I've read a ton about the debate over torture, but in a piece in today's New York Times Week In Review, Scott Shane makes a new and excellent point: The government has spent virtually nothing studying the sciences of influence and persuasion and how they apply to interrogation.

Shane points out that well-known fact that the Army Field Manual explicitly advises against torture; it offers instead a set of observations about human motivation that an interrogator can exploit. ("People tend to want to talk when they are under stress and respond to kindness and understanding during trying circumstances," for example.) This is the sort of behavioral psychology we've all learned at the foot of prime-time police procedurals. But, as Shane points out, an understanding of this stuff isn't reflected at the highest levels of government, which is either a symptom -- or a cause -- of the bigger problem, which is that the feds don't avail themselves of the truckloads of research that's been done in recent decades, partly by corporations eager to get people to buy, y'know, $300 prestressed jeans.

As Shane writes ...

... the manual's inherited wisdom has not been updated to reflect decades of corporate analysis of how to influence consumers. Behavioral economists have dissected decisionmaking, and academic psychologists have studied political persuasion, but their lessons have not informed the interrogator's art either. Nor has there been a systematic effort to analyze the successes and blunders of the interrogations carried out since the attacks of 2001.

Steven M. Kleinman, a colonel in the Air Force reserve and a veteran interrogator in Iraq and elsewhere, says the government spends billions on spy satellites but almost nothing on studying interrogation. This is true, he said, despite a broad consensus that interrogation might be the best source of information on an elusive, low-tech, stateless foe like Al Qaeda.

"We need to bring scientific standards for interrogation to the same level of sophistication that we bring to satellite imagery and intercepting communications," said Mr. Kleinman, who has studied the American interrogation programs used for high-level German and Japanese prisoners during World War II, which he judges superior to those developed since 2001.

Kleinman suggests "a new intelligence agency or subagency devoted solely to interrogation -- sponsoring research, conducting training and building a team of sophisticated interrogators with linguistic and psychological skills." That sounds like a great idea. When I wrote a story a year ago for the New York Times Magazine about the intelligence agencies -- and the difficulty they're having getting their superlegacied and legally "airgapped" databases to talk to one another -- virtually everyone I talked to agreed that high-tech spying was great, but secondary to good old-fashioned cultivation of sources. If you want to understand the makeup of terrorist threats, you need to just, well, talk to a lot of people, which requires intelligence experts fluent in the languages and psychology -- not the black arts of torture.

I admit, I'm a sucker for brain-scanning experiments. But this one is particularly intriguiging: A group of scientists scanned several jazz keyboardists while they improvised solos. The finding? The parts of the musicians' brains that monitor their performance shut down, while the sections that organize "self-initiated thoughts and behaviors" were highly activated.

Soloing is, of course, one of the more spontaneous and creative moments in music. You have to follow the basic structure of the song while, on the fly, generating a new melody that picks up on -- and plays off of -- the individual performances of the other instruments. But the idea that improvising requires you to sort of stop scrutinizing yourself is incredibly interesting.

As a piece in Scientific Blogging notes ...

... the researchers found that much of the change between improvisation and memorization occurred in the prefrontal cortex, the region of the frontal lobe of the brain that helps us think and problem-solve and that provides a sense of self. Interestingly, the large portion responsible for monitoring one's performance (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) shuts down completely during improvisation, while the much smaller, centrally located region at the foremost part of the brain (medial prefrontal cortex) increases in activity. The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in self-initiated thoughts and behaviors, and is very active when a person describes an event that has happened to him or makes up a story. The researchers explain that, just as over-thinking a jump shot can cause a basketball player to fall out of the zone and perform poorly, the suppression of inhibitory, self-monitoring brain mechanisms helps to promote the free flow of novel ideas and impulses. While this brain pattern is unusual, it resembles the pattern seen in people when they are dreaming.

That latter point is particularly lovely. I have to say, this corresponds perfectly with my own experience of improvising. I've played guitar, harmonica, and a bunch of other stringed instruments -- banjo, etc. -- for 20 years, and I often find that improvising for a half-hour or so at the end of the day is the single best way to clear my brain. I've always thought that this was because I work in words, and by the end of a long work day I crave doing something that's completely nonverbal; and instrumental noodling perfectly fits that bill.

