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Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of NounsScience 30 May 2008

Spoken language is perhaps the most notable marker of our species. Our ability to call forth words with universal meaning is so natural that we take it for granted, and yet scientists still know very little about how it works, or from where the ability derives.

Because current neuroimaging technologies have relatively low resolution, it has been extremely difficult to study language in human subjects. Researchers have generally relied on observational models from linguistics to try to predict how the brain represents the meaning of words.

Recently, a team of researchers used a creative methodology to get past these technological hurdles by using a text corpus, a linguistics tool that shows how often certain words co-occur with other words. By combining information from the text corpus with previous fMRI data gathered while subjects thought of specific nouns, a model was able to predict patterns of brain computational activation with remarkable accuracy for words that had never before been imaged.
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Model & Photograph: Alice Cho

On July 21, 1969, after landing in the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag and spent almost three hours exploring the lunar terrain. The Moon’s airless, inert surface should preserve their footprints and equipment for millions of years. But new robotic rovers due to begin visiting the Moon next summer threaten to radically accelerate the site’s decay, prompting preservationists to ask how best to protect off-world archaeological sites as the heritage of future generations.

The impetus behind the robotic voyage is the Google Lunar X Prize, which could pay $20 million or more to the first team to successfully land a rover on the Moon and accomplish a set list of tasks. Fourteen teams from around the world have registered, but only one, Astrobotic Technology, has publicly announced its planned itinerary: a trip to the Apollo 11 site next summer, shortly after the first mission’s 40th anniversary. Astrobotic Tech representative David Gump says their rover will land far from the Apollo 11 site and will be able to recognize and circumvent footprints and artifacts on the lunar surface, but not everyone shares this op-timism. John Logsdon, director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, believes the team should first perform trial runs on Earth.

“I’d like to see them demonstrate their ability to do a precision landing someplace else before they try it next to the Apollo 11 site,” Logsdon says. “You wouldn’t have to be very far off to come down on top of the flag or something dramatic like that.” Precision landings are further complicated by the fact that most sites are known to accuracies of only, at best, tens of meters. New Mexico State University anthropologist Beth O’Leary proposes that NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launching this October, be used to survey these sites before any landings are attempted.
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Seed’s inaugural edition of the State of Science explores the current scientific landscape and its emergent hotspots — along with the motivations and ambitions of the individuals charting its future.
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Guhonda, a Silverback gorilla from the Sabyinyo tribe of gorillas who occupy the Virunga valley on the border of Rwanda and Uganda. Photograph courtesy of youngrobv.

Two major legal developments in the past few months are deepening a schism between leading primatologists, biologists, and ethicists around the world. A pending Spanish law that would grant unprecedented protections to great apes, and a recent extension to a Swiss law that protects the “dignity” of organisms, are the latest fronts in a battle to redefine the meaning of human rights, and indeed whether such rights are the exclusive domain of humans.

At the forefront of the battle is the Great Ape Project (GAP). Established in 1993, it demands a basic set of moral and legal rights for chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans. This June, GAP persuaded the Spanish Parliament’s environmental committee to approve a resolution supporting those goals.

Other countries, including the United Kingdom and New Zealand, have taken steps to protect great apes from experimentation, but this is the first time that actual rights would be extended to apes. The resolution establishes a set of laws based on GAP’s principles, which Spain promises to implement by the end of the year. Those laws would ban the use of apes in experiments or entertainment or commercial ventures, and they would set higher standards for their conditions in captivity. The message is clear: These animals are not property. “It’s a historic breakthrough in reducing the barrier between humans and nonhuman animals,” says Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher and the head of GAP.
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Image courtesy of Bitforms Gallery, NYC (detail of “Path 25, 2001″ by C.E.B. Reas).

Like Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck suggested that living organisms are products of a long process of transformation. But instead of asserting, as Darwin did, that diversity emerges through the natural selection and accumulation of heritable variations over time, Lamarck proposed two mechanisms of evolutionary change: an inherent tendency in living matter to become increasingly more complex and the inheritance of acquired characteristics &mdash environmentally induced or learned individual adaptations that accrue over time and pass to offspring. Many biologists at the time, including Darwin himself, believed such “soft” inheritance was complementary to the theory of natural selection.

