Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

Students Least Informed About Environmental Science Are Most Optimistic

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Will problems associated with environmental issues improve in the next two decades? According to an analysis of student performance on PISA 2006–an international assessment of 15-year-olds–students who are the best informed about environmental science and the geosciences are also the most realistic about the environmental challenges facing the world in the next 20 years. Meanwhile, students who are least informed in these areas are the most wildly optimistic that things will improve.

These attitudes are among the results presented in Green at 15?, a study done by sociologist David Baker and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, in collaboration with a team of researchers at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, an international organisation that helps governments tackle the economic, social and governance challenges of a globalised economy. A PISA assessment is done every three years. PISA 2006 focused on science, assessing the knowledge and skills of more than 400,000 students in 57 countries around the world.

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Agent S, anyone?

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Serratia has dark history in region

Army test in 1950 may have changed microbial ecology

Serratia is a bacterium that some doctors and residents of the Bay Area have been familiar with for many years.

In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious disaster tale about the microbe.

serratiaThe Army used serratia to test whether enemy agents could launch a biological warfare attack on a port city such as San Francisco from a location miles offshore.

For six days in late September 1950, a small military vessel near San Francisco sprayed a huge cloud of serratia particles into the air while the weather favored dispersal.

Then the Army went looking to find out where it landed. Serratia is known for forming bright red colonies when a soil or water sample is streaked on a culture medium — a property that made it ideal for the bio-warfare experiment.

Army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities including Sausalito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, San Francisco, Daly City and Colma, according to reports that later were declassified. Soon after the spraying, 11 people came down with hard-to-treat infections at the old Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco. By November, one man had died. Edward Nevin, 75, a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worker recovering from a prostate operation, had succumbed to an infection with Serratia marcescens that attacked his heart valves.

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– Research thanks to California Refugees In New Zealand

Freeman Dyson and Global Climate Change

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Two good friends of mine have both referred me recently to articles by Freeman Dyson.   One pointed me at an article in the NY Times and the other sent me to an article  in  John Brockman’s site, The Edge.

Both of my friends have some reservations about global climate change and they’ve directed me to these articles, I think, because Freeman Dyson is also skeptical of climate change and he’s an extremely smart and well respected scientist.  So, I read these two articles carefully.freeman-dyson1

Freeman Dyson hasn’t converted me.   Sorry.    That he is world-class brilliant is obvious.   But I haven’t been convinced that he’s so brilliant that he’s been able to see the correct answers and that the majority of the world’s scientists have been, strangely, missing them.

In the Edge article, he trashes the use of climate models saying the following:

I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.

For someone wanting to believe that the climate scientists are just making it all up, it would be easy to gather this sort of thing to yourself and snuggle in it.

But, flash as it sounds, it’s not right.

First, climate modelers don’t just develop a model and then start it from today and run it forward.   They develop it and then prime it with data from the past and then run it forward to the present and then see how it did predicting the weather in a period where we know what the correct outcome was.   And then they iteratively tweak and adjust the model and run it again and again until it does a decent job before they turn it lose predicting future events.

Second, we’re not talking about one model here.   We’re talking about many models – all independently developed and all manifesting a good deal of agreement with each other in their predictions.

And, third, and most telling, is that Dyson’s implication that these models are exaggerating the danger is badly off.    In fact, in nearly all cases, the climatic changes predicted by the models over the last decade have been consistent in under estimating the amounts and rates of change.   If anything, these models have been conservative in their predictions compared to what’s actually come to pass.

That’s not exactly a reason to decide that Global Climate Change is being exaggerated.

Concerning the scientists who develop the models, he says:

It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

I’m sorry, but that isn’t scientific discussion – it’s simply a personal attack.   And, yes, some folks do work in buildings and do theory while others go out and get their hands dirty.   But these both, theoretical and practical, are vital and real parts of science.    Dyson himself, for example, has spent the last 50+ years at at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.   And that’s a pretty theoretical place, if there ever was one.

There are arguably more scientists out in the field today, getting their hands dirty studying the climate than there has ever been before.   But, if you uncritically accept Dyson’s attack, you’d assume that most climate scientists just sitting in their air-conditioned offices playing with computers and adjusting their climate models and ignoring the messy real world.

How can anyone imagine that such attacks improve the scientific discussion climate?

