Philippa Kaur

By Josh Bell
When Dr Sewon Koh uploads memories from dead people, he doesn’t always like what he seesCourtesy of Apple
Dr. Brain
Apple TV+
WITH a name like Dr Brain, the title character of the first South Korean-language series from Apple TV+ sounds like he should be a second-string Marvel superhero. Yet while Dr Sewon Koh (Parasite‘s Lee Sun-kyun) does have superhuman powers of a kind, he isn’t a superhero, and no one actually calls him Dr Brain.Advertisement
The series is an adaptation of a South Korean webtoon in which a neuroscientist develops a way to mine the brains of dead people for their memories, which he can weave into his own. Despite the somewhat absurd premise, this adaptation plays it mostly straight, keeping its story grounded in character drama and sci-fi.
Sewon is a talented and eccentric neuroscientist who has devoted his life to understanding how brains work. He develops a technology called brain syncing, which connects two brains through a silly-looking contraption made of wires, dials and blinking lights that are supposed to have something to do with quantum entanglement. The details are hazy, but series director and co-writer Kim Jee-woon presents it all with due reverence.
Sewon decides that he must be the first human test subject for his invention. So he tasks his assistant with procuring a fresh body from the morgue and hooks himself up to the dead man’s brain.
As we soon discover, Sewon’s motivation for uploading other people’s memories isn’t solely scientific curiosity. He also comes overburdened with a tragic backstory, which began when his mother was killed in a road accident when he was a child. Then, years later, he saw his young son die in a house fire and his wife fall into a coma after a suicide attempt – a condition in which she remains.
The incidents with his wife and son occurred under mysterious circumstances, and soon after Sewon’s first brain sync, he is visited by a private investigator who is also looking for answers about those tragedies. The police soon show up, too, and Dr. Brain morphs into a murder mystery, as Sewon uses his skills to uncover a shadowy conspiracy that is targeting him and his family.
However, the more brains that Sewon syncs with, the more his mind fractures, as bits of the personalities and skills of the subjects take hold in his own brain. At one point, he hooks himself up to his family’s dead cat, which may have witnessed a murder. From then on, he possesses cat-like abilities, allowing him to quickly climb a tree, see better in the dark and land on his feet when jumping from a building. It is an appealingly goofy touch in a series that sometimes takes itself too seriously, given its somewhat outlandish premise.
Kim, who is best known outside South Korea for mind-bending thrillers A Tale of Two Sisters and I Saw the Devil (as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie The Last Stand), directs Dr. Brain as a mix of mundane police procedural and bizarre head trip.
The middle portion of the six-episode series drags a little, as it focuses more on crime solving and less on brain syncing. But Kim reliably returns to the surreal imagery of Sewon’s visions, regardless of whether he is hooked up to another brain or just receiving some crucial piece of insight. The director also stages some exciting action sequences, including a chase through a mall and a close-quarters fight in an empty cargo transport.
Dr. Brain isn’t quite as out there as fans of Kim’s best-known films might hope for (or as its faintly ridiculous set-up might suggest), but it is still an entertainingly off-kilter take on a murder mystery, with a protagonist who is admirably committed to his own strange ideas.

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Absynthe by Brendan Bellecourt is a delirious tale of altered realities set in a world where the first world war ushered in a technological utopia of automata and monorails, plus a serum that can give people telepathic abilities.
Mark Waugh
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Cancer Revolution at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, explores the new science that is allowing more of us than ever before to live longer and better with the disease. The exhibition is free and runs until March 2022.Advertisement

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Racism, Not Race is a rigorous discussion of the scientific answers to questions of race. Joseph Graves Jr and Alan Goodman explain why race isn’t a biological fact and ponder why society continues to act as if it is.

