Philippa Kaur

A terrific book by Sam Knight about a bizarre, real-life attempt to collect people’s premonitions is beautifully written, but goes too easy on the pseudoscience

Humans

4 May 2022

By James McConnachie
The Aberfan disaster in Wales was caused by a colliery spoil tip collapseMario De Biasi per Mondadori Portfolio
The Premonitions Bureau
Sam Knight
FaberAdvertisement

IN OCTOBER 1966, around the time a colliery spoil heap in Aberfan in Wales collapsed, burying a school and homes and killing 116 children and 28 adults, an English psychiatrist called John Barker was working on a book about people who appeared to have scared themselves to death.
In some ways, it was a precursor to the work of writers such as Oliver Sacks: Barker was boldly but thoughtfully exploring the odder reaches of the psyche. In other ways, however, his research was sensationalist and foolish – Barker was also a member of the Society for Psychical Research and he had suggested that people could become aware of the moment of their death. By telepathy, perhaps.
In the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster, Barker heard that a boy who had escaped the wave of coal slurry had later died of shock. Barker drove 160 kilometres from a psychiatric hospital where he was a consultant to investigate. But while touring Aberfan, he heard stories of forebodings and warnings, and he had a new idea.
Within a week, in collaboration with Peter Fairley, the Evening Standard‘s science journalist, he was inviting the newspaper’s readers to contact him with their “dreams and forebodings”. These would be recorded and, in the event of ensuing disaster, verified. This was the “premonitions bureau”, and its story (and Barker’s) is the subject of a book by journalist Sam Knight.
Barker was certainly an interesting man. Intellectually ambitious, he researched Munchausen’s syndrome and experimented with aversion therapy, claiming to have cured a man of desire for an extramarital affair by administering 70-volt electric shocks. He was a pioneer of longboard surfing. And he kept a crystal ball on his desk.
In the 15 months it existed, the bureau collected 723 predictions, of which 18 were recorded as “hits”, with 12 coming from just two correspondents. One was a London music teacher, Kathy Middleton. She saw pictures, with words flashing as if in neon lights. The other “human seismometer”, as Fairley put it, was a switchboard operator called Alan Hencher, who worked at the Post Office. His visions were accompanied by distress and headaches.
In one “major hit” for the bureau, Hencher predicted a plane crash involving 123 people. Nine days later, a plane came down near Nicosia in Cyprus, killing 126 people, 124 of them on impact.
In another, Middleton wrote to Barker detailing a vision of a petrified astronaut. Earlier that day – although it wasn’t reported until later – Vladimir Komarov’s Soyuz 1 capsule had crash-landed in Russia, burning him to death.
Knight finds that Barker could be “credulous, or laconic; doubtful, yet insinuating”. Something similar is true of Knight. Now a staff writer at The New Yorker, his non-fiction heroes include sophisticated literary storytellers such as W. G. Sebald and Joan Didion. He likes jump cuts, internal resonances and leaving things unstated.
Take the section where he segues from a discussion of entropy to a tragic outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in England and then to a campaign to shut Victorian-era asylums – by a woman who dreamed of the winning horses in the Epsom Derby.
Or another where he moves from the origin of the word embolism to the nocebo effect and Sweden’s uppgivenhetssyndrom (resignation syndrome), a condition in which refugee children appear to retreat into near-comas of hopelessness.
With such manoeuvres, Knight builds a subtle, allusive study of his subject, and his evocation of the frowsty yet aspirational mid-1960s England feels just right. But it is Barker who dominates the book, with his “contained, quietly belligerent energy”, and Knight treats him with generosity, and delivers a great deal of pathos.
Too much generosity and too much pathos, because premonitions aren’t true. If you deal in them, you are deluded or a charlatan. Barker was mostly the former. Knight, I am sure, is neither – but he still allows the possibility to play, as a kind of mood music. And for all that this is a compelling, beautifully written book, it feels like bad faith.

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Horniman Museum and Gardens
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In the Air at London’s Wellcome Collection traces concerns about air quality back to the 17th century, revealing how the air we breathe influences well-being. The exhibition opens on 19 May.

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Chimpanzee Memoirs, edited by Stephen Ross and Lydia Hopper, tells the personal stories of chimpanzee experts and shows the effort that has gone into understanding and saving our chimp relatives in forests, sanctuaries and zoos.Advertisement
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How the science of dogs changed the science of life captivates zoologist Jules Howard. His talk, which streams from London’s Royal Institution on 12 May at 7pm BST, explores what we know about dogs.

