Daniel Lametti
PhD IV Psychology

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The move-in approached. I bought a radio, subscribed to two newspapers, three magazines, and rented seasons one through five of The Wire. I started reading a novel – Love in the Time of Cholera – set in Colombia a century before the internet was invented. I was like a heroin addict on a forced comedown stock piling methadone and vomit bags. And then I moved in.

When asked about our addictions, most of us cite the cups of coffee we drink each morning or the cigarettes one-fifth of us smoke each day. Some of us think about harder drugs – cocaine, crack, and heroin. Drugs are easy to label as addictive: when we stop taking them we feel bad. Daily coffee drinkers who suddenly quit experience headaches. Heroin addicts, losing the effect of the drug that comes to replace the natural painkillers in their brains – neurotransmitters that keep the clothes on our backs from making our skin crawl – experience physical pain. But what kind of withdrawal symptoms do we experience when we give up technology? Can we really be addicted to the internet?
In April, researchers at the University of Maryland asked two-hundred students to go 24 hours without media – no computers, cells phones, iPods, or televisions. At the end of the experiment, each student was asked to blog about their media-free day; they wrote more than 110,000 words, the equivalent of a four-hundred page book. When the researchers analyzed the posts they found that words like “craving,” “jittery,” and “anxious” were often repeated. “I got back from class around 5 p.m. frantically craving some technology,” wrote one student who ended up cheating – later that evening he checked his phone for texts.

Most of the Maryland students, in fact, couldn’t go 24 hours without checking their cell phones, Facebook profiles, or Twitter feeds. But unlike someone addicted to a drug, what the students missed during their technology comedown – what caused their drug-like withdrawal symptoms – were the connections to the outside world technology provides. Words like “friends,” “people,” and “lonely” also showed up frequently in the blog entries. Without being able to text or instant message, one student wrote, “I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.” Technology wasn’t acting like a drug – isolating people within a high. It was helping make connections. You can’t label someone an addict for missing their friends.

My experiment lasted two weeks. At home one afternoon, wanting to go see The Social Network with a friend and frustratingly realizing that I had absolutely no way to figure out where it was playing, I cracked – it was time to find a phonebook and call Bell. As of last Thursday, I now pay forty dollars a month so I can download movies, fire off e-mail, and tweet with my friends, all while writing this column from my living room. Fuck netaddiction.com – if this is addiction, it’s bliss.

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In Bronfman, one piece of bathroom writing neatly read, “Sean Turner holds debt with no financial distress.” A Sean Turner scribble found its way into a stall at Biftek. Names that other people had graffitied in McGill bathrooms were crossed out with Sean Turner scrawled in their place. And whenever the name Sean Turner pops up in conversation, someone will inevitably ask if anyone has actually met the man – does he exist? Or is he simply the figment of some bored student’s imagination?
Sean Turner, it turns out, was a McGill engineering student. And one evening last summer, in the dingy living room of a house party on Clark, I met the legend in the flesh. He was shorter than I’d imagined and, perhaps, a little thinner, but when a friend confirmed that he was indeed the Sean Turner, I had to go over and introduce myself.

“Hey, um, are you Sean Turner?” I asked. “Yeah, that’s me,” said Sean Turner.

“Crazy,” I said, suddenly feeling rather awkward. “The bathroom guy.” He nodded, slowly, and then we just stared at each for a few seconds.

“I’m, um, Dan Lametti, by the way.”

“Oh yeah,” said Sean Turner, “I’ve heard of you.”

My mind exploded.

Sean Turner had heard of me? How was this possible? He was the guy McGill students wrote about in bathrooms and I was just, well, a guy – no one had ever written my name on a bathroom stall (at least, not that I knew of). How did Sean Turner know me?
The world, it seems, is a small place. Everyone has a story about running into someone they know or someone who knows someone they know in an exotic location. In 1969, a psychologist at City University in New York named Stanley Milgram decided to figure out just how connected a random person was to any other random person.

Milgram’s experiment, called The Small World Problem, was simple: he mailed 296 random Americans a packet with a set of instructions and the name of a “target” person and their occupation. If the recipients didn’t know the target – and none of them did – they were told to mail the packet to a friend or acquaintance who they thought might; whoever then received the packet was instructed to do the same, forming an “acquaintance chain” that hopefully ended at the target.

Of the 296 people Milgram sent packets to, 217 agreed to participate in the study, thoughtfully mailing the packet on to a friend or acquaintance. In the end, a number of participants dropped out and only 64 packets reached the target, a stockbroker living in Massachusetts. But the packets that did make it only had to go through about six people, and Milgram famously concluded that only six people – or six degrees of separation – stand between any one American and any other American.

Thirty-five years later, researchers at Columbia University used the Internet to replicate Milgram’s study on a global scale. Sixty-thousand randomly selected email users attempted to reach one of 18 targets located in 13 countries: an Ivy League professor, a policeman in Australia, and an archival inspector in Estonia, to name three. Remarkably, even though the targets were scattered around the world, the email message reached its destination in about six steps.

So how did Sean Turner know me? Milgram noted that 25 per cent of the packets that reached the stockbroker ended up going through one person: his neighbour. The neighbour was a social “connector” – a term coined by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell. In my case, the social connector was my best friend’s girlfriend, Brynn, who, being a socialite, happened to be good friends with Sean Turner’s girlfriend. Small world.

Help make Daniel Lametti a social connector. Get in touch at thesplitbrain@mcgilldaily.com.

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When Fleischl-Marxow finally died from his addictions at the age of 45, Freud felt terrible about pushing cocaine on his friend. “[It was] like trying to cast out the Devil with Beelzebub,” he lamented (Beelzebub being the Devil’s second in command). If only Freud had spent a little less time speculating about the sexual urges of young boys and a little more time researching drug abuse (and, perhaps, if he wasn’t a cokehead himself) he might have simply suggested to Fleischl-Marxow that he find a new place to live. According to a controversial study published in 1978 by Bruce Alexander of Simon Fraser University, the abuse of narcotics might have more to with one’s surroundings then it does with physical dependence on a drug.

