Ever since I learned about it I’ve made use of it in everyday life, increasingly without thinking about it; but it’s not something I would necessarily have picked up anyway. It’s not intuitive: I had to be told about it. It’s a different kind of thing from hitting a nail with a hammer, because it requires the application of a counter-intuitive principle; and yet just like using a hammer it becomes a part of my complement of skills and tools. Actually, perhaps it’s more that it’s a mental tool, as opposed to the hammer, which is physical. A hammer requires conscious use, but it requires no conscious application of scientific knowledge. We intimately know the physics of a hammer blow, but some phenomena, like granular convection, are remote from us: they are not built into our bodies.

In this video, the guy is demonstrating the effect with exactly the same muesli that I eat every morning. It’s ideal for the purposes of a demo because it’s full of brazil nuts. But he’s doing it wrong – all you have to do is shake it gently from side to side – so I’m sceptical about his explanation of how it works.

I’ve come to regard it as quite ordinary, but there is more to it than first appears. The particles actually divide and circulate in a flowing motion, very much like liquid convection. I don’t know how it works. But then, nobody really does.

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?

These thoughts have been waiting in the wings now for a long time, since about a year ago, when I became fully enamoured of sturnus vulgaris, the European starling. People don’t give much thought to the lowly starling. Even those with a positive interest in wildlife often ignore these commoners among birds, favouring romantic rarities such as golden eagles.

I’ve seen golden eagles and they are indeed magnificent. The first time I saw one was with Stu on Ben Cruachan, our first munro. We had stopped for a rest on a rocky outcrop, looking out over a steep drop into the deep bowl of the mountain. And then, echoing around the natural amphitheatre came the sound which, though I hadn’t heard it before, chimed within me, so that when Stu said it must be an eagle I felt I already knew it. It was a harbinger, or a theatrical cue, so we looked about for it in the hope that it might enter the stage, and seconds later there it was, gliding around our crag, maybe twenty metres away and below us. The backs of its wings were shining in the sun, a sight denied to most people, who see only its silhouette high above.

Stirring romantic nobility is not the appeal of the starling. But take a closer look and you’ll find much more than that. If you are as I was not so long ago, a starling ignoramus, then let me be your guide to the wonderful world of this amazing little creature, my favourite bird (though obviously the bullfinch comes a close second.)

To begin, I want to tell you a story. It’s about time I got this out in the open. To be honest this whole post is a kind of catharsis for me, because of what happened…

Back when I was young, I answered an advert claiming I could make £1000 in a week. I had to go around the streets of some town or other – a different one of my choice every day – trying to sell various kinds of junk to shop assistants, mechanics, receptionists, butchers, pub regulars, bricklayers, and car salesmen. I lasted in the job (can it even be called a job when you end up with less money than you’ve put in?) for only a month, because I wasn’t any good and I lost money and I was miserable.

Anyway, one morning I was in an industrial estate in Renfrew (I have nothing against Renfrew and I know it has a lovely park and a great physiographical location and copious historical importance, but what is it about the phrase industrial estate in Renfrew that makes my heart sink? The astute amongst you will answer because it reminds you of an unhappy time in your life, stupid! And I cannot deny it – sniff – but I think there’s an objective dismality in it also.)

I stopped to get a roll and sausage for breakfast at one of those little greasy caff vans, which was parked up and cooking away on the edge of an expansively empty car park. This one even had tables and chairs scattered around it, under the shade of a couple of oak trees. I, the sole customer, was sitting at a table eating my roll when a starling appeared in front of me, perched on the back of a chair at a neighbouring table. It started eyeing me up, as intelligent birds do, by cocking its head at various angles to take me in fully with its eyes. Others appeared to my right and left, and one or two started swaggering nonchalantly on the ground. I looked up and saw that several had arrived on an overhanging branch. They can be aggressive little birds with gangsterish habits, and those beaks are like little daggers. They were very menacing and I was quite unnerved. It was clear that they knew this spot for its rich pickings, and I knew that they were cocky enough not just to wait for crumbs but to try to actually steal my food, or, I imagined, physically attack me so as to make me drop it, as crows and gulls do to hawks and herons.

Well, it came to nothing, but I wanted to make it clear that my love for starlings is not without an edge of bitter fear.

Starlings are very excellent, because:
They have iridescent plumage;
They gather in flocks up to one million birds strong, which create fantastical patterns in the sky;
They imitate sounds that they hear around them – every starling has an amazing repertoire, and they can even be taught to imitate a human voice perfectly.

Iridescent plumage

It’s not easy to convey this in phototgraphs, because appreciating iridescence really depends on seeing the object move in the light. Iridescence is the property of surfaces whose colour changes with the angle from which they are viewed. Soapy bubbles, oil slicks, some butterflys: you know what I’m talking about. Starling plumage is alternately green and violet. I don’t always see this, so it’s possible that their feathers have this quality only at certain times of year, or it might be that only the males have it. If anybody’s interested there’s a study entitled Plumage Reflectance and the Objective Assessment of Avian Sexual Dichromatism (PDF), published in the American Naturalist, which comes to some conclusions about sex differences and the use of iridescence in signalling. In any case, the fact that male starlings display their feathers in courtship suggests that the iridescence is sexually selected.

Flocking

Last year I caught glimpses of huge starling flocks from the M74 near Ecclefechan. Although it was difficult to see much, it was stunning. They gather like this in the autumn and through the winter I think, probably in the same place for several years running. For hours in the afternoon and into dusk, birds from miles around come to form a flock which can be about one million strong. Seeing the sheer size of these flocks, and the patterns they make as they move through the sky like some amorphous creature with indivisible purpose, is breathtaking.