Dyson is brilliant – no doubt.   But, he’s also widely acknowledged to like being the heretic.   If everyone goes left, he’s the one who will often go right.   And there’s a place for that in the world of science to keep everyone from getting complacent.   But when people know that this has been his habitual response across an entire career, one wonders whether his current contrarianism is based on convictions or if he’s just acting out his signature response?

If you think I’m exaggerating a bit, read the two articles and see how many times he’s played the  contrarian in his career.

The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility:

“I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

Oliver Sacks, a good friend of Dyson, said this about Dyson:

“a favorite word of Freeman’s about doing science and being creative is the word ‘subversive.’ He feels it’s rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he’s done that all his life.”

Of himself, Dyson says this about how he reacted in college when he found his muse when reading J. B. S. Haldane’s work:

Haldane was even more of a heretic than I am,” he says. “He really loved to make people angry.”

And has Dyson always been right?   It would certainly be a lot more telling if he had been.

orion_blastoff2But no, he’s gone off the rails once or twice.    For example, he opposed the Space Station and the Hubble Telescope.  And he was fully on-board with the Air Force’s Orion Project -  a project to develop spacecraft that flew by exploding atomic bombs behind themselves to get a ‘push’.

The Edge article is in Dyson’s own words and is excerpted from his latest book, Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe.

The NY Times article, on the other hand, was written by Nicholas Dawidoff.   Nicholas’ previous writing seems to have largely involved baseball. He’s not suited to the material and his story rambles a bit as in the following excerpt:

These days, most of what consumes Dyson is his writing. In a recent article, he addressed the issue of reductionist thinking obliquely, as a question of perspective. Birds, he wrote, “fly high in the air and survey broad vistas.” Frogs like him “live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby.” Whether the topic is government work, string theory or climate change, Dyson seems opposed to science making enormous gestures.

Jeez, I think I know what reductionist thinking refers to but, after reading this, I seriously doubt that Dawidoff does.

This, of course, shouldn’t be a reflection on Dyson’s qualifications but it is a reflection of how lightly all of this is taken by an organization no less weighty that the NY Times.

Dyson’s admirers tout him as first-class systems thinker – a big picture man.   But, frankly, I have my doubts when he says things like the following:

“the move of the populations of China and India from poverty to middle-class prosperity should be the great historic achievement of the century. Without coal it cannot happen.”

India and China’s rush to try to live like we Americans live is unsupportable.  The planet simply doesn’t have sufficient resources.   Signs of the strain are appearing everywhere around us – but he thinks it is all the best thing since sliced bread.

Freeman Dyson is brilliant, as I’ve said before, and he’s got a lot of credibility based on  his earlier career work (atomic bomb spaceships aside).  But, he’s also known as a habitual maverick and he’s got some seriously loose cannon ideas about climate science.   I personally think he’s irresponsible to wade into such a critical subject area armed with no more of a purpose for being there than, as he says himself:

…I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority. If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic.

His credibility as a world-class scientist means that his ideas are taken as valid criticisms of the science of Global Climate Change and that’s just not helpful now.   Yes, we will always need the contrarian viewpoint to keep us honest.  But Dyson, with his credibility, should spend it a little more responsibly and not use it to sow confusion in a world that badly needs to come to consensus on its climate problems soon.

Dyson says the following of James Hanson:

“It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgment than knowledge.”

And James Hanson says this of Freeman Dyson:

“…if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

I know where my money is at.  And I think you’d have to be a contrairan to get this one wrong.

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Executed for daring to elope

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

– Stone age values have no place in this modern world.  Women are the equals of men and men and women have the right to choose their beliefs.  I’m pretty liberal but if you want to push me beyond those two statements you are going to find it tough going.

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Their crime was falling in love. Their punishment: death by firing squad. Bound and blindfolded, a young couple were shot at close range in southern Afghanistan – for daring to elope.

Abdul Aziz was 21 years old. The girl he ran off with was just 19. Her name, Gul Pecha, means flower.

Officials said the pair were tried by a Taleban court, found guilty of “immoral acts” and sentenced to death. The Taleban denied involvement.

Administrators say the couple’s parents were complicit in their fate. But that has not been confirmed.

Gul and Abdul were both from Lukhi village, in Nimroz province. Their home district borders Helmand, where a large number of Western troops are based.

