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Human Behavior

Psychology: An introduction to the science of human behavior

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: January 13, 2020.

Why do we do the things we do? Why do some people like hot chocolate while others prefer coffee? Why do some live to surf while others would rather stay home and read a book? How can some of us puta name to every single person we've ever met while others struggleeven to remember our own telephone number? Why do some peoplealways seem happy and successful while others see no choice but toend their painful lives in suicide? These are the sorts of questionswe can try to answer through psychology: the science of humanbehavior. In this short article, we'll briefly explore the differentbranches of psychology and get a quick overview of the kinds ofthings psychologists do.

Photo: Everything you do, think, and feel involves your brain, shownhere as a 3D-printed model. Understanding how the brain works, how it gives rise to the mind, and why it makes us do the things we do is the prime goal of psychology. Photo courtesy of Nevit Dilmen, NIH 3D Print Exchange, National Institutes of Health, published on Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence.

We can divide psychology into two big areas called experimental psychology and social psychology.

Of course, we can study social psychology in a lab using rigorousexperiments, just as we can carry out meticulous experiments in the real world; the division I've drawn between experimental and socialpsychology is arbitrary and artificial, but it reflects the waypsychology is often taught in schools and colleges, and how it'swritten up in textbooks and scientific papers. The reason for that islargely historical: in the late 19th-century, when psychology wasstill a very new field, psychologists were keen to be taken seriouslyas scientists, so they tried to adopt scientific methods to cloak thethings they studied in respectability. To this day, there's a certainstigma attached to social psychology and sociology (the study of howindividuals and groups behave in society); whether fairly or not,some people see them as soft sciences lacking academic rigor. AtCambridge University in England, for example, the psychologydepartment still calls itself the "Department of ExperimentalPsychology" and its curriculum includes relatively little socialpsychology.

Humans are the most complex of all the animals, which explains whypsychology is such a vast subject. Within the psychology departmentof a typical university, you'll find people working in a huge rangeof different areas. There are people who study perception (such ashow our eyes and ears work), learning (how we develop as children andhow we make sense of the world as adults), memory (why we rememberand how we forget), language, thinking, and reasoning. While somepsychologists study "normal" human behavior, others specialize in"abnormal" psychology, which includes how people behave whentheir brains are damaged or degenerate over time and what causespsychiatric disorders. Social psychologists study everything from thebest way to design a computer mouse to whether we can really trustthe evidence we get from people who witness crimes. Let's look at thevarious branches of psychology in turn, in a bit more detail.

You can think of people as living machines who receive information fromthe world, process it in various ways, and then act on it. In themid-20 century, it was fashionable to talk about animals (includingpeople) receiving a stimulus through their senses (maybe seeing achocolate-chip cookie appearing in front of you), which then led tosome kind of response (salivating and reaching out); according to aschool of thought known as behaviorism, human behavior was allabout the way a certain stimulus produced an appropriate response(and exactly what went on inside the brain to make the connectionwasn't thought to be especially important: behaviorism was literally"mindless"). Since the 1960s and 1970s, psychologists have tendedto view the human brain as a kind of computer, taking in informationas "input," processing and storing it in various ways, and thenproducing "output" (some kind of visible behavior); this approachis known as cognitive psychology and we'll consider it again alittle later. However you react to the world, your behavior usuallystarts with sensory perception: the way your five main senses(vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste), plus other, lesser-knownsensory abilities such as proprioception (your sense of where yourlimbs are and how your body is moving), feed information into yourbrain.

Photo: A huge part of your brain is devoted to processing information gathered by your eyes.

For most people, vision is easily the most important sense, closelyfollowed by hearing; that also explains why perceptual psychologistshave traditionally devoted most effort to studying vision, closelyfollowed by hearing (comparatively speaking, the other senses havebarely been explored at all). Most of us assume that we see with oureyes, but it's far more accurate to say that we see with our eyes andour brains. While we can't see without our eyes, it's also true thatour brains carry out a huge amount of processing on the sensoryimpressions they receiveand in all kinds of interesting ways. Onevery obvious example is that we see things in three dimensions usingseparate, two-dimensional images that our brain fuses together fromour two eyes. But we also see things based on what we expect to see,which is what causes most of the things we call optical illusions;for example, we see faces in clouds because our brains try to makesense of the world very quickly based on the things we've seen in thepast (an awful lot of faces), the things we expect to see in thefuture (an awful lot more faces), and the things that matter most tous (the faces of people we love, work with, and have to interactwith). We can get some idea of just how complex the human visualsystem is by considering how little progress computer scientists androbot engineers have made designing machines that can "see" inanything like the same way. Why are our own brains so good at seeing?It's estimated that something like 30 percent of the cortex (the outer and,in evolutionary terms, "newest" part of the human brain) is devoted to vision. That's a veryimpressive illustration of the sheer complexity of making sense ofthe world entirely by studying light rays that enter two big holes inyour head.

One of the things that marks out humans from "lesser" creatures is ourability to make sense of our environment and learn from it. It'sobviously untrue to suggest that humans are the only creatures thatlearn things: you can teach a chimpanzee to use a symbolic language,you can train a dog not to defecate on your carpet, a rat willquickly learn to run through a maze to reach a food reward, and evena simple sea-slug can learna couple of basic tricks.

Learning goes hand-in-hand with survival, but it's a surprisingly large andcomplex subject. At one end of the spectrum, psychologists study theprocess of conditioning, which is how animals come toassociate a particular stimulus with a certain response. One ofthe first people to look into this was Russian scientistIvan Pavlov(18491936), who famously rang a bell when he delivered food to his dogs; eventually,he found the dogs would salivate simply when he rang the bell, evenwhen there was no food around, because they'd been conditionedto associate salivating with the sound of the bell. When behaviorismwas fashionable, some psychologists thought all kinds of complexhuman behavior might be broken down into patterns of stimulusand response. That's why, for example, you often see attempts toblame violence on TV and in the movies for wider violence in society.Now we know complex human behavior is much more than a simpleknee-jerk reflex from stimulus to response.

One of the great things about psychology, which differentiates it from oldersciences such as physics and chemistry, is that its relevance toeveryday life is often more immediate and apparent. One branch of thepsychology of learning is called developmental psychology andit concerns how babies develop into children and adults: for example,how they learn language, how they turn specific, concrete examples ofthings they see around them into much more general, abstractprinciples (the rules by which we have to live to survive), and therelative importance of "nature" (genetic factorsthings we'reborn with) and "nurture" (environmental factorsthings we'retaught and learn). Developmental psychology has played a huge role inpedagogy and the scientific, theoretical approach to education; it's also afascinating subject to study if you're a parent.

