Oxford University Press's Blog, page 186

Why morning people seek more variety

Imagine two consumers, John and Mary. During a typical morning, John sluggishly drags himself out of bed after snoozing the alarm clock several times. He then brushes his teeth, bleary eyed, and slowly makes his way to the kitchen. His wife, Mary, has already poured him a cup of coffee. She’s bright-eyed, dressed, and ready for the day, having gotten up before the first alarm even went off. Mary is a morning-type. John isn’t. Being a morning-type certainly makes Mary more alert in the morning than John, but might it make her differ in other ways, too?

It does.

While most people prefer less variety in the morning than they do later in day, morning-types prefer variety all day. For instance, if Mary went to the grocery store in the morning, she might buy several different flavors of yogurt, be interested in the variety pack of chips, and decide to get a different type of pasta for dinner that night. John, on the other hand, might get several of the same flavors of yogurt, go for just one style of chips, and pick up the same type of pasta he had for dinner last week. However, if John went later in the day, he would be more likely to get the same variety as Mary would in the morning. While John and Mary’s overall shopping list might be the same, what they choose to fulfill that list might be very different at different times of the day.

This seems to occur because morning-types are physiologically different in the morning than other types of people are. Prior work has shown that the pattern of one’s circadian rhythms, which are daily fluctuations of things like body temperature and hormone secretion, determines whether a person is a morning-type or not. Circadian rhythms synchronize with the sun to help to make sure that certain bodily functions occur at the correct time of day, such as waking in the morning and sleeping in the evening. The waking process happens quicker, earlier, and with greater intensity for morning-types. As a result, morning-types have relatively higher body temperatures, skin conductance, and heart rates—or are otherwise more physiologically aroused—earlier in the morning than other people are.

It appears one’s natural level of physiological arousal or internal stimulation at any given time makes them more or less interested in variety.

It appears one’s natural level of physiological arousal or internal stimulation at any given time makes them more or less interested in variety. Variety makes things more exciting, more interesting, and more stimulating. But in the morning, when most people’s physiological arousal levels are at their lowest, the stimulation from the variety is too much to handle so people avoid it until later in the day when their physiological arousal levels have increased. However, morning-types, with their higher levels of physiological arousal in the morning, don’t feel over-stimulated by variety and so don’t exhibit the same decrease in preference in the morning.

For businesses, this means that not everyone has stable variety preferences throughout the day. While morning-types might prefer variety all day, the majority of the population is not made up of morning-types. Advertisements that emphasize the variety of selection or new products might do better in the afternoon than they would the morning. Radio stations might gain more listeners if a wider selection of music is played in the evening and more similar songs are played in the morning.

For consumers, people who are not morning-types should keep their dynamic preferences for variety in mind. If you do your grocery shopping in the morning, you might not feel like mixing up what you buy for dinners and lunches. However, future you would probably appreciate more variety than what seems appealing when you do your shopping in the morning. Similarly, for vacation planning, it might be more enjoyable to schedule more similar activities in the mornings and save the newer and more diverse activities for later in the day.

If variety is the spice of life, then morning-types have spicier mornings than everyone else.

Featured image: “Alarm clock” by Lukas Blazek. Freely available via Unsplash. 

 

 

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The trouble with how we talk about climate change

It’s a rare day when the news doesn’t cover something related to climate change, whether biodiversity loss, climate refugees, retreating glaciers, or an extreme weather event. Though it’s broadly accepted that climate change is caused by “us,” at some level, we often assume the solutions are covered and controlled by experts, especially natural scientists, engineers, national governments, and international organizations. In that sense, climate change is not in our hands, even as it lies at our feet. Another tendency of the daily climate change reminders is to suggest that we are all in this together. That this is a global challenge, and that we stand shoulder to shoulder in a global lifeboat, collectively imperilled by climate change.

These are oversimplifications.

And they boil down to five problematic “reductionisms.” In academese, we term these disciplinary, participatory, experiential, teleological, and species reductionisms.