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Having studied chimps and bonobos for decades, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that variation in gender-typical behaviour is likely to be more common than we thought in humans

Humans

4 May 2022

By Rowan Hooper
Nabil Nezzar
WHERE once we thought of ape behaviour only in terms of sex and war, we now understand that our closest relatives live a much more nuanced life. A huge part of that understanding comes from the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the past five decades, he has shown that cooperation is at least as important as competition in explaining primate behaviour and society. His work has revealed that the great apes might fight, but they also reconcile their differences. They have a capacity for empathy and a concept of fairness that de Waal proposes is the foundation of the human moral compass. He believes that chimps, bonobos and humans are simply different types of ape and that empathetic and cooperative behaviours are continuous between these species. Now, he has turned his attention to gender and identity in his new book Different: What apes can teach us about gender. We spoke to de Waal to find out what he has learned.
Rowan Hooper: You are well known for writing about the inner lives of chimpanzees and bonobos, but your new book is a bit different, because it discusses gender roles, gender identity and biological sex differences in both apes and us. What do we mean by gender in non-human primates?
Frans de Waal: Well, some people insist that we have genders and chimps and bonobos have sexes, and that is the end of the discussion. I think that is nonsense. Gender as a concept exists mainly because we are a sexually reproducing species. Sex is predominantly … More

By Sally Adee

Memories are subject to the same pressures as fashion in Glitterationurdongel/Getty Images
Eversion
Alastair Reynolds
GollanczAdvertisement

YOUR autobiographical memory can’t be trusted, and science has determined that this isn’t a bug, but a feature. The remembered stories from which we braid our identity bend and swerve to serve the narrative needs of our circumstances because our minds happily trade veracity for coherence and narrative. This strange space between recollection and construction is explored in two mesmerising books out this month.
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds concerns itself with how this constant process of layering and recasting can create meaning and purpose in the most desolate circumstances. The story starts on a ship dodging icebergs in the North Sea during the 17th century, and unfolds into a virtuoso genre-hopping puzzle.
It isn’t every day you get to experience a perfect collision of the Romantic macabre of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft with The Usual Suspects and 2001: A Space Odyssey. So much of the book’s joy is working out which bits are real and which are misdirection on the way to unlocking the final mystery. Trust me, you don’t want this spoiled by more plot details.
It is no spoiler to say that Reynolds shows how such stories can be moulded to make us better humans. But memories can also be weaponised to keep our identities in stupefied thrall to capitalism, and this darker aspect gets an ample airing in Oliver Langmead’s Glitterati.
The star of this speculative satire is Simone. He is a fashionite, a rarefied type of super influencer whose every whim is lavishly catered for and documented by magazines read only by fashionites. For example, during a brief hospitalisation, he spies a regular proletarian gown among the haute couture medical gowns available to him. He complains and the item is summarily burned.
Simone and his fabulous friends and enemies are suspended in a vicious, never-ending battle for status, fought through clothes, make-up and accessories, sometimes leaving literal fashion victims in their wake. This sense of dangerously pointy high stakes beneath the ruffles and froth recalls writers like Edith Wharton, whose stories dissect the mores of the very rich who lived and schemed during the so-called Gilded Age of the 19th-century US.
Beyond a deft, wicked skewering of influencer culture, Langmead inhabits his protagonists’ fetishistic delight with the material world. His deliciously sensory prose puts you inside that colossal closet, running your fingers through the gossamer folds of a spider-silk gown.
Glitterati starts like puff pastry, a comedy of manners stuffed with buffoonery and characters whose trivial, self-inflicted miseries you can chortle at with abandon. But it ends like a shot of Black Mirror.
Simone’s lifestyle isn’t without costs. Along with the right clothes, he needs the right memories. And that is when a darker reality emerges, showing why these fluffy idiots can’t care about anything more than matching their outrageously expensive outfits to their false eyelashes.
At this point, it becomes clear that rather than being privileged scions, people like Simone are just pretty cogs in a vast apparatus that grinds humanity into capital. The reader begins to sympathise and have a stake in Simone’s ability to escape – and perhaps also starts to wonder which forces bend our own (flawed) memories.
Sally also recommends…

The This
Adam Roberts
Gollancz

Memory also plays a starring role in The This by Adam Roberts, but the utility of an individual’s identity itself is called into question in this mash-up of the sum of Nick Bostrom’s worst fears in Superintelligence and the alien weirdness of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

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This still from The Boat People, a film shot in the Philippines following five children as they travel by sea, collecting objects, is one of many evocative artworks on display at Seattle Art Museum’s exhibition Our Blue Planet: Global visions of water

