At the Brainwaves blog, Ferris Jabr writes about a fascinating project. Anthropologist Andrew Irving talked random strangers on the streets of New York City into putting on a headset and speaking their inner monologue out loud as he followed behind them with a camera. The result is something that approximates what it might be like to be able to hear someone else's thoughts.

A woman worries about where she can find a Staples and contemplates her relationship with a friend who has cancer. A man deals with his emotions over two close friends (or, possibly, roommates, or lovers) having a baby together. Another man flits between internal discussions of totalitarianism, speculation about other people on the street, and his own attempts to figure out which direction he's heading. In general, it's all a mixture of engaging and mundane, swirled together.

There are other videos in the series, as well. You can watch them at Brainwaves.

I can haz transformational grammar?

Via Justin Bernacki and Trust me, I'm a linguist.

New York's Grand Central Terminal, as it currently stands today, was built between 1903 and 1913. But it is the third Grand Central. Two earlier buildings — one called Grand Central Depot, and the other known as Grand Central Station (which remains the colloquial name for the Terminal) — existed on pretty much the exact same spot. But neither lasted nearly as long. The Depot opened in 1871, and was drastically reconstructed in 1899. The new building, the Station, only stood for three years before it began to come down in sections, eventually replaced by the current building.

That's a lot of structural shuffling, and at the Anthropology in Practice blog, Krystal D'Costa explains some of the history behind it. Turns out, the rapid reconfiguration of Grand Central had a lot to do with crowd control — figuring out how to use architecture to make the unruly masses a little more ruly. One early account that D'Costa quotes describes regular mad scrambles to board the train — intimidating altercations that could leave less-aggressive passengers stranded on the platform as their train left them behind.

The problem it seemed was that the interior of the depot did nothing to manage the Crowd—which could resume the same patterns of movement as they did on the street—and believe me, it was just as unruly out there. In the depot, where passengers were confronted with the unbridled power of locomotives, it was necessary to impose some sort of structure to the meeting: the Crowd had to be domesticated.

... A deadly collision in 1902 preceded public demand for an even safer, more accessible terminal. Warren and Wetmore won the bid for reconstruction, and the plan they produced included galleries, which added yet another transition area but, more importantly, rendered the Crowd into a spectacle. This design, which is the one visitors experience today, preserves the Crowd in a central area, providing raised balconies from which there are plenty of opportunities to people-watch. Being placed on display is not lost on the subconscious of the Crowd: what appears to be hustle and bustle are manifestations of many synchronizations happening at once. So what appears to be chaos to the casual observer is actually a play directed by design that makes the Crowd a key feature of the space even as it is minimized by the architectural elements that Grand Central Terminal is known for: the grand ceiling, the large windows, and the deep main concourse. These items add perspective to the Crowd and diminish its psychological power as an uncontrollable mass.

Read the rest of the story at Anthropology in Practice

In an interview with The Houston Chronicle, paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin hits on an interesting point that I don't think we (the media and laypeople) consider enough when we talk about our closest ancient relatives. Although we have an increasingly deep picture of Neanderthal anatomy and genetics, that doesn't necessarily tell us a great deal about their biology.

Truth is, for how little we understand the wiring and functioning of our own brains, we understand even less about the Neanderthal mind. It's quite possible that they could mate with us, but couldn't think the same way we do. And it's those unseen, unstudied differences that could really account for the vast disparities that we see between how humans lived and how their Neanderthal neighbors lived.

The picture we have so far is that the Neanderthals are sort of opportunistic, good at hunting middle- to large-sized mammals. They have a territory in which they probably go through a cycle of habitation in different places, basically when one place is exhausted they move to another one. What we don't see with Neanderthals is long-distance exchanges with other groups. What we see with modern humans in the same areas is different. For example, we find shells in Germany coming from the Mediterranean or from the French Atlantic Coast. It means there was a network of people. So, the question is, what kind of relationship did a Neanderthal have with his brother-in-law? Humans did not just live with their families and their neighbors, but they knew they had a brother-in-law in another village, and that beyond the mountain there is the family of their mother, or uncle, or something like that. There is a large network of groups that, if necessary, could help each other. I think this is where we would like to go to find differences between Neanderthals and modern humans.

Read the full interview at The Houston Chronicle

Via Marc Kissel

In that case, it was a physical distance that lead to the development of two different sign languages. But, within the United States, the same thing happened because of social distance. Turns out, there is a Black American sign language that is distinctly different, as a language, from ASL. Its roots lie in segregation, and especially in separate-and-not-at-all-equal school systems. Ironically, though, that meant sign language had a more prominent place in black schools for much of the 20th century. At white schools, up until the 1970s and 1980s, students were heavily pressured to speak and lip-read, rather than sign — because it was thought to be better. Meanwhile, at black schools, sign language continued to be heavily used, growing and changing. By the late 1960s, the two systems were almost completely different languages.

Carolyn McCaskill remembers exactly when she discovered that she couldn’t understand white people. It was 1968, she was 15 years old, and she and nine other deaf black students had just enrolled in an integrated school for the deaf in Talledega, Ala.

... The teacher’s quicksilver hand movements looked little like the sign language McCaskill had grown up using at home with her two deaf siblings and had practiced at the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind, just a few miles away. It wasn’t a simple matter of people at the new school using unfamiliar vocabularly; they made hand movements for everyday words that looked foreign to McCaskill and her fellow black students.

...So, McCaskill says, “I put my signs aside.” She learned entirely new signs for such common nouns as “shoe” and “school.” She began to communicate words such as “why” and “don’t know” with one hand instead of two as she and her black friends had always done. She copied the white students who lowered their hands to make the signs for “what for” and “know” closer to their chins than to their foreheads. And she imitated the way white students mouthed words at the same time as they made manual signs for them.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

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• Martha's Vinyard: Birthplace of American Deaf Culture
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• Learn the sign language of physics, male genitalia

It is very hard, and very weird to try to get a handle on how human health has changed between the 19th century and today. Obviously, the way we live has changed dramatically. But understanding how that impacts health (or doesn't) is complicated by the fact that healthcare, science, and public health research changed dramatically during those years, as well.

And all that science hasn't happened in a vacuum. The names we give various disorders change. Whether or not we consider something to be a disorder, at all, might change. And our cultural understanding changes, too—especially when it comes to mental illness.

At the Mind Hacks blog, Vaughn Bell has an excellent breakdown of two recent studies that try to put the modern diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) into a cultural and historical context. Many people assume that PTSD is just a new name for something that has always existed—look at shell shock, which made it onto Downton Abbey last season. But these new papers suggest that the distinction between what soldiers experienced in the past and what they experience today might go deeper than naming conventions.

The diagnosis of PTSD involves having a traumatic experience and then being affected by a month of symptoms of three main groups: intrusive memories, hyper-arousal, and avoidance of reminders or emotional numbing ... there has been a popular belief that PTSD has been experienced throughout history but simply wasn’t properly recognised. Previous labels, it is claimed, like ‘shell shock’ or ‘combat fatigue’, were just early descriptions of the same universal reaction.

But until now, few studies have systematically looked for PTSD or post-trauma reactions in the older historical record. Two recent studies have done exactly this, however, and found no evidence for a historical syndrome equivalent to PTSD.