They were gunned down, together, on Tuesday. Witnesses said they were shot in front of a local mob by men with AK47 assault rifles.

“They had fled their homes to the neighbouring village, because their parents refused to let them marry,” said Nimroz’s Governor, Ghullam Dastagir Azad. “Their parents tracked them down and handed them over to the Taleban.”

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African leader embarks on bizarre witch-hunt

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

– Sorry, but I think some folks should just drink the kool-aid.

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A state-sponsored witch-hunt has begun in Gambia where as many as 1000 people have been kidnapped from their villages and taken to “secret detention centres” then stripped, beaten and poisoned.

The campaign in the tiny West African nation is the latest manifestation of the increasingly brutal and bizarre rule of President Yahya Jammeh, who has claimed he can cure people of Aids. Now the President is thought to believe he is under attack from witches.

Witnesses and victims of the abductions told Amnesty International that the President’s personal guard, with armed police and intelligence agents, accompanied witch doctors to round up suspects.

Many of those taken from their homes were elderly people who were held for up to five days in appalling conditions, made to drink hallucinogenic concoctions and forced to confess to black magic powers.

“At 5am, the paramilitary police armed with guns and shovels surrounded our village and threatened the villagers, saying anyone who tries to escape will be buried 6 feet under,” one witness said.

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Key: Afghan ‘sexual desire’ law unacceptable

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Prime Minister [New Zealand] John Key said the Shi’ite law in Afghanistan saying a wife is obliged to fulfil the sexual desires of her husband is “unacceptable”. But it would not threaten New Zealand’s commitment to Afghanistan.

Mr Key said last night that he would write to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai to express New Zealand’s views on the law.

“But there is no doubt that our voice will be strongly heard, that we find this an abhorrent act and totally unacceptable to the New Zealand Government.”

But Mr Key is unlikely to follow the example of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper who said it would lead to “a clear diminishment in Allied support” in Afghanistan.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has telephoned President Karzai about the issue.

“I think in the short term, it would be unlikely to have any impact on our commitment to Afghanistan,” Mr Key said. “We are fundamentally there to try and reduce the threat of global terrorism. We need to deal with that situation first and foremost.”

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See also: & &

Our Sick Farms, Our Infected Food

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

Yum - antibiotics in excess– One aspect of the world’s increasingly dire problems that one sees over and over again, is how special interest groups push their agendas to the top of the stack to the detriment of the whole.

– It is a short sightedness that happens over and over and over again.   And again, ‘No single raindrop thinks that it is responsible for the flood’.

– Here’s a story about American farms and how a decision that was for all of our benefits was pushed quietly aside by the Farm Lobby.

– Their profits will hold up a bit better over the next few years because of their actions, but all of us will suffer badly in the long run.

– When we do this sort of thing to ourselves over and over again, how can anyone have any real hope that we’re suddenly going to wake up and save ourselves collectively from the impending global environmental and climatic crises?

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Congress and the FDA must upend the nation’s agricultural policies to keep its food supply safe

Agriculture has fueled the eruption of human civilization. Efficiently raised, affordable crops and livestock feed our growing population, and hunger has largely been banished from the developed world as a result. Yet there are reasons to believe that we are beginning to lose control of our great agricultural machine. The security of our food supply is at risk in ways more noxious than anyone had feared.

The trouble starts with crops. Orange groves in Florida and California are falling to fast-moving blights with no known cure. Cavendish-variety bananas the global standard, each genetically identical to the next will almost certainly be wiped out by emerging infectious disease, just as the Cavendish’s predecessor was six decades ago. And as entomologists Diana Cox-Foster and Dennis vanEngelsdorp describe in “Saving the Honey bee,” on page 40, a mysterious affliction has ravaged honeybee colonies around the U.S., jeopardizing an agricultural system that is utterly dependent on farmed, traveling hives to pollinate vast swaths of monoculture. The ailment may be in part the result of the stresses imposed on hives by this uniquely modern system.

Plants and animals are not the only ones getting sick, however. New evidence indicates that our agricultural practices are leading directly to the spread of human disease.