Humans

4 May 2022

By Gege Li
Tuan Andrew Nguyen 2021. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York
Seattle Art Museum
FROM its pure essence to its significance in culture and society, water takes on rousing and inventive forms in these artworks from Our Blue Planet: Global visions of water, an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington. The show explores one of the world’s most crucial resources through more than 80 artistic interpretations.
Raqib ShawAdvertisement
At top is a still from The Boat People by Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Shot in the Philippines, the film follows five children as they travel by sea, collecting objects. Above is The Garden of Earthly Delights V, Raqib Shaw’s mixed-media depiction of mystical underwater creatures, inspired by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.
Claude Zervas
Adrienne Elise Tarver
Above shows: Nooksack, a sculpture by Claude Zervas made from wire and cold-cathode fluorescent lamps that mimics the form of the Nooksack river in Washington state; Mirage 24 by Adrienne Elise Tarver, part of her watercolour series of nude women lounging and swimming in tropical environments; and below, Mask of Kumugwe’ (Chief of the Sea), an alder and red-cedar-bark mask made around 1880 by the Kwakwaka’wakw Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, whose culture and traditions are centred on the natural environment.
Mask of Ḱumugwe’ (Chief of the Sea), ca. 1880 Native American
Our Blue Planet is on display at the Seattle Art Museum until 30 May.

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

4 May 2022

Love in the metaverse
A PR writes in a breathless tone that suggests they are just back from doing something else. “For the next generation dating in the metaverse won’t be optional,” we read. “There will be a blurry line between an in-person date and being on video. The audio will be spatial. The video will be immersive. And video dating will change as we know it.”
And Mark Zuckerberg will be hiding round a corner holding a big bucket for your most intimate secrets, ka-ching. We would bet on at least some people keeping the physical dating option open, if only because not all sensory experiences are fully available in the metaverse as yet. But never say never. History is littered with intrinsically real-world experiences we never expected to go virtual: shopping for shoes, boring people with holiday snaps, hurling abuse at strangers.
But the spatial audio bit sounds interesting. We weren’t aware the metaverse equated to full-on synaesthesia. More prosaically, the PR turns out to be offering a hook-up with the CEO of a video speed-dating app for hot chat with topics including “Requirements for dating in the metaverse” – a large headset and wide turning circle, we presume – and “Cheating in the metaverse”.
We are unsure whether this last one is in the sense of a “how to”, or just informing us how to tell if an avatar is cheating. There must be ways. Perhaps guilty feet have got no algorithm, to misquote a poet.Advertisement
What the doctor ordered
Possibly fresh from a consultation in what we are now joining the world in misbranding as the metaverse, Andy Howe writes in concern at his doctor prescribing something that sounded very like “die, mister”. We are happy to confirm that this is a nasal spray for the treatment of hay fever, one Dymista, and merely homophonically alarming.
We are altogether more exercised by the advice his daughter finds in a Google preview window under the rubric “What to do when your baby poops in the bath”. “We recommend removing them from the tub and making sure to get rid of any excess water which might contain fecal matter. Once they’re completely dry, give them a wash with baby-safe disinfectant or boil them in water in the same way you would sterilize a pacifier before returning them to the bath.” And then be sure to throw away the baby with the… no, wait a moment. Following the trail back to its source, the advice turns out to be about bath toys, but still.
Like the sun going down
There are few more disheartening ideas for those who believe in human agency than Isaac Newton’s conception of a preordained clockwork universe. This is why we are vicariously pleased as Kathy Haskard, consulting some celestial runes in her neck of the woods, discovers a website promising that the “next planned solar eclipse that will be visible from Adelaide, will take place on April 20, 2023″.
We like the idea of throwing in the odd unplanned one every now and again to keep people on their toes. The errant adjective reminds Feedback of a report we once spotted in a small-town newspaper in Germany, that a spontaneous demonstration would occur on the main square at 11am on the following Tuesday, and of another clockwork certainty in keeping with our own native country’s aptitude for genteel chaos: disruption for anyone so foolhardy as to attempt to travel by train on a weekend or public holiday. We are still unsure whether the dread “planned engineering works” are any less annoying than the spontaneous, self-nucleating variety, or which authority ordains they should always be precisely in our way.
Testicle tans
US TV commentator and all-round… egg Tucker Carlson has been teasing his new documentary film, The End of Men, with a trailer of such startling homoeroticism that it will possibly soon be banned in Florida.
Carlson’s premise is that male testosterone levels are declining, that this is a bad thing and that the best way to combat it is to get your testicles tanned. Feedback’s level of hormonal outrage remains middling about all of this. We are unsure of the last part, however, which seems to involve exposing private parts to infrared radiation. Hot, we suspect, and not in a good way.
Doing our due diligence, we do run across well-founded research reported in this organ in 2018 – no sniggering at the back, there – that “The higher your testosterone levels, the more you love soft rock”. On that basis, anything that accidentally ends up reducing them is probably all to the good.
Woke-o-saurus
Meanwhile, in the UK, The Sun reports that David Attenborough’s new one-off CGI-enhanced documentary Dinosaurs: The Final Day features a “softer ‘woke’ version of the T-Rex”. “Predators tend to just fight all the time and we wanted to show them pooing,” the article quotes executive producer Helen Thomas as saying. This mystifies us, as that wasn’t on our list as a specifically woke activity.
We suspect this might annoy those dinosaurs who like their T. rex raw in tooth and claw and think the world’s gone to the dogs since the mammals have been in charge, or whatever. We also suspect the final day of the dinosaurs would have been a good one for a spot of testicle tanning. Doesn’t seem to have done them any good, mind.
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