For almost a century, scientists have noted that laboratory animals seem to love drugs. If you put a monkey in a cage and give it a choice between two buttons, one that delivers a shot of water and one that delivers a shot of morphine, the creature will gleefully hit the morphine button over and over again, sucking up every last drop, and neglecting meals and mates in the process.

Getting rats to do hard drugs is slightly more difficult; you have to get them addicted first. Rats that have been forced to drink morphine for a few days will continue to take the drug even if they are later given a choice not to. This experiment, in particular, was thought to provide definitive proof that opiates – morphine and its more powerful derivative, heroin – are highly addictive: why would the rats continue to drink morphine unless they were physically dependent on it? But in 1978, Alexander thought differently. He reasoned that the rats’ continued drug abuse might simply be a means for the animals to escape the bleak laboratory environment in which they were housed.

To test this theory, he constructed something of a lab rat utopia, later dubbed “Rat Park.” Rat Park was an open-topped plywood box, 200 times the size of a normal rodent cage, filled with comfy sawdust, lots of food, and obstacles for the rats to explore. He then forced several dozen of the animals – some isolated in standard rodent cages, the rest housed together in Rat Park – to drink water laced with morphine for 57 days.

On the 58th day, Alexander let the animals choose between morphine and water. As dozens of studies had shown before, the caged animals appeared to be addicted to the drug; they continued to drink morphine. But the animals housed in Rat Park immediately went back to drinking plain old water. After being forced to abuse hard drugs for almost two months, the rodents housed in Rat Park, it seemed, were not all that addicted to morphine.

Alexander concluded that in the stimulating world of Rat Park, the effects of morphine interfered with otherwise enjoyable rat activities – mating, nesting, grooming – that weren’t available to the caged animals. In other words, the caged animals weren’t physically dependent on the drug, they were more likely just really, really bored. Depressed, even. From a human perspective, the Rat Park experiment suggests that locking drug users away in prison might only make the problem worse – much like Freud trying to treat his friend’s heroin abuse with cocaine.

Daniel Lametti has only one column left this year. Get in touch with him at thesplitbrain@mcgilldaily.com.

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This network of random event generators, or REGs, is part of a controversial experiment known as the Global Consciousness Project. The project was started in 1998 by Roger Nelson, then a professor of engineering at Princeton.

Nelson, who is now retired and runs the project from an office in his basement, claims that when major events occur in the world – the death of Princess Diana, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the inauguration of Barack Obama – his array of REGs suddenly starts spitting out numbers that he can show are mathematically non-random.

The statistical evidence is compelling. Averaged over the 321 events the project has looked at since it began, the odds against the array randomly producing the numbers it did are more than a million to one – like winning the lottery, being struck by lightning, or drowning in your bathtub.

The Global Consciousness Project grew from research performed by Nelson and other scientists in the 1980s at the now-closed Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory. The PEAR lab was particularly interested in determining if human consciousness could alter the behaviour of machines. In one experiment, subjects were shown random numbers on a display and asked to try – by thinking – to raise or lower the numbers they saw. Remarkably, the researchers claimed they found a small but statistically significant effect.

In the 1990s, Nelson trucked REGs to famous holy sites around the world and set them running; he even brought one inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. He then compared the results to data he collected at more mundane locations – business meetings and academic gatherings. To him, the findings seemed clear: an REG running inside the Great Pyramid, for whatever reason, produced numbers that were more non-random than one running in a boardroom.

Based on his earlier work in the PEAR lab, Nelson speculated that the effect might be related to coherent thoughts that create a sort of group consciousness powerful enough to throw the REGs off. Then, when Princess Diana died in a 1997 car crash and the world reacted with a huge outpouring of grief, Nelson decided to test his theory on a larger scale. He asked 14 of his friends and colleagues that happened to have REGs to collect data during the six-hour televised funeral. The result was small, but significant. The REGs spat out numbers that normally would only occur once in 100 tries – enough to convince Nelson to set up a permanent array of REGs around the world to record a history of the effect.

I spoke with Nelson over Skype at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. We’d planned to talk the night before but he postponed the conversation through a one-sided flurry of emails, reneged on the postponement, and then, 15 minutes later, re-postponed our interview. “Sorry about the seemingly random fluctuations,” he wrote rather fittingly after we’d finally settled on a time to chat.

Secured on the line, Nelson launched into a description of the random number generators he’s made a career studying, quickly pointing out that they are not based on computer algorithms as most people assume.

“We set up a circuit that pushes electrons against a barrier,” he said. “A few electrons do what is called quantum tunneling; they appear on the other side of the barrier in a fashion that is only explainable using quantum mechanics. It’s a completely unpredictable phenomenon.”

If some scientists consider the project controversial ­– and many do – it’s typically not because of Nelson’s math. All the data from the experiment is available to the public on a web site Nelson maintains, and his statistics have been independently analyzed. But he runs into trouble when he tries to explain how group consciousness, if there even is such a thing, might make the output from his array less random.

Before interviewing him, I had confidently surmised (largely based on a careful study of the final Luke-Vader battle scene in The Empire Strikes Back) that coherent thought might create a disruptive electromagnetic field, perturbing the REGs like a radio in a room full of microwaves.

“The devices are designed to be not susceptible to electromagnetic fields,” Nelson replied flatly, deflating my hypothesis. They are, he explained, incased in heavy shielding, and frequently tested to make sure that electrical devices can’t influence them.

But if the shielding solves one problem, it creates another that causes most of the controversy surrounding the project: if the REGs can’t be influenced at a distance by any known particle that exists within the laws of physics, then what causes the effect?
Last October, Nelson posted a note on his web site: the project’s Wikipedia entry, he wrote, had been highjacked, “becoming the focus of biased editors with an agenda.” In just over 2,000 words – twice the number of words in the Wikipedia entry – he carefully rebutted every altered piece of information in the article that he deemed false or misleading.

“They seem pretty sure that this is all hogwash, nonsense, and craziness,” Nelson said about the rogue Wikipedia editors. “What we do is a step beyond the ordinary psychology of experience; it touches areas that some people react to. But really good scientists tend to have quite a different response – they’re likely to be interested.”

As we wrapped up our interview, I asked him if the controversy ever caused him to doubt his own work. “I’m confident that the results are good solid science,” he replied, stopping to think for a second. “The interpretation of the results as some kind of an indicator that there is global consciousness – about that, I have plenty of doubts.”

