Nature Matters
“Twitter may sound trivial, it’s not. It’s hugely important.” It will transform the way that people talk to one another. Surely, if we can put a man on the moon, we can put our own house in order. The inimitable Sir David Attenborough OM on population growth, communication, life on earth.
Oh, did I mention I met him once…?
When you’re feeling blue, put on a sad song. Getting in the party spirit? Turn up the dance music. We are all well aware that music can fit our mood and even reinforce certain emotions. Now, researchers at Philips Research in The Netherlands have demonstrated that background music can affect our mood even while we are directly focused on another task. Their work, described in the International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics might have implications for those investigating the benefits of music therapy, music in the workplace, commercial environments or even in healthcare.
Music is almost ubiquitous for many people, they listen wherever and whenever and with modern portable electronic gadgets it is almost impossible to be without one’s music collection even when on the move; at least until the batteries are expended. Music is often the primary activity at any given time, listening for pleasure and relaxation. It is well known that music can strongly influence a person’s mood under such circumstances. However, what was not entirely clear from previous scientific research was whether music can influence mood so significantly if it is being played in the background, secondary to a person involved in another activity.
Marjolein van der Zwaag and Joyce Westerink specialists in human perception and interaction with technology have now observed participants in sequential experiments in which people were first asked to listen to happy or sad music while doing nothing or solving a Sudoku puzzle. They also did the Sudoku with no music as a control. Later, they were asked to listen to the other type of music under the same conditions. The team measured changes in the participants’ skin electrical conductance and tension in facial muscles during the experiments as indicators of changing mood. They also interviewed the participants to obtain a more subjective but personal view of each individual’s mood.
The team found that participants’ mood responded to the different kinds of mood music – happy or sad – in approximately the same way regardless of whether listening to the music was the person’s focus or simply background sound to their solving the puzzle. The team suggests that mood music might thus be useful in calming or energising a user even when they are involved in an independent task, at work, in school or in other situations, such as driving, for instance.
Zwaag, M.D.V.D. & Westerink, J.H.D.M. (2012). Inducing moods with background music, International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 1 (2) DOI: 10.1504/IJHFE.2012.048035
I relocated a planter in our back garden and inadvertently exposed an ants’ nest. I needed the tub elsewhere in the garden so these creatures had to undertake frenzied remedial action in the face of a man-made disaster. In the name of science, I videoed their efforts, Needless to say, the population was not affected significantly and we still see trails of Formicidae relocating crumbs and other debris around our garden patio and into our conservatory…
I wonder what the pair of wood lice at about 43 seconds in thought of the disastrous events taking place around them, they were probably first to tweet it…or maybe not.
Oh the music? That was me messing around with a drum loop and a few guitar chops, it sounded like I’d at once ripped off both Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix badly, hence the title – Breathe the Wing.
TouchPress has done it again giving us an aesthetically pleasing collision of art and technology – akin to the Leonardo Anatomy app I mentioned a while back. This time The Sonnets by William Shakespeare gets the modern treatment with videos and readings featuring Patrick Stewart (always a draw for the Trekkie classicist), Stephen Fry (for the Apple fanboys) and David Tennant (for the Whovians) and Kim Cattrall (who was in the TV series of Logan’s Run, of course) and others. All 154 pieces are performed to camera by the all-star cast.
The app includes scholarly notes from the Arden Shakespeare that the developers say bridge the gap between Elizabethan and modern English given that the original folio pages are presented.
A surprisingly compelling explanation of differential gearing from the 1930s. Fast Forward to 1:50 if you want to skip the introduction…jump to 8:50 for the acrobatics!
Not for the first time I’ve suspected that lyricist and drummer with the Canadian rock band Rush, Neil Peart has been reading my blog. First time was having written about the concept of earthshine, the band’s next album featured a song on that very concept, the reflected light from the Earth illuminating the dark face of a new moon ‘cradled’ in the old. Of course, I didn’t really believe he was reading my stuff, it was a kind of bizarre, displaced hero worship surely?
