LINKS - November 2nd, 2022
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Crows Perform Yet Another Skill Once Thought Distinctively Human
By Diana Kwon, Scientific American
“The discovery that crows can grasp center-embedded structures and that they are better at doing so than monkeys ‘is fascinating,’ says Giorgio Vallortigara, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Trento in Italy, who was not involved in the work. These findings raise the question of what non-human animals might use this ability for, he adds. ‘They do not seem to possess anything similar to human language, thus recursion is possibly relevant to other cognitive functions,’ he says. One speculation is that animals might use recursion to represent relationships within their social groups.”
Hayao Miyazaki’s Beautiful, Broken Worlds
By Sam Thielman, The New Yorker
“The nature of ecological catastrophe in Miyazaki’s worlds is unnervingly plastic. His early films, which imagine giant, incomprehensibly powerful weapons that have unleashed irreversible destruction and threaten to do so again, are nuclear-age parables for a Japan that had suffered catastrophe without precedent. Later works such as ‘Ponyo’ and the 1997 movie ‘Princess Mononoke’ are more singly concerned with environmentalism. But the world has caught up with Miyazaki’s apocalyptic vision, and the ecological collapses of even his older works no longer read as metaphors for past acts of destruction but as reflections of the present and predictions of the near future.”
Life with a Jinni
“Khan writes that most Muslims believe that God created jinn long before humans, though how literally to take them is a subject of theological debate. Unlike angels, which are beings of pure goodness, jinn are more like humans. Some are Muslims, while others are not, and they’re capable of both good and evil. They can think rationally, experience emotions, eat, have children, and die. But they have superhuman abilities such as shapeshifting and extreme strength and speed, and they live very long lives.”
What Makes Us Lucid Dream?
“We hypothesize that, during lucid dreaming, we also receive a lot of information from our body. We call this interoception. We assume that this contributes to these so-called autolytic experiences in lucid dreaming—that people usually fly, levitate, or have these out-of-body experiences. It’s possible that we receive extremely strong vestibular inputs informing us of the moving body. But at the same time, we also receive information from our real body that is lying in a relaxed state in bed. This proprioceptive information informing us, conveying information of a body that is not moving, contradicts the information that we feel that we are moving. We have to solve this contradiction. We argue that the solutions for that are the experience of flying or levitating, because that really accommodates this contradictory information that our body is relaxed, but at the same time it’s moving. We assign more precision to the signals coming from our body, and this contributes to these quite frequent flying experiences in lucid dreams. “
First known map of night sky found hidden in Medieval parchment
By Jo Marchant, Nature
“Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. The extract is published online this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts. It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.”