changed.
2.A way of looking at the world may be changed to reduce the stress on an observer.

Which of course echoes Alison Gopnik and her research about babies and how their brains develop ("As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new.")

Again:

"All general systems thinking," he writes, starts with one of three questions:

1.Why do I see what I see?
2.Why do things stay the same?
3.Why do things change?

Of our grappling with these questions, Weinberg says,

. . . [W]e can never hope to find the end; we do not intend to try. Our goal is to improve our thinking, not to solve the riddle of the Sphynx.

Which is also why I've found myself returning to An Introduction to General Systems Thinking again and again in the twenty-plus years since I first stumbled across it. I know no better spark to revive a mind that's stuck in dead-end thinking than to open this book, dive into one of Gerald Weinberg's wonderful open-ended questions, and rediscover how one looks at the world.

Again echoing the observation of Gopnik's; babies explore in their thinking while adults exploit.

We tend to substitute opinions for thinking

Is Thinking Back in Fashion, Lane Wallace, The Atlantic June 2009. See our earlier Pigeon Post article on Imagination in children's stories as well as Science Experiments in the Kitchen.

"We're capable, but not practiced, in the art of thinking," says Phil Terry, CEO of Creative Good, a business consulting company, and the founder of a web-based reading and lecture organization called Reading Odyssey. "We're all endowed with curiosity, but a lot of us, for very good reasons, stop using it after a certain point. After a certain age, we tend to substitute opinions for thinking."

[snip]

Which brings us to Aristotle. Wisdom, according to Aristotle, isn't an object anyone acquires. It's a habit; something that emerges from a particular way of processing information and engaging with others and the world. And a habit that's essential for us to develop to make better decisions in business and life.

Reading is productive

An interesting diagram from Introduction to Social Macrodynamics, Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth by Andrey Korotayev, Artemy Malkov, and Daria Khaltourina, 2006.

I am not versed in the comparative academic rigor of Russian historical research but I think these authors are all associated with Moscow University which by reputation is solid. Their graph shows the predictive power of literacy rates in 1800 to future national economic productivity.

A man writing such history is driving more horses abreast in his team

Hilaire Belloc, On the Decline of the Book. The lament for the decline of reading, the decline of the book is of course ageless.

It is an interesting speculation by what means the Book lost its old position in this country. This is not only an interesting speculation, but one which nearly concerns a vital matter. For if men fall into the habit of neglecting true books in an old and traditional civilization, the inaccuracy of their judgments and the illusions to which they will be subject, must increase.

To take but one example: history. The less the true historical book is read and the more men depend upon ephemeral statement, the more will legend crystallize, the harder will it be to destroy in the general mind some comforting lie, and the great object-lesson of politics (which is an accurate knowledge of how men have acted in the past) will become at last unknown.

This seems right.

The excellence of a book and its value as a book depend upon two factors, which are usually, though not always, united in varied proportions: first, that it should put something of value to the reader, whether of value as a discovery and an enlargement of wisdom or of value as a new emphasis laid upon old and sound morals; secondly, that this thing added or renewed in human life should be presented in such a manner as to give permanent aesthetic pleasure.

I have to agree with this assessment of writing history.

To read History involves not only some permanent interest in things not immediately sensible, but also some permanent brain-work in the reader; for as one reads history one cannot, if one is an intelligent being, forbear perpetually to contrast the lessons it teaches with the received opinions of our time. Again, History is valuable as an example in the general thesis I am maintaining, because no good history can be written without a great measure of hard work. To make a history at once accurate, readable, useful, and new, is probably the hardest of all literary efforts; a man writing such history is driving more horses abreast in his team than a man writing any other kind of literary matter. He must keep his imagination active; his style must be not only lucid, but also must arrest the reader; he must exercise perpetually a power of selection which plays over innumerable details; he must, in the midst of such occupations, preserve unity of design, as much as must the novelist or the playwright; and yet with all this there is not a verb, an adjective or a substantive which, if it does not repose upon established evidence, will not mar the particular type of work on which he is engaged.

So with locusts, so with humans?

Productivity is the source of human well-being and it took a marked leap upwards back around 10,000 years ago when people settled down, changed from a hunter gatherer life-style and began to have settled agriculture and shortly afterwards to live in small hamlets, villages, towns and eventually cities. Increasing density of human habitation has paralleled yet higher gains in productivity. Larger communities required better capacity to coordinate and cooperate. More coordination and cooperation required reading and writing. It also required our brains to keep evolving and adapting.

Here is a report from BBC News (by Victoria Gill, May 25, 2010, Swarming 'swells' Locusts' Brains) which reports on discoveries of a similar phenomenon in locusts. Brains continuing to evolve to living conditions, not locusts reading.

The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

I am always intrigued by cultural continuity, the capacity for ideas or memes to continue on down the generations through stories, songs, and linguistic phrases. I have blogged before on George Washington's The Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation in Published in France, by the Jesuits

Here is another instance. In this close to raw translation of The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, there is almost a feel of The Rules of Civility.

We may phrase it differently today, but many of these injunctions remain alive and well in families near and far.

High population density triggers cultural explosions

An interesting article over at e! Science News, High population density triggers cultural explosions from June 4th, 2009.

High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world.

It would appear to be analogous to the reading research we are finding that volume of books read and access to books are key determinants to yet further improvement in reading capability.

Turning Fifty - To Kill a Mockingbird

The New York Times has an article (A Classic Turns 50, and Parties are Planned) outlining the celebrations planned for this year to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Loved the story when I was a child, as have each of the kids in their turn. What fascinates me about To Kill a Mockingbird, beyond just being a great tale, is the nature of its attraction and longevity. The article references a million copies being sold each year, implying that at least a quarter of all children today still read this book from two generations ago. Back to the old conundrum of why some books take up residence in our collective psyche while others never find a home. One of life's enduring mysteries.