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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

science

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Why old dogs can learn new tricks

An out of focus airy and well-lit shot of a model brain and biological head. A person is walking by the display in the background.
Photo credit: Jesse Orrico

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is a proverb I learned in primary school along with other common English idioms. It never occurred to me at the time that the saying contradicted the also-common “You’re never too old to learn.”

It turns out that even if the battle between “fixed mindsets” and “growth mindsets” is largely imaginary, “You’re never too old to learn” is the more accurate of the two sayings. Learning is always possible, even if it can become more difficult with time.

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to respond to our environment and experiences by changing its structure, creating new circuits, signals, and neural pathways. New connections within the structure of the brain is the physiological evidence of learning, whether the content being learned is how to walk (motor function), how to make toast with peanut butter (object function), or how to adapt with and navigate a difficult family relationship (relational function).

Today I learned about three strategies that support learning and the rewiring of the brain:

The exercise suggestion surprised me, but I’ve noticed that people pushing for significant change in an area of their lives will often take up some form of physical discipline or training alongside that attempt to chage: a program of weightlifting, walking, running, yoga, or another organized practice like a martial art.

I would never have thought of these kinds of exercise as something that drove literal brain changes, but that’s what the research suggests.

“Old dogs can learn new tricks” because our brains aren’t cement or hardened clay. They’re soft, mushy, and more resilient than I’m sometimes tempted to acknowledge.

We can learn: it’s possible. Whether it’s likely is a combination of our will, our finding or making social networks and other structures that support our learning, and how motivated we are to learn and keep learning even in the face of resistance.

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Not magic but science

Expanding is what things do when they get warm... It's not magic. It's science. —Bill Nye

Mechanical engineer Bill Nye, also known as The Science Guy, has a new popular science program on Netflix called Bill Nye Saves the World.

During the first episode, Nye dons a light blue lab coat and demonstrates the mechanics of climate change and the greenhouse effect.

“As I hold the bulb of this thermometer,” Nye says, “the liquid metal inside is expanding. That’s what things do when they get warm.”

That sparked a light in my head.

Across several Christian denominations lately, I’ve been watching traditionalists pull up their drawbridges and nudge—or catapult—marginalized people out into the icy moat.

In April, Adventist administrators published an awkward and unhelpful statement about transgender people. At the start of this year, Presbyterian administrators at Montreat College introduced what one community member called “an evangelical cultural litmus test,” a “covenant” for employees to sign that bound them to narrow and intentionally exclusive conclusions about women’s healthcare and family formation.

If when things get warm, they expand, the corollary rule is that when things get cold, they contract.

Communities collapse on themselves in the absence of kindness and curiosity—and you don’t have to be “progressive” to be kind or to disrupt your journey through the world long enough to stop and offer care to someone who needs it.

Coldness inspires harshness and an unwillingness to learn with others. It provokes us to assign mean interpretations to each other’s actions, and it discourages us from growing.

But when people are warm, persistently, wholeheartedly warm, the future becomes wide enough to belong to all of us.

As Nye said it first, that isn’t magic. It’s science.

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Making stuff up

Epigenetics is a useful word if you don't know what's going on—if you do, you use something else. —Sir Adrian Bird

I took an extra year to finish college for health reasons. That year taught me a lot about myself, and it also gave me front-line exposure to the uncertainty and ambiguity that’s a normal part of conventional medicine.

Take the adjective idiopathic. It’s used to describe conditions or symptoms that seem to arise in individuals from nowhere and for no apparent reason instead of through environmental triggers or genetic predispositions. It’s a way for medics to say “something’s happening here, but we don’t know what caused it.”

The term idiopathic was accurate for me: my doctors didn’t know what caused my symptoms. But seeing “idiopathic” as a patient made me roll my eyes.

Whenever my specialists didn’t have an answer, they pointed me to clunky categories like undifferentiated primary disease and idiopathic secondary symptom. Each of these categories sounded quite authoritative and clarified very little.

So I laughed on reading one of the Genetic Literacy Project’s latest posts: medicine isn’t the only scientific specialty where this happens.

Reviewing popular articles on epigenetics and Lamarckian evolution, the GLP explains that some of the sociologists and journalists who invoke epigenetics are doing it inaccurately and with much more certainty than the underlying science merits:

While there is some evidence that stress can induce epigenetic changes, most of it comes from studies of people who went through severe trauma or stress (like the Holocaust)… [Epigenetic] changes are also reversible and shift throughout a person’s life. This means that an epigenetic modification linked to a disease (e.g. obesity or depression) that arises during childhood will not necessarily persist for a person’s lifetime. Scientists are not clear under what conditions epigenetic tags persist or are removed.” —Nicholas Staropoli, April 11, 2017, emphasis added

It’s not necessarily the case that Grandma’s experiences overdetermine mine. They might contribute to my life context, my disposition, or the tools I naturally use to deal with my life experiences, but I can still adapt beyond whatever she left behind.

