What does the peacock's tail say?

A gazelle grazes in the savannah. Suddenly, it notices a dangerous beast approaching through the high grass. At first it stands motionless. Then, instead of bolting, it leaps high in the air and continues jumping about two meters high right in front of the beast. But why? Is this not a complete waste of energy and would it not be better in terms of survival for it to run away as quickly as possible? Does it use jumping to warn other gazelles in the vicinity?

At the beginning of the seventies a biologist called Amotz Zahavi, a professor of zoology at Tel Aviv University started examining the question that has puzzled scientists from Darwin on: why do animals, in terms of energy consumption, often behave in wasteful ways? Why do peacocks have bushy tails which only hinder their movement through the natural environment? Why do gazelles, at the sight of a lion, not run away, but start to jump high into the air?

Zahavi developed a theory according to which the seemingly irrational and wasteful behavior has no meaning in itself, but functions as a message (signal, sign). With its high leaps the gazelle is telling the lion that it is healthy and strong, so that any attempt to catch it would be useless. The lion would need more energy to catch it, than if it decided to look for another animal, less agile and fast. Similarly, a peacock with its bushy tail informs its potential mates that its genes and physical condition are excellent; otherwise, it would not have been able to grow such a magnificent tail.

Which signals can be trusted?

But why would animals “tell truth” with these signals? Would it not be most convenient for every living being to boast and show itself in the best light possible in order to survive? Could an animal gain anything at all by “telling the truth”? How can sincere communication be established among living beings in nature when there is a conflict of interests between the sender and the receiver of information?

According to the theory developed by Zahavi, and independently by several economic theorists, the solution to the problem of trustworthy communication lies in the high costs of creating such signals. Zahavi claims that the very fact that animals have to invest such amounts of energy into creating these signals is of key importance. It is exactly because producing these signals in the natural environment seems to be an irrational waste of energy that they can be acknowledged as genuine and not deceiving in the eyes of the receiver. If every signal has a certain price and if the creation of false signals is in average and in the long term more costly than the creation of true signals, it simply does not pay to lie.

Drawing from sports, Zahavi named his hypothesis the handicap principle. The energy-wasting signals function as a sort of an additional difficulty which guarantees that messages are truly genuine and not false. The peacock’s tail is the perfect example of such a “handicap” or energy-wasting signal. The purpose of the bushy tail is to communicate to potential female mates what they cannot perceive directly. Maintaining a lustrous, bushy tail requires a great amount of energy, which only strong and healthy males can afford to spare. Sickly and weak peacocks would be so exhausted by such an investment that they would not be able to reap its benefits. They have to direct all of their energy into survival alone and have no extra energy left to invest into luxury goods such as a bushy tail.

Another important fact is that peacocks can not benefit from lying in the long term. Investing in a tail requires such an expenditure of energy that it is better for them to hope to succeed with one of the females without growing a bushy tail. It might be that they are only weak one year and will be able to grow a magnificent year by the next, but for the time being it is of foremost importance to survive until that time. It is because of its high energy cost that a bushy and colorful tail makes a good indicator of a peacock’s condition which would have otherwise remained hidden from the females.

Biologists discovered similar communicative signs in birds. The chicks in the nest can be very loud when they are hungry, because their feeding depends on what their parents bring them. The dilemma a bird parent faces is how to know which of the little beaks is really in the greatest need of the worm it had just brought to the nest. Is it the chick that chirps the loudest? If the chicks had no natural enemies in their surroundings, the bird parent could not be sure whether the loudest chick is also the hungriest. As the loud calling can also attract enemies, the chick, once fed, is better off not making any more noise which could cost it dearly in the wilderness where it is threatened by other animal species.

Why it makes sense to tax luxury goods

Similar conclusions as those made by zoologists, who studied animal behavior in the wilderness, were also reached by economists. People also like to invest in goods which are not really necessary for their survival. It was already in the eighteenth century that Adam Smith realized that people are very fond of displaying their wealth, while they tend to conceal their poverty. However, he did not (yet) think of displaying wealth as of a status symbol, but formulated the theory that people prefer to identify with happiness rather than with misery, so it made sense to show off wealth and hide poverty.

A more modern point of view was adopted in the middle of the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill who perceived luxury goods as a status symbol and suggested that they be taxed. As people do not buy expensive things because they need them, but to show how well they are doing, their price naturally does not correlate with their usefulness. In Mill’s opinion that is why it is only proper that the government makes these items even more expensive by imposing taxes. “When we do not buy an object for its practical purpose but for its high price, lowering the price does not make any sense … nobody really pays the tax for such an item. Taxing these goods is ideal; this way, the state treasury fills up without costing anybody anything.”

If wealth was once no more than a sign of an individual’s success, it gradually became a value in itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen analyzed the ways in which people exhibit their wealth in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. At first, the mark of a well-off individual was that he did not have to work in order to survive. Having plenty of spare time to dedicate to leisure activities was a good indicator that a person was wealthy.

As an example of displaying an abundance of spare time he also stated excessive education which he contrasted with education aimed at developing the skills to perform real, practical tasks. Like in sports, excessive education aimed at learning unimportant skills was not much more than an exhibition of the abundance of spare time.

On the subject of spare time it should also be mentioned that modern science started to develop in these very wealthy circles, because someone who researched only to guarantee his survival could not be entirely credible. A trustworthy scientist could only be someone who researched for pleasure in his own spare time, not having to rely on his work to support his family. Scholars who were employed at universities received money for teaching and not for research. This belief remained unchanged until the nineteenth century, when being a scientist became a profession like any other.

What is an education good for?

The theory of education as a signal was perfected by the economist Michael Spence and earned him a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. While Veblen defended the claim that higher education was a signal of belonging to the work-free social class, Spense developed a theory according to which the level of education is primarily a signal to potential employers, conveying information about the characteristics of an individual which would otherwise be impossible to perceive. In 1973 he published a mathematical model of the employment market based on the level of education as a signal which, much like a peacock’s tail, communicates the otherwise unperceivable characteristics of an individual.

In a simplified version of this model there are two sorts of people on the employment market: in group A there are the highly productive workers, and in group B there are the less productive workers. However, an employer can not evaluate in advance whether the potential employee is a group A or a group B worker. In his original model Spence does not take into consideration that additional education would directly increase the worker’s productivity. The essential question is why would potential workers in this model educate themselves at all, and why employees would give higher salaries to more educated people?

With his analysis, Spence demonstrated that the level of education can be a good indicator of the type of worker. Much like in the case of the peacock’s tail a degree or a doctorate which requires a considerable effort and the investment of a great amount of energy in average functions as a credible signal indicating the potential productivity of an individual. However, let it be pointed out once again that, at least in this simple model, education has no practical significance and in itself does not increase the productivity of an individual. It is only a signal aimed at the employee, which is in most cases trustworthy. For the less productive group B, investing in additional education which would guarantee them a higher salary has no sense, because they would have to invest more in doing so than they could gain by having it. That is why education, according to this model of the employment market, is as trustworthy a signal for employers, as the high leaping of a gazelle in front of a lion or the peacock’s proud exhibition of its magnificent tail.

Statistics against poverty and disease

Not many people can read music notes well enough to hear the music in their minds just by looking at a score of a composition they had never heard befores. Hans Rosling, a professor of medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, claims that something similar applies to statistics. Pieces of raw data are like notes on paper, requiring a musical instrument and an interpreter so they can be understood by an average person. In fact, we can understand different data only after it has been very clearly presented with analogies that we can visualize.

The visualization of human development

A good decade ago, when Rosling was preparing his first lectures on the global public health for his Swedish medical students he quickly realized that they were having difficulties with visualizing the mass of data on medical and economic statistics which are the basis for studying the level of development of individual areas of the world. With the help of his son he started to write a computer program which would enable a clear presentation of the enormous amount of information in a way that would allow him to breathe life into this data much like a musician who transforms the musical notation of a composition into sounds.

After a week or so, they had developed the first, test version of the software called Trendalyzer. They also had some help from his son’s wife who designed an attractive user interface. With this program, which they uploaded to the Internet and could be accessed for free, they could animate the chronological changes of the most important statistical data of all the countries in the world from the middle of the nineteenth century to this day. In 2005, after the program’s great success, Rosling founded the non-profit Gapminder Foundation whose mission was to “create free-access applications for the visualization of human development”. In March this year, Trendalyzer’s future development was taken over by the Google group that will continue to offer free access to the software to all internet users.

Rosling negotiated the software takeover with the famous Marissa Mayer who is, besides the both co-founders, one of Google’s most important people and has the last word in everything that concerns all the new products with which this internet giant continues making internet users happy. Mayer immediately advised him to add short and attractive video presentations of different applications of his brilliant computer program. Rosling at first thought that was a bit too much, because he was convinced that anyone would want to play with the mass of information and bring it to life with the help of the software himself, but he quickly admitted his mistake. It was evident that merely the data and the software for its visualization were not enough, just as music notes and a musical instrument do not make music by themselves. They need an interpreter and it turned out that, when it comes to statistics, Rosling is a natural. Rosling’s short lectures which he named GapCasts are also available on Youtube and are quite popular.