But now I'm wondering -- maybe the deeper reason I enjoy it so much is that improvising shuts down my brain's near-constant self-surveillance. My job, like many white-collar jobs, involves a lot of socializing (over the phone, anyway, in interviews), and enforced workplace socializing requires constant self-awareness, self-scrutiny and inhibition. This is pretty exhausting to maintain all day long. So maybe what I like about improvising on an instrument is that it frees me having to pay attention to myself.

I'd imagine Daniel Levitin would have some smart things to say about this.

(Thanks to Music Thing for this one!)

My comments are down again. I need help!

Apparently the spambots are slamming my comment script so rapidly that Pair, my hosting service, keeps on disabling the script. That's why comments aren't working right now.

Anyone have any advice on dealing with this? I currently use Autoban (version 1.2.3), which is supposed to throttle any spambots that try to post zillions of time in a row. I've been using it for about a year now, with great success.

But something's changed in the spambots' behavior, I guess. Anyone with smart advice, feel free to email me -- I'm all ears!

So, you're living in Florida, and you just suffered through a massive blackout. Want advance warning of the next one? Then go to the website of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and download the "Grid Monitor" -- a screensaver that shows you the stability of the power grid, in real time, via a series of totally gnarly graphics, such as the Oscillatory Mode Graph above.

You can actually watch the grid begin to buckle and collapse when a blackout is approaching. Since grid collapses occur randomly and very infrequently, you'd have to be staring at your screensaver 24 hours a day, but hey: Maybe you'll get lucky! On the other hand, you can also set the screensaver to give off a warning sound when the power in the grid fluctuates too wildly -- an impending sign of a blackout.

Pacific Northwest also created this nice PDF pamphlet that explains how the Grid Monitor works. It contains this rather metaphorically lovely passage:

In reality, the AC electric power signal is the sum of innumerable sub-signals. The 60 Hz AC signal is actually a complex accumulation of many elements such as random noise, mechanical vibratory dynamics of generators producing the power, damping effects, and even self-induced oscillatory dynamics of the transmission grid. It acts like a tremendous bed of interconnected springs and weights.

This is fascinating to watch: A team of Japanese researchers have created "shockwave traffic jams" that replicate the dynamics of real-world highways.

For 15 years, researchers have known that traffic jams can emerge out of the blue. All it takes is for one driver to momentarily slow down, at which point the person behind him hits the brakes, forcing the person behind him to hit the brakes even harder, and so on, and so on. One teensy butterfly flaps its wings, and pretty soon the whole damn interstate's a mess. If you're in a helicopter, you can watch the "shockwave" of slowed-down cars propagate backwards through traffic like a wave through water. Physicists have long produced eerily accurate computer models that replicate this phenomenon precisely. But because it's pretty hard to commandeer an entire highway for the purposes of research, no one has ever replicated the phenomenon in a real-world experiment.

Until now! The Japanese team got a cluster of vehicles to drive in a circle. As the New Scientist reports, here's what happened:

They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment.

That cluster spread backwards through the traffic like a shockwave. Every time a vehicle at the front of the cluster was able to escape at up to 40 km/h, another vehicle joined the back of the jam.

The shockwave jam travelled backwards through the ring of vehicles at roughly 20 km/h, which is the same as the speed of the shockwave jams observed on roads in real life, says lead researcher Yuki Sugiyama, a physicist in the department of complex systems at Nagoya University.

"Although the emerging jam in our experiment is small, its behaviour is not different from large ones on highways," he told New Scientist.

Check out the video of the experiment. Towards the end, the shockwave becomes deliciously mobile -- you can really see it moving backwards.

This also puts me in mind of William Beatty, the electrical engineer who -- while stuck in traffic in 1998 -- figured out a way to hack traffic jams and erase them. Basically, when he was stuck in a jam, he'd slow down until he had a really large amount of space between him and the car in front of him. Then he moved forward in at very slow, uniform speed, so that he no longer stopped and started. Sure enough, the wave stopped at him: Everyone behind him began driving at a uniform 35 mph. "By driving at the average speed of the traffic around me, my car had been 'eating' the traffic waves," he wrote. The only problem, of course, is that he himself was stuck traveling at the average speed of the wave in front of him, which -- at 35 mph -- is pretty pokey.