The first—disciplinary reductionism—is to focus on the men (mostly) in white coats (largely). This makes sense; when we want our car fixed, we go to a mechanic, not an anthropologist. When we want to understand climate change, we go to the scientists engaged in measuring and understanding the atmosphere and the physical world around us. However, when climate change comes home, into our lives and livelihoods, we must think more broadly about its effects. On how we feel, what we do, and on what we know, and what we don’t. Natural science alone is simply not enough. Climate change is social and cultural, as well as natural. And, of course, also economic and political—making it a matter of justice.

Public participation needs to be much more than merely passive or nominal to ensure justice.

The second—participatory reductionism—is to be a passive recipient of expert knowledge. While experts do provide important information about the reality of climate change, it’s also important for non-experts to share the knowledge that they, too, might offer. We should be engaged in expressing our views, meaningfully engaging with debates, and encouraged to do so; indeed, to collectively produce knowledge. What do we think of geo-engineering? Of the trade-offs that are at the heart of addressing climate change? Such public participation needs to be much more than merely passive or nominal to ensure justice.

The third—experiential reductionism—refers to the way in which scientists and policymakers see the world through lenses colored by their own professional concerns, and influenced by their own interests. But many other issues take priority in people’s minds beyond climate change (e.g., struggling to make ends meet, finding enough clean water to sustain one’s family for the day). These are often dominant in shaping decisions and actions. Such concerns need to be taken seriously, and not just regarded as background “noise.” This is not how most people see and experience the world. To ignore these perspectives is to ignore true climate justice.

Fourth, how will the future look? Teleological reductionism refers to the tendency of climate change science to use models, based on current knowledge, to forecast future conditions, albeit with various degrees of confidence. Such unilinear thinking arguably make it hard to entertain alternative futures. Indeed, some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that such future thinking actually helps to realize such futures. The world could look different—to achieve justice, we must challenge ourselves to imagine so.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the species reductionism of the global—the tendency to view a global problem as a global experience. It isn’t, and it won’t be. Global inequalities, whether between or within countries, will have their climate change parallels. And it is not just a case of rich and poor; ethnic minorities, older adults, women, and children will experience, be exposed to and—critically—insulate themselves from climate change in different ways. Even you and your next door neighbor, for instance, may respond differently. In short, climate science needs to come home.

Together, these reductionisms make climate change a matter of justice. Who is hurt by climate change? And compared with who is to “blame”? Why are some groups affected more than others? And how do we respond in tailored ways that take people’s lived experiences, needs, and knowledge into account? By challenging these reductionisms—by widening our lens—we contextualize climate change and increase our chance of achieving meaningful, sustainable change.

Featured image: “via Unsplash. 

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How well do you know your fictional fathers?

The relationship between parent and child is intricate and has been widely explored in literature through the ages. Particularly complicated is the role of the father. They are often portrayed as abusive or absent while the mother takes on the traditional nurturing role, but that’s not to say literature doesn’t have its fair share of gentle and caring father figures.

This Father’s Day, test your knowledge with a quiz on the paternal characters in literature and the fathers who wrote them.

 

Featured image and quiz image credit by Lonely Planet. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Why urgent action is needed to avoid centuries of global warming

In the climate change debate, we often hear the argument that the climate has been changing since time immemorial. This is true, but if modern climate change differs from pre-historic climate cycles, the statement by itself is empty. We need to know how modern climate change compares with that of the past.

Geological observations and computer climate-models have revealed the basic controls and responses involved in past climate variability. This is how we know that climate has always varied. We also know that this happened because of small changes in the forcing of climate that resulted from long-term changes in Earth’s orbital position around the Sun, small changes in the actual solar output, and occasional injection of volcanic dust veils into the atmosphere. These small triggers could result in large climate responses because of feedback processes.

Earth’s climate system includes a plethora of processes that govern the carbon cycle. Their atmospheric expression is familiar to all: changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane. Climate fluctuations include changes in Earth’s reflectivity to incoming solar radiation, through changes in its cover by cloud, snow, ice, and different land surfaces (desert, tundra, forest, etc.). Together, these feedback processes underpinned all known climate variations in a well-understood and quantifiable manner.