These videos really are worth a look:

Starlings on Ot Moor
Feeding flock
Flocking at dusk

This all reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about for a long time. When I was a teenager I would sometimes see them flocking like this around the railway bridge over the Clyde as I got the train home to Largs. The flock would sweep up into the sky, over the bridge and then under it, in a big circle.

To be a good flock-member, all an individual starling has to do is memorize the following rules:

Steer to avoid crowding local flockmates (Separation)
Steer towards the average heading of local flockmates (Alignment)
Steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates (Cohesion)

This is the flocking algorithm, first worked out in 1986 by Craig Reynolds, and demonstrated in his program Boids. It became very big in the world of computer graphics and is used, I think, quite heavily in games and movies.

But what about velocity? I guess in the rules above we’re assuming identical velocities? Well, the mathematics and programming code are available all over the place, so I needn’t go into it all here.

Incidentally, it’s not just starlings that do this. Herring and sardine are famous for it (though we tend to call their groups shoals rather than flocks.)

Song

Last summer I was relaxing in the back garden, casually watching a small group of starlings feeding from a block of fat. But there was one starling that wasn’t interested in eating, only in singing. Starlings are commonly known for their chatter and noisiness, but listen to them carefully. This one was a virtuoso and sang with style and gusto for about 10 minutes, far out-performing any of its companions. It was making a huge variety of sounds, a mixture of melodious pure tones and repetitive clicks and chirps. There was complexity, richness and weirdness in the sounds, and I was enraptured, never mind any female starlings within hearing distance (although unlike them I would always stop short before actually mating with a starling, male or female). At one point it seemed to be overlaying different sounds, melodic calls on top of a constant high-frequency click repetition, like a kind of beatboxing.

They are renowned for their ability to mimic other sounds. Those living in the vicinity of a building site will incorporate the sounds of cement mixers, drills and human shouting into their songs. I myself have heard them imitating blackbirds and pneumatic drills (jackhammers to our North American friends).

There’s an excellent sound file on this page which I strongly urge you to listen to. You can hear, among other things, a magpie, a blackbird, a dog’s bark and what sounds like somebody hammering a fencepost into the ground. Obviously a suburban starling. There are lots of talking starlings on YouTube as well, such as this one. Incidentally, they are related to minah birds, which are perhaps more famous as amazing mimics.

What better way to end this post than with Shakespeare, from Henry IV:

“The King forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he is asleep, and in his ear I’ll holler Mortimer! Nay I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion.”

In the article in which I found this quoted, it says:

“This is the only instance where Shakespeare mentions starlings.”

Stuart took only a few seconds to locate it with his naked eye. It looked just like any other bright star, but when we finally got it in our sights…

(Picture courtesy of Mike Brough, 24th February 2005 – http://www.scholarshome.org.uk/astro/saturn.htm)

What we saw was very much like this, only smaller. A star suddenly transformed into another world, a world that I’ve been seeing in pictures since I was a young child but which I never thought of as so potentially immediate: just look up in the sky! It was the first time for me that a star had been anything other than a star, a single point of light with no dimensions. The three of us were amazed and delighted, and Stuart said it made him feel part of the cosmos.

Fear of death is silly: one’s demise is inevitable, so it’s a waste of time to worry about it. But it hurts that I won’t be alive to see a colony on Mars, mining in the asteroid belt, humanity expanding into the solar system; not to mention the eradication of malaria, poverty and war.* I badly want to know what’s going to happen in the centuries to come, and it’s no use saying “you can’t know, so get over it” – it’s the human condition to mourn for oneself before one’s death.

Anyway, that line of thought is going to lead me into fruitless existential ponderings, so I should celebrate what’s happening now. We’re out there at Saturn as I write, albeit remotely. The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan – a joint mission by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency – is going well. The Cassini spacecraft entered Saturn’s orbit in July 2004, when it began its four-year mission to collect various kinds of data on the planet, its rings and its moons. It sends home several gigabytes of data every day, which is analyzed by more than 250 scientists worldwide.

In December 2004 Cassini ejected the Huygens probe, which then descended through the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan and landed successfully on its surface, sending back data all the while.

See the images and videos at
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/index.cfm

Of course, we’ve been out there before, with the Voyager mission, whose Voyager 1 and 2 flew by Saturn in 1980 and 1981. They had flown past Jupiter a few years before and got some excellent pictures, as well as revealing that the moon Io was covered in active volcanoes, which surprised everyone.

After Saturn, Voyager 1 and 2 carried on out to Uranus and Neptune. Today, they are still beaming back information as they become the first human-made objects to leave the solar system and venture into interstellar space.

* It’s common these days to oppose space exploration against the solving of our problems on Earth, but I think they’re intimately tied together.

There’s a fascinating analysis of the summary report and the surrounding fuss at spiked. It’s very useful for putting the document into context. The media are describing it as the work of 600, 1200 or 2500 scientists, depending on what you read. This is misleading, for various reasons.

I heard Clive James on Radio 4 a couple of days ago, in A Point of View. I had forgotten just how brilliant he is. This short piece, with erudition, humour and self-deprecation mixed with deeply-felt liberal values, is dazzling. I’d encourage anyone to read it, and the audio’s on the site as well. Anyway, here are some of his serious points:

“There are good reasons for cleaning up the mess we make, but finally it’s what we make that makes us an advanced culture, and only a highly developed industry knows how to keep itself clean.

We shouldn’t expect the less fortunate nations to cut themselves off from industrial progress in the name of a green planet.

It wouldn’t be fair even if it was likely, and anyway, we aren’t civilized by the extent to which we return to nature, only by the extent that we overcome it.”

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