Well then what to make of a song on the recently released album from the progressive power trio Clockwork Angels that discusses what I’ve come to refer to as deceived Wisdom in my forthcoming book. The song is called The Wreckers and uses the allegory of those who would draw sailors on to rocky shores by lighting fake beacons offering safe harbour. The idea is captured in Peart’s quite lyrical lines:
All I know is that sometimes you have to be wary
Of a miracle too good to be true
All I know is that sometimes the truth is contrary
Everything in life you thought you knew
All I know is that sometimes you have to be wary
‘Cause sometimes the target is you
A man tries to convince his friend that Charles Darwin conceived his book ‘Origin of Species’ on the concept of evolution in the town of Cromer, Norfolk, England and not in the Galapagos Islands. This video was premiered at the first Science Online conference back in 2009 but has only just this last week reached the virtual hallowed halls of Youtube. Thanks to Graham Steel for the alert. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before…
Meanwhile, for fans of the North Norfolk Coast, here’s a little poem wot I wrote about the village of Stiffkey.
Ever been taken up the North Norfolk Coast?
There’s a place on the coast name of Stiffkey
Which surprisingly yet rhymes with hookie
Now in near disgrace a priest of said place,
spent his time up The Smoke after nookie
This priest, must be said, was the rector
And claimed souls he would save as a lector
A girl of SoHo, took him ever so low,
Defrocked she would be, he’d inspect her
The village was shocked but kept quiet
’bout those happenings, they’d cause a riot
in the street and the lane where the people are plain
But the papers they scooped that old the story quite righ-ut
A court case was held, “Immoral!” they yelled and the rector was morally shaken
thrown out of the church but escaping the birch
he frowned as reached Stiffkey quakin’
But those stuffky old folks on the North Norfolk coast,
will never admit to his truancy
They claim that it’s right, he did fight the good fight,
and it’s Stiff-Key not Stookie if you’ve fluency
Incidentally, the Rev Dr Ezekiel Gee (played by Henry Gee aka CromerCrox) is not the Rector of my poem.
There is almost no limit to the number of people you could follow on Twitter, but when someone follows you, how do you decide whether to follow back or not? I’ve updated my handy cut-out-and-keep Twitter Decision Flowchart for the scientific age. You may wish to add your own block words, so print it in pencil and use an eraser ;-)
Please retweet and share wildly, we should all be applying these principles to boost the overall Twitter signal-to-noise ratio. With apologies to Star Wars fans, a little joke at their expense I was having.
As a follow up to that item on eye movements and lying, here’s a quote from the Skeptics’ Dictionary about Neuro Linguistic Programming, NLP:
“It seems that NLP develops models which can’t be verified, from which it develops techniques which may have nothing to do with either the models or the sources of the models. NLP makes claims about thinking and perception which do not seem to be supported by neuroscience.”
“NLP itself proclaims that it is pragmatic in its approach: what matters is whether it works. However, how do you measure the claim “NLP works”?…Anecdotes and testimonials seem to be the main measuring devices. Unfortunately, such a measurement may reveal only how well the trainers teach their clients to persuade others to enrol in more training sessions.”
Norcross, J.C., Koocher, G.P. & Garofalo, A. (2006). Discredited psychological treatments and tests: A Delphi poll., Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 37 (5) 522. DOI: 10.1037/0735-7028.37.5.515
There’s a weird piece of Deceived Wisdom that emerged from so-called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that suggested that one could somehow tell whether a person was lying by looking at their eye movements. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that it’s nonsense. All that guff about looking up to their right when you’re fabricating a tale and down to the left when they’re recalling a truth? It’s nonsense.
Research published by Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire and colleagues in the journal PLoS ONE today lays the deceived wisdom bare. “The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,” noted Wiseman.
“A large percentage of the public believes that certain eye movements are a sign of lying, and this idea is even taught in organisational training courses,” team member Caroline Watt of the University of Edinburgh says. “Our research provides no support for the idea and so suggests that it is time to abandon this approach to detecting deceit. The researchers are now calling on the public, the media and organisations who claim credence for NLP and eye-movement lie detection to abandon this nonsense.
No need to hide your lyin; eyes, after all Glenn.
(2012). The Eyes Don’t Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040259.t003