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To explain the paradox of a smart species that embraces fake news, conspiracy theories and paranormal woo, we need to rethink rationality, says psychologist Steven Pinker

Humans

8 December 2021

By Graham Lawton
Jennie Edwards
HUMANITY faces some huge challenges, from the coronavirus pandemic and climate change to fundamentalism, inequality, racism and war. Now, more than ever, we need to think clearly to come up with solutions. But instead, conspiracy theories abound, fake news is in vogue and belief in the paranormal is as strong as ever. It seems that we are suffering from a collective failure of rationality.
Steven Pinker doesn’t buy into this disheartening conclusion. In his new book, Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters, the Harvard University psychologist challenges the orthodoxy that sees Homo sapiens … More

By Sally Adee

Are we really just puppets being controlled by the words of those in charge?Shutterstock/SvetaZi
Outcast
Louise Carey
Gollancz 20 JanuaryAdvertisement

“YOU’VE exceeded everyone’s expectations.” These are words that Tanta, the hero of Louise Carey’s InScape series, hears often from her boss. The resulting dopamine rush is strong enough to make her knees tremble and to reinforce her total devotion to her employer, InTech.
InTech isn’t just any tech company. It is also the local government, a role it assumed in the wake of a global disaster that obliterated nation states. Civil rights have been replaced by end-user licence agreements, and violations of community guidelines get you executed.
Tanta, like most of her coworker-citizens, has internalised her company’s values so completely that the worst thing you can say about someone is that they are “not being very corporate”.
In Outcast, the second book in the series, Tanta has been assigned the task of finding the deeply uncorporate mole who is selling company secrets. But there is a twist: first, she needs to rid her mind of the phrases used by the corporate autocracy to command loyalty in its citizen-employees.
This is the point at which the series pivots to deft satire, skewering the cult-like employee culture that exists not only in Carey’s dystopian future but in our present, too. From Mark Zuckerberg’s exhortation to “move fast and break things” to Disney’s insistence that all its employees, down to the janitorial staff, identify as “cast members”, corporations already use certain phrases to get inside employees’ heads. Carey has a degree in psychology, which clearly informs her send-up of the way companies do this.
“In Outcast, your employer determines whether you live or die and you think that is good and fair”
In Battle of the Linguist Mages, Scotto Moore takes the idea of weaponised linguistics to the next level. In this world, human language began as an embedded sentient alien mind virus that colonised humanity back in the mists of time, shaping the way we communicated ideas. Then one human finds a way to weaponise these mind viruses into “power morphemes”, sounds that can bypass logic and motor control to evoke a particular feeling, action or belief.
This book won’t be for everyone. It veers wildly from one style to the next: one minute it reads as a snackable version of Ready Player One, the next it channels the loopy extravagance of Douglas Adams, then it abruptly skids into the style of a dense Wikipedia entry. In between the main plot, driven by a glitter-caked, disco-themed multiplayer game where bad guys are killed with a kaleidoscopic beam, Moore plunges into discursive ravines where he explores concepts like memetics and the weaponised persuasion tactics of the advertising industry.
These are very different books by very different authors, but the thread running through both is the unstoppable evolution of persuasion techniques. Using words as weapons is as old as advertising and politics, of course. The question is where the iterations will end. In Outcast, the endpoint is that your employer determines whether you live or die, and you think that is good and fair. In Battle of the Linguist Mages, others can use words to control your ability to think.
What’s scary is that if language as a form of mind control is even theoretically possible, you can be sure some executive has assigned a working group to it. This is the world we live in now. But at least we get to laugh at it through the medium of science fiction.