(Thanks to Greg Sewell for this one!)

Can you fix things that break in your household? Probably not. Our schools systematically stream "smart" people away from working with their hands, and I think that's a huge problem for the US, on pretty much every level -- commercially, globally, intellectually and spiritually, really.

My latest column in Wired magazine is on the stands now, and it tackles this precise problem. There's a copy of it on the Wired web site, and one archived below -- but of course you should also immediately drop whatever you're doing and buy a physical copy of Wired, then fill out the subcription card too, heh.

By the way, if you like this column then you'll love Matthew Crawford's essay "Shop Class as Soulcraft", which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 2006. I discovered it while doing my research, and wound up interviewing Crawford for my piece. He's working on an entire book about the demise of America's prowess with tools, and judging by how superb his essay was, his book will rock with hurricane force, I suspect.

How DIYers Just Might Revive American Innovation

by Clive Thompson

What a mess. I'm sitting on the floor of my apartment, surrounded by electronic parts, a cigar box, a soldering gun, and stray bits of wire. I'm trying to build my own steampunk-style clock -- hacking a couple of volt meter dials to display hours and minutes. It'll look awesome when it's done.

If it ever gets done -- I keep botching the soldering. A well-soldered joint is supposed to look like a small, shiny volcano. My attempts look like mashed insects, and they crack when I try to assemble the device.

Why am I so inept? I used to do projects like this all the time when I was a kid. But in high school, I was carefully diverted from shop class when the administration decided I was college-bound. I stopped working with my hands and have barely touched a tool since.

The decay has been rapid. Only a few decades ago, most serious adults were expected to be fluent in basic mechanics. If your car or stove or radio broke down, you opened it up and fixed it. "Magazines like Popular Mechanics in the '40s and '50s would publish projects like an automated pig-feeding trough, and they assumed you had the tools and skills to make it," says Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make magazine.

But as we migrated to an information economy, those skills began to seem as quaint as, well, mechanical clocks. America's bright future, we were assured, wasn't industrial. It was in the hands of "symbolic analysts" -- folks who sat at desks and thought for a living. In the '90s, the rise of the Internet sent this post-mechanical age into a sort of giddy overdrive. Remember Nicholas Negroponte urging everyone to "move bits, not atoms"?

But when we stop working with our hands, we cease to understand how the world really works.

You see this on a personal level. If you can't get under the hood of the gadgets you buy, you're far more liable to believe the marketing hype of the corporations that sell them. When things break, you toss them and buy new ones; you accept your role as a mere consumer. "I think it makes you more passive as an individual," says Matthew Crawford, a former motorcycle repair-shop owner (and postdoctoral fellow in cultural studies) who's writing a book on the demise of mechanical aptitude in America.

It might even screw up our brains. Neuroscientists have shown that working with your hands exercises different parts of your cerebrum than sitting and cogitating. Ever wonder why Detroit isn't producing 100-mpg cars? One reason might be that the engineers there spend all their time tinkering with CAD software -- developing design concepts in a purely virtual sense. They aren't ripping open cars to see what's possible, the way those amateur ultra-mileage Prius hackers do (some of whom, by the way, have modded their hybrids to get 100 mpg).

I'd argue there are even larger political effects of our post-atom age. Take the epidemic of corroded highways and collapsing bridges. The basic mechanics of how bridges and roadbeds work are so beyond us that we don't have any sense of urgency about the issue, and we don't put anywhere near enough pressure on our politicians to prioritize infrastructure upgrades.

The good news? A counterrevolution is afoot. The past few years have seen an uprising of DIY hobbyists, people who've realized that making stuff is not only cognitively empowering but also a lot of fun. Dougherty's Make magazine -- which publishes plans for building cardboard guitar amplifiers, board games, and VCR-powered cat feeders -- has been a surprise hit, selling 100,000 copies each issue. Weekend robot-building societies are cropping up everywhere. And I can't turn on the TV without stumbling across some extreme home-renovation show, complete with a hyperactive host and loving descriptions of how to, y'know, mix concrete. In prime time!