And there we have it: in the natural state, greenhouse gas concentration changes were generally part of Earth’s intricate climate feedback processes. But we also know of a few past events that started with greenhouse gas changes. A key example is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) which occurred 56 million years ago and was the most dramatic natural event of the past 66 million years. At that time, burps of methane and carbon dioxide, likely triggered by volcanic processes, caused a shock-change in the carbon inventory of Earth’s climate system and a rapid global warming event. This well-studied event provides useful information about the likely consequences of humanity’s industrial-age emissions.

The PETM saw carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere increase to 500 parts per million (ppm) or more. By comparison, humanity’s carbon injection into the climate system has so far changed atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by 130 to 140 ppm. But the rate of this recent change far exceeds that of the PETM. In recent years, human-caused carbon emissions were 10 times more rapid than during the PETM. It is this rapidity that concerns climate researchers.

Humanity’s super-rapid carbon dioxide emissions are acidifying the oceans because they do not allow enough time for neutralizing reactions with sea-floor sediments, which requires thousands of years. In other words, the rapidly increasing ocean acidification marks a disequilibrium that is growing out of control. Something very similar happened during the PETM, albeit at a less dramatic rate. Despite that slower growth of the PETM disequilibrium, it took about 200,000 years for the ocean and climate system to recover. That is a strong indication of the sort of timescale Mother Nature will need to clean up our mess.

In addition, humanity’s unnaturally rapid greenhouse gas increase is driving such a fast warming response that most biological species cannot evolve or migrate fast enough to keep up. This drives many species to extinction rapidly. In the oceans this push is worsened by acidification. Global extinction rates are now at least 1000 times faster than past natural extinction rates, which include Earth’s five great mass extinctions. In consequence, biologists often speak of the current period as the sixth mass extinction.

Since the industrial revolution, global average surface temperature has gone up by 1.1 to 1.2 °C. But almost no region experiences the global average. Polar regions are warming two to four times more rapidly (and in some places even faster), and tropical regions somewhat slower, than the average. The rapid polar warming causes ice and snow reduction, leading to more warming, sea-level rise, and permafrost melting that will unlock masses of methane held within it.

All of the above changes concern hard observations, not disputable theory. Evidence for the expected consequences can be seen directly as well, in paleoclimate data.

Finally, there is the hidden menace of delayed ocean warming. Oceans absorb massive amounts of heat; so far, they have taken up some 95% of the climate system’s industrial-age heat accumulation. Because it takes gargantuan amounts of heat, and thus time, to warm up the oceans, their temperature lags behind the warming of land (land responds very rapidly to climate forcing). As a result, ocean temperature will take centuries to catch up with the amount of climate forcing that has been applied until today. Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today, considerable global warming would continue over centuries to come. And given that ocean warming causes ice-sheet melting, we should also expect considerable sea-level rise to continue for a very long time.

So how can we humans help Mother Nature clean up the mess of our wild carbon party? Emissions reductions are not enough. We will need to draw greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere (and thus the wider climate and ocean system). Nature alone cannot do this on societally relevant timescales—it would take hundreds of thousands of years. We will need to be inventive and help. And we will need to do so sooner rather than later.

Feature image credit: “Stockholm, Sweden” by Marcus Löfvenberg. Public domain via Unsplash.

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The impeachment illusion

The best barometer of political anger is how often the word “impeachment” appears in news stories, editorials, and Congressional rhetoric. These days, the references have grown exponentially, despite the House Speaker’s efforts to keep her members focused on legislation.

The constitutional definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is vague enough to have encouraged members of Congress to raise it repeatedly against judges, cabinet officers, and presidents of the United States. At times, just the threat of impeachment has been enough to encourage recalcitrant agency heads to release documents being held back from Congress or resign from office.

The Constitution’s requirement of nothing more than a majority vote for the House to impeach has made it an enticing illusion for angry members, who may forget that impeachment is an indictment, not a conviction. Senators must then sit as a trial to weigh the evidence and cast a two-thirds vote to remove anyone from office. Do the political math: a partisan vote in the House will not produce a bipartisan vote in the Senate.

Consequently, history records few instances of impeachments that successfully removed federal officials. Early in the nineteenth century, Jeffersonians had ample cause to be angry with the Federalists for packing the federal courts with judges likely to oppose them. But the Senate’s failure to convict Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1804 set a precedent against impeaching judges for their political views.

