Andrew Zolli

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
―W.B. Yeats

Human perception is a fickle, paradoxical instrument.

Our visual sense, while more acute than that of many species, is hardly the keenest in the animal kingdom. An eagle, for instance, has eyesight so sharp it can spot small prey more than three kilometers away. The next time you happen upon one in the wild, know that it saw you coming from afar, and waited patiently for you to arrive.

Birds are also “tetrachromats”; in addition to the spectra that are visible to humans, they possess a fourth kind of cone in their retinas, which allows them to see ultraviolet wavelengths of light. A very few human beings have inherited a genetic variant that confers tetrachromacy; they describe living in a world of spectacular subtlety and vibrancy, wholly unavailable to the rest of us, in which hundreds of unseen variations lurk in what we might otherwise label “green” or “blue.”

Other animals, especially small ones, sense time in ways that we might consider super-human. A common housefly processes about four times more visual information each second than a human being. Their “mental movie” is composed of two hundred and fifty frames per second; ours, a paltry sixty. As a consequence, some zoologists believe that a fly’s experience of time is radically slowed. To them, we appear as lumbering beasts, haplessly waving our rolled-up newspapers in slow motion.

One could fill a book with such unflattering comparisons, but don’t pity the poor humans. Over thousands of years of self-compounding refinement, we have managed to augment our otherwise provincial senses far beyond what any other animal might hope for. Indeed, this increasing sensual acuity is a central theme in the story of human progress.

Consider: In the 5th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Democritus first developed the (at the time, unobvious) idea that the world was filled with small, indivisible particles—άτομα. His contemporary, Aristotle, thought this idea was ludicrous, and the idea languished for centuries.  Today, along the border between France and Switzerland, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider regularly accelerate subatomic particles to 99.999999% of the speed of light, and then smash them together in violent explosions that simulate the earliest moments after the Big Bang. In the resulting flash, which lasts for only a few billionths of a second, they glimpse the esoteric particles that form the basic building blocks of the universe. To even attempt this feat required the invention of detectors that are so exquisitely sensitive that they must be continually readjusted to compensate for minute fluctuations in the gravitational pull of the moon.

In a similar vein, we have peered further out into the inky darkness—and thus, further back in time—than any other animal. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Human beings have built an instrument—the Planck Space Telescope—that has detected the dim remnants of radiation emitted when the cosmos was a mere 380 thousand years old—or 0.00002 billion years after its birth. Said another way: if the entire history of the cosmos were compressed into a year, we human beings have peered all the way back to the first ten minutes.

These Olympic feats of enhanced perception are among the crowning achievements of our species. Yet even as we celebrate them, our workaday senses remains stubbornly parochial.

Walking down the street, we easily sense changes that occur at a one or two meters per second, especially if those changes occur where our experience tells us they ought to. But, we’re terrible at sensing changes that unfold significantly faster—or slower—than our preferred speed, or occur where our experiences haven’t conditioned us to look.

This parochialism is part of the reason why we so poorly understand the world around us. Our planet is vastly larger and more complex than our ability to readily comprehend, and moves at speeds, and scales, and with interdependencies that do not conform to our everyday modes of thinking. If it did, climate change would have been solved long ago.

Paradoxically, humanity’s civilizing instinct inflames these perceptual biases. Civilization can be understood, in part, as the imposition of a kind of human-scale regularity upon the world. From inside it, it’s easy to forget that we nest, unsteadily, within the larger complexity of the whole—and not the other way around.

Now, thankfully, humanity is developing new technologies that can help us sense the world at scale, and make change visible in ways that are much more amenable to human cognition. And that matters, because seeing the world, deeply and in its totality, is the first step on the path to communion, empathy, and stewardship.

 

For the past several years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with Earth-imaging specialists, planetary scientists, engineers and others who regularly peer at the world through a suite of these new instruments.

Some of these colleagues, at a company called Planet Labs, are deploying the largest constellation of Earth-observing satellites in human history. When fully operational, this system will collectively image the entire surface of the Earth, in high resolution, every day.

