Tag Archives: New Scientist

“Our trained mediums are standing by”

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Watching Mali Elfman’s Next Exit for New Scientist, 22 February 2023

From out of nowhere, a chink of light appears. With painful slowness, the light grows stronger: we are inching towards a half-open door. Beyond the door, everything seems normal. A little boy is playing a game of pretend. At least, that’s what we think. Soon enough, we learn what’s really going on: the boy is playing cards with his dead father.

Nothing else in Mali Elfman’s debut feature lives up to this unsettling opening sequence (though there’s a sight gag — two would-be suicides renting a car from Charon Vehicle Rental — that comes close).

Rahul Kohli and Katie Parker — actors who turn up regularly in work by horror director Mike Flanagan — play Teddy and Rose, driving across the US to an appointment with Dr Stevensen (Karen Gillan) who has promised them a clinically managed euthanasia. Teddy, a Londoner, has spent ten years trying and failing to make it in the United States, and figures that being turned into a pioneer ghost (his transition from life to death monitored with all the latest gear) will at least give his life some meaning. Rose is weighed down with guilty secrets, and just wants to be done with it all.

Mind you, even Rose is not as nihilistic as the man who, early on in the film, wonders in front of their hire car, and under their wheels, with a note pinned to his chest: “Thanks for the help”.

Suicides and homicides are common now, as Heaven beckons (or whatever passes as Heaven), and our hardscrabble lives on this ordinary Earth lose their preciousness and meaning. “Our trained mediums are standing by,” a radio advert announces, offering contact with the newly visible dead. This is a world lost to itself, snared by fantasies of the hereafter.

But what do these newly discovered ghosts really want, as they stream into our world through every available screen? Not every haunting is as touching as that of the boy and his dead parent. Rose guzzles bourbon by the bottle so as not to see her mother watching her from inside the motel pay-per-view. A friendly cop, caught up in a drinking game, confesses to a thoughtless on-duty prank that killed a family of five; not surprising then, that he thinks “they’re here to hurt us.” Karma, a hitchhiker Teddy and Rose pick up out in the desert, has her own doubts: ”Just because we can see them,” she points out, “doesn’t mean we understand them”.

It’s at this point, about half way into the movie, that the viewer’s heart, if it does not immediately sink, certainly begins to tip: surely this film has bitten off way more than it can possibly chew?

Teddy admits that what he really wants out of his own managed death is for the news to get back to his absentee father: “I’d rather kill myself than live the life you gave me.” This is not a bad line, but what follows is horrific, and not in any intended way: a stage-managed confrontation with Teddy’s dad; an impromptu psychodynamic therapy session in a filling station car lot. The script rights itself, but having lost all confidence after this compound pratfall, it delivers, in the end, only a low-key retread of Joel Schumacher’s 1990 flick Flatliners. (Judgement waits for us all; struggle gives life its meaning; you know the rest.)

Next Exit is a promising film, but not a good film. It warps the world into a very strange shape, to ask some valid — indeed, pressing — questions about where the value of life resides. But it loses its way. If the writing had exhibited half as much commitment as the acting, we might have had a hit on our hands.

“The solutions are not even in the works”

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Reading Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud for New Scientist, 1 February 2023.

“Fifty thousand?”

Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks from the US National Security Agency had triggered a global debate around state surveillance — and even he couldn’t quite believe the scale of the story as it was described to him in the summer of 2021.

Whistle-blowers had handed French investigative journalists Laurent Richard and and Sandrine Rigaud a list of 50,000 phone numbers. These belonged to people flagged for attack by a cybersurveillance software package called Pegasus.

The journalistic investigation that followed is the subject of this non-fiction thriller: a must-read for anyone remotely interested in cryptography and communications, and a dreadful warning for the rest of us. “Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons — against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse — is a dystopian future we really are careening toward,” the authors warn, “if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it.”

Pegasus offers a fascinating insight into how journalism has evolved to tackle a hyper-connected world. Eye witnesses and whistle-blowers have better access than ever before to sympathetic campaigning journalists from all over the world. But of course, this advantage is shared with the very governments and corporations and organised crime networks that want to silence them.