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On the more traumatic occasions, he’d subject me to what he liked to call “tickle torture.” Holding both my puny arms in his left hand, he’d tickle me mercilessly with his right until my laughter turned to shrieks and my mother had to shoo him away with her wooden spoon.

To my surprise, my brother didn’t invent tickle torture. The ancient Romans coated the bare feet of criminals in salt and then set a goat to the task of licking it off; the victim’s feet were often licked raw before the goat deemed the job finished. Chinese courts during the Han Dynasty favoured the tickle as a method to punish royalty: tickling, when done by a human at least, seldom leaves a mark.

For as long as we have used the tickle – for pain or pleasure – we have wondered why we can’t tickle ourselves. Darwin theorized that for a tickle to be effective it had to be unpredictable – an impossibility during a self-tickle. He was almost right.

In 1998, neuroscientists at University College London set to the task of determining what the difference was, neurologically speaking, between a good tickle and a bad self-tickle. To do this, they needed to create a tickle device that could be used inside a magnetic brain scanner – a difficult task, as anything made of metal would be sucked into the machine’s giant magnet, impaling the test subject in the process. In the end, they came up with something similar to a plastic, gag store back scratcher, modified slightly so that both the test subjects and the experimenters could operate it.

With the brain scanner running, the tickle device cocked and ready to, well, tickle, subjects experienced three conditions: the experimenters tickled the subjects, the subjects tickled themselves, or the subjects simply moved the tickle device around without actually placing it against their skin.

When the experimenters tickled the test subjects, a brain area known as the sensory cortex lit up. Not surprising. But when the subjects tickled themselves, this area wasn’t nearly as active. In fact, brain activity during a self-tickle looked about the same as when subjects simply moved the tickle device around.

A closer study of the data showed that during a self-tickle, an area of the brain near the bottom rear of the head called the cerebellum was also active. The cerebellum, it seemed, was instructing the sensory cortex to cancel out the sensory signals generated by the self-tickle precisely because it was self-produced. Such a response by the cerebellum is likely a product of evolution – a mechanism allowing our brains to respond rapidly to external stimuli while ignoring self-generated, often accidental, stimuli. Without this sensory cancellation we’d be annoyingly startled every time one hand accidentally brushed against the other.

These days, I claim – mostly in front of girlfriends and my younger cousins – to be impervious to a good tickle. It’s a big lie. Everyone with an intact spinal cord is ticklish. After years of my brother’s tickle torture, I mastered what I like to call the tickle poker face – what’s the point of tickling someone if they aren’t going to laugh?

Daniel Lametti writes every other week. If you really think you can’t be tickled, he’ll accept the challenge: thesplitbrain@mcgilldaily.com.

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That year, Neuroscience was held in Washington, D.C., and the organizers had made the controversial decision to let the Dalai Lama give the keynote address. Many thought that the Dalai Lama, with no formal science training, was a poor pick for the keynote speaker of a prestigious scientific conference; some even signed a petition in protest. It was agreed that the talk had to be seen, and when the day arrived, several thousand scientists – this writer included – flooded the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to try to get a seat.

Soon, a crowd thick with glasses, pocket protectors, and bad haircuts had queued orderly outside the lecture hall, waiting to be let in. Everyone secretly scoped out each other’s scientific credentials, prominently displayed on their conference badges – Ph.D.s were in the majority. And then, swiftly – almost silently – everything changed. A rumour spread down the line: There were not enough seats in the lecture hall; some people wouldn’t be let in. The crowd became uneasy. A Ph.D. pushed past security; another followed and then a handful more. Suddenly someone shouted “Everybody run” and, in an instant, some of the smartest people on the planet turned into a pack of wild animals.

Behaviour can be contagious. A random drop in the price of a stock can cause a rapid sell-off that leads to the stock crashing. If you see someone yawn, or even read the word “yawn,” you are more likely to yawn yourself in the following minutes. When a group of people observe someone else’s behaviour and decide to copy it, social psychologists refer to this as an “information cascade.” Information cascades can be both good and bad. If the person sitting next to you in class is a straight-A student and she takes down a note you ignored, it might be a wise idea to jot it down as well. Cascades become dangerous, however, when they are driven by misinformation.

Last year, nearly 10,000 people in the U.S. died from swine flu. At first glance, this is a frightening number. When reported by the media, it caused a run on the vaccine at many doctors’ offices across the U.S. and Canada. But this particular information was irrational: more than 40,000 people die in the United States each year from the regular flu – an important piece of information that, if circulated with the swine flu death total, might have prevented unnecessary panic.

Back in 2005, waiting to see the Dalai Lama, I believed the rumour that there wouldn’t be enough room. And when someone shouted “Everybody run,” I joined the pack, straight past security into the massive lecture hall, which, as it turned out, was nearly empty and easily seated everyone that had come to see the show.

Daniel Lametti’s column will be back again in three weeks. Writing to him is also contagious. Try it: thesplitbrain@mcgilldaily.com.

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The afternoon of the date arrived, and I was, so to speak, on – she laughed at my jokes, I made insightful comments about modern art, and, in my favourite pair of skinny jeans, I looked great. By the end of the date, though, I had started to develop a sinking feeling. The usual signs of romantic interest – suggestive glances, unnecessary body contact, sloppy make-outs – were missing, and I went home that evening unsure if we’d go out again.

And then, two days later, while sitting in a coffee shop working on a piece for The Daily, she texted me. My heart soared – that is, until I actually read her text and realized that it made little sense. It turned out she had confused my number with that of another “Dan”; she had never meant to text me. Ouch. Leaving half an Americano on the table and my column for the week unfinished, I sulked home feeling like I’d been punched in the gut, my stomach firmly lodged in my throat.

Rejection. Like everyone, I’ve experienced it and I’ve even dished it out (sorry, Caroline from third year…). We say that it hurts, but does it actually hurt – does the brain experience the emotional pain of rejection in the same way that it experiences physical pain? Six years ago, neuroscientists working at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) decided to find out.

