Arts Week 2015: Coffee and Commonwealth

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What do coffee, tea and rancid meat have in common? All are intimately tied to the politics, gender dynamics and social unrest of the 18th century.

A fascinating free public event will delve into the Enlightenment’s beverages of choice and disgusting diets as part of Birkbeck Arts Week (18 to 23 May).

An English 17th Century coffeehouseCoffee and Commonwealth, which will feature a panel of Birkbeck academics, will be held at the Upper Fleet Café (7-11 Upper Woburn Place) on Monday, May 18 at 6pm.

From the bawdy houses and pre-modern pubs of Derbyshire to the coffee houses of London, the Birkbeck, University of London’s panel of historians and literary experts will explain how a food and drink can lead to full-scale mutiny.

One main strand of the panel event will focus on the often revolting – and frequently contentious – diet of sailors on long-haul sea voyages in the late 17th century.

PhD student Sue Jones’s presentation will draw on real-life case studies of some poor souls who had to endure the cramped conditions and putrid meals on board trading and pirate ships.

Weavil-ridden ship biscuits, rancid meat swimming in pickled brine and woefully little grog to numb the pain – this was the diet which awaited many a seafarer on long odysseys which could last anywhere up to two years.

By delving into diary entries of an ordinary sailor for the East India Company, and the British ambassador to Tunisia, Sue will reveal just how limited the diet on the open sea was, and the effects it had on the seafarers – from widespread scurvy, to full-blown mutiny

Sue said: “Being self-contained spaces and communities, these ships were often a powder-keg of social ructions. A limited and pretty rotten diet might not seem a huge deal in the grander scheme of things, but on the open sea you don’t have much else to think about. And so food and drink were often the catalyst for unruliness.”

Other speakers at the Coffee and Commonwealth event include:

  • Professor Sue Wiseman, who will present on the milieux of alehouses versus coffee house, exploring the role of coffee and beer in sustenance, sociability, sex and politics
  • Mr Robert Stearn who will explore the way food and drink interacted with ‘sexual immorality’ in the secret subcultures of London’s alehouses, coffeehouses, brothels, homes, and lodgings
  • Dr Elizabeth Eger (King’s College) will discuss tea and sociability in the age of Enlightenment, and why tea became the thinking woman’s drug of choice.

The event runs as part of Birkbeck Arts Week’s packed programme of more than 40 lectures, discussions, workshops and performances exploring the worlds of arts and culture.

Attendance at all Arts Week events is free, though booking is essential. To book a place, and to see the full programme of events, visit www.bbk.ac.uk/artsweek.

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What can we learn from laughing?

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This post was contributed by Aline Lorandi, a visiting postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof Annette Karmiloff-Smith, investigating the precursors of phonological awareness in Down Syndrome. Aline attended Dr Caspar Addyman’s recent event during Birkbeck’s Science Week

LaughterLaughter is one of the most well-known characteristics of babies, although greatly ignored by science. Motivated by this intriguing gap in the study of babies, Dr Caspar Addyman (Research Fellow from the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck) decided to invest on the research on baby laughter.

Dr Addyman quotes Victor Borge when he says that “laughter is the shortest distance between two people”. As laughter is one of the central characteristics of babies and a way to connect people, Dr Addyman’s interest in this sort of study is more than justified.

Maternity and paternity brings several challenges: fewer hours of sleep, loads of mess to organise, lack of time for the parents themselves or to work, their lives changed forever – although most of them would say, for the better. One of the greatest rewards for all those challenges in parenting is, undoubtedly, to hear their babies laughing.

“Baby laugh is appealing!” states Dr Addyman. It is present from the very beginning of life, and, historically, it can be tracked to non-mammals more than six-million years ago. It encourages social play, and it is also linked to tickling, which is as old as laughter itself, phylogenetically speaking.

Some researches on rats (like Weaver et al., 2004, published on Nature Neuroscience) show that rats whose mothers lick and groom them were less stressed, for the mother’s touch may be an answer to stress. From this, Dr Addyman argues that touching and tickling are very important for development.

Ontogenetically speaking, Dr Addyman maintains that laughter begins really early. Through a survey with parents, he found out that at three months of life, in general, babies give their first laugh (the first smile is at one month). According to Dr Addyman, laughing is more difficult than crying, for it requires more motor and voice control. When looking for how many laughs per day a baby gives, the number can be bigger than 150. And, of course, a guaranteed way for a laugh is tickling.

As to fun games and toys, Dr Addyman found that ‘peek-a-boo’ seems to be the best one. It also provides social interaction, as you have to wait for the other person to appear, and there is pleasure in doing that.

Naturally, at some point, children will realise that they can make parents laugh, changing the games. By this, Dr Addyman shows us that laughter is about social learning, and ‘peek-a-boo’ is a condensed form of this kind of interaction.

There is another important feature about laughing that distinguishes it from crying – it makes it a way for communication: While crying is a sign that something is wrong and must be stopped by parents, laughing points to something that they want to be continued.

As an argument for the social role of laughing, Dr Addyman presented research where he shows that children laugh more when in a group than alone, independently of how funny they think a movie is. Another experiment shows that laughter captures and holds attention from babies, and it is more ‘contagious’ than yawning!

Dr Addyman believes that we can learn from babies’ laughter. He says that we should challenge ourselves to be happy; for people who challenge themselves see more purpose in life. He also believes that we should do things with joy, be 100% in it, share with other people and simply be happy!

