Lie in, learn more

Sleep – for some just an annoying habit that uses up valuable library hours, but for others, it’s something else. The glorious delirium of the lie-in, the divine majesty of the extra hour, the sublime excellence of the ‘sleep’ button proves irresistible for so many of us. Oh, if only t’were not for the shame, the melancholy penance, the creeping slimy guilt that wracks our souls when we wake up at two in the afternoon. Curse you alarm clock! And damn you all to hell, nine o’clock lectures! Will we ever be allowed to sleep a little but more?

Surprisingly enough, we might – research is going on that might just give us no more reason to mourn our slovenly ways. The study in question concerns a type of learning known as imprinting in domestic chicks. Imprinting, to be brief, involves the wide-eyed chicks learning, shortly after hatching, the characteristics of a visual stimulus (normally their doting mother).

Nerve impulse activity after imprinting has been tracked to a brain region believed to be involved in the storage of learned information. Researchers have found that nerve cells in this region come to respond specifically to the stimulus with which the chicks have been imprinted (i.e. that image of mummy). So far, so so.

However, this responsiveness and memory for mum is sensitive to how much sleep the chicks get at certain times after learning. The relevance of this to our sleeping patterns? Basically, the study indicates that sleeping at the right times might actually improve our memory. For the chicks, memory was most improved over 15 hours by sleep during the first seven and a half hours. So shake up your routine – drag yourself to lectures, learn lots and then climb right back into your bed and go to sleep, perchance to remember.

Secret music

In 1642, Civil War raged and Sidneyite Oliver Cromwell’s army stormed round the country causing quite a fuss. Someone in Peterhouse was worried, not for the future of this fine nation, nor for their own safety, but for the security of the Peterhouse Partbooks – a series of manuscripts containing three sets of sixteenth and seventeenth century sacred music.

The cautious music fan hid the partbooks in a secret compartment behind the panelling in Peterhouse’s Perne Library and there they stayed, safe and sound,  for many a long year. But then, in 1926 a College servant by the name of George Witt discovered the precious partbooks. Cue celebration, congratulations and a peculiar absence of questions about what exactly Mr Witt was doing digging around the library panelling in the first place.

The books are still the subject of much examination by historians, musicians and the organ scholars of the Chapel Choir of Peterhouse. The Henrician set consists of books likely to have been produced in the early 1540s. Being a time of turmoil in the embryonic Anglican Church, contemporary sacred music was very much affected by changing ideas of doctrine and liturgy. This makes these books hugely significant: their existence, yet lack of use, is testimony to the transitory nature of worship and belief at the time. There are also two Caroline sets which, as the name suggests, date from the seventeenth century.

A huge amount of the Tudor and Stuart music sung by top choirs in cathedrals, churches and chapels across the country has been transcribed from the partbooks – you can even catch the Peterhouse Chapel Choir doing the odd rendition. Perhaps most excitingly – or most frustratingly – some of the books are still missing. It is hoped by many that, somewhere in the College, the missing books are lurking, waiting to be found to complete and perform the set for the first time since the mid-seventeenth century.

Bird brain

As humans we’re top of the food chain, the big kahunas, we’ve got “dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth”... or so we thought.

A gang of researchers in Cambridge have discovered that the intelligence that sets us apart from the animal kingdom, that took us to the moon, that discovered gravity, created modern medicine, the computer, the iPhone and Furbies, might not be so unique.

So apes and dolphins are smart – we knew that. But hyenas? Your dog? Birds? Turns out all these critters have got pretty impressive smarts; in fact you might just describe them as intelligent.

Some big-brained birds such as corvids (crows etc.) and parrots have been discovered to have cognitive abilities thought to be uniquely human, such as recalling specific past events, planning for the future, taking the visual perspective of other animals of the same species, co-operative problem solving and creating novel tools to solve problems.

This enthralling topic deals with questions about exactly what intelligence is and how we got so smart in the first place. For zoologists this case of convergent evolution via independent means is quite baffling – have crows and magpies been exposed to the same evolutionary pressures as the great apes or have they acquired similar skills differently? And most pressingly, are they genuinely clever or does it just look that way?

We can bid farewell to Planet of the Apes nightmares and say hello to ‘planet parrot’ – a day-glo world peopled by a ruling elite of highly intelligent macaques and their human slaves, who while away the centuries in the cracker-mines of central Africa to feed the great god Polly and her insatiable appetite for said crackers.

Psycho-poetic

Even today there’s still a good deal of belief in and discussion over the famous arts/ science divide. Most students and academics are likelyto associate with one perspective at the expense of the other, making use of different materials, questions, and vocabularies. Where the arts should stress culture, aesthetic pleasure and ingenuity, science must aim at problem solving and data accumulation. The arts also don’t accelerate at the speed that the sciences and modern technology do; but they can expand and change, says Dr Raphael Lyne. A Fellow in English at Murray Edwards and specialist in Renaissance literature, Dr Lyne’s research is now moving into the terrain of Cognitive Theory.