To simulate rejection in the lab, the UCLA scientists had test subjects play a game of virtual ball toss. While having their brains scanned and looking at a computer screen, a test subject had to pass a blip on the screen – the “ball” – to one of two characters also on the display. Crucially, the subject was told that the actions of the characters – whether they passed the ball back to the subject, or between themselves – were controlled by two other test subjects in a separate room, also having their brains scanned.

In reality, though, there were no other test subjects. A computer controlled the other characters, and after a few minutes of playing fairly, it abruptly stopped passing the ball back to the subject. The subject was then forced to sit and watch the characters on the display gleefully pass the ball between themselves without ever passing it back – in other words, laboratory-style rejection.

When the game made subjects feel rejected, the scanner found that neurons in an area of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACG, fired.

If you could push your hands through the middle top of your skull, peeling apart the two lobes of your brain, a bulbous structure, almost in the middle of your head, would pop out; that would be the ACG.

The ACG plays a role in processing emotion and empathy and, as a 1998 study confirmed in dramatic fashion by shooting lasers at subjects, it also fires neurons when you experience physical pain. The UCLA scientists concluded that, from the brain’s standpoint, there is little difference between physical pain and emotional pain.

If the brain doesn’t distinguish between physical pain and emotional pain, then those of us who have a high tolerance for one must also have a high tolerance for the other. So, before I go on my next date, perhaps all I need are a few boxing lessons.

You can email Daniel Lametti at thesplitbrain@mcgilldaily.com. You might never hear back from him though, so prepare yourself now for the pain.

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It was a reasoned introduction, but 30 seconds after Ruba took the stage, he was suddenly interrupted by a group of protesters. Shouts of “Please go” echoed through the room in sync with the pounding of fists on desks. Ruba’s supporters began to get upset; a man in the audience compared the disrupters to the Hitler Youth. Campus security was called first, followed by the police. In the end, the talk was cancelled, two protestors were arrested, and McGill came off looking like a black hole for free speech. What the hell happened?
Admittedly, the title of Ruba’s talk – “Echoes of the Holocaust” – sounded a little crazy, if not offensive. But even if Ruba had been giving a less controversial anti-abortion talk, does debating such a controversial topic in an environment of opinionated students actually lead to “thoughtful consideration” as Fohl and others had hoped?
In 1978, Mark Lepper, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, ran an experiment to see if he could change the opinions that Stanford students held on the death penalty. Lepper surveyed a random sample of undergraduates and chose 24 that were strongly in favour of capital punishment and 24 that were strongly opposed to it. He then presented each of the 48 students with two written statements. The first detailed a study showing that murder rates were lower in states that had the death penalty; the second detailed a different study showing that murder rates were actually higher in states that had the death penalty.

Given such conflicting information, one might predict that the students’ extreme views on the death penalty would be moderated, but this is not what Lepper found. After reading the statements, those that favoured the death penalty before were now more in favour of it, and those that opposed the death penalty before were now even more opposed to it: views had become more extreme, not less. Lepper concluded that the students simply believed information that confirmed what they already thought and ignored everything else.

A 2004 study used brain imaging to examine Lepper’s finding, dubbed “motivated reasoning,” in more detail. Scientists at Emory University in Georgia put committed Republicans and Democrats in a brain scanner and presented them with information that showed then-Republican president George W. Bush and Democratic senator John Kerry committing acts of hypocrisy – a Bush quote, for instance, extolling America’s troops, followed by the revelation that on the same day he cut health benefits to thousands of war veterans.

While still running the brain scanner, the scientists then asked each subject what they thought about the two politicians. Surprise, surprise – the Democrats labelled George Bush a hypocrite while excusing John Kerry’s actions, and the Republicans labelled John Kerry a hypocrite while excusing George Bush’s actions.

What the brain scanner found, though, was more interesting. When the subjects were calling the politician they disliked a hypocrite, brain regions associated with normal reasoning lit up. But when they were excusing the hypocritical actions of the politician they favoured, brain regions associated with both reasoning and strong emotions lit up. The scanner had caught them in the act: when it came time to thoughtfully consider information that went against what they believed in, the subjects simply couldn’t – their reasoning was coloured by emotion.

Daniel Lametti’s column will be back again in two weeks. In the meantime, send extremely emotionally-invested opinions only to thesplitbrain@mcgilldaily.com.

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The case went to trial in 1989. Convinced by his lawyer that he would be locked up for a long time based on the mother’s testimony, Hanemaayer pled guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence. Hanemaayer, though, was innocent. The crime was actually committed by Paul Bernardo, Canada’s most notorious serial killer. Hanemaayer served two years in prison, losing his wife and job in the process. It wasn’t until 2008 that his name was finally cleared. The thing is, Anthony Hanemaayer looks nothing like Paul Bernardo. Hanemaayer has straight, wire-thin blonde hair, while Bernardo has thick, curly, brown hair. But the victim’s mother was convinced the attacker was Hanemaayer. How could she have been so wrong?
The Hanemaayer case is not the only example of eyewitness testimony gone wrong. Of the 244 exonerations that occurred in the United States since courts began allowing DNA evidence (17 of which were prisoners on death row), faulty eyewitness testimony played a role in 74 per cent of the original convictions. Is it possible that our memories are that bad? Well, as it turns out, yes – and a recent breakthrough in our understanding of memories helps explain why.

Nine years ago, a post doc at NYU named Karim Nader ran an experiment that his supervisor at the time told him would surely fail. First, he conditioned a rat to associate the sound of a bell with an electric shock. That is, he rang a bell just before delivering a mild jolt to the rat’s foot. After several bell-shock pairings, the rat soon remembered that the bell was followed by a shock and it began to freeze in fear at the bell’s ring. Nader then injected anisomycin, a drug that stops the construction of new neural connections, into an area of the rat’s brain where he thought the memory might be stored. He found that if the drug was injected just after the bell rang, while the rat was in the process of remembering that the bell signaled a shock, the memory of the fearful association remarkably vanished – poof! Gone. At the sound of the bell, the rat no longer froze in fear. Nader’s experiment provided the first evidence that the neural connections that store memories have to be rebuilt every single time they are remembered. And during rebuilding, memories can be altered or even erased.