Soft inheritance was passionately debated for decades but fell from favor in the 20th century with the forging of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (MS), a version of Darwinism that unified the theory of natural selection with Mendelian genetics, and, later, the myriad discoveries from the midcentury molecular biology revolution of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. For the past 60 years, it has provided the theoretical basis for evolutionary studies.
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“We are encouraged to introduce the periodic table as poetry and LEGOs as a form of art.” Illustration: Joe Kloc.

Science is fueled by passion, a passion that is often attached to the world of objects much as the artist is attached to his paints, the poet to her words. From my first days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, I saw this passion for objects everywhere. My students and colleagues told how they were drawn into science by the physics of sand castles, by playing with soap bubbles, by the mesmerizing power of a crystal radio.

Since this was the early days of computer culture, there was also talk of new objects. Some people identified with their computers, experiencing these machines as extensions of themselves. For them, computers were useful for thinking about larger questions, questions of determinism and free will, of mind and mechanism. For me, training as a humanist and social scientist moved me to investigate the role of objects in scientific creativity and the development of young minds.

Objects don’t nudge every child toward science, but for some, a rich object world is the best way to give science a chance. Given the opportunity, children will make intimate connections, connections they must construct on their own. But at a time when science education is in crisis, many of us discourage the object passions of children, perhaps out of fear that they will become “trapped,” learning to prefer the company of objects to the company of other children. Indeed, when the world of people is too frightening, children may retreat into the safety of what can be predicted and controlled. This should not give objects a bad name. They can make children feel safe, valuable, and part of something larger than themselves. They are points of entry to transformative experiences, experiences that often emerge as they are shared.

If we attend to young scientists’ romance with objects, we are encouraged to make children comfortable with the idea that falling in love with things is part of what we expect of them. We are encouraged to introduce the periodic table as poetry and LEGOs as a form of art.

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT.

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Second lifeNature advocacy groups like the World Wildlife Fund have learned that the best way to secure a donation is to highlight the threat of extinction, a very valid cause, but sometimes their numbers simply don’t add up..

Methane on Mars. Does that mean… life?Methane detected on Mars has already caused a sensation amongst alien enthusiasts around the world—but not all astro-biologists agree that life on mars is a sure thing just yet.

CNN is spun right round, baby, right roundWhat happens when you axe a science journalism department? A complete evaporation of any former credibility.

Mission AccomplishedAfter 8 years of destructive science policy America finds itself one week away from restoring science to its rightful place. Yet, as Chris Mooney reflects, will a new administration be enough? Or, will it take a cultural revolution to jump start the next scientific revolution?

A New Kind of Big Science One of the most disappointing things to happen in the new year is the disappearance of Olivia Judson’s column as she takes a year long sabbatical. Luckily for us, she has scheduled guest scientists to fill in her weekly column while she is away with biologist Aaron Hirsh getting it started in his piece about the limits of Big Science and a call for “citizen science”.

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Conservatives lose first evolution vote In another setback to the creationist cause a court in Texas defeated a movement that sought to include the supposed “weaknesses” of evolution in textbooks.

Climate Change Killing America’s Trees at Ever Faster RatesThough it may seem like the same story being repeated over and over the global threat to our forests is accelerating and should never be dismissed or ignored.

Middlebrow Messiahs Now nearly absent from contemporary education is the “Great Books” program still taught at St. Johns University— and although it may place more emphasis on looking back than forward there is something to be said for this peculiar process of fostering intellect.

Mysterious waysHow genetically similar are identical twins? Recent research into epigenetic inheritance reveals that there may be more factors influencing a set of twins DNA than previously believed.

How I Made a 1,474-Megapixel Photo During President Obama’s Inaugural Address Two days later and the inauguration doesn’t seem any less extraordinay—a fact this humongous searchable photo reminds us of once again.

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