To drag Pegasus into the light, Laurent’s Forbidden Stories consortium choreographed the activities of more than eighty investigative journalists from seventeen media organisations across four continents and eight languages.

The consortium got together in March 2021 knowing full well that they would have to conclude their investigation by June, by which time Pegasus’ creators at the Israeli company NSO were bound to twig that their brainchild was being hacked.

The bigger the names on that phone list, the harder it would be to keep any investigation under wraps. Early on the name of Jorge Carrasco cropped up: the lead partner in Forbidden Stories’ massive cross-border collaboration to finish the investigations of murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martínez. Then things just got silly: a son of Turkish president Recep Erdogan turned up; and then the names of half the French cabinet. Also the cell number for Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. Laurent Richard recalls, “Macron was the name that made me realise how truly dangerous it was to have access to this list.”

In a pulse-accelerating account that’s never afraid to dip into well-crafted technical detail, the authors explain how Pegasus gains free rein on a mobile device, without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. Needless to say it evolved out of software designed to serve baffled consumers waiting in long queues on tech support call lines. Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, who would go on to found NSO and create Pegasus, cut their teeth developing programmes that allowed support technicians to take charge of the caller’s phone.

It was not long before a European intelligence service came calling. Sold and maintained for more than sixty clients in more than forty countries, Pegasus gave security services an edge over terrorists, criminal gangs and paedophiles — and also, as it’s turned out, over whistleblowers, campaigners, political opponents, journalists, and at least one Emirati princess trying to get custody of her children. This book is not a diatribe against the necessary (or at any rate ubiquitous) business of government surveillance and espionage. It is about how, in the contest between ordinary people and the powerful, software is tilting the field wildly in the latter’s favour.

The international journalistic collaboration that was the Pegasus Project sparked the biggest global surveillance scandal since Snowden; it’s led to a European Parliament inquiry into government spyware, legal action from major technology companies, government sanctions against the NSO Group and countless individual legal complaints. But the authors spend little time sitting in their laurels. Pegasus may be dead, but demand for a successor is only growing. In the gap left by NSO, certain governments are making offers to certain tech companies that add zeroes to the fees NSO enjoyed. Nor do the authors expect much to come out of the public debate that has followed their investigation: “The issues… might have been raised,” they concede, “but the solutions are not even in the works.”

We’ve learned a valuable lesson today

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Watching M3gan, directed by Gerard Johnstone, for New Scientist, 25 January 2023

Having done something unspeakable to a school bully’s ear, chased him through the forest like a wolf, and driven him under the wheels of a passing car, M3gan, the world’s first “Model 3 Generative Android”, returns to comfort Cady, its inventor’s niece. “We’ve learned a valuable lesson today,” she whispers.

So has the audience, between all their squealing and cheering. Before you ask a learning machine to do something for you, it helps if you know what that thing actually is.

M3gan has been tasked by its inventor Gemma (Allison Williams, in her second Blumfield-produced movie since the company’s 2017 smash Get Out) with looking after her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), recently orphaned when her parents — arguing over who should police her screen time — drove them all under a snow truck.

M3gan is told to protect Cady from physical and emotional harm. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Gemma works for toy company Funki, whose CEO David (comedian Ronny Chieng) is looking for a way — any way — to “kick Hasbro right in the d—.” In a rush to succeed, Gemma ends up creating a care robot that (to paraphrase Terminator) absolutely will not stop caring. M3gan takes very personally indeed the ordinary knocks that life dishes out to a kid.

The robot — a low-budget concoction of masks and CGI, performed by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis — is an uncanny glory. But the signature quality of Blumfield’s films is not so much their skill with low budgets, as the company’s willingness to invest time and money on scripts. In developing M3gan, James Wan (who directed the 2004 horror film Saw) and Akela Cooper (whose first-draft screenplay was, by her own admission, “way gorier”) discovered in the end that there was more currency in mischief than in mayhem. This is the most sheerly gleeful horror movie since The Lost Boys.

Caring for a child involves more than distracting them. Alas M3gan, evolving from Funki’s “Purrfect Petz” (fuzzballs that quote Wikipedia while evacuating plastic pellets from their bowels) cannot possibly understand this distinction.