Nader is now a professor in the psychology department here at McGill. An interesting aspect of his work is its ability to explain why eyewitness testimony is, at best, unreliable. Going back to the case of Anthony Hanemaayer, one can imagine the victim’s mother being asked by the police to recount the image of her daughter’s attacker over and over again. Each time she recalled the assault, the neural connections in her brain that stored the memory of the attacker’s face had to be rebuilt and thus became susceptible to alteration. Soon, the unfamiliar face of Paul Bernardo morphed into the face of Anthony Hanemaayer, a man she’d seen before around her neighbourhood.

No one is asked to remember an event more often than an eyewitness, but Nader’s discovery tells us that the most accurate memory is the one least remembered.

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While he was lying in his death bed one day, wrote William, a neurosurgeon named Landy came to visit him with a proposal: when William dies, Landy wants to remove his brain from his body and, by attaching the appropriate veins and arteries to an artificial heart, keep it “alive,” floating in a white basin of saline solution. At first, William thinks the idea is crazy – why would he want his brain kept alive if he cannot talk, hear, see, or feel? “We’ll leave one eyeball attached,” retorts Landy, emphasizing that, as simply a brain and an eyeball, William will have few sensory distractions and thus great clarity of thought.

William is eventually convinced, and at the end of the letter he leaves instructions for Mary to come visit him in Landy’s laboratory. Without spoiling the rest of the story, I’ll simply say that Mary does go to visit her husband in his basin and, in classic Dahl fashion, the ending has a disturbing twist. After reading the story this past weekend, the idea of keeping a dissected brain alive had piqued my interest and so I decided to research the topic. As it turns out, the experiment has been done – not with humans, but with monkeys.

In 1963, Dr. Robert J. White, a neurosurgeon at the Cleveland Metropolitan Hospital, removed the brains of several monkeys and attached them to artificial circulatory systems. In the experiment, used blood dripped from the isolated monkey brain into an oxygenator; from the oxygenator it ran through a pump that pushed it back into the brain via tubes connected to the monkey’s carotid arteries – the main arteries that supply the brain with blood. With the oxygenator and pump humming along, the exposed brain – remarkably – appeared to show signs of life. That is, electrodes placed on the brain’s surface recorded signs of neural activity.

Of course, since brains on their own have no way to communicate with the outside world, White couldn’t tell whether they were actually conscious. To test this, in 1970, he removed the entire head of one monkey and attached it to the body of another monkey. “It woke up and almost bit me,” White said in an interview. “It moved the muscles in its face. It blinked its eyes. It chewed on pencils.” Or, in the words of Mary Shelley, “It was alive!”

In 2001, White repeated the experiment and showed that the transplanted head was not only conscious, but that it could see, hear, taste, and smell. “This is medical technology run completely mad,” an enraged scientist reported to the BBC in 2001 when asked about White’s experiment.

These days, White, now 84 and retired, spends his time drinking Diet Coke in a Cleveland McDonald’s, sharing his stories of transplanting monkey brains with anyone who is willing to listen. A surprise ending to an illustrious scientific career – an ending that not even Roald Dahl would’ve have guessed.

Daniel’s column will appear every other week. Send your final death-bed instructions to thesplitbrain@mcgilldaily.com. Don’t worry, he’ll leave one eyeball attached.

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For students at McGill, it’s not exactly unusual for there to be more roommates in an apartment than there are available bedrooms. With the average rent of a one-bedroom apartment close to campus almost $800 a month, cordoning off a living room with a sheet to create a third bedroom or having a friend chip in a few extra bucks to crash on a couch can save money. Of course, to really save money, you may have to put up with some less-than-appealing living conditions.

Compared to Leung’s set up, recent McGill graduate Merry Maclellan had it rough: she slept on a friend’s couch last semester in a small two-bedroom apartment on Rue Prince-Arthur, while working for almost nothing in an animal hospital. She shared the room with a road pylon, a miniature trampoline, and a litter box that belonged to an orange cat named Meowla. “It didn’t really smell,” said Maclellan, about the litter box, “but maybe the entire apartment just smelled.”

For the four months that Maclellan slept on the couch, which was blue and “really comfy,” she paid $200 a month to the apartment’s original two roommates, and split utilities with them. The arrangement, she explained, worked remarkably well because their schedules were quite similar. “I never got woken up,” she said. “We went to bed at the same time and woke up at the same time every day.”

Still, there are clearly some problems with sleeping in a living room, “hooking up” being one of the more obvious ones. “You have to go to their house,” explained Maclellan, – although, in some situations, this technique is simply impossible. “When someone was in town visiting, there was concern about what was going to happen,” she said, “but then there was just a hotel room involved.”

Fifth year student Steve Reiss found himself in the exact opposite situation when he hosted a friend, recent McGill graduate Nick Fishbane, for almost five months last year in the living room of his house on Rue Drolet. According to Reiss, hosting a living room sleeper is not a problem, provided you have enough space to keep your guest – and all of their stuff – out of the way.

The house Reiss shares with four roommates, nicknamed the “Bug Poem,” boasts two bathrooms, a finished basement, and a pyramid of empty beer cases that rises nearly six feet tall. “See that nook between the couches behind the bar?” Reiss said, pointing to a cube of space no bigger than a small TV at the intersection of two dilapidated couches. “That corner was all Fishbane’s shit, so it was out of the way for us and we didn’t really care.”

Fishbane, who Reiss described as being prone to “losing money like it was fucking water,” chipped in for utilities and bought a case of beer for the occupants of the house at the end of each month. And if not for one slight incident, when a roommate discovered that Fishbane had been secretly sleeping in his bed while he was away, Reiss said his friend’s stay on his couch was relatively problem- free.

“Sleeping on a couch wouldn’t be my first choice,” said Reiss, “but if times were tough, I would probably do it. You’d have to find someone to hook up with regularly though.”

For those students that want to save money but don’t really want to go through the hassle of sleeping on a friend’s couch, or even renting a derelict apartment, there is a third option. Last spring, a McGill master’s student named Thomas (he asked that his full name not be printed) stored all of his belongings in a friend’s basement, gave up his apartment, and slept on Mont Royal for nearly four months.

“The first few times it rained, I got pretty soaked,” said Thomas, who slept on a hammock that he made out of rope and a eight-foot piece of cloth. Each day he would set up camp around sunset and wake up at sunrise, being sure to pack up his hammock early enough to avoid detection – sleeping on Mont Royal is, of course, illegal.