Notably, all this is happening outside our broken educational system. America is healing itself at the grass roots -- rediscovering the mental joy of making things and rearming itself with mechanical skills.

And, hey, I'm doing my part. After a couple dozen tries, I finally get my soldering technique back up to scratch. The clock is telling time -- and I made it.

I'm coming to this one late, but apparently some Italian scientists have spent $6 million euros building a robot that makes coffee.

You laugh. (Well, I did, anyway.) But part of the challenge of producing robots that help people, of course, is mastering some of the unexpectedly complex motions of human limbs -- and making coffee is precisely this sort of unexpectedly complex task, so it's actually kind of a cool thing to try and achieve. As the scientists note in this designboom story:

"The problem of using two hands together, the way humans do when the pick up a heavy plant pot, is a particularly sticky one. At present robots can use a single arm with reasonable accuracy and flexibility. But until now they have fallen short of the technological complexity and artificial intelligence needed for a two-handed approach.

"We want to develop a system of two-handed manipulation, equipped with sensors that make
the robot conscious of its surroundings and the people in its working space', Siciliano said.

Truthfully, having watched a video of the robot in action, ay yi yi would I not want that thing slinging volcanic McDonald's-hot coffee anywhere near me. The robot's motions are quite elegant, in their own way, but the training is still pretty spastic.

Sometimes I wonder whether robotics money ought to be spent less on making robots that replicate human activity, and more on robots that enhance human activity -- i.e. that do things of which we're completely not capable. Like blasting holes in walls, or picking up that car that's illegally parked in front of your house and crumpling it into a ball. On that note, I was particularly charmed to read yesterday on Boing Boing about the guy who created a remote-controlled vigilante robot to chase drug dealers away from his neighborhood by spraying them with water.

(Thanks to Yishay Mor for this one!)

Last week, Wired News published my latest video-game column -- and this one's about the peculiar relationships we strike up with AI characters inside games.

It's online free at the Wired site, and a copy is archived below!

Going Gunning With My Imaginary Friends
by Clive Thompson

Can a machine think?

That's the question that mathematician Alan Turing posed in 1950, when he posited his famous Turing Test. He argued that artificial intelligence could be thought of as intelligent if it passes a social test -- if it can fool a human into believing it's real.

Alas, critics agree that no machine has passed the Turing Test. We're never fooled by chatbots for very long, as the annual Loebner Prize contest proves. The thing is, we humans are awfully good at decoding social cues and detecting humanness; we can instantly tell when a preprogrammed "conversation tree" is repeating itself. That's why many philosophers say machines will never pass the Turing Test.

And here's the weird thing: In games, we know they're machines. We know our companions aren't human. But we don't care -- we still wind up treating them in oddly human ways.

Videogames, in effect, are beyond Turing. As Bart Simon, a sociologist who studies videogames at Concordia University in Montreal, put it in a recent paper: "The solo game is posthumanistically social." It's about the pleasures of hanging out with machines even when you're aware they're merely machines.

To put this epiphany in its full whoa-nelly context: If smart machines are going to become increasingly a part of our everyday lives, maybe videogames are the best place to glimpse our emotional future.

Simon first noticed the social nature of AI while playing Call of Duty. He normally avoids World War II shooters because he's really bad at them. But the squad-based strategy in Call of Duty lured him in. Because he relied on the squad to help kill enemies and keep him safe, the squad got its emotional hooks into him.

Why? Because the squad had good "reciprocity" -- its actions affected him and vice versa. If he drifted too far away from the center of battle, his squad would lose cohesion, and its members would all be more vulnerable. Forget talking to AI machines: Games force you to act in concert with them, and that's a much stronger way to generate a social sense.

Sure, the AI would often do stupid things. But even that can sometimes be beneficial -- because slightly dumb and helpless AI can often seem more emotionally "real" than stuff that's trying to be too smart. Much like the uncanny valley effect in graphics -- where cartoony characters can seem more "real" than super-detailed faces -- AI often seems most gripping when it hits a sweet spot considerably below omnipotence. If the AI is actively asking us for help, it triggers what sociologists call "interpretive charity": We feel more warmly toward it.