The point of parenting is to manage your own failure, leaving behind a child capable of handling the world on their own. M3gan, on the contrary, has absolutely no intention of letting Cady grow up. As far as M3gan is concerned, experience is the enemy.

In this war against the world M3gan transforms, naturally enough, into a hyperarticulated killing machine (and the audience cheers: this is a film built on anticipation, not surprise).

M3gan’s charge, poor orphaned Cady, is a far more frightening creation: a bundle of hurt and horror afforded no real guidance, adrift without explanations in a world where (let’s face it) everything will eventually die and everything will eventually go wrong. The sight of a screaming nine-year-old Cady slapping her well-intentioned but workaholic aunt across the face is infinitely more disturbing than any scene involving M3gan.

“Robotic companionship may seem a sweet deal,” wrote the social scientist Sherry Turkle back in 2011, “but it consigns us to a closed world — the loveable as safe and made to measure.”

Cady, born into a world of fatuous care robots, eventually learns that the only way to get through life is to grow up.

But the real lesson here is for parents. The robot exists to do what we can imagine doing, but would rather not do. And that’s fine, except that it assumes that we always know what’s in our own best interests.

I remember in 2014, at a conference on human-machine interaction, I watched a a video starring Nao, a charming “educational robot”. It took a while before someone in the audience (not me, to my shame) spotted the film’s obvious flaw: how come it shows a mother sweating away in the kitchen while a robot is enjoying quality time with her child?

Never say die

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Reading Remnants of Ancient Life by Dale Greenwalt for New Scientist, 11 January 2023

What is a fossil made of? Mineralised rocky fossils are what spring to mind at a first mention of the word, but the preserved fauna of the burgess shale are pure carbon, a kind of proto-coal. Then there are those tantalising cretaceous insects preserved in amber.

Whatever they are made of, fossils contain treasures. The first really good microscopic study of (mineralised) dinosaur bone, revealing its internal structure, was written up in 1850 by the British palaeontologist Gideon Mantell.

Still, classifying fossil organisms on the basis of their shape and their location seemed to be virtually the only weapon in the paleobiologist’s arsenal — until 1993. That was the year Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park famously captured the excitement of a field in turmoil, as ancient pigments, proteins, and DNA were being detected (not too reliably at first) in all manner of fossil substrates, including rock.

Jurassic Park’s blood-sucking insects fossilised in amber were a bust. Though seemingly perfectly preserved on the outside, they turned out to be hollow.

Mind you, the author of Remnants (a dull title for this vivid and gripping book) has himself has managed to get traces of ancient haemoglobin out of the bloated stomach of a fossilised mosquito — so never say die.

Greenwalt, who spends eleven months of every year “buried deep in the bowels of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC,” has brought to the surface a riveting account of a field achieving insights quite as revolutionary as any conjectured by Crichton. The finds are extraordinary enough: a cholesterol-like molecule in a 380-million-year-old crustacean; chitin from the exoskeleton of a fossil from the 505-million-year-old burgess shale. Even more extraordinary are the inferences we can then draw about the physiology, behaviour, and evolution of these extinct organisms. Even from traces that are smeared, fragmented, degraded, and condensed, even from cyclized and polymerized materials, valuable insights can be drawn. It is even possible to calculate and construct putative “ancestral proteins” and from their study, conclude that Earth’s life had its origins at the mouths of deep ocean vents!

The story of biomolecules in palaeontology has its salutary side. A generation of brilliant innovators have had to calm down, learn the limitations of their new techniques, and return, as often as not, to the insights of comparative anatomy to confirm and calibrate their work. Polymerase-chain-reaction sequencing (PCR) is the engine powering our ever older and ever more complete ancient DNA sequences, but early teething problems included publication of a DNA sequence thought to be from a 120-million-year-old weevil that actually belonged to a fungus. Technologies prove their worth over time.