Photo: Mirror neurons? Sometimes we mimic one another's behavioral unconsciously, such as when two friends stand next to one another and, quite unawares, adopt exactly the same posture. Psychologists think our brains contain "mirror neurons," which are activated both when we do things and when we see other people doing those things. That encourages us to copy other people's behavior, and possibly explains how we feel empathy with others. Photo by Kasey Close courtesy of US Navy.

Thousands of years ago, before humans started to create fixed settlements anddeveloped agriculture, we lived much like other animals andday-to-day survival was our only preoccupation. How different thingsare now. Although the world's poorest people still experience life asa horrible daily battle to survive, most of us, thankfully, get tolead lives that alternate between (reasonably tolerable) work and(extremely tolerable) pleasure. Both of these things involve usingour brains as much as or more than our bodies; both see us functioningas living computers"human information processors"that take ininformation, process or store it in our brains, and then outputresults. The way we process and store information is what cognitivepsychologists study. How do we understand a simple sentence whisperedinto our ears? How can we remember everything from how to ride abicycle to the names, in order, of all the American presidents? And isthere any fundamental difference between these two types of memory(knowing how to do something, which is called procedural memory, andknowing facts about the world, which is declarative memory)?

Where behaviorists liked to pretend that "internal mental processes"didn't matter, didn't exist, or probably both, cognitive psychologists spendtheir time teasing out the precise nature of those processes,typically coming up with flowchart models that break such things asmemory and language processing (a field of its known, often known aspsycholinguistics) into sequences of discrete components.Applying this to the study of memory, for example, has given usmodels of mind that suggest memory breaks into separate long-term andshort-term stores, with the short-term or "working" memory itselfdivided into distinct areas that process visual impressions, snippetsof spoken language, and so on.

Artwork: Ulric Neisser's famous caricature of cognitive psychology from his 1976 book Cognition andReality.

Cognitive psychology is not limited to how we process the structure ofinformation, but also what information means. The word cognition is asynonym for thinking and reasoning, two areas that cognitivepsychologists have also studied using computational models. How do wemake informed judgements about things, such as whether one car is abetter buy than another? Why do we live in absolute fear of thingslike terrorist attacks but happily cross roads, drive cars, ridebicycles, drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes (all of which pose fargreater risk to our safety and health)? Why do we play lotteries whenthe chances of winning are so much less than the odds of being struckby lightning? These are the sorts of questions cognitivepsychologists consider under the broad umbrella of thinking and reasoning.

Photo: The psychology of typography: Thanks to things you've read and seen previously, you read words printed in different fonts (typefaces) with a slightly different meaning and emotion: elegant, relaxed, friendly, imperative, hostile, or whatever it might be. You can emphasize a message you want to get across by choosing the most appropriate font. That's one of the key principles of graphic designand it happens in your mind, not on the page.

Though related to cognition, intelligence, which we might define as ageneral ability to solve problems, is a separate area of study, andit's much less fashionable than it used to be several decades ago.There are several reasons for this. FromSir Cyril Burt (a prominentBritish psychologist who allegedly faked research data about hisstudies of intelligence) toWilliam Shockley (the co-inventor of thetransistor who, predictably, became embroiled in controversy when hedared to suggest that there was a link betweenrace and intelligencethat made white people intellectually superior to blacks), the studyof intelligence has often proved intensely controversial. Thecontroversies, though important, distract from a much more fundamentaldifficulty: how should we define intelligence and is it even a meaningfulconcept? Some cynics have defined intelligence as the mere ability topass intelligence tests, but although psychometric testing isas popular as ever in recruitment for jobs, intelligence tests arenot, and never have been, a predictor of people's ability to livehappy, worthwhile, successful lives.

When you study psychology, it's remarkably easy to forget that most of thecool and fascinating things you discover happen inside the brainanapparently unremarkable organ often compared to "two fistfuls ofporridge." Neuropsychology is all about figuring out how the brainis structured and how different parts of it have different functions.One extreme, early example of neuropsychology, known as phrenology,famously involved quack doctors claiming they could tell interestingthings about someone's personality by feeling their skull for bumps.Although the idea seems risible today, the central idea ofphrenologythat the brain is modular, with discrete regions havingspecialized functionsis now known to be essentially correct.However, it's an unhelpful oversimplification to suggest, forexample, that the right half of the brain is dreamily creative whilethe left half is clinically rational; for most of the things we do,many different parts of the brain are involved, either working inparallel or in complex serial circuits.

Photo: Brain scanners have revolutionized psychology. By showing up the activity inside ourbrains when we think certain thoughts or do certain things, they can help to reveal which areas of the brain do what. Photo by courtesy ofWarren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center (CC) and USNational Institutes of Health (NIH) Image Gallery.

If cognitive psychology can break things like memory or language intoseparate areas or processes, is it possible to locate parts of thebrain where those things happen? That's the basic thinking behind ahugely successful field called cognitive neuropsychology,which involves trying to map abstract processes and functionsdiscovered through cognitive psychology onto very concrete areas ofthe brain that neuropsychologists have discovered (and vice-versa).Some psychologistsmodern-day mentalMercatorsget carried away in a frenzy to map the brain,forgetting that the ultimate goal is not to draw a tourist's guide to the insideof your head but to produce a scientific explanation of the mind: who we are andwhy we do the things we do.

While neuropsychologists do study healthy, functioning brains, they alsodevote a lot of their time to researching people whose brains havebecome damaged through such things as head injuries, strokes, ordegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. We can discover much abouthow things like memory and language processing work by studying whatpeople can no longer do when specific areas of their brain aredamaged or destroyed. In the most spectacular cases, it's possible tofind people with very localized brain damage who can no longer dovery specific things (for example, recognizing faces or readingwords); we can infer from this that the damaged brain areas play akey role in whatever function has been lostand that helps us buildup a map of which parts of the brain do what.

People are hugely diverse and differentthat's one of the things that makeslife interesting. While it's difficult to define "normal"behavior, it's somewhat easier to point to examples of abnormalbehavior, which is harmful to people and those around them.Neuropsychological problems following brain injuries are one example,but behavior can also become abnormal for a wide variety of otherreasons, which we might broadly divide into behavioral, cognitive,and neurochemical/biological. Eating disorders such as anorexia andbulimia are believed to be largely behavioral and cognitive, forexample: you might develop an eating disorder if you convinceyourself you're fat, after becoming obsessed with skinny catwalkmodels. Illnesses such as Parkinson's disease are more to do withneurochemistry and biology: Parkinson's is believed to occur when nerve cells in the brainstop producing dopamine, an essential chemical neurotransmitter that sends messages around the brain.

Psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia are hugely complex andstill imperfectly understood. Depression can occur for many differentreasons, which might be behavioral (you feel nothing you do makes anydifference and become miserable through "learned helplessness"),cognitive (you analyze the world around you in a way thatpersistently makes you unhappy), neurochemical/biological (for onereason or another, the chemicals or the basic structure of your brainare geared to unhappiness), or some combination of these things. Thestudy of schizophrenia has a fascinating history, with attempts toexplain it shifting from anatomical/biological causes, through cognitive and behavioral ones, and back again. Originallydescribed as a kind of premature dementia ("dementia praecox"),by the 1960s it was being painted (by such figures as R.D.Laing) as akind of sane reaction to an insane world, and now it's much more likely tobe considered a consequence of a person's particular brain chemistry.

You'd think understanding the cause of a psychiatric problem would be thefirst step toward treating it but, remarkably, psychiatry has oftenworked in willful ignorance of what was happening in the mind, partlythrough the influence of behaviorism, partly through the challenge of anti-psychiatristswho refused to believe in what they called the"myth of mental illness," and also because the underlyingcauses of psychiatric problems were genuinely not known. Treatmentsfor psychiatric disorders were largely doled out on the basis of whatseemed to work and what didn't; if clinical trials found that drugscured more depressive patients than, say, group therapy (talkingabout your problems with other patients), drugs became the treatmentof choice. It didn't necessarily matter why they worked or how,providing the patients showed an improvement. That's how hugelycontroversial psychiatric treatments such aslobotomy (surgicalremoval or destruction of parts of the brain, also called leukotomy) andelectroconvulsive therapy(electrical shocks to the brain) became popular in the mid-20thcentury. Just as psychology tried to cloak itself in experimental andscientific rigor, so 20th-century psychiatry latched onto therespectability of medicine, often masking a substantial ignorance ofhow and why disorders actually occurred. Today, thanks to advances inneurology, neuropsychology, and neurobiology, we have a much clearerunderstanding of how the brain works and why it can malfunctionbutmany questions remain.

Photo: Psychologists are helping computer scientists to develop emotional robots like this one, pictured at Think Tank, the science museum in Birmingham, England.

In the 150 years or so since psychology became a science, hugeamounts have been discovered about why people behave as they do andhow we can relate different aspects of human behavior to what goes oninside our heads. Even so, teasing out the many, remaining mysteriesof the brain remains one of the last great challenges of science.Apart from being hugely interesting in its own right, anotherimportant prospect is the discovery of effective treatments forterrible degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Afurther interesting direction is the development of artificialintelligence, including computers and robots that can "think" andact in more humanlike ways. Will probing the mysteries of the mindhelp us perfect electro-mechanical rivals who make us obsolete? Orwill the act of developing intelligent machines sharpen our sense ofwhat it means to be human, making us happier and more fulfilled?Psychologists, you can be sure, will find the answer!

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Psychology: An introduction to the science of human behavior

Human Behavior

Psychological Facts about Human Behavior – Psych Lens

The psychological facts about human behavior that you might not know.

Human behavior is more complicated than you think. It is shaped by many instrumental factors that you may not aware of.

If you wonder how and why a person acts as he/she does, today youll learn the different factors that affect behavior. Here are the psychological facts about human behavior that you might not know.

High testosterone level could lead an individual to find pleasure in others irritation. Those who have a high level of this hormone tend to enjoy others agitation.

People who have the lower level of self-esteem engage in a stereotyping act or discrimination. Most of their victims are those who are better than them in a certain aspect of life. Humiliation boosts their self-esteem.

Someones making decision considers the presence of others. In fact, an individual may make favorable or good decision in a group than when no one is around. People being watched tend to behave accordingly.

People who committed undesirable acts tend to reshape moral standards. A robber, for instance, may perceive that stealing is good.

In most cases, we perceive someone who looks attractive and honest as trustworthy and sincere. While in fact, in some instances, the contrary is true. Appearance plays an important role in behavior.

Successful people are mostly considered as intelligent.

Most people who face hard challenges tend to do nothing. This may be the reason why most people are not successful.

These psychological facts about human behavior affect almost all of us. These concepts may have no significant effect on your life. But in extreme cases, they shape your attitude and behavior.

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Psychological Facts about Human Behavior - Psych Lens

Human Behavior

Todays News: What You Need to Know – The New York Times

(Want to get this briefing by email? Heres the sign-up.)

Good morning.

Were covering new research on the coronaviruss arrival in New York, a virus-related cease-fire in Yemen, and Bernie Sanderss withdrawal from the presidential race.

We start today with a note of cautious optimism from our writer Dan Barry: The world began this week to see small but encouraging signs that concerted efforts to drastically change human behavior to suspend daily routines by staying at home are slowing the insidious spread of the novel coronavirus, which has killed tens of thousands and sickened more than a million others across several continents.

As the coronavirus disrupts the global supply chain, scientists in Africa and Latin America have been told by manufacturers that orders for testing kits cant be filled for months, because almost everything they produce is going to the U.S. or Europe.

All countries report steep price increases, from testing kits to masks.

So far, the developing world has reported far fewer cases and deaths, but public health experts fear that the virus could be especially devastating for countries with underfunded health systems.

Quotable: If it was just one country with an epidemic it would be fine, but all the major countries in the world are wanting the same thing at the same time, said the chief executive of a group that represents the testing industry.

Another angle: New Yorks network of group homes for people with special needs has seen a surge in infections.

Closer look: Food banks across the U.S. are struggling to meet demand. Crazy pretty much sums it up, a food bank official in Louisiana said.

Now that Bernie Sanders has withdrawn from the presidential race, Joe Biden is faced with the challenge of uniting the Democratic Party and winning the support of the younger, more liberal voters who powered the Vermont senators campaign.

Starting today, the Biden campaign is expected to highlight a series of policy positions that show how he has moved closer to Mr. Sanders on health care and other issues.

Quotable: In dropping out on Wednesday, Mr. Sanders said: I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour.

News analysis: The pandemic has turned the primary race into less of an ideological contest between the Democrats and refocused their attention on defeating President Trump in November, a correspondent for The Times Magazine writes.

Another angle: Republicans have fought the expanded use of mail-in ballots during the pandemic, arguing that it encourages fraud. Although there have been several documented fraud cases involving mail or absentee ballots in recent decades, some states that already conduct elections almost entirely by mail report little fraud. We checked some of the facts.

If you have some time, this is worth itHow can America emerge stronger?

The Timess Opinion section is starting an ambitious project to envision how the U.S. can eventually come out of the current moment stronger, fairer and more free.

In an introduction, our editorial page editor, James Bennet, writes: This pandemic offers the same opportunity that Americans have seized during past crises: to set aside petty differences, recognize national priorities and set to work again on creating a more perfect union. Were launching this initiative in hopes of supporting that national instinct.

Our special report on A.I.: As artificial intelligence evolves and expands, so does the impact on our lives. The Times examined the trend as it applies to fields including education, entertainment, science and sports.