Today is different world

Rosling likes to joke that, at the moment, his software has two important target groups that like to use it: children to the age of twelve and influential politicians. It is characteristic of both groups that their attention has to be captured in a matter of seconds or they lose all interest. Important statesmen are usually always out of time, so they find this sort of visualization of statistical data very useful. After the end of the Cold War and in the era of globalization, on has to be up-to-date with all kinds of information, because the standard divisions of countries no longer apply.

The main message Rosling has been trying to convey to his students and, in the recent years, to the wider audience is that today’s world can no longer be described by using only traditional notions like dividing countries into developed and developing countries. By animating statistical data, Rosling has clearly illustrated that such divisions might have corresponded to the actual circumstances prevailing in the first decades after the Second World War, but to this day the world has changed completely. Many of the countries that had been completely undeveloped only half a century ago, and for which experts strongly doubted that they could change their patterns of behavior that had obstructed their progress any time soon, are today, according to several criteria very close to the developed countries.

He makes an example of himself by saying that he only knows two sorts of wine: white and red. Similarly, most people have a simplified idea about countries, dividing them into two types: the developed and the undeveloped. However, just as there is a very large number of sorts of wine, there are many different types of countries which becomes evident if one is willing to have a better look at all the information available. Rosling prides himself on knowing no less than two hundred sorts of countries.

As an example of miraculous development, Rosling likes to present Bangladesh during the last three decades. Today, this Asian country with almost one thousand inhabitants per square kilometer is the most densely populated of all the larger countries of the world. India, known to be very populated, ranks second with a population density three times smaller. 150 million people live in Bangladesh which is more than the population of Russia, while the area the country covers is no bigger than that of Florida.

In 1970, the women of this poor land east of India had an average of seven children and every fourth child died before he reached his fifth year of life. At the time, the opinion of numerous experts was that large families are so deeply rooted into the culture and religion of this country that the trend of the rapid growth of the population was not likely to change. However, after declaring its independence from Pakistan in 1971, the country’s general indicators of the development in health began to improve drastically. In 2003, an average Bangladeshi woman had only three children in her lifetime and only one in fifteen children died before his fifth birthday. But the main point is that this change did not occur because of the migration from the villages to the cities, but because of the improvement of the quality of life in the countryside.

The seemingly impossible is possible

Rosling also poses himself a seemingly unusual question: is the world today in average better than it was three decades ago? He finds the answer with the aid of the term extreme poverty. In 1970, 38 % of all people (1.4 billion), which is more than a third of all mankind, lived under the limit defining extreme poverty, surviving on less than a dollar per day. Extreme poverty means waking up hungry in the morning, going to bed hungry in the evening and spending all the time in between spending energy to get food. In 1990, 26 % of all people lived under the limit of extreme poverty and in 2000, 19 percent of mankind. According to projections, supposedly only 10 percent (0.7 billion) of mankind will live in extreme poverty by 2015. However, Rosling warns us that this data is relatively unreliable and therefore is not necessarily a completely accurate reflection of the present and past world.

Despite the unreliable data, most researchers still agree that during the last three decades the percentage of mankind living in extreme poverty has diminished by half. If, in 1970, two out of five inhabitants of the planet were hungry all day, in 2005, only one in five inhabitants of Earth remained extremely poor. That is why the conclusion that humankind can rescue its entire race from extreme poverty, which has now also become a generally accepted opinion among the experts, is very important.

Rosling has already accepted numerous awards and has been just declared one of the top scientists of the year 2007 by Discover magazine. Rosling is not merely a theoretician playing around with numbers, but has spent many years as a doctor in remote locations of the world. At the beginning of his career he even described a new disease in Mozambique and also discovered a successful therapy to fight it.

Apart from science, Rosling has a rather unusual hobby. He trains in circus arts. At the end of a now already legendary lecture at a conference in the US, and in support of his claim that even apparently completely impossible goals like ending poverty all over the world are actually not as unattainable as it might seem, he did something very unusual, especially for a scientist. He asked for a moment of silence, took of his shirt and, in the manner of an Indian sword-swallower, slid a meter-long Swedish army bayonet down his throat. He accompanied his performance with the following thought: “Sword swallowing is a cultural tradition that has for thousands of years inspired people with the thought that it is possible to think beyond the limits of the obvious.”

The Origins of Continents and Oceans

Revolutionary scientific theories that turn the already established explanations of natural phenomena upside down usually require firm arguments to support them, before the scientific community starts to consider them to be serious. Even after clear evidence has been provided, quite some time is needed for a hypothesis that had before been thought of as heretic to be accepted by experts in the field which the theory deals with.

The hypothesis according to which continents are believed to have drifted along the Earth’s crust and collided with one another, resulting in the creation of mountain ranges, volcanoes and earthquakes, was not taken seriously for a long time because there was supposedly insufficient proof to support it. Despite the fact that the theory of plate tectonics is today considered to be one of the most important scientific revelations in the field of geology as it has enabled us to explain many phenomena that had before been thought of as inexplicable, its author was, at least during his life, believed to be more a madman than a scientist whose name would once become synonymous with the greatest paradigmatic leap in the history of earth sciences.

Arctic enthusiast responsible for the geological revolution

Alfred Lothar Wegener earned a PhD in astronomy from the University of Berlin in 1904, but had always been more fascinated with the Earth than with the sky and the stars. He was especially interested in geophysics and in the quickly developing fields of meteorology and climatology. Even though today he is not particularly well-known for his achievements in meteorology, he had contributed many original ideas and methods to this subject, and wrote a textbook which has in the German-speaking area long been recognized as the fundamental work in the field. He had always been fascinated with Greenland which he visited regularly on arduous and extensive scientific expeditions. There, he used weather balloons to follow the movement of air masses in the North.

One of the reasons Wegener was in love with Greenland was because he hoped it to be the very place where he would find evidence to confirm his unusual hypothesis that continents were, slowly, constantly moving. In a letter to his future wife in 1910, he wrote: “Is it not true that the eastern shore of South America and the western shore of Africa make a perfect match, as if the two were once one? I must examine this idea more closely.” Since then he constantly searched for arguments that could best support his unusual hypothesis.

In the autumn of 1911, when he was rummaging through the library of the University of Marburg, he stumbled upon a scientific article on identical fossils that geologists had found in separate corners of the world now divided by vast oceans. Traditionally, the correspondence between these findings was argued to be the consequence of the existence of land bridges which once enabled animals to cross the seas, but were later destroyed. However, Wegener had his own explanation of the matching fossils: the fossils were identical because the separate continents of our time were once close together.

The way the continents matched in their shape as well as the similarity between the fossils discovered convinced Wegener that they had once constituted a whole that became divided into parts which now moved in all directions. Europe is moving away from America, just as other continents are moving from each another. Another evidence supporting the hypothesis of the existence of a united “primordial continent”, which Wegener later named Pangaea, were mountain ranges which also matched and, if put together, would form a continuation from one continent to the other. Mining sites were another perfect fit and provided an additional argument in support of his theory.

Wegener described his idea about continents drifting across the surface of the Earth in his book The Origins of Continents and Oceans which was published in 1915. He later updated the book with new information, so three new editions were published before his death. Unfortunately, the experts of the time had difficulties accepting the idea of moving continents. The main problem was that Wegener was not able to explain the mechanism according to which the continents could move, and to reveal the forces causing the phenomenon.

He often referred to the analogy of a journey of an icebreaker through a frozen sea, and attributed the forces to the rotation of the Earth, but he failed to convince the experts. One geologist even calculated that a centrifugal force large enough to move continents would cause the Earth to stop rotating in less than one year. Another difficulty was that Wegener had false data to begin with, so he obtained some unusual results, like one which implied that Europe and North America were moving apart at 250 centimeters per year which was 100 times faster than exact measurements showed many years later.

Death in Greenland

During the First World War, Wegener was enlisted as a soldier at the front where he received two minor wounds because of which he was later transferred to the army’s weather service. After the war, he returned to his post at the University of Marburg, but soon found himself displeased with the possibilities of his academic advancement, so he accepted the position of the professor of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz in 1924. In 1930, he left for another expedition to Greenland. An expedition from which he would, unfortunately, never return.

Despite the severe cold, he and his local friend set off to find a group of colleagues who camped somewhere in the middle of the Greenland icecap and were starting to run out of food. They managed to break through to the camp and renew their supplies. They decided to return to the base after a couple days of rest. Regrettably, after 1st November when they left the camp, they were never to be seen alive again. Wegener’s body was discovered by another expedition the following May. He was lying on reindeer skin, wrapped up in his sleeping bag. His piercing blue eyes were still wide-open and, as the expedition leader wrote down in his journal, his face seemed to be smiling.