Image credit: “The Senate as a Court of Impeachment for the Trial of President Andrew Johnson” by Theodore R. Davis in Harper’s Weekly, April 11, 1868. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Radical Republicans were justifiably furious with President Andrew Johnson for undermining their policies for postwar Reconstruction and protection of the freedmen. They also had good reason to believe they could succeed, since they held a two-thirds majority in the Senate. But fear of weakening the presidency led seven Republican senators to defect and Johnson won acquittal by a single vote. By contrast, by the time the House began formally considering the impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974, a bipartisan consensus had been reached that the president had obstructed justice. The Senate began planning a trial—going so far as to install television cameras in the chamber, a dozen years before C-SPAN—but when Nixon determined that he lacked the votes to survive, he chose to resign.

During the 1980s, large bipartisan majorities in the House impeached three federal judges on charges of perjury, corruption, and tax fraud. The Senate removed all three by lopsided majorities. But when the 1998 impeachment vote against President Bill Clinton closely followed party lines in the House, there was not the slightest chance the Senate would remove him. Senators dutifully went through a trial, and their votes fell predictably short of conviction.

What is clear from the record is that politically-motivated impeachments fail. Only in cases where malfeasance has become overwhelmingly obvious to members of both parties in the House will there be any chance of conviction in the Senate, raising the question: is a losing effort worth the trouble?

Had political impeachments succeeded, our government might be considerably different. Federal judges might face recall once the party that nominated them lost power. Presidents might have come to resemble prime ministers, subject to removal by a vote of no confidence, depending on their party’s fate in mid-term elections. Instead, a more judicial system of impeachment has evolved that enables the removal of federal officials for widely agreed upon criminal offenses rather than political disfavor.

Featured image credit: “The Senate’s side of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC” by Scrumshus. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

 

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Two cruces: “slave” and “slur”

Slave

The word slave would have attracted much less attention if it did not sound like Slav. Modern people should get rid of ancient sensibilities. Slave and Slav are probably not related, but, even if they were, why should the events of a thousand or so years ago be regarded as a slur on the modern descendants of the Slavs? National pride is a dangerous tool in etymology.

Essays and notes on the origin of the word slave appeared in many languages. My bibliography of English etymology was published in 2010, and by that time, I had read only a fraction of the relevant literature, but I was aware of the two especially important articles on the subject, and, although today I know much more about the debate than I knew ten years ago, below I’ll refer only to those two publications, because between them they summarize the earlier sources in a satisfactory way. However, their conclusions differ.

One of the opening statements in the 1962 article by Henry and Reneé Kahane sounds so: “There is no argument about the identity of the morpheme: sklav ‘slave’ continues slav ‘Slav’.” Yet this is exactly what the entire argument is about. One can hardly adduce a similar example of the word for “slave” coinciding with a so-called ethnonym. The ever-repeated case of Welsh in English (see my post “A Linguistic League of Nations” for May 15, 2019) is different: Old Engl. welisc meant “foreign,” not “enslaved,” and the Germanic invaders found themselves in permanent contact with the Celts. Some old sources also cite Serb, allegedly from serve. This is nonsense.

Why should Slavs have been singled out for supplying the source for the word meaning “slave”? This is the only question that should be answered. Instead of that, the Kahanes offered an exhaustive survey of the spread of the word in Eurasia and its use in Byzantium, Romance- and Germanic-speaking countries, and by the Arabs.  It is instructive to quote The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology: “Medieval Latin sclavus… identical with the ethnic name Sclavus SLAV, the Slavonic races having been reduced to a servile state by conquest.” All the Slavonic races? By what conquest?  The above formulation was borrowed from the original edition of the OED and reflected the scholarly consensus of the time.

Slavery in Ancient Egypt. Image credit: “Illustrerad verldshistoria utgifven av E. Wallis. band I” by Ernst Wallis et al. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Elsewhere, we read that in the early stages of their recorded history, the Slavs were prone to subjugation by foreign military powers. They allegedly had a very loose social and political structure. Their military organization was poorly developed. These facts, together, with the primitive Slavs’ predilection for cattle grazing and agriculture, are said to explain why nomadic invaders in the form of a seasoned body of well-armed cavalry gained control of the Slavic tribes. Such is the opinion of a Czech historian, whom no one would try to accuse of an anti-Slavic bias. But we again notice the absence of concrete facts in the argument. The entire passage seems to have been written to justify the equation Slav= slave, rather than to investigate the situation in detail.