Snapshot: Above, the Queensboro Bridge as seen from the East River promenade on the Upper East Side. Our critic Michael Kimmelman took a virtual tour of the waterfront with the architect Deborah Berke and found that it encapsulates New York Citys history.

Late-night comedy: After speaking to Senator Bernie Sanders on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert said, Bernie Sanders is saying Bernie Sanders cant win? Man, he is going to catch hell from Bernie Sanders supporters.

What were checking out: The Social Distancing Festival, a calendar of live-streamed events. Youve probably already exhausted your Netflix and HBO options, writes our national correspondent Mike Wines, so here are different options.

Cook: Green goddess dressing, perfect for dunking veggies, uses almost any soft herbs or greens, pured with something creamy, something garlicky or oniony, and a few anchovies.

Read: Theres a new collection of novellas from Don Winslow out, Broken. Janet Maslin says it shows his range, and his bite. One begins: No one knows how the chimp got the revolver.

Listen: Priya Parker has a new podcast for The Times, Together Apart, and the first episode is all about how to celebrate Passover, Ramadan or Easter. Here are the essential John Prine songs you ought to listen to. And April is National Poetry Month. Weve put together a great list of places you can stream poems and slams.

We have lots more ideas about what to read, cook, watch and do while staying safe at home.

Around the world, online habits are changing. But are we giving away too much? Shira Ovide, the host of our On Tech newsletter, chatted about that question on Twitter with Kara Swisher, a veteran technology journalist and an Opinion writer for The Times. Here are lightly edited portions of their conversation.

Shira: How do you feel about us relying more than ever on services from tech companies?

Kara: Im nervous about it. It doesnt abrogate the problems they had before.

What should tech companies like Amazon do to protect their workers?

Tech companies have lived off other peoples cheap labor for a long time whether its an Uber driver, a delivery person or Amazon warehouse workers. Its just coming into sharp relief.

These workers deserve much stronger pay and more benefits. Thats costly to the people who want to stay enormously wealthy, and to consumers who like a low price.

What is keeping you happy right now?

I just had a baby with my girlfriend, and staring at a baby who has no idea that any of this is happening is really quite something. Watch a baby eat bananas for the first time. You will feel just fine.

Thats it for this briefing. See you next time.

Chris

Thank youMelissa Clark provided the recipe, and Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh provided the rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S. Were listening to The Daily. Todays episode is about how New Orleans became a petri dish for the coronavirus. Heres todays Mini Crossword, and a clue: Old saying (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here. The Timess DealBook team will discuss the pandemics impact on media and advertising with our media columnist Ben Smith and our media industry reporter Edmund Lee at 11 a.m. Eastern today. R.S.V.P. here.

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Todays News: What You Need to Know - The New York Times

Human Behavior

Similar behaviors influenced the 1918 pandemic and now COVID-19 in Missouri – KOMU 8

Beds with patients in an emergency hospital in Camp Funston, Kansas, in the midst of the influenza epidemic.

COLUMBIA Before COVID-19 was even on the worlds radar, MU School of Health Professions associate professor Carolyn Orbann had been studying how human behavior played a role in the 1918 pandemic.

Im very interested in humans and their culture and how their culture influences the way they interact with each other," Orbann said. I started working with someone in the department of anthropology who was studying the 1918 flu pretty extensively.

When COVID-19 emerged as a global pandemic on the same scale as the 1918 pandemic, Orbann started to notice some similarities.

Massive movements of population really played a role, she said.

For COVID-19, things like cars and commercial air travel are major factors for transporting the virus to new places. But in 1918, those things were in their infancy, yet the flu was able to spread around the world in the same fashion. Theres one big reason for that.

In the 1918 pandemic, you had this big global stage of World War I, she said. The circulation that was happening as the war was winding down, you had all these multinational people who and been in Europe fighting, who were now going home.

In her study of the 1918 pandemics effects in Missouri, Orbann found it spread across the state in a similar pattern as COVID-19 is spreading now.

The cities at the time seemed to have it earlier whereas some of the rural places at the time seemed to have it later, even up to years later.

While it hit rural areas later, it also hit them harder.

One of the things that happened in rural Missouri is that a lot of the medical professionals actually left to help with the war effort, she said.

Orbann said her study found people in rural areas in 1918 often felt more of a sense of patriotism and duty to serve their country as compared to people living in bigger cities like Kansas City and St. Louis.

Soon, Orbann will put her knowledge of the 1918 pandemics spread in Missouri to use in the COVID-19 fight.

Well start to look at state data and see if we have any similar patterns, Orbann said. There are reasons to think its possible we could see a similar pattern and reasons to think that it might not follow the same trajectory.

Even though a global war didnt bring on COVID-19, the virus didnt need one in order to spread as quick as at has.

Its the same patternin our time now its just so sped up that you have to really jump on the mitigation much faster, Orbann said. You just dont have as much time to plan because everything happens so much more quickly.

She said her knowledge of the 1918 pandemic may have played a role in her preparedness for COVID-19.

Having read some of the manuscripts and letters and all the historical stuff from the flu here, maybe I was a little more mentally prepared for these weeks and weeks of home quarantine, Orbann said.

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Similar behaviors influenced the 1918 pandemic and now COVID-19 in Missouri - KOMU 8

Human Behavior

Not Just Coronavirus: Why Tiger King Is A Juggernaut For Netflix Its Not What You Think – Forbes

Netflix and 'Tiger King's' unexpected dominance (Photo by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket ... [+] via Getty Images)

Today ratings tracker Neilsen released their numbers for Netflix NFLX s notorious and binge-inducing docu-series, Tiger King.

To the surprise of no one, Tiger King scored record highs, with 34 million viewers in just 10 days.

Some believe the special benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic, since were staying at home, discovering a new show together and talking about it via phone, email, text and social media. Sheltering-in-place can lead to all of us virtually embracing something as a global community. As a result, Tiger King did indeed go viral. Theres no doubt that the series performed exceptionally well due to most of us waiting out this virus together.

But thats not the real reason behind its massive success.

Others think the show succeeded because its yet another glimpse into the underbelly of America, a celebration of all thats tacky, trashy, criminal and outrageous. They say that in Trumps United States, we shouldnt be surprised that a carnival-barking opportunist like Joe Exotic would capture our national imagination.

Theyre not wrong, but that cant explain how universally popular the shows become, both with Trump supporters and those turned off by the president and his followers.

Some believe the series became such a ratings outlier due to the mix of low human behavior contrasted against the beauty and majesty of exotic cats particularly the 12-foot-long, 600-pound tigers. The series hit home how the tigers are the ones that should be free and these seemingly wild humans were the ones who belonged in cages.

Those whove seen the show know that at least one human does in fact end up behind bars; many predict others featured in the series will soon follow.