“On the east side of the mountain,” he said, “there’s a nice view to wake up to: you see the sun rising over the Plateau.”

Throughout his months living on the mountain, Thomas estimated that he spent about $400 a month – total. “I was eating in restaurants all the time because I couldn’t cook,” he said, “so it’s cheaper than having an apartment but not that much cheaper.”

In fact, Thomas claims that his motivation for sleeping on the mountain was not to save money. In May of last year, with the lease on his apartment coming to an end, he wanted to have enough time to look for a new place without “feeling rushed.” He reasoned that he’d camp on the mountain until July, leaving him two months to find a new apartment.

“By June, I didn’t care any more,” he said, “and kept on putting the apartment search off.” He eventually found an apartment in September, two weeks into the school year. And while camping on the mountain may not be for everyone, Thomas felt some nostalgia for his experience last year: he has since erected his hammock on his apartment’s balcony.

The post Taking life one couch at a time appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“It’s called Live-in for Literacy,” explained Daniel, a fourth-year Human Relations and Religion student at Concordia. Students live in a university library for ten days to raise money for education in developing countries.

Since the fundraiser began at Queen’s University four years ago, Live-in for Literacy has raised $50,000. The money has gone toward building computer labs in Cambodia and libraries in Nepal.

This year, seven Canadian university libraries are housing two students each until the end of the fundraiser today at 1 p.m. The students hope to raise $40,000 for the construction of nine libraries in India.

Daniel started by sharing a tent in the library foyer with third-year Concordia student Neeka Fedyshyn, but she soon decided to sleep on an adjacent couch because it was more comfortable.

“It was impossible to sleep on the floor,” she said, looking a little tired.

Fedyshyn, who had brought in a cot from home, stayed in the tent. Beside the tent, two large suitcases overflowed with clothes and schoolwork, while a rope barrier just in front of the suitcases doubled as a clothesline.

As the Concordia team explained, despite the positive reaction to the fundraiser, there were a few misunderstandings.

“One girl walked past, like, ten times,” said Daniel.

The hardest challenge, however, was missing a week’s worth of classes.

“The constant interruption makes it difficult to study,” said Daniel. “But one of my professors stopped by and donated $20 and said, ‘Don’t worry about your assignments.’”

According to the event’s rules, participants are only allowed to leave the library for five minutes each hour, but are allowed to accumulate unused breaks, leaving enough free time to run to the gym in the morning and shower.

The library allowed them to bring in a small fridge to hold food – most of which had been donated by friends. In the evening, when the building was closed, they got their exercise.

“Yesterday we were running up and down the stairs and doing sprints around the stacks,” said Daniel.

Still, the students didn’t find it that tough.

“I would do this week after week,” said Fedyshyn.

Donations can still be made at liveinforliteracy.com.

The post Students camp out for literacy appeared first on The McGill Daily.

When waking at night with a full bladder, a true winter camper will opt to urinate into a bottle and then hug the warm vessel of urine against her chest as she drifts back to sleep. You see, precious body heat – heat that might stop your fingers and toes from freezing as you sleep – will be used to keep any urine in your bladder at body temperature. Nalgenes, with their large volume and extra-wide lid, work best in these situations.

I know this because I overheard two members of the McGill Outdoors Club (MOC) discussing just such a situation as I sat in the back of a station wagon en route to the Adirondacks for a weekend of winter camping – zipperless winter camping.

I first contacted the MOC in the middle of November. I wanted to write a story on wilderness survival and, knowing nothing about the topic (I hadn’t been camping since grade school), I figured that an outdoors club might be a good place to start.

Sasan Ghinani, a second year Masters student and MOC executive, replied to my email: In a week’s time he’d be leading a trip to New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and he had saved me a spot. But the trip, he explained, had a twist. Apparently, the MOC has a few longstanding traditions. One tradition has members hike up Mount Marcy, the highest peak in New York State, with a four-piece band in tow. Another has canoeists paddle through ice on Lake Saranac, shortly after the winter’s first freeze. And one of the more storied MOC traditions – the trip Ghinani wanted me to come on – involves winter camping without the use of zippers: no tents, no sleeping bags, no jackets, no fancy Mountain Equipment Co-op backpacks.

Three days after receiving Ghinani’s email, I make my way to a MOC meeting on the third floor of the Shatner building; I’m there to get more information on the zipperless trip and to decide whether I actually want to go. Several dozen students have shown up and, to my dismay, they all look much more equipped to deal with the outdoors than I do. In contrast to my boat shoes, everyone seems to be wearing serious hiking boots. Nalgenes, cargo pants, and extraordinarily large backpacks also appear quite popular. In fact, most of the students seem ready to jump up and go camping that instant. And as I take a seat in the crowd, I start to wonder if I’m in over my head. Ghinani’s opener does not reassure me.

“People have been dropping out like flies,” he says, referring to the trip. Everyone laughs but me.

Bring blankets, Ghinani says – “all the blankets you own.” And clothes – “more clothes than you think you can carry.” And boots – “winter boots are essential.”

I glance down at my boat shoes. I’d have to borrow a pair of boots. The trip costs $40. But The Daily had agreed to pay. My excuses are running out. Plus, camping without zippers, how bad could it be? I hand Ghinani two twenties and walk out.

And thus, the following Saturday, having just learned that I may have to spend the night with a bottle of urine pressed against my chest, I step out of a Ford Taurus, and am greeted by 4,000 foot mountains covered in several feet of snow.

Preparing to camp without zippers had proven difficult – everything has a fucking zipper. Even the six MOC members who had decided to come on the trip had found it challenging. And waiting beside our cars for Ghinani to return from the ranger’s hut, in subzero weather, jacketless, layered in sweaters, and carrying reusable grocery bags stuffed with blankets, well, we look like a bunch of amateurs. The park ranger seems to agree.

Ghinani had planned for us to hike Algonquin Peak – the second highest peak in New York, at 5,114 feet. After the hike, we would build a shelter and a campfire to, presumably, keep us alive during the night. That was the plan, at least, until he emerges from the ranger’s hut with a disappointed look on his face.

