Ethicists to wrestle with zombies on Halloween

Among the questions the "Walking with the Dead" conference will tackle is why many people have embraced the zombie fad, such as these enthusiasts in Marietta Square on Saturday. 

By Carol Clark

Karen Rommelfanger’s husband got her hooked on “The Walking Dead.” She had resisted, but finally succumbed to the AMC TV series when her husband was watching an episode on zombie neurobiology set at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“He called out to me, ‘You’ve got to see this,’” says Rommelfanger, a neuroscientist and director of the Neuroethics Program at the Emory Center for Ethics.

The fictionalized researchers were gathered around a glorified brain scanner, discussing the “you” part of a brain, where thoughts reside, and whether the “you” part was gone.

“This is exactly the kinds of questions we talk about in neuroethics,” Rommelfanger says. “Is the brain the seat of personhood? What does ‘brain dead’ really mean?”

It wasn’t long before the Emory Center for Ethics coined the term “zombethics” and created a public forum to discuss them. “Walking with the Dead: An Ethics Symposium for the Living” is the brainchild of Rommelfanger and Cory Labrecque, a scholar of bioethics and religious thought at the Center for Ethics. All the reserved seats for the event on Wednesday, October 31, are filled, but people can still participate in the campus Zombie Walk, starting at the center at 11:30 am and proceeding up to Asbury Circle.

Zombies are becoming as emblematic of Atlanta as the Varsity drive-in. 

“The Walking Dead,” filmed in and around Atlanta, has resurrected zombies and turned them into visceral symbols of all sorts of modern-day fears.

“The show is full of ethics questions dressed up in zombie suits,” says Labrecque, who wrote his dissertation on radical life extension and teaches courses on personhood theory and religion and medicine.

A close friend recommended the series to him. “I was initially reluctant about wasting my time on a series about zombies, but was hooked after the first episode,” Labrecque says. “I watched the whole first season in one sitting.”

His fiancée was too afraid to watch the show. But after he described it to her, Labrecque says she wanted to know: “Would you shoot me if I was bitten by a zombie?”

(Apparently, he gave a satisfying response because the wedding went as planned on October 13.)

Since “The Walking Dead” is set in Atlanta, it seemed especially fitting to launch a zombethics conference here, Rommelfanger says.

Harvard psychiatrist Steve Schlozman will be among the panelists at the Emory conference. In the video below, he describes a zombie brain autopsy:

Zombies touch on fears beyond death, such as slowly disappearing to Alzheimer’s, or wasting away in a coma. “We are not equating real-life patients with zombies, we’re using zombies as an entry point to start a conversation about really difficult subjects,” Labrecque says.

The conference panelists include psychiatrists, philosophers, religious scholars, physicians, CDC officials, historians, ethicists and neuroscientists. They will grapple with questions like: When is a human being no longer a person? What is free will? What does end-of-life care look like for those for whom biological death is not the end? How should healthcare resources be allocated when pandemics hit? 

And, finally, what’s behind the public obsession with a gory series like “The Walking Dead?”

“Some scholars have suggested that it’s massive group therapy,” Rommelfanger says. “Zombies are a way to experience fears of death, degeneration and other scary things in ways that you can manage.”

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Why robots should care about their looks

Photos by Carol Clark

When chemistry becomes a piece of cake

It's National Chemistry Week, when chemists show just how clever they really are by cooking up things like periodic tables made of cupcakes. Non-chemists are also invited to join in the festivities at Emory, which will hold its annual Mole Day party this evening at 5:30 pm in the courtyard between the Emerson and Atwood buildings. Bring your own beaker.

Related:
Sparking a love of chemistry

Higher-math skills entwined with lower-order magnitude sense

While many animals understand the concept of less and more, only humans can learn formal math.

By Carol Clark

The ability to learn complex, symbolic math is a uniquely human trait, but it is intricately connected to a primitive sense of magnitude that is shared by many animals, finds a study to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Our results clearly show that uniquely human branches of mathematics interface with an evolutionarily primitive general magnitude system,” says lead author Stella Lourenco, a psychologist at Emory University. “We were able to show how variations in both advanced arithmetic and geometry skills specifically correlated with variations in our intuitive sense of magnitude.”

Babies as young as six months can roughly distinguish between less and more, whether it’s for a number of objects, the size of objects, or the length of time they see the objects. This intuitive, non-verbal sense of magnitude, which may be innate, has also been demonstrated in non-human animals. When given a choice between a group of five bananas or two bananas, for example, monkeys will tend to take the bigger bunch.

“It’s obviously of adaptive value for all animals to be able to discriminate between less and more,” Lourenco says. “The ability is widespread across the animal kingdom – fish, rodents and even insects show sensitivity to magnitude, such as the number of items in a set of objects.”

Only humans, however, can learn formal math, including symbolic notations of number, quantitative concepts and computational operations. While the general magnitude system has been linked primarily to the brain’s intraparietal sulcus (IPS), higher math requires the use of more widely distributed areas of the brain.

For the PNAS study, the researchers wanted to build on work by others indicating that a lower-order sense of number is not just a separate function, but plays a role in the mental capacity for more complex math.

The dot test shows variation in people's ability to intuit number and area.

The researchers recruited 65 undergraduate college students to participate in an experiment. To test their knack for estimating magnitude of numbers, participants were shown images of dots in two different colors, flashed for only 200 milliseconds on a computer screen. They then had to choose which color had the greater number of dots. Most people can quickly distinguish that a group of 10 dots is greater than a group of five, but some people have a finer-grained number sense that allows them to discriminate between 10 and nine dots.

The participants were also shown dots of varying sizes and colors to test their ability to gauge magnitude of area.

They then completed a battery of standardized math tests.

The results showed that the more precise the participants’ abilities were at estimating the magnitude of a number, the better they scored in advanced arithmetic. The same correlation was found between precision at gauging magnitude of area and the geometry portion of the standardized math test.

“By better understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying math abilities such as arithmetic and geometry, we hope to eventually inform how we come to learn symbolic math, and why some people are better at it than others,” says study co-author Justin Bonny, an Emory graduate student of psychology. “It may then be possible to develop early interventions for those who struggle with specific types of math.”

U.S. teens lag in math skills compared to other industrialized countries. China ranked number one in math in 2010, the first year that the country participated in the Program for International Student Assessment, while the United States ranked number 31.

“Falling behind in math is a huge problem,” Lourenco says, “given that we live in an increasingly technological society and a globally competitive world.”

Related:
How babies use numbers, space and time

Top image: iStockphoto.com.

'No offense to anyone,' except women scientists

Karen Rommelfanger, program director of the Neuroethics Program at the Emory Center for Ethics, wrote an opinion piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education. An excerpt:

"What does it mean when a highly successful neuroscientist … states that he is disappointed there aren’t more “super model types” at a major conference? Here’s what he wrote:

My impression of the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually high concentration of unattractive women. The super model types are completely absent. What is going on? Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain? No offense to anyone. 

"There are some who will say that it is no surprise, given the large number of attendees (30,000 plus), that an ugly statement appeared on an individual’s Facebook page. Some might say it’s inevitable, and perhaps inconsequential, given how large the membership is, that you will find a bad seed. But dismissing [his] comments would be a mistake and represents part of the problem for women."

Click here to read the full article.

Related:
Academia's female brain drain 

Election markets take stock of presidential race

If buying shares in an election market sounds like online gambling, that's because it is, says economist Monica Capra. (Emory photo/video.)

By Kimber Williams, Emory Report

Ever wonder how a presidential candidate's stock is trading?

As voters weigh the odds of their candidates prevailing in a close race, an Emory economist suggests that beyond pundits and pollsters, the curious may also consult a lesser-known crystal ball: election markets.

Through election markets, also called prediction markets, voters put their money where their mouths are by buying "shares" that reflect a candidate's chances of winning — essentially betting in an online futures market about the nation's election outcome.

Though rarely referenced by news programs or political analysts, election markets are actually a viable tool that can be used in conjunction with polls and statistical models to help predict election outcomes, says Monica Capra, an associate professor of economics at Emory with research interests in behavioral and experimental economics.

"Basically, the prediction markets are futures markets, exchanges in which people trade asset shares — candidates, in this case — based upon what they believe will happen in the future," says Capra, who teaches about the topic in her experimental economics classes. "The idea that presidential markets can predict election outcomes comes from the fact that markets are aggregators of individual beliefs," she adds. "It's a perfect application for elections — we know when the election will take place and who the candidates are. Trades are made on the belief of who will win."

Election trading typically takes place through online websites, such as Intrade.com, based in Ireland, Betfair.com in England, and the University of Iowa Electronic Markets, where spectators follow the fortunes of their candidates — or other real-world events — by tracking how they're "trading" in the eyes of the public, or bettors.

This week, for example, activity at Intrade.com showed the odds of President Barack Obama winning re-election improving throughout Tuesday night's debate, rising from 61.7 percent before the debate to 64.1 percent shortly afterward — a trend noted on the other sites, as well.

If it sounds like online gambling, that's because it is, acknowledges Capra, who doesn't play the market herself, nor require her students to play it. But as an economist, she does consult it: beneath the profit motive lies a fascinating glimpse into the mind of the American voter. And there can be value in listening to the betting public.

"The fact that there is money on the table gives people more inspiration to gather information and do some homework," Capra says. 

"Markets are information aggregators," she explains. "People arrive with different sets of information and beliefs that are revealed through their trading behavior and captured by the market. That idea is what makes predictive markets work. Basically, it's an economist's crystal ball."

The system works like this: Let's say you want to bet on the likelihood that Mitt Romney will win the 2012 presidential race. You buy "shares" — this week, they're running around $3.66 on Intrade. If he wins, all shares jump to $10 each and you make money. If he loses, all shares immediately plunge to $0 and you lose.

Predictive market sites also post a probability for each candidate winning. This week, for instance, Obama's shares were running about $6.32, which puts him at a 63.1 percent chance of winning. In contrast, Romney's shares were selling at $3.67 each, with a 36.9 percent chance of victory. That can change in an instant.

With websites updating trading around the clock, "it's a market that never closes," Capra observes. However, she offers an important caveat: predictive markets traders don't necessarily represent the average voter. While a political pollster may seek a representative sample of the population, predictive market traders in the Iowa Electronic Market, for instance, tend to be predominantly male, younger, wealthier and more educated than the average voter.

"But as long as you have people informed and motivated to trade in order to make money, that's all you need for the market to work well," she adds, suggesting that traders are more likely to make choices based on solid data rather than emotional impulse when money is at stake.

Capra says she consults predictive markets every day. "Right now, Gallup polls give the edge to Romney," she notes. "But InTrade says Obama will win — his predicted percentage rose both during and after this week's debate. The fact that he did much better in this debate was reflected by people immediately buying shares. The second debate also appeared to stop the upward movement of Romney shares."

So how accurate are online election markets? Though researchers are divided on the topic, Capra says she considers them a valid predictive tool: "As an economist, you have three main sources for predicting election outcomes: forecasting models, daily polls and prediction markets. If I had to choose one, I would choose prediction markets."