Scientific Highlights of TEDxOxford 2014

Admittedly, it didn’t feel like a day on which to be inspired. Precipitation, surely, but not inspiration, as cold and rainy weather battered the spires and the New Theatre on George Street, venue of 2014’s TEDxOxford. In the TED spirit of ‘ideas worth spreading,’ TEDxOxford was founded in 2011 and this year, on 26 January, TEDxOxford was brought to life once more by president Leon Musolff, and his team of fellow students from the University of Oxford.

TED, which stands for technology, entertainment, and design, began in 1984 as a conference to share ideas, a platform for these three realms to combine. It continues today, still based in California. But it is TEDx, an independently-organised, offshoot programme designed to allow local communities to inspire each other, that has really gotten people talking about TED. TEDx talks have been the driving force in TED’s mission to provide inspiration all over the world.

And where better else to provide inspiration than a beautiful city of over 40,000 students from two universities, making up around a quarter of the city’s population?

Enter TEDxOxford. Held at New Theatre, TEDxOxford 2014 held 12 speakers including Laura Bates, Paul Collier, Susan Greenfield, and John Tate, each speaking for a maximum of 18 minutes. I was impressed by the science representation, with six of the 12 speakers touching on science to varying degrees. For me, there were three several sciencey highlights of the show, and I hope in this blog to explore these highlights and spread these ideas worth spreading.

How is technology changing the human mind?

Susan Greenfield kickstarted TEDxOxford with a thought-provoking anecdote. Whilst she dissected a human brain for the first time, she wondered what would happen if she had not been wearing gloves. She wondered whether she might have trapped a piece of brain under her fingernail, and whether it was possible for that piece of brain to contain love, or a memory, or even a habit of biting fingernails – under a fingernail.

Baroness Greenfield then discussed how technology is changing our minds, especially in childhood when neurones are more ‘plastic’ or malleable and able to change its connections. So far, so good. Yet, somehow, Susan Greenfield took a sharp turn in her talk, taking this initial premise that the brain is malleable to somewhat more damning terms, and heralding doom.

She describes ‘mind change’ – a term she coins from ‘climate change.’ She says that she believes technology is leading to shorter attention spans, due to the way in which the internet provides fast access to information and entertainment. Similarly, she also finds a link between video games and decreased empathy or increased aggression, claims that I find rather worrying to come from a scientist. Worrying, for two main reasons: that a mainstream scientist could heavily insinuate a correlation as a causal link, and that, if she were true, that this could potentially lead, as she says, to more reckless or impulsive behaviour like binge eating and gambling.

She says that all of this is backed up by many studies, one of which she showed the audience: a graph showing increased prescription for ADHD drugs. She puts this down to technology decreasing attention spans. There are so many things wrong (or at the very least, misleading) with this. Firstly, every A-Level Biology student will know that a correlation does not mean causation. If I said to you that increased sun cream sales is correlated with a sharp rise in shark attack incidents, it does not mean that the sun cream is causing people to be attacked by sharks. The link is almost probably that sun cream is sold more often when people are going to the beach, where people might be attacked by sharks whilst swimming. Another flaw in Greenfield’s reasoning is that an increase in prescription does not necessarily mean the population of patients with ADHD is rising. An increase in prescription may be down to an increase in studies that claim efficacy. An increase in prescription may be due to the drug becoming more refined to produce less side effects, or simply that it is being taught more commonly at medical school. It may not even be due to the drug; maybe, we are diagnosing more cases of ADHD due to increased education.

Or maybe, just maybe, looking at funny videos of cats on YouTube is pushing the world’s children off a cliff-edge made of ADHD! Of course, she could be right, and I am not saying her claims are outright wrong. At the core of science is scepticism but openness to ideas so that we can investigate the avenues where we simply do not know what is going on. One fact that we do know is that it is far too early to tell whether this massive change in the way we interact with the world will change our minds.

Another worry that Susan Greenfield has is that social media may be decreasing empathy, despite that social media allows people to keep in greater connection, a concept that is extremely relevant to people of my age group. It is also increasingly relevant due to the increased diagnosis of autistic-like conditions, which can often be associated with decreased empathy or, at the very least, difficulties in nonverbal communication. There are many aspects to communication, aside from words: intonation, sarcasm, laughter, eye contact, facial expressions, posture, clothing, gestures, smells, even a simple touch – a handshake, a high-five, a fist-bump, a hug. All of these are removed on Facebook and other social media, even more so on Twitter, where character lengths are limited to 140 characters.

