Progress Daily

Electrodes inserted into the brain help patients regain functions lost to strokes and spinal cord injuries. About 200 Americans so far have had the VeriChip, a microchip the size of a grain of rice, implanted in their arms, where it stores medical information that can be retrieved and viewed by a doctor with the sweep of a scanner the size of a calculator.

Other implantable devices can monitor the heart, passing information from the patient at home to the doctor in the hospital. Artificial hearts extend the lives of the dying. Bionic limbs replace those lost through war or accident. Such technologies raise possibilities that go into the realm of human enhancement.

Craig Kinsley said, “We can grow neurons on silicone plates; we can make the blind see; the deaf hear; we can read minds. These really are miracles, but they are being done by neuroscientists.”

As James Hughes put it: “We’re not doing anything natural these days. Modern life is entirely different from what life evolved to be. We evolved to wander the savanna for four hours at a stretch. You can either try to live as if we’re still on the savanna, or try to design the human body to live in the circumstances we’re in now.”

“Robo-quandary,” by Mark Johnson

Farm subsidies are bad for both taxpayers and unsubsidized farmers, but in 2002 the American farm lobby got a 70% increase in government support.

Since 1976, the Worldviews survey has always found that Americans who “sympathize more with those who want to eliminate tariffs” are seriously outnumbered by “those who think such tariffs are necessary.” A 2004 PIPA-Knowledge Networks Poll found that 58% agree that “government needs to subsidize farming to make sure there will always be a good supply of food.” In 2006, the Pew Research Center found that over 80% of Americans want to raise the minimum wage.

Yet economists have spent centuries explaining how markets channel greedy intentions into socially desirable results; how trade is mutually beneficial both within and between countries; how using price controls to redistribute income inflicts a lot of collateral damage. These are the lessons of every economics textbook. Economists across the political spectrum see eye to eye on these basic lessons.

As every introductory teacher of economics knows, students are not blank slates. On the first day of class, they arrive with strong — and usually misguided — beliefs.

The mystery of politics is why policies aren’t a lot worse.

“Special-Interest Secret,” by Bryan Caplan

An experiment (”Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements“) underscores the pivotal part played by unconscious empathy and emotion in guiding decisions.

Intuition tempers rational deliberation, said Joshua Greene, especially when our actions to help some people will harm others.

Trust is a measure of neuropeptide levels, while fairness is an electromagnetic pattern in the right prefrontal cortex. Disrupt it with a strong magnet, as did University of Zurich researchers in 2006, and any sense of fair-dealing fades.

The researchers singled out 6 middle-age men and women who had injured the same neural network in the prefrontal cortex. On neuropsychological tests, they seemed normal. They were healthy, intelligent, talkative, yet also unkempt, not so easily embarrassed or so likely to feel guilty. They had lived with the brain damage for years but seemed unaware that anything about them had changed.

To analyze their moral abilities, Dr. Michael Koenigs used leading questions: To save yourself and others, would you throw someone out of a lifeboat? Would you push someone off a bridge, smother a crying baby, or kill a hostage?

All told, they considered 50 hypothetical moral dilemmas. Their responses were essentially identical to those of neurology patients who had different brain injuries and to healthy volunteers, except when a situation demanded they take one life to save others. For most, the thought of killing an innocent prompts a visceral revulsion, no matter how many other lives weigh in the balance. But the 6 patients felt no such compunction in sacrificing one life for the good of all.

For Marc Hauser the moral-dilemma experiment is evidence the brain may be hard-wired for morality. Most moral intuitions, he said, are unconscious, involuntary and universal. To test the idea, he gathered data from thousands of people in hundreds of countries, all of whom display a remarkable unanimity in their basic moral choices.

“Scientists Draw Link Between Morality And Brain’s Wiring,” by Robert Lee Hotz

Testosterone (”T”) appears to sharpen our focus and concentration on a single task, but it detracts from our ability to attend to several things at once. Although the average guy churns out 8 to 10 times as much testosterone as the average woman, female bodies appear to be much more sensitive to small amounts of the hormone. Because testosterone levels fall in men as they age, and rise in women in relation to dropping levels of the female hormone estrogen, the sexes become more alike as they age.