Among the independent English lexicographers (that is, such as dared to express non-traditional opinions), only Henry Cecil Wyld wrote about slave: “Of unknown origin.” The discussion I found on the Internet is uninspiring. All the sources rehash the OED; sometimes Ernest Klein is referred to (the word slave allegedly goes back to the time of Otto the Great’s putting down the Slavic rebellion). Few people realize that Klein’s English etymological dictionary is the last source they should consult. Non-specialists exchange their opinions about the origin of the word slave (as though in such cases opinions, rather than facts, matter) and discuss the previously unnoticed problem: Is it OK to use the word slave if it sounds like an insult to the Slavs? Fortunately, most discussants agreed that nowadays no one associates Slavs with slaves and that no renaming is needed. By the way, only English has lost k in the group skl– (compare French esclave, German Sklave, and so forth). Slave came to English from French, and in English, the group scl– was regularly simplified. The same change occurred in slander, muscle(in which the spelling and the adjective muscularremind us of the oldest form), and a few others.

Words, not unlike germs, travel with people. “Le Vieux Musicien” by Édouard Manet. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1970, Georg Korth brought out an article on the subject that interests us. It appeared in a German philological journal (Glotta), and in German. The story (as had always been known) began with the Greek word Sklabēnoi; this is what the southern Slavs were called in Byzantium. In the eighth century, the word reached Italy. Later, it became widely known. Neither the Greeks not the descendants of the Roman Empire needed a new word for “slave; servitor; prisoner,” but the ethnonym Slav did coincide with one of the already existent words for “an unfree person”; hence the illusion that we are dealing with the same word—a typical example of folk etymology.

As early as 1882, slave was derived from the root of the Greek verb eskleío “I include,” with the idea that those “included” were kept in their new habitat against their will. Even more convincing is the derivation of our word from Greek skūlon or skúlon“spoils of war” (y instead of u would be a better transliteration). Korth’s article convinced Elmar Seebold, the editor of Kluge’s German etymological dictionary, who used its conclusion in the entry Sklave. Unfortunately, he said nothing about the history of the question, which is a pity, because in etymological dictionaries, dogmatic statements defeat their purpose. Of course, Seebold referred to Korth (among other sources), but who, except for a few professionals, follows the references in small print? It seems that the latest version of the etymology of slave is indeed preferable to the traditional one. The Internet shows that a handful of discussants from Russia noticed it (they have read Seebold, not Korth) and approved, but only because the hateful association slave = Slav has been debunked. We, however, will leave politics to politicians.

The etymology of the ethnonym Slav is also highly controversial, but it needn’t bother us here.

When a slur is not a slur. “Українська” by Микола Лисенко. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.Slur

This post looks like my last shot at sl- words. As pointed out a week ago, some words with initial sl– may have an “unetymological,” movable s (s-mobile), so that sometimes the ancient root has to be looked for among the nouns and verbs beginning with l. Quite a few sl– words came to English from Old French, Low German, and Middle Dutch. Dictionaries often cite the related forms but have nothing to say about their origin. Obviously, a list of cognates does not amount to an etymology, even though it specifies the word’s dispersion field. Finally, we have a residue of “words of unknown origin.”

Slur is troublesome because it combines several distinct senses. Yet they can be reduced to two: 1) liquid mud and 2) gliding. Similar formations occur in Low German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages (the range is wide, from “slut” to “slurping”), so that, while dealing with English, one should consider the possibility of borrowing or so-called wandering words. Apparently, it was easy to form the names for “slime,” “slush,” “sludge,” “sleaze,” “slobber,” “saliva,” ”slum,” “slim” (originally, slim meant “bad”), and “slut.” In a way, they told their own story, and the whole looked like a game. Linguists have invented several terms for such sound-symbolic, expressive, emphatic, and phonesthetic words. The term primitive creation reminds us that such coinages are universal in the languages of the world, but the mechanism of producing each individual item remains partly unclear. Slurp and its German congener schlürfen are probably not only “expressive” but also sound-imitative (onomatopoeic). I sincerely hope that my prevarication will not be looked upon as a slur on my escutcheon.