He died only a day or two after his fiftieth birthday. The cause of his death was most probably a heart attack. His friend tried to reach the shore alone, but soon all trace of him disappeared. The expedition that found Wegener’s body put up a big cross to mark the spot, but the movement of the Greenland ice soon knocked it down and it was not to be found in fifty years. Along with the cross, the ice had also swallowed Wegener’s body.

Evidence supplied by military projects

During the Second World War and after, navies started using sonars to examine the depths of the oceans as seas became more strategically important. Before, scientist had almost no knowledge of the ocean floors. The structure of the bottom revealed by the sonars uncovered a whole new world. First, they were surprised to find out that approximately in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean there was a mighty mountain range that was later named the mid-oceanic ridge. This mountain range runs deep beneath the sea except in the north where it rises above the surface of the sea as a piece of land we call Iceland. It was soon discovered that similar mountain ranges ran under other oceans as well. It was also found out that these mountain ranges had an extremely high volcanic activity. The other important argument supporting the theory of moving continents was also a result of a military project. During the Cold War, the superpowers surveyed each other to discover potential nuclear testing. An atom bomb explosion shakes the earth with such magnitude that, using a seismograph, it can be detected as a minor earthquake. With this in mind, the Americans installed several hundred devices for measuring seismic waves and used computers to analyze the data in a military base somewhere in Colorado. After a detailed examination of the measurements obtained, they were able to determine where under the sea floors many of the earthquakes began, and at the same time discovered that seismic waves under the upper layer of the lithosphere spread slower than through solid rocks. Under the upper layer of the solid lithosphere, at depths between 100 and 200 kilometers beneath the surface, lies the plastic asthenosphere over which the solid plates carrying the continents move.

On the basis of the above mentioned and several other discoveries, the hypothesis of the drifting continents was revived and by the end of the sixties became generally accepted, although only after a couple essential improvements of Wegener’s original idea were made. Continents do not plough through the bottom of oceans like an icebreaker through a frozen sea, but form vast tectonic plates with the ocean floors. It is not only the continents that move, as Wegener falsely assumed; the ocean floor moves as well. Continents are like loads on different conveyor belts represented by individual tectonic plates. The Earth’s surface is formed of ten large plates which move and are pushed one over the other. When two “loads” moving on two separate plates collide, a mountain range rises. Similarly, the movement of continents can help explain other features of the Earth’s surface. Today, the theory of plate tectonics is believed to be one of the essential theories of modern science on the structure of our planet.

Pseudo-patients in Psychiatric Hospitals

In January 1973, the American psychologist David L. Rosenhan of Stanford University published a report in the prestigious scientific journal Science, on an unusual experiment that had been carried out by him and his assistants. He wanted to know how the staff of psychiatric hospitals treated its patients and how effective the doctors were in establishing psychiatric diagnoses. The article entitled “On Being Sane in Insane Places” in which he gave a detailed description of the results of his experiment is believed to be one of the most resounding articles in the field of psychology because it initiated the long-lasting polemic about the validity of psychiatric diagnostics.

Pretending to hear voices

Rosenhan, four male and three female colleagues, of which three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife, decided to experience for themselves how it would be to be admitted into a psychiatric hospital. For the needs of the experiment they chose several hospitals in five different American states and tried to get admitted by simply appearing on their doorsteps.

In all of the cases the experiment started in a similar way. The pseudo-patient would first call the hospital and set up an appointment to be examined. When he came to the reception he would complain of sometimes hearing voices. When asked what kind of voices these were, he would answer that they were mostly indistinct, but that he could recognize some words among which “empty” and “hollow” would often appear. These very words were chosen deliberately because there was no report on hallucinations referring to emptiness and the meaningless of life in the literature of the time. The psychiatric profession had not yet written about the supposed existential psychosis which they had enacted. The inner voices belonged to the same sex as the patient, but the patient was not able to link it to any familiar person.

Except for the fake symptoms, profession, occupation and name which they provided at their arrival, everything else was true. All questions concerning their personal history and other medical difficulties were answered truthfully. Once admitted into the hospital the pseudo-patients would behave completely normally and no longer heard voices in their heads. They had genuine conversations with both the patients and the staff and followed the instructions they were given, except for swallowing the prescribed medication.

Once you get a diagnosis, it’s hard to get rid of it

After being admitted, seven were diagnosed with schizophrenia and, when they were discharged, received the diagnosis of schizophrenia in remission. Of course this did not mean that they were healthy, but simply that they were no longer very ill. One of them was diagnosed with manic depression. Even though the doctors treated them as if they were ill, other patients were quick to discover that there was nothing really wrong with them. The actual psychiatric patients would tell them: “You’re not crazy. You’re a journalist (or a professor, because they often took notes). You are only here to check the hospital’s work.”

In several cases of the pseudo-patients who were hospitalized, some anxiety occurred as none of the participants of the experiment expected that the hospital would be so eager to keep them. Because most of them had never visited a psychiatrist before, they mostly worried about being exposed as imposters and scorned. The pseudo-patients were also instructed to try and get discharged on their own. They would have to convince their doctor that there was nothing wrong with them which was actually true, except for the lie about hearing voices which they had told in the reception office. However, they soon found out that the only way they would be released to go home would be if they agreed with the doctors that they also believed they were mentally ill and then pretend they were feeling much better. The length of hospitalization for the fake patients who took part in the experiment ranged from 7 to 52 days, with the average period of 19 days spent in the hospital.

For the needs of the research they tried to write down as many observations as possible and, out of fear that the notes would be destroyed by the hospital staff, hid them in safe places each day. At first they took their notes in secret because they expected that they would not be allowed to do so, but as the staff showed no particular interest in their activity, they started to write in their journals right in the common social rooms. It turned out that taking notes was not problematic, as the hospital staff usually considered it to be part of the illness compelling the patient to write everything down. Once they were labeled as schizophrenic, even their most common activities were viewed as potentially pathological.

During the entire period of the experiment the fake patients were prescribed a total of 2100 pills by their doctors. Of these, only two were swallowed and all others ended up in pockets or were flushed down the toilet. Another interesting thing is that fake patients often discovered that the toilet seed already contained medication, left there by the actual patients.


Expecting pseudo-patients

During the research they discovered two major difficulties facing people admitted to psychiatric hospitals; the feeling of helplessness and the feeling of depersonalization. The staff talked about the patients as if they were not present in the same room or even invisible. On one occasion, for example, a nurse unbuttoned her uniform in front of the entire ward and started readjusting her bra despite the presence of many male patients. But it was not at all meant as an act of exhibitionism because she did not regard the patients as people in front of which she would feel uncomfortable.

When doctors from other hospitals across the United States heard about the results of this unusual experiment they were naturally certain that nothing of the kind could happen in their wards. Rosenhan later made the arrangements with one of the most prestigious hospitals to send them a couple of false patients during a period of three months. The doctors there were convinced that they would have no problems in identifying the ones that were not really ill, but were only simulating their illness. For a couple of the months that followed, each new patient was intentionally evaluated as a possible imposter. Out of 193 patients altogether 41 were identified as false and another 42 were placed under suspicion. Of course the doctors were in for another shock as Rosenhan did not send them a single false patient, but they still managed to find so many.

BBC repeats the experiment

Recently, BBC repeated the experiment within the popular science series Horizon. However, this time the volunteers did not get themselves admitted into hospitals; the experiment was carried out as a sort of reality show. They chose five typical psychiatric patients with the most common diagnoses: bipolar disorder, depression, eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and social anxiety disorder. All the patients had been in treatment for quite a while, so they could not be simply recognized as different from the five volunteers who had never experienced any difficulties with their mental health.

Three experienced psychiatrists, experts on mental disorders, followed the group of ten for one week. Their task was to separate the ill from the healthy by observing them and performing tests. For an experienced diagnostician this should not be too difficult, but it soon turned out that this process of identification would prove to be a very demanding challenge. They only succeeded in correctly identifying the two disorders that were most characteristic. The obsessive-compulsive disorder was exposed when they observed the patients cleaning a stable as one of the ten was much more meticulous in washing up thoroughly after the dirty work was done.

They were also successful in diagnosing the eating disorder because one of the participants showed a 30 percent deviation in assessing her actual physical appearance. The patients were told to correct a deformed image of themselves using a computer program so that it would match their real image. Most of the participants in the experiment were able to correct their image more or less successfully, only a former anorexic patient, who had already been rehabilitated and is now leading a completely normal family life as a mother of three, failed to see the realistic image of her body; she thought she was one third fatter than in reality.

When it came to other diagnoses, the experts unfortunately failed. A once severely depressive patient was actually declared to be the healthiest of the group. It should be mentioned, though, that all they had at their disposal while making the diagnoses was footage of the candidates performing the task they were given, and the chance to pose a couple of short questions. The diagnoses therefore had to be made on the basis of very limited information.