A study just published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders looked at the extensive medical records for soldiers in the American Civil War, whose mortality rate was about 50-80 greater than modern soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, there would have been many more having terrifying experiences but despite the higher rates of trauma and mentions of other mental problems, there is virtually no mention of anything like the intrusive thoughts or flashbacks of PTSD.

Read the rest at Mind Hacks

David Dobbs adds some more context to Bell's post at the Neuron Culture blog.

The story is familiar to us today: Somebody, usually a young man, walks into a public place, kills a bunch of people seemingly at random, and (usually) ends the murder spree with a suicide-by-cop.

But this story—at least, in Western culture—is startlingly new, relatively speaking. In fact, Paul Mullen, a forensic psychologist, says we can pin a date and place on the first time it happened. On September 4, 1913, in the German towns of Degerloch and Mühlhausen an der Enz, Ernst August Wagner killed his wife, his children, and at least nine strangers. He shot more than 20 people and set several fires during his killing spree. He ended up spending the rest of his life in an insane asylum.

But when we try to pin killings like these on mental illness, Mullen says, we're not quite hitting the right point. The people who go on killing sprees are mad, sure. But that's not the same thing as diagnosable, objective, physical mental illness. Only about 10% of the people ever arrested for crimes like this had actual mental illnesses. In fact, Mullen thinks these killings have more to do with culture than brain chemistry. His argument is interesting. And it might sound a little similar to the old "angry music made him do it!" trope. But what Mullen is talking about is different than that. Science journalist David Dobbs tries to explain the distinction:

I’m not saying the movies made Holmes crazy or psychopathic or some such. But the movies are a enormous, constant, heavily influential part of an American culture that fetishizes violence and glamorizes, to the point of ten-year wars, a militarized, let-it-rain approach to conflict resolution. And culture shapes the expression of mental dysfunction — just as it does other traits. This is why, say, relatively ‘simple’ schizophrenia — not the paranoid sort — takes very different forms in Western and some Eastern cultures. On an even simpler level, this is why competitive athleticism is more likely to express itself as football (the real kind) in Britain but as basketball in the U.S. Culture shapes the expression of behavioral traits.

This is an interesting argument and an interesting thing to think about.

Read the rest of David Dobbs' post about the difference between blaming movies for violence and talking about the consequences of violence in culture.

Watch the video of Paul Mullen discussing cultural violence, mental illness, and spree killings

Read a very good post at the Neuroanthropology blog that expands on Paul Mullen's ideas and provides more interesting links

In certain parts of the United States (including Birmingham, Alabama) shooting guns into the air is one way that some locals celebrate major holidays, like the 4th of July.

For those of us who didn't grow up with celebratory gunfire, this cultural practice can be difficult to understand—especially given the fact that it is dangerous. Bullets that go up come back down, and they can injure and kill people. It's unclear exactly how risky the practice is. If you're hit by a falling bullet, your chances of death are significantly higher compared to a normal gunshot wound. And a study of celebratory gunfire injuries in Los Angeles turned up 118 victims, including 38 deaths, between 1985 and 1992. But I wasn't able to find a good analysis that put deaths into perspective with shots fired. (So, for instance, for every x shots fired into the air, x number of people are injured. Without that, it's hard to tell whether celebratory gunfire is really, really dangerous or only kind of dangerous sometimes. But either way, when you do it, especially in urban areas, you're taking a risk of killing someone.)

Usually, though, when we talk about celebratory gunfire, we're talking about unorganized huzzahs fired off with impromptu vigor in backyards and at family gatherings. In Cherryville, North Carolina, however, the whole thing is a lot more official ... and safer. Starting at midnight on New Year's Eve, the Cherryville New Year's Shooters go door to door throughout a three-county area singing traditional New Year's shooting songs, and calling residents out to shoot with them. It's a lot like going caroling, but with weaponry. Thankfully, it's all done with blanks these days.

For more than 18 hours, and through three different counties — Gaston, Lincoln, and Cleveland — the shooters follow the route bringing ceremony and good tidings to neighbors. At each stop along the way, a crier recites the “Chant of the New Year’s Shooters,” and then participants fire their muskets, one by one, each loaded with black powder, no bullets allowed. The noise of the musket is thought to drown out evil spirits and bad luck; while the chant — part poem, part speech, and part song — asks for peace and prosperity in the New Year.

Joyce Green sent this story in to me. While she was raised in one of these communities—Shelby, North Carolina—she would like you to know that, "I never wake up on New Year’s day and think, 'I’d better get on down to the nursing home and fire off a couple of shots to bring in the New Year right.'"

Read more about the Cherryville New Year's Shooters

Read more about the dangers of celebratory gunfire that involves real bullets.

The Leakey family is like the Kennedys, but for paleoanthropology instead of politics. Think about any hominin fossil or artifact you can name. Chances are, there was a Leakey involved in its discovery. Louis Leakey was one of the first scientists to champion the idea that humans had their origins in Africa. For three generations now, his family has carried out active paleo excavations in eastern Africa, especially the countries of Tanzania and Kenya.

The first generation—Louis Leakey and his wife Mary—were most associated with Tanzania's Oldupai Gorge. But their son Richard, his wife Meave, and their daughter Louise have all spent their careers focused on Lake Turkana, on the border between Kenya and Ethiopia. The site is the world's largest, permanent desert lake. Undisturbed by modern development, in a spot where millions of years of flowing water have washed deposits and fossils down from the rift valley—Lake Turkana is an excellent place to search for human ancestors and our ancient relatives.

On Wednesday, PBS will air an hour-long documentary on the Leakeys' work at Lake Turkana. Part biography of Richard Leakey and part exploration of human history—Bones of Turkana will air May 16th at 9:00 pm central and again on May 21st at the same time. Yesterday, I got the opportunity to speak with Richard and Meave Leakey. We talked about human evolution, the scientific promise of Lake Turkana, the process of paleo fieldwork, and the lasting impression of the Leakey legacy.

First, a bit of context. Although he's the more famous of the two, Richard Leakey hasn't really been doing paleoanthropology for 20 years. Instead, he's worked in wildlife conservation—especially with elephants. He's also participated in Kenyan politics, including helping to found a new political party there in the late 1990s. Currently, he's focused on fundraising for the Turkana Basin Institute, an organization aimed at providing logistical and financial support to researchers from many disciplines working in remote parts of Kenya. Previously the site of a base camp for Leakey work at Lake Turkana, the Turkana Basin Institute will soon be home to a permanent building. "Now it’s a place where scientists can do research without having to live in tents and eat sand," Richard Leakey told me. "And we can give local nomadic people permanent jobs in curatorial duties with collections on site. Traditionally, people found fossils and took them away. We’re turning that around now, so that the local economy gains as well."

Maggie Koerth-Baker: Richard, what drew you to Lake Turkana in the first place?

Richard Leakey: I had been working in southern Ethiopia representing my father in 1968 and 1967 [He would have been around 24 at the time—MKB]. I didn’t really enjoy it, I was very much the junior person on the expedition. But I had dropped out of high school and didn’t have any credentials except my experience. I knew that to go any further in my career I'd either have to go to university or I’d need a to find a really good site and build team around me. So that’s what I chose to do. I happened to notice that Lake Turkana looked very promising geologically—there were formations suggesting that the lake had fluctuated in depth and size over millions of years. There was sediment from river systems that often contains fossils. You had exposure through modern erosion, and there was very little vegetation. In 1968, I went in to check it out more closely. Immediately, we started finding fossils and lots of them.