Personally, I don’t believe the sound of the human laughter can be replaced by ‘lol’ or your family’s smile exchanged with 🙂 or a sweet embrace with *hugs* and no way would I settle for just ‘xxx’.

Whether you like the new ‘stickers’ on Facebook or the ever-annoying hashtags on Twitter, you can’t deny that human interactions have changed since before the digital age. Of course, it is a question of whether it is beneficial or detrimental to our brains and minds, and that question was posed incredibly well on the TEDxOxford stage by the amazing speaker and neuroscience researcher that is Susan Greenfield. Her final thought was that her ideas are controversial but the evidence is out there and that we ought to make our informed decision by reading the literature, an admirable trait in a scientist to engage the public with the scientific process despite having strong views.

Is it wrong to harm a virtual human?

Several talks later and enter the futurist Anders Sanderg, whose background is from computational neuroscience, but is now a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute, working on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology. Sandberg’s idea worth sharing is a vision of the future. He believes, that one day we will be able to create a complete computer model of the brain, whether of an animal or a human being, or indeed, lower organisms.

He asks the question of whether there should be any virtual considerations for the virtual organism. For example, it is immoral by most if not all philosophical views to mistreat or kill a human being, almost probably because it causes suffering to the human being. (I would like to point out at this point that I am by no means a philosopher!) But what if that human being is virtual? Is it wrong to kill the virtual human being? If yes, is it because the action of killing is immoral, or the suffering caused is immoral? What is ‘suffering’ anyway? Can a virtual mind suffer? If suffering is only possible due to an experience of a conscious mind and if a virtual human can suffer, is a virtual human being conscious? What is consciousness? These are the questions that Sandberg seek to answer.

Sandberg provides the example of the Tamagotchi. If you don’t feed your virtual pet, it will ‘cry’ and then eventually die. Did it suffer? Most users would say probably not, especially as the programming is just a series of flowcharts that determine that the virtual pet has not yet been fed. This is not Sandberg’s vision of the future. His hypothetical software to model brains would be an accurate representation of what goes on in the human brain, all the neural connections and pathways, and not just a flowchart. But aren’t we really just a flowchart ran on cells rather than on a silicon chip?

Say, for example, we were set on fire. The fire damages tissues, and sensory nerve fibres signal this damage to our brain. The neural pathways that process the information would activate, and  we would then have a perception that we are on fire. We would feel the flames. On a computer model, if the virtual human were to be set on fire, the computer would show that the neural pathways, which are really just connections modelled on software, to be active. But does the virtual human experience the fire? Does it feel the flames?

If it does, then we would need to create a series of ethical and moral guidelines on the usage of virtual organisms. If it does not, then is it still wrong to harm, even to the point of torturing, the virtual organism anyway? And what if the virtual human says that he or she can feel the flames when in (virtual) reality, he or she cannot?

What makes these questions so difficult to answer is that we have not yet truly defined what consciousness is, nor what it means to experience or perceive. Similarly, pain is a subjective experience, even in the real world, and we have no complete idea of what pain is as it is such a subjective concept. It is these questions that make philosophy, to me as a medical student, so interesting. Anders Sandberg represents to me an incredible opportunity for the arts and the sciences to combine, and his idea is definitely worth spreading.

How can our other senses shape our taste?

Why do we drink tea whilst it’s hot? Why do we even drink it in a cup in a first place, rather than, for example, in a wine glass? Why do we garnish food? Why do food establishments like Nando’s play music in the background?

Could it be that the answer to these questions is that it can change the way we taste? Surely, not? And yet research at Charles Spence’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory based at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford shows suggests that it is not just the smell of food that affects taste, but also temperature, sight, and hearing.

Unfortunately, Spence was unable to give the talk, and instead the talk was given by one of his colleagues, Alejandro Salgado Montejo, a graduate student who studies the integration of information across the various different sensory modalities. This research provides insight not just into gastronomy, but also in understanding the way we process sensory information to give the experiences that we call hearing, vision, touch, taste, and smell.

