Posts Tagged ‘emotion’
“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived”*…
The most under-rated of our senses is also the least understood. But as Yasemin Saplakoglu reports, a better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that enter your nose and the individual neurons that translate them into perception in your brain…
… Smell is deeply tied with the emotion and memory centers of our brain. Lavender perfume might evoke memories of a close friend. A waft of cheap vodka, a relic of college days, might make you grimace. The smell of a certain laundry detergent, the same one your grandparents used, might bring tears to your eyes.
Smell is also our most ancient sense, tracing back billions of years to the first chemical-sensing cells. But scientists know little about it compared to other senses — vision and hearing in particular. That’s in part because smell has not been deemed critical to our survival; humans have been wrongly considered “bad smellers” for more than a century. It’s also not easy to study.
“It’s a highly dimensional sense,” said Valentina Parma, an olfactory researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “We don’t know exactly how chemicals translate to perception.” But scientists are making progress toward systematically characterizing and quantifying what it means to smell by breaking the process down to its most fundamental elements — from the odor molecules that enter your nose to the individual neurons that process them in the brain.
Several new databases, including one recently published in the journal Scientific Data, are attempting to establish a shared scientific language for the perception of molecular scents — what individual molecules “smell like” to us. And on the other end of the pathway, researchers recently published a study in Nature describing how those scent molecules are translated into a neural language that triggers emotions and memories.
Together, these efforts are painting a richer picture of our strongest memory-teleportation device. This higher-resolution look is challenging the long-held assumption that smell is our least important sense…
[Saplakoglu recounts the history of our understanding of smell; explains the current science on how millions of molecules, often in complex bouquets, enter the nose and are processed by neurons to generate a sense of smell that’s deeply emotional and personal; and explores the ways in which it’s intstrumental in attraction, survival, and memory…]
… Because our sense of smell can be largely subliminal, in surveys many people, given the choice of losing one sense, choose olfaction. But “every day, I experience people sitting in my office and talking about how they are disconnected to the world,” [Thomas] Hummel said. They can’t smell their children or spouses anymore. They cannot detect bad-smelling food or dangerous smoke. They no longer have access to certain memories.
“I know the memory is there, but I don’t have the key to open [it] anymore,” Hummel said. “Life becomes a much more insecure place without a sense of smell in many ways, but you only realize it when it’s gone.”…
Fascinating: “How Smell Guides Our Inner World,” from @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* Helen Keller
###
As we get to know the nose, we might celebrate the avatar of affecting aromas: today is National Cheese Pizza Day.
“O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!”*…
The estimable Steven Johnson suggests that the creation of Disney’s masterpiece, Snow White, gives us a preview of what may be coming with AI algorithms sophisticated enough to pass for sentient beings…
… You can make the argument that the single most dramatic acceleration point in the history of illusion occurred between the years of 1928 and 1937, the years between the release of Steamboat Willie [here], Disney’s breakthrough sound cartoon introducing Mickey Mouse, and the completion of his masterpiece, Snow White, the first long-form animated film in history [here— actually the first full-length animated feature produced in the U.S; the first produced anywhere in color]. It is hard to think of another stretch where the formal possibilities of an artistic medium expanded in such a dramatic fashion, in such a short amount of time.
[There follows an fascinating history of the Disney Studios technical innovations that made Snow White possible, and an account of the film;’s remarkable premiere…]
In just nine years, Disney and his team had transformed a quaint illusion—the dancing mouse is whistling!—into an expressive form so vivid and realistic that it could bring people to tears. Disney and his team had created the ultimate illusion: fictional characters created by hand, etched onto celluloid, and projected at twenty-four frames per second, that were somehow so believably human that it was almost impossible not to feel empathy for them.
Those weeping spectators at the Snow White premiere signaled a fundamental change in the relationship between human beings and the illusions concocted to amuse them. Complexity theorists have a term for this kind of change in physical systems: phase transitions. Alter one property of a system—lowering the temperature of a cloud of steam, for instance—and for a while the changes are linear: the steam gets steadily cooler. But then, at a certain threshold point, a fundamental shift happens: below 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the gas becomes liquid water. That moment marks the phase transition: not just cooler steam, but something altogether different.
