Author Archives: Larry Franz

Would You Forget About It, If You Could? (Part 2)

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Last week, I wrote about some scientists who have erased memories by injecting a drug into the brains of rats (our memory appears to work the same way as rat memory, but nobody is currently injecting propranolol into human test subjects). 

Now some other scientists have reported the ability to create memories in rats by injecting a certain kind of virus into their brains. The virus affects the creation of a protein that underlies the storage of memories. In this case, the rats were made to remember a certain environment as being painful, even though they had never experienced pain in that environment. 

Erasing real memories. Creating false ones. We’re a long way from our memories being manipulated like a character in a Philip K. Dick story (“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”). But what’s a nice rat to think about its memories these days? Did I have that excellent cheese yesterday or not?

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/07/26/3811591.htm

How to Fix Congress

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Congress is under the control of Republicans who are terribly afraid of primary challenges from right-wing nuts. So Congressional Republicans behave as if they are right-wing nuts themselves, even if they aren’t (some of them aren’t).

In a column devoted to reactions to President Obama’s recent economic speech, Alex Pareene responds to the idea that Obama needs “bold, new proposals” in order to get the Republicans to cooperate:

I dunno, the only bold new proposal I can think of that will meaningfully break down Republican resistance would be to massively expand the size of the House and institute nationwide nonpartisan redistricting, and somehow do this before the 2014 elections, and then get rid of the filibuster? That would be pretty bold.

The House doesn’t represent the will of the people, because small states are over-represented (some congressional districts are nearly twice as large as others) and recent gerrymandering results in more Republicans being elected than Democrats, even though Democrats get more votes. (This rightward tilt is made even stronger by the Republicans’ adherence to the so-called “Hastert Rule”: bills don’t get a vote unless they’re supported by a majority of Republicans, i.e. a majority of the majority).

The Senate, of course, was designed to give extra power to small states and the filibuster gives extra power to the minority. It’s a little-known fact that the original rules of both the House and Senate allowed debate to be ended by a majority vote. In 1806, however, Vice President Aaron Burr convinced senators that they didn’t need such a rule; the rule hadn’t been invoked recently so it was just cluttering up the rule book. That change created the possibility of a filibuster, the requirement that a super-majority be required to end debate. The first filibuster occurred 31 years later. Now ordinary business often requires the approval of 60 Senators. So much for majority rule.

Unfortunately, the likelihood that Mr. Parene’s “bold, new ideas” will soon be adopted is approximately zero. It’s true that the Senate might change its rules; that could happen now if some Democratic senators weren’t afraid of the consequences. But it’s highly unlikely that the House will be expanded (although someone is arguing for that to happen: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/). The most we can hope for is that Congressional districts will one day be drawn with little or no political influence — or that whoever carries out the next round of gerrymandering does a better job.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/25/post_pundits_obama_economy_speech_boring_not_grand_bargain_y_enough/

The Future Gets a Little Closer

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The British government has announced it will invest 60 million pounds to support the development of a “spaceplane”. This will be a spacecraft that can take off and land at an airport, just like a jet plane. But it will have the ability to escape the earth’s atmosphere, delivering passengers and 16 tons of cargo to space stations orbiting earth.

As planned, the spaceplane won’t need to carry lots of heavy fuel when it takes off, like today’s rockets have to do. It will use an extremely efficient engine that allows it to reach Mach-5 (five times the speed of sound) using oxygen from the earth’s atmosphere, and then use a small amount of on-board oxygen to reach Mach-22 in space. The technology has been proven in the lab. Now an actual spaceplane needs to be built and tested.

The article below suggests that the spaceplane technology might eventually be used to make regular air travel faster, allowing tourists, for example, to fly from England to Australia at an average speed of 2,500 miles per hour (i.e. fly 10,000 miles in just 4 hours). That would be 300 miles per hour faster than the fastest military aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird, has ever flown (according to public records).

A futuristic passenger plane would have to accelerate and decelerate rather slowly, however. Otherwise your Aunt Sally and Uncle Bob would experience a g-force like an astronaut does.