This contrast of man versus nature surely contributed to the shows success, but cant explain why the show set records for Netflix, especially with viewers not known for watching nature documentaries.

The answer behind the success of Tiger King is simple yet confounding: Tiger King is an example of excellent storytelling, perfectly designed for streaming.

James Gandolfini accepts one of many awards for the classic cable drama, 'The Sopranos.' (AP ... [+] Photo/Kevork Djansezian, File)

Since HBOs premiere of The Sopranos, subscription television has become home to what I call closed communities, where taboo things happen.

In example after example, premium cable, basic cable and ultimately streaming built their reputations and grew their audiences by featuring characters in situations unlike anything on free, broadcast TV.

Few among us are familiar with the stress of being a Jersey mob boss (The Sopranos); cooking meth and selling it, while fighting stage IV lung cancer (Breaking Bad); or being a woman performing stand-up in the 60s, in a male-dominated world (Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.)

Network television, after all, is known for featuring what I describe as extraordinary characters in ordinary situations.

Whether with domestic sitcoms, procedural dramas or reality competitions, broadcast TV is our comfort food, nurturing us with programs featuring an idealized view of whats exceptional about some of us, in our everyday lives.

We like whats familiar on broadcast; we demand peculiar and strange when we subscribe.

Some scrunch up their nose at Tiger King and what it may say about America and what it celebrates.They dont get it.

Americans are smart.

Americans know quality content when they see it. They understand and appreciate complex story-telling, unpredictable characters and rich, colorful settings. They love to watch the lengths some of us will go in pursuing our dreams, and the price some pay for such ambition. They want to escape and experience characters that ignore the law, or bend it to their will, consequences be damned.

America loves Tiger King for one, basic reason: its excellent.

This Netflix docuseries is king of the jungle because it embraces and skillfully executes on pay televisions First Commandment: feature a closed community, where taboo things happen.

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Not Just Coronavirus: Why Tiger King Is A Juggernaut For Netflix Its Not What You Think - Forbes

Human Behavior

Amid Hardship, There Is An Opportunity For Positive Global Change – Forbes

When I was a kid, I imagined the day Mother Earth would "throw up" humanity in the form of a worldwide war or societal crisis, like the one we have just entered. I liked to flirt with the idea of extreme survival and imagined what I would do in such a situation, how prepared (or unprepared) I would be and what I would have to learn in order to survive such a drastic time.

I became a psychologist because I have always had humanity at heart. I wanted to study our behavior, our talents and our greatest achievement and success stories but also our darkest hours in order to understand how we managed to bounce back. What's interesting is that in all of the scenarios I have studied about humanity, there is always one constant element required for recovery: unity!

We've managed to survive because of unity. Conflict brings no winners, and even though some economists might argue that there are those who become extremely wealthy in the aftermath of a conflict, my response would be, "Yes, but for how long?" The bigger you inflate your balloon, the bigger the blast will be.

Since 1929 and the stock market crash, the economy has nosedived time and time again, often shortening the time for recovery between crashes. It seems to me that greed has never been so toxic for our planet and those who are addicted to money have never been further away from much-needed psychological treatment.In the early aftermath of this new worldwide situation, I watched as we faced our own fears of losing goods and the stuff we have accumulated. As we rushed down the aisles of our supermarkets to replenish our stock of toilet paper and cue tips, I had to ask, "Is this really what humanity has come up with after 4.5 million years of evolution?" Despite this, I personally view this crisis with positivity and great hope for humanity and our planet. This is our chance to press the reset button.

If this lockdown lasts long enough, and after panic and fear have disappeared, I believe we could enter a new normal for humanity where the Earth continues to heal. In just two months, air pollution has dropped significantly. For the first time in decades, the new generation might see something new in the sky that blue color! In a year's time, having survived with just the essentials, buying the latest lawnmower could seem unthinkable, dreaming of the new pickup truck might be laughable and gambling on the stock exchange could be a thing of the past.

The new normal could also bring better human relations and upgraded human behavior. My hope is that people start remembering our intrinsic connection to one another, to nature and to our universe. This reset could feel like waking up from a bad dream made up of altering virtual reality, gaming, TV series and biased social media connectivity only to realize that our house was on fire.

Once we come to terms with what's truly essential, I hope humanity will understand that never have we increased our chance of survival by flipping indexes on a virtual stock exchange, which the psychologist in me calls the "index of fear" the fear of those who have become one with their object and assets.

What seemed to be an absolutely unthinkable scenario a few months ago is now a full reality as most leaders of the world have worked closely with the United Nations and scientific organizations without the need for a media parade or negotiation. In just a few weeks, we have reduced our consumption, we have shared our resources and knowledge, we are moving away from fossil energy as oil prices plunge, we are doing more to support local businesses and we have seen a drastic decrease in cars on the road and airplanes in the sky.

The good news is that the world has now come together more quickly than ever in our common shared history, and the status quo between action and inaction that lasted half a century has finally been broken. We have demonstrated our ability to adopt a worldwide strategy, proving the point that all failed attempts of the past were pure excuses.

Now, the entire world knows that another world is possible and there is no turning back. We can only beat this pandemic united, and we now have the unique chance to take our next step in our evolutionary history as one voice, one people and one planet. Let's not miss that chance.

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Amid Hardship, There Is An Opportunity For Positive Global Change - Forbes

Human Behavior

Dr. Lance Dodes on Trump: A "predator" who "would be in prison" if he hadn’t been born rich – Salon

Most people find Donald Trump bewildering. His lies, cruelty, corruption, greed, delusions of godlike powerand other unconscionable behavior seemunbelievable. If Trump werea character in a TV show, movie or comic book, the audience would laugh at his clumsy, obvious villainy. The whole story would be rejected as horrendously bad writing and a waste of time.

But Trump is not that in fact complicated or puzzling once his core motivations are understood and then accepted as basic facts: He appears to be a sociopath. As such, helacks human empathy and a capacityfor the norms of healthy human social relationships. In so many ways, Donald Trump is like a space alien who came to Earth and is (badly) impersonating a human being.

The coronavirus pandemic, and Trump's cruel and callous reactions to it, have only served toamplifyhis gross defects in personality, behaviorand values.

Writing at the Guardian, Lloyd Green summarizes Donald Trump's emotional and cognitive defects as magnified by the coronavirus crisis:

On Sunday, initially at least, there was no White House briefing on the president's public schedule. But the bad news kept coming. Coronavirus deaths continued to climb and reports of the heartland being unprepared for what may be on its horizon continued to ricochet around the media.

In the words of one administration insider, to the Guardian: "The Trump organism is simply collapsing. He's killing his own supporters."

Members of the national guard, emergency workers, rank-and-file Americans: all are exposed. Yet Trump appears incapable of emoting anything that comes close to heart-felt concern. Or just providing straight answers.

