A new definition for the soul is required

A question for the spiritual people out there. What is the soul?

Before you answer please be aware of this -

We know that the mind is what the brain does. Our personalities which are mainly herditary are managed in the brain. Our memories are stored in the brain. We know that brain damage can effect personality, memory and IQ. We can say now with confidence that the brain does not require anything more than what we can measure for it to work (or not work).

We also know that the terms 'energy' and 'force' are quantifiable and measurable terms in science. We know that the soul is not something that can be measured or tested in any way and therefore those terms are not appropriate to use.

Given all these things, where does the soul sit? What does it do? Given it is not required by our brains to function and make us who we are, what is the definition of a soul? Where is the new gap it fits now that we have filled so many previous gaps with knowledge?

We so want to fill our lives with magic and wonder that we make up these terms which are simple and comforting to help explain what we dont know. But when we do this we miss the real mystery, the real magic.......... our brains.

You know what you believe, why not find out what the experts who actually study this stuff know.

Here are some recommended readings and listenings -
The Brain Science Podcast
Genome & Nature Via Nurture by Matt Ridley
How The Mind Works & The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker
http://www.ted.com/
The Mechanism Of Mind by Edward de Bono
http://brainrules.net/

Do you come in a dozen OR have a heart.

Recently I have heard a few rumblings in print and podcast about Japan's Toyama University professor Makoto Nakamura. There is much interest in his research into using and inkjet printers to possibly produce human organs. Essentially the idea is instead of ink you eject cells with the technology to slowly build a 3D structure by applying layer after layer. Here is the article.

Being very new to biology I find it hard to grasp just how these cells are manipulated to become specifically heart cells. This process is so incredibly complicated. I don't get how he supplies the cells with the required ingredients. This is why learning about these things is so vastly superior to reading about UFOs for example. We have such beautiful complexity within us, so why are we so taken with crop circles and aura colours and past life regressions?

When I heard about this I was reminded of a terrific book by Michael Marshall Smith in which clones are created of people who can afford it and when emergencies arise doctors have an exact copy of the patient to take what is required. Smith takes the story into some strange territories that are not so science fiction any more. It is both disturbing and morbidly fascinating. In other words a great read.

It brings us neatly back to ethics in science. A subject of interest that I know Mark is keen to talk about some more.

Until next time.............

The Psychology of Music Preferences

Apple has just released a version of iTunes with a new feature called Genius. Genius makes custom playlists (of either music you own or music you might want to by) based on a secret algorithm. If you opt-in, iTunes sends all of your listening history data (e.g., track names, artist names, playcounts, skipcounts) to a central server. The algorithm then looks for patterns in worldwide listening trends. To use Genius you right-click a particular song, choose 'start Genius', and BANG you've got a list of 'similar' songs. I'm loving it. It's helped me rediscover some music that Dan had given me but that I hadn't listened to much.

This got me thinking about how one might statistically look for trends in music preferences. I wondered if there'd ever been a factor analysis of music preferences. A factor analysis is a statical technique for finding trends amongst different variables. It's often used in personality research. You ask a large sample of volunteers a whole stack of questions (e.g., "On a scale of 1 to 10 how much do you like parties?", "How much do you like being the center of attention?" etc.) and look for shared variance in the responses. I've written about factor analyses of personality related data before here.

Anyway, a quick literature search turned up this article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Rentfrow, P.J., Gosling, S.D. (2003). The Do Re Mi’s of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(6), 136-1256.

Among the studies reported is a factor analytic study of music preferences. 1,704 students from the University of Texas were asked to rate each of 14 music genres on a scale from 1 ('I don't like it at all') to 7 ('I like it a great deal'). The genres were: alternative, blues, classical, country, electronica/dance, folk, heavy metal, rap/hip-hop, jazz, pop, religious, rock, soul/funk, and sound tracks.

The analysis revealed 4 main dimensions (factors) that captured 59% of the total variance. The names given to these factors and the genres associated with them are as follows:

- Reflective and complex (blues, jazz, classical, and folk)
- Intense and rebellious (rock, alternative, heavy metal)
- Upbeat and Conventional (country, sound track, religious, and pop)
- Energetic and Rhytmic (rap/hip-hop, soul/funk, and electronica/dance)

These dimensions are reasonably independent of each other (1). People who like reflective and complex music are just as likely to enjoy intense and rebellious music as they are to not. What these factors mean is that if someone likes a genre related to a particular dimension (e.g., blues) then they'll probably also like the other genres on that dimension (e.g., jazz). The same goes for disliking a genre.

One limitation of this study is that peoples' understanding of genre terms may vary. I might think that I don't like folk music and yet like many songs that others would categorise as folk. It would be great to see an analysis done on song by song ratings, rather than just genres.

Another analysis, which was really interesting, involved looking for relationships between e musical preferences and differences in personality and cognitive ability. They found all sorts of relationships, although most of them were quite small (.2ish). The largest one (.4ish) was between a preference for Reflective and Complex music and the personality characteristic Openness to Experience. Interestingly, there was a small (.2ish) relationship between verbal IQ and liking of Reflective and Complex, Intense and Rebellious, or Upbeat and Conventional music (2).

Very interesting stuff.

I'd love to see these researchers team up with Apple and analyse the iTunes Genius data.

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(1) Upbeat and Conventional and Energetic and Rythmic correlate .5 if allowed to covary.

(2) And no, I don't think this is evidence that music makes you smarter (can you guess why?).

Mark on Science

Science is a special kind of magic, practiced by people called 'nerds'. No body knows how it works for sure, but it probably has something to do with computer machines.

Be careful, science is dangerous. Nerds get so lazy from all their science making that they only have enough strength to stare into space, talk to the internet, or drive their electric wheelchairs.

Sometimes nerds get angry. If too many nerds are angry at one time, electricity stops working and nuclear bombs go off. Damn you nerds! (but don't tell them i said that)

Luckily, normal people can reap the rewards of science without having to risk their own sanity, because nerds are happy to do science for you. They will accept monetary compensation, but are also happy to work for social approval.

One final note. Logic tells us that all nerds wear glasses, but that not all people who wear glasses are nerds. You may not agree with this opinion, but you'll have a hard time convincing me otherwise, as there are two sides to every fact.

Fleshing out evolution.

I grew up believing in evolution. The concept didn't clash with any closely held beliefs of the community I was born into, so I'd heard of the concept and understood it to be the scientific reality that it is. But it wasn't until recently that I actually understood the concept properly. My pre-university concept of evolution was pretty simplistic, something like "creatures gradually get better over time; humans came from monkeys".

But evolution is much more interesting than that, much more profound in its implications, yet not that difficult to understand. The key is why evolution occurs, not just that it does. My sense, however, is that the majority of evolution acceptors in Australia have only ever been exposed to the one sentence version of the concept, as I had been.

So if you want more, here's two recommendations:

Read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I believe my co-blogger, Dan, is in the middle of it himself.

AND/OR

Check out Dawkins' new TV series The Genius of Charles Darwin

Dan recommends you check out this site for even more fascinating information to help us understand more about us and the world we live in.