The first article I read, I chose because of the title, "Metaphors Are Us". (I love metaphors!) I was fascinated to find out how metaphors, empathy, morality, and neurology all come together in a beautiful and complicated mess of humanity. Our ability to feel empathy, to connect to someone else's pain and feel it ourselves, relates to very specific functions of the brain:
While in a brain scanner, you’re administered a mild shock, delivered through electrodes on your fingers. All the usual brain regions activate, including the anterior cingulate. Now you watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. The brain regions that ask, “Is it my finger or toe that hurts?” remain silent. It’s not their problem. But your anterior cingulate activates, and as far as it’s concerned, “feeling someone’s pain” isn’t just a figure of speech. You seem to feel the pain too.Humans also appear to abstract disgust as well as pain. The insula, which processes gustatory disgust in all mammals (to make us spit out poison, for example), also activates when we think about some shameful thing we did. This "moral disgust" also relates to humans as social creatures:
Many cultures inculcate their members into acquiring symbols that repel, doing so by strengthening specific neural pathways from the cortex to the insula, pathways that you’d never find in another species. Depending on who you are, those pathways could be activated by the sight of a swastika or of two men kissing. Or perhaps by the thoughts of an abortion, or of a 10-year-old Yemeni girl forced to marry an old man. Our stomachs lurch, and we feel the visceral certainty of what is wrong. And we belong.That beautiful paragraph makes me want to read more by the article's author, Robert Sapolsky.
I haven't finished Issue 1 yet because I was distracted by Issue 0, which I got around to reading today. I probably won't write about all of the issues, but here are more reasons I love Nautilus:
In one article, I learn that music is fractal, and so is a coastline!A fractal pattern looks the same on large scales as it does on small ones; put another way, the parts of a fractal system look similar to the entire system. I'm not entirely sure how music is fractal, but it's still cool!
In another article, I get some fascinating insight into psychological epistemology:
According to Rolf Reber, a psychologist at the University of Bergen, in Norway, “there is growing empirical evidence that people use a common source for evaluations of both beauty and truth.” The source he refers to is processing fluency, the state of being able to easily parse and understand a situation. Essentially, the more easily we can get a handle on a situation (because it’s mathematically simple, we’ve seen it many times before, it’s symmetrical, etc.), the more likely it is to seem right.This explains so much about people and why they believe what they do! (I have just now decided to call this psychological epistemology. It probably already has a more appropriate and boring name like the "psychology of belief" but... boring.)
So anyway, this is very fascinating for psychological epistemology: the easier something is for us to understand, the more likely we will accept it as true. Simple and elegant solutions just seem right. Things that don't make "horse sense" are met with skepticism. And when we hear something over and over again it becomes much easier to believe, even when it has no relation to reality. (I'm glaring meaningfully in your direction, Fox "News"....)
A third article had me at its title, "Where Science and Story Meet", because I've been wanting to read "The Storytelling Animal" but it's not at my local bookstore. The article was not quite what I expected, but that's good; if I only ever learned what I expected to learn, then I probably wouldn't actually learn very much. Anyway, the unexpected thing I learned was that
The pleasurable feeling that our explanation is the right one—ranging from a modest sense of familiarity to the powerful and sublime “a-ha!”—is meted out by the same reward system in the brain integral to drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions.Not only are humans good at pattern recognition, but figuring out the pattern produces happy chemicals in the brain! Solving that equation, putting that jigsaw piece in the right place, or hearing someone else tell you something you already know is true - putting things together into a coherent story - makes us feel good, while not solving that equation or puzzle, or having a friend present you with facts that contradict your beautiful story, makes us hate math and angry at our friends. This pretty much explains why I like to do jigsaw puzzles when I'm stressed, and adds to theories I have about the psychology of gaming. (Or maybe theories other people have that I've read...)
There's more Nautilus to read, and learn and think about, but this story is over for now!