…
It is possible—maybe even likely—that a further twist awaits us. When Charles Babbage encountered an automaton of a ballerina as a child in the early 1800s, the “irresistible eyes” of the mechanism convinced him that there was something lifelike in the machine. Those robotic facial expressions would seem laughable to a modern viewer, but animatronics has made a great deal of progress since then. There may well be a comparable threshold in simulated emotion—via robotics or digital animation, or even the text chat of an AI like LaMDA—that makes it near impossible for humans not to form emotional bonds with a simulated being. We knew the dwarfs in Snow White were not real, but we couldn’t keep ourselves from weeping for their lost princess in sympathy with them. Imagine a world populated by machines or digital simulations that fill our lives with comparable illusion, only this time the virtual beings are not following a storyboard sketched out in Disney’s studios, but instead responding to the twists and turns and unmet emotional needs of our own lives. (The brilliant Spike Jonze film Her imagined this scenario using only a voice.) There is likely to be the equivalent of a Turing Test for artificial emotional intelligence: a machine real enough to elicit an emotional attachment. It may well be that the first simulated intelligence to trigger that connection will be some kind of voice-only assistant, a descendant of software like Alexa or Siri—only these assistants will have such fluid conversational skills and growing knowledge of our own individual needs and habits that we will find ourselves compelled to think of them as more than machines, just as we were compelled to think of those first movie stars as more than just flickering lights on a fabric screen. Once we pass that threshold, a bizarre new world may open up, a world where our lives are accompanied by simulated friends…
Are we in for a phase-shift in our understanding of companionship? “Natural Magic,” from @stevenbjohnson, adapted from his book Wonderland: How Play Made The Modern World.
And for a different, but aposite perspective, from the ever-illuminating L. M. Sacasas (@LMSacasas), see “LaMDA, Lemoine, and the Allures of Digital Re-enchantment.”
* Shakespeare, The Tempest
###
As we rethink relationships, we might recall that it was on this date in 2007 that the original iPhone was introduced. Generally downplayed by traditional technology pundits after its announcement six months earlier, the iPhone was greeted by long lines of buyers around the country on that first day. Quickly becoming a phenomenon, one million iPhones were sold in only 74 days. Since those early days, the ensuing iPhone models have continued to set sales records and have radically changed not only the smartphone and technology industries, but the world in which they operate as well.
“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic”*…
Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate has issued proceedings, complaining that Enola Holmes, a recently released film about Sherlock Holmes’ sister, portrays the great detective as too emotional.
Sherlock Holmes was famously suspicious of emotions. “‘[L]ove is an emotional thing,’ he icily observed, ‘and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things’.” “I am a brain’, he told Watson. ‘The rest of me is a mere appendix’.”
I can imagine that many professional scientists and philosophers would feel affronted if they were accused of being emotional animals. Holmes is a model for them. He’s rigorous, empirical, and relies on induction.
But here’s the thing. He’s not actually very good. Mere brains might be good at anticipating the behaviour of mere brains, but they’re not good for much else. In particular Holmes is not a patch on his rival, Chesterton’s Father Brown, a Roman Catholic priest. Gramsci writes that Brown “totally defeats Sherlock Holmes, makes him look like a pretentious little boy, shows up his narrowness and pettiness.” Brown is faster, more efficient, and, for the criminal, deadlier. This is because, not despite, his use of his emotions.
…
In science it is rather more important to find out the right answer than to identify an answer that will fit one’s currently ruling paradigm. In moral philosophy it is rather more important to find the morally correct course than to identify one that doesn’t outrage the zeitgeist. Father Brown can help. Sherlock Holmes can’t.
“Lessons for Philosophers and Scientists from Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown“
For an example, see “Peirce on Abduction.”