Through the Planet Labs satellites (called Doves) and other Earth-imaging tools, on any given day, one can witness the world of the Anthropocene—the Age of Humans—in all its complexity. Agricultural fires signal the onset of the planting season in Brazil. Refugee camps expand along the Turkish border with Syria. Ice-flows dissolve off the coast of Nova Scotia. The Amazonian rainforest is slowly, and illegally denuded. Monolithic manufacturing complexes spread out in China. Megacities in Africa push ever outward. Crater-like remnants of nuclear bomb tests scar the Nevada desert. The density of nighttime illumination hints at the relative poverty, and equity, of human societies.

Not all of this sensing is done with satellites. At the University of Washington, computer scientist Ricardo Martin Brualla and his colleagues have developed software tools that harvest countless digital snapshots that we post on the Internet and synthesize them into films that show the aggregate change in one place over time.

 

 

 (Above: The retreat of the Briksdalsbreen glacier in Norway, and the rise of the Las Vegas skyline, recomposed from hundreds of Internet photos, by Ricardo Martin Brualla and colleagues. Used by permission.)

For the first time in our history, broad access to these kinds of tools and imagery make visible, for anyone, the hidden dynamism of the planet—a dynamism that we spy occasionally, and only liminally, in our everyday life.

These images reveal not only change, but also vast diversity. Look upon the Earth long enough, and you will find almost every adjective fulfilled, somewhere. The world is beautiful, of course. But it is also sometimes ugly. It is intensely intertwined with human affairs, although it is sometimes indifferent or even overtly hostile to them. In some places, we are instruments of the world’s ruin; in others, less frequently, its regeneration.

In 1901, the writer and Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck published “The Life of the Bee”, which popularized the idea that humanity owes our continued survival to the dutiful pollinator. “It is … estimated that more than a hundred thousand varieties of plants would disappear if the bees did not visit them,” Maeterlinck noted, “and possibly even our civilization, for in these mysteries all things intertwine.”

Today, we are getting perilously close to testing Maeterlinck’s hypothesis empirically. Bee colonies, which are responsible for billions of dollars of agriculture, food security, and ecosystem services, are collapsing around the world. It would not take the death of the last hive for life to become grim for at least some of the people, plants and animals who depend on bees, either directly or indirectly.

But precisely how many bee colonies have to collapse before the larger system fails? Are we near the tipping point? Here, we are on much murkier ground.

The same dynamic holds true in our understanding of countless other marquee challenges of our present age, from ocean warming and climate change, to the genetic basis of cancer, the performance of electrical grids, digital networks, and even the stock market. While all of these complex systems have compensatory elements, there is a point when the accumulation of damage becomes unrecoverable, and catastrophic collapse follows. But when?

Last month, network theorists Jianxi Gao, Baruch Barzel and Albert-László Barabási published an important paper in Nature, “Universal resilience patterns in complex networks,” which takes us a significant step closer to determining these pernicious tipping points. The authors present a universal mathematical framework which allows one to compute a straightforward “resilience function” (or perhaps more aptly, a “collapse threshold”) for any complex system – its point of no return.

Until now, the only way to identify such thresholds was to painstakingly map the interactions of all of the individual elements in the system – a task that was impractical or impossible in most circumstances. (Even our most sophisticated models of the climate, run on supercomputers, model only a fraction of the forces acting upon it.) Gao, Barzel and Barabási have taken much of that complexity out, collapsing it into a single indicator of system health. As such, if borne out, this work will certainly find its way into applied resilience domains – especially disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation and finance.

The above video, which acts as a companion to the paper, does a terrific job of explaining the work (and key concepts of ecological resilience in general).

 

 

Continuing the recent theme of bringing emotional richness to social media, FastCo.Exist has details of Introjis, emoticons designed for introverts by designer Rebecca Evie Lynch.

Introjis allow introverted users to express a natural and healthy affinity for solitude or quietude, and wordlessly express the occasional distress or fatigue that comes from being in the crowd too long. They’re an evocative counterpoint to more traditional emojis, which express a different range of emotional temperatures.

 

 

 

For the past year, I have been working closely with Jad Abumrad and the team at RadioLab on a fascinating story about Facebook, entitled “The Trust Engineers“.

The story centers on the work of Arturo Bejar, who is one of the technical leaders at the company, and a team of engineers, product developers and external social scientists who collectively operate under the banner of the Compassion Research Group. Together, this team is studying how our ancient human capacities for conflict, compassion, respect, trust, and empathy are expressed by people on Facebook; based on these findings, they’re reworking the service’s interface to encourage more humane relationships among its 1.3 billion users.