More problematic are the cul-de-sacs. In 2007 Greenwalt’s colleague, the palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer reported her lab had recovered short sequences of collagen from the femur of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. As Matthew Collins at the University of Copenhagen complains, “It’s great work. I just can’t replicate it.” Schweitzer’s methodology has survived 15 years’ hard interrogation, it may simply be that animal proteins cannot survive more than about 4 million years. That still makes them much hardier than plant proteins, which only last for about 30,000 years.

Against these fascinating controversies and surprising dead-ends Greenwalt sets many wonders, not least “the seemingly unlimited potential of ancient DNA to shed light on the ancestry of our species, Homo sapiens”. And for short-changed botanists, there’s an extraordinary twist in Greenwalt’s tale whereby it may become possible to classify plants based, not on their morphology or even their DNA, but on the repertoire of small biomolecules they leave behind. “The biomolecular components of plants have been found as biomarkers in rocks that are two and a half billion — with a ‘b’!—years old,” Greenwalt exclaims (p204). The 3.7-billion-year-old cyano-bacteria that produced stromatolites in Greenland are the same age as the rocks at Mars’s Gale Crater: “Are authentic ancient biomolecules on Mars so implausible?” Greenwalt asks.

His day job may keep him for months at a time in the Smithsonian’s basement, but Greenwalt’s gaze is set firmly on the stars.

Delight and devilry

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Reading Douglas Futuyma’s How Birds Evolve for new Scientist, 7 December 2022

In Douglas Futuyma’s evolutionary history of birds, the delight is in the detail, and some of the devilry too — this is not a light read. Futuyma tells a double tale: he explains how the study of birds advanced our understanding of evolution, and he shows how advances in evolutionary science solve some long-standing ornithological mysteries, even as they throw up others.

He has written How Birds Evolve for birders, and being a birder himself (he began bird-spotting around the age of eleven in New York’s public parks), he knows just how fiercely the birding bug can bite. Many are half-way to being field scientists already, and many celebrated field scientists — from Ernst Mayr to Konrad Lorenz to Niko Tinbergen — have been birders.

“I suspect few of my teachers in the 1960s imagined that we would be studying birds by combining information from geology and molecular biology — disciplines that are miles apart,” says Futuyma, giving the reader an early hint of the complexities to come.

Birds are a curious, and curiously productive field of study for evolutionary biologists: less useful in understanding the mechanisms of evolution than insects, plants, and bacteria because they don’t reproduce as quickly, but, being various and everywhere, vital to the study of behaviour, longevity, ecology, speciation, cultural evolution and a host of other specialisms.

The ability to study populations and how they interact gave evolutionary biologists a foretaste of what their science would become. “The models of how variation might persist” Futuyma remarks, “were developed by evolutionary biologists who might not have known a hawk from a handsaw but were adept in mathematics.” Applying lessons from birds to ourselves, though risky, has also proved both irresistible and, at least in the science’s early stages, highly productive. In pondering human evolution, Darwin developed the idea of sexual selection, which takes up more than half his The Descent of Man of 1871. “Darwin devotes four full chapters to birds and cites at least 170 species,” Futuyman points out. “Birds provided more evidence for his ideas about sexual selection than any other group of animals”.

To grapple with bird diversity, one pretty much has to conjure up an idea of evolution. Peculiar and apparently inutile features abound in the bird world, a sure sign of unceasing adaptation. There are also, to complicate matters, many instances of convergent evolution. Feathers may have evolved only once, and through a bizarre genetic accident at that. (They don’t arise easily, as we once assumed, from reptilian scales.) Feather and wing shapes, however, recur again and again in even distantly related species. Darwin once predicted: “Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies,” but even his credulity would have been stretched by the news that flamingoes are related genetically to grebes.

“I don’t know how similar to birds a creature would have to be for us to call it an “avioid” or an “ornithoid,” Futuyman speculates, but for it “to be bipedal with feathers, toothless kinetic jaws, highly developed vision, a gizzard, and a high constant body temperature… I think… is very unlikely indeed.”

Futuyma unpacks the story of evolutionary science alongside the story of how birds evolved, acquiring bipedal locomotion and simple filamentous feathers as Dinosauria, then clavicles fused into a wishbone in Theropoda, on and on, until we arrive at what we might as well call the modern bird, with its large, keeled breastbone, rapid growth, and unfeasibly lightweight construction.