What’s important about Lake Turkana is that it’s been there, growing and shrinking, for four million years, if not longer. There's this continuous record that exists in other places, but perhaps not as broad and rich. The work that’s been done so far suggests that other places aren’t as extensive. That’s what makes Turkana different from other sites we know of at the moment. But that's not to say that the other sites don't matter. It’s the combination of work done in South Africa, Tanzania, work being done in Ethiopia. It all adds up to a comprehensive picture. We’ve accumulated a huge amount of data at Lake Turkana but it would be less important than it is without that bigger continental sample.

Meave Leakey: It did entirely. I was doing marine zoology in university. I can’t think of anything further removed from paleontology. But my initial contact with Richard’s father led to me getting a job in his primate research center. I ended up doing my Ph.D. on modern monkey skeletons, and I got so interested in that that I left marine sciences behind entirely.

Then I met Richard and he invited me up to Turkana to look at fossil monkeys. It was entirely Richard who got me started in the field work. As soon as I got there I really loved it. In that sense, the Leakeys directed the opportunities that led to what I do today. Being married to Richard led to my interest in fossil human ancestors. I was mostly interested in monkeys for years, that was what I studied. But in 1989 he went into wildlife conservation and that left me in the position of leading the fieldwork.

ML: I think the thing to understand about Turkana is that it’s very huge. We work with many colleagues in different disciplines, looking at lots of different angles and that’s what makes it exciting. You have geologists interpreting the lake’s history. Geochemists looking at dominant vegetation. The main overall focus is how and why our ancestors evolved and how they became us. The big questions relate to that. But climate is important. Environments are important. Extinctions are important. There’s many different questions and aspects and approaches to the one main focus.

We have an enormous backlog of work that’s been done there, 45 years worth or so. We have a huge amount of information about the lake basin. On the other hand, when someone comes up with a new site in Africa, you have no idea what you’ll find and that gives you a better idea of what you’re seeing in Turkana. We tend to think that Turkana gives you the right picture of our past, but it doesn’t. It’s just a little pinhole view. The rest of Africa might have something entirely different going on. Personally, I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else because my expertise is in that specific lake basin. But I think we should be finding as many sites as possible all over the world. That's how you get the big picture.

RL: I would say that people have generally gone about explaining this backwards. The very earliest things that are our ancestors, quite frankly they don’t look like us at all. I think it’s much more important to look from the present and go back. When you find 10,000-year-old old skeletons they look just like us. In fact, modern looking goes back to 200,000 years. Then, I think we tend to go further and start really seeing the differences. At 1.5 million years ago, it’s not like us at all. If we presented it this other way, from present back, I think we’d have more understanding from the public.

ML: It really is a lot of work to establish that you’ve got something different and that it’s not just variation within the species. The main comparative example you use is to take the gorilla, which has a huge size and shape difference between males and females. Gorillas have the most variation within a species of all modern primates. You look at that very extreme variation and you assume you're unlikely get a much higher degree of variation within a species than that. Then you compare all the points on your new specimen with known species and you see if it fits within that range of variation. If it exceeds the gorilla level of variation you’ve got a pretty good case for a new species.

And the truth, with this method, is that you're likely missing species. If you were to take a series of modern monkey skulls and break them apart the way we find them in the fossil record, there’s no way you’d call them different species. But you know in the modern situation that they are different. If anything, we’re conservative on this.

RL: It’s quite subtle. We know birds use tools and chimps and insects and lots of mammals. But to take a block of very hard stone and to take another stone and fashion an object from it, that's something different. You have to "see within" the stone to know what you’re fashioning before you fashion it. You have to project an idea. That's a step that no other tool maker uses. It’s an almost soft science definition but I can see a fundamental difference.

ML: I'd agree. Kanzi is a chimp that humans tried to teach to make stone tools. But his hands were simply the wrong shape. They don’t have the precision of grip we have and they have less flexible grip. It wouldn’t have been possible for Kanzi to make a tool as professionally as our ancestors did. We haven’t found tools older than 2.5 million years old. I’m sure that’s not the last word on this. There might be ones found that are older, but as you go back, the hand then becomes less and less flexible. The limiting factor would be the morphology of the hand. It's more that and less the morphology of the brain, in my opinion. This aspect of being human very much depends on hand flexibility.

ML: We do find more skulls than you’d expect. I think it has to do with the size of the brain, or rather the size of the actual skull. Other remains can get chewed up by carnivores. They aren’t as complete. But the skulls we do find in greater number than you might expect. Maybe it's becuase carnivores couldn’t get their mouths around the skull and cruch it up, because the brain was so big. I'm speculating, but when you get back to something like Lucy, you don’t find more skulls than other bones, maybe because the brain was smaller and the carnivores were bigger. We do find other peices but they’re usually pretty fragmentary. And we're missing lower jaws a lot, because those can be chewed up. Monkeys are another good example. There are fewer fossil monkey skulls as complete as hominid skulls, and that's even though we find far more monkey specimens.

RL: If you have an opportunity to be involved in fieldwork it's hugely exciting and rewarding. You’re out in the open in nature, unbothered by emails and telephones. And once you enjoy fieldwork, paleontology is one of the professions where you can devote a lot of time to that. I think that's what draws you back into it as an adult. as A result of my childhood is that I always had a natural curiosity about origins, extinction, and evolution. It’s a natural part of my life. It’s not the only thing that interests me, obviously, but fully understanding why we are what we are—I think it adds to the whole human experience.

ML: You also have to understand that we're only three months of the year in the field and those months tend to fall within school holidays. Our children were in the field with us the entire time, from the time they were babies. They were in the camp or in the base. We'd take them out now and again and they'd get very excited about finding things. When they were older, they were able to start helping in camp, picking out bone fragments. The result of all of that exposure is that they say they definitely won’t get into the subject as adults. Of course, Louise said exactly that, but now she’s fully involved. Our other daughter said no and kept her word.

Watch the documentary Bones of Turkana on PBS

One of the problems with writing science fiction and fantasy is creating truly different societies. We tend to change things but keep other things at societal defaults. It’s really easy to see this in older SF, where we have moved on from those societal defaults and can thus laugh at seeing people in the future behaving like people in the fifties. But it’s very difficult to create genuinely innovative societies, and in genuinely different directions. As a British reader coming to SF there were a lot of things I thought were people’s amazing imagination that turned out to be normal American things and cultural defaults. And no matter how much research you do, it’s always easier in the anglosphere to find books and primary sources in English and about our own history and the history of people who have interacted with us. And both history and anthropology tend to be focused on one period, one place, so it’s possible to research a specific society you know you want to know about, but hard to find things that are about the range of options different societies have chosen.

What Debt does is to focus on a question of morality, first by framing the question, and then by examining how a really large number of human societies over a huge geographical and historical range have dealt with this issue, and how they have interacted with other people who have very different ideas about it. It’s a huge issue of the kind that shapes societies and cultures, so in reading it you encounter a whole lot of contrasting cultures. Graeber has some very interesting ideas about it, and lots of fascinating details, and lots of thought provoking connections.

For a more academic discussion of Debt among political scientists and economists, see this Crooked Timber seminar on the book, and the author's reply. I liked Debt, but was also frustrated by the amount of circling back and meandering the author engages in. That said, it was one of my more thought-provoking reads of 2011.