Too much safety can be dangerous

The Sunday of September the 3rd was a special day for Swedes. From one o’clock in the night until six in the morning all road traffic was suspended, except for emergency vehicles, and even these had to follow special regulations. At 4:30 am every single vehicle had to come to a stop. In the following thirty minutes, all the roads in Sweden received a drastic makeover. That Sunday, Swedes switched from driving on the left side of the road to the right.

Planning this important change in Sweden had taken several years. In 1955 there was even a referendum in which more than 80 percent of voters opted against switching sides. However, despite the will of the people, the expert and practical arguments were too convincing to allow Swedes to continue driving “the English way”. What contributed the most to the decision was the fact that, in all the neighboring countries, people drove on the right lane. In addition to that, most of the cars in Sweden already had a left-sided steering wheel, so the decision to switch the direction of driving was just a matter of time.

Contrary to expectations, this great and important change of traffic regulations that took place on “H-Day” (H for höger, meaning right), as that first September Sunday of 1967 was named, did not result in a higher number of traffic accidents. Quite the opposite: on the Monday after the change of directions had been implemented, the number of the accidents recorded was actually lower than the daily average up to that time. It took a whole year until the average number of car crashes rose back to the average before “H-Day”.

The paradox of perceiving safety

In his book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What it Says About Us (Allen Lane, 2008), one of the questions Tom Vanderbilt asks himself is how an actual increase of danger on the road, like that which took place in Sweden in 1967, can decrease the number of accidents. The answer is, of course, quite simple: because of the change in the direction of driving on the roads, people felt less safe and therefore drove more carefully. After a year, when they became used to the new regulations, they became more confident in their driving again and the number of accidents rose back to the previous level.

On the basis of additional examples, Vanderbilt concluded that in perceiving road danger we face a paradox: “The system that the majority perceives to be more dangerous is in fact safer, while the system that seems safer is actually more dangerous.”

The explanation of this paradox is that people adjust their road behavior according to the feeling of risk or danger involved. If they perceive something as dangerous they will naturally be more careful than when they feel like nothing bad can happen to them. When, for example, the green traffic light turns on, most drivers feel that, at least for a few moments, they own the road ahead and do not need to think about anything but stepping on the gas pedal. If a road is constructed like a racetrack the people using it will accelerate and drive faster even if there are speed limit signs on the side, because such a road will make them feel safe. Similarly, people who drive to work taking the same road on daily basis drive much faster than tourists driving through for the first time, which is completely understandable, as locals know their route in detail and therefore feel much safer.

There are several approaches to planning and building roads. According to the theory of passive security, roads should be built in such a way that potential mistakes made by drivers would not cause severe consequences. This way of building could be called “the engineering approach” as it tries to take into account in advance the potential errors made by drivers, much like builders and architects have to consider the possibility of an earthquake or violent winds. The problem with this approach is that it does not take into consideration the fact that there is a major difference between an earthquake and a dangerous driver. The earthquake does not “know” that people have begun building more solid structures, so it will not become more violent than it was even before they had started to build earthquake-proof buildings. Drivers, however, are a different story. On a “safely” built road they tend to feel much less threatened, so they drive accordingly which, in the end, can result in even more accidents than if the road is not built as “safe”.

One of the pioneers of a completely new approach to road planning and traffic signalization was the recently deceased Dutchman Hans Monderman, who is also introduced by Vanderbilt in his book. His approach to regulating traffic is the complete opposite of the aforementioned “engineering approach” which suggests predicting the drivers’ mistakes and adjusting the road plan accordingly. Monderman, on the other hand, does not think of himself as an engineer but as an architect because he bears in mind that, in traffic, he is not dealing with natural forces but with people.

The essence of his theory is represented by two types of spaces one encounters when building roads and streets. The first is the “traffic space” which is best represented by the freeway and is built exclusively for vehicles and enables an efficient traffic flow. According to Monderman, the best example of this type of space is the German “autobahn”. Typical environments representing the other basic type of space are city and village centers, which he calls “shared space”. Here, the vehicle is only a “guest” or, in the best case, an equal to the other participants in traffic, such as pedestrians, cyclists, children, domestic animals and others.

According to Monderman, the crucial mistake committed by classic traffic engineers is that they try to transfer the rules and standardization from the traffic space to the shared space. The abundance of traffic signs, road markings and other types of signalization in cities and villages transposes the rules from the world of cars into the world of pedestrians. If the road outside a village is designed in the same way as the road inside the village, only with a speed limit sign, people will only drive slower if they are afraid of police control. That is why Monderman suggested a radical solution: the shared space in city and village centers should be altogether without any kind of traffic signalization.

The road as a space of participation

Monderman first tested his ideas in several Dutch villages and towns. In the village Oudehaske he tried to make the main road as “rural” as possible, and after it was rearranged, tested it by measuring speed. He wanted to find out whether the perception of the road really exerts such a strong influence on drivers. When measuring the speed of cars he was at first convinced that his laser speed gun did not work, but he quickly realized what the problem was. Everyone was driving under 30 km/h and the gun does not detect such low speeds.

In his test village Monderman deliberately did not try to arrange the traffic, but intentionally made it more complex by putting pedestrians, cars and cyclists together. The drivers no longer felt as comfortable on this road, and had to communicate with other people on the road all the time.
Reassured by his initial successes, he decided to take on bigger challenges in cities. In the city of Drachten he rearranged an intersection which made him famous around the world. Although it was an important city intersection through which up to twenty thousand vehicles drove each day together with a large number of pedestrians and cyclists, he removed all traffic lights and signs, and reduced the road markings to a minimum. However, he did not leave the space entirely empty. He added a series of fountains that detect traffic density and squirt the water higher when a larger number of vehicles are present in the intersection. He put a round green plot in the center of the intersection to create a sort of a roundabout, but one in which motor vehicles could not be dominant. All the traffic participants that meet in the roundabout have to communicate with one another and negotiate their way through. Despite the fact that the intersection also includes a driveway to a shopping mall, the traffic is completely fluent, and even more so than it was before, when traffic lights ruled the intersection.

On Youtube you can have a look at videos of traffic in intersections and on roads that Monderman had rearranged according to his principles. The approach to such “psychological” traffic arrangement immediately received the name “shared space”. Monderman trusted his approach to the extent that he answered a journalist’s questions right in the middle of the road and had no problem with walking through his intersection backwards or with his eyes shut. He knew that, because of the way the road and the intersection were arranged, drivers would pay equal attention to all the traffic participants and would not feel annoyed if someone would get in their way; they would even adjust to a weirdo crossing the road backwards.

Most Submitted to Authority

In 1961, a professor of psychology at the American Yale University called Stanley Milgram placed an announcement in the newspaper looking for volunteers that would, for a substantial reward, take part in a study of memory. From a host of candidates he chose forty and invited them to his laboratory. But it would only be at the end of the experiment that they would find out that the professor was not at all studying their memory abilities, but was interested in something completely different.

Electroshocks for the good of science

At their arrival to the laboratory the volunteers were received by a young scientist in white robes who explained to them how the experiment would be carried out. Pairs of two candidates were chosen an asked to toss a coin in order to determine who would take on the role of the “teacher” and who the role of the “learner”. They were then taken into a special room where the learner would have electrodes attached to his arms through which the teacher could give him educative electric shocks. The teacher and the learner would then experience a mild electric shock on their own skin so that they were well aware of the pain that several tens of volts could already inflict. All the while the conductor of the experiment reassured them that even though the shocks could be painful, they would pose no danger to their health and cause no long-term damage.

The learner then remained attached to the electrodes while the teacher was taken to another room which contained the device for administering electroshocks and a speaker connected to the room in which the learner had been placed. The teacher was now instructed to give the learner questions testing his memory. For each wrong answer he was told to punish the learner with an electric shock as this was supposed to be a part of the study of the influence of punishment on the subject’s ability to memorize. However, not all shocks were of the same intensity. Each following shock was 15 volts stronger. From the hardly perceptible 15 volts in the beginning of the experiment the teacher had at his disposal 30 switches of which the last one could release 450 volts through the learner’s body. Each switch also had a label describing the danger involved, for example, “moderate shock”, or “danger: very intense shock”. The last two switches which could administer the highest voltage were simply described as “XXX”.

At first, the experiment proceeded smoothly as the learner answered each question posed by the teacher correctly. As the tasks became more and more difficult, the learner would gradually start to make mistakes. The teacher began to administer, at the beginning still mild, shocks for each mistake committed. But when the shocks reached 150 volts the learner suddenly did not want to participate anymore. He would start to moan, saying that it hurt too much and that he wanted to quit. At 180 volts he would start screaming that he could no longer take the pain. At higher voltages he would whimper and groan, and above 330 volts he would no longer respond. The teacher would then be instructed that in the case the learner does not respond in a few seconds he should interpret his silence as a wrong answer and proceed.


What is this study really about?