How Birds Evolve is not meant to be an introduction to birds (though one imagines readers of this magazine would lap it up). It is personable, entertaining and deeply passionate about its subject.

Futuyma, the author of two successful textbooks about evolution, is out to inspire, and his comprehensive book more than makes up in wonder what it might lack in an easy and seductive narrative.

So that was me told

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Visiting Voyage to the Edge of Imagination at London’s Science Museum, 9 November 2022

London’s Science Museum has come up with a solution to the age-old problem of how to keep visitors from bunching up while they tour an exhibition. At an awkward corner of Science Fiction: Voyage to the edge of imagination, ALANN (for Algorithmic Artificial Neural Network) announces that all the air is about to leave the room (sorry: “deck”). To avoid the hard vacuum of outer space, please move along.

Little fillips of jeopardy enliven this whistle-stop tour of science, technology and imagination — not a show about science fiction (and in fact London’s had one of those quite recently: the Barbican’s superb 2017 Into the Unknown) so much as a show that does science fiction. The gallery is arranged as a story, which begins once a Pan Galactic Starlines shuttle drops us aboard a friendly if bemused alien craft, the Azimuth. The Azimuth’s resident AI is orbiting the Earth and pondering the curious nature of human progress, that puts imagination and storytelling ahead of practical action. It seems to ALANN — who jumps from screen to screen, keeping us company throughout — that using stories to imagine the future is a weirdly double-edged way of going about things. Humans could just as easily be steering towards nightmares, as toward happy outcomes. What will their future hold?

ALANN bottles it in the end, of course — our destiny turns out to be “uncomputable”. Oh for a show that had punters running screaming for the exits! Isn’t that what sf is for?

Assembled on a conspicuously low budget, and featuring mainly film props and costumes (which at the best of times never look that good in real life) and replicas (some of them jolly cheap), this “voyage to the edge of imagination” stands or falls by its wits. Next to a cheery video about trying to communicate with humpback whales as a rehearsal for alien “first contact”, some bright spark has placed a life-size xenomorph from the film Alien. Iron Man’s helmet is there to promote our eventual cyborgisation, melding metal and flesh to better handle the technological future — but so, mind you, is Darth Vader’s. The sheer lack of stuff here is disconcerting, but at the end of it all we have explored space, bent spacetime, communicated with aliens, and become posthuman, so clearly something is working. Imagine an excellent nest constructed from three sticks.

What this show might have achieved with a bigger budget is revealed in Glyn Morgan’s excellent accompanying book (Thames and Hudson, £30) featuring interviews with the likes of Charlie Jane Anders and Chen Qiufan.

This being the Science Museum, it’s hardly surprising that the exhibition’s final spaces are given over to pondering science fiction’s utility. Futurologist Brian David Johnson is on screen to explain how fiction can be used to prototype ideas in the real world. (Actual science fiction writers have a word for this: they call it “plagiarism”.) Whether you give credence to Johnson’s belief that sf is there to make the world a better place is a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty sort of question. “Applied science fiction” can be jolly crass. In a cabinet near Mr Johnson are a couple of copies of Marvel’s Captain Planet. In the 1990s, we are told, Captain Planet “empowered a new generation to be environmentally aware.” As someone who was there, I can promise you he jolly well didn’t.

But as I turned the next corner, the sneer still on my lips, I confronted as fine an example of imagination in action as you could wish for: Tilly Lockey, a couple of days off her seventeenth birthday, had been invited along to the press launch, and was skipping about like a dervish, taking photographs of her friend. In the gloom, I couldn’t quite see which bionic arms she was wearing — the ones based on the Deus Ex video game series, or the ones she’d received in 2019, designed by the team creating Alita: Battle Angel.

So that was me told.

A baffling accident of history

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Watching Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes for New Scientist, 28 September 2022 

“Hundreds of birds are falling out of the sky every day,” complains Nadeem Shehzad, by far the grumpier of the two cousins whose life’s work is to rescue the injured raptors and waterbirds of Delhi. “What amazes me is that people go on as if everything’s normal.”

