Speed, matricides, Anora and hearing problems

8 March 2025

Imagine a car travelling at a legal 60 mph on a straight country road and an identical car, also travelling at 60 mph, coming towards it and they collide head-on.  The effect on each car will be like driving into a brick wall at 120 mph, their speed relative to the other car. 

Now imagine you’re standing beside the road where they collide.  If we ignore the small variation caused by the angle between your line of sight and each car’s direction of travel, you will see both cars travelling at 60 mph relative to you.

Now imagine you’re in a helicopter travelling at exactly 40 mph at right-angles to the road and you pass over the place where they crash at exactly the moment they do.  As you approach the road, the speed of each car relative to you will change even though their speed and yours remain constant relative to the road.

Now imagine your helicopter is approaching the point of impact at an angle of less than 90^o, or approaching in a regular curve round a central point 1 mile from the point of impact.  Now calculate the speed at which each car is moving relative to you.

At this point, I have to tell you I failed my A Level maths quite impressively so I don’t even know how to start calculating the relative speeds of the cars and the helicopter but there are two important things to remember:  (a) the speed at which anything is travelling can only be measured against an external point, which might help explain Einstein’s idea that nothing can travel faster the light and (b) if you’re driving, it’s not just the speed shown on your speedometer that decides how bad a crash will be.

Another horrifying number that really needs some sort of comparison to give it a context is that, of 2,000 women killed by men from 2009 to 2021, 170 of them were killed by their sons or grandsons, 70% of whom had mental health problems.  The research was carried out by Prof Rachel Condry and Dr Caroline Miles, from Oxford and Manchester universities, in collaboration with the Femicide Census, and is to be published shortly so the full report may give a perspective by comparing the figures with the number of men killed by their sons or grandsons in the same period, or equivalent numbers from other countries or different time periods.

It was glad to hear that the film ‘Anora‘ won several Oscars, because I’d seen and enjoyed it – none of the ‘villains’ was actually that villainous, Anora herself was believably naïve and some of the scenes had me laughing out loud.  What I didn’t notice was that the F-word is apparently used 479 times, an average of almost 30 times a minute over the 140 minutes of the film, or once every two seconds, which is a new record.  Just imagine it:  “What do you do for a living?” / “I count the number of F-words in movies.” / “Are they good films?” / “I don’t know, I’m counting the effing effs.”

Mind you, with my hearing as bad as it is, I struggle to understand the ‘normal’ dialogue so I probably missed the swearing.

There was an interesting article this week by Rachael Groessler, a writer who lives in Brisbane who first noticed hearing problems when she found she could no longer eavesdrop on people at neighbouring tables (which was also one of my favourite hobbies).  Groessler suffers from a specific and rare form of deafness but I have had similar problems for many years as I’ve gotten older:  in crowded rooms and bars where a lot of different conversations are going on, I find it very difficult to separate the voice of the person I’m talking to from the background noise.

Curiously, the consonants go first while the vowels remain, giving rise to some surreal mishearings.  When I turned the radio on in the car last week, I landed in the middle of a programme about Roman gods which didn’t make much sense until I realised they were talking about Venus, not a Penis.

When I realised I was going deaf, I did of course get (free) NHS hearing aids.  These improved some things but not the full spectrum and the top three keys on the piano still made only a clicking sound and produced no audible note.  An added complication of hearing loss is that, if your ears are different, you misjudge the direction a sound is coming from, which is particularly annoying if you’re trying to find the bird with that unusual call.

Then of course, one’s nearest and dearest sees an advertisement and suggests you look at the miraculous hearing aids offered by people who’ve graduated from used-car sales training and are tremendously keen to get their commission.  So I went to a private shop and they convinced me their hearing aids would do everything the NHS ones did but much better, and all for only £3,000 because they have a special discount on this week (you know the spiel).

What they failed to mention is that their hearing aids are just one step ahead of the NHS ones and the NHS will catch up quite quickly. I gave them a year or so to improve my life and, after failing to notice any real difference, I had a long fight with Boots to get 50% of my money back.  To be fair, you can pay for prettier ones that are less obvious from outside if you care about people seeing them, but I don’t.

Talking of what one hears, I read that Timothée Chalamet spent a long time working with a professional harmonica coach so, when he played Bob Dylan in the film ‘A Complete Unknown’, he could make it sound exactly like someone has accidentally trodden on the cat.

Are animals intelligent?

10 June 2023

I’ve mused before about how we all use words like ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ and ‘intelligence’, without ever really understanding any of them, and my curiosity was piqued once again by a fascinating article published last week which considered whether non-human living species have minds that process information in ways that we can’t even imagine.  

