Lobster pain may prick diners’ consciences (New Scientist)
Blow for fans of boiled lobster: crustaceans feel pain, study says (Guardian)
No backbone? Lobsters still feel pain (Times)
Prawns do feel pain, say scientists (Daily Mail)

The study was carried out by a team led by Robert Elwood at Queen’s University, Belfast. They’ve been spending their time “daubing acetic acid on to the antennae of 144 prawns.”

“Immediately, the creatures began grooming and rubbing the affected antenna, while leaving untouched ones alone, a response Prof Elwood says is “consistent with an interpretation of pain experience”. The same pain sensitivity is likely to be shared by lobsters, crabs and other crustaceans, the researchers believe.”

Prof Elwood says that the results are consistent with pain. This is true, but it’s a rather weak claim: the results are also consistent with the absence of pain. That an animal reacts physiologically and behaviorally to adverse stimuli does not imply that there are concomitant emotions or feelings of unpleasantness – or any consciousness at all. Even plants react to adverse stimuli. Nociception, the physiological mechanism behind animal responses to adverse stimuli, is important for those that possess it because it allows them to avoid damaging situations. Consciousness need not have anything to do with it.

But what is pain anyway? Here’s a reasonable definition, from the International Association for the Study of Pain:

“An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.”

Defined in this way, pain is a subjective conscious experience. It follows that it is impossible to prove that animals feel pain, because animals cannot tell us how they are feeling. That the findings of scientific studies imply the presence of pain is an interpretation based on the assumed presence of consciousness.

If, on the other hand, you would rather define pain only in terms of physiology and behaviour, you can’t then suggest that crustaceans feel like we do, after conveniently dropping pain’s conscious aspect.

The aforementioned Lynne Sneddon is quoted as saying:

“Shrimps do not have a recognisable brain. You could argue the shrimp is simply trying to clean the antenna rather than showing a pain response.”

And Richard Chapman, from the University of Utah’s pain research centre said:

“Even a single-cell organism can detect a threatening chemical gradient and retreat from it. But this is not sensing pain.”

So crustaceans cannot feel pain because they do not have the right anatomical and physiological apparatus, ie. the apparatus that we know is involved with human pain sensation. In the Guardian article Prof Elwood gets the last word on this:

“Using the same analogy, one could argue crabs do not have vision because they lack the visual centres of humans”

His comment is misleading. The analogy is wrong. One of the reasons it might be inappropriate to use the word pain to describe animal responses is because of the emotional connotations of the word. Vision has no such connotations, so it doesn’t sound odd or controversial to say that a crab can see. We can therefore use the words vision and see without problems because they contribute relatively little to an anthropomorphic view of crabs.

In any case, crab vision – like the crab response to adverse stimuli – is radically alien to human vision, partly because crabs “lack the visual centres of humans”. To say that a crab can see is not to say that it is experiencing anything like we do.

Is it right to say that a robot with eyes – such as Domo – can see? Many would say yes, more for convenience than anything else. Saying so does not imply that you think the robot has any of the thoughts and emotions associated with conscious vision, because seeing does not imply them very strongly. I think that this is the way in which we would say that crabs can see.

Now, what if you program a robot to respond in the same way as we do to adverse stimuli? Does it experience pain? I think most people would say no, because pain, unlike seeing, has strong connotations of emotion and consciousness, which few would grant to robots.

Why should we infer pain in a prawn any more than we would infer pain in such a robot?

Drawn in pen, this elaborate doodle is interesting because while I was drawing it the black was the figure and the white was the ground. So the black was the thing to notice, and the white was just the space in between, the substrate. This was natural, as I was actually drawing the black on a white background. When I finished it (and I was satisfied to find that there was a moment when I realised, without any doubts, that I’d finished, because it was right) there was a figure-ground reversal and since then it’s the white shapes that I’ve noticed, lying on a black background, or in a black space. When I was drawing it I hadn’t realised that, effectively, I was drawing the spaces between things, rather than things themselves. You can still choose to see it either way, by creating your own figure-ground reversals.

Seen the new way, which does seem stronger, several animals can be spotted. You can see a dolphin, a crocodilian (a cayman perhaps?), a duck, some kind of bird and a happy sperm-whale-like creature. But seen the other way – the way I drew it – it’s more refined and flowing.

This is another impression of the Quirang in Skye. I posted a photo of my first one, a painting in acrylics, in a previous post. It really does require art to convey the oddness of the place. Photos don’t capture it. This is one aspect of what 19th/20th century modern art was about – the experience of seeing a thing or being in a place, and the truths of shape and light and colour and perception.

I’ve made the rocks the wrong colour. They shouldn’t look so earthy, because they’re volcanic. But I was trying out my new water-soluble pencils and I liked the contrast of the brown and the green.

(About that last paragraph, I ask myself “but why even mention that?” Well, after a moment’s reflection I now know the bizarre reason: it’s because I’m insuring myself against any accusations of inaccuracy from geologists. Go figure.)