The ranger, upon observing our ragtag apparel and lack of appropriate hiking gear, was not going to allow us to climb Algonquin Peak. And in another blow, we’re told that it’s against state law to build a campfire in the park. (We later discover that we had mistakenly driven to the wrong campsite. A private facility, five minutes up the road, allows campfires).

By this point, I’m starting to wonder if going on the trip was a big mistake. I glance over at Ghinani, who, surprisingly, doesn’t seem too worried. In fact, he’s convinced the ranger to let us climb a smaller, less challenging, peak – Mount Phelps, a tame 4,161 feet – and he’s adamant that we can survive the night without a campfire. I’m not as sure.

Ghinani, who is built like a tree trunk and sports a pair of overly large and well-groomed sideburns, is no stranger to taking risks in the wild. Once, while paddling in whitewater, he came upon a canoe flipped over, pinned against a tree.

“Strainers are trees that fall into the river,” he told me, “and if your canoe hits one, the pressure of the water and the river pins you down there. That’s how most canoeists die.”

Assuming the worst, he dove into the freezing water to search for dead bodies. He didn’t find any, but he decided to stay in the river to remove both the canoe and the tree. “Nobody wanted to do the dangerous parts,” he said, “so I volunteered.” He was in the water for more than an hour and came out with hypothermia. “I was delirious,” he said, “I didn’t know my name.”

Ghinani is the definition of an altruist. I ran into him once at the gym and, in between sets on the bench press, he mentioned that he wasn’t doing cardio that day because he’d spent the past half hour pushing cars stuck in the snow up Docteur-Penfield.

So as we depart from the rangers’ station, en route to our campsite, I’m somewhat reassured by the thought that if anything bad does happen in the woods, Ghinani will at least be there to throw me over his shoulder and carry me to safety.

By the time we reach the campsite and drop off our gear, the sun has passed the midway point in the sky and we have but a few hours to ascend Mount Phelps and make it back to camp before dark. With this in mind, we push ourselves up the icy trail, stopping only briefly to take in the magnificent views and to gulp water.

Mount Phelps, located in the northeast of New York State, is part of 46 mountains that are collectively known as the Adirondack “High Peaks.” All but four are greater than 4,000 feet. To date, more than 6,000 people have climbed all 46 of the Peaks. Those that achieve this feat are entitled to membership in the “Adirondack 46ers” and a commemorative badge.

As we approach the top of Mount Phelps, breathless from a final scramble up a particularly icy slope, the trees give way to a clearing that provides a panoramic view of the area. White Face, the site of the alpine events in the 1980 Winter Olympics, is to the North; Mount Marcy, the highest of the High Peaks, towers over us to the South; and Algonquin Peak, the forbidden fruit, the sun setting behind its back, glares at us from the West.

“A picture is never as good as the real thing,” Ghinani offers, staring off into the horizon. We snap a few photos, pass around a granola bar, and head down the trail, determined to make it back to camp before dark.

Having just climbed a mountain, the mood of the group on the way down is noticeably upbeat. The MOC members joke about different techniques for shitting in the woods (the “friendship lean” involves two people and a great deal of trust), while I skip along beside the group, gleefully scribbling notes.

I’m starting to understand why people do these things – climb mountains, that is. Hiking a mountain gives one an intense adrenaline rush. In fact, I’m so wired that as we approach our campsite, with the sun slipping behind the mountains and the temperature rapidly dropping, I’ve completely forgotten that the trip is far from over – we still have to spend a night outdoors, in subzero weather, without tents, sleeping bags, or a fire.

Hypothermia progresses in six stages. Stages one and two are characterized by a decrease in blood flow to the non-essential organs, an aching in the fingers and toes, and uncontrollable contractions in the muscles of the body, or shivering, in an attempt to generate heat. In stages three and four blood flow to the brain is greatly decreased, decision-making becomes impaired, and fine motor skills are lost. By stage five, body temperature has typically dropped by more than seven degrees. At this point most people lose consciousness. Stage six is death.

Standing by our campsite, shivering, wondering when I would enter stage three, I start to worry that I might not make it through the night. My feet, which had gotten wet during the climb, are especially cold. I ask Ghinani if he has a backup plan in case things get worse.

“There are ways of keeping warm,” he says. “Body heat will keep you so warm, and if it comes down to it, and you’re cold, fuck, get down and give me ten pushups. It actually helps a lot.” He pauses. “If your feet are completely frozen and you think they’re going to fall off, you take your feet and you put them – I mean, it sucks for the other person – but you put your feet inside a person’s jacket, on their stomach.” Without a fire, Ghinani explains, this is really the only way to defrost cold feet in the bush.

Unable to imagine myself shoeless, feet pressed against Ghinani’s burly stomach, I opt to put on three pairs of socks and run laps around the campsite.

When spending a winter’s night in the bush, a quinzhee, or hollowed-out mound of snow, provides the best possible shelter. Quinzhees are entirely windproof, and with body heat and a candle the inside can reach two or three degrees Celcius. The downside of a quinzhee is that they take four or five hours to construct and are typically only big enough for a couple of people.

Winter camping with a large group usually calls for tents. Or, if you’re moronic enough to go camping without zippers, several tarps and a roll of twine can be used to construct a tent-like shelter. And, as I watch, this is exactly what Ghinani and first year student Marc Kojima proceed to do.

Kojima places a tarp on the snow to form a ground sheet while Ghinani runs twine between two adjacent trees. Over the line they drape a second tarp, stretching it over the ground sheet and tacking its end into the snow. It looks like a wedge of cheese. They call it an A-frame. I hope it will keep me alive that night.

Several camping stoves are lit and dinner is prepared. The food brings a feeling of warmth to the group, and the mood, which had fallen with the disappearance of the sun, lightens. As we sit in a circle, cradling cups of hot chocolate, headlamps shining into each others’ eyes, the survival stories start to come out.

“I’ve done 72 hours with nothing,” says fourth year student Chloe Dumouchel-Fournier. “You’re thrown in the woods and you have to build a shelter. I was unlucky and had pouring rain for 24 of the 72 hours.”