The Best Science Fiction Ideas in any Non-Fiction Ever: David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/17/why-debt-is-creeping.html/feed 26 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/26/the-grammar-of-happiness-an-i.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/26/the-grammar-of-happiness-an-i.html#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:25:13 +0000 Avi Solomon http://boingboing.net/?p=151431 Daniel L. Everett is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University. He is the author of Language: The Cultural Tool and the subject of the documentary A Grammar of Happiness.

Avi Solomon: Were there any formative experiences in your childhood that shaped your career?

Dan Everett: Well, by far the most important experience in my childhood was the death of my mother when I was eleven. She was twenty-nine. That changed my life, and it taught me that life is extremely fragile. And I knew from that point on that I was going to die and never feared dying. Because I felt that if my mother had died, I certainly didn't have any fear of dying.

Another important thing was music. I found the guitar, and played music, and wanted to be a famous musician. I had insecurities and issues that were the result of the fact that my mother had died so young, and music really helped me through all of that. And also it turned out I was pretty good at music, that if I stuck with something long enough, I could get really good at it. That encouraged me when I went to college, even though I had not been a very good student in high school, to believe that if I worked hard, I could be a good student.

So these things encouraged me and changed me, and gave me different perspectives on my life. Those were two of the most important things of my childhood.

Avi: You describe your uncle in World War II recounting how his Marine platoon got shot on the beaches, and what their last words were.

Dan: They said "Momma". He was in the Marines that were the first on the beaches, and he was eighteen years old. Most of these men were eighteen. He said the last thought everybody had was for their mother. It's a really sobering thing. I know that I'm sixty years old, and my mother has been dead for forty-nine years, but there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about her, and when things happen. I think every young man is close to their mother ñ that's the normal. I realize that there are dysfunctional relationships, but it is a surprisingly powerful force in male lives.

Avi Solomon: How did you come to live with the Pirahã?

Dan: I met a young woman in high school and she had been raised in Brazil, her parents were missionaries. We decided after we got engaged that we would be missionaries ourselves, so took all the training, and went off to Brazil to translate the bible and we were asked to work with the Pirahã because their language wasn't related to any other known language. I had done well in linguistic training, and so the mission thought that we might be the people to take up the challenge, because no one else had been able to figure out the language.

Avi: You went to convert them, but they kind of ended up converting you.

Dan: That's right. I went to tell them about God, and the need to be saved so that they could go to heaven and not go to hell, but what I found was a people for whom most of the things that were important to me seemed irrelevant. They couldn't understand why I thought that I had any right to tell them how to live, although they tried very hard to understand me because they treated me with respect. And they couldn't understand why I could think that someone whom I had never seen, never met, whom no one I knew had ever seen or ever met, could be the basis for teaching them how they ought to live.

Also, the quality of their lives was better in most respects than most people I knew who were religious. Just the way that they coped with the difficulties of life around them, and related to one another. This is not to say that they're a perfect people. Nobody is. But I found them extremely inspiring and challenging. And I certainly couldn't, after a while, justify to myself the idea that I knew more about how to live than they did.

Avi: During the course of your fieldwork you underwent a triple crisis, a personal, intellectual, and religious crisis.

Dan: On the personal level, it was a very hard time for me. Before I met my current wife I was all alone. There were some days of dark depression in there. And it was the end of my thirty-plus year marriage. But that wasn't by design. That happened as a result of my religious change. I would have loved to have avoided those things. Obviously the hardest thing by far for me, was to have my children not talk to me for quite some time. It's still hard on my daughters. You know, they go back and forth between talking to me and not talking to me. But I really believed and still believe that I had to tell the truth as I understood it, and take the consequences.

As far as religion, I felt that I had been a hypocrite for a long time because I didn't believe in things that I said I believed in, and I had to be honest. Professionally, I realized that to contradict the major theory that I had been working with, to say that I thought it was wrong was going to create a lot of opposition. I didn't really anticipate how much, but I knew it would cause some. But that's what I felt and that's what I had to say.

Avi: What gave you the resilience to pull through?

Dan: I feel like it was being able to look at myself in the mirror and know that I was saying what I believed, and no longer pretending things that I didn't believe. And it was meeting my current wife. She has been the greatest source of encouragement and support that I've ever had.

Avi: What is your definition of language?

Dan: My concept of language is broader than many theoreticians. To me language is far more than grammar. Grammar is simply the way that we take, for example, words and put them together in sentences. That's a simple component. But language to me includes all the things that we talk about, and the ways that we talk about them. So it includes poetry, and conversation as well as sentences, phrases and words. And each individual item, whether it's a sentence or whether it's a word, is a sign in the sense of the Swiss linguist Saussure. It has meaning, and it has form. And the meanings and the forms are largely ñ not exclusively, but largely shaped by the values of the culture that produces them. So just like some cultures have words that aren't found in other cultures. One example is Haggis, which is a food in Scotland, but a lot of cultures don't eat that food, so they don't have the name for it. By the same token, different cultures have different constraints on the shape and the meaning that's conveyed by sentences so that the very grammar is shaped by the culture.

Let me just say what I mean by culture. I mean knowledge, and ways of interacting, and I mean a set of values ranked in a certain way so that each culture not only has a set of values, but it knows which values are ranked higher than other values and have higher priority or more importance. Culture is one of the largest, most important shapers of the form and meaning of our language. And that has been overlooked and denied, in fact, by many modern theories of grammar.

Avi: How did you learn the Pirahã language?

Dan: By working daily and starting off with simple objects. I would point to an object, and say it's name in English. Like a stick, or a leaf, an animal, a part of my body. Saying the name in English, and then writing down whatever they responded, and trying to figure out whether that was the noun I was after. Then I would do things with the objects. Throw the stick. Drop the leaf. Hit myself. And try to get verbs. And by working very slowly, setting a goal of ten words a day for myself, I worked all day every day for the better part of a year. After about six or seven months I could say a lot of things. But it took me about a year of hard work before I felt like I could say pretty much what I needed.

Avi: The Pirahã language has rules of empirical evidence built into it.

Dan: That's right. Every verb ends with a suffix that tells you whether what you're saying was directly observed, or inferred, or just overheard by hearsay. So they don't talk about things that they haven't witnessed themselves, or that somebody they know hasn't witnessed. They don't have stories of the ancient past because that doesn't make any sense to them. You were never there. And they don't have stories about what's going to happen to them in the future. They speculate a little bit, but it's not an important part for them. They don't make plans for the distant future because again, you haven't seen that. You haven't been there. So they live one day at a time. It's not like they don't know that there is a past, or they don't know there is a future. They just don't talk about it because it doesn't make any sense to them to talk about it.

The interesting thing about the Pirahã language is that it's like the Basque of the Amazon. It's not related to any other known Amazonian language. That means that if it ever did come from any other Amazonian language, it's been more than 6,000 years. We can tell, for example, that German and English, and French were the same language 6,000 years ago because we can see similarities between them today. But we can't find any similarity between Pirahã and other Amazonian languages, which indicates that it's probable that it has been distinct for more than 6,000 years. The descriptions of Pirahã culture that we have from about 1784, indicate a culture very similar to the way that it is today, although more numerous. So you know, it's possible that if we went back several thousand years, it's not only possible, it's probably likely the Pirahã culture was different. Maybe the language was different. Probably it was. But we know that for the last several hundred years at least their culture has been relatively stable, and the way that they live today was the way that they were living in the 1700s.