Perhaps most interestingly, Simon thinks that gamers actually enjoy the process of gradually understanding the logical rule sets that govern the behavior of our AI friends. "You have to suss out their algorithm," he says. We learn what makes them artificial, but we also understand them more completely -- it's the machine-age version of psychology.

Granted, Simon doesn't think all games achieve this lovely state of robot-human togetherness. "The AI has to be something that's halfway between being a person you react to, and a tool that you use," he says. When he plays sports games, his AI teammates don't trigger any emotional connection in him. They feel like tools -- the equivalent of weapons. (And he doesn't really think his theory applies to mere "sidekicks" -- characters whose actions are the same no matter what you do. They're more like tools, too.)

I think Simon's right. And it's not just about virtual comrades; well-crafted enemies evoke the same response. When I face down the bosses in No More Heroes, I can feel my curiously two-sided reactions. On the one hand, I'm treating them as machines -- coolly assessing the clockwork mechanisms of their attacks, the better to defeat them. On the other hand, I get angry or annoyed at them; I regard each of them as having a personality, even when the personality is just a bunch of rules.

Either way, I think Simon's onto something. We're beyond Turing now, and into much stranger territory.

So maybe it's time to abandon the question, "Can a machine think?"

Here's a better one: Can a machine play?

(A tip of the hat to the excellent Game Studies Download by Jane McGonigal, Ian Bogost and Mia Consalvo, which first tipped me off to Bart Simon's work.)

For hundreds of years, art critics have mused over why the Mona Lisa's smile seems so mysterious. Now the Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone has a fascinating answer: It's because Da Vinci painted her face in colors that play tricks on the eye.

Livingstone's work has long examined the way that different cells in the visual system process different types of information -- such as form, color, depth and movement. When she analyzed the Mona Lisa, she found that Da Vinci painted her smile almost completely in low spatial frequencies, and these are best picked up in your peripheral vision. The result, as she notes on her web site, is a nifty illusion:

These three images -- [pictured above!] -- show her face filtered to show selectively lowest (left) low (middle) and high (right) spatial frequencies.

So when you look at her eyes or the background, you see a smile like the one on the left, or in the middle, and you think she is smiling. But when you look directly at her mouth, it looks more like the panel on the right, and her smile seems to vanish. The fact that the degree of her smile varies so much with gaze angle makes her expression dynamic, and the fact that her smile vanishes when you look directly at it, makes it seem elusive.

It's somewhat like the way rods in the eye are more numerous in the periphery of our retinas -- so the best way to see a faint star in the night sky is to look slightly to the side of it. Either way, this is really cool science.

Cooler than the actual Mona Lisa, really. When I visited the painting a few year ago, I found the experience incredibly underwhelming, because the painting is so ferociously guarded by security devices: A velvet rope preventing you from coming closer than 20 feet, storm troopers with tasers, and, worst of all, a plastic box that produces reflections of light so garish that they destroy any effect Da Vinci was trying to make. Seriously -- I get a more moving artistic experience when I look at a low-rez gif of the painting on Flickr. Walter Benjamin would be rolling in his grave.

(Thanks to David Dobbs for this one!)

For years, I've worked in isolation -- either sitting alone in my office, or, recently, sitting in a rented cubicle in New York. I haven't had a job that required me to work physically alongside coworkers since 1998.

And maybe that's been a good thing for my productivity -- because according to a new study, when you can see other workers performing different tasks out the corner of your eye, it slows you down. Tim Welsh, a kinesiologist at the University of Calgary, organized a nifty experiment in which he asked a subject to perform a task on a computer, alongside a partner performing a different computer task. Then he'd get the subject to perform the task while his partner went off to another room.

The result? When subjects were working alongside companions, they worked more slowly. Welsh theorizes that when we watch someone else performing a task, it triggers our mirror neurons, and mentally we begin modelling the task ourselves. If we're simultaneously trying to complete our own, different task, the signals get crossed -- and we slow down.

Welsh reports his results -- "Seeing vs. believing: Is believing sufficient to activate the processes of response co-representation?" -- in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of Human Movement Science, but, alas, it's behind a paywall.

