A Brief Thought Experiment - A World Without Ego

 By Todd William

(Artwork by: Cyril Rolando)

Have you ever wondered why people are proud of their beliefs?

Why would you have satisfaction for having an opinion? Everyone has opinions. The act of believing doesn't require any effort at all. 

In fact, it's the opposite that is challenging. Battling your own ego takes guts. No one likes to be wrong, so genuinely opening up to that possibility is the real test of courage.

Its perfectly natural to ignore things that don't jive with our already made up minds - its called confirmation bias. How often have you had an opinion, heard some good reasons that indicate you're probably wrong, and still thought to yourself, Screw it, I'm going to believe this anyway. I know I've done it.

John Kenneth Galbraith said it best:

"Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

Strong beliefs are just opinions you refuse to reconsider. Sure, you have good reasons for your views. Everyone does. But you're human, so you are just as susceptible as anyone to cognitive biases, bad judgement, and overemphasizing personal experience. 

If you should be proud of anything, its having the humility to admit that even where you're most certain, you could still be wrong. Can you imagine a world where we were all this humble?

The Role of Ego

This is a large part of what ego is all about - that sense of self assurance we all get that makes us reject the idea of possibly being wrong. It makes us prefer to be agreed with rather than be corrected. We ignore those who disagree with us on matters that mean the most to us. Shouldn't it be the opposite?

Often times we deride those with big egos, labeling them as arrogant, self-centered, and lacking humility. You know the type. They walk around acting as if their "sh!t don't stink". Wouldn't the world be better off without big egos?

But hold on...

Why do we even have an ego? Do you ever wonder why the human ego evolved?

It's possible that humanity depends on ego to continually progress, at least the part defined by a strong self assurance. The need for some people to willingly take excessive risks, even when it puts their lives in danger, has been a huge boon for society throughout history. 

The Wright Brothers risked their lives to prove flight was possible and we all benefit from this in immeasurable ways. Had they died in their efforts., other brave assured men and women would have filled their roles as pioneers of flight. We just needed enough people to take such risks.

The human race benefits by volume We only need a very small segment of risk takers to succeed for civilization to reap massive rewards. It's not always evident because we don't write books about those who didn't prevail. Inspirational stories about history are deceptively selective in this regard.

I'm not denouncing risk. I wholly agree with Goethe, "Boldness has genius, power and magic in it". But for every great success like the Wright Brothers, there are perhaps millions of colossal failures you've never heard with all the same attributes who willingly took the same style of risks - yet failed. 

Progress depends on this. We need a lot of people willing to take risk in lieu of seemingly very poor odds. Humanity requires a ridiculously large number of failures to be assured of getting some big winners.

So how do we repeatedly get massive amounts of people to continuously push on despite such poor odds?

Ego. It's the perfect ingredient. Question a man's pride or rationale in the face of long odds and you'll typically find it only strengthens his resolve to prove you wrong. 

To the extent that ego goes hand-in-hand with self-assuredness, humanity needs it. We need big egos - a lot of them. 

Not every person with a big ego is a jerk. That's not the point. The Wright Brothers may have been fine gentlemen. But they were supremely confident in their ideas before they knew for certain things would work out, and that's attributed to ego.

How might things be different if human history was defined by caution instead of a willingness to forge ahead into uncharted waters?

Perhaps there'd be a lot more humility to go around, but there would considerably less ingenuity too. 

So ask yourself, would you really rather live in a world without ego?

__________________________________________

Source: Mind Games: 25 Thought Experiments...
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Games-Thought-Experiments-Imagination-ebook/dp/B01862TMWA

Stargazing Live viewers find four-planet solar system via crowd-sourcing project

BY DANIEL MILLER

PHOTO 

Astrophysicist Chris Lintott (R) briefs Stargazing Live hosts Julia Zemiro (L) and Professor Brian Cox (C).

ABC NEWS: GEMMA DEAVIN

Australian volunteer citizen scientists have found four previously unknown planets orbiting a nearby star thanks to a crowd-sourcing project aired on the ABC's Stargazing Live.

The four "Super Earth" planets are about double the size of Earth and are orbiting a star in the Aquarius constellation 600 light years away, said Dr Chris Lintott, the principal investigator of Zooniverse.

ABC and iview April 4-6

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On Tuesday night, Stargazing Live viewers were called on to hunt exoplanets by trawling through observations of about 100,000 stars via a project on the Zooniverse website, which shows recently downloaded data from the Kepler Space Telescope.

What they found excited astronomers.

In 48 hours dozens of candidates were discovered, and four planets were confirmed to be orbiting a star in our interstellar neighbourhood, Dr Lintott said.

The star's planets were "crammed together" and indicated there may be more planets further from the star, he said.

"They're all much closer to the star than even Mercury is to the Sun," he said.

"The closest of them whips around in just three-and-a-half days, so a year is only three-and-a-half days long."