Avi: So what is the secret of their happiness?

Dan: I believe that they're happy because they don't worry about the past, and they don't worry about the future. They feel that they're able to take care of their needs today. They don't want things that they can't provide for themselves. At least they never have in my experience. In other words, I take in things and they will ask for a few little things that I have that they don't make, such as pots and pans or matches. And if I give it to them, fine, and if I don't give it to them, fine. They're not materialistic. They value being able to travel quickly and lightly. I've never met another group, not even another Amazonian group, that is so little concerned with material objects.

Avi: The Pirahã use various ways to express themselves, especially whistling and humming.

Dan: They're not the only group in the world that does this, but it's especially important to them. They hum and whistle, and they use other kinds of speech much more than many other groups. So anything they can say using consonants and vowels and what we would consider to be normal speech, they can also say by whistling or humming. Because they use the tones of their language and they use the rhythm of their language to communicate, and that's rich enough. It's much richer in some respects than languages like English, so that they actually have enough information in the tones and rhythm of their humming and whistling to talk about anything. Women do not whistle. Men can hum like the women, but only men can whistle, and they use it almost always when they're hunting. It's a good way of communicating and sounding like birds.

Daniel Everett

Avi: They also have a special language for communicating with spirits.

Dan: Actually "spirits" is a bad translation. I started calling them "spirits" when I was a Christian missionary. And what they are to the Pirahã are jungle entities that are not humans, but look like humans. And they all talk in a falsetto voice. But they're tangible. You know, I mean if you saw them or I saw them, which I have many times, to us in our way of thinking, they're just Pirahã talking in a high falsetto voice. But to the Pirahã they are really different creatures. They'll say there's one of those "fast mouths". And I'll say "Well, that looks just like so-and-so from the village". And they'll say "Yes, they look just like Pirahã. But you can tell they're not because they talk in those high voices". I suppose that the closest thing we have to it is saying that someone is possessed. But it's not quite the same to the Pirahã. They would say that that is not a Pirahã. In fact if you find a Pirahã man that claims to be one of these jungle entities—it's always men that do this—these fast mouths, and you talk to him later, he will deny any knowledge of it. He will say "That wasn't me, I wasn't there".

It's a different concept of what's objective or subjective. It doesn't neatly fall in our dichotomy of fact versus fiction. And so for example, even when they dream, they'll tell you about dreaming and while they know that it's not the same as being awake, they consider it just as valid an experience. So the fact that I dreamed I was walking on the moon means that in some sense I did walk on the moon.

Avi: The Pirahã have an intimate knowledge of their environment.

Dan: The Pirahã can tell you what the name of every different species of tree according to the way that they classify them. They can tell you what animals live in those trees. They can tell you what kind of food those trees produce. They can tell you about the animals. They can tell you which ones can be tamed, which ones can't be tamed. Which ones are good for eating. Where they live. If you're going along the river and you see bubbles coming to the top of the water, they can tell you whether that's a fish or whether it's the rock underneath. And every Pirahã child that I've ever asked is able to give me the same information. So everyone learns about nature and their environment very early on in their lives. Each individual Pirahã is fully capable of providing for themselves. Any Pirahã child, a boy, can provide for himself from the time he's nine or ten years old.

Avi: Did your children also pick up stuff from the Pirahã children?

Dan: Yes. My daughters, when they were young, would take off with Pirahã girls during the day in a canoe, and disappear, and be gone until evening. And come back singing with them, and they would walk with them through the jungle and pick up things with them, and learn the names for those things. My son from the time he was three years old had a Pirahã bow and arrow, and would run with the Pirahã boys all around the village and sometimes into the jungle. And they would tell me all sorts of things about animals they had seen, and often come back with animals and lots of different things like berries and nuts that they'd collected in the jungle.

Avi: How can we try and emulate some of this in our own lives?

Dan: I think the main thing is being observant. You know, our children can't begin to take care of themselves when they're nine or ten years old, because they're not forced to observe and to learn about you know, the world around them. There are certainly many members of our culture who are extremely observant and knowledgeable about nature, but it's not general in our culture. The Pirahã have to survive. They don't have the concept of going to a supermarket to get their food. When I tell them about it, they find it very boring. They have to feed themselves every day. They don't store food. So each day when they wake up they're hungry. Each day they have to find food. They have to find food for their children, for themselves, for their family. And that means knowing where to find the food.

One night a Pirahã man came in to the village and told me that a bushmaster, one of the most poisonous snakes of the jungle, tried to bite him. And that he was tired, but tomorrow morning he was going to go out and kill the snake. So he left early the next morning, and he came back about 11:00 am or noon with this enormous poisonous snake with an arrow through its head, and he stuck it into a tree, and it was just hanging from the tree. He said to me "He thought he would bite me, but I bit it!". I can't imagine knowing enough about my environment to go back and find the same snake that tried to bite me the day before in the thick jungle.

Avi: So the Pirahã have made a cultural choice to live in the present and it shapes their language?

Dan: That's right. They've made a choice. So for example, everything that Pirahã say has to come with a marker for where they got the evidence. And that is why their grammar is radically different from the grammars of many other languages. Because the taboos on talking about things for which you don't have evidence for have profound impact on the actual structure of the language.

Avi: Are individuals in the Pirahã culture conscious that they're choosing to live in the present?

Dan: I wouldn't say so. If you think about some of the things that we do on a regular basis, we make decisions in our lives every day, and there are things that we don't do, but it's not conscious. It's just something that we do. To take one extreme example - my anthropology professor, the first one I ever had, asked the class to spit in their hands. And some people didn't want to do it, but others did. He said, okay, now lick it back up. Nobody wanted to do that. He said "But why? What is the problem? It just was in your mouth a couple of seconds ago, and now you don't want to lick it back up". Who knows that we don't want to do that? Do Americans tell themselves that if they expel something from their body they don't want to take it back in their bodies?

The Pirahã are not like that in some ways. I mean, a lot of things that they consider repugnant we don't, and things we consider repugnant they don't. But nobody goes around and teaches anyone that it's wrong to do this, and it's wrong to do that. These are just values that we absorb, and we internalize them through imitation. And by cultural constraints on talking in a similar way.

Say for example, in the marriage ceremony in English when you put the ring on the spouse, you say "With this ring I thee wed". Nobody talks like that today. But you do it in that ceremony, and nobody is conscious of why they do it that way. So there's all kinds of ritualistic language. So it's that cultural form that affects the language that we use, but it's not conscious to people. They can say "Oh yes, that's right, that's the way I say it". But they wouldn't be able to tell you why.

Avi: Another expression of culture shaping language is their relationship to numbers or quantities.

Dan: They don't need numbers, and they don't need quantities except in very relative amounts. So they can say a small pile of things, or a big pile of things. But they don't need any more than that, and they don't have words for any more than that. A number of people have claimed that numbers are innate and that the concept of counting is innate. It's difficult to reconcile claims like that with the fact that the Pirahã have no numbers and don't count. That's a very controversial claim, but it has now been tested and corroborated by three separate studies in major scientific journals by people who've actually been there. So factually it's quite sound and well tested to say that Pirahã don't have numbers. And the reason they don't have numbers is because they don't need numbers. There's no task in their culture for which numbers are important.