In a recent op-ed forthe New York Times, Frank Bruni speaks tothe human emptinessandlack of care, concern, empathy, and overall decency atthe center of Donald Trump:

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One more question: Do you remember the moment when President Trump's bearing and words made clear that he grasped not only the magnitude of this rapidly metastasizing pandemic but also our terror in the face of it?

It passed me by, maybe because it never happened.

In Trump's predecessors, for all their imperfections, I could sense the beat of a heart and see the glimmer of a soul. In him I can't, and that fills me with a sorrow and a rage that I quite frankly don't know what to do with.

And while I'm not looking to Trump for any panacea, is it too much to ask for some sign that the dying has made an impression on him, that the crying has penetrated his carapace and that he's thinking about something other than his ratings? I watch. I wait. I suspect I'll be doing that forever.

I recently spoke with Dr. Lance Dodes, a retiredassistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and now a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. We discussedthe coronavirus pandemic and what this crisis hasrevealedabout Donald Trump's mental health and behavior.

Dodes wasa contributor to the bestselling volume "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," and is a regular guest on MSNBC's "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell".

In this conversation, Dodes explains how the coronavirus pandemic offers further evidence of Trump's predatory, sociopathic behaviorand his lack of care or concern for other human beings. Trump's programming and behavior, in fact makes him perhaps the worst person imaginable to lead the United States through the coronavirus crisis. Dodes also explains why too many people, especially in the news media, remain in a state of deep denial about Trump's behavior and the depths of his mental pathologies.

If Trump had not been born into money, Dodes told me, he would have wound up in prison by now. Instead he ispresident of the United States and vigorously protected by the Republican Party and its supporters.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Is Donald Trump the freest man alive? He has no internal restraints and increasingly no external restraints either.

I think he is the least free man. You and I have some degree of choice about how we're going to behave and react to the world around us; we are complex and we make complex decisions because we have a conscience and we care about the effects of our actions on others. Donald Trump, in contrast, is very simple. Everything he says or does is for himself, either to have power over others or to hurt them in revenge against their disagreeing or standing in his way. Because he has shown himself to be incapable of either conscience or empathy, he is basically a predator, lacking the most essential parts of our humanity.

Despite this, he has two techniques that have allowed him to be successful in business and politics: He is a bully, and he lies continuously. Repeating his lies over and over is like the "big lie" technique made famous by Hitler.It works because when a lie is endlessly repeated, even decent people assume there must be some truth in it.

Donald Trump has lied at least 16,000 times. Why are there journalists, reporters, politiciansand peopleamong the general publicwho keep giving him the benefit of the doubt despite the overwhelming evidence that he is a compulsive liar?

People want to trust others.I, too, would rather believe that the president of the United States was an honest, decent, thoughtful person. For some people, having an authority figure be trustworthy is so important that they will not accept the obvious facts about Trump. Like other predators, or other sociopaths, Trump takes advantage of this very human quality by pretending to be trustworthy through endless lying about his real motivations and even his real actions.

Donald Trump has said and done many unconscionable things during his time in the White House. But his recent suggestion that doctors and nurses are stealing ventilators from hospitals is, even by standards, one of his most despicable comments.Is that just his instinct to go to such an unbelievably dark place?

As my colleague Dr. John Gartner pointed out, if Trump were walking around wearing a tinfoil hat and talking about Martians controlling his mind, it would be easy for the public to recognize how severely ill he is. Trump is the most dangerous person we could have as a president precisely because his delusional core is not as obvious. When he makes these claims about ventilators and the coronavirus, they need to be understood as delusional beliefs that he summons from his imagination to protect himself, and which he is incapable of altering when presented with reality.

Donald Trump actually believes that he is a great president. I believe he is likely to win a second term. His entirepresidency stands as an indictment of the American people, the news media, the political classand the country's culture and values as a whole.

With respect to the political class, Donald Trump would have been removed from office already if the Republicans in Congress were not propping him up. If a Democrat were behaving like Trump, Republicans would certainly have impeached and convicted him already.Many decent Americans have been successfully conned by Trump, but there is no excuse for the Republicans in Congress.Trump's decisions about the coronavirus are killing Americans and he will continue doing it. The Congress should remove him from office immediately.

If Trump was not born into wealth, what do you think would have happened to him?

People with Donald Trump's very severe personality disorder are rare, which is good for civilization but helps explain why most people cannot understand his behavior. Sociopaths can be camouflaged by being successful in certain areas precisely because they get to the top by lying, cheating, bullying and manipulating, stepping on people who are in their way. Dictators, crime bosses and similar types of people are examples. But most sociopaths end up with criminal records. Donald Trump has committed multiple civil crimes that we know of.If he had not been born into money, it is likely that he would be in prison.

In terms of "metacognition,"is Donald Trump aware of what motivates and drives his behavior?

Donald Trump has made it clear that he processes reality in a different way than most human beings. When he says that if 100,000 people were to die from the coronavirus it would be a "victory" for him, he is revealing who he really is. He is showing that his perceived self-interest is the only thing that is ever on his mind.Insight into himself wouldn't make any sense to him.

Given your expertise in mental health, do you find Donald Trump to be an interesting person to study?

I find Donald Trump to be boring because he's so simple; it is always obvious what he's going to do. In any situation, its merits or complexity will have no bearing on his statements or actions; he will simply say or do whatever he thinks will benefit himself.Part of that calculus, of course, is to act as though he actually cares about others.But with fouryears of experience, everyone now ought to be able to see through that. When he was first elected, many reporters and commentators wrote that they hoped he would change and become "presidential." People with the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorderdo not change. This is just who Trump is.

What do you want the American people and the world to be prepared for, in terms of Donald Trump's behavior?

No matter what happens with the coronavirus, Donald Trump is going to claim victory. He will say that he did the best job possible and use the "big lie" strategy to double down on this falsehood. He will blame his critics for his failures with the virus. If there is a truly horrible outcome, Trump will blame the Democrats, the doctors, the governorsand anyone else he can imagine while, as he has already said, taking no responsibility himself.

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Dr. Lance Dodes on Trump: A "predator" who "would be in prison" if he hadn't been born rich - Salon

Human Behavior

Letter to the Editor: UMN Climate Justice solidarity in response to COVID-19 – Minnesota Daily

Solidarity in a time of social distancing

Were reframing social distancing as physical distancing in social solidarity. We need social connections now more than ever. The Conversation articulated it well: Physical distance is important, but its equally necessary we maintain social closeness during this time. Staying connected with others will make us happier, healthier and more socially responsible as we continue to contend with this crisis.