Visit Exoplanet Explorers to start searching for new planets

One of the amateur astronomers who was responsible for the discovery was Andrew Grey, a mechanic from Darwin.

"The first night I jumped on I believe it was about until 12:30. I catalogued 1,000 on the first night, so I punched a few out," he told Stargazing Live after the announcement of the find.

When told his name would appear in a scientific paper on the discovery, Mr Grey said: "That is amazing. Definitely my first scientific publication."

"[I'm] just glad that I can contribute. It feels very good."

More than 7,000 volunteers classified over 1.5 million points of interest as part of the Exoplanet Explorers project, led by Dr Ian Crossfield from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

External Link Facebook: Australian volunteer citizen scientists find four new planets

Dr Lintott said he was excited to see the impact of just two days of crowd-sourcing data.

"From experience we're talking the equivalent of a single astronomer working for a couple of years straight, no coffee breaks, no nipping to the loo [to complete this data]," he said.

Stargazing Live host Professor Brian Cox said he could not be more excited about the discovery.

"In the seven years I've been making Stargazing Live this is the most significant scientific discovery we've ever made. The results are astonishing," he said.

The four discovered planets are most likely rocky and far too hot to support human life, Dr Lintott said.

But he said the discovery was important scientifically because it was one of only one or two other systems he knew of where planets were packed together and it might tell astronomers more about how planets form.

Scientists are trying to contact all of the discoverers of the new solar system, with the volunteers who classified the system's data to be listed as co-authors on a scientific paper about the discovery.

"We're just trying to get in touch with them now," Dr Lintott said.

"Lots of Australians will be waking up to a message in their inbox saying they've discovered an exciting planet."

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has led to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets by measuring the brightness of faraway stars.

When a planet passes in front of the star, the star briefly dims or "blinks".

"So what we're actually looking for is a repeated pattern of blinks," Dr Lintott said.

"It's that pattern of blinks that tells us that something is in orbit around it."

The Exoplanet Explorers project is the first time citizen scientists have been able to collaborate and classify "fresh" data from Kepler, as opposed to other projects that use archival data, Dr Lintott said.

"[The data] came down from Kepler via NASA's deep space network in Canberra just a few weeks ago, and so this is almost real-time intervention," Dr Lintott said.

"If we can get that going that's exciting. It means we can get discoveries faster but it also means we can follow up on discoveries faster.

"So I'm very encouraged that, at least with the help of the ABC, it's possible to get through large amounts of data very quickly."

Cassini Is Back

Cassini lives on!
NASA's Cassini spacecraft is back in contact with Earth after its successful first-ever dive through the narrow gap between the planet Saturn and its rings.
As Cassini closes in on its end on 15 September, scientists are starting to risk increasingly dangerous manoeuvers to collect once in a lifetime science.
This wonderful robot was directed to dive through this gap of just 2000 kilometres, actually skimming through Saturn's upper atmosphere where atmospheric pressure was 1 bar - equivalent to Earth's at sea level.
It will be amazing to see what they've collected. 

Cassini spacecraft dives between Saturn and its rings

More on Heat and Therrmodynamics

   We got a whole lot of stuff,and we intend giving them to you a we got it.Good luck sifting through it.

Past Question 1

Thermal Properties of Matter

Heat Lectures

Past Question 2

P.Q 3

P.Q 4

Kinetic Theory

A Snapshot of Neural Activity (Neuroscience News)

FEATUREDNEUROSCIENCE7 MIN READ

Summary: A new neuron labeling technique allows researchers to obtain a snapshot of their activity at any moment in time. The new approach could provide new insights into neural functioning by offering better precision than current, more long term, labeling techniques.

Source: MIT.

FLARE technique can reveal which cells respond during different tasks.

Many cognitive processes, such as decision-making, take place within seconds or minutes. Neuroscientists have longed to capture neuron activity during such tasks, but that dream has remained elusive — until now.

A team of MIT and Stanford University researchers has developed a way to label neurons when they become active, essentially providing a snapshot of their activity at a moment in time. This approach could offer significant new insights into neuron function by offering greater temporal precision than current cell-labeling techniques, which capture activity across time windows of hours or days.

“A thought or a cognitive function usually lasts 30 seconds or a minute. That’s the range of what we’re hoping to be able to capture,” says Kay Tye, an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and one of the senior authors of the study, which appears in Nature Biotechnology on June 26.

Tye envisions that this tool could be used to help decipher the neural circuits involved in learning and memory, among many other possibilities.

She developed the technology with former MIT Professor Alice Ting, who is now a professor of genetics and biology at Stanford and is also a senior author of the paper. The paper’s lead author is Wenjing Wang, a Stanford postdoc.

Dream tools

While Ting was at MIT, she and Tye often ran along the Charles River together. One day about five years ago, they were discussing their dream projects. “Alice said, ‘If you could have any tool that doesn’t currently exist, what would you have?’ And I said that I would like be able to functionally define populations of neurons and then study them,” Tye recalls.