People, in Shaunak Sen‘s award-winning documentary, aren’t the only ones making the best of things under Delhi’s polluted skies. The city is also home to rats, pigs and frogs, mosquitoes and turtles, cows and horses and birds, and especially black kites, who have come to replace vultures as the city’s chief recycling service, cleaning up after the city’s many slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.

The film follows Nadeem, his brother Mohammad Saud and their young cousin Salik Rehman as they struggle to turn their family obsession into [https://www.raptorrescue.org] a fully fledged wildlife hospital. No sooner is yet another funding bid completed then their meat mincer breaks down. No sooner is a wounded bird stitched up than there’s a power cut and all the lights go out. What happens to the family’s sewer connection when the monsoon arrives does not bear discussing.

These struggles are compelling and yet this is not really a film about humans. It’s about, quite literally, “all that breathes”. The humans are just one more animal trying to eke out a living in this alien place called Delhi: not a bad place, but not a human place neither: more a baffling accident of history.

The cousins compare notes on the threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan while, barely two kilometres away, religious riots tear up the streets. Feral pigs cross a nearby stream. A millipede eases itself out of a puddle, even as a passing aeroplane casts its reflection in the water. The film’s first shot is a sumptuous pan across a rat-infested rubbish dump. Filmed at a rodent’s eye level, bare inches from the ground, a fascinating, complex, dramatic world is revealed. Later, we hear how Hindu nationalists are presenting the city’s muslim population in terms of disease and hygiene. Any European viewer with an ounce of historical sense will know where this thinking can lead.

Whether or not one picks up on all the film’s nested ironies is very much left to the viewer. Sen’s method is not to present an argument, but rather to get us to see things in a new way. Of the film’s main subject, the black kites, Sen has said, “I want audiences to leave the theater and immediately look up”.

Achieving this requires a certain amount of artifice. Viewers may wonder how it is that a tortoise reaches the top of a pile of garbage just in time to watch a motorike career around a distant corner. Individual shots took days to capture; some took much longer. The human conversations are a little more problematic. After consuming so many slipshod hand-held documentaries, I found the conversations here a little too on-message, a bit too polished to be true.

But why cavil at a powerful and insightful film, just because its style is unfamiliar? Filmed between 2020 and 2021 by German cinematographer Ben Bernhard, supported by Riju Das and Saumyananda Sahi, All That Breathes inhales extreme close-ups and cramped interiors, exhales vertiginous skyscapes and city skylines.

The story of Delhi’s black kites, regularly injured by the glass-coated threads used to fly paper kites — one of Delhi’s favourite leisure activities — might have been better served by a more straightforward story. But then the kites would, in the same breath, have become a small, contained, even inconsequential problem.

The whole point of Sen’s film, which won a Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is that the kites are a bell-weather. We’re all in this emergency together, and struggling to fly, and struggling to breathe.

A balloon bursts

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Watching The Directors: five short films by Marcus Coates, for New Scientist, 31 August 2022

In a flat on the fifth floor of Chaucer House, a post-war social housing block in London’s Pimlico, artist Marcus Coates is being variously nudged, bullied and shocked out of his sense of what is real.

Controlling the process is Lucy, a teenager in recovery from psychosis. Through Coates’s earpiece, she prompt Coates in how to behave, when to sit and when to stand, what to touch, and what to avoid, what to look at, what to think about, what to feel. Sometimes Coates asks for guidance, but more often than not Lucy’s reply is drowned out by a second voice, chilling, over-loud, warning the artist not to ask so many questions.

A cardboard cut-out figure appears at the foot of Coates’s bed — a clown girl with bleeding feet. It’s a life-size blow-up of a sketch Coates himself was instructed to draw a moment before. Through his earpiece a balloon bursts, shockingly loud, nearly knocking him to the ground.

Commissioned and produced by the arts development company Artangel, The Directors is a series of five short films, each directed by someone in recovery from psychosis. In each film, the director guides Coates as he recreates, as best he can, specific aspects and recollections of their experience. These are not rehearsed performances; Coates receives instructions in real-time through an ear-piece. (That this evokes, with some precision the auditory hallucinations of psychosis, is a coincidence lost on no one.)