In 2006, the novelist A.S. Byatt dipped famously into this field, with her essay ‘Feeling thought: Donne and the embodied mind’. She developed an idea about the pleasure of reading Donne’s poetry, for which his readers feel a special awareness of the electrical and chemical impulses that connect neurones in their brains. The meaning of a poem was almost a mental activity. This original and audacious approach allows us to realise more fully that, as Dr Lyne explains, “literature is full of valid, insightful, and ambitious questions and knowledge about how we actually think.” To deal with some of these questions, Dr Lyne strayed beyond the confines of the Faculty of English, engaging with a course of lectures in Psychology and even “word-fragment-completion memory experiments”. The rewards of these efforts can be many and varied, extending to reconsiderations of basic literary terms like ‘metaphor’ or our emotional responses to theatre itself  through “neuroscientific accounts of empathy”.

With this dynamic, less traditional research in mind the arts and the sciences might learn from one another, providing new ways to address difficult moments in both experimental poems and experimental psychology.

Thinking of you

Get hold of some kids aged three to five years old. Show them a game of table football on a table that is too high for them to reach (cruel, yes but all in the name of progress). Then ask them how they think they might reach the table. There should probably be a box somewhere in the room (all will become clear).

Turns out that your three year olds will be stumped. They won’t know what to do, will never be able to fulfil their dreams of table-football glory and will probably cry quite a lot until you give them a lolly when they’ll shut up and forget it ever happened.

Five year olds, on the other hand, will know just what to do. They’ll realise that in order to reach the table, they’ll need to stand on that box we mentioned earlier. Table football becomes accessible – say hello to very strong wrists, a progression from this gateway game into hard core pinball and 20 years of regrets.

Four year olds, however, do something quite interesting (more interesting than table football you ask? Yes – and stop banging on about table football, it’s entirely besides the point – this is science goddamit!). They don’t find it too difficult to figure out what someone else might need to play the game (i.e. a box to stand on) but they find it harder to figure out what they themselves will need. Weird, no?

Here comes the science part – this result is due to the ‘growth error’ of over-applying newly-developed Level 2 perspective-taking skills (Flavell et al., 1981), which encourages the selection of non-functional items. The data are discussed in terms of perspective-taking abilities in children and of the neural correlates of episodic cognition, navigation, and theory of mind. Make sense? No worries – stick to Land Economy, you dolt.

Total recall

I never had an imaginary friend. People always tell you about theirs with the same slightly self-congratulary, expectant tone as the “I-had-the-craziest-dream-last-night” story. (As overheard in the queue for hall the other night: Girl 1: [tells dream]. Girl 2: Omg you’re so weird. Girl 1: I KNOW.) But when you’re such a wacky, fanciful person, how do you distinguish between dreams and waking, imaginary and real?

It seems pretty simple. My friend Lucy had a companion called Melon, who lived in the curtains, but also hangs out with me, Charlotte, who lives in a house, and doesn’t get confused between us too often; although her mother apparently did and sent him an invite to her 6th birthday party.

However, recent research in Cambridge into the distinction between internally-generated thoughts and externally-derived perceptions, carried out by having volunteers conjure up one half of word-pairs such as ‘bacon/ eggs’ or ‘Simon/ Garfunkel’, found one in five to be either under the delusion that they had imagined the word they had been actually shown, or that they had been shown the word which they had actually imagined.

The area of the brain at work while they tried to remember their thought process which lit up under the MRI neuro-scanner revealed itself to be the same as that which becomes distorted by diseases like schizophrenic hallucinations.

No single organic cause of such syndromes has yet been found, but these experiments point out that there must be a ‘reality-check system’ in place which stops the imagination from spilling from behind closed curtains into the lives which we consider to be real; in the absence of this biological as well as mental gate-keeper, the world would be a crazy and unending dream.

The ‘possible link’ the findings suggest between the healthy volunteers and sufferers of schizophrenia may unsettle our belief in the testimony of memory itself, memory of those people whose once-familiar faces gradually slip from you or the episode you can vividly remember even though you know you weren’t there, or of the times you spent with your imaginary friend whose existence is no longer so easily dismissable.

Insectislide

Two PhD students in the Department of Zoology have invented an exciting new coating technology which is deemed to be “insect-proof”.

During Michaelmas term, a team of student researchers took part in the Cambridge Enterprise ‘I-teams’ project, which analyses the potential of emergent technologies. Having conducted market research into the insect-proof surface, in which a diverse range of companies from across the world was contacted, the team reported an overwhelming interest in the invention. At a business presentation in December, which was attended by local business people (including Doug Richards, previously seen on Dragon’s Den), excitement and support for the idea was only heightened. The culmination of the research project suggests that there is high demand for the invention, and that, given financial and industrial support, the invention could be available to consumers in ensuing years.

Aptly coined “insectislide” by its market research team, the coating uses a complicated physical mechanism which causes insects to ‘slip’ when they attempt to walk on it. This works in much the same way that a person would slip from wet feet in the shower.

The idea also comes at an opportune time: with the effects of global warming, insect problems are feared to intensify, costing the global economy billions of dollars each year.

Several applications for the technology have been suggested. These range from uses in commercial kitchens and air-conditioning ducts to the formulation of an “insect-proof tape” which would open an even broader range of possibilities.

It is likely that yet further uses will emerge as the invention is developed, such as combining it with paints and varnishes. At present, this research is still underway in the Department of Zoology, whilst Cambridge Enterprise is working with the inventors to seek future partnerships and funding.

If you are interested in the technology and want to know more, then get in touch with Amy Mokady from Cambridge Enterprise (am678).