Men with high levels of T die younger, perhaps because they do more fighting and risk-taking and less consensus-building. T levels are lower among vegetarians, possibly because there are natural estrogens in the plants they eat.

On average, the high-T man is leaner, balder, more self-confident, more rambunctious, and less likely to have friendly smiles, and more likely to favor tattoos and gold jewelry than other men. Football players and construction workers are relatively high in T, whereas intellectuals and administrators are relatively low. Firefighters’ T rises on the way to a blaze and declines once they’re safely away from the fire and headed back to the station.

Annie Murphy Paul’s review of Heroes, Rogues, And Lovers

Fourteen men in an extended family of Dutch sociopaths committed impulsive, aggressive crimes including arson and attempted rape. In 1993, scientists reported that all 14 had the identical form of a gene on the X chromosome. The gene makes an enzyme called MAOA, which breaks down such brain chemicals as serotonin and noradrenaline. The normal version of the gene produces lots of MAOA; the aberrant form produces low amounts. Studies in animals had linked low enzyme levels to aggression, perhaps because when MAOA is in short supply the brain remains jacked up on neurochemicals in a way that induces aggression.

In 2002, scientists who had followed 442 New Zealand men since their birth found that the MAOA link was not nearly as straightforward as the Dutch study suggested. Yes, men with the low-activity form of the MAOA gene were more likely to engage in persistent fighting, bullying, cruelty and violent crime than were men with the high-activity version. But that was so only if they had been neglected or abused as children. If they had not been mistreated, men with the low-activity MAOA gene were not much likelier to be violent.

In his research on killers, Adrian Raine classifies them as either reactive, those who murder in response to an insult or slight (real or imagined), or proactive, who kill to achieve a thought-out goal such as robbery. Proactive killers show brain-activity patterns no different from that of normal, nonviolent volunteers, Raine reported in 1998. But the brains of reactive killers have clearly reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, the site of such “executive” functions as judgment, planning, abstract reasoning, inhibiting inappropriate or impulsive behavior and self-monitoring.

In the brains of reactive killers the eerie quiet in the prefrontal regions is paired with increased activity in the limbic regions, site of emotions. Also overactive is a region involved in shifting attention, called the cingulate gyrus. “You become obsessive,” Daniel Amen says. “Someone with violent thoughts can’t let them go. Stalking is one sign of that.”

Life experiences and even introspection can alter patterns of brain activity. When people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder learn to think about their thoughts differently, for instance, they can quiet activity in the cingulate. That raises the possibility that killers’ aberrant brain activity is itself the result of experiences they had or thoughts they thought, rather than something that was wired in at birth. Individual differences in testosterone levels (as long as they are within 20% to 200% of normal) do not cause differences in levels of aggression, nor do changes in a man’s testosterone levels over time predict changes in aggression. Only levels at least four times the norm (as can occur with “roid rage”) spell trouble. And just as experiences can alter brain circuitry, so behavior can alter biology: aggression can raise testosterone levels even more strongly than testosterone raises aggression.

More than 90% of killers, and even more mass murderers, are male. Mass killers are usually 25 to 35, though school shooters are younger.

Studies find that up to 45% of boys who commit serious violent crimes by the age of 17, and up to 69% of girls, were inappropriately aggressive in childhood, picking fights with other kids. It is very rare for violence to show itself for the first time in a person’s 20s.

On a national scale, the countries of Western Europe that Pope Benedict laments are turning their backs on their Christian heritage have the world’s lowest rates of homicide. At the individual level, though, there is some evidence that regular church attendance “promotes moral integration,” says Jack Levin.

“The Anatomy of Violence,” by Sharon Begley

Man’s habitat at the outset was dominated by the need to find food, and hunting and foraging were rural pursuits. Not until the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, did he start building anything that might be called a village, and by that time man had been around for about 120,000 years. It took another six millennia for cities of more than 100,000 people to develop. Even in 1800 only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. Sometime in the next few months, though, that proportion will pass the 50% mark, if it has not done so already.