In addition to exploring our digital relationships and emotions, the Facebook story also touches on the ways in which our online lives are continuously experimented upon; the new ways social scientists are exploring ancient questions with ‘big data’; and the ethical considerations that such inquiries inevitably raise. Social media is changing social science, and at Facebook, we caught a glimpse of its future.

For space and flow reasons, one particularly intriguing example of this work didn’t get an in-depth airing in the radio piece, and I thought I’d relate it here more fully.

The story actually begins all the way back in 1859, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s landmark treatise, On the Origin on Species. In that book, Darwin famously lays out the argument that species evolve over the course of generations, through the process of natural selection. At the time, most scientists, not to mention most people, were creationists who believed that the great diversity of Life was part of a natural and unchanging order, over which God had given us dominion. Accordingly, Darwin left the natural conclusion of his argument – that human beings evolved via the same mechanism as all other species – largely unstated. (Except, for a single, telling line at end of the book: “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”)

Darwin didn’t publish his own fuller views on human evolution until more than a decade later, with two works that came in rapid succession, The Descent of Man (in 1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (in 1872).

In first of these books, Darwin argued, to no one’s surprise, that human beings did indeed evolve from a common hominid ancestor. In the second book, however, he presented an argument not just about the origins of our species, but of our psyches.

His argument spoke to what was, both in Darwin’s time and our own, a commonly held view: that our emotional life – marked by feelings like grief, envy, tenderness, love, guilt, pride, and affirmation – is uniquely human. If our emotions are unprecedented, so the thinking went, then we must be, too.

To debunk this idea, Darwin presented a detailed taxonomy of forty distinct emotions, ranging from “high spirits” such as joy, to the “low” spirits” such as despair, and concluded with the more complex emotions such as shame. Then he painstakingly documented how these emotional expressions have consistent physiological roots. Everywhere, people use the same thirty muscles in our faces to pull our lips up into a smile, knit our forehead into a frown, distort our cheeks into a grimace of psychic pain, bow our heads in supplication, and tilt our necks to signal puzzlement.

Darwin argued that these emotional expressions are not just universal across cultures, but have their roots in purposeful, and similar, animal behaviors across many mammalian species. A Chimpanzee uses similar muscle groups to purse its lips as we do, and often for the same reasons. We’re not as different – or as special – as we might suppose.

With this argument, Darwin helped advance the field of evolutionary psychology and usher forth the robust scientific study of emotional experience.  His basic thesis has been elaborated, refined, studied and debated ever since.

Researchers subsequently confirmed that human beings in both Western and non-Western societies can indeed consistently recognize a core subset of Darwin’s facial expressions. In 1967, psychologist Paul Ekman, perhaps the most well known contemporary figure in emotions research, went so far as to show these expressions to an isolated community in Papua New Guinea, who had never seen modern movies or television. They were able to identify the expressions without difficulty. Other studies have shown that our autonomic nervous system responds in consistent ways when we see Darwinian expressions of emotion – further evidence that they’re hard-wired into our biology.

Yet critics point out that both the subjective experiences and physical expressions associated with supposedly ‘basic’ emotions can vary widely even within a category. One person might stutter when enraged, while another lets loose an eloquent stream of epithets; one person might blush with quiet pride at an accomplishment, while another roars like an NFL star in the endzone.

To critics, this variability suggests that emotions are as much cultural signals as they are biological ones. To stereotype for a moment (for rhetorical purposes only – no letters, please!): is the Southern Italian, who wildly gesticulates with his hands as he talks, really using the same innate, emotional vocabulary as the famously stoic Swede? Is the facially impassive, but verbally expressive Japanese businessman really wired the same way as the ironic Brooklyn hipster? Doesn’t this variety suggest that our emotional lives are substantially, if not entirely, a matter of culture?

And, if that’s the case, why should it matter that everyone in the world can associate a smile with happiness, if people in your particular society don’t actually make a habit of smiling when they’re happy?

Here, we return to Facebook, and to the work of the Compassion Research Group. One of its leading members is the Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, who co-directs that university’s aptly-named Greater Good Science Center. A former student and colleague of Ekman, Keltner’s research explores the roots of human goodness, particularly compassion, awe, love, and beauty, and how they are communicated through means of gestures, touch and expression.