Existing tools allow researchers to engineer cells so that when neurons turn on a gene called cfos, which helps cells respond to new information, they also turn on an artificially introduced gene for a fluorescent protein or another tagging molecule. The system is designed so that this labeling takes place only when the animals are exposed to a drug that activates the system, giving scientists control over the timing — but not very precise control.

“Those activity-dependent tools have been hugely impactful, but those tools really only work on the timescale of a couple of days,” Tye says. “If you think about the speed of the neural code, it’s operating more at the pace of milliseconds. What I wanted was a tool that we could use to take a snapshot of activity at a given moment.”

The researchers designed their tool to respond to calcium, because neurons experience an flux of calcium ions every time they fire an electrical impulse. However, the neurons are only labeled if this calcium flux occurs while the cell is also exposed to a beam of blue light delivered by the researchers.

This combination of light exposure and calcium activity triggers the activation of a transcription factor that turns on a target gene that the researchers have engineered into the cells’ genome. This gene could encode a fluorescent protein or anything else that could be used to label or manipulate neurons.

In this study, the researchers demonstrated the technique, which they call FLARE, by turning on a red fluorescent protein called mCherry in the motor cortex neurons of mice as they ran on a treadmill.

This approach could also be used to label cells with light-sensitive proteins that would allow the targeted neurons to be controlled by optogenetics, or new proteins called DREADDS that allow neurons to be controlled using small-molecule drugs. Importantly, because all of the tool components can be delivered using viral vectors, this tool could be used in any model organism.

Rapid labeling

Being able to label and then manipulate sets of neurons that are active during specific tasks opens up a wide range of studies that have been previously impossible, Tye says. For example, researchers could investigate what happens as the brain makes quick decisions, responds to stimuli associated with strong emotions, or determines which behaviors are appropriate for the current situation.

For this kind of study, it’s particularly important to have a tool that works quickly because the same neuron may be involved in different tasks at different times. The current version of the technique can label neurons within a few minutes.

“This is just a first-generation tool, but we’re already able to get very tight labeling,” Tye says. “Now we have something that we can work with. We’re within striking range of the temporal precision of neural activity.”

Researchers have developed a way to label neurons when they become active, essentially providing a snapshot of their activity at a moment in time. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to MIT.

“A technology that reliably and precisely labels and controls sets of neurons active during specific thoughts or behaviors would have an incredible impact on systems and circuit neuroscience. This paper is a major step towards that dream technology,” says Andrew Hires, an assistant professor of biological sciences and neurobiology at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the research. “The specificity of the in vitro data in the FLARE paper is remarkably clean, suggesting that there will be very little off-target effect.”

This kind of tool could also be useful for studying and treating diseases, Tye says. For example, scientists could use it to identify diseased neurons that cause Alzheimer’s disease, potentially allowing them to pinpoint the neurons that need to be treated while leaving nearby healthy neurons alone, she says.

“The thing I’m really excited about is the possibilities of what we can now do,” Tye says. “It’s opening up this whole area for people to be able to explore.”

ABOUT THIS NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH ARTICLE

Funding: The research was funded, in part, by the JPB Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health, and a National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award.

Source: Anne Trafton – MIT
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to MIT.
Original Research: Abstract for “A light- and calcium-gated transcription factor for imaging and manipulating activated neurons” by Wenjing Wang, Craig P Wildes, Tanyaporn Pattarabanjird, Mateo I Sanchez, Gordon F Glober, Gillian A Matthews, Kay M Tye & Alice Y Ting in Nature Biotechnology. Published online June 26 2017 doi:10.1038/nbt.3909

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Abstract

A light- and calcium-gated transcription factor for imaging and manipulating activated neurons

Activity remodels neurons, altering their molecular, structural, and electrical characteristics. To enable the selective characterization and manipulation of these neurons, we present FLARE, an engineered transcription factor that drives expression of fluorescent proteins, opsins, and other genetically encoded tools only in the subset of neurons that experienced activity during a user-defined time window. FLARE senses the coincidence of elevated cytosolic calcium and externally applied blue light, which together produce translocation of a membrane-anchored transcription factor to the nucleus to drive expression of any transgene. In cultured rat neurons, FLARE gives a light-to-dark signal ratio of 120 and a high- to low-calcium signal ratio of 10 after 10 min of stimulation. Opsin expression permitted functional manipulation of FLARE-marked neurons. In adult mice, FLARE also gave light- and motor-activity-dependent transcription in the cortex. Due to its modular design, minute-scale temporal resolution, and minimal dark-state leak, FLARE should be useful for the study of activity-dependent processes in neurons and other cells that signal with calcium.

“A light- and calcium-gated transcription factor for imaging and manipulating activated neurons” by Wenjing Wang, Craig P Wildes, Tanyaporn Pattarabanjird, Mateo I Sanchez, Gordon F Glober, Gillian A Matthews, Kay M Tye & Alice Y Ting in Nature Biotechnology. Published online June 26 2017 doi:10.1038/nbt.3909