It doesn’t exist yet (and isn’t expected to start flying until 2019), but it still looks really cool:

SkylonTakeOff

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/across-the-universe/2013/jul/17/sabre-rocket-engine-reaction-skylon

The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought by Susan Jacoby

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According to The Great Agnostic, there were two great opponents of religion and proponents of naturalism in American history: Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. Strangely, hardly anyone today has heard of Ingersoll. (For that matter, few Americans today know that Tom Paine had anything to say about religion.)

Robert Ingersoll was a world-famous lawyer and lecturer who lived from 1833 to 1899. He was considered perhaps the greatest orator of his day. He had an extremely successful career traveling all across the country, lecturing to large, appreciative crowds, among whom were many ordinary, religious Americans. He was a member of the social and political establishment, but his public statements opposing religion insured that he never held political office.

In Susan Jacoby’s words, Ingersoll “explained the true meaning and value of science … in a more understandable fashion than any scientist, even the brilliant popularizer Thomas Henry Huxley … Second, Ingersoll made the connection between repressive religion and everyday burdens and injustices as no one had before him.” 

Among the targets of Ingersoll’s scorn were slavery, capital punishment, the subjugation of women, debtor’s prisons, the mistreatment of animal and Social Darwinism. He believed that “there were no social injustices in which religion did not play a major role” — for example, in the belief that the existence of the poor was God’s will, and the idea that men should exert authority over women. 

Jacoby suggests that Ingersoll’s primary purpose was to remind his countrymen that the United States was founded by men who rejected the idea of theocracy: “the glory of the founding generation was that it did not establish a Christian nation”. Ingersoll rejected all supernatural explanations for human behavior and the world around us, while hoping that science and reason would eventually lead us to a world of peace, justice and prosperity. Quoting him: “Man through his intelligence must protect himself. He gets no help from any other world…. Let the ghosts go. We will worship them no more”.

Ingersoll came to be known as the “Great Agnostic”, even though he saw no significant difference between agnosticism and atheism. It isn’t clear why his fame diminished over the years. Although his collected works comprise 12 volumes, perhaps his written words weren’t as powerful as his oratory. Maybe if he had written a good summary of his views, he would be as famous today as Thomas Paine is for writing “The Age of Reason” (which, unfortunately, isn’t very famous at all).

One of the virtues of The Great Agnostic is how it shows that our current cultural battles over religion are hardly new. The 19th century featured the same kinds of conflict, on topics like evolution, birth control and government support for religious education. We haven’t made as much progress as we should have. If there had been someone with Ingersoll’s convictions and abilities speaking out during the 20th century, and now in the 21st, we might be a better country today.

Would You Forget About It, If You Could?

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Everyone has some bad memories. Would you erase a bad memory if you could?

That’s the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a wonderful movie from 2004 in which Jim Carrey (playing a serious role) and Kate Winslet use a new technology to erase their memories of each other. As you might expect, things don’t go as planned.

The idea that we might get rid of painful memories raises some interesting questions. Is it right to erase what is part of ourselves, something that contributes to making us who we are? Don’t bad memories help us avoid making the same old mistakes again? Does having painful memories help us appreciate our happy memories and the good things that happen to us?

We might have to consider such questions in the relatively near future. Scientists aren’t yet ready to erase our memories, but some of them are working on a way to make bad memories less painful. It isn’t clear from the article below whether the details of a memory can be changed, or whether it’s the emotion associated with a memory that can be changed. What is clear is that ingesting a certain drug (propranolol) within a window of time after a memory is formed or after it’s recalled can change the memory’s emotional impact. In theory, a traumatic memory can become relatively benign. 

The premise of the article is that this method will work because it takes a certain amount of time for a memory to be “consolidated” (added to our long-term memory), and each time we recall a memory, it is “reconstituted” (reconstructed from some underlying arrangement of the stuff in our brains). If the drug is administered at the right time, the process of consolidation or reconstitution can be modified.

Perhaps it’s a sign of having a “half-empty” personality, but I’d be more than willing to remove a few bad memories or make some of them less powerful. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between getting rid of a bad memory and avoiding a bad situation that you will later remember.

In fact, one of the benefits of being dead (there aren’t a lot, but there are at least a couple) is that you don’t have to remember how you screwed up that time or what that so and so did to you. Even if there’s an afterlife (don’t count on it), you won’t have to remember all the bad stuff unless you’re in hell — or heaven isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515981/repairing-bad-memories/