So: some questions. In the course of each tricky, disorientating and sometimes very frightening film, does Marcus Coates at any point experience psychosis? And does it matter?

Attempts to imagine our way into the experiences of other beings, human or non-human, have for a long while fallen under the shadow of an essay written in 1974 by American philosopher Thomas Nagel. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” wasn’t about bats so much as about the continuity of consciousness. I can imagine what it would be like for me to be a bat. But, says Nagel, that’s not the same as knowing what’s it’s like for a bat to be a bat.

Nagel’s lesson in gloomy solipsism is all very well in philosophy. Applied to natural history, though — where even a vague notion of what a bat feels like might help a naturalist towards a moment of insight — it merely sticks the perfect in the way of the good.

Coates’s work consistently champions the vexed, imperfect, utterly necessary business of imagining our way into other heads, human and non-human. 2013’s Dawn Chorus revealed common ground between human and bird vocalisation. He slowed recordings of bird song down twenty-fold, had people learn these slowed-down songs, filmed them in performance, then sped these films up twenty times. The result is a charming but very startling glimpse of what humans might look and sound like brought up to “bird speed”.

Three years before in 2010 The Trip, a collaboration with St. John’s Hospice in London, Coates enacted the unfulfilled dream of an anthropologist, Alex H. Journeying to the Amazon, he followed very precise instructions so that the dying man could conduct, by a sort of remote control, his unrealised last field trip.

The Directors is a work in that spirit. Inspired by a 2017 residency at the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in London, Coates effort to embody and express the breadth and complexity of psychotic experience is in part a learning experience. The project’s extensive advisory group includes Isabel Valli, a neuroscientist at King’s College London with a particular expertise in psychosis.

In the end, though, Coates is thrown back on his own resources, having to imagine his way into a condition which, in Lucy’s experience, robbed her of any certainty in the perceived world, leaving her emotions free to spiral into mistrust, fear and horror.

Lucy’s film is being screened in the tiny bedroom where her film was shot. The other films are screened in different nearby locations, including one in the Churchill Gardens Estate’s thirty-seater cinema. This film, arguably the most claustrophobic and frightening of the lot, finds Coates drenched in ice-water and toasted by electric bar heaters in an attempt to simulate the overwhelming tactile hallucinations that psychosis can trigger.

Asked by the producers at ArtAngel whether he had found the exercise in any way exploitative the director of this film, Marcus Gordon, replied: “Well, there’s no doubt I’ve exploited the artist.”

Dreams of a fresh crab supper

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Reading David Peña-Guzmán’s When Animals Dream for New Scientist, 17 August 2022

Heidi the octopus is dreaming. As she sleeps, her skin changes from smooth and white to flashing yellow and orange, to deepest purple, to a series of light greys and yellows, criss-crossed by ridges and spiky horns. Heidi’s human carer David Scheel has seen this pattern before in waking octopuses: Heidi, he says, is dreaming of catching and eating a crab.

The story of Heidi’s dream, screened in 2019 in the documentary “Octopuses: Making Contact”, provides the starting point for When Animals Dream, an exploration of non-human imaginations by David Pena-Guzman, a philosopher at San Francisco State University.

The Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius thought animals dreamt. So did Charles Darwin. The idea only lost its respectability for about a century, roughly between 1880 to 1980, when the reflex was king and behaviourism ruled the psychology laboratory.

In the classical conditioning developed by Ivan Pavlov, it is possible to argue that your trained salivation to the sound of a bell is “just a reflex”. But later studies in this mould never really banished the interior, imaginative lives of animals. These later studies relied on a different kind of conditioning, called “operant conditioning”, in which you behave in a certain way before you receive a reward or avoid a punishment. The experimenter can claim all they want that the trained rat is “conditioned”; still, that rat running through its maze is acting for all the world as though it expects something.

In fact, there’s no “as though” about it. Pena-Guzman, in a book rich in laboratory and experimental detail, describes how rats, during their exploration of a maze, will dream up imaginary mazes, and imaginary rewards — all as revealed by distinctive activity in their hippocampuses.