But as he concludes in this press release:

"In a situation where speed and accuracy in performing a certain task are important, I think an argument could be made for a work setting in which people work in isolation -- or at least with people who doing very similar tasks," he said. "That will remove the involuntary modeling of another's behaviour, potentially improving speed and likely accuracy."

If his conclusions hold water, they'd have some interesting implications for labor-resource management. For one thing, it might be that private offices would sufficiently improve the productivity of a corporation that it would offset the cost of giving employees private offices.

(Photo courtesy nycbone's Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license!)

This is beyond delightful! The LaRouche PAC report -- "The Noosphere vs. The Blogosphere: Is The Devil in Your Laptop?" -- refers to me as a "degenerate writer", "infantile", and a "disgruntled family man".

Apparently the political action committee of Lydon Larouche -- an economist, political activist, and prolific conspiracy theorist -- decided to fund a report on various sourges of digital life, including blogs, Wikipedia, and video games. (PDF copy here.) As you might imagine, the section on video games argues that video games are training kids to become such bloodthirsty psychopaths -- so thoroughly desensitized to death -- that they are inexorably drawn to suicide.

Their proof? My video game columns at Wired News! The report writers stitch together horrified reactions to my columns on Halo suicide bombings and the infamous Super Columbine Massacre RPG, in a bouquet of prose so garishly purple it reads as if it had been written by a Victorian sexual anthropologist. I don't even know where to start quoting; it's all so spectacularly wonderful! So I'll just excerpt the segment below at length, and let it speak for itself.

I should point out that their research is so dreadful that the errors begin in the header opening up their section on me, where they report that I live in "Worcestershire, U.K." I also love that picture, which -- in addition to clearly depicting my homicidal/suicidal degeneracy and familial dissatisfaction -- they appear to have stolen, without attribution, from the web site of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships.

This is the best thing I've read in, like, seven years or something. And who knows? Given that just yesterday I blogged about the aesthetic pleasure of dying in Halo 3, maybe they're right!

Forthwith:

The Case of Wired Magazine Writer Clive Thompson, 38 years old Worcestershire, U.K., Nov. 5, 2007

On Nov. 5, 2007, degenerate writer Clive Thompson supplied clinical evidence to support the charge by Lyndon LaRouche that, the intended end-game of computer games is to drive the player to suicide. In addition, he provided clinical evidence that it is an obvious intention of certain institutions to popularize this cult of death, in the United States and Western Europe. In his enraged screed, titled, "Suicide Makes Sick Sense After Playing Halo 3," Thompson wrote, "I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mindset of a terrorist. That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting -- with great success -- terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing." The infantile Thompson whines that he "sucks" at Halo 3, played on Bill Gates's Xbox live, because he has a wife, and kid, and therefore only gets "maybe an hour with Halo on a good day."

"For me," the disgruntled family man continued, "dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me. Or to put it another way: The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes -- haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away -- just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3." On the subject of suicide, Thompson concludes, that "something about playing the game gave me an 'aha' moment that I'd never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act."

In another Wired magazine article, by the same Thompson, titled "I, Columbine Killer," he revels in the game "Columbine Massacre RPG," a game created to simulate the Columbine massacre! He writes, "I barrel into the Columbine High School cafeteria, pull down the fire alarm, and the kids erupt into chaos. Then I pull out my Savage-Springfield 12-gauge pump-action, which I've sawed off to 26 inches for maximum lethality. A jock stumbles across my path: With one blast, he lies dead on the floor. 'This is what we've always wanted to do!' hollers my fellow killer, Dylan Klebold. 'This is awesome!"'

This game, as can be observed, places the player in the shoes of satanic gamers' "folk heroes" Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. What's the end of the game? Thompson can't wait to tell you: "As the school shootings wind up, your avatar commits suicide in the library alongside Harris.

The game cuts to real-life photographs of the killers' dead bodies, taken from security cameras in the schools."[9]

Two years ago, I wrote a column for Wired News called "The Joy of Sucking" -- about the subtle pleasures of totally screwing up in a video game. It wasn't just pulling that out of my hat. It was based on a study by Niklas Ravaja at MIND Labs, who wired up a bunch of gamers with biosensors and found that they gave off strong pleasure signals whenever they died in the game Super Monkey Ball.