The first villages came with the emergence of agriculture and the domestication of animals: people no longer had to wander as they hunted and gathered but could instead draw together in settlements, allowing some to develop particular skills and all to live in greater safety from predators. After a while the farmers could produce surpluses, at least in good times, and the various products of the villagers—grain, meat, cloth, pots—could be exchanged. Around 2000BC metal tokens, the forerunners of coins, were produced as receipts for quantities of grain placed in granaries. Cities began to take shape at about the same time.

They did so, first, in the Fertile Crescent, the sweep of productive land that ran through Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Palestine, from which Jericho, Ur, Nineveh and Babylon would emerge. Rome was the first great metropolis, which boasted, at its zenith in the third century AD, a population of more than 1m people.

The city became a centre of exchange, both of goods and of ideas, and so it also became a centre of learning, innovation and sophistication.

Technological changes made it possible to survive in a city. The Romans, for instance, constructed aqueducts to bring fresh water to their towns and sewers to provide sanitation.

With the new factories of the industrial age that began in the late 18th century was born an entirely new urban era. Peasants left the land in their multitudes to live in new cities, first in the north of England, then all over Europe and North America. By 1900, 13% of the world’s population had become urban.

The latest leap, from 13% to 50% took just 107 years. Improvements in medicine, coupled with new knowledge about ways to avoid disease, have enabled more and more people to live together without succumbing as once they did to diarrhoea, tuberculosis, cholera and other pestilences. The same developments have lengthened lives in the countryside, leading to a huge increase in rural population, but without commensurate growth in rural prosperity. As a result, ever more villagers have seeked a better life in the city.

“The world goes to town,” by John Grimond

When Guglielmo Marconi was granted patents on his “wireless telegraph” in 1897, the radio signals could travel only a few kilometres, and only one receiver and transmitter could operate in any one area. Since 1900 “spectrum efficiency” — the amount of information that can travel over the same portion of radio waves — has improved perhaps a trillion times.

The processing power of chips doubles about every two years, according to Moore’s law. As the billions of transistors on the chips get smaller, there is more room to add extra functions.

Many of the functions of such chips are controlled by software, which means they can be continually upgraded at little cost. Chip technology has not only improved the performance and cost of the radio itself but other parts of the system too, from “smart” antennae to advanced power management for longer battery life.

Around 12% of address traffic involves computers linking to other computers, without a person at either end. John Roese expects the amount of machine-to-machine communication to pull ahead of human calls and web clicks some time between 2009 and 2011 as cameras, cars, utility meters, home security systems and the like continuously send data across the network. Vivek Ranadivé, the boss of Tibco, says the number of computer transactions automatically started by other computers is already higher than that initiated by people.

In 2003 Texas Instruments began work on a single low-cost radio chip that included support for a digital music player, FM stereo radio, camera and colour display with a longer battery life. A prototype was built in 2004 and bulk production began in 2006. In the fourth quarter of last year alone the firm shipped 10 million of these chips. The chips have dropped from $50 apiece to around $5, and a phone that would have cost $250 five years ago is now $25.

A simple kind of chip called a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag, which sends a tiny quantity of data over a short range when activated, can already be manufactured for four cents apiece. Hitachi has a prototype chip that fits into the groove of a thumb-print. Last year one billion RFID chips were sold.

Most big logistics companies in America and Europe now track their fleets with a combination of satellites and mobile-phone networks. Small wireless sensors monitoring equipment in large factories can provide early warning of impending breakdown. They can run on energy “harvested” from the heat or vibrations of the machinery.

One of the most important consequences of these new wireless technologies will be to increase visibility and accountability. Economists today treat many items as indirect costs because there is no way to attribute the use of a resource to a particular individual. Wireless communications can change this, he says, by making it possible to base things like road tolls and car-insurance premiums on people’s actual driving patterns.

Wireless technology is akin to the electrical grid, which was originally intended for a particular use, the light bulb, but whose “killer application” turned out to be the power socket that allowed a multitude of new and unforeseen devices to draw energy from it.