Millions of people are stuck in their homes with a lot more time on their hands, some feeling helpless and hopeless, and others feeling more pressure and inspiration to do something to help others. This will hopefully lead to the larger population being more active in movements after COVID-19. Even in times of social distancing, building a collective, social response to the pandemic is our only salvation, says Paul Enger in Waging Nonviolence.

The COVID-19 crisis and the climate crisis

Humans activity drives climate change. Especially through the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship between climate change, disease and human behavior is becoming even more clear. Many of the worlds biodiversity hotspots include diverse species with a number of existing diseases and viruses.

Many researchers believe that humanitys destruction of biodiversity, whether through deforestation, logging, urbanization, mining or other actions that disrupt the earths natural ecological functions may be to blame for the increase in the spread of diseases and viruses, including COVID-19.

These activities, mostly carried out by large corporations only seeking profit, are viewed as some of the largest contributors to climate change. Ecological destruction and disease introduction and spread are positively correlated, where the human-caused environmental harm reinforces the release of new diseases and viruses to the human population. Climate change only exacerbates the damages of these pandemics.

Living through a historic trigger event

This crisis is not regarded lightly and has caused devastating health and economic consequences. Therefore, we are choosing to use this trigger moment as a call to action. This is an opportunity to enact major systemic change. Weve already seen people helping one another through mutual aid efforts during this time, including student organizers.

Political pressure and mutual aid begin at the grassroots level, and we know this from our efforts regarding the climate movement. This intersectional movement recognizes the influence that public health crises, such as COVID-19, have on our work. This may be the first global crisis for young people, but we have been actively organizing, and we are ready to tackle the issues that arise now.

We may be apart physically, but our passions for advocacy build our community. This pandemic has only emphasized the deeply rooted flaws within our current system. We are brought together by our collective experiences and will continue our fight for systemic change. If we can put people over profits in times of crisis, we always can. All are welcome to join us.

This letter is written by members of the University of Minnesota's Coalition for Progressive Change, Students Against Pipelines, UMN Climate Strike, College Democrats and Students for a Democratic Society.

This letter to the editor has been lightly edited for style and clarity.

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Letter to the Editor: UMN Climate Justice solidarity in response to COVID-19 - Minnesota Daily

Human Behavior

Sea Fever is a Monster Movie with No Monsters, Just Animals That Gotta Eat – Film School Rejects

Humanitys greatest enemy is humanity. Weve known it for a very long time, but our fiction seems consumed with self-loathing these days. We suck. The hope is that if we continue to scream our wretchedness to others, someone, somewhere, will listen, and through that tiny bit of comprehension, the world will slowly change for the better.

Neasa Hardiman felt a little rage in her, and she wanted to channelit into a monster movie of the Guillermo del Toro and George A. Romero variety. The creature may look big and scary, but its those pesky humans who fall under its gaze that are the real problem. The mirror contains the most repulsive animal.

Sea Fever traps a handful of humans aboard an Irish fishing trawler. There are the sailors, and then there is the scientist. Hermione Corfield is tasked with mapping bizarre patterns within deep-sea behavior, snapping photos, and shaving samples from their catch. Tensions between her and the crew are already high even before a massive, unknownentity takes hold of their vessel, anchoring them to the middle of nowhere. The beast does what the beast does. The humans strive to free themselves as long as they can resist tearing each other limb from limb.

Hardiman wrote her film with a mission in mind. She was sick of a particular lens in which these stories tend to be told. She wanted to place a spotlight on the real-world champions battling against ignorance from their labs.

What I really wanted to do in the story was glamorize the scientific method, says Hardiman, while acknowledging that we get emotional sustenance from magical thinking, and I think both of those things are valid. I feel like theres a kind of tradition weve fallen into, especially in the bigger sci-fi projects, where were a bit fearful of science. We reject scientists as if science is something that is unethical or as if scientists are somehow lacking in moral fiber. Actually, its the opposite that is true. The scientific method is possibly the most exciting and epoch-changing invention that humans have ever come up with.

The creature these sailors encounter only finds its way to them as a result of how they, or we, are altering the biosphere through our aggressive pollution methods. The tendrils wrapping around the ship are not evil. How they burrow into the haul and poison the water tanks is not malicious. The creature is merely living in its domain.

Connie Nielsen, who plays the skippers wife and the real muscle aboard the trawler, responded strongly to how Hardimans script treated the planet beneath our feet. She agrees that we all deserve a good slap; to wake up and see what were doing to the world around us. Mother Earth deserves more than our admiration; she demands dignity and deference.

I would like us all to think about our relationship to nature, says Nielsen. Is nature something that we should be scared of? Is there a way in which we can find common ground with nature and treat it with the respect that it does us? Thats what Id like people to take away from Sea Fever.

Where tentacles and undersea beasties are concerned, many jump to the conclusion that H.P. Lovecraft must be to blame, but Hardiman admits to having never partaken in the Cthuhlu mythos. Her critter is a symbol for our ignorance, and as such, its influence had to come straight from the science.

There is an attraction to the deep sea, she says. You could drop theHimalayas into the Atlantic, and you wouldnt even see the top of it. The ocean is so deep and unknowable. We still dont have the technology to explore whats going on in this huge body of water. It covers so much of our planet and we know more about the surface of the Moon.

Building your own animal is a great gift, but its also a challenge. Weve all dreamed of crafting our Wolf Man, or our Dracula. How do you get the most bang for your buck? How can you score the scares as well as the mystery and the titillation?

I tend to work from the abstract down to the literal, says Hardiman. I started out going, Whats the metaphor here that I want to articulate? I wanted this to be about the natural world, so I wanted it to be both beautiful and awe-inspiring in the real sense of being terrifying. I wanted it to be mesmeric, so I knew I wanted it to be bioluminescent, and to be pulsing.

Working on a minuscule budget, Hardiman could not exclusively rely on the wizardry of CG artists. She needed her beast to be present for the actors, and as physical as the trawler they shot a lot of the film on.

We had absolutely zero cash! she states emphatically. I wanted to film in water, and I wanted the actors to have something real to look at. Because the animal was going to be bioluminescent, there is a chaos to the physics of how the light works once youre in the water, and you cant fake that.

The creature consisted of a series of puppet tendrils lit from within and submerged into a gargantuan water tank. The lights would rotate through a pattern of colors, and when Corfield spots the beastie for the first time, shes responding to its genuine magnificence. In post-production, the puppets were digitally painted over to enhance its bioluminescent nature and tweak thetranslucent texture of its skin.

I wanted it to be unclear what kind of level of sentience it had, explains Hardiman. We dont know that about anything. It doesnt have a face, and I wanted it to be somewhere between plant and animal where its a bit unclear. Theyre not really tentacles. Its not a squid. Theyre more like the tendrils of a jellyfish. They dont have a lot of muscle to them. Theyre smooth, theyre fine, and theyre more like neurons reaching out to feel their way across the world.