“Did you ever fast on a solo?” asks third year student Anya Bernton. Nobody had. Berton had been on a three-day solo and, given almost no provisions, she decided to fast for the duration of the trip. “After you start eating again,” she explains, “you barf a lot.”

“I did a solo,” Ghinani chimes in, “but mine was completely different than you guys.” Dropped off on an island, in the middle of nowhere, free from society’s watchful eyes, Ghinani decided to spend 48 hours in the nude.

“So I’m lying naked on my island,” he continues, “on a rock, right by the shore, and randomly there was another group of canoeists – I don’t know, teenage kids. And you could imagine how weird this looks: You’re canoeing in the wilderness for nine days, and on the ninth day you see a naked guy on an island.” We all laugh.

Ghinani’s story, although not really about survival, seems to top them all.

For the night’s sleep, we’d trucked 22 blankets into the woods. These included a queen-sized duvet and a sleeping bag that Ghinani had ceremoniously cut the zippers off of the night before. Before retiring for the evening I cocoon myself in three of the blankets. Underneath, I’m wearing three wool sweaters, two pairs of fleece pants, three pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, and a wool toque. I wrap another wool sweater around my feet, for good measure, and worm my way into the middle of the A-frame. I’m optimistic about my heat situation: I’m wrapped in a fucking sheep. How could I get cold?

I wake up three hours later – freezing. An icicle of drool has formed at the side of my mouth, and I can’t feel my toes. Stage six immediately comes to mind. I pull my toque over my face, bring my knees up to my chest and curl into a fetal position. I don’t move, or sleep, for another five hours. Thankfully, I never have to pee.

The next morning we find out that the temperature in the High Peaks had dropped to -15ºC during the night. In fact, before going to sleep we’d come across two campers, just down the trail from us, who had full zippered gear and a lean-to to sleep in, but had still broken the rules and made a fire. “We’re fucking cold,” one complained. They weren’t at their campsite in the morning. It looked like they had bailed during the night. I was pretty cold, and I hadn’t slept very much, but at least I’d stuck it out till the morning.

Two weeks later, back in Montreal, I meet up with Ghinani at Thomson House for a beer. We start talking about Chris McCandless, a college grad who wandered into the wilds of Alaska in an attempt to escape society. After several months in the bush, he ended up dying of starvation. McCandless’s death has since been made famous by the 1996 Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild and the 2008 movie of the same name.

“McCandless greatly underestimated nature,” says Ghinani, “which you should never do. The idea is romantic – being outside in the wilderness on your own. I can see eye-to-eye with him on that for sure. I can see his reasoning about wanting to go into the woods to escape society,” he says. “But in order to do that you have to be prepared. You have to know what you’re doing and how to do it.”

And what about our trip, I ask, remembering the high of the mountain climb and the low of the sleepless, freezing cold night. How did he think it went?

“Flawless,” he replies.

The post Out Cold appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In the department of Mechanical Engineering, Radziszewski’s robot design competition, held on a recent Friday afternoon, is a serious affair, and not just because his students are being graded. The rules of the contest are taken from a similar event run each year by the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME). And the McGill team that finishes at the top of Radziszewski’s class has a chance to compete at the ASME regional competition in the spring.

“This year’s competition is called ‘Mars Rocks,’” said Radziszewski.

Teams build a remotely controlled vehicle that is able to traverse obstacles (pieces of wood placed on the floor), collect rocks (crumpled pieces of tinfoil), deposit the rocks in a target (a bulls-eye marked on the floor with tape), and then park. All within four minutes, he explained.

At the event, an overhead projected the scores onto a wall. They were calculated from a simple algorithm (S = å(R*t) +1000P – W – A – 1000T – 5s) provided by ASME; some teams had faired better than others. Only a few of the groups had managed to place multiple rocks in the target and one unfortunate group had a score of negative 6844. Even so, this year the competition to qualify for regionals was greater than ever. One team arrived in the morning to discover that their robot’s “servo” had mysteriously seized during the night. They frantically ordered a part from robotshop.ca; it was delivered by courier and arrived just in time. Another team brought in a ringer: a brother, who makes seismographs for a living, and is apparently a “soldering expert,” drove in from Ottawa to help.

“Good fucking job, eh,” a student from Radziszewski’s class remarked as a teaching assistant hovering over the course with a stopwatch signaled time.

“Yo,” his teammate replied, “that was fast.”

Their group – “Team 2” – had placed five rocks in the target area, three more than the next closest group, putting them several thousand points ahead of the competition.

Third year student Chris Wong’s group – “Team 17” – had yet to compete. To save on weight, they had gambled on their robot’s design: instead of joining the wheels together with metal tank treads, like the majority of the other teams, they had simply used a thick elastic band. “Treads are more reliable,” Wong admitted. But the elastics ensured that their robot weighed less than Team 2’s, meaning that they could win the contest simply by placing the same number of rocks on target.

The crowd, which had dispersed throughout the McConnell lobby while Radziszewski calculated Team 2’s score, surged toward the line of yellow caution tape surrounding the course as Wong readied his group’s robot.

With a squeal of rubber on ceramic, and the whirr of an electric engine, the robot was off, Wong methodically working the joystick while his teammates fed him instructions.

As the robot slowly moved around the course gathering rocks, it quickly became clear that Team 17 had built a contender. With time to spare, they were on track to match Team 2’s count and maybe even get the “parking bonus” – a 1,000 point reward for parking the robot in the same spot it started. Crucially, the elastic band gamble appeared to be working; not only were the bands holding up, but they were gripping the wooden obstacles better than the other teams’ tank treads, powering the vehicle over the strewn wood to grab rocks that most teams couldn’t reach.

With 20 seconds left Team 17’s robot had five rocks placed and Wong appeared to be steering the vehicle towards a sixth. “Leave it,” his teammate shouted, “get the bonus!”

The crowd, now counting down with the clock – “ten, nine, eight” – leaned in over the caution tape – “seven, six, five” – as the robot slowly crawled toward its parking space – “four, three, two” – and with a flick of Wong’s thumb, performed a perfect parallel park just as the count reached “one.”

A roar erupted from the crowd. Team 17 exchanged high fives. And Radziszewski, with a grin on his face, quickly added Team 17’s score to those already projected on the wall. This year’s contest had a new leader.

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