Well, Ravaja is at it again -- and this time he checked for players' reactions to killing others, and dying, in a first-person shooter. The results? Apparently the act of killing other people causes enormous strain on us; however, we actually enjoy getting shot to death. As Brandon Erickson summarizes it:

"... instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent elicited anxiety, anger, or both." In addition, "death of the player's own character...appear[s] to increase some aspects of positive emotion." This latter finding the authors believe may result from the temporary "relief from engagement" brought about by character death.

That latter argument makes sense to me. When I'm in a really intense firefight in a game, I'm a total wreck, emotionally. Sure, it feels good to vanquish my foes, but sometimes it's just nice to get a break, and dying is -- among, uh, other things -- certainly a break.

Part of this has to do with the intriguing aesthetic question of precisely how the first-person-shooter represents the player after the moment of death. Multiplayer Halo online offers my personal favorite death vignettes. The instant you die, the game shifts to a third-person camera perspective and follows your body as it slumps to the ground or, more often, goes pinwheeling through the air.

This sudden switch in camera angle -- from first person to third person -- is, in essence, a classic out-of-body experience, of exactly the sort people describe in near-death experiences. And much like real-life near-death experiences, it tends to suffuse me with a curiously zen-like feeling. The emotional narrative goes like this: During the gameplay, I'll be desperately fighting for my life, ducking behind pillars, firing spastically, and synaesthetically wincing each time I take gunfire. Just when I think I'm safe, I'll turn a corner, and whoa -- find myself face-to-face with another opponent who slams me with a surprise punch, killing me instantly. The final attack will give me one final jolt of amygladaic shock, and then ...

... hey, I'm dead, and my body is floating through the air, and I'm watching myself just sort of tumble around lazily, like a ragdoll.

It's amazingly peaceful.

(Thanks to Brandon for this one!)

Linda Stone, one of my all-time favorite thinkers on the impact of technology on human life, has written a superb piece about what she's termed "email apnea" -- the phenomenon of holding your breath while you check and write email.

Stone noticed recently that whenever she sat down to check email, she began, quite unconciously, to hold her breath. Then she noticed that other people were doing it, too:

I observed others on computers and BlackBerries: in their offices, their homes, at cafes. The vast majority of people held their breath, or breathed very shallowly, especially when responding to email. I watched people on cell phones, talking and walking, and noticed that most were mouth-breathing and hyperventilating. Consider also, that for many, posture while seated at a computer can contribute to restricted breathing.

As Stone points out, holding your breath a lot wreaks havoc in your body's normal balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitric oxide. Among other things, it freaks you out by constantly triggering your fight-or-flight instinct; it also triggers the liver to "dump glucose and cholesterol into our blood, our heart rate to increase, our sense of satiety to be compromised, and our bodies to anticipate and resource for the physical activity that, historically, accompanied a physical fight or flight response." Stone hypothesizes that this may be a partial cause of today's increasing obesity rates.

Yet Stone doesn't offer an answer to what for me is the most interesting question: Why are we holding our breath when we do email?

It's so metaphorically rich I can barely begin to tease out the implications. Do we feel somehow threatened while doing email -- hence our unconscious trip into fight-or-flight mode? Or do we feel as though we're literally diving into some socially or technologically unbreathable environment, as if jumping underwater? Or is it because we're preparing to vocalize -- i.e. that email triggers the mental rhythms of conversation and self-presentation, so we're taking a deep breath so we can "talk" uninterrupted for 20 seconds or so? By which I mean, is this a symptom of some form of performance anxiety?

Here's an interesting parallel. I'm a guitar player, and in my teens I learned a trick that some jazz players employ: They use breathing to keep from dithering on too long in their solos. Every time they start a new phrase in the solo, they take a breath, then exhale as they play; when their breath is gone they stop the flurry of notes. This prevents them from producing overly-long phrases of notes, which can otherwise tire out their audience.