During their work together, Arturo Bejar approached Keltner with an intriguing proposition: would he be interested in using what had been gleaned in the scientific study of emotions to design a ‘sticker pack’ for Facebook?

Stickers are widely-used animated icons (often of the human face or common objects) used to add expressiveness to otherwise bland text chats – think of them as more sophisticated versions of emoticons, like the “:-)”smiley face that some of us embed in our emails. Here was a chance to use Darwin’s insights to enhance the emotional content the online communications of millions of people around the world.

So Keltner turned to Matt Jones, an animator at Pixar Studios (yes, that Pixar) and gave him the job of designing 51 animated faces, mostly derived from Darwin’s original emotional taxonomy. The full list included admiration, affirmation, anger, anxiety, astonishment, awe, boredom, confusion, contemplation, contempt, contentment, coyness, curiosity, desire, determination, devotion, disagreement, disgust, embarrassment, enthusiasm, fear, gratitude, grief, guilt, happiness, high spirits, horror, ill temperment, indignant, interest, joy, laughter, love, maternal love, negation, obstinateness, pain, perplexity, pride, rage, relief, resignation, romantic love, sadness, shame, sneering, sulkiness, surprise, sympathy, terror, and weakness.

To succeed online, Jones’ sticker designs would have to consistently communicate these emotions without benefit of a label, and in very different parts of the world. End-users would have to be able to look at the sticker for ‘happiness’ or ‘maternal love’ and identify it as such. To ensure the stickers performed as expected, Keltner and his colleagues took Jones’s prototype designs and independently tested them with research subjects in two very different societies: the United States and China.

Overall, both the Chinese and American subjects had roughly the same accuracy, correctly identifying 42 of the 51 distinct emotions presented. Cultural differences did appear: the Chinese were better able to recognize negative emotions, while the Americans were better able to identify positive ones. Yet Jones’ designs universally communicated the most extensively-researched emotions like anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and happiness, as well as more recently-studied ones like embarrassment, pride, desire, and love – and even a few emotions that hadn’t been studied before, like contemplation, coyness, astonishment, boredom, and perplexity.

With these results in hand, Keltner and his colleagues turned Jones’ now-tested illustrations over to Facebook’s designers, who used the best performing ones to create a new sticker pack called Finch, named after the finches Darwin had famously encountered in the Galapagos Islands. Finch contains sixteen cross-culturally tested animations of emotions based on Jones’ original designs.

As the stickers were made available on Facebook, downloaded and then used in chats by millions of users around the world, the Compassion Research team could now look at how they were being used – not by specific users, but in the aggregate. How much ‘love’ was being expressed with the stickers in each country? Or ‘anger’? Or ‘sympathy’? Did different cultures vary in terms of the types of emotional stickers they use? Over time, the researchers realized they could use such analysis to take the emotional temperature of a sizeable portion of the planet.

Clear patterns emerged in the data. Italians, South Africans, Russians and Brazilians had ‘Cultures of Love’ – sending lots of amorous stickers. The U.S. and Canada were similar in most of their usage patterns – though the Canadians were vastly more ‘sympathetic’, while the Americans were ‘sadder’. And the use of ‘deadpan’ stickers predominated across North Africa and the Middle East.

The picture got even more interesting when the researchers correlated the usage of the Finch stickers with other social indicators. Countries that expressed the most ‘awe’ online gave more to charity offline. And countries that expressed the most ‘happiness’ were not actually the happiest in real life. Instead, it was the countries that used the widest array of stickers that that did better on various measures of societal health, well-being – even longevity. “It’s not about being the happiest,” Keltner told me, “it’s about being the most emotionally diverse.”

These are intriguing correlations – and so far, they’re just that. We have to be careful not to over-extrapolate, or conflate the measure of the thing for the thing being measured. Clicking on a sticker to express a belly laugh is not quite the same thing as having an actual belly laugh. And while there are now more Facebook users than Catholics worldwide, there are still more people who’ve never been online than have ever been on Facebook. (One wonders how their inclusion would skew the data.)

Still, this is clearly the beginning of a unprecedented social science revolution, one that will reveal previously impossible assessments of the global psyche, and perhaps shift the dialogue about the relationship between nature and culture. And one wonders what else might consistently correlate with our global emotional weathermap. The stock market, maybe? Or social revolution? Or world peace?

How does that make you feel?