Also, having numbers requires generalization, and those generalizations go beyond the Pirahã principle that you talk about the present, and you avoid generalizations whenever possible. I mean, if the Pirahã has a word for dog ñ and they of course, do ñ any noun is a generalization. So if a Pirahã says parrot, they don't just mean one parrot. They mean all parrots. So clearly they generalize. And they generalize to the degree that all languages have to generalize. You can't have a language without being able to talk about a noun or things, and the events that they participate in. You know, so there's a thing and it does something. Or a thing and something happens to it. So they can do that. But they avoid unnecessary generalizations that go beyond the needs of their culture. And numbers are such a generalization, so they don't have them. They don't have words for colors. They can clearly see colors and describe them but don't have words for them. They don't have words that some philosophers and linguists have considered to be essential to all human languages, such as quantifiers like the word "all", or "each", or "every". They don't have words like that.

Avi: They might not have that, but there's a tradeoff with happiness.

Dan: When you talk about how complex a language is, it can be very simple in some respects and very complicated in others. The Pirahã word structure is very complicated. And a lot of things we do with complicated sentences, the Pirahã do with simple sentences, but very complicated words. However, this refusal of theirs to generalize beyond the present and their refusal to worry about the past or the future is, I believe, crucial to their happiness.

And what's the evidence for their happiness? On the one hand every visitor that I take down to the Pirahã comments that they've never seen people smile and laugh so much. That's one superficial evidence of happiness. But you also don't find Pirahã sitting around depressed and crying. You don't find chronic fatigue syndrome. You don't find suicide. The concept of suicide is foreign to them. I've never seen evidence for any of the mental disorders that we associate with depression, sadness and lack of happiness among the Pirahã. They just work, they come home, and they talk. They're happy. They sing at night. And they get up and do it again. It's just an amazing degree of satisfaction without the need for consciousness-altering drugs or states.

>Daniel Everett performs "Colors in my Life"

Avi: You described a day where the whole tribe was at the beach having a huge party.

Dan: Yes. In the rainy season there are no beaches because the river comes up more than seventy feet. Since food becomes harder to get in the rainy season because you have the same amount of fish, but in much greater volume of water, the Pirahã tend to spread out, and you find very small villages of maybe one or two families. But in the dry season when the river goes down and the beaches come out and the fish are easy to catch, they get together on the beaches in large groups. And you'll find beaches with over 100 Pirahã for a couple of months during the dry season. And in that case, they're singing and dancing every night. They could go on dancing for forty-eight hours, sometimes even for seventy-two hours. But that doesn't mean that everyone's awake for that entire period of time. It just means that you dance and dance and dance, and then when you get tired, you might step out and take a nap, and then get back up and start dancing again. But the noise and the happiness and all this stuff going on with it continues on. And if you're like me, and not able to do that all the time, and trying to sleep, it gets frustrating! They're just happy the whole time!

Avi: They also do not express recursion in their language.

Dan: That's correct. That's a cultural choice. Here's how it works. In the Pirahã language, every verb has a meaning, and that meaning includes the participants in the action. So take the verb "hit". That is ñ whatever hit means, plus the person doing the hitting, and the thing being hit. So I hit you. You're the thing being hit. I'm the person doing the hitting. Every part of that basic verb's meaning has to be warranted by a suffix on the verb that tells you where the evidence came from.

Now if I start to make it more complicated, so instead of ñ so let's say that I say John hits Bill. That's fine. John and Bill and hit are all warranted. We know whether the evidence was observed, whether it was overheard, or whether it was inferred. But the minute I say John said that Peter hit Bill, all I can tell is the evidence for John said. I can't tell about the evidence where Peter hit Bill. Each verb has to be separate, and have its own evidence expressed for it. That's a simplified explanation. And the fact that each verb and its participants have to be evidenced, warranted by these suffixes that gives the source of evidence means that there can't be any recursion in the language.

Here's another way of thinking about it. This isn't the technically correct way of thinking about it, but it does get the idea across. When we utter a simple sentence, every part of it is new information. John hit Bill. I'm telling you that something happened. If I say on the other hand the man who you saw yesterday hit Bill. The "who you saw yesterday" is old information. That's why we put it in there so we can keep track of things. And that's a recursive structure, but it violates the fact that it's not an assertion, it's not new information, there's a part of that that's old information. So as long as you say that each sentence has to carry only new information, and we have to know the source of the evidence, there can be no recursion in the language.

And that follows from the principle of immediacy of experience that I've talked about. Because that immediate experience tells us that it has to have been experienced by the person speaking, or by someone who told the person speaking. And that is reflected in the grammar by these suffixes that tell us where the evidence comes from. And those suffixes, by their very nature, prohibit recursion.

Avi: That kind of reminds me of a Yoga Sutra which talks about these three kinds of knowledge!

Dan: I've often seen a strong correlation and compatibility between the Pirahã worldview and Zen Buddhism.

Avi: Your recursion claim has aroused intense controversy.

Dan: Many claims I've made have been controversial. And every single one of them has been independently tested. Thirty years ago, I made claims about the way the rhythm of the language worked. And UCLA sent down a phonetics specialist, Peter Ladefoged, who was probably the greatest in the world at that time. Then he went with me to the tribe and tested these claims. And only after he said we had verified them did people begin to accept that. And it's the same thing. People have tested the number claim. They've tested the color claim. And they've tested the recursion claim.

At the last Linguistic Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon a paper was presented by MIT cognitive scientists who had gone through all of the Pirahã data very carefully , and they made sure to go through data that was not collected by me, but by the previous missionary. Because the feeling was if they went through data collected by me, somebody could say well, he just made up that data, or he doctored it up. But they went through stories and text collected by another missionary who was there before me, and their conclusion after going through all of these examples very carefully was that they didn't see any clear evidence for recursion in the language. In fact, they saw evidence for the contrary. That there wasn't recursion in the language. And that was a very well attended talk, and some of my critics were there as well as a lot of neutral observers. And this wasn't my research. This was somebody else's research testing my research. So I believe that the absence of recursion is far more accepted today among people who think of Pirahã than it was just a few months ago, since the studies have come in.

Avi: How hopeful are you that the Pirahã will survive their encounter with modernity?

Dan: I have to say that overall I'm not really optimistic. I don't want to underestimate them. They're a very strong and resilient people, but the history of these kinds of contexts is not good. But I do have a lot of faith in the Pirahã inner strength and if any culture can stand up to this kind of pressure, it's theirs.

Avi: And hopefully, we the colonized can learn from them.

Dan: There's tremendous amounts we can learn from them, and in fact, from all other groups and peoples who are not like ourselves. I am currently working on a book idea called "Wisdom From Strangers" about how we can learn very important valuable lessons from people who are unlike ourselves. In fact, the more unlike us they are, the more we can learn. You cannot learn what you need to learn just by staying in the library. You have to have these experiences to take you beyond the boundaries of what you know, and make you live in ways that you never knew before. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/26/the-grammar-of-happiness-an-i.html/feed 25 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/tales-of-a-great-pacific-coast.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/tales-of-a-great-pacific-coast.html#comments Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:13:04 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=149274

Last year, the Eastern coast of Japan was struck by a massive 9.0 earthquake and tsunami. Since that happened, you've heard researchers talk about how it was not the first time that region had experienced an earthquake that large. Although the 2011 Tohoku earthquake has been called the biggest earthquake in Japan's recorded history, that's really only describing the relatively short history of scientifically measured earthquakes. The Japanese have kept written records, describing earthquakes that sound as though they could have been every bit as destructive. And those records date back 1600 years.