The thing is, while this was described to me as a conscious technique, I've also noticed that lots of guitar players do the same thing unconsciously: Holding their breath seems to help them measure out certain emotional or logistical aspects of a guitar solo. And so I wonder, does the role of breathing in this sort of guitar playing shed any light on what we're doing while we're holding our breath typing email? They're not entirely dissimilar activities. They're both digital -- in the original, literal sense of performed with our fingers -- and they're both involved with self-expression. Indeed, when I scrutinize my feelings a bit while doing email at my laptop, it does feel slightly like being on stage: I'm crafting something that's going out to an audience.

This is all off the top of my head, and probably wrong -- but hopefully it's at least wrong in an interesting way. And hopefully Stone will write more on this, because I'd love to know her thoughts on the question! Why are we holding our breath while doing email?

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)

This is just about the oddest bit of research I've recently come across: Apparently C-sections might cause eczema in babies.

No one fully knows what causes eczema, of course. But immunologists have for years been suspecting that eczema is linked, in some way, to autoimmune disorders. And they've also been learning that if you want to have a good immune system, you need to have a healthy balance of intestinal bacteria.

New evidence supporting this argument comes in the latest Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, which reports on a fascinating study by some scientists out of Lund University in Sweden. The reseachers studied the feces of babies one week after birth to get a sense of how well-balanced the bacteria in their gut were. They found that newborn infants who had imbalanced intestinal bacteria often developed atopical eczema by the age of 18 months.

But here's the interesting thing: How do newborn infants wind up with bacterial imbalances? Because of their mothers. During vaginal delivery, the children are pick up a lot of lactobacilli -- lactic acid bacteria -- from their mother's vagina. Lactobacilli are crucial for maintaining a healthy balance of intestinal flora. If the mother has any bacterial imbalances, the babies won't pick up enough lactobacilli, as this press release notes:

"With a vaginal delivery the child will come into close contact with the mother's bacteria. If the mother has a good flora of bacteria, the contact is an important help for the child to be able to be colonized by bacteria in the proper way. It can be assumed that certain hygiene measures, such as antibiotics given in some countries in connection with deliveries, in normal cases may have a deleterious effect, since the mother then is at risk to get a skewed bacteria flora, which she passes on to the child," Goran Molin reasons.

And as Molin goes on to point out, in the US today, one third of all women have bacterial vaginosis -- a condition in which bacteria other than lactobacilli dominate.

What Molin doesn't talk about, but which is equally interesting, is the drastic increase in the use of ceasarean-section delivery in the last few decades. If there's no vaginal delivery, then there's presumably no way to pass on a healthy dose of lactobacilli, either.

This made me wonder about myself, actually. I developed atopical eczema in my late teens, and it's slowly grown more annoying over the years; and I was born by C-section. Ditto for the younger of my two older sisters. My eldest sister wasn't born via C-section and she has no eczema. A vanishingly small and subjective sample, of course, but it fits the pattern the Swedish guys would predict.

Given the roaring debate around C-sections in this country, I'm surprised I haven't heard much about this study. Though that's probably because it doesn't exactly lead to particularly palatable Thanksgiving conversations, eh? Hey mom: What was the bacterial count in your vagina when I was born? Oh boy.

Here's a lovely bit of evolutionary trivia: Apparently our hiccups are caused because we're descended from fish.

That's the argument that Neil Shubin, head of the University of Chicago's anatomy school, makes in his new book Your Inner Fish. As a review of the book notes:

Spasms in our diaphragms, hiccups are triggered by electric signals generated in the brain stem. Amphibian brain stems emit similar signals, which control the regular motion of their gills. Our brain stems, inherited from amphibian ancestors, still spurt out odd signals producing hiccups that are, according to Shubin, essentially the same phenomenon as gill breathing.

Love it. Shubin's book is a nifty and subtle rebuttal to opponents of evolution, since he documents the often kooky ways in which DNA from far-back ancestors wound up inside us: "Fossil amphibian fins that demonstrate a structural affinity with human hands; teeth, first discovered in ancient jawless fish, that evolved into modern mammary and sweat glands; and genes, which control our eyes and ears, that correspond directly to DNA found in primitive jellyfish." I think I'm going to buy a copy tomorrow.

(Photo courtesy ich_bin_ein_elmo's Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license!)