Humans

Having good metacognition – the ability to think about our own thoughts – is key to success in many aspects of life. Fortunately, there are things we can all do to get to know ourselves better

Humans

5 May 2021

By Stephen Fleming

Jasu Hu
AS YOUR eyes skip across the words on this page, it is likely that you are not only reading, but also thinking about yourself reading. Are the words clear? Can you concentrate? Do you have time to read this article now or are you feeling rushed?
Psychologists have a term for this kind of awareness of our own minds: metacognition – literally, the ability to think about our own thinking. Being able to turn our thoughts on ourselves is a defining feature of being human. But we often overlook the power it has in shaping our lives, both for good and ill. The importance of good self-awareness can seem less obvious than, say, the ability to make mathematical calculations, or remember facts. Instead, for most of us, metacognition is like the conductor of an orchestra, occasionally intervening to nudge the players in the right (or wrong) direction.
Now, research from my lab and others is pulling back the veil on self-awareness, giving us a new-found respect for the power of the reflective mind. We have found ways to measure it, and can even watch it in action using brain scanners. What we have discovered is already suggesting a rethink in our understanding of conditions like dementia, but it has implications for us all. Boosting self-awareness can improve our decisions, open our eyes to fake news and help us think clearly under pressure. Just as a good conductor can make the difference between a routine rehearsal and a world-class performance, the subtle influence of metacognition can make the difference between failure and success in many aspects of life.
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By Karina Shah

The hull of the Mary RoseHufton + Crow
When the Tudor warship the Mary Rose sank off the south coast of England in 1545, it may have taken an international crew with it. An analysis of the remains of eight mariners from the vessel suggests that some may have come from as far away as North Africa.
The Mary Rose served King Henry VIII for 34 years, before sinking during the Battle of the Solent against France. The ship, including the remains of its drowned crew, was raised from the seafloor in 1982 near the Isle of Wight in one of the most complex salvage projects in history.

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Jessica Scorrer at Cardiff University, UK, and her colleagues have examined the ancestral origins and diets of eight of the ship’s crew members. Previous analyses of these remains predicted their professions according to the belongings they were found with. They were identified as a cook, carpenter, officer, gentleman, purser, young mariner and two archers.
The researchers took around 20 milligrams of enamel from each crew member’s teeth and analysed the chemical isotopes it contained.
“All the isotope elements in your food and drink get deposited in your bones and your teeth during early childhood,” says Scorrer. What’s more, the balance of isotopes in food and drink can vary from region to region, so by analysing the unique chemical fingerprint of isotopes in a given tooth sample, the researchers could infer the region in which an individual had spent their childhood.

Their analysis suggests that three of the crew may have originated from warmer, more southerly climates than those seen in Britain – perhaps somewhere on the southern European coast, Iberia or North Africa. The enamel of the remaining five crew members had isotope values consistent with a childhood most likely spent in western Britain.
However, one of the five brought up in western Britain had cranial characteristics typical of someone with African ancestry.
“This is the first direct evidence of a Black mariner in Henry VIII’s navy,” says Scorrer. Such a discovery would match historical texts, which suggest Black mariners did work in Tudor Britain. “There were extensive trade networks across Europe and much further afield at that time,” says Kate Britton at the University of Aberdeen, UK, who wasn’t involved in the research.
When the ship was recovered, the remains of at least 179 men were found. Although this research provides insight into eight of these individuals, there is still more to discover, says Scorrer.
Journal reference: Royal Society Open Science, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.202106

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By Alexander McNamara
and Matt Hambly

Worldspec/NASA/ Alamy
You may have heard that we are all stardust, but that isn’t strictly true. There are about 20 different elements in the human body, most of which were made inside ancient stars. There’s oxygen, which makes up about half of your body’s mass but only a quarter of its atoms, and then carbon, accounting for another 12 per cent. And just after that, there’s hydrogen, the only element in your body that wasn’t made inside a star long ago and flung into space by a supernova explosion. The hydrogen atoms in your body, accounting for a little over 10 per cent of you, were formed much earlier during the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago.
The smallest insect on Earth is a wasp
The Mymaridae, commonly known as fairyflies or fairy wasps.Scenics & Science / Alamy

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There are more than 110,000 known species of wasp, and while we tend to think of them as the black-and-yellow-striped nuisances, wasps come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. Only one third of species have stings, for instance, and while some live in colonies, the vast majority of wasp species are solitary. There’s even a wasp that can lay claim to the title of smallest insect on the planet. The Mymaridae or fairy wasp has a body length of just 0.139mm, shorter than that of an amoeba.
The first space walker became trapped outside his ship
Over the Black Sea. Museum: Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, Moscow. Author: Leonov, Alexei Arkhipovich.Album / Alamy
Alexei Leonov became the first person to walk in space when, on 18 March 1965, he left the Voskhod 3KD spacecraft for 12 minutes. Although he spent such a short time alone in the vacuum of space, the walk was not without incident. Free from the atmospheric pressures of the spacecraft, his space suit ballooned, preventing him from getting back inside the airlock. Leonov had to bleed his suit of air until it was flexible enough for him to get back inside the ship. Despite the rapid decompression resulting in Leonov developing the bends, he made it back inside safely and returned to Earth shortly afterwards.
Marie Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive
Holograph note-book containing notes of experiments, etc. on radioactive substances, with rough pen-drawings of apparatus.Public Domain Mark/Wellcome Collection
Marie Curie was a physicist and chemist who became the first woman to win a Nobel prize. Along with her husband Pierre, she discovered two elements: polonium and radium. She also carried out pioneering research into radioactivity. At the time no one knew about the effects of radioactivity on the body, so they handled the elements they used in their research without any of the precautions or protective clothing we would use today. Curie even kept vials of what she was working on in her pockets or her desk drawers. More than 100 years after their discoveries, the couple’s notebooks are still so radioactive they have to be kept in lead-lined boxes and handled only while wearing protective clothing.
The largest dinosaur could have weighed 120 tonnes
Public life size model of Patagotitan dinosaurJosh Forwood/Alamy
Fossil remains of truly huge dinosaurs have been limited but after an astounding discovery in 2013, six specimens of a truly enormous beast, Patagotitan, started to emerge from the ground.
Since Patagotitan was discovered, it has often been described as the largest animal ever to walk the earth. Estimating the weight of these dinosaurs is not straightforward but recent analyses are in broad agreement. Patagotitan comes in at a whopping 55 tonnes, which is ten times the mass of an elephant, the largest living land animal.
However, a reappraisal of a dinosