What is a secret, neurobiologically? And why are people more likely to tell their secrets to total strangers? by David Eagleman.

From Incognito, by David Eagleman





What is a secret, neurobiologically?  Imagine constructing an artificial neural network of millions of interconnected neurons---what would a secret look like here?  Could a toaster, with its interconnected parts, harbor a secret?  We have useful scientific frameworks for understanding Parkinson's disease, color perception, and temperature sensation---but none for understanding what it means for the brain to have and to hold a secret.


Within the team-of-rivals framework, a secret is easily understood:  it is the result of struggle between competing parties in the brain.  One part of the brain wants to reveal something, and another part does not want to.  When there are competing votes in the brain---one for telling, and one for withholding---that defines a secret.  If no party cares to tell, that's merely a boring fact; if both parties want to tell, that's just a good story.  Without the framework of rivalry, we would have no way to understand a secret.*  The reason a secret is experienced consciously is because it results from a rivalry.  It is not business as usual, and therefore the CEO is called upon to deal with it.


The main reason not to reveal a secret is aversion to the long-term consequences.  A friend might think ill of you, or a lover might be hurt, or a community might ostracize you.  This concern about the outcome is evidenced by the fact that people are more likely to tell their secrets to total strangers; with someone you don't know, the neural conflict can be dissipated with none of the costs.  This is why strangers can be so forthcoming on airplanes, telling all the details of their marital troubles, and why confessional booths have remained a staple in one of the world's largest religions.  It may similarly explain the appeal of prayer, especially in those religions that have very personal gods, deities who lend their ears with undivided attention and infinite love. 


....


As you have doubtless noticed, venting a secret is usually done for its own sake, not as an invitation for advice.  If the listener spots an obvious solution to some problem revealed by the secret and makes the mistake of suggesting it, this will frustrate the teller---all she really wanted was to tell.  The act of telling a secret can itself be the solution.  An open question is why the receiver of the secrets has to be himan---or human-like, in the case of deities.  Telling a wall, a lizard, or a goat your secrets is much less satisfying.

* Some people are constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret, and this balance may tell us something about the battles going on inside them and which way they tip.  Good spies and secret agents are those people whose battle always tips toward long-term decision making rather than the thrill of telling.

Why drinking coffee helps reduce the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. By Jef Akst

The Benefits of Coffee

Researchers finally nail down why drinking coffee helps reduce the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

By Jef Akst | January 17, 2012

Wikimedia Commons, Takkk

 

Researchers have known for some time that regular coffee drinkers have a lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes: people who drink four or more cups of coffee each day have a 50 percent lower risk of the disease, with each additional cup associated with a further 7 percent drop in risk. But the cause of this bizarre connection has been a source of speculation.

Now, researchers in China have found evidence that coffee influences the misfolding of the human islet amyloid polypeptide (hIAPP), a protein implicated in causing Type 2 diabetes. According to their paper published in the Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry, certain compounds in coffee significantly inhibited the formation of toxic hIAPP amyloids, which likely explains the lowered risk of Type 2 diabetes in coffee lovers.

“These findings suggest that the beneficial effects of coffee consumption on [Type 2 diabetes] may be partly due to the ability of the major coffee components and metabolites to inhibit the toxic aggregation of hIAPP,” the authors wrote. “A beneficial effect may thus be expected for a regular coffee drinker.”

Is Science more moral than Religion?

Atheism’s Poster Boy Sam Harris on the Science of Morality

• By Olivia Koski
• November 29, 2010
• Wired November 2010

Photograph: Peter Yang

If there is a hell, Sam Harris—author of The End of Faith and atheism’s poster boy—is going there. But while the faithful may argue that godless scientists are doomed to soul-destroying nihilism, Harris’ new book, The Moral Landscape, attempts to redeem the science-based worldview, arguing that it offers a clearer path to morality. Wired called Harris—from out of lightning-bolt range—to discuss his argument.

What do you mean by “moral landscape”?
It’s a framework in which we can talk about the most important questions in scientific terms—questions that relate to human and animal well-being. For instance, we in the developed world have a different notion about how to live a long and healthy life. That’s because we have a science of medicine, which gives us an understanding of the mechanics of disease processes and how to address them.

How can you scientifically determine whether something is good or bad?
The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that. Obviously it would be a good thing to stop nuclear proliferation and genocide and climate change, and to better educate our children. These are things that would be good for everybody and bad for nobody. People seem to believe that there’s no ground for truth-claims about human values—that these are not the sort of facts that science can ever deal with. But there is a place for science to argue, for instance, that the Taliban is really wrong. Its beliefs lead to unnecessary human suffering. Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.

Religion makes those sort of truth-claims all the time.
But religion is precisely the wrong software for analyzing human well-being. It’s the one area of our lives where people win points for saying, “I’m not going to change my mind no matter what happens.”

But hasn’t religion made some people behave more morally?
The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good. Is it better to alleviate famine in Africa because you think Jesus Christ is watching and deciding whether to reward you with an eternity of happiness after death? Or is it better to do that because you actually care about the suffering of your fellow human beings?

Why is science a better alternative?
Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.

Science has suffered when it’s seen as the enemy of religion. But in your book you criticize scientists who have tried to build bridges.
A religious scientist is someone who has decided he can behave rigorously in his scientific profession but has no obligation to connect that way of thinking to his larger worldview. If he did, he would notice contradictions between his science and his religion. Besides, the point is not to get religious people to accept evolution—it’s to get everyone thinking honestly about the nature of the world.

A lot of people must hate what you’re saying. Do you worry about your personal safety? 
I take security seriously, and I’ve gotten my share of weird emails. I don’t tell people where I live.

What are the tools needed for a complete electronics workbench?

DIY Essentials

Does your do-it-yourself workbench have everything you need?

By James Turner  /  August 2011

All Photos: Randi Silberman Klett

Click on image for enlargement.

 

What are the tools every hands-on projecteer needs? To answer that question, we went right to DIYers themselves, specifically the exhibitors at last fall's World Maker Faire NY event.

One tool everyone agreed on is a Multimeter. It's surprising how much information you can glean from a simple resistance reading or by checking out the voltage drop across a series of LEDs. Basic analog meters start at around US $15, but consider getting one with a digital display and an audible continuity tester. When you're up to your arms inside a chassis probing a pair of contacts, you don't want to keep looking away just to see if you have continuity between two points. You'll also want a variety of ends for the probes, such as alligator clips and PC board lead hooks.

Next you'll want a Soldering Iron. Some of the Maker Faire geeks didn't look for much more than the simple ones that cost less than $10, but others wanted the flexibility that a digitally controlled soldering station brings ($80; more for a name brand such as Weller). With advanced projects, you may need to vary the iron temperature depending on your components.

Sometimes, though, you just need a lot of heat, especially when soldering a large component or a thick wire. A conventional iron can't heat a large mass of metal quickly enough. Casey Haskell of Sparkfun Electronics likes to have a propane-powered pen iron for its portability, while others prefer a high-watt soldering gun.

Some of the Makers have moved beyond "through-hole" PC boards and now like to work with surface-mount devices. The "right" way to reflow solder for SMDs is using a purpose-made oven, but many a brave adventurer has gotten by with a toaster oven and some TLC. You can also use a hot-air gun or a hot-air pencil, which lets you do SMD one component at a time. Justin Huynh, who hacks remote-controlled cars with Arduinos, the popular DIY microcontrollers, uses this technique as well as a variable-temperature Weller. "I've always used the Wellers," he says. "My friends who are engineers use them. They just work really well."

Along with an iron, you'll want to have a way to desolder, for those inevitable missteps. Some people like to use desoldering braid; others like Desoldering Irons with suction bulbs. I've used both, and I find the irons do a better job with less heating of the components.

Most of us start out using batteries or cannibalizing power adapters, but a good bench Power Supply lets you control voltages precisely as well as measure and limit the amperage flowing through the circuit. You can get a reasonable single-voltage supply for $120 or so, such as the 18-volt, 3-ampere supply made by Extech Instruments. More advanced ones will offer multiple controllable voltages, useful when projects have more than one input voltage.

A bench supply goes well with a large Protoboard, one that supports multiple supply voltages and has lots of real estate to lay out chips. If you do a quick proof of concept on a protoboard first, you can save yourself a lot of grief when you try to set out a permanent version (or send it out to a printed-circuit-board fab).

Haskell notes that no good workbench should be without a few nonelectrical items as well, such as Calipers. "I use them constantly," he says. They're especially critical when you start to lay out circuits in close quarters, such as inside an enclosure. Another go-to item is a good hot Glue Gun. This is not to be confused with a craft glue gun, which uses low-temperature glue sticks. An industrial gun melts at a much higher temperature, and the material is nearly as hard as plastic when it cools. Haskell has another nontraditional tool in his bag of tricks. "A bag of LEDs is really helpful," he says. "It's a good way to see if something is getting power."

So far, we've been talking about items that you can get for around $100. Of the Makers I spoke to who could afford one, the next tool they went for was an Oscilloscope. A good one, such as a 40-megahertz Tektronix, can cost $950, and the prices rise quickly from there. Huynh says that his group had to pool their money to afford even a used one, a common strategy for hobbyists.

There's one other big-ticket item most makers yearn for. "We'd love to have a Logic Analyzer for working with chips," says Huynh, "but it's kind of pricey." A good one (better than the portable unit shown here) is invaluable, especially if you need to look at several seconds of history.

Haskell says that if money were no option, his next purchase would be either a desktop computer numerical control machine or a 3-D Printer. As it turns out, desktop CNC machines are coming down in price quickly; there are designs available for under $500 at this point. And 3-D printers are selling for less as well, some piggybacking on top of the new CNC platforms.

The nice thing about getting a workbench together is that you can do it gradually. That's why it's often worth spending a bit more to get the item you really want. There's nothing worse than having to buy something better six months down the road. Shop with care, consider used equipment, and before you know it, you'll be ready to tackle just about any project you can imagine.

About the Author

James Turner is a contributing editor for O’Reilly Media, a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, and a regular contributor to IEEE Spectrum. Next month he’ll describe how to build a high-quality, low-cost oscilloscope using an iPad.

To Probe Further

For the back story about IEEE Spectrum photo editor Randi Silberman Klett being scanned in 3-D, see the sidebar, "A 3-D Me."

Why do humans practice self-deception?

Tell me the truth, lizard – am I deceiving myself?

Evolutionary guru: Don't believe everything you think

• 12 October 2011 by Graham Lawton
• From New Scientist Magazine issue 2833. 
• For similar stories, visit the Interviews , The Human Brain and Human Evolution Topic Guides

The human capacity for self-deception knows no bounds, but why do we do it? According to biologist Robert Trivers the simple answer is that it helps us have more children. He told Graham Lawton about the evolutionary benefits of lying

Psychologists been interested in self-deception for years, but you say we need a new science of self-deception?
Yes. Because the psychologists have not produced a theory. Self-deception lies at the heart of psychology, but if you read only psychology you will go blind and probably crazy before you discern the underlying principles. A functional view of self-deception has to come out of evolutionary logic. It has to be a pay-off in terms of reproductive success.

You argue that we deceive ourselves all the time, but why do we do it?
One reason is to better deceive others. Deceiving consciously is cognitively demanding. I've got to invent a false story while being aware of the truth, it's got to be plausible, it cannot contradict anything you already know or are going to find out and I've got to be able to remember it so that I don't contradict myself.

This takes concentration and I may give off cues that I'm lying. If I try to slip something by you I may not be able to meet your gaze. For linguistic cues, there are more pauses and fillers while I try to come up with my story. I'll choose simple action words and avoid qualifiers. Another thing that gives us away us is the effort to control ourselves. Let's say I'm coming to a key word in a lie. I tense up, but tensing up automatically raises my voice. That's a very hard thing to fight.

So believing the lie yourself can help with this cognitive burden?
Yes. If I can render all or part of the lie unconscious I can remove the cues that I'm deceiving you. So that's one kind of general reason to practice self-deception: to render the lie unconscious, the better to hide it.

What other types of self-deception are there?
Another broad category is that there is a general tendency to self-inflation. If you ask high school students are they in the top half of their class for leadership ability, 80 per cent will say yes; 70 per cent say they're in the top half for good looks. It ain't possible! And you cannot beat academics for self-deception. If you ask professors whether they're in the top half of their profession, 94 per cent say they are.

So we self-deceive in order to give ourselves an ego boost?
The ego boost, again, is in order to deceive others. There is little intrinsic value in deceiving yourself without deceiving others.

What are the benefits of deceiving other people?
There are many, many situations in which you gain personal benefit. If you're going to steal, you've got to lie to cover it up. If you're having an affair you lie to protect the relationship Now, what do we mean by personal benefit? Ultimately it is measured in terms of reproductive success. But there isn't a straightforward relationship between deception and reproductive success. For example, if I lie and I rise in the corporation, does this result in extra children? So we have to make a separate argument about why rising in the profession gives you benefits that translate into more surviving offspring.

There must be costs too?
Yes. The cost takes various forms. One is that you are more likely to be manipulated by others. A self-deceived person may be the only one in the room that doesn't know what the hell is going on. Con artists use tricks to get your machinery of self-deception going, and then they control you. The general cost is you risk being out of touch with reality.

But still the benefits outweigh these costs?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Self-deception would not have evolved if the costs always outweighed the benefits.

What is going on in our brains when we deceive ourselves?
At the moment, not a lot is known about the neurophysiology. Much more is known about the immunology of self-deception. Here's a vivid example of the cost of self-deception. Because of HIV, various aspects of homosexuality have been studied very intensely. It turns out the more you're out of the closet, the better for you. If you're HIV positive, you transit into AIDS much quicker if you're in the closet about being homosexual.

Let's return to evolution. Are humans the only species with the capacity for self-deception?
No, I do not think so. Lying is widespread throughout the animal kingdom, both between species and also within species. One example is mimics, species that are harmless and tasty but gain protection by resembling a poisonous or distasteful one. Psychologists are getting close to showing that monkeys practice self-deception.

Like humans, monkeys naturally associate members of their "in-group" with positive stimuli such as fruits, and out-group members with negative stimuli such as spiders.

Do children come into the world as self-deceivers or does it take a while to develop?
That is very tough to say. There's evidence that deception in children starts at six months of age. By eight or nine months they have developed the ability to deny that they care about something that they do care about. But demonstrating self-deception is tricky.

Is it right that self-deception is correlated with intelligence?
Yes, at least for deception. The smarter your child is, the more he or she lies. In monkeys, the bigger the neocortex is, the more often they're seen lying in nature.

In your new book you get into some quite serious stuff about how self-deception fuels warfare and other evils...
Regarding warfare, if you can get the group believing the same deception, you have a powerful force to impose group unity. And if you've sold the population a false historical narrative, say "the German people need room in which to live", then it's relatively easy to couple marching orders to the delusion.

Tell me about the relationship between self-deception and religion.
It's complex. At one extreme you could say religion is complete nonsense, so the whole thing is an exercise in self-deception. I was raised as a Presbyterian and I occasionally attend. I stand back and I read the creed that I was taught as a child and it's utter, utter nonsense. But could it have spread so far by self-deception alone? Religion has been selected for. It has given many benefits to people - health benefits, cooperative benefits. So I take an intermediate position.

Are you a self-deceiver?
I end the book with a chapter on fighting our own self-deception. I've been remarkably unsuccessful in my own case. I just repeat the same kinds of mistakes over and over. If you ask me about my self-deception, I can give you stories, chapter and verse, in the past. But can I prevent myself doing the same damn thing again tomorrow? Usually not, though in my professional life as a scientist, I feel that I probably practice less self-deception, I'm more critical of evidence, a little bit harder nosed.

You could be deceiving yourself about that.
Absolutely.

Profile

Robert Trivers is one of the world's best-known evolutionary biologists. His work influenced sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, behavioural ecology and Richard Dawkins's concept of the selfish gene. He is professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His latest book, titled The Folly Of Fools in the US and Deceit And Self-Deception in the UK, is out this month

Why the first two years are the most important of a child's life.

The Two Year Window | The New Republic
 The new science of babies and brains—and how it could revolutionize the fight against poverty.

• 
  

  Jonathan Cohn

• November 9, 2011 | 12:00 am

A decade ago, a neuroscientist named Charles Nelson traveled to Bucharest to visit Romania’s infamous orphanages. There, he saw a child whose brain had swelled to the size of a basketball because of an untreated infection and a malnourished one-year-old no bigger than a newborn. But what has stayed with him ever since was the eerie quiet of the infant wards. “It would be dead silent, all of [the babies] sitting on their backs and staring at the ceiling,” says Nelson, who is now at Harvard. “Why cry when nobody is going to pay attention to you?”

Nelson had traveled to Romania to take part in a cutting-edge experiment. It was ten years after the fall of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose scheme for increasing the country’s population through bans on birth control and abortion had filled state-run institutions with children their parents couldn’t support. Images from the orphanages had prompted an outpouring of international aid and a rush from parents around the world to adopt the children. But ten years later, the new government remained convinced that the institutions were a good idea—and was still warehousing at least 60,000 kids, some of them born after the old regime’s fall, in facilities where many received almost no meaningful human interaction. With backing from the MacArthur Foundation, and help from a sympathetic Romanian official, Nelson and colleagues from Harvard, Tulane, and the University of Maryland prevailed upon the government to allow them to remove some of the children from the orphanages and place them with foster families. Then, the researchers would observe how they fared over time in comparison with the children still in the orphanages. They would also track a third set of children, who were with their original parents, as a control group.

In the field of child development, this study—now known as the Bucharest Early Intervention Project—was nearly unprecedented. Most such research is performed on animals, because it would be unethical to expose human subjects to neglect or abuse. But here the investigators were taking a group of children out of danger. The orphanages, moreover, provided a sufficiently large sample of kids, all from the same place and all raised in the same miserable conditions. The only variable would be the removal from the institutions, allowing researchers to isolate the effects of neglect on the brain.

Prior to the project, investigators had observed that the orphans had a high frequency of serious developmental problems, from diminished IQs to extreme difficulty forming emotional attachments. Meanwhile, imaging and other tests revealed that some of the orphans had reduced activity in their brains. The Bucharest project confirmed that these findings were more than random observations. It also uncovered a striking pattern: Orphans who went to foster homes before their second birthdays often recovered some of their abilities. Those who went to foster homes after that point rarely did.

This past May, a team led by Stacy Drury of Tulane reported a similar finding—with an intriguing twist. The researchers found that telomeres, which are protective caps that sit on the ends of chromosomes, were shorter in children who had spent more time in the Romanian orphanages. In theory, damage to the telomeres could change the timing of how some cells develop, including those in the brain—making the shorter telomeres a harbinger of future mental difficulties. It was the clearest signal yet that neglect of very young children does not merely stunt their emotional development. It changes the architecture of their brains.
Drury, Nelson, and their collaborators are still learning about the orphans. But one upshot of their work is already clear. Childhood adversity can damage the brain as surely as inhaling toxic substances or absorbing a blow to the head can. And after the age of two, much of that damage can be difficult to repair, even for children who go on to receive the nurturing they were denied in their early years. This is a revelation with profound implication—and not just for the Romanian orphans.

APPROXIMATELY SEVEN MILLION American infants, toddlers, and preschoolers get care from somebody other than a relative, whether through organized day care centers or more informal arrangements, according to the Census Bureau. And much of that care is not very good. One widely cited study of child care in four states, by researchers in Colorado, found that only 8 percent of infant care centers were of “good” or “excellent” quality, while 40 percent were “poor.” The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has found that three in four infant caregivers provide only minimal cognitive and language stimulation—and that more than half of young children in non-maternal care receive “only some” or “hardly any” positive caregiving.

Of course, children in substandard day care are not the only children at risk in the United States. There are also hundreds of thousands of babies born each year to American teenagers, about 60 percent of them poor. The vast majority of teen mothers are unmarried when they give birth, and frequently lack either family support or the financial resources to find capable outside help. Then there are the children who begin their lives in traumatic circumstances for other reasons—because they have a parent with clinical depression, or they witness violence in the home. Nobody has a precise definition of adversity, let alone a number for the children who experience it. But experts like Nelson think at least a few hundred thousand children suffer from serious abuse or neglect every year. Presumably they are disproportionately, although far from exclusively, in low-income families.

For a long time, social science has known of correlations between childhood turmoil and all sorts of adult maladies that carry massive social and financial costs—mental illness, addiction, tendencies toward violence. And for decades, we have attempted to address those problems with a variety of social interventions: Head Start, which aims to prepare low-income kids between the ages of three and five for school; investments in elementary and high school children; programs for rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents. While some have achieved important successes, many of the problems stemming from childhood poverty remain intractable.

But a scientific revolution that has taken place in the last decade or so illuminates a different way to address the dysfunctions associated with childhood hardship. This science suggests that many of these problems have roots earlier than is commonly understood—especially during the first two years of life. Researchers, including those of the Bucharest project, have shown how adversity during this period affects the brain, down to the level of DNA—establishing for the first time a causal connection between trouble in very early childhood and later in life. And they have also shown a way to prevent some of these problems—if action is taken during those crucial first two years.

The first two years, however, happen to be the period of a child’s life in which we invest the least. According to research by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, children get about half as many taxpayer resources, per person, as do the elderly. And among children, the youngest get the least. The annual federal investment in elementary school kids approaches $11,000 per child. For infants and toddlers up to age two, it is just over $4,000. When it comes to early childhood, public policy is lagging far behind science—with disastrous consequences.

THE ADULT BRAIN consists of about a hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, that communicate with each other and the rest of the body by transmitting electrical impulses. A baby’s genes contain a blueprint for what cells to build and when, and how those cells are capable of operating, over the course of a lifetime. But experience and environment have profound effects on how the body reads and applies that blueprint.
Hormones affect this process, especially stress hormones. Like all living creatures, human babies are hard-wired with a stress reaction. It’s a survival mechanism that, millions of years ago, allowed humans to protect themselves from hunger, cold, or a saber-toothed tiger about to pounce. Today, that stress response kicks in whenever a baby perceives a threat, which can be as simple as hunger or the feeling of a wet diaper. Deep inside the adrenal glands, which sit atop the kidneys, cells pump out adrenaline—a hormone that makes the lungs breathe and the heart beat faster, increasing the supply of oxygen to the muscles. In the outer shell of the glands, different cells produce cortisol, which helps the body devour stored sugars and prepare the immune system to ward off invaders.

With these hormones sloshing around, blood pressure rises, muscles tighten, and energy surges. A baby wails, waiting for somebody to provide milk, dry clothing, or maybe just a warm embrace. When comfort comes quickly, the body produces fewer stress hormones, the baby calms down, and the brain goes back to business as usual. And if this happens repeatedly, as it should, the nerve impulses crackling in the brain will carry the signals for effective coping with stress over and over again—building pathways that the baby can use later in life to solve problems and overcome difficulty.

But the baby who is ignored or neglected just keeps screaming and flailing. Eventually, he exhausts himself and may appear to withdraw. Yet the quiet child is not a content child. Constant activation of the stress system causes wear and tear on the brain, altering the formation of neural pathways, so that coping and thinking mechanisms don’t develop in the same way. For example, a baby who endures prolonged abuse or neglect is likely to end up with an enlarged amygdala: a part of the brain that helps generate the fear response.
Some of the earliest and most important research establishing this process dates to the 1950s, when investigators observed that rats were better at solving problems if they got more nurturing at very young ages. Among the pioneering scientists in this field were Seymour Levine of Stanford, Michael Meaney of McGill, and Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University. McEwen’s work showed, among other things, that persistently high levels of cortisol altered the structure of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in forming memories and providing context for emotional reactions. Eventually McEwen introduced a term, “allostatic load,” to describe what was happening when stress hormones inundated the body for extended periods of time. Subsequent research showed that persistent childhood stress also leads to significant physical problems, such as far higher rates of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, as Paul Tough explained in an elegant New Yorker article in March.

But the links to cognitive and intellectual problems are just as concrete. Early adversity, says Nelson, can interfere with “planning ability, cognitive flexibility, problems with memory, and all of those will correlate with diminished IQ.” Every one of the researchers emphasizes that some children who go through these experiences end up OK—and that later interventions may still be helpful for those children who struggle. But, overall, says Nelson, “they’re more likely to have mental health problems. The top of the list will be anxiety. Second to that will be attention deficit disorder. And then depression.” One 2010 paper from Psychological Medicine concluded that “childhood adversities”—a category that includes abusive parenting and economic hardship—were associated with about one in five cases of “severely impairing” mental disorders and about one in four anxiety disorders in adulthood.

These problems incur large costs. Think about the lost wages from serious mental health problems, which total $200 billion a year, according to a 2008 study from the American Journal of Psychiatry. Or think about the expense of incarcerating criminals: about $60 billion a year, according to a 2006 study from the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. Childhood adversity obviously doesn’t account for all of these sums. But if the studies are correct, then adversity explains a significant portion—certainly in the tens of billions of dollars.

And the implications go beyond mental illness or crime. Children who fail to develop coping mechanisms struggle from the earliest days in school, because even the slightest provocations or setbacks destroy their focus and attention. They can’t sit still and read. They have trouble standing in line. They lash out at classmates or teachers. And these struggles, naturally, lead to other problems that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. All of this is to say that the science of early childhood may play a significant role in the dominant political question of our time: rising inequality.

THE FIRST TIME I heard of this field of research was during a conversation with a woman named Diana Rauner. In the early ’90s, about a decade after graduating from Yale, Rauner had left a lucrative career in private equity to study developmental psychology at the University of Chicago. For her dissertation, she visited day care centers in the city, hoping to learn about how infants and toddlers pick up language skills. But she learned a lot more about the sorry state of child care. Rauner described facilities where infants were strapped in car seats, “watching The Lion King all day,” while the older kids were “circling the room almost like sharks” and throwing things at the infants, because they had nothing else to do. But the infants frequently didn’t cry. “A lot would just stare, which is almost worse,” Rauner says.

Today, Rauner runs a nonprofit organization called the Ounce of Prevention Fund, a $40 million-per-year initiative that applies the latest scientific findings about early childhood—in particular, those first few years—to help some of Chicago’s most disadvantaged families. The fund trains workers at day care centers on how to nurture babies in ways that will stimulate positive brain activity. It also operates its own child care center and school, called Educare, that became the model for a national network of such facilities designed to improve day care for infants and young children, including those too young for Head Start. But perhaps the program’s most intriguing initiative is its work with agencies that provide at-home visits to young women, particularly teenagers, who are either pregnant or are new mothers. Some of these agencies employ doulas, who are specially-trained to provide advice and support to mothers, from the prenatal period all the way up through early childhood.

A few weeks ago, I went on a visit with Maria Caref, a doula who works for Christopher House, an organization that partners with Ounce of Prevention. Maria was visiting Rosaria, a 17-year-old high school student with a four-month-old baby boy. (As a condition of my attendance, I agreed not to identify the real name of Rosaria or her baby.)

Rosaria lives on the second floor of a house in a lower-income, predominantly Latino neighborhood on the west side. When we walked in, her son was lying face-up on a Winnie-the-Pooh fleece blanket on the floor, playing with a ball. Rosaria was on the floor next to him. Children’s music was playing loudly in the background. Like most of the young mothers Caref visits, Rosaria came to Christopher House via a referral (in this case, from a health clinic) while she was pregnant. The official agenda for the visit was to assess whether she was still working toward her own goals as a student and as a parent. But, as always, it was also a chance to check up on the baby and how Rosaria was caring for him.

Rosaria told Caref she was pleased that her boy was aware of her voice and would turn his head to follow her. “He laughs all the time; he’s smiling,” she said. When Caref pulled out a rattle, it got his attention right away. “Curioso,” Rosaria said, “like Curious George.” At that point, Rosaria pointed out a plaything she’d made the baby, by sewing buttons onto socks that she’d turned into mittens. Caref smiled but, after tugging on the buttons with her fingers, warned that they were actually a hazard: “Wow, mom is so creative,” Caref cooed, while holding the baby. “But you have to be careful,” she said, carefully switching gears. “He can pull this hard and he can swallow this. It would be very dangerous.” Later the two talked about whether Rosaria had followed up with immunizations (she had) and whether she was still reading to the boy regularly (she was, although not as regularly as before because she was busy with her own homework). “For some mothers, it’s really hard to keep up,” Caref told Rosaria as we left. “You’ve been doing really well.”

A major goal of these visits is to establish long-term relationships, so that the young women come to see the visitors as both a source of support and an advocate for their interests. Visitors like Caref are trained to deal with a wide range of issues, from basic psychology to health. During the visit, Caref talked to Rosaria about breastfeeding, which has significant health benefits for both mother and daughter. They also spoke about birth control. Studies have shown that teen mothers who have more than one child, particularly in rapid succession, are by far the most likely to fall into crisis.

The model for these efforts is a visiting nurse program that David Olds, a University of Colorado pediatrician, tested in Elmira, New York, during the ’70s and ’80s, and which grew into the national Nurse-Family Partnership. In 2011, the program, which the federal government helps finance, will serve more than 20,000 families; they receive home nurse visits from when they become pregnant until their children are two years old. Olds’s program is one of the more unambiguous success stories in the modern history of social policy. Two long-term studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that adolescents whose mothers had been in the program were less likely to run away, get arrested, or consume alcohol or tobacco. Reports of child abuse were lower by about 50 percent.

When the RAND Institute evaluated the initiative, it determined that the program would save between $1.26 and $5.70 for every $1 spent, with the higher savings from the higher-risk families, thanks to reduced spending on hospitals, incarceration, and cash assistance. And according to Timothy Bartik, an economist and author of Investing in Kids, every dollar that goes into the Nurse-Family Partnership will raise incomes for the entire population by $1.85, once you factor the economic benefits of a more productive workforce—and a tax base that won’t be so strained picking up the tab for remediation and crime. High-functioning day care centers that cover birth through age five, Bartik says, produce a larger payoff per dollar: $2.25.

The science of early adversity, then, offers a blueprint for tackling the effects of poverty and neglect, one that is more precise and observable than any tools policymakers have ever had at their disposal. “The concept of disrupting brain circuitry is much more compelling than the concept that poverty is bad for your health,” says Jack Shonkoff, a Harvard pediatrician and chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. “It gives us a basis for developing new ideas, for going into policy areas, given what we know, and saying here are some new strategies worth trying.”

AFTER MY VISIT with Caref, it was possible to imagine what a comprehensive policy response to the problems of impoverished early childhood might look like. Young families would have the option of home visits, from doulas or social workers. Child care would be higher quality across the board. It would also be affordable, even for families at or below the poverty line. Such services wouldn’t be available exclusively to the poor, since middle-class families could also benefit from many of these programs. That would make them more popular, too.

From a policy standpoint, probably the biggest question about home visiting is how well it would work on a much larger scale. Not all home programs are going to be as thorough as the effort I saw in Chicago, which means they may not produce the same benefits. This is a familiar problem: Studies of Head Start, for example, suggest that it does not have the long-lasting effects on test scores that exemplary programs like the famous Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Michigan, do. Instead, Head Start’s impact on test scores tends to fade (although many researchers argue plausibly that dismal assessments of reading or math skills overlook other advantages that Head Start students gain).

But the bigger questions right now are political. Nobody is talking about launching a new government initiative, no matter how much money it might save in the long run. On the contrary, the focus today is on slashing government spending. The Affordable Care Act has $1.5 billion over five years for expanding visiting nurse programs for brand new mothers. That’s a massive expansion over the previous investment which, according to administration officials, was only in the millions. But even as that money works its way through the pipeline, the net investment in early childhood care is probably declining, given how much of it flows through cash-strapped state governments that are frantically cutting their budgets. In Illinois, to give just one example, about 5,000 at-risk children will lose state-financed schooling, care, or developmental services this year because of a 5 percent budget cut, according to Adam Summers, from Illinois Action for Children. And that’s in addition to 14,000 kids who lost access to state-funded pre-kindergarten in the last two years. At the federal level, House Republicans have proposed eliminating the new home visit funds altogether.
Hard times require hard choices, of course. But these cuts can be counterproductive. One of the most convincing advocates for this argument is James Heckman, a Nobel Prizewinning economist from the University of Chicago. Earlier in his career, Heckman undertook a project to study the effects of high school equivalency (GED) programs. To his chagrin, he discovered that the graduates didn’t seem to be much better off, despite the considerable public investment in the programs. So Heckman began a quest to discover what kinds of government spending would work. His research led him to the conclusion that earlier is better, until eventually he came to focus on the first years of a child’s life.

Heckman argues that a dollar spent on the earliest years of life generates more payoff than a dollar spent on later childhood—let alone a dollar spent on adulthood. Neither he nor any of the scientific researchers believes the United States should stop funding later interventions as long as the programs actually have some impact. Among other things, plenty of infants with nurturing caregivers still develop problems later on, for other reasons. But Heckman agrees with researchers who argue that the older the child, the more expensive and difficult those interventions will be.

Heckman has tried to make this case to anybody who will listen, including members of the congressional super committee on deficit reduction, whose cuts to social services—either directly or through reduced aid to the states—could decimate existing services while leaving little room for new initiatives. “We can gain money by investing early to close disparities and prevent achievement gaps, or we can continue to drive up deficit spending by paying to remediate disparities when they are harder and more expensive to close,” Heckman wrote in a formal letter to the committee in September. “The argument is very clear from an economic standpoint.”

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article appeared in the December 1, 2011, issue of the magazine.

Are the eyes really windows to the soul?

Amanda Knox: What's in a face?

Amanda Knox was convicted of murder and her reputation sullied around the world, in large part because of her facial expressions and demeanour. Her story reveals how our instincts about others can be dangerously superficial, writes Ian Leslie


Ian Leslie
The Guardian, Friday 7 October 2011





The eyes are not windows to the soul. They are organs for converting light into electro-magnetic impulses Photograph: PIETRO CROCCHIONI/EPA

In the days and weeks following the discovery of Meredith Kercher's body, Italian police found no physical evidence linking Amanda Knox to the murder. But then, they didn't need it: they could tell Knox was guilty just by looking at her. "We were able to establish guilt," said Edgardo Giobbi, the lead investigator, "by closely observing the suspect's psychological and behavioural reaction during the interrogation. We don't need to rely on other kinds of investigation." Giobbi said that his suspicions were first raised just hours after the murder, at the crime scene, when he watched Knox execute a provocative swivel of her hips as she put on a pair of shoe covers.

Little about Knox's behaviour during that time matched how the investigators imagined a wrongfully accused woman should conduct herself. She appeared too cool and calm, they said – and yet also, it seems, oddly libidinous. One policeman said she "smelled of sex", and investigators were particularly disturbed by a video that first appeared on YouTube, shortly after the investigation began, which showed Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in each other's arms outside the cottage in which Kercher was murdered, as the investigation proceeded inside.

In fact, the video is anything but sexy. Knox, looking wan and dazed, exchanges chaste kisses with Sollecito, who rubs her arm consolingly. But the police professed shock. "Knox and Sollecito would make faces, kiss each other, while there was the body of a friend in those conditions," tutted Monica Napoleoni, head of Perugia's murder squad. A detective said he complained to Knox when she sat on Sollecito's lap, describing her behaviour as "inappropriate". Knox later explained to Rolling Stone magazine, via an intermediary, that she had been pacing up and down when Sollecito pulled her on to his knees to comfort her. The only strange thing about this is that an explanation for simple physical affection became necessary.

The Italian police's overheated interpretation of Knox's behaviour was a particularly pungent manifestation of a universal trait, one that frequently leads criminal investigators and juries astray: overconfidence in our ability to read someone else's state of mind simply by looking at them. This is not a uniquely modern error, born of pop psychology books. Shakespeare was wary of it. In Macbeth, he has Duncan remark how hard it is "to find the mind's construction in the face". It's a warning that law enforcement officers often seem unable, or unwilling, to heed.

In 2008 a group of Norwegian researchers ran an experiment to better understand how police investigators come to a judgment about the credibility of rape claims. Sixty-nine investigators were played video-recorded versions of a rape victim's statement, with the role of victim played by an actress. The wording of the statement in each version was exactly the same, but the actress delivered it with varying degrees of emotion. The investigators, who prided themselves on their objectivity, turned out to be heavily influenced in their judgments by assumptions about the victim's demeanour: she was judged most credible when crying or showing despair.

In reality, rape victims react in the immediate aftermath of the event in a variety of ways: some are visibly upset; others are subdued and undemonstrative. There is, unsurprisingly, no universal reaction to being raped. The detectives were relying on their instincts, and their instincts turned out to be constructed from inherited and unreliable notions about women in distress.

Professional interrogators remain stubbornly convinced of their ability to tell if a person is being truthful simply by observing them. The lawyer and fraud expert Robert Hunter has termed this misapprehension "the demeanour assumption". He points out that it underpins the notions of oral evidence and jury trials; those who watch witnesses give evidence are assumed to be best placed to judge whether they are telling the truth.

It's not just police or legal professionals who make this error. We all have an inherent bias towards assuming that we can discern a person's inner mental state simply by observing them. Whether it's coining new theories on what the Mona Lisa was thinking, or wondering about the stranger opposite us on the tube, we possess an endless capacity to speculate on a person's character, thoughts, and motivations based on the slender evidence of a facial expression. The eyes, it is said, are windows to the soul. They are not. They are organs for converting light into electro-magnetic impulses. But this has never stopped us dreaming of them that way.

Amanda Knox wasn't able to communicate her thoughts and feelings directly, either to the police or to the wider public. Her Italian, at the time of the murder, was poor, and her arraignment meant that she couldn't speak to the media. But there were plenty of pictures to go on. There was, therefore, an even greater emphasis on her expressions and physical behaviour than there would normally be in such a situation, right from the beginning.

This focus on the superficial shaped not just Knox's fortunes in the original trial, but her reputation around the world. Italian prosecutors were quick to leak stories about Knox doing cartwheels while in custody, because they knew the image, even if only imagined, would lead people to conclude that she was guilty. When the press published pictures of Knox with a smile on her face, readers around the world reacted the same way: no innocent person accused of a crime would behave like this. An Italian friend of Kercher's, Giacomo Silenzi, was widely quoted: "Her eyes didn't seem to show any sadness, and I remember wondering if she could have been involved." The tape of Knox embracing Sollecito was played over and over, often with a commentary suggesting there was something odd or distasteful about it.

It is astonishing how quick we are to draw conclusions about how a person ought to look or behave in circumstances we haven't ourselves even come close to experiencing. How many of us have returned to our home after a night away to discover that our flatmate has been brutally murdered? How many of us can know what it feels like to be at the sharp end of a punishing interrogation, in a foreign country, carried out by men in uniform who seem absolutely convinced that they know what happened, who are as certain as we are confused, fearful and exhausted? None of us. And yet we feel free to blithely pronounce, from a great distance, on whether someone in this situation is "acting weird" or not.

What does it stem from, this over-confidence in facile intuitions about what other people are thinking? It probably has something to do with our innate difficulty in recognising that other people are as fully rounded and complex as we are. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton University, points out that there is a fundamental asymmetry about the way two human beings relate to one another in person. When you meet someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result we tend to judge others on what we see, and ourselves by what we feel. Pronin calls this "the illusion of asymmetric insight".

You know when you're hiding your true thoughts and feelings – pretending to be fascinated by your boss's endless anecdote, or grinning your way through an agonising first date – but you nonetheless tend to assume the other's appearance tells the full story of how they feel: if she's smiling, it's because she's genuinely enjoying herself.

Studies have found that people over-estimate how much they can learn from others in job interviews, while at the same time maintaining that others can only get a glimpse of them from such brief encounters. The model we seem to work with is something like this: I am infinitely subtle, complex and never quite what I seem; you are predictable and straightforward, an open book.

Of course, the asymmetry is likely to be particularly lopsided when we don't know the person; when we have only seen pictures of them on TV, in newspapers and magazines. We know for sure that they don't know us, and yet we're almost equally certain that we've got their number. We only had to look at Knox's various expressions – in her Facebook and MySpace photos, and in pictures of her on the way to court – to make snap judgments about what kind of person she was, or what was running through her mind when the picture was taken. Even this week, photographs of her smiling as she boards a plane home have been interpreted as a sign of callousness.

An inclination to oversimplify the minds and motivations of others lies at the root of sexism and racism, and all forms of inter-group conflict, violent and benign. Liberals and conservatives tend to think that those on "their" side are reasonable, reflective, and thoughtful, while those on the other side are not just wrong, but simplistic and dim. Part of the reason that Knox became unpopular in Europe, and especially Italy, is that people projected on to her what they regarded as the worst qualities of Americans: arrogance, greed and brashness.

Our unwillingness to devote much effort to understanding how others might actually think or feel is exemplified by the popular assumption that Knox's initial admission to police that she had been present at the scene of the murder, and her false implication of the bartender, Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, revealed a guilty conscience. "She lied!" declared her critics, slamming the collective gavel in condemnation. But of course we know, empirically, that under the extreme duress of an intense interrogation, a terrified person will say almost anything the police want them to say. Quite apart from falsely implicating others, people will falsely implicate themselves.

The Innocence Project is an American organisation devoted to exonerating those wrongfully convicted of serious crimes, frequently murder, by using DNA evidence. Of the 250 people they have successfully exonerated, a quarter had confessed under interrogation (Knox has indicated an interest in working for the Innocence Project, now she is free). Because we find it hard to imagine that we might do the same, we assume that others wouldn't do it either: a confession is still regarded by lawyers as the nuclear weapon of evidence, the one thing that, even in the absence of physical evidence, can guarantee conviction.

Most us know, when we reflect rationally, that other people are as complex and difficult to read or predict as we are, and we do compensate for the natural imbalance in our encounters with others. The trouble is, we rarely compensate enough. Thinking about what others might be thinking and feeling is hard work. It requires intellectual application, empathy, and imagination. Most of the time we can barely be bothered to exert such efforts on behalf of our friends and partners, let alone on people we read about in the news. We fall back on guesses, stereotypes, and prejudices. This is inevitable, and not always a bad thing. The trouble comes when we confuse our short-cuts with judgment.

Amanda Knox's face proved to be her misfortune. It was pretty enough to incite the fantasies of Italian cops and tabloid editors, and just expressive enough to provide a richly textured canvas for a public all too willing to pronounce on the soul it concealed.

Ian Leslie is the author of Born Liars; Why We Can't Live Without Deceit. He is on Twitter @mrianleslie.

Neuroscience Highlights Through the Ages

From The Scientist magazine, October 2011 issue.

How do we know what's really true?

Bringing Dawkins home to the kids

16:57 19 September 2011

Books

Andy Coghlan, reporter

(Image: Dave McKean)
In The Magic of Reality, Richard Dawkins brings science - and atheism - to teens. New Scientist reporter Andy Coghlan took it home to read with his family

John Lennon famously found himself in hot water in 1966 after declaring that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus". In the US Bible Belt, Beatles records were thrown on bonfires by infuriated evangelists eager to prevent their children's corruption by this pop icon. The question is whether the same fate will now befall arch-atheist Richard Dawkins's new book, a lavish tome entitled The Magic of Reality.

Dawkins has repackaged his passion for atheism - and for the capacity of science to deliver demonstrable truths about nature - in a book designed to appeal to teenagers. While Lennon gave offence by accident, Dawkins is unabashedly out to prevent what he sees as the brainwashing of children into religion.
Stunning in appearance, the book features beautiful illustrations by artist Dave McKean, which enhance and help to explain the text.

The writing is also masterly, if a little waffly in places. From the strident polemicism of The God Delusion, Dawkins has shifted into "wise grandad" mode. His strategy is laid bare in the list of chapters, a clear "scientific" rewrite of the contents of Genesis. The formula is simple: each chapter addresses a basic question: "Who was the first person?" or "When and how did everything begin?" Dawkins then supplies imaginative answers provided by ancient myths from around the world - among them prominent tales from the Bible. Finally, he demolishes these myths by supplying the "real" answers provided by science.

This formula works brilliantly. The tone may be softer, but as ever Dawkins is uncompromising in his refusal to accept religious explanations as anything other than fables. Scientists who quite happily square their faith with acceptance of evolution will likely find this incredibly patronising.

Under the title "Who was the first person really?", his explanation of evolution is compelling, as well as surprising, well reasoned and thought provoking. To his credit, Dawkins also admits to not fully understanding material outside his normal bailiwick, evolutionary biology. Of the big bang origin of the universe, he writes: "Time itself and space itself began with the big bang too. Don't ask me to explain that, because, not being a cosmologist, I don't understand it myself." But the closest he comes to conceding that forces might exist beyond scientific inquiry is when discussing the possibility of parallel universes where different rules of physics might apply.

The most provocative chapters, are the final two: "Why do bad things happen?" and "What is a miracle?" In the first, he rams home the message that nature, evolution and the workings of the universe are indifferent to our individual fates, and that it is through pure chance that misfortune strikes some but not others. In the second, he takes issue with Jesus's "water-into-wine" feat and admonishes against accepting miracles as truth. "Don't ever be lazy enough - defeatist enough - to say 'It must be supernatural' or 'It must be a miracle'," he writes. "Say instead that it's a puzzle, it's strange, it's a challenge we should rise to."

Notably missing, however, is a chapter entitled: "Why do people do bad things to others?" This question plays a key role in how and why religion evolved, and it is one that is still being researched. An experiment earlier this year, for example, found that children were less likely to cheat in a game if told they were being observed by "Princess Alice", an invisible, fictitious person (New Scientist, 23 April, p 18). Of course, the flip side of the order and cohesion religion can promote is the hostility it can engender towards strangers who are not part of the group. The book provides a golden opportunity for Dawkins to ask whether we can evolve to treat one another more civilly. Alas, he doesn't seize it.

Still, he finishes with a flourish, encouraging readers to be bowled over by the stunning beauty of reality - a sentiment I thoroughly support. Too few of us wake up each day and reflect on how amazing it is that we are not only alive, but aware of being alive. "The truth is more magical than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle," he writes. "Science has its own magic: the magic of reality."

The book is a triumph and will undoubtedly be a bestseller. The inevitable bonfires will only serve as brilliant advertising.
Andy Coghlan

I was a little apprehensive about reviewing Richard Dawkins's book, mainly because I remember spending science lessons staring out of the window in agonising boredom. But although I haven't studied chemistry or biology for four years, I was unable to put the book down. I found myself enjoying learning exciting new facts and having old ones reinforced. It was definitely no repeat of the classroom scenario.

The aim of The Magic of Reality is to make readers distinguish between myth and science. Critics may say that it is a one-sided argument, and perhaps a little too patronising or offensive towards religious explanations for earthly matters. Yet, as a history undergraduate, I appreciate how Dawkins backs up each point with evidence and explanation.

Perhaps the book's greatest asset is that it manages to bring science to life. The vibrant illustrations reinforce this, as do the fun font styles. There are "fact of the day" type statements, such as that the word "shampoo" originated from the Hindi language. Analogies, too, attach science to everyday life: Dawkins compares the history of generations to the height of New York skyscrapers. His style is colloquial, creating a relaxed, lighter tone. At one point, he suggests we hop in a time machine, "fire up the engine and zoom back ten thousand years".

The book is for people of all ages looking for a clear, simple and interesting read to improve their general understanding of science (though some explanations remain tricky - the Doppler effect might require a second reading, for example). While tackling questions of inconceivable magnitude about how and why events occur in our universe, this book conveys just how absolutely amazing - and magical - science really is.
Phoebe Coghlan, age 20

Miracles don't exist. Simple as that. The Magic of Reality hasn't changed my views on anything, but it has reinforced my views on miracles and why natural disasters happen and definitely expanded my knowledge.
The book is easy to understand, thanks to analogies Dawkins uses to back up or explain some of the science - for example, the idea that plate tectonics can be compared to moving walkways at airports, or that the distance between stars can be demonstrated with two distantly positioned footballs.

At times, Dawkins uses one too many analogies or scientific examples to get a point across, and the jumps between chapters sometimes seem very random indeed - such as aliens to earthquakes - but his style is very fluid, so I really didn't mind.

The book is also written like a discussion. Dawkins is inviting teenagers, such as myself, on a voyage of discovery with him! He refers to "us" and "we", instead of "you", and I really felt like I was being invited to find out all about earthquakes, stars and what have you, alongside him.
Callum Coghlan, age 13

What are the things to consider before buying an all-electric vehicle?

Going Electric: Things to Consider

What you should know before you buy an all-electric vehicle

By KATHY KOWALENKO 9 September 2011

Ford says its Focus Electric can go 160 kilometers with a full charge.

Photo: Ford Motor Co. 

There’s a lot of excitement about those new all-electric automobiles, but you may experience several drawbacks if you do buy one, according to Saifur Rahman, an IEEE Fellow and director of Virginia Tech’s Advanced Research Institute, in Arlington. For instance, several electric vehicles on one residential street can contribute to a brownout or even a blackout by overloading the local distribution transformer. If you are on the road, you may find it difficult to recharge your vehicle because even though EV charging stations are being built, they are still few and far between. And there are significant environmental concerns about the disposal of used up EV batteries in landfills. 


TRANSFORMER TROUBLE


Buy an all-electric and you may also have to pay for a home charging station to recharge your battery. The stations come in three varieties. A Level 1 charger plugs into a regular 110/120-volt, 20-ampere outlet. But it may take longer than one night to do its job. Anywhere from 10 to 21 hours is more like it, depending on the car model and the battery.


A Level 2 unit is heftier, a dedicated 220/240-V, 40-A unit that must be installed by an electrician. This is the type EV automakers recommend you use. It could take about three hours to charge a battery that’s half depleted and about eight hours to charge a battery that’s dead, depending on the car model. Rahman estimates a Level 2 charger will cost about US $2000 in the United States, plus the electrician’s fee.


Level 3 chargers will go into the quick-charging, 480-V stations that owners of all-electrics hope will be popping up everywhere. Chargers at such stations could bring a half-charged EV battery to full capacity in 10 to 30 minutes. Such setups, said to be in the planning stages in many cities, will be the “gas stations” for all-electrics.


But if your neighborhood has too many all-electrics plugged in and if no load-control programs are added, there is a chance the local transformers could be overloaded. Most pole-mounted transformers in the United States are rated at 50 000 volt-amperes (50 kVA) and typically serve four to eight homes. At any time, each home could be pulling in about 8 kilowatts, but plug in two or three EVs drawing 5 kW or more each, turn on a few 240-V appliances such as air conditioners, electric ovens, or clothes dryers—each of which draws from 5 to 7 kW—and you and your neighbors could be sitting in the dark.


“The impact of electric vehicles will be felt at the local distribution point—the home,” says Rahman, who does see a bright side. “Because the number of EV owners will be small at first and spread across different time zones, transmission- or generation-level overloads will not be a problem, as some claim.”


Installing larger pole-mounted transformers providing 100 kVA or more could help. Installed, each of these would cost several thousand dollars, but the question is, Who will pay for that? It’s unreasonable to ask consumers without an EV to come up with the money, Rahman says. Nor is it feasible to ask the few initial electric car owners. Rahman suggests that rather than upgrading the transformer, it makes more sense to add a control device on each charging station that turns off other 240-V appliances in the home when the EV needs to be charged, or delay charging the car.


“This station could be made intelligent enough to sense when other 240-V devices are running,” he explains. “If it senses two appliances are on and there’s not enough capacity in the transformer, it will either turn off the appliances or not charge the car. This will make the electric car transparent to the power company.” Such a feature, he says, could be added at a small cost.


CHARGING DILEMMA


Another problem is finding a place to put the charging station. If you live in a house with a garage, charging your car should be relatively simple. But you’ll have a real problem if you live in an apartment or town house and don’t have an assigned parking spot with room for a charging station.


The options are limited. A Level 2 home charging station would be hard-wired to your house, so you couldn’t take it with you to your sister’s or bring it to your workplace and plug in your car. That means you’ll probably need a public charging station. These will be expensive, so don’t expect to see them anytime soon in public garages, in your company parking lot, or sprouting along highways. Public stations will require a new infrastructure, involving 240-V lines with several hundred amperes of spare capacity for EVs—which might not always be available. A roadway station that can charge four to eight EVs at a time could cost upward of $25 000 to build, Rahman says.


“Running the lines costs money, and existing garages may not have the physical space and/or spare electrical capacity to add stations,” says Rahman, who calls building such stations “a significant bottleneck” to EV sales, one that will likely be overcome only by government incentives.


The slow speed of charging the battery will also affect the infrastructure, with cars potentially tying up Level 2 charging stations for several hours, though it’s expected that the roadway stations will use 480 V.


BATTERY BRIEFING


Cars such as the Chevrolet Volt, Ford Focus Electric [below], and Nissan Leaf warranty their proprietary battery packs for eight years or 161 000 km, whichever comes first. The Volt relies on a 16-kilowatt-hour manganese spinel lithium-polymer prismatic battery pack for its 64-km range. The Leaf uses a 24-kWh lithium-nickel-manganese polymer battery for a 160-km range. The Focus Electric can go 160 km with its 23-kWh lithium-ion battery pack.


But battery capability fades with time. A battery delivers less range after a couple of thousand charge-discharge cycles. Battery life is also affected by how people drive, whether the battery is charged in minutes or hours, and the climate. An EV’s range will decrease as it ages—and the more aggressively it is driven, the faster that happens.


As the batteries are improved, they could last 10 years, longer than the life of many vehicles. But replacing a failed battery could cost from $3000 to $12 000, depending on the car model.


“And if your battery goes dead, you can’t simply run to your local garage for a replacement,” Rahman points out.


Then there’s the dilemma of what to do with spent batteries. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, rechargeable batteries are not an environmental hazard if they are not dumped in landfills. But the European Union has a battery recycling law requiring vendors to reclaim for recycling at least a quarter of the batteries they manufacture and sell, including lithium-ion. 


“Because the ion of lithium is not a benign metal, it will have an impact on the environment,” Rahman says. 

As the EV batteries age, their ability to hold charge will diminish, but they can still be useful in homes and offices as backup sources of electricity, Rahman points out. “For example, if homeowners or small businesses want to have high-quality power for short durations (maybe several hours) for whatever reason or to avoid peaking charges by not using as much electricity when the power company faces supply crises, these discarded EV batteries can meet those needs. As these opportunities are identified and the value of such applications are realized, a secondary market will grow to trade for such batteries.”


Is it possible to power the world just using Wind, Water, and Solar technologies?

Wind, Water, and Solar Power for the World

Nix nuclear. Chuck coal. Rebuff biofuel. All we need is the wind, the water, and the sun

By Mark Delucchi  /  September 2011

Illustration: iStockphoto

We don’t need nuclear power, coal, or biofuels. We can get 100 percent of our energy from wind, water, and solar (WWS) power. And we can do it today—efficiently, reliably, safely, sustainably, and economically.

We can get to this WWS world by simply building a lot of new systems for the production, transmission, and use of energy. One scenario that Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson and I developed, projecting to 2030, includes:

• 3.8 million wind turbines, 5 megawatts each, supplying 50 percent of the projected total global power demand
• 49 000 solar thermal power plants, 300 MW each, supplying 20 percent
• 40 000 solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants supplying 14 percent
• 1.7 billion rooftop PV systems, 3 kilowatts each, supplying 6 percent
• 5350 geothermal power plants, 100 MW each, supplying 4 percent
• 900 hydroelectric power plants, 1300 MW each, of which 70 percent are already in place, supplying 4 percent
• 720 000 ocean-wave devices, 0.75 MW each, supplying 1 percent
• 490 000 tidal turbines, 1 MW each, supplying 1 percent.

We also need to greatly expand the transmission infrastructure in order to create the large supergrids that will span many regions and often several countries and even continents. And we need to expand production of battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, ships that run on hydrogen fuel cell and battery combinations, liquefied hydrogen aircraft, air- and ground-source heat pumps, electric resistance heating, and hydrogen for high-temperature processes.

To make a WWS world work, we also need to reduce demand. Reducing demand by improving the efficiency of devices that use power, or substituting low-energy activities and technologies for high-energy ones—for example, telecommuting instead of driving—directly reduces the pressure to produce energy.

Because a massive deployment of WWS technologies requires an upgraded and expanded transmission grid and the smart integration of the grid with battery-electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles—using both types of these vehicles for distributed electricity storage—governments need to carefully fund, plan, and manage a long-term, large-scale restructuring of the electricity transmission and distribution system. In much of the world, we’ll need international cooperation in planning and building supergrids that span across multiple countries, because many individual countries just aren’t big enough to permit enough geographic dispersion of generators to mitigate local variability in wind and solar intensity. The Desertec project proposes a supergrid to link Europe and North Africa, and 10 northern European countries are beginning to plan a North Sea supergrid for offshore wind power. Africa, Asia and Southeast Asia, Australia/Tasmania, China, the Middle East, North America, South America, and Russia will need supergrids as well.

Although this is an enormous undertaking, it does not need to be done overnight, and there are plenty of examples in recent history of successful large-scale infrastructure, industrial, and engineering projects.

During World War II, the United States transformed motor vehicle production facilities to produce over 300 000 aircraft, and the rest of the world was able to produce over 500 000 aircraft. In 1956, the United States began work on the Interstate Highway System, which now extends for about 47 000 miles (around 75 000 kilometers) and is considered one of the largest public works project in history. The iconic Apollo program, widely considered one of the greatest engineering and technological accomplishments ever, put a man on the moon in less than 10 years. Although these projects obviously differ in important economic, political, and technical ways from the project we discuss, they do suggest that the large scale of a complete transformation of the energy system is not in itself an insurmountable barrier.

Efficient and Reliable: A 100-percent wind, water, and solar power system can deliver all of the world’s energy needs efficiently. Jacobson and I estimated the potential supply and compared those estimates with projections of energy demand made by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. We calculated that the amount of wind power and solar power available in locations that can likely be developed around the world, excluding Antarctica, exceeds the projected world demand for power in 2030 for all purposes by more than an order of magnitude. On top of that, Jacobson and I estimate that converting to a WWS energy infrastructure can actually reduce world power demand by more than 30 percent (based on projected energy consumption in the year 2030), primarily because electric motors have less energy loss than do combustion devices.

But, the naysayers will retort, what about reliability? Can these resources deliver power reliably? Indeed they can. While it is true that no single wind-power farm or solar-photovoltaic installation can reliably match total power demand in a region, it is also true—and often not recognized—that no individual coal or nuclear plant can either.

Indeed, any electricity system must be able to respond to changes in demand over seconds, minutes, hours, seasons, and years, and must be able to accommodate unanticipated changes in the availability of generation due to outages, for example. Today’s mainly fossil-fuel electricity system responds with backup systems, power plants brought online only during periods of peak demand, and spinning reserves—that is, the extra generating capacity available by increasing the power output from already operating generators.

A WWS electricity system handles changes in demand far differently. To start with, WWS technologies generally suffer less downtime than do current electric power technologies. However, they face inherently more variability; the maximum solar or wind power available at a single location varies over minutes, hours, and days, and this variation generally does not match the demand pattern over the same timescales.

Dealing with this short-term variability can be challenging, but it is doable. Including hydropower—which is relatively easy to turn on and off as needed—in the generating package helps, as does managing demand (for example, by shifting flexible loads to times when more generating capacity is available) and forecasting weather more precisely; these have little or no additional cost. A WWS system also needs to interconnect resources over wide regions, creating a supergrid that can span continents. And it will probably need to have decentralized energy storage in residences, using batteries in electric vehicles. Finally, WWS generation capacity should significantly exceed the maximum amount of demand in order to minimize the times when available WWS power runs short. Most of the time, this excess generation capacity could be used to provide power to produce hydrogen for end uses not well served by direct electric power, such as some kinds of marine, rail, off-road, and heavy-duty truck transport.

Photo: iStockphoto

Economical and Safe: WWS power is economical. The private cost of generating electricity from onshore wind power is already less than the private cost of conventional fossil-fuel generation and is likely to be even lower in the future—less than US $0.05 per kilowatt-hour including some transmission costs, according to our calculations (this includes the fully amortized cost of capital and land).

By 2030, Jacobson and I estimate that the social cost (which includes the private or consumer cost, plus additional external costs: for example, the value of health damage from air pollution, which society bears but the individual consumer does not) of generating electricity from any WWS power source is likely to be less than the social cost of conventional fossil-fuel generation, and that includes the amortized cost of land acquisition, capital, and construction.

The cost of transmitting and managing—as opposed to generating—electricity will probably be somewhat higher in a wind, water, and solar system than in a conventional electricity system. In an intelligently designed and operated WWS system, the extra infrastructure and energy cost of sending electricity long distances over a supergrid and of vehicle-to-grid storage, along with demand management, hydropower, and weather forecasting, will probably add up to an average of $0.02/kWh generated. By comparison, conventional long-distance transmissions in the United States today cost about $0.01/kWh.

We don’t have to worry too much about the costs of the basic construction materials, because the supply of steel and concrete used in a wind, water, or solar power system is virtually unlimited—these materials are abundant and recyclable. The rarer materials, including neodymium (in electric motors and generators), platinum (in fuel cells), lithium (in batteries), and silver, tellurium, indium, and germanium (in different kinds of photovoltaic systems), are harder to get, more expensive, and limited in supply, so they will have to be reduced, recycled, or eventually replaced with less-scarce materials unless new sources emerge. However, the cost of reducing, recycling, or replacing neodymium, platinum, or the materials for photovoltaics is not likely to noticeably affect the economics of WWS systems.

WWS power is safe and sustainable. Wind, water, and solar power have essentially zero emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants over the whole life cycle of their systems. They do little to hurt wildlife, water quality, and terrestrial ecosystems; they are not catastrophic disasters waiting to happen in terms of waste disposal, terrorism, war, human error, or natural disasters; and they are based on natural resources and materials that are indefinitely renewable or recyclable.

Nuclear power, coal, and biofuels are anything but safe and sustainable. Biofuels and so-called clean coal systems still cause air pollution, water pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change; biofuels also contribute to higher food prices. Nuclear power already has had two catastrophic accidents, and even though the industry has improved the safety and performance of new reactors and has proposed even newer (but largely untested) ”inherently safe” reactor designs, the industry can’t guarantee that the reactors will be designed, built, and operated correctly. And catastrophic scenarios involving terrorist attacks are still conceivable. Furthermore, any nuclear-fuel cycle can contribute, even if very indirectly, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

With a wind-water-solar system, the risk of any such catastrophe is zero.

Finally, though critics envision sprawling solar installations or rows of wind turbines crowding out farms, a WWS power system won’t take a lot of land. The equivalent footprint area on the ground for enough WWS devices needed to power the world is about 0.74 percent of the global land area, and the spacing needed around wind turbines adds about 1.16 percent of global land area. However, the land used for such spacing is available for other purposes, including agriculture, ranching, and open space, and so is not ”used” in the way that land for biomass production or coal mining is used. Moreover, if we assume that one-half of wind devices will be placed over water, and recognize that all wave and tidal devices will be in water, that 70 percent of hydroelectric is already developed, and that rooftop solar power doesn’t require new land, then the additional footprint and spacing of devices on land will be only about 0.41 percent and 0.59 percent of the world land area, respectively.

The more extensive the supergrid, the less local fluctuations in power generation are a problem. However, more energy is lost in transmission, and infrastructure costs climb. Figuring out how to balance these factors in order to design the optimal grid and determine the best location of generation facilities will take additional research.

Getting in our way today is the fact that energy markets, institutions, and government policies support the production and use of fossil fuels. The world needs new policies to ensure that WWS systems develop quickly and broadly. The United States and other countries have adopted or discussed policies that stimulate production of renewable energy, including feed-in tariffs, which are subsidies to cover the difference between generation costs and wholesale electricity prices, investment subsidies, quotas requiring that a certain amount of generation be WWS power, and carbon and other environmental-damage taxes.

The obstacles to this transformation are primarily social and political, not technical or economic. If we continue to make decisions based on interest-group politics and muddle through with nuclear power, ”clean” coal, offshore oil production, and biofuels, then our energy system will continue to threaten the health and well-being of everyone on the planet. But with sensible broad-based policies and social changes, it indeed is possible to convert 25 percent of the current energy system to WWS in 10 to 15 years, 85 percent in 20 to 30 years, and 100 percent by 2050.

About the Author

Mark Delucchi is a research scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, specializing in economic, environmental, engineering, and planning analyses of current and future transportation systems. He is a member of the Alternative Fuels Committee and the Energy Committee of the Transportation Research Board.

To Probe Further

The material for this article is based on the detailed analyses presented in ”Providing All Global Energy With Wind, Water, and Solar Power, Part II: Reliability, System and Transmission Costs, and Policies,” Energy Policy 39 (2011): 1170–1190 by M.A. Delucchi and M.Z. Jacobson, and
”Providing All Global Energy With Wind, Water, and Solar Power, Part I: Technologies, Energy Resources, Quantities and Areas of Infrastructure, and Materials,” Energy Policy 39 (2011): 1154–1169 by M.Z. Jacobson and M.A. Delucchi.

Copies of these papers are available from the author upon request by e-mail (madelucchi@ucdavis.edu).