The actual subject of Milgram’s study was the very question of how the teacher would respond to the learner’s suffering. The research on the influence of punishment on the ability to memorize was only a pretext to get the unsuspecting volunteers into his laboratory. He was not examining their memory abilities, however, but their obedience to the authority that, in this case, was represented by the young doctor in white overalls, the conductor of the experiment, who encouraged them to continue.

During the entire experiment the scientist was in the same room as the teacher. He would sit as his desk arranging some paperwork, all the while keeping an eye on the experiment. When problems arose, the teacher usually turned to the scientist and asked if it would not be better to conclude the experiment because the learner was in pain and no longer wanted to collaborate. To this request the conductor of the experiment who represented the authority would first reply: “Please continue.” When the teacher would repeat his request to stop the experiment he would answer: “The experiment requires that you continue.” At the third appeal he would say: “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” To the final plea he would respond: “You have no other choice, you must go on.” It was only after all four encouragements had been given to the teacher and he still demanded that the testing be stopped, that the experiment was finally put to an end.

At this point it was explained to the teacher that the learner did not really receive shocks, but was actually an actor, and that the reactions that came through the speaker were pre-recorded. The coin toss determining who would be the teacher and who the learner, was performed with a same-sided coin, so that the actor would always become the learner, and the volunteer the teacher. It should also be mentioned that during the initial electric shock test the actor always complained that he had heart problems, so that the volunteer who was given the role of the teacher would be well aware of his false condition.

The shocking results of the experiment

Before the experiment was carried out, Milgram asked his colleagues how they thought the volunteers would react, and they predicted that only the handful of people who had sadistic inclinations would be capable of continuing to administer electroshocks beyond the limit when the learner starts to scream that he can no longer take the pain. But the actual results of the experiment shocked everyone. 26 % of altogether 40 volunteers were capable of submitting themselves completely to the authority of the experiment conductor in his white overalls and of inflicting the most severe, 450 volt electroshocks. Only a third of them stopped the experiment somewhere in the middle, no longer willing to cause pain despite the authority’s encouragement.

The experiment was later repeated more than a hundred times in different environments in different parts of the world, but the results were always very similar. About 60 percent of people were ready to completely submit to the will of the authority and administer the most intense and deadly electroshocks. A short while ago, several researchers repeated the Milgram experiment in various documentary programmes on torture and discovered that the percentage of people who are willing to take it to the end has not changed at all in the past decades.

Milgram also reported that, during the experiment, the participants were under a great amount of stress which showed in excessive perspiration and the shaking of the hands, while some of them even had trouble speaking. He also noticed that some of them tried to overcome the emotional tensions building up inside them with nervous laughter. This is how he described the reaction of one of the volunteers: “A mature and by all appearances cool-blooded businessman stepped into the laboratory confident and smiling. In 20 minutes he transformed into a shivering, stumbling wreck of a man, rapidly approaching the point of a nervous breakdown … but he continued to respond to every word of the experiment conductor and obeyed to the very end.”

Of course, Milgram was criticized of having caused permanent damage to the unsuspecting volunteers by confronting them with such intense emotional struggle. To find out whether the experiment participants had actually suffered from any long-term consequences he called the volunteers a couple of months later and asked them if they had been experiencing any trauma because of what took place during the experiment. According to his reports, the simulated infliction of pain had left no permanent consequences. The majority of the volunteers did not even regret having participated in the experiment.

What makes good people do evil things?

The Milgram experiment first took place in the beginning of the sixties at about the same time as the trial of Adolf Eichmann who was responsible for the killings of Jews during the Second World War, but in a Jerusalem court pleaded that he was only obeying orders. Milgram wondered if he could make an average American inflict severe pain on completely innocent people by putting him in a situation where an authority would give him the clear order to execute an atrocious deed in the name of a higher goal.

He later carried out different variations of the experiment to find out which parameters were most decisive in establishing obedience. In one of the variations, the conductor of the experiment would get a telephone call soon after the beginning of the experiment, so he asked another volunteer who was actually an actor to take his place while he leaves the room. Even though his substitute insisted that the teacher continue with the experiment, only 20 % of the teachers proceeded to the most intense electroshocks. Similarly, the willingness to continue decreased in circumstances where, in the eyes of the teacher, the authority of the conductor of the experiment was diminished.

On the other hand, the submission to authority increased when the teachers were not turning the electroshock switches themselves, but were part of a team that questioned the learner. In these circumstances only one tenth of the volunteers decided to quit before the end. However, the personality and the appearance of the conductor of the experiment did not affect the results. Whether the experiment was conducted by an unkempt old man or a well-groomed young man did not make any difference; the teachers responded to authority in a very similar way.

What is Randomness?

Even though it might seem that defining randomness is easy, this could not be further from the truth. Not only is it difficult to create random events or sequences of numbers, verifying whether something that we have produced is really random is no easy task either. Many great mathematicians throughout history have examined the problem of randomness, but it was only a short while ago, in the era of computers and information technology, that the questions concerning randomness revealed themselves in all their complexity and appeal.

The paradox of the definition of randomness

It would be easiest to define randomness as a series of events taking place without any meaning or independent of any possible rule. Random is what has neither cause nor meaning. Nevertheless, it is very important not to confuse our subjective unawareness of rules with the objective nonexistence of meaning. We can quite easily come to the conclusion that a certain sequence of numbers is random when we can not recognize any rule that might govern it, while it is likely that we just can not make out the pattern. A good example of this is the number pi which represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The definition of pi is very simple, but if we were to se nothing but the long list of decimals with the beginning 3.1415 … hidden, it would be extremely difficult to figure out that it is, in fact, a sequence which is far from random.

One could even say that the definition of randomness is, in a way, a paradox. On the one hand, we say that a truly random sequence can not conceal any rule that would enable us to recreate the sequence while on the other hand, requiring the absence of all patterns within a sequence leads to a very restricting definition which is almost impossible to apply in practice. For something to be random, it must meet very well defined conditions. Randomness is thus defined by the complete absence of form which is, on the other hand, a very strictly defined form in itself, only with a negative sign.


The shortest possible instruction

In the mid 60s, the mathematicians Andrej Kolmogorov, Gregory Chaitin and Ray Solomonoff all independently invented a way to effectively define randomness in the era of computers and digital recording of information. They linked the definition of randomness to the concept of algorithmic complexity which sounds very complicated, but is actually based on a simple idea.

Andrej Kolmogorov, a renowned Russian mathematician, defines the complexity of a thing as the length of the shortest recipe (algorithm) required to make it. Cakes are usually more complex than bread, because the instructions for making them are normally more extensive. Similarly, orange juice is less complex than beer, for example, as we can reduce the recipe for making the juice to no more than two words: “Squeeze oranges”, while the instructions for making beer are much longer.

Following the same pattern, the complexity of a number is defined as the length of the most simple computer program that can write it out. The sequence 01010101010101010101 can be reduced to “10 times 01”. We notice immediately that the sequence can be memorized in a shorter and clearer way. When observing a sequence like 01000101000011101001, however, it is not possible to recognize the rule right away, so we have to memorize it as a whole.
If your phone number happened to be 01 1111-111, you would be able to memorize it straight away, just as you would the number 01 2345-678. The rules hidden behind both numbers are simple and we need no more than a single piece of information to recall them. When it comes to more complex numbers, though, we have to commit several pieces of information to our memories. Sometimes a part of the number contains the date of our birth or a similar sequence that we can easily recall, so memorizing such numbers presents a smaller difficulty than memorizing numbers that possess no apparent pattern. These are, in our eyes at least, completely random.


No recipe for randomness

We can use the concept of algorithmic complexity to define what is random as a thing for which there exists no shorter recipe than the detailed description of the thing itself. If we limit ourselves to number sequences, then the sequence which is random can not be reduced to any shorter form or algorithm than the entire actual list of numbers. As there is no rule to sum up the list of numbers, we can only memorize it in its entirety, like a phone number which does not contain a single set of numbers we can recognize.

A binary number, used in the language of computers that can only read ones and zeros, is random when its complexity is equal to the number of its digits. A program that a computer reads in binary code as well can not be shorter than the number itself. In simpler terms, there is no shorter recipe to write down the number than writing it with all the digits it contains. There can be no other shorter algorithm or program.

All programs for creating random numbers built into our computers are actually only creating the so-called “pseudo-random numbers”. The algorithms that create them are shorter than the numbers they produce, so they do not really meet the strict criterion of randomness based on algorithmic complexity. In his article in 1951, the famous mathematician, physicist and father of computer science, John Von Neumann summarized this problem in a single sentence: “Whoever tries to produce a random sequence of numbers by using arithmetical methods is wrong.”


The “Monte Carlo” method

However, modern science could hardly progress without the generators of (pseudo-) random numbers. Today, random numbers are most frequently used to enable simulations or to help with more complex calculations. The method of using random numbers to solve mathematical problems is very similar to public opinion polls. If we pose a certain question to a smaller sample of population and if the sample only contains randomly chosen representatives of a population that are not, for example, mostly senior citizens or students, their answers can give us a pretty good idea about the population’s opinion concerning a certain subject.