[Image above: source]
* G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown
###
As we get in touch with our feelings, we might spare a thought for Humphrey DeForest Bogart; he died on this date in 1957. An actor whose career began in the theater, his motion picture roles made him a cultural icon; in 1999, the American Film Institute selected Bogart as the greatest male star of classic American cinema. While there can certainly be legitimate debate as to his most memorable role, his turns as a detective (Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon; Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep) are certainly among the contenders.
“When angry, count four. When very angry, swear”*…
Anger, like other emotions, has a history.
It is not merely that the causes of anger may change, or attitudes toward its expression. The nature of the emotion itself may alter from one society to another. In classical antiquity, for example, anger was variously viewed as proper to a free citizen (an incapacity to feel anger was regarded as slavish); as an irrational, savage passion that should be extirpated entirely, and especially dangerous when joined to power; as justifiable in a ruler, on the model of God’s righteous anger in the Bible; and as blasphemously ascribed to God, who is beyond all human emotions.
Profound social and cultural changes—the transition from small city-states to the vast reach of the Roman Empire, the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome—lay behind these shifting views, but all the positions had their defenders and were fiercely debated. This rich heritage offers a wealth of insights into the nature of anger, as well as evidence of its social nature; it is not just a matter of biology….
The history of anger– indeed, the very fact that it has a history– sheds light on the elevated emotional climate of today: “Repertoires of Rage.”
* Mark Twain
###
As we wrestle with wrath, we might recall that in 1752 in Britain and throughout the British Empire (which included the American colonies) yesterday was September 2. The “jump” was occasioned by a switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, as a product of which almost all of “western civilization” was then on Pope Gregory’s time; Sweden (and Finland) switched the following year.
“Outward show is a wonderful perverter of the reason”*…
Humans have long hungered for a short-hand to help in understanding and managing other humans. From phrenology to the Myers-Briggs Test, we’ve tried dozens of short-cuts… and tended to find that at best they weren’t actually very helpful; at worst, they were reinforcing of stereotypes that were inaccurate, and so led to results that were unfair and ineffective. Still, the quest continues– these days powered by artificial intelligence. What could go wrong?…
Could a program detect potential terrorists by reading their facial expressions and behavior? This was the hypothesis put to the test by the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in 2003, as it began testing a new surveillance program called the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques program, or Spot for short.
While developing the program, they consulted Paul Ekman, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco. Decades earlier, Ekman had developed a method to identify minute facial expressions and map them on to corresponding emotions. This method was used to train “behavior detection officers” to scan faces for signs of deception.
But when the program was rolled out in 2007, it was beset with problems. Officers were referring passengers for interrogation more or less at random, and the small number of arrests that came about were on charges unrelated to terrorism. Even more concerning was the fact that the program was allegedly used to justify racial profiling.
Ekman tried to distance himself from Spot, claiming his method was being misapplied. But others suggested that the program’s failure was due to an outdated scientific theory that underpinned Ekman’s method; namely, that emotions can be deduced objectively through analysis of the face.
In recent years, technology companies have started using Ekman’s method to train algorithms to detect emotion from facial expressions. Some developers claim that automatic emotion detection systems will not only be better than humans at discovering true emotions by analyzing the face, but that these algorithms will become attuned to our innermost feelings, vastly improving interaction with our devices.
But many experts studying the science of emotion are concerned that these algorithms will fail once again, making high-stakes decisions about our lives based on faulty science…
“Emotion detection” has grown from a research project to a $20bn industry; learn more about why that’s a cause for concern: “Don’t look now: why you should be worried about machines reading your emotions.”
Meditations
###
As we insist on the individual, we might recall that it was on this date in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN for developing a new way of linking and sharing information over the Internet.
It was the first time Berners-Lee proposed a system that would ultimately become the World Wide Web; but his proposal was basically a relatively vague request to research the details and feasibility of such a system. He later submitted a proposal on November 12, 1990 that much more directly detailed the actual implementation of the World Wide Web.
You must be logged in to post a comment.