Findings from people running in the lab and in the real world show that men and women tend to run at a speed that minimises energetic costs, though men run faster

Humans

28 April 2022

By Alex Wilkins
When we run recreationally, we automatically pick the speed that is most energy efficientMoMo Productions/Getty Images
When people are exercising, they intuitively maintain the same running speed regardless of how many kilometres they cover, in order to be as energy efficient as possible.
In a race, people try to run as fast as they can for a given distance, which means someone might jog slowly during a marathon, but sprint at top speed during a 100-metre event.
But Jessica Selinger at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and her colleagues found that recreational runners take a different approach. They analysed the running speeds over a variety of distances of more than 4645 runners, who wore wearable measurement devices during exercise outside. They also collected data in the lab, where they could use treadmills to control a runner’s speed while collecting and analysing the participant’s breath to establish the energy costs associated with running at each pace.Advertisement
From the outdoor runners, Selinger and her team found that, on average, women run at a speed of 2.74 metres per second while men run at 3.25 metres per second. The data collected in the lab showed that these paces are indistinguishable from the energy-optimal running speeds for men and women.

“People have this strong preference for a particular speed, regardless of what distance they’re running,” says Selinger. “And that speed is in fact energy optimal. It’s the speed that’s the most economical that you could choose.”
The runners that Selinger and her team analysed in the lab were limited to younger, fit individuals. “In the future, it would be really nice to have the lab-based energetic measures for a broader swathe of the population,” says Selinger.
The finding isn’t surprising when examined from a biological perspective, says Andrew Jones at the University of Exeter, UK. “When people go out for an easy or steady run, typically over 3 to 5 miles… they’ll typically fall into a fixed, comfortable speed that is below the lactate threshold [when lactate can build up in the muscles and cause fatigue] and allows a steady state in oxygen uptake.”
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.03.076

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Analysis of pollen preserved in peat at Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills reveals the resilience of a rural community through environmental changes

Humans

27 April 2022

By Michael Marshall
The peat-covered uplands of the north of Ireland were once wooded and farmedHelen Essell, CC-BY 4.0
A rural Irish community survived a succession of climate shifts and other threats over the past 1000 years, a study of pollen preserved in peat has revealed. The finding suggests that societies can endure despite environmental changes, if they are flexible enough to adapt their way of life.
People in Ireland have experienced multiple upheavals over the past millennium. These include the European famine of 1315-17, the Black Death of 1348-49 and the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52. There were also climatic shifts, notably the transition from the relatively warm Medieval climate anomaly to the marginally cooler Little Ice Age.
To find out more about how people handled these events, Gill Plunkett and Graeme Swindles at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK studied an archaeological site called Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills, now part of Northern Ireland. It is a bog in the uplands, surrounded on three sides by ridges.Advertisement
“If you go up today, it’s deserted,” says Plunkett, but there are abandoned houses and indications of farming.
Plunkett and Swindles studied pollen from a peat core from Slieveanorra to find out what plants grew there over the past 1000 years. They found evidence of human interference throughout, such as fewer trees than would be expected, more pasture plants plus cereal crops.

The team also saw pollen from plants in the cannabis family, which includes hemp. “I think we’ve probably got hemp being produced and flax as well,” says Plunkett, perhaps for the textile industry.
The little community weathered multiple crises. The famine and plague of the 1300s were associated with increased land use, suggesting that any reduction in the population was temporary. The only time the site was possibly abandoned was during a wet period in the mid-1400s, for a generation or two, but after that farming resumed and even increased.
Only in the early 1900s did farming cease. Plunkett thinks that was because people saw better opportunities elsewhere, rather than the area becoming uninhabitable.
It isn’t clear why the Slieveanorra community was so resilient, but Plunkett says one reason may be that there was no landlord or owner, at least until the late 1800s. This meant the people living there were free to change their lifestyle, for example doing more hunting when crops grew poorly – instead of having to send a certain quantity of grain to a feudal lord.
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266680

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