Bees, Brains, Violins, and an Abortion
The first ever batch of links
Welcome to the first real installment of my newsletter. My plan is to send something when I have 3-5 links that I consider worth sharing. Let me know if you think they are interesting, or (most importantly) if you find some contradicting evidence.
Dr Maya Shankar on Huberman. She had dreamed become a violinist (and was a student at Juilliard), but at the age of 15 she had a career ending injury. He identity had been centered around her musicianship, and she needed to reinvent herself. She became a cognitive scientist. This is a delightful conversation, and it makes you really wish to be invited to the same dinner parties as these two. The episodes main theme is identity and goals, and it relates to the previous episode about growth mindset.
Are bees sentient? Some time ago I read an article in the Guardian that suggested this was the case (and they meant individual bees, not a hive). This is one of those ideas that are either crazy or change everything. The article was pretty scant on the details that interested me the most (apparently they decided that the average Guardian reader is not that interested in the philosophy of mind), so I decided to read the book they were talking about: What a Bee Knows by Stephen Buchmann. The book is a true treasure of interesting bee facts – Buchmann definitely knows his bees. For example, did you know that bees can use the polarized-light pattern on the sky to navigate? Or that one of the secrets of Stradivarius was that he was using beeswax from stingless South American bees, which contained resins from local trees? Or that the queen mates with a very high number of males (she needs to collect plenty of sperm!), so in a beehive there are multiple patrilines of workers, and not all bees in a hive are equally related? Well, I didn't, and I was very happy to be educated in all things bee. Now, does the book deliver on its main thesis, about the sentiency of bees? Quite frustratingly, the science of insect cognition is still in its nascency, so we can't know for sure, but the data seems to be pointing in that direction. Bees are wicked smart, capable of using tools, like playing with balls, and can do basic arithmetic. What is more, ants may be able to pass the mirror test. Think about it when you are about to swat at a bee.
This is probably old news for people who know me personally, but it's too important not to share. My wife wrote an article about having a legal abortion in Poland. This was an incredibly painful experience for our family. Not only we lost a pregnancy that had been very much planned and eagerly awaited, but the Polish state actively made the situation worse. Poland only allows to terminate a pregnancy when it's dangerous for the woman's health, but in practice even in this situation there are multiple hurdles. It's in Polish, but it reads OK through Google Translate.
I've always had an ambivalent attitude towards Freud. He was an incredibly important pioneer, and I found his books enjoyable to read, but I felt they were more interesting from the point of history of science than science proper. Psychoanalysis, for example, isn't considered evidence based in the 21st century, which makes me feel bad for Freud. However, it turns his legacy still has some relevance. This paper by Carhart-Harris (famous for his psychedelic research and being a guest in Andrew Huberman's podcast) and Friston (famous for free energy principle and active inference) is looking for neurobiological substrates of constructs from Freud's metapsychology (most notably the ego). And to be fair it seems quite convincing. So, is that a point for team Freud?