Much has been made in recent years of MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria, and for good reason. In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, about 95,000 MRSA infections caused the deaths of nearly 19,000 Americans. The disease first incubated in hospitals the killer bacterium is an inevitable evolutionary response to the widespread use of antibiotics but has since found a home in locker rooms, prisons and child care facilities. Now the bacteria have spread to the farm.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. Modern factory farms keep so many animals in such a small space that the animals must be given low doses of antibiotics to shield them from the fetid conditions. The drug-resistant bacteria that emerge have now entered our food supply. The first study to investigate farm-bred MRSA in the U.S. amazingly, the Food and Drug Administration has shown little interest in testing the nation’s livestock for this disease recently found that 49 percent of pigs and 45 percent of pig workers in the survey harbored the bacteria. Unfortunately, these infections can spread. According to a report published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, MRSA from animals is now thought to be responsible for more than 20 percent of all human MRSA cases in the Netherlands.

In April 2008 a high-profile commission of scientists, farmers, doctors and veterinarians recommended that the FDA phase out the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animal production, to “preserve these drugs to treat sick animals, not healthy ones” in the words of former Kansas governor John Carlin, the commission’s chair. The FDA agreed and soon announced that it would ban the use of one widespread antibiotic except for strictly delineated medical purposes. But five days before the ban was set to take effect, the agency quietly reversed its position. Although no official reason was given, the opposition of the powerful farm lobby is widely thought to have played a role.

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Escape from the Zombie Food Court

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

– How can you not like Joe Bageant’s writing?   He’s just a laser beam.  We’re so deeply buried within the world we’ve created (what he calls the “American Hologram”), that it is really hard to see that there are other ways of looking at life and existence.  

– Joe has managed to step outside the mainstream consensus reality and here he’s bringing us a report of what it looks like from the outside looking in.   Good stuff!

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Joe Bageant recently spoke at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University at Lexington, and the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, where he was invited to speak on American consciousness and what he dubbed “The American Hologram,” in his book, Deer Hunting With Jesus. Here is a text version of the talks, assembled from his remarks at all three schools.

By Joe Bageant

I just returned from several months in Central America. And the day I returned I had iguana eggs for breakfast, airline pretzels for lunch and a $7 shot of Jack Daniels for dinner at the Houston Airport, where I spent two hours listening to a Christian religious fanatic tell about Obama running a worldwide child porn ring out of the White House. Entering the country shoeless through airport homeland security, holding up my pants because they don’t let old men wear suspenders through security, well, I knew I was back home in the land of the free.

Anyway, here I am with you good people asking myself the first logical question: What the hell is a redneck writer supposed to say to a prestigious school of psychology? Why of all places am I here? It is intimidating as hell. But as Janna Henning and Sharrod Taylor here have reassured me that all I need to do is talk about is what I write about. And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things — corporations, television and human spirituality.

No matter how smart we may think we are, the larger world cannot and does not exist for most of us in this room, except through media and maybe through the shallow experience of tourism, or in the minority instance, we may know of it through higher education. The world however, is not a cultural history course, a National Geographic special or recreational destination. It is a real place with many fast developing disasters, economic and ecological collapse being just two. The more aware among us grasp that there is much at stake. Yet, even the most informed and educated Americans have cultural conditioning working against them round the clock.

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What we need vs. what we’ll get

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

– The current G-20 meeting has stirred a lot of commentary and hope.   The world has a lot of problems and there’s always the possibility and the hope, when a significant number of world leaders come together to talk about those problems, that they’ll make decisions that will improve things.The Browns and the Obamas

– Below, is an analysis by George Friedman of STRATFOR of the G-20 meeting and what’s likly to come out of it along with a look at a follow-on NATO meeting and an Obama-EU summit.  There’s even discussion of President Obama’s upcoming visit to Turkey, which will be his last stop on his current international trip.

– Other commentators might go through these same subjects; G-20, NATO, EU and Turkey and come to somewhat different conclusions about their meanings and prospects but I seriously doubt that anyone could seriously avoid my final conclusion – that what the world needs is not what the world is going to get out of all these meetings and pontifications.

– In the near-term, we need unified global strategies to pull the world out of the current economic melt-down.

– And, following immediately on the heels of such economic repairs, we need a deep recognition that mankind’s current dominate economic system, Capitalism, even when working well,  cannot continue as it is currently configured.   Its fundamental requirements of continuing growth and consumption to fuel itself, are axiomatically inconsistent with the fact that we live on a planet with finite resources.