Montejo discussed the idea that most adults (95-98%) can assign objects of different shapes the names ‘kiki’ and ‘bouba’ – a phenomenon that occurs in any person in the world, no matter what race, ethnicity, or mother tongue. It is interesting therefore to note that autistic people agree with the standard result less than 60% of the time. This phenomenon shows a link between vision and sound perception.

The spiky one is labelled ‘kiki’ and the rounded one is labelled ‘bouba’ by around 95-98% of a given population, no matter what ethnicity or language.

Montejo then describes a personal anecdote in which he links taste to sound. To study this, he wanted to blindfold participants and ask them to taste a fruit, and label it either ‘kiki’ or ‘bouba.’ So that there wouldn’t be any bias from known fruits in England, he went back to his native Columbia to obtain some fruits, and on his way back to England, he was stopped by border control staff, who were wondering why they had brought fruits with him. In order to prove to them that they were doing a psychology experiment, Montejo and his colleagues performed the experiment on the border control staff, who gave the same responses that Columbians did. ‘Kiki’ was mainly given to sour fruits, and ‘bouba’ to sweet fruits. The result is amazing and it may imply that a tabula rasa does not apply in this kind of crossmodal or multisensory perception, that we may have a ‘built-in’ associations between different senses.

Further research reveals that sweetness is accentuated by high-pitched sounds, whereas bitterness is heightened by low-pitched sounds. During his talk, Montejo also asked us what the taste is of the colour pink. To me, I would associate it with a Juicy Fruit bubblegum sort of taste, whereas another audience member commented that it would taste sweet. I find it interesting that there are also variations in the associations that people make.

Despite the bizarre nature of this kind of research, Charles Spence and Alejandro Montejo’s work is currently being applied to diners at The Fat Duck, as the Crossmodal Research Laboratory works with Heston Blumenthal in order to more effectively stimulate the senses of the consumer. In 2008, Charles Spence won the Nutrition Ig-Nobel Prize, for his work that the sound of a crispy crisp being played to someone who is eating crisps makes them think that the crisps taste better. The Ig-Nobel Prize is a mock Nobel Prize that rewards scientific achievements which ‘cannot, or should not, be reproduced’ and achievements that ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think.’

Besides the idea that sensory associations may connect us (in the human race) more closely, I feel that Spence’s research truly embodies the TEDx spirit of ideas worth spreading.

Other notable science talks given included Peter Millican, who discussed how computing has revolutionised more than just computer science and has also provided simple answers to mundane questions such as whether Oxbridge is truly elitist (his computing software highly suggest it isn’t!), and whether areas in America with large white communities distinct from areas with large black communities are racist. Another speaker was St. Catz visiting student Jacob Cole from MIT, the creator of a website project that allows people to form connections between different topics.

An audience favourite was founder of Action for Happiness and economist Richard Layard, who is best known for ‘happiness economics,’ and studying what it is that truly makes people happy, as well as the importance of mental health  therapies in a country’s economic state. He is the author of ‘Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,’ a book that discusses the link between income and happiness. Conclusions from his research say that neither income nor academia at a young age is a prime determinant of happiness in life. A sobering and sad fact for Oxford students, he says. Instead, what makes people happy are things like stable families, socially integrated neighbourhoods, and low rates of unemployment, and emotional development and support from an early age.

TEDxOxford 2014 was an incredible experience, and it was much more than just a series of talks or lectures. It was about being in an environment where everyone was encouraged to discuss and talk about what they had heard, and motivated to do something to make the world a better place. The talks did their job – they inspired, stimulated, and galvanised debate – and more. I feel that I came out of the talks feeling more informed about the world in which we live; many students can relate to how Oxford can be so insular sometimes.

I hope that the lessons that my fellow TEDxOxford audience members and I have learnt will travel much further than the Oxford community. The stories of hope, love, and perseverance are exceptional, and I would encourage anyone to attend a TED or TEDx talk to gain such a thought-provoking experience. All it takes is just a seed planted into someone to grow into something that may just change the world. Kudos is clearly deserved to be given, not just to the speakers, but also to the team of incredible people who made TEDxOxford 2014 a reality! I look forward to TEDxOxford 2015.