In science, we can deal with the problem of random numbers in a similar way. Suppose we had to calculate the surface of an irregular shape in the form of a heart. Using a procedure that mathematicians named the Monte Carlo method we can evaluate the surface of the heart by circumscribing it with a rectangle, the surface of which is not difficult to calculate. Now, all there is left to do is to evaluate what part of the rectangle is covered by the heart and the problem is solved. But what is the easiest way to assess the ratio of the surface of the entire rectangle to the surface covered by the heart? Try randomly placing dots on the rectangle and counting whether you have hit the heart or not. If the dots are really distributed in a random manner, the ratio of the number of dots inside the entire rectangle to the number of dots on the heart will gradually approach the ratio of the rectangle’s surface to the heart’s surface.


Compressing data

Naturally, verifying whether a long sequence of numbers is random is no easy feat. However, mathematicians have developed several methods for testing different random number generators and checking if the random sequences are good enough to be used for a given task.

In our daily lives, we encounter the process of evaluating the degree of randomness when compressing files on our computers which happens almost every day. As we all know, we can use special software devised to compress data and greatly reduce the size of a file on our computer. These file compressing programs look for repetitions within data and create new dictionaries to write down the information in shorter form. Suppose we repeatedly used the word “problem” in our document. A good file compressor will notice that and substitute all the occurrences of the word with a single sign like *. The sentence: “The problem lies in the problematical approaches to solving problems”, will be written in a coded and compressed form: “The * lies in the *atical approaches to solving *s”. And the dictionary will add the explanation that the asterisk (*) means “problem”.

The following rule applies: the more that the size of the file is reduced by compressing information, the less random data is being compressed. When compressing a written document it is thus easy to evaluate the size of our vocabulary. The more we repeat words in our text, the easier it will be for the file compressor to reduce the size of the file containing our document.

This is why file compressing programs are a relatively good judge of the randomness of a certain sequence. The more the data can be compressed, the less random it is. A truly random sequence can not be compressed by using file compressing programs because the entire computer algorithm is also the shortest possible algorithm describing this sequence. A file of a truly random sequence can not be compressed.

The Man with no Memory

On the 26th of March 1985 a renowned British musicologist, producer at the BBC and choir music conductor Clive Wearing experienced a strong headache. He took a couple of painkillers, but they did not help much. At first, doctors were certain that it was just a bad case of flu so they sent him home. He rested for the next couple of days, but the pain in his head did not subside. At the time he was not aware that these were the last days he would be able to remember in the evening what he had been doing in the morning.

When his wife returned from work on the fourth day of his illness, their apartment was a mess and her husband was nowhere to be found. Naturally, she immediately became worried because she remembered he still had a high fever in the morning. In the meanwhile, Clive was aimlessly wandering the streets when he was noticed by a cab driver who informed the police who then contacted his wife. She and Clive spent the rest of the day in the hospital where he underwent a series of examinations and was diagnosed with a severe case of a viral brain disease called herpes encephalitis.

They started treating him with antiviral drugs, but the virus had already severely damaged his brain. Because of the infection a great part of his brain had already been destroyed, so that on the image his head appeared as if entire pieces of brain were missing. The most damage was inflicted on the very part where memories are formed and stored. Even though Clive survived the viral infection and later completely recovered physically as well as mentally, he never got his memory back. Today, more than twenty years after the infection, he is believed to be the man with the worst memory to have ever been thoroughly medically examined.


A Prisoner of the Present

Since 1985 Clive has been “waking up” from a long sleep every few minutes, not knowing where he is. Most of you have probably experienced the unpleasant feeling of waking up and, at first, not knowing where you were or what was happening to you. After a few moments, though, you were able to bring back to your consciousness the events of the night before and recall how you ended up in this seemingly unknown bed. Unfortunately, Clive has no memory to help him and finds himself completely lost in time again and again when after a few minutes – at times no more than seven – his short term memory is erased.

Of course his mental capacities have remained almost the same as they were before the illness occurred. He can still be a very intelligent and witty conversational partner. Unfortunately, everything that happened after 1985 is completely new to him and he would forget who you were after only a few minutes unless he knew you from before. He usually spontaneously understands this absence of memories to be the result of a coma from which he had woken after a very long time. He feels as if he had only been awake for two minutes. Day after day, he poses the same first question to people he finds in his company: “How long have I been unconscious?”

For a while, he used to keep a diary which contained almost nothing but an exact record of the time and the note: “Now I am awake.” The fact that he was awake, that he was conscious of his existence, was what he thought to be the most important piece of information that he had to store each time he “woke up” again. Of course, he could never understand exactly why the previous record in his diary which was also written in his handwriting said: “Now, I am really awake.” That is because the record also contains the time shown on the clock only some ten minutes earlier. As he can not remember writing the previous records he is repeatedly convinced that they are incorrect, so most of the entries in his notebook are crossed out. Sometimes he only corrects the time because the record stating that he is awake seems to be completely correct, only the time written on the side does not match the one he sees on the clock at a particular moment.

Clive has been the subject of several documentaries and some clips taken from them are available on the internet. The most surprising thing one notices when watching these clips for the first time is the intensity of the feelings Clive expresses towards his wife every time he sees her. Even when his wife leaves the room only to return a couple of minutes later he is as happy to see her as if he had not seen her in ten years. In fact, his love for Deborah is the same or even stronger than it was soon after the wedding when he fell ill.


Tales of Music and the Brain

Like his intense love for his wife, his capacity for creating music is another thing from his previous life that has remained unchanged. Soon after his loss of memory, Clive’s wife noticed that he could sing or play pieces of music exceeding the span of his conversational memory. It seemed that, to him, singing was even easier than speaking. When playing the piano he is completely taken over by the music. This lasts until the end of the song when the brain mechanism enabling him to play music switches back to the mechanism that controls the process of thinking and language expression. Between these two phases healthy people would usually search through their memories and remember where they were and who they were playing the song to. Unfortunately, Clive does not possess this ability and, when the song ends, finds himself utterly confused, not knowing where he is or how he got there.

On a recording of a rehearsal with his classical choir, which he led before his illness, he can be seen completely focused on conducting the choir and instructing the singers when to join in. Once the song ends, though, he suddenly starts violently shaking and is completely confused. This is when his memory should have come to his help, but he is simply unable to activate it.

The discovery that Clive has preserved an impressive capacity for performing music despite his severely injured brain is becoming increasingly interesting to scientists researching brain activity. The renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks even gives a detailed description of the story about Clive Wearing in his new book, entitled Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, coming out in the middle of October. Sacks made a name for himself as a doctor in the seventies when he succeeded in waking up some of his patients from a state of numbness, an achievement which he describes thoroughly in one of his broadly acclaimed books. In addition to this book, on which the famous movie Awakenings (1990) – he was portrayed by Robin Williams – was based, Sacks wrote about his unusual patients in many other works which are true narrative masterpieces.

His style of writing is probably best represented by a passage from one of his books The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, published in 1985: “A smile appeared on his face. He seemed to have decided the examination was over. He started searching for his hat with his eyes. He stretched out his hand, seized his wife by her head and tried to pick her up and put her on his head. It was obvious that he had mistaken his wife for a hat! His wife looked as if she were used to this sort of an event.”

Newly in Love Every Day

Clive spent most of the six years after the virus had destroyed his memory in a psychiatric hospital. He became very depressed as, even though he was alive and, in a way, completely healthy, he was completely unable to lead an independent life. Day after day he woke up in a strange hospital room with unfamiliar doctors and hospital staff. Nearly seven years later and with the help of his wife’s persistent persuasion, he was transferred to a smaller countryside clinic for patients suffering from brain damage where he immediately started to feel much better.

In 2005 his wife Deborah wrote a book about her experience with her husband’s illness, entitled Forever Today: A True Story of Lost Memory and Never-Ending Love in which she described the good as well as the unpleasant moments of their relationship. When Clive fell ill she was 27 and the first years were extremely difficult for her, but she tried to do her best. In 1992 at 35 years of age, however, she came to realize that she could not go on living like that anymore. She decided to divorce her husband and move from London to New York. She wanted to start a new life. Of course, Clive knew nothing of the divorce and even if he did, he would have forgotten it only a few minutes later. The divorce papers were signed by Clive’s son from his first marriage who is also his father’s legal representative.

Naturally, Deborah still visits Clive who continues to be immensely happy every time he sees her. As he has no sense of time, his feelings for her are always just as strong when he sees her after a few months as when he sees her coming from the bathroom after only a couple of minutes.

The Man Who Believed Machines Could Think

In 1952, the mathematician Alan Turing called the police to report that his house in Manchester had been burgled. The thieves did not take much, so it first seemed that the official statement of the burglary would be no more than a formality. It was not very likely that the burglars would be discovered and the stolen items and money retrieved. It soon turned out that the mathematician would have been much better off if he had not contacted the police. After a brief questioning on the possible background of the burglary, Turing was suddenly transformed from the victim into the criminal.