– And, once we’ve rethought our basic economic systems and globally began to reorient them into something that focuses on sustainability rather than growth, then we need to move onto how we, globally, are going to defuse all the ecological and climatic destruction we’ve set in motion which is threatening to reset our climate and to initiate another major ecological die-off like the one that took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

– That’s all.  It’s not much to ask, right?   Surely,the best and the brightest of our national leaders can see that these are the paths forward?

– Well, I wish I thought so, but I don’t.  Friedman’s analysis makes clear that in spite of the fact that we need radical new thinking, these meetings will end up driven by narrow national interests as nation jockeys against nation to see who’s going to do the work and pay the bills.

There’s your future, folks.– It’s as if we’re all sitting in a lifeboat at sea and we’re having meeting after meeting about how to best arrange the seating in the boat to determine who has to row and who gets to just sit and benefit. And all the time, the boat is slowing but inexorably sinking but no one can be bothered to talk about that because… because?     Damned if I know.

– Here’s George Freidman’s analysis.   See what you think:

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Three major meetings will take place in Europe over the next nine days: a meeting of the G-20, a NATO summit and a meeting of the European Union with U.S. President Barack Obama. The week will define the relationship between the United States and Europe and reveal some intra-European relationships. If not a defining moment, the week will certainly be a critical moment in dealing with economic, political and military questions. To be more precise, the meeting will be about U.S.-German relations. Not only is Germany the engine of continental Europe, its policies diverge the most sharply from those of the United States. In some ways, U.S.-German relations have been the core of the U.S.-European relationship, so this marathon of summits will focus on the United States and Germany.

Although the meetings deal with a range of issues — the economy and Afghanistan chief among them — the core question on the table will be the relationship between Europe and the United States following the departure of George W. Bush and the arrival of Barack Obama. This is not a trivial question. The European Union and the United States together account for more than half of global gross domestic product. How the two interact and cooperate is thus a matter of global significance. Of particular importance will be the U.S. relationship with Germany, since the German economy drives the Continental dynamic. This will be the first significant opportunity to measure the state of that relationship along the entire range of issues requiring cooperation.

Relations under Bush between the United States and the two major European countries, Germany and France, were unpleasant to say the least. There was tremendous enthusiasm throughout most of Europe surrounding Obama’s election. Obama ran a campaign partly based on the assertion that one of Bush’s greatest mistakes was his failure to align the United States more closely with its European allies, and he said he would change the dynamic of that relationship.

There is no question that Obama and the major European powers want to have a closer relationship. But there is a serious question about expectations. From the European point of view, the problem with Bush was that he did not consult them enough and demanded too much from them. They are looking forward to a relationship with Obama that contains more consultation and fewer demands. But while Obama wants more consultation with the Europeans, this does not mean he will demand less. In fact, one of his campaign themes was that with greater consultation with Europe, the Europeans would be prepared to provide more assistance to the United States. Europe and Obama loved each other, but for very different reasons. The Europeans thought that the United States under Obama would ask less, while Obama thought the Europeans would give more.

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– research thanks to Michael M.

The Human Brain Is On The Edge Of Chaos

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Alan,

I had not seen this and I found it extremely interesting.   A central point that I took away from the first book I ever read in depth on Complexity was the notion that it, complexity, happens right at the boundary where chaos meets the static.  Hence not in ice nor steam but in water.

I think the two big mechanisms that will come forth more and more as core features of our new understandings of how things work will be (1) this notion that complexity arises at the edge of chaos and we will begin to see it everywhere and that (2) nature makes use of quantum effects whenever they make sense.

Regarding the latter, I expect you’ve seen the articles out over the last year explaining that the reason our calculations for how photosynthesis generates energy could never ‘explain’ how the observed molecular mechanisms could actually generate the total energy they’ve been seen to generate – the explanation turned out to be that a sort of quantum computer effect is happening as the electrons cascade through the photosynthetic sieve and they ‘know’, via a quantum computers type solution, where to go to maximize energy output.

Someday, I think we’ll discover that at the deepest level, a lot of the mind’s processes will involve quantum computing along with the currently understood chemical and electrical mechanisms.  Given that the scale of these events hovers on the edge where quantum effects compete with macro-effects, I doubt it could be otherwise.

Dennis

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Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos”, at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.

“Due to these characteristics, self-organized criticality is intuitively attractive as a model for brain functions such as perception and action, because it would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions,” says co-author Manfred Kitzbichler.

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– research thanks to Alan T.