But written records aren't the only way of preserving local memories, or warning future generations about the destructive power of the Earth.

Geologic evidence shows that North America's Pacific Coast has experienced earthquakes on the scale of the Tohoku earthquake. (In fact, the Pacific Northwest is probably due for one of these large quakes. It's not an "if", but a "when".) The last time it happened, nobody in the area was keeping written documents. Instead, the story of a massive earthquake and a devastating tsunami—which probably occurred around the year 1700—have become a part of oral storytelling traditions. Ruth Ludwin, a seismologist at the University of Washington, has been collecting these stories since the early 1990s.

"There was a shaking, jumping up and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters."

So says an ancient tale told to generations of Quilleute and Hoh Indians. Variations of this saga of an epic battle between the Thunderbird and the Whale are found among Pacific Northwest Tribes from Vancouver Island to Oregon's Tillamook tribe.

The Whale was a monster, killing other whales and depriving the people of meat and oil. The Thunderbird, a benevolent supernatural being, saw from its home high in the mountains that the people were starving. The great bird soared out over the coastal waters, then plunged into the ocean and seized the Whale.

A struggle ensued first in the water, the tribal tale says. "The waters receded and rose again. Many canoes came down in trees and were destroyed and numerous lives were lost."

The Thunderbird eventually succeeds in lifting the evil Whale out of the ocean, carrying it "high into the air (and then) dropping it to the land surface at Beaver prairie. Then at this place there was another great battle."

"A picture began to emerge that looked a lot like what you'd expect from a major quake," she said. One tribe even had what sounds like an explanation for aftershocks, noting Whale had a son, Subbus, who took Thunderbird several more days to locate and kill. The earth-rumbling struggle persisted, but eventually Subbus was subdued.

"I can't say for certain this was the 1700 event, but it sure sounds like it," Ludwin said. "You hear the same story from tribes all along the coast."

Read more about how Ruth Ludwin connected the story of the Whale and the Thunderbird to the 1700 Pacific Coast earthquake.

Rage faces slowly migrated from 4chan into other communities. There, they gained popularity and expanded their numbers as artists introduced new faces, and particularly humorous comics went viral in their communities. Though the faces were no longer exclusive to any single forum, they stayed true to the originals in style.

More people got involved, the cartoons mutated and evolved, and like any successful species, they adapted to fit into a wide variety of habitats. "You can trace back the origins to 4chan so you can say [the faces are 4chan's] baby, but it's evolved on such a wide scale that it's gone beyond anyone's single ownership," Swanson said. "Mostly the original faces are from 4chan, but a lot of the newer faces have come out of F7U12, or other places like FunnyJunk."

Fffuuuuuuuu: The Internet anthropologist's field guide to "rage faces" ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/12/taxonomy-and-history-of-rage-f.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/02/interview-with-a-cyborg-anthro.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/02/interview-with-a-cyborg-anthro.html#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:00:10 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=146711 Jon Lebkowsky sez, "Former bOING!bOING! 'cyborganic jivemeister' interviews 21st century cyborg anthropologist Amber Case. A discussion of cyborganic mind and memory and the new world of digital tribes. In the SXSW Interactive issue of the Austin Chronicle."

Case spends a lot of time studying and thinking about how digital extension affects our brains and behaviors. "The brain doesn't really need that much stimulus in order to create a virtual reality," she says. In early computing, "we thought it would take much more to incite people into these realities," but text and good two-dimensional interfaces are enough to absorb us totally in virtual worlds. "It's mixed reality, where you can be anywhere and you have different virtual realities going on around you – the different tabs in a browser window, text messages you get, Facebook messages, Twitter messages. All of those are different realities in simultaneous time zones that people are living in all the time, and we switch rapidly between these contexts all the time. People are living multiple virtual realities while existing in one reality at a time."

I asked about the overhead for all the virtual switching we do as we bounce from one to another reality, referring to it as "virtual jet lag." "To be fully aware of an environment and take something in that is not fragmented is important for learning and embodying knowledge," she says. "But the problem on the Internet is, say you learn something on Wikipedia; you're not embodied in that knowledge. Rather than learning in a lab, you're reading something about biochemistry on Wikipedia, learning it there. And halfway through the article, you may be checking your email or looking at Facebook; it disrupts the writing of that memory to your brain." This leads to greater fragmentation of memory than we might otherwise experience. "By the time you've finished loading that memory, you've only loaded part of it," she notes. "And if you stay up late, don't get enough REM sleep, your brain can't get through the natural defragmentation process. And you wake up with a sloppy hard drive of a brain."

Man or Machine? Circle Option C. (Thanks, Jonl!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/02/interview-with-a-cyborg-anthro.html/feed 5 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/killed-by-something-that-doesn.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/killed-by-something-that-doesn.html#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:15:40 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=143334 Placebos have no repeatable physical effect that can be broadly demonstrated to exist. But, if people believe the placebo can help them, it often does—especially for inherently subjective issues like pain relief.

Nocebos are what happens when a placebo (again, something that technically has no physical effect on the body) causes a negative side-effect, simply because the person believes that such side-effects are likely to happen to them.

There is a lot we don't understand about both of these effects. After all, running really detailed tests would inherently involve unethical behavior—intentionally not treating patients or intentionally trying to induce a negative reaction in them. But that doesn't mean you can ignore these phenomena.

A great example comes in a recent column by Alexis Madrigal on The Atlantic. You're probably familiar with the idea of sleep paralysis—the experience of waking up, being mentally awake, but still physically paralyzed. This happens to people all over the world. And, all over the world, it's long been explained in folklore as the work of demons and evil spirits. (The fact that sleep paralysis is often accompanied by feelings of terror, and the sensation of something sitting on your chest doesn't hurt in that regard.) Normally, sleep paralysis brings a few minutes of terror, but no lasting harm. In the mid-1980s, however, it suddenly became capable of killing. The catch, the men it killed were all recent Hmong immigrants, living in the United States. Researcher Shelley Adler thinks it was actually a nocebo effect that killed these men—they believed themselves into an early grave.

[In America] some Hmong felt that they had not properly honored the memories of their ancestors, which was a known risk factor among the Hmong for being visited by the tsog tsuam. Once the night-mare visitations began, a shaman was often needed to set things right. And in the scattered communities of Hmong across the country, they might not have access to the right person. Without access to traditional rituals, shamans, and geographies, the Hmong were unable to provide themselves psychic protection from the spirits of their sleep.

Drawing on all this evidence, Adler makes the provocative claim that the Laotian immigrants of the 1980s were in some sense killed by their powerful cultural belief in night spirits. It was not a simple process.

"It is my contention that in the context of severe and ongoing stress related to cultural disruption and national resettlement (exacerbated by intense feelings of powerlessness about existence in the United States), and from the perspective of a belief system in which evil spirits have the power to kill men who do not fulfill their religious obligations," Adler writes, "the solitary Hmong man confronted by the numinous terror of the night-mare (and aware of its murderous intent) can die of SUNDS."

I've been doing periodic appearances on Sex is Fun, a sex-positive podcast aimed at providing fun, informative sex ed. for grown-ups. Last time I was on the show, we talked about some funny animal sex studies and what they can and can't teach you about human sexual behavior. This time around, we talked about a couple of recent studies focusing on sociology and sex.