A moral crime

Turing confessed to the officers that he had been seeing a nineteen-year-old youth called Arnold Murray who he had met shortly before the incident. Arnold had spent a couple of nights at his place and also borrowed some money, so it was very possible that he had something to do with the burglary. Now, the police were no longer interested in the details of the theft, but in another offence which Turing was careless enough to confess.

At the time, homosexuality was still considered to be a crime in England and the police quickly grasped the true nature of the relationship between the two men. Turing was summoned to appear in court on the same charges (“gross indecency”) for which Oscar Wilde had been sentenced to two years in prison half a century earlier. During the trial Turing never denied his “crime”, and was – according to the law from 1885 which was originally created to protect women – sentenced to choose between imprisonment or compulsory treatment of homosexuality. He decided for treatment which was more like torture and did nothing to change his sexual orientation.

In order to avoid prison he had to, in accordance with the sentence of the court, undergo a one year therapy with the female sex hormone estrogen which was supposed to eradicate his lust for men. For a year, he received regular shots of estrogen leading him to gain weight and visibly develop breasts. In reality, the hormone therapy was a sort of chemical castration as it did not “heal” his homosexuality, the worst part of it being that it also affected his ability to think and concentrate. Because of this completely absurd law, the British legal apparatus systematically destroyed one of the greatest minds of England. At the time Alan Turing was just over 40 years old.


100 km bicycle ride to school

In the beginning of the twentieth century Turing’s father served as a British colonial officer in India. Because his mother believed the Indian environment to be inappropriate for the education of her two sons, Alan and his older brother John spent their youth in different English institutions for children and, later, in boarding schools. In 1926 when Alan was 14 years old, he was accepted to the renowned Sherborne School, but almost came in late for his first day of class. England was just then in the middle of a general strike during which public transportation was cancelled, so young Alan had to set off on a 100 km long journey from his home to the school on a bicycle. His unusual cycling exploit was even mentioned in the newspapers.

He continued to lead an athletic life, especially as a long distance runner. He often used to run to science conferences, sometimes even beating his colleagues who preferred other means of transportation. He actually became good enough to make the British Olympic team in 1948 if not for an unfortunate injury.
Alan discovered his homosexuality early, during his teen years, when he was strongly attached to one of his classmates who suddenly died after complications in his tuberculosis treatment. The loss of a good friend in his youth also dealt a blow to his faith. He became an atheist and firmly convinced that everything had to have a factual explanation, even the processes which lead to thoughts in the brain.

After he failed twice to obtain the scholarship for the prestigious Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, he decided to enroll into King’s College where, among others, John Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster lectured. After writing an excellent doctoral thesis, he was invited to remain at the university as a teacher and a researcher. If not for the Second World War, he probably would have continued his academic career for a long time, but his country needed him for another, highly important national security project.


How to decipher the Enigma?

After he had obtained his doctorate he left for the United States and spent a couple of years at Princeton University, but came back when the Second World War broke out and started working in a secret decryption center somewhere between Cambridge and Oxford, called Bletchley Park. This was where the British gathered up mathematicians, chess masters, Egyptologists and all others that were in any way capable of helping decipher intercepted German military messages.

It was particularly difficult to decipher the enemy’s coded messages because the German Army used a special mechanical device called the Enigma which looked like a kind of typewriter. With the aid of this device they could encode their messages so efficiently that they were certain that, without the decryption key, which they changed every day, nobody would be able to read them.

Soon after his arrival to Bletchley Park, Turing and his colleagues developed an electro-mechanic machine which enabled them to break the German code each day and read the messages of the hostile army. It was especially important that they also succeeded in breaking the additionally reinforced code system which had been used by German submarines in the North Atlantic. Turing’s ideas, in which he had combined all of his previous research in the foundations of logic and mathematics with the notion of a machine that could do great amounts of work quickly and efficiently, were of key importance in the successful deciphering of the Enigma.

Like many great scholars, Turing was a peculiar character himself. He rode a bicycle to his post in Bletchley Park wearing a gas mask which he believed would protect him from pollen. In the tearoom he chained his cup to the radiator, so that nobody would take it.

Until the British removed the label classified from the documents containing information about their great wartime project of decoding German military messages, Alan Turing was best known to the public for his achievements in the fields of mathematical logic and theoretical basics of artificial intelligence. It was only after this revelation that it became clear how important his influence on the events that took place during the war was.


The poisoned apple

After the war, he returned to Cambridge hoping to find some peace in his academic work. He joined a group that was trying to build a working prototype of a computer, but soon discovered that after the war many of the bureaucratic restrictions were restored, making work more difficult. During the war, the solution to deciphering German messages was needed quickly, so scholars were given free rein in choosing their methods of work. All that mattered were results. After the war, bureaucracy was reinforced and Turing did not really feel at home in Cambridge, so he accepted a position at the University of Manchester whose researchers were also attempting to construct a computer.

During his stay in Manchester he published some more influential articles, among which the well known article on artificial intelligence in which he presented his famous test designed to determine if a computer could really think. According to the Turing test, as it was later called, a machine can be said to be capable of thought when, on the basis of its answers, no one can tell whether it is a human or a machine that is answering the questions.

On the 8th of June 1954 his cleaning lady found him dead in his bed. On his night table was a bitten apple poisoned with cyanide. Although there was no death note to be found it is almost certain that he had committed suicide. His mother firmly believed that her son’s death was the result of his carelessness after a chemistry experiment, but, as one of his biographers is convinced, Turing had supposedly deliberately committed suicide in such a way that his mother was able to create her own interpretation of the tragic event.

As Turing is regarded as the father of modern computers, many years after his death the rumor started spreading that the bitten apple, which is today the trademark of the Apple company, was in fact a tribute to the tragic life story of “the father” of computers, but it has never been officially confirmed.

Carl von Linné and plant marriages

Born three hundred years ago, the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné became one of the most notorious figures on the European scientific scene. He had a very high opinion of himself which is evident in his autobiography where he spared no praise on his account: “There has been no greater botanist or zoologist. Nobody has written more books, in such detail, as systematically, and on the basis of his own experience. Nobody has revolutionized science so thoroughly to begin a new era.” However, he was not alone in singing his praises as many scholars of the time recognized his greatness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him a message that read: “Tell him that I know no greater man on the face of the Earth.” And Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: “With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza there is no one among those who had passed away who has had a great influence on me!”

Becoming the second Adam

The 18th century is often referred to as “the age of classification” and Linné was its most typical representative. Even after three centuries, Linné is remembered mostly because he created an efficient and simple system of nomenclature and classification of living beings which is still used today. Systematization was not his only scientific passion though. He also had the visionary idea to recreate paradise on Earth in the university town in Sweden where he lived. He wanted to gather plants and animals from all over the world and breed them in such a way that they could survive the relatively unfriendly Swedish climate.

Linné saw himself as a second Adam. In paradise the biblical Adam knew the names of all the animals put there by God. Linné wished to recreate this natural paradise in the botanical gardens of Sweden’s Uppsala. He thought that the original biblical paradise was on one of the smaller tropical islands from which plants and animals spread across the rest of the world adapting to other, colder climatic conditions, but remaining more or less unchanged. His “scientific” idea was that this otherwise spontaneous adaptation of originally tropical plants could be artificially encouraged. He was certain that if the plants were able to adapt to a different climate before, they could be made to do so again.


Creating a second paradise

His mission was to create a new heaven on Earth in Sweden. He sent his assistants and students to all the faraway places of the world so they would bring him exotic plants which he would then try to adapt to the unfavorable Swedish climate. He first planted the specimens from warmer places in the southern part of the country, then gradually moved them toward Uppsala. From China, for example, his envoys tried to transfer tea plants and rice as well as mulberries on which silkworms could be bred.

Linné’s ideas to grow as many plants as possible in Sweden were driven mostly by his desire to make Sweden an economically independent country. At the time, economy was interpreted in a very mythical way. All of a country’s food supply problems would be solved, if scientists succeeded in creating paradise-like conditions, a sort of an ecologic harmony that God had originally created in paradise and nowhere else. Some scholars claimed that God had spread the treasures of nature across different parts of the world to encourage international trade, but Linné did not agree.

However, the megalomaniac scheme of the visionary naturalist came upon an insurmountable obstacle, the Swedish weather. Despite his cunning attempts to gradually adapt exotic plants to the local climate, only a few managed to survive a longer period in their new environment. It is interesting that Linné almost made an important breakthrough with calorie-rich potato, but he was unfortunately convinced that it was poisonous. It was supposed to be related to the very poisonous deadly nightshade (atropa belladonna), so he was certain that even pigs would not touch it. Unfortunately nobody came up with the idea to cook only the plant’s bulbs and eat them as we eat potato today. Nevertheless, they had already discovered that potato could be used to make liquor and even powder for wigs which were at the time still very fashionable. The author of this idea actually became the first woman to be accepted into the Swedish Academy of Science and the only one who received this honor before the beginning of the 20th century.