Clinical proofs that animals have imaginations are intriguing enough, but what really dragged the study of animal dreaming back into the light was our better understanding of how humans dream.

From the 1950s to the 1970s we were constantly being assured that our dreams were mere random activity in the pons (the part of the brainstem that connects the medulla to the midbrain). But we’ve since learned that dreaming involves many more brain areas, including the parietal lobes (involved in the representation of physical spaces) and frontal lobes (responsible among other things for emotional regulation).

At this point, the sight of a dog dreaming of chasing a ball became altogether too provocative to discount. The dog’s movements while dreaming mirror its waking behaviours too closely for us to say that they lack any significance.

Which animals dream? Pena-Guzman’s list is too long to quote in its entirety. There are mice, dogs and platypuses, beluga whales and ostriches, penguins, chameleons and iguanas, cuttlefish and octopuses — “the jury is still out on crocodiles and turtles.”

The brain structures of these animals may be nothing like our own; nonetheless, studies of sleeping brains throw up startling commonalities, suggesting, perhaps, that dreaming is a talent to which many different branches of the evolutionary tree have converged.

Pena-Guzman poses big questions. When did dreaming first emerge and why? By what paths did it find its way into so many branches of the evolutionary tree? And — surely the biggest question of all — what are we do with this information?

Pena-Guzman says dreams are morally significant “because they reveal animals to be both carriers and sources of moral value, which is to say, beings who matter and for whom things matter.”

In short, dreams imply the existence of a self. And whether or not that self can think rationally, act voluntarily, or produce linguistic reports, just like a human, is neither here nor there. The fact is, animals that dream “have a phenomenally charged experience of the world… they sense, feel and perceive.”

Starting from the unlikely-sounding assertion that Heidi the octopus dreams of fresh crab suppers, Pena-Guzman assembles a short, powerful, closely argued and hugely well evidenced case for animal personhood. This book will change minds.

 

 

Some rude remarks about Aberdeen

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Reading Sarah Chaney’s Am I Normal? for new Scientist, 10 August 2022

In the collections of University College London there is a pair of gloves belonging to the nineteenth-century polymath Francis Galton. Galton’s motto was “Whenever you can, count”. The left glove has a pin in the thumb and a pad of felt across the fingers. Placing a strip of paper over the felt, Galton could then, by touching different fingers with the pin, keep track of what he saw without anyone noticing. A beautiful female, passing him by, was registered on one finger: her plain companion was registered on another. With these tallies, Galton thought he might in time be able to assemble a beauty map of Great Britain. The project foundered, though not before Galton had committed to paper some rude remarks about Aberdeen.

Galton’s beauty map is easy to throw rocks at. Had he completed it, it would have been not so much a map of British physiognomic variation, as a record of his own tastes, prejudices and shifting predilections during a long journey.

But as Sarah Chaney’s book makes clear, when it comes to the human body, the human mind, and human society, there can be no such thing as an altogether objective study. There is no moral or existential “outside” from which to begin such a study. The effort to gain such a perspective is worthwhile, but the best studies will always need reinterpreting for new audiences and next generations.

Am I Normal? gives often very uncomfortable social and political context to the historical effort to identify norms of human physiology, behaviour and social interaction. Study after study is shown to be hopelessly tied to its historical moment. (The less said about “drapetomiania”, the putative mental illness discovered among runaway slaves, the better.)

And it would be the easiest job in the world, and the cheapest, to wield these horrors as blunt weapons to tear down both medicine and the social sciences. It is true that in some areas, measurement has elicited surprisingly little insight — witness the relative lack of progress made in the last century in the field of mental health. But while conditions like schizophrenia are real, and ruinous, do we really want to give up our effort at understanding?

It is certainly true, that we have paid not nearly enough attention, at least until recently, to where our data was coming from. Research has to begin somewhere, of course, but should we really still be basing so much of our medicine, our social policy and even our design decisions on data drawn (and sometimes a very long time ago) from people in Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies?

Chaney shows how studies that sought human norms can just as easily detect diversity. All it needs is a little humility, a little imagination, and an underlying awareness that in these fields, the truth does not stay still.