As Abraham Lincoln once said: “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be”. If this is correct, and babies can show us that it is, as Dr Addyman’s research points out, the answer to happiness is not ‘how to be happy’, but ‘how to change our minds’, remembering ourselves of the pleasures of tickling and laughing, as if we were still babies, and of the rewards of living a less stressful life, through the happiness of laughing out loud.

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Attention Machines: The science of cinematic perception

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This post was contributed by Sofia Ciccarone (master student of Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology, Birkbeck University of London)

It was exciting to be a part of this event, which took place in Birkbeck cinema in Gordon Square during Science Week.

Birkbeck CinemaThe people who participated not only had the opportunity to experience the amazing and capturing cinematography of The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky; they could also be both the participants and the researchers of a live experimental study.

The experiment was interested in how viewers’ attention changes throughout a movie. To this aim, audience’s attention was measured by locating their eye position on the screen. This was done by making the image disappear sometimes during the film and briefly substituting it with a flashing grid, which filled the whole cinema screen and contained a series of letters and number combinations.

The audience was asked to pay attention to this grid and to report (using their smartphones) the letter and numbers pairs (e.g. S76) they could identify among the other pairs contained in the grid. This procedure, which is known as crowdsourcing gaze data collection, is a method proposed in 2012 by Rudoy and others for collecting gaze direction from any number of participants simultaneously.

The eye movements of one volunteer from the audience were instead recorded using a portable eye tracker. The eye tracker was calibrated right before the start of the film and the participant sat in the front row of the cinema and enjoyed the film while her eye movements were being recorded.

After a shot practice trial, the audience’s eye movements were collected for the first part of the film. During the second half, while participants were allowed to watch the film without distractions, Dr Tim Smith and his team used the available time (48 minutes!) to analyse the answers submitted through the smartphones and the data recorded by the eye tracker.

After the film finished, Dr Tim Smith presented the results of the experiment. It was really surprising to find out that the two eye movement collection methods showed similar results: people mainly focused their attention on the centre of the screen. This is where the more frequently detected letter-number pairs were located. The gaze of the volunteer who wore the portable eye tracker also seemed to be mainly focussing on that area of the screen.

Why does this happen?

The composition of the shots, the camera movements, the staging and the editing of the scenes are some of the ways in which filmmakers direct viewers’ attention. As opposed to films shot in the past, modern TV and Hollywood cinema use a compositional style which involves rapid editing, bipolar extremes of lens length, wide-ranging camera movements and close shots.

For example, the scene in “The shop around the corner” (Esnst Lubitsch, 1940) where the two protagonists meet in the café, lasts 9 minutes and contains 20 shots lasting 27 seconds each. The same scene from a recent remake of this film, “You’ve got mail” (Nora Ephron, 1998), lasts 9 minutes and contains 134 shots of 4 seconds each.

This style causes the audience to have a unified experience of the film being watched, as it induces spectators to focus their attention on the centre of the screen, a type of behaviour defined as central tendency by Le Meur and others in 2007.

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Curiosity: A study about babies and ways to learning

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This post was contributed by Aline Lorandi, a visiting postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof Annette Karmiloff-Smith, investigating the precursors of phonological awareness in Down Syndrome.

Curiosity is unique to humans. There are many stories and quotes about curiosity in literature and in mythology. Sometimes you can get in trouble because of your curiosity, as Pandora did when she opened the box that she was given by Zeus and discovered what was inside.

Experiments at babylabWe are all curious, but there are some researchers who are curious about curiosity, as Katarina Begus, who talked about “The development of human curiosity: A few baby steps”, during Science Week.

Some researchers have shown that curiosity activates the same areas in the brain as when we consume chocolate, nicotine or when we win a race. If curiosity seems to be linked to pleasure, why is it so difficult to awaken curiosity in some people?

Driven by the curiosity about curiosity, Katarina is investigating curiosity on babies. She maintains that children seem curious about things, and that the universal gesture for showing curiosity about something is pointing. However, how can we know what babies mean by pointing?

Katarina presented a series of tests that aimed to verify in which situations babies point, including informative versus non-informative parents, different kinds of objects, and spontaneous pointing. She also reported that theta oscillation (during EEG/ERP) is found in the hippocampus during situations that involve reward.

The more motivate a child is, the more theta oscillation is found, and, consequently, the greater is his or her learning. Based on this assumption, Katarina invested on tests that can look at brain activation during play, in order to attest whether the babies would recognise some objects that they saw before as a sign of learning and motivation.

When testing learning of nonwords in informative versus non-informative contexts, she found greater theta oscillations in the brain when babies were expecting for information in informative contexts (contrasted to non-informative contexts, where no real information was available).

Although Katarina Begus has already found some very exciting results for how children demonstrate curiosity, her work is still going on, and her curiosity about curiosity never ends:

  • What is the role of technology in our curiosity?
  • How will children explore their curiosity using technology?
  • How the studies about curiosity and learning can help us prevent dementia?

Those were questions that Katarina would like to address in future researches. The audience was also curious, a fact that was shown by the questions made by the end of the talk:

  • How far children go with non-informative teachers?
  • What about their reaction to surprises?
  • What about the effects of surprise on learning?
  • How can we make people more curious?
  • What is the role of the environment on curiosity?

As Albert Einstein once said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” Let’s keep curious!

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