“Marconi’s brainwave,” The Economist

Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns — the basic idea is that the power of technology is expanding at an exponential rate. Mankind is on the cusp of a radically accelerating era of change unlike anything we have ever seen.

In the 1980s he predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998 (it happened in 1997) and that some kind of worldwide computer network would arise and facilitate communication and entertainment (still happening).

Don’t underestimate the power of technological change. “Information technologies are doubling in power every year right now,” says Kurzweil. “Doubling every year is multiplying by 1,000 in ten years. It’s remarkable how scientists miss this basic trend.”

Most of us fail to see the world changing exponentially because we are “stuck in the intuitive linear view.”

He explains that Moore’s Law - the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years - is but one example of the Law of Accelerating Returns. The Human Genome Project “was scheduled to be a 15-year project. After seven years only 1% of it was done, and the critics said it would be impossible. But if you double from 1% every year over seven years, you get 100%. It was right on schedule.”

Everything will be subject to his Law of Accelerating Returns because “everything is ultimately becoming information technology.” As we are able to reverse-engineer and decode our own DNA, for instance, medical technology can be converted to bits and bytes and zoom along at the same fantastic rate. That will enable overlapping revolutions in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

“The smartest (or the nuttiest) futurist on Earth,” by Brian O’Keefe

Chris Lowry thinks a particular sort of bacterium might alleviate clinical depression.

Dr Mary O’Brien was trying out an experimental treatment for lung cancer that involved inoculating patients with Mycobacterium vaccae. This is a harmless relative of the bugs that cause tuberculosis and leprosy that had been rendered even more harmless by killing it. When Dr O’Brien gave the inoculation, she observed not only fewer symptoms of the cancer, but also an improvement in her patients’ emotional health, vitality and general cognitive function.

Dr Lowry’s hypothesis was that the immune response to M. vaccae induces the brain to produce serotonin. This molecule is a neurotransmitter (a chemical messenger between nerve cells) and one symptom of depression is low levels of it.

Dr Lowry injected his mice with M. vaccae and examined them to find out what was going on. First, they looked for a rise in the level of cytokines, which are molecules produced by the immune system that trigger responses in the brain. As expected, cytokine levels rose. They then looked directly in their animals’ brains for the effect of those cytokines.

Cytokines act on sensory nerves that run to the brain from organs such as the heart and the lungs. That action stimulates a brain structure called the dorsal raphe nucleus. Dr Lowry found a group of cells within it that connect directly to the limbic system, the brain’s emotion-generating area. These cells release serotonin into the limbic system in response to sensory-nerve stimulation.

The consequence of that release is stress-free mice. Dr Lowry was able to measure their stress by dropping them into a tiny swimming pool. Previous research has shown that unstressed mice enjoy swimming, while stressed ones do not. His mice swam around enthusiastically.

This offers the possibility of treating clinical depression with a vaccination. (Besides cancer and depression, M. vaccae is being looked at as a way of treating Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis.)

Depression is becoming more common, as are asthma and allergies, both of which are caused by the immune system attacking cells of the body it is supposed to protect. A lack of childhood exposure to harmless bugs may be leading to improperly primed immune systems, which then go on to look for trouble where none exists.

If an ultra-hygienic environment is not stimulating the interaction between immune system and brain, some people may be made depressed by the consequent lack of serotonin.

“Bad is good,” The Economist

Antonio Damasio sought out patients who had suffered brain injuries that prevented them from perceiving their own feelings. The lives of these patients quickly fell apart because they could not make effective decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; most spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. These results suggest that proper thinking requires feeling.

A study led by Brian Knutson, published last January, demonstrated that our daily shopping decisions depend on the relative activity of various emotional brain regions. What we end up buying is largely dictated by these instant feelings, and not by some rational calculation.

Joshua Greene used brain imaging to demonstrate that whenever we contemplate hurting someone else, our brain automatically generates a negative emotion. This visceral signal discourages violence. Greene’s data builds on evidence suggesting that psychopaths suffer from a severe emotional disorder — that they can’t think properly because they can’t feel properly.

“Hearts & Minds,” by Jonah Lehrer