This week has seen the welcome but overdue departures of Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries as MPs.  We still don’t know how conscious they have become of their own (un)intelligence but, mercifully, we no longer need worry about it.

I’m indebted to Adam Kirsch, author of the article and a new book ‘The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us’, from which I have plundered much of the rest of this muttering.

Giraffes’ preference for carrots over courgettes has been used to test their perceptions by showing them two transparent containers, one holding lots more carrots than courgettes and the other holding lots more courgettes than carrots.  They let the giraffe see them take one vegetable from each container, using different hands, without letting the giraffe see what they’d picked up, and then offer them to the giraffe with closed hands.  The four giraffes tested all repeatedly chose the hand that had taken something from the container that held more carrots than courgettes.

Put in human terms, they’d calculated the odds of getting a carrot from each container and bet on the hand that had picked something from the container with more carrots because it was more likely to contain a carrot.

Experiments on zebra finches, whose brains weigh half a gram, have shown that, while they’re sleeping, their throat muscles sometimes move in the same way that they do when the bird is awake and singing.  So perhaps they’re dreaming about singing.

It’s easy to assume that only humans can imagine the future but an African grey parrot called Griffin seemed to be able to do this.  He was taught that if he refused a meal of cereal, he would be rewarded some unpredictable time later with a meal of food, such as cashew nuts, that he preferred.  Griffin managed to hold out for 90% of the time using displacement activities such as talking or preening or simply throwing the bowl of cereal across the room.

Another experiment showed how important smell is in the understanding of the world around them to many animals.  It’s well-known that dogs have a sense of smell so much more sensitive than ours that they can smell visitors coming before they’re even in sight but this involved a herd of elephants, within which each member has their specific place.  Taking a sample of urine from an animal at the back of the herd and spreading it in front of the herd led to apparent bewilderment and curiosity in the leaders about why an individual’s distinctive odour was in the ‘wrong’ place.

It’s impossible for humans to experience all these extra dimensions of the world we all live in.  For example, we can imagine what it’s like to be a bat, flying on webbed wings, finding our way around by echo-location, snatching insects from mid-air and sleeping upside down, but we’re actually imagining just what it would be like for us to be a bat, not what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.

Some of the most fascinating creatures are cephalopods, octopus and squid (and about 800 other close relations), which are incomprehensibly different from us apes.  The most recent common ancestor of humans and cephalopods is a worm-like creature thought to have lived some 500-600m years ago (to put this into context, the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived about 6m years ago).  Since then, our neurologies and physical systems have developed very differently, perhaps because cephalopods live underwater in a three-dimensional world while land animals live in a world that is, for all practical purposes, two-dimensional.

The octopus has about the same number of neurons as a dog but has a comparatively small central brain which connects with many more neurons in each of its eight arms so each of its arms can move and sense its surroundings separately.  The world they experience and the ways they interact with it are therefore quite alien to what we can imagine.

But they exhibit what we’d consider curiosity in humans and are prone to removing researchers’ tape measures.  They have also been caught covering up things they apparently ‘know’ they’re not supposed to do.

In one aquarium, an octopus lived in a tank next to another tank full of fish.  The staff noticed that fish seemed to be disappearing but couldn’t work out why so they rigged up a camera and discovered that, when the aquarium was closed and unstaffed, they were being eaten by the octopus.  This involved the octopus climbing to the top of its tank, lifting the lids of both tanks, hopping into the fish tank and taking a fish before returning to its own tank, replacing both lids on the way.  (This of course sounds pretty cool but perhaps isn’t that different from moving from one rock pool to another.)

But do these animals have a mind?  Perhaps the brain is the hardware that receives input, consciousness filters out the irrelevant stuff and passes what’s left to the mind, which is the software that makes adds information to its existing store of past information and makes decisions?  So, if this classification is even partly valid, perhaps other creatures do have minds. 

At this point, the word ‘intelligence’ springs to mind and I start to wonder how valid it is to judge intelligence from a purely human perspective, and the limited ability we have to perceive the world.  We can only see things in what we arrogantly call the ‘visible’ spectrum and our hearing and sense of smell are similarly limited;  we can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to live underwater.  Even within our own species, our senses ‘report’ different information:  some people (more men than women) are colour-blind and an estimated 10% of humans can’t smell the scent of freesias.

As for ants …

Musings on consciousness

3 July 2022

I anthropomorphised some plants a couple of weeks ago and I’ve written before about how trees communicate.

Their actions are certainly not random or accidental and clearly show a response to external influences of which they are obviously aware.  But are they conscious?

We use words like ‘conscious’, ‘unconscious’ and ‘subconscious’ and we understand what they mean in the context without ever stopping to wonder what they do actually mean.  As long as we’re just talking to other people, this doesn’t matter, but life would get more difficult if somebody asked us to explain any of them as concepts.