In particular, we focused on a study from last fall that surveyed students at the University of Kansas to find out how men's and women's internalized sexism affect their relationships with each other. If you've ever watched one of those shows about so-called "pick up artists" and wondered, "Who the hell are the women falling for this crap!?", then this is the show to listen to.

Check out the podcast at the Sex is Fun site!

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit" is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. I'll be featuring posts in this series all week. Want to see them all? Check out the archive post. I'll update the full list there every morning.

Not every museum exhibit will survive untouched from your childhood to your grandchildrens'. Over time, historic and scientific accuracy, changing mores and aesthetics, and improvements in design will force some exhibits off the main stage and into the dusty storage room of memory.

But you can still love them from afar.

On this, the last day of "My Favorite Museum Exhibit" week, I'd like to include one man's tribute to a long-dismantled museum exhibit. Tom Luthman writes:

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I'd go to the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio (COSI). COSI opened in 1964, in the old Franklin County Memorial Hall, built in 1906. It closed in 1999, or rather, it moved to a new location, and most of the old exhibits didn't make the move.

One of the exhibits was THE TRIUMPH OF MAN, a leftover exhibit from the 1964 World's Fair in New York City, built by the Travelers Insurance Companies. You'd walk down a darkened corridor, and off in alcoves were 14 paper-mache scenes depicting the history of humanity. All accompanied by a recorded narration from the World's Fair. It was also sold in the gift shop as a 33-1/3 record, which we had.

Now, Luthman has put that recording to good use, incorporating it into a Flash-based recreation of THE TRIUMPH OF MAN* that will live online, long after the physical exhibit has decomposed in a landfill somewhere.

This is a really neat project and worth checking out, even if you don't have the emotional connection to THE TRIUMPH OF MAN that Luthman does. Just make sure you're someplace where you can crank up the sound and enjoy that sweet, sweet mid-20th-century triumphalism in stereo.

A virtual recreation of The TRIUMPH OF MAN

On Submitterator, Musicman pointed me towards this great presentation on LOLspeak as a form of language play, and why people engage in that play. According to Lauren Gawne, who gave this speech last week at the Australian Linguistics Society conference, the choice to use LOLspeak has a lot to do with establishing identity—the playful identity of "cat", and the serious identity of "knowledgeable Internet user".

Includes an explanation of why LOLspeak is language play and not some language mashup "kitty pidgin".

You can read more about this on Lauren Gawne's blog Superlinguo.

The video, by the way, is 20 minutes long. It's also got a little bit of weird, warbly feedback in the audio, but that doesn't get in the way of hearing what Gawne is saying.

One of the things I enjoy about writing for BoingBoing is the opportunity it's giving me to learn how to write reviews of books. That's not something I'd ever done before I started writing here. And I'm only now getting around to experimenting with not only describing books I like, but figuring out how to talk about books I find to be flawed. Fair criticism is a difficult skill to learn.

That's why I'm sort of simultaneously terrified and in awe of this 1991 book review, published in the International Journal of Primatology. In it, anthropologist Matt Cartmill expresses his opinions about sociologist Donna Haraway's book Primate Visions. I don't know enough about either scholar, or the book, to have an opinion about whether Cartmill is right or wrong. But, wowow, is that a blistering review.

This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. This is a book that systematically distorts and selects historical evidence; but that is not a criticism, because its author thinks that all interpretations are biased, and she regards it as her duty to pick and choose her facts to favor her own brand of politics. This is a book full of vaporous, French-intellectual prose that makes Teilhard de Chardin sound like Ernest Hemingway by comparison; but that is not a criticism, because the author likes that sort of prose and has taken lessons in how to write it, and she thinks that plain, homely speech is part of a conspiracy to oppress the poor.

This is a book that clatters around in a dark closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before it bumps accidentally into its index and stops; but that is not a criticism, either, because its author finds it gratifying and refreshing to bang unrelated facts together as a rebuke to stuffy minds. This book infuriated me; but that is not a defect in it, because it is supposed to infuriate people like me, and the author would have been happier still if I had blown out an artery. In short, this book is flawless, because all its deficiencies are deliberate products of art. Given its assumptions, there is nothing here to criticize. The only course open to a reviewer who dislikes this book as much as I do is to question its author’s fundamental assumptions—which are big-ticket items involving the nature and relationships of language, knowledge, and science.

In Science Ink, Carl Zimmer's new book collecting photos of cool science tattoos and the stories behind them, there's a photo of a guy who got tattoos to match those found on Otzi, aka The Iceman, who died more than 5,000 years ago in the Italian Alps.

Mike Goldstein, the guy who got the tattoo, said the series of 10 simple lines arranged in groups of four, three, and three served to remind him that you don't have to be incredibly important during your lifetime in order to be important. "It reminds me that I can live however I want," he says in the book. "I don't have to work in an office or wear a tie, as are the expectations of our culture. I can walk across the Alps and die in a swamp, and that's OK."

I was reminded of that quote today, while reading my news stream. There's no evidence that Otzi was a particularly important figure to his culture. But here we are, thousands of years later, still debating the minutia of how he died. Emily Sohn writes about new Otzi research for Discover News:

...new analyses have revealed that a deep cut likely led to heavy bleeding in the man's eye. In the cold, high-altitude conditions where he was found, that kind of injury would have been tough to recover from.

The official opinion remains that an arrow in his left shoulder was the cause of death for Ötzi. But the new study raises the possibility -- for some, at least -- that he fell over after being shot by an arrow. And, at higher than 10,000 feet in elevation, his alpine fall may have made the situation much worse.

"Maybe he fell down or maybe he had a fight up there, nobody knows," said Wolfgang Recheis, a physicist in the radiology department at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. "With this cut alone, at 3,250 meters, it would have been a deadly wound up there. Bleeding to death in the late afternoon when it was getting cold up there, this could be really dangerous."

Granted, most of us have a better chance of making an impact after our deaths by helping other people during our lives. Or by donating our bodies to science. But it's still interesting to think about all that could happen to you thousands of years after you're gone.

At Anthropology in Practice, Krystal D'Costa looks at the cultural history of the rabbit's foot as a good luck charm, and attempts to figure out why bunny feet ended up being imbued with such significance. After all, owning that foot didn't turn out to be particularly lucky for the rabbit. But then, that may be part of the point.

It's an interesting article, and D'Costa finds connections to both European hedge-witchery and African-American trickster legends. But one idea that was particularly engaging to me: The "luck" of the rabbit's foot might come from procuring it in the most "unlucky" way possible. The foot becomes a paradoxical totem—an object so damn unlucky that it's back around to being lucky again. In other words, people thought rabbit's feet were lucky for the same reason we think little, gremlin-looking pug dogs are cute.

Folklorist Bill Ellis traces the lore of the rabbit’s foot to an interesting thread of subversion evident in the ways these tokens were certified—the process by which they were created determined the effectiveness of the charms. For example, one advertisement read, “the left hind foot of a rabbit killed in a country churchyard at midnight, during the dark of the moon, on Friday the 13th of the month, by a cross-eyed, left handed, red-headed, bow-legged Negro riding a white horse.”

Ellis labels these descriptive terms as “backward elements”—that is, they run counter to positive, fortuitous signs: the rear and left side is the “sinister side,” red hair and physical deformities were regarded as unlucky, the dark of the moon and Friday the 13th are both regarded as sinister times, and albino mules or horses were regarded as unlucky.