Obviously this is a bit half-assed, but I’m working up to something – it’s the second one like this I’ve drawn. Not sure what it is, but I’m pleased to see that the disc – the sun – really does look bright.

At the risk of revealing a shameful fetish: in case you don’t know what a Moleskine is, have a look at this.

I believe they’re seen as a bit pretentious, but the facts remain: I haven’t seen a better-quality, better-looking, better-feeling notebook anywhere.

I’ve been reading Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. You couldn’t hope to find another writer on art so wise, modest, generous, uncorrupted by fashion and lacking in snobbery. I have two heroes who are important in similar ways: David Attenborough and Jacob Bronowski. I think that Ernst Gombrich will be joining them.

Most of the time I merely mouth it in a whisper as it runs through my head, or else I hum it or whistle it. I said that I start singing when I wake up, but I’m usually already singing it before I become aware of it and before I’m fully awake. It goes back to my days at Sunday School when I was about 10 years old, and it’s been happening on and off since then.

Give me joy in my heart, keep me praising,
Give me joy in my heart, I pray,
Give me joy in my heart, keep me praising,
Keep me praising ’till the break of day.

Sing hosanna, sing hosanna,
Sing hosanna to the King of kings!
Sing hosanna, sing hosanna,
Sing hosanna to the King.

Give me peace in my heart, keep me praying,
Give me peace in my heart, I pray,
Give me peace in my heart, keep me praying,
Keep me praying ’till the end of day.

A local character called Dave Clark would come by with his guitar to lead the sing-song, which was the culmination of the session.

What is the psychology of this intrusive, recurring tune in my head? Perhaps it’s just the ultimate catchy song, and because I heard it and sang it, week after week, at a formative time in my mental development, it became a part of me. The melody is irritatingly childlike, with a kind of mindless, uninvolving jumpiness. It has this in common with many songs that I “can’t get out of my head”. I suppose it’s the same for other people.

It turns out that the Germans have a word for this. I have an ohrwurm – an earworm.

Songs such as the Village People’s YMCA, Los Del Rio’s Macarena, and the Baha Men’s Who Let The Dogs Out owe their success to their ability to create a “cognitive itch,” according to Professor James Kellaris, of the University of Cincinnati College of Business Administration.

“Certain songs have properties that are analogous to histamines that make our brain itch.”

“The only way to scratch a cognitive itch is to repeat the offending melody in our minds.”

(BBC News)

The simplest tunes – the easiest tunes to assimilate – are the ones that become earworms. Some say that listening to a tune in its entirety will make it go away. Mozart’s children would play on the piano below his room, and when they played incomplete scales he was compelled to rush down and complete them. So perhaps I need to seek out a performance of this song, or simply sing it myself in full.

Some think that the mind gets stuck in a phonological loop, which rehearses verbal information in a constant loop to prevent the decay of the information in storage. According to this theory, the best thing to do to get rid of the tune is to distract yourself so that natural decay can take place.

That doesn’t take account of my condition, in which it just keeps coming back no matter what I do, over a period – so far – of about twenty-five years. In fact, researchers seem to be unaware that this can happen. Here’s a definitive-sounding answer to the question How long am I likely to be infected with an earworm?

“An earworm episode can last anywhere from a few minutes to many days. Most people report episodes lasting from a few hours to an entire day; however, episodes lasting over a week are not uncommon.”
(Earworm FAQ page)

So what about brain science? I found a Guardian report, and this Science Daily report, from last year. They report on a study by researchers at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, called Musical Imagery: Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex, published in the March 10, 2006 issue of Nature.

‘”We found,” says David Kraemer, a graduate student of cognitive science and the lead researcher on the Dartmouth study, “that the auditory cortex that is active when you’re actually listening to a song was reactivated when you just imagine hearing the song.”‘

And the auditory cortex keeps on singing when the sound stops. So a part of the brain that was thought only to handle sound perception actually reproduces its “normal” activity when there is no sound stimulus at all. It is “perception in reverse”.

But again, we find no mention of chronic earworms:

“Treated earworms go away in one day, untreated earworms in 24 hours.”

It seems that none of the scientists and researchers who are studying the phenomenon have encountered people, like me, with extremely long-lived earworms. And because mine is a special case, it will require a special cure. I do have the normal run-of-the-mill earworms as well, and I’m well aware that they can be got rid of through a mental effort, or with a replacement earworm. But what’s gonna shift this horrible hymn? On one site it says that lobotomy is known to work, but that it’s ill-advised because of the possible side-effects. I’ll say!

Well, it’s not the hottest area of psychological, let alone neurological, study at the moment, so all the unanswered questions will have to remain unanswered for quite a while I think. Here are some more links:

http://www.business.uc.edu/earworms/research
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=earworm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/health/psychology/12musi.html?ex=1278820800&en=6ad31758c7334d06&ei=5090&partner=rss
http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/03/why_you_cant_ge.html
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=499811
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/05/levitin/
http://philosophy.tamucc.edu/article.pl?sid=06/09/05/1219247&mode=thread