Scientists will need to keep correcting us no matter which concept we’re garbling this time: there may be no preemptive defense against the human impulse to neaten ambiguous details and to tell stories where life has proven idiosyncratic or unruly.

We are Homo narrativus, and we make things up.

We should probably be careful with that.

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A timely example: denial at work

At sunset, a purple-orange sky hangs over several large smokestcks and a lit industrial complex. Smoke billows left from them all..
Photo credit: Viktor Kiryanov

The merchants of doubt are back in business.

Just as I wrote about denial in public controversies this weekend, London’s Daily Mail charged yet another climate science data conspiracy. The Daily Mail isn’t new to the game of “If you can’t lie, obfuscate,” but the public’s comprehension of and trust in climate science isn’t a game. The stakes include the survival of millions.

Some in the press have rushed to play chart-tennis with the newspaper and its Congressional allies’ latest accusations. But the facts really aren’t at issue here: if the critical spotlight weren’t on one data point it would be on another. As Lipstadt found of Holocaust deniers, at issue is the underlying ideology that fuels denial and shunts conspiracists from one obstructive criticism to another.

Umair Muhammad puts it bluntly when he writes, “The point is to make sure we do not in fact start to do what needs to be done.” It doesn’t matter how much mass confusion and diversions are needed to block action, so long as action is indeed blocked.

Muhammad refocuses on five specific actions that are worth taking:

  1. Directly tax carbon to discourage its use
  2. Kill the car and redesign residential and work areas to support other forms of transit
  3. Reduce general consumption, including the resources used in manufacturing—not just individual, private consumption
  4. Transform agricultural and cattle-raising
  5. Modify energy-inefficient buildings and end outright the use of coal

Depending on how much sleep I’ve had, even I could feel a little overwhelmed by these action items. I can imagine why Members of Congress funded by the oil and gas industries might be more inclined to look for reasons not to accept human responsibility for climate change than to accept that “climate change is fundamentally a social problem and it requires a social solution.”

In real time, this is what denial does to us.

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Nostalgia is no way to build a life

Cropped portion of Andrew Jenkins' photo: full fir trees line the bottom of a photo of bright white and blue star-specks on a purple-grey night sky.
Photo credit: Andrew Jenkins

One of my favorite things is looking at the stars, especially in areas with low levels of light pollution.

When I lived in Jamaica, my grandparents still had an exposed balcony (we installed railings when my grandmother developed dementia). I would sometimes sit on the balcony, long after my grandparents had gone to bed. Their windy country roads would be quiet and I’d listen to frogs and crickets as the moon and stars inched across the sky.

Erykah Badu’s song “Orange Moon” captures the mood quite well: there’s just something about taking in our thin slice of space that fills me with wonder, imagination, and no small serving of nostalgia.

So I laughed tonight when I read a meme from a friend:

When you wish upon a star, you’re a few million light years late. That star is dead. Just like your dreams.”

The stars I notice when I melt into awe are no longer where I think they are. They’ve moved, most of them. Some of them are now dust and black holes, and they’re visible to me only because they once shimmered brightly right before collapsing.

Theologian Rita Nakashima Brock writes, “If we base an entire theological system either on a human longing for an unreal past or in hierarchical authority, we have a system based in nostalgia… A nostalgic system prevents honesty.”

Arthur C. Clarke’s story “The Star” (1954) is one of the most haunting pieces of fiction I’ve read in my life, and it hinges on the horror of how much time and distance distort each other and skew the stories we craft to ease our discomfort with what’s physically or chronologically distant from us.

Read it now if you never have, and do everything you can to hold a healthier relationship to the past.

 

 

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Raising our information standards

Mailboxes in the foreground.As long as there’s been an internet, people have forwarded one another stories and photos and award offers, some inspiring, some horrifying, some valid, some fictional.

What some reporters are now calling “fake news” is a sub-category of the content we information traders are willing to traffic in and share with each other. During this fall’s US elections, enterprising Greek teenagers capitalized on United States readers’ willingness to read and share unsubstantiated stories. Some of these teens have made thousands of dollars per month from advertising on their fictional news sites. It’s an especially cynical combination of politics, capitalism, and folly. It’s also a kind of propaganda, and many of us are much more susceptible to it than we’d imagine we are.

Professor and writer Zeynep Tufekci has explained the big part this small group of young people played on social media during the campaigns thanks to the public’s willingness to look, click, and share, often without reading or researching the content first. Perhaps only in the future will it be clear how much misinformation like this shaped the outcomes of this election.

We can’t go backward and stop writers from creating false information. But each of us can challenge ourselves to take more care when we encounter new material—even and especially from sources that we already trust or agree with.

I’ve taken this month as a perfect time to voluntarily raise my information standards. If dissembling and bluffing are going to become the next great international sports, we all need to be much better prepared to recognize it and shut it down.

Read more about Facebook and patterns of misinformation.

Also check out Naomi Oreskes and Erik  M. Conway’s historical book on information manipulation during the heyday of tobacco. Merchants of Doubt also reviews other science controversies including nuclear safety and climate change.