 

Slurp, slurp. “Drinking Milk Bottle” by tung256. Pixabay License via Pixabay.

Featured image: “Longships Are Built in the Land of the Slavs” by Nicholas Roerich, Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The Trump administration’s Africa policy

Does President Donald Trump have a policy on Africa, and if so what? The answer to this question is both interesting and revealing.

President Trump does not seem to pay much attention to Africa. Apart from his well-publicised comments to a group of senators in January 2018 dismissing the whole of Africa as “shithole countries,” he has not said much about the continent. He has not visited it and has shown no inclination to do so, though both his wife and his daughter have done so. In two years, he has met very few African leaders. When he does, his focus is clear: at a breakfast meeting with some, organised by Nikki Haley in the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2017, he reportedly told them, “I have so many friends going to your countries trying to get rich.  I congratulate you – they’re spending a lot of money.”

And yet, Africa is the one region of the world on which the Trump administration has published a coherent strategy. On 13 December 2018, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, National Security Adviser John Bolton set out the Administration’s approach. Bolton identified three core US interests in Africa: advancing US trade and commercial ties with African countries, for the benefit of both; countering radical Islamic terrorism and violent conflict; and making efficient and effective use of development assistance to promote the interests of the American people.

But the major theme of the strategy is not Africa at all: it is the superpower rivalry for influence with China and Russia, and (a favourite Bolton theme) hostility to the United Nations. Bolton accuses America’s rivals of pursuing “predatory” policies: China of using debt to “hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands,” and Russia of “selling arms and energy in exchange for votes at the UN.” By contrast, countries receiving US assistance must invest in health and education, encourage accountable and transparent governance, support fiscal transparency and promote the rule of law, though he underlines (without apparent irony) that “countries that repeatedly vote against the United States in international forums, or take actions counter to US interests, should not receive generous American foreign aid.”

The strategy reflects President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy. The clearest expression of this policy is in Trump’s personal statement on Standing with Saudi Arabia, after the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The world is a dangerous place, the president says, so we need to stick by those who fight our enemies, buy our arms, and invest in our country, even if they may have killed a few innocent people along the way. Values have vanished, and in the case of Africa, Africans’ own view of their interests is not an element in the strategy at all.

Even so, underneath this policy umbrella, there has been more continuity of US policy than meets the eye.

For the best part of two years, with no new assistant secretary appointed in the State Department and no steer from the White House, US policy on Africa continued much as before. Congress, which rejected Trump’s proposal for drastic cuts in US aid, ensured that the major US programmes put in place by previous Presidents, such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Millennium Challenge Account agreements for economic reform, and the African Growth and Opportunity Act to encourage trade, continued uninterrupted. And United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), set up in 2007, continues to cooperate closely with African governments in the fight against Islamic terrorism, especially in the Sahel.

In addition, rather hidden by the rhetoric of the Bolton statement, a new Prosper Africa initiative has doubled the amount available under the US International Development Finance Agency to $60 billion – almost exactly the same size as President Xi Jinping’s last commitment to Africa under the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

America, of course, remains a superpower, and a country with which most African countries want to maintain a healthy working relationship. They have no problem taking money, trade and support.

Featured Image: “American Flag” by Jon Sailer. CCO Public Domain via Unsplash .

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When narcolepsy makes you more creative

At night, the surrealist poet Saint-Pol-Roux used to hang a sign on his bedroom’s door that read: “Do not disturb: poet at work.” Indeed, may sleep increase our creativity? The link between creativity and sleep has been a topic of intense speculation, mainly based on anecdotal reports of artistic and scientific discoveries people have made while dreaming. Dmitri Mendeleev supposedly came up with the arrangement that became the periodic table while asleep. Yet, scientific proof of such a relationship remains scarce. To investigate the long-term effect of sleep on creativity, clinicians and scientists from Sorbonne University, Paris, France, and Bologna University, Italy, called upon experts of sleep and dreams: patients with narcolepsy.