People have debated what ‘consciousness’ is for millenia.  The ancient Greeks invented philosophy as a way of keeping people who were too clever for their own good off the streets, but there’s still no consensus about what consciousness is.

It appears to be linked with our minds but this doesn’t help much because nobody really knows what or where the mind is either.

The brain is also linked with consciousness because it sends signals to activate muscles to move a finger away from a flame it’s become ‘conscious’ of, but nobody has ever found this link or which bit of the grey slush inside our skulls we call our ‘brain’ is links physical action with consciousness.  There are well-documented cases of individual consciousness existing independently of the body, even after some medical criteria define the person as dead.   (There are a couple of side-tracks here such as extra-sensory perception, near-death experiences and after-death experiences but let’s not over-complicate things.)

Consciousness involves an awareness of things happening inside and outside the body, but what is it that communicates this awareness with the mind or the brain?  (Think of a Venn diagram of three circles, one for consciousness, one for mind and one for brain.  How would the circles overlap each other?)

Our understanding of consciousness is unavoidably anthropocentric and based on what we’ve learnt over the last umpty-ump thousand years.  Then we use this understanding of human consciousness to judge whether non-human species like chimpanzees, corvids, sharks and Venus fly-traps are conscious.

We also ignore the fact that such judgements are tunnel-visioned, limited in time and space. 

For example, we define things like consciousness using timescales based on the speed we live at but we understand but find it impossible to grasp the speeds at which electrons or tectonic plates move.  We even have difficulty grasping numbers:  we can picture 10 things, but can we judge whether there are 100 marbles in that bowl, or 90, or 110, without counting them?  Or thousands or millions?  There’s a lot to be said for cultures that count 1, 2, 3 … 8, 9, 10, lots.

Perhaps our understanding is complicated by our use of physical dimensions like length, breadth and depth.  These concepts are useful for measuring the size of small and simple things with regular shapes, like whether a bookcase will fit in that alcove, but lead us to believe that if something can’t be measured, it can’t exist.

Then somebody suggested we could add ‘time’ as a dimension if we want to describe an object’s location by saying this object with those measurements was there from 8 pm till midnight.  Even though science has moved somewhat beyond this, we normal people still tend to think of time as a fixed ‘line’ along which we move, from the past to now to the future. 

This gets complicated when we imagine time steadily ticking its way on independently of any one person of thing.  Think how time flies when we’re with close friends and how it drags when we’re waiting for a train;  or how alcohol and other drugs affect our perceptions of time.

Time is also variable in terms of measurement.  We know that time passes more slowly as one gets higher;  and the rate at which time passes changes as an object’s speed increases towards the speed of light.  It also depends whether we’re experiencing it or observing it …

Inevitably, everything we think of as conscious tends to move at about the same speed as we do, and tends to be roughly the same size, but only because we don’t think of ascribing consciousness to things that move at vastly different speeds, or are very small or large. And, for humans to be believe they’re conscious, they have to be things we think of as living.

Why shouldn’t ‘living’ trees and forests or ‘not-living’ oceans and the earth itself be conscious?

Why shouldn’t entangled sub-atomic particles or entire galaxies be conscious?

Our current knowledge of sciences is at so primitive a level, how could we know or even be aware of it?

Perhaps we need to consider space and time as one amorphous multiverse that encompasses everything and not worry about where we are in it;  we could then include consciousness into this great unity, along with concepts like ‘mind’ and ‘emotions’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’.

In practice, of course, this is a WTF question and we just have to accept that we’re trapped inside bubbles of information collected by our senses and filtered through our consciousness;  then we live our lives based on information we get from our consciousness, and we don’t worry about how anthropocentric and incomplete the information is when deciding what to have for lunch.

When I occasionally stop and ponder this, I wonder how each scallop has up to 200 eyes with no obvious links to its brain but can still identify plankton that can be trapped and digested.  Or why so many other species can see ultra-violet colours for which we don’t even have names.  Or how octopus’s various brains communicate with each other to coordinate movement.  Or how Venus fly-traps, which don’t have any brains at all, know when to snap shut on a fly.  Or how creatures use earth’s magnetic field to navigate when migrating – nobody even knows where the magnetic receptors are in migratory birds, fish or land animals.

By now, those of you who aren’t cursed with my apparently incurable curiosity will be wondering what I’m talking about and why it matters.  Actually of course, those of you who aren’t cursed with an incurable curiosity probably won’t have read this far …

Shakespeare put his finger on it in the first draft of Hamlet when he wrote “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, but don’t let it bother you, old son, just keep on keeping on”.  (He removed the last bit when was doing the second draft because he thought the first bit seemed more mysterious on its own.)