Names and surnames for plants

While gathering exotic plants all over the world, Linné’s emissaries introduced local scientists to his system of classification of living beings which was quickly accepted due to its simplicity, becoming much more successful than his idea of creating a copy of paradise in Sweden.

Linné’s system is very effective because it describes any plant or animal with only two Latin names which is similar to the way people identify themselves with a name and a surname. He chose Latin names to make the system universal and prevent some nations from feeling left out. Before, naturalists used different and often highly impractical methods to name nature. It was quite common that a plant would get a descriptive name which was fifteen or more words long.

Today it is less known that his system of plant classification was very controversial when it was published. His method of classification was criticized as being unnatural, a system that he had chosen to force and divide plants into imaginary groups. Another aspect of his method that presented a great problem for his critics was his decision to classify the plants according to their reproductive organs.

This might seem strange today, but it was not until the end of the 17th century that naturalists discovered that plants also reproduce sexually. Linné’s principle of classifying plant species was based on “plant marriages” as he explicitly described his method. He introduced a system of classification derived from the number of males (stamens) and females (pistils) present in a particular plant marriage.

An immoral classification of plants?

In his fundamental work Systema Naturae, which was first published in 1735, he began by dividing the kingdom of plants into classes according to the number, size and position of the male members of the plant marriage, today called stamens. These classes were then further divided into orders depending on the number, relative size and position of the female members of the marriage or pistils. Based on the structure of their flowers or fruits orders were then divided into genera which, in turn, were divided into species according to the leaf structure or other characteristics of the plants.

Linné’s system of classification is of course an abstract creation. Even though it was founded on the structure of vegetal reproductive organs, it was not derived from the actual knowledge of the way these organs function, but aimed to effectively divide plants within a system and name them. It was based only on the structure of the reproductive organs and had nothing to do with their function.

Of course, the guardians of public morals of the time wanted to protect young girls from the bad influences of an education in botany. Linné spoke of the principal organs of plants as of a man and a woman on their wedding night and used other suggestive names such as blanket and bride’s bed.

In the tenth edition of his book Systema Naturae he introduced a new term Mammalia which comprised the large group of animals that we still call mammals. It is interesting that the common characteristic he chose to name this group after were woman’s breasts, even though he could have easily decided for a different trait typical of this group. In the same edition of the book he also introduced the term homo sapiens referring to mankind.

Alexander von Humboldt – adventurer and scientist

There was a time when adventurers did not venture to remote places of the globe and conquer high mountains and peaks only to get an adrenaline rush and test the limits of their capabilities, but were driven by their desire to discover the unknown. The principal figure among these adventurers who were at the same time brilliant scientist was undoubtedly the German scholar Alexander von Humboldt, whose name became a synonym for the true naturalist. Even though he is hardly ever mentioned today, in his time he enjoyed a superstar image similar to that of Albert Einstein in the twentieth century. At the peak of his popularity, according to testimonies, only Napoleon was more famous.

The life story of Alexander von Humboldt is interesting in itself. He and his brother Wilhelm, who was also a very successful scientist and a politician, grew up in a wealthy Berlin family. Their father was an officer in the Prussian Army and their mother was from a rich, noble family, so they were well provided for. After the early death of their father, their mother hired the best private tutors who made sure on daily basis that her sons received the best education possible at the time.

Their mother wished for her sons to pursue illustrious careers as statesmen, but her death in 1796 liberated the young men from the pressure of fulfilling her desires. Alexander who was the younger of the two was always impressed by travels to distant places, so he soon decided to join one of these expeditions himself. As he had inherited a fortune, he had no difficulties with gathering the means to pay for his journey. All that needed to be done was to organize the expedition, which, more than two centuries ago, was not an altogether easy task.


The shocking experiments of a mining inspector

To learn as much as possible about such expeditions he made the acquaintance of some of the scientists who had, among others, accompanied James Cook on his legendary voyages. He also traveled across Europe to meet a number of scholars and create important contacts which he later found to be helpful. He visited several renowned universities where he studied everything from economy and languages to astronomy, biology and geology with the most eminent professors of the time.

Although this might sound unusual today, at the time geology was the discipline in which groundbreaking discoveries were being made, leading to the most interesting scientific debates. Alexander finished his formal education at twenty three years of age at a mining academy and became a mining inspector. During the years of his work in the mines he introduced many improvements in the working conditions, especially in the area of safety, so he was very popular with the workers.

All along he was very interested in science and conducted some experiments himself. As a geologist he was fascinated by the Earth’s magnetic field and the similar phenomenon of “animal magnetism” which was being researched by other scientists, such as Luigi Galvani who studied the electricity of frog’s legs. Humboldt was so impressed with this new branch of science that he did not only conduct the electricity and magnetism experiments on rocks and frogs, but on his own body as well.

His hypothesis was that metal electrodes did not cause the contraction of muscles as an external source, but merely stimulated their inner properties. He first tested this hypothesis on plants and animals, then on himself as well. The descriptions of experiments which he published in 1977 in a notorious book were in places quite frightening. He used various electrodes which he attached to different positions on his back to trigger muscles and evaluate the intensity of the pain that spread across his back. One time, the back injuries he inflicted on himself were so severe that the attending doctor insisted on stopping the experiment, but Humboldt kept going on, driven by his passion for new experience and knowledge. His notes even contain some bizarre statements like: “The frogs on my back then started to hop.”

Despite his extensive experimentation he was very surprised by Alessandro Volta’s discovery that making a battery does not require the use of animal tissue. He felt disappointed because, despite all the extremely painful experiments he had endured, he was unable to reach this conclusion which quickly made Volta famous. It was at this time that he stopped working with electricity and decided to dedicate himself to botany.

The most important years of Alexander’s life came to pass during the transition into the nineteenth century. It was in the period between 1799 and 1804 that he and the French botanist Aimé Bonplandon traveled across a great part of then completely “wild” South America. Together they walked across the territories of today’s Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico and Cuba. They concluded their journey in Washington where they met up with Thomas Jefferson.

Conquering the supposedly highest mountain on earth

During his travels, Alexander continually sent letters to his friends and family, containing interesting accounts which were enthusiastically summarized by European newspapers, so that the public could keep up with his exploits with a couple of months’ delay. When he returned to Europe from his journeys, he brought more than 60.000 samples of plants and a number of animals that had until that time been unknown. However, his most celebrated feat was his ascent of the volcano Chimborazo, the stories of which dazzled the European public.

At the time it was believed that this South American volcano, which was called the Snow Mountain by the natives, was the highest mountain in the world. However, this ascent was not only another great adventure, it was also a serious scientific expedition. Humboldt’s monograph on the mountain which he published when he returned home set the foundations for many other similar scientific works that followed. In his book Humboldt gave a detailed description of the geography as well as of the plant and animal life on the mountain, focusing on how the change in the environment at different heights influenced the types of growth that could thrive there.

At the time it was still unclear if a human being could even survive venturing to such heights. Humboldt was in great physical shape and, being used to experimenting on his own body, was not afraid of the ascent. His reports of the ascent were actually what finally made him a real media celebrity. The readers were impressed with Alexander’s “mountaineering” as well as scientific achievements.

At the beginning the way up was easy, but gradually the terrain started to become more difficult. Unfortunately, not every member of the expedition had the proper equipment, with the help of which even people with no mountaineering experience can reach the summit today. From the description of the difficulties the adventurers experienced during the ascent it is evident that they were affected by altitude sickness and, in addition, lacked proper clothing that would protect them from the cold. Nonetheless, they continued to diligently measure the air pressure and temperature and carefully observe their surroundings all the way to the top. Despite all obstacles Humboldt was determined to persevere and rise as high as possible. At first, the fog prevented them from seeing the summit, but then the weather cleared up and their goal no longer seemed to be as far away as before. However, they came upon a hollow which, with their equipment, they were not able to cross.

The snow and ice-clad volcano was a tempting goal, but the combination of cold, snow, lack of oxygen and other completely objective obstacles prevented the scientific expedition from conquering what was believed to be the “top of the world”. Even though Humboldt, Bonpland and a local guide did not succeed in reaching the summit of the 6268 meters high mountain, the 5875 meters meant an altitude record, as until that time nobody before was recorded to have climbed higher. Another witness to the difficulty of the ascent is also the fact that the peak of Chimboraza was not conquered until 1880, almost a hundred years later.

After his return to Europe, Humboldt wrote down everything that he had discovered and learned during his five year journey. In the following twenty years he wrote a number of books and discussions which attracted many enthusiastic readers. One of the most famous admirers of Alexander von Humboldt was Charles Darwin. He actually took the accounts of Humboldt’s travels with him on his famous voyage on the board of the Beagle and used it as a sort of a guide through the poorly explored territories of South America. When he reached Brazil he made an entry in his diary: “I have always admired him; now I worship him.”