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StockFood/Jones, Huw
CREATING a gingerbread house is a fun festive activity, but shoddy construction can spoil the party and put any gingerbread inhabitants in serious danger. This recipe and some tips will help you avoid catastrophe.
First, create a design. It is helpful to draw the pieces for your house on paper, then cut these shapes out to use as templates. The quantities of ingredients listed will give you enough gingerbread to make a structure 30 centimetres tall with walls 20 cms wide.
Building requires a strong and stable biscuit. A dense dough with a low moisture content is ideal, so … More

By Alexandra Martiniuk and Joseph Freeman
Simone Rotella
CYBERBULLYING was already a problem before the covid-19 pandemic hit. In Australia, for example, one in five young people reported in 2017 that they had been socially excluded, threatened or abused online, and the same proportion said they had participated in cyberbullying themselves. Then lockdowns and work-from-home orders came into force, meaning even more time was spent online.
Yet when it comes to cyberbullying, the pandemic has had a different effect than you might expect. Although we have been online more, some studies show that cyberbullying has decreased. The reasons behind this could tell us how to better tackle this problem once we emerge from the pandemic.
Unlike in-person bullying, cyberbullying can occur 24/7 and has a stronger association with suicidal ideation. We know that teenagers already spend a lot of time online, and that is increasing. A survey of people aged 10 to 18 in 11 European countries during the 2020 spring lockdowns found that nearly half of them felt they were experiencing “online overuse”. They were online for 6.5 hours per weekday on average, and around half of that time was related to school. In 2018, the comparable number was 2.7 hours per day.Advertisement
Previously, more time online had been linked with an increased chance of participating in cyberbullying. Studies have also shown that stress and anxiety have increased during the pandemic, both of which can drive increases in anger and cyberbullying.
Yet this phenomenon has actually decreased during the pandemic. One study looked at school cyberbullying in the US using Google search data. Trends in the search term “cyberbullying” have previously matched up with actual survey data about it. This study found that searches for both “cyberbullying” and “bullying” dropped by 30 to 40 per cent relative to historical norms after US schools adopted remote learning.
Another study involving South Korean schoolchildren found that the proportion of school-aged children that were either cyberbullying or being cyberbullied decreased from 27 per cent in 2019 to 23 per cent in 2020.
What’s going on? One reason for the decline is that in-person interactions can fuel both online and in-person bullying. Bullying tends to start in unstructured time, which doesn’t exist in the same way in online schooling. This suggests if we focus prevention efforts on unstructured time, it is likely we will stop both traditional bullying and cyberbullying.
Bullying rates aren’t fixed. When children feel nurtured and socially and emotionally safe, they bully less. During the pandemic, young people have spent more time at home with their parent or carer. For some, this has probably provided feelings of safety – a positive effect well known to occur in times of disaster or crisis.
Positive relationships also help reduce bullying. While some families have had interpersonal conflicts during the crisis, most households worldwide have reported increased cohesion and positive bonding between family members. Studies have shown that children reflected positively about spending more time with family. Keeping these positive relationships strong may also help prevent bullying in the future.
Unstructured play is key to the development of self-esteem, self-determination and the ability to self-regulate – all vital parts of emotional development that help prevent children bullying and protect them from being bullied.
The answer isn’t to get rid of unstructured time. But by making it a more nurturing environment backed up by positive relationships, the reduction in cyberbullying seen during the pandemic may stick around for some time.
Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans: 116123 (samaritans.org). Visit bit.ly/SuicideHelplines for hotlines and websites for other countries

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Magnificent adventures are captured in this selection of photographic firsts, some of the earliest images from each location, taken by world-renowned photographers including Gertrude Bell, Carleton Watkins, Isabella Bird, Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley.

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Centuries before the pharaohs emerged in Egypt, the local elites used a thick porridge-like beer in their ceremonies

Humans

3 December 2021

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Reconstruction of beer cups and jars from early EgyptDr. Renee
The elite members of early Egyptian society – before the emergence of the pharaohs – probably drank beer, which they transported around in six-litre jars.
Jiajing Wang at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire and her colleagues analysed fragments of pottery found at Hierakonpolis, an archaeological site in southern Egypt. The fragments date back to between 3800 and 3600 BC, about 600 years before Egypt was united into one state under Narmer, the first pharaoh.
The fragments were found in an area that served as … More