Narcolepsy is a rare sleep disorder characterised by uncontrolled sleep attacks. These naps are special, as they often start immediately with a specific sleep stage named rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, whereas healthy subjects need to sleep for roughly one hour before entering REM sleep. Therefore, patients with narcolepsy have a swift access to REM sleep, a stage associated with robust dreaming activity. They also present many symptoms showing that the boundary between wakefulness and REM sleep is blurry. For example, most narcolepsy patients are lucid dreamers, meaning that they are conscious of dreaming while dreaming, to the point of sometimes having control over their dreams. It has also been shown that naps containing REM sleep are followed by a period of increased mental flexibility, in turn favouring problem solving. Given their life-long privileged access to REM sleep and dreams, may patients with narcolepsy have developed over time higher creative abilities than average?

To answer this question, the authors compared the creative abilities of patients with narcolepsy with healthy subjects. Defining and measuring creativity is not an easy task. In this research field, creativity is commonly defined as the ability to produce work that is both original and adapted to constraints. In order to obtain a picture of creativity as detailed and complete as possible, the authors asked participants to complete various tasks.

First, 185 patients with narcolepsy and 126 healthy subjects completed two questionnaires on creativity. The first questionnaire explores your creative profile and score, through 57 questions, and concludes whether one is innovative, imaginative, or a researcher.  Then, in the second questionnaire subjects report creative achievements (from being a complete beginner to being a national star) in various domains of arts and sciences, including writing, theatre/film, humour, inventions, or culinary arts. The results of these two questionnaires provide a subjective measure of creativity. Next, researchers tested the creative performances of 30 patients with narcolepsy and 30 healthy subjects during a face-to-face two-hour long test of creativity, named the Evaluation of Creative Potential. The divergent-exploratory thinking, a thought process used to generate creative ideas, was tested by finding the greatest number of solutions to a problem (e.g., “Invent the maximum of shapes using two triangles”). The convergent-integrative thinking, the ability to give the correct answer to questions that do not require significant creativity, was tested by combing several elements into a coherent pattern (e.g., drawings a scene based on seven shapes, or writing a story that includes an animal, an old man, the suburb and three cars).

Globally, subjects with narcolepsy obtained higher creative scores than the healthy subjects, for both the subjective and the objective measures, and in all forms of creative profiles. Most symptoms of narcolepsy (sleepiness, lucid dreaming, hallucinations, but not treatments) were also associated with higher scores of creativity.

This increased creativity may be a result of more frequent opportunities for patients with narcolepsy to incubate ideas during daytime naps (with REM sleep). Moreover, the high dream recall frequency observed in narcolepsy may also provide them with a high pool of inspiring new ideas.

For the first time, an increased creativity is demonstrated in subjects with narcolepsy, providing a silver lining to this disastrous disease. These young adults are often considered lazy, but it appears their proficient lucid dreaming and creative abilities may help researchers better understand the role of dreaming in everyone’s life.

Featured image credit: “Grayscale photo of sleeping woman lying on bed” by Kinga Cichewicz. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Why posh politicians pretend to speak Latin

When Jacob Rees-Mogg wished to criticise the judges of the European Union, he said, “Let me indulge in the floccinaucinihilipilification of EU judges.” The meaning of the jocular term (the action of judging something to be worthless) is not as important as its source—the Eton Latin Grammar. Latin and Latinate English flow readily from the tongue and quill of Mr Rees-Mogg, so when he joined Twitter in 2017, his inaugural tweet was “Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis” (times change, and we change with them). Boris Johnson, another Etonian, frequently reaches for his Virgil to provide a withering put-down of opponents: “Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis tempus eget!” (the time does not require such assistance nor such allies).

Why should prominent Brexiteers who are proudly English so often quote from an ancient European language that originated in Italy? After all, the ancient language of England was Anglo-Saxon, not Latin. Why, indeed, has Anglo-Saxon never been taught in English schools, whilst many schools taught Latin for centuries, and some still do?