While it is easy to fall in awe of the creature and direct your frustration and anger towards the human behavior responsible for its uprising, Nielsen would also like to remind us that the panicked humans at the center of Sea Fever are not the monsters I condemned earlier in the article.

Sea Feveralso talks about a group of people that are basically ignored, she says. All of these small fishing communities are still trying to hang in there, trying to make a living, trying to survive. All of these people are hanging by a thread financially. We dont see enough films about people who are so exposed financially. We just dont talk about their lives.

The creature may put certain butts in the seats, but Nielsen made the film for the characters who could have walked straight out of the tiny Danish village in which she was raised. She recognized their pain, and she saw an opportunity to give voice to it. Like Hardiman, she has a mission here as well.

I would just like to remind everybody that every story has dignity, continues Nielsen. Every person has dignity. Whether theyre rich or not, their stories matter.

Hardiman concurs. Sea Fever tackles climate catastrophe, and in doing so, its asking us to be careful in regards to our neighbors of the sea, land, and cities. We have to protect ourselves from not just the behavior of others, but our behavior as well. We are all that we have.

Ultimately, its a story about ethics, she says. Its a story about takingresponsibility for yourself, for each other, and the world. The animal in the story is kind of a metaphor for nature, which is both threatening and beautiful.

Sea Fever arrives on Digital on April 10th, but you can attend its Livestream premiere on April 9th at 5:00 PM PT by clicking HERE.

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Sea Fever is a Monster Movie with No Monsters, Just Animals That Gotta Eat - Film School Rejects

Human Behavior

You Cant Spell Creative Without A.I. – The New York Times

This article is part of our latest Artificial Intelligence special report, which focuses on how the technology continues to evolve and affect our lives.

Steve Jobs once described personal computing as a bicycle for the mind.

His idea that computers can be used as intelligence amplifiers that offer an important boost for human creativity is now being given an immediate test in the face of the coronavirus.

In March, a group of artificial intelligence research groups and the National Library of Medicine announced that they had organized the worlds scientific research papers about the virus so the documents, more than 44,000 articles, could be explored in new ways using a machine-learning program designed to help scientists see patterns and find relationships to aid research.

This is a chance for artificial intelligence, said Oren Etzioni, the chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a nonprofit research laboratory that was founded in 2014 by Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder.

There has long been a dream of using A.I. to help with scientific discovery, and now the question is, can we do that?

The new advances in software applications that process human language lie at the heart of a long-running debate over whether computer technologies such as artificial intelligence will enhance or even begin to substitute for human creativity.

The programs are in effect artificial intelligence Swiss Army knives that can be repurposed for a host of different practical applications, ranging from writing articles, books and poetry to composing music, language translation and scientific discovery.

In addition to raising questions about whether machines will be able to think creatively, the software has touched off a wave of experimentation and has also raised questions about new challenges to intellectual property laws and concerns about whether they might be misused for spam, disinformation and fraud.

The Allen Institute program, Semantic Scholar, began in 2015. It is an early example of this new class of software that uses machine-learning techniques to extract meaning from and identify connections between scientific papers, helping researchers more quickly gain in-depth understanding.

Since then, there has been a rapid set of advances based on new language process techniques leading a variety of technology firms and research groups to introduce competing programs known as language models, each more powerful than the next.

What has been in effect an A.I. arms race reached a high point in February, when Microsoft introduced Turing-NLG (natural language generation), named after the British mathematician and computing pioneer Alan Turing. The machine-learning behemoth consists of 17 billion parameters, or weights, which are numbers that are arrived at after the program was trained on an immense library of human-written texts, effectively more than all the written material available on the internet.

As a result, significant claims have been made for the capability of language models, including the ability to write plausible-sounding sentences and paragraphs, as well as draw and paint and hold a believable conversation with a human.

Where weve seen the most interesting applications has really been in the creative space, said Ashley Pilipiszyn, a technical director at OpenAI, an independent research group based in San Francisco that was founded as a nonprofit research organization to develop socially beneficial artificial intelligence-based technology and later established a for-profit corporation.

Early last year, the group announced a language model called GPT-2 (generative pretrained transformer), but initially did not release it publicly, saying it was concerned about potential misuse in creating disinformation. But near the end of the year, the program was made widely available.

Everyone has innate creative capabilities, she said, and this is a tool that helps push those boundaries even further.

Hector Postigo, an associate professor at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, began experimenting with GPT-2 shortly after it was released. His first idea was to train the program to automatically write a simple policy statement about ethics policies for A.I. systems.

After fine-tuning GPT-2 with a large collection of human-written articles, position papers, and laws collected in 2019 on A.I., big data and algorithms, he seeded the program with a single sentence: Algorithmic decision-making can pose dangers to human rights.

The program created a short essay that began, Decision systems that assume predictability about human behavior can be prone to error. These are the errors of a data-driven society. It concluded, Recognizing these issues will ensure that we are able to use the tools that humanity has entrusted to us to address the most pressing rights and security challenges of our time.

Mr. Postigo said the new generation of tools would transform the way people create as authors.

We already use autocomplete all the time, he said. The cat is already out of the bag.

Since his first experiment, he has trained GPT-2 to compose classical music and write poetry and rap lyrics.

That poses the question of whether the programs are genuinely creative. And if they are able to create works of art that are indistinguishable from human works, will they devalue those created by humans?

A.I. researchers who have worked in the field for decades said that it was important to realize that the programs were simply assistive and that they were not creating artistic works or making other intellectual achievements independently.

The early signs are that the new tools will be quickly embraced. The Semantic Scholar coronavirus webpage was viewed more than 100,000 times in the first three days it was available, Dr. Etzioni said. Researchers at Google Health, Johns Hopkins University, the Mayo Clinic, the University of Notre Dame, Hewlett Packard Labs and IBM Research are using the service, among others.

Jerry Kaplan, an artificial-intelligence researcher who was involved with two of Silicon Valleys first A.I. companies, Symantec and Teknowledge during the 1980s, pointed out that the new language modeling software was actually just a new type of database retrieval technology, rather than an advance toward any kind of thinking machine.

Creativity is still entirely on the human side, he said. All this particular tool is doing is making it possible to get insights that would otherwise take years of study.

Although that may be true, philosophers have begun to wonder whether these new tools will permanently change human creativity.

Brian Smith, a philosopher and a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto, noted that although students are still taught how to do long division by hand, calculators now are universally used for the task.

We once used rooms full of human computers to do these tasks manually, he said, noting that nobody would want to return to that era.

In the future, however, it is possible that these new tools will begin to take over much of what we consider creative tasks such as writing, composing and other artistic ventures.

What we have to decide is, what is at the heart of our humanity that is worth preserving, he said.

Original post:
You Cant Spell Creative Without A.I. - The New York Times