The answer to the puzzle lies in the model of cultural descent we call the Renaissance. In this model, the culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe is not a continuation of the culture of preceding centuries, but rather a deliberate repudiation of that earlier period, a deliberate “rebirth” embracing  the far older culture of ancient Greek and Rome. The relatively small proportion of people able to attend school and university in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was therefore taught in Latin. Because this was the practice all over Europe, Latin became the common language of educated Europeans. This remained the case even in the eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson, visiting Paris in 1775, insisted on speaking only in Latin, reasoning that his imperfect French would put him at a social disadvantage in conversing with native French speakers. His biographer James Boswell loyally declared that Johnson “spoke Latin with wonderful fluency and elegance,” but his English pronunciation baffled many of his interlocutors, so Johnson admitted that he “could not have much conversation.”

In the twenty-first century, Latin is fading. It survives in the technical language of law, medicine, and the Roman Catholic church—the Vatican has an ATM in which the welcome screen declares that the machine can be used for withdrawing cash (deductio ex pecunia), and asks the visitor to insert the card to access services (inserito scidulam quaeso ut faciundam cognoscas rationem)—and it is still widely taught in countries such as Germany and Italy; but in England it has become the preserve of the elite. So when politicians  speak in Latin, they are proclaiming themselves members of that elite, and hence—it is fair to infer—destined to rule the lower orders.

The culture of the Renaissance extends back to classical antiquity, but also outwards to the world beyond Europe, and inwards to the attitudes, ideas, and spirituality of the population at large.

But is this true to the spirit of the Renaissance? Was the Renaissance only the preserve of the elite? Early books on the subject certainly give that impression and similarly paint it as a quintessentially European movement, one in which  the rest of the world only mattered inasmuch as it was being “discovered” and subjugated by Europeans. Today’s historians, though, liberate the Renaissance from traditional constraints. Rather than portraying it as an ever-expanding cultural amoeba that devours the benighted Middle Ages as it reaches distant parts of Europe, historians now understand it as both global and interactive—a series of material and cultural exchanges rather than cultural imperialism. Europe’s trade with  South America, for example, included the very non-elite matter of livestock export, and the import of potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco. The presence of Portuguese traders in Japan led to a new style of art—Nanban—which Japanese traders in turn exported to colonial Mexico. The culture of the Renaissance extends back to classical antiquity, but also outwards to the world beyond Europe, and inwards to the attitudes, ideas, and spirituality of the population at large. Today’s historians study the art and architecture of the Renaissance, as they have always done, but they now also attend to vernacular literature, the performing arts, war, science, technology, and craft on a scale that would have surprised their predecessors.

This view of a capacious Renaissance —a complex civilization in motion— is very different from previous historians’ idealised imagined past. In point of fact, the humanists of the Renaissance had their own imagined past, depicting themselves as reaching back across the dark Middle Ages to recapture the glories of ancient Greece and Rome. The idea of a middle age of cultural darkness is of course untenable, as anyone who has visited a medieval cathedral will know, but the concept has survived in our own time: ‘medieval’ is still in popular usage as a synonym for outdated, or even barbaric. Similarly, we are now far less inclined to idealise the ancient Greeks and Romans, as we realise that slavery was embedded in those societies and that a Roman’s idea of entertainment was watching people being killed by wild animals or in combat with each other.

Just as we now take a cooler view of classical antiquity and a warmer view of the Middle Ages, so we are less inclined to idealise the Renaissance, preferring instead to investigate its cultural complexity.

So to return to the politicians. Does their use of Latin and Latinate speech indicate their status as the standard-bearers of the glories of Britain’s past? Or is it the relic of a long-dispelled illusion?

Featured image: “Appius Claudius Caecus in senate” by Cesare Maccari. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

 

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Quiz: How well do you know Albert Camus?

The Nobel Prize winner, Albert Camus (1913-1960) is one of the best known French philosophers of the twentieth century, and also a widely-read novelist, whose works are frequently referenced in contemporary culture and politics. An active figure in the French underground movement, a fearless journalist, and an influential thinker in the post-war French intellectual life, Camus’s experience of growing up in troubled and conflicted times during the World War I and Nazi occupation of France permeate his philosophical and literary works.

How much do you know about the life and work of Albert Camus? Test your knowledge with our quiz below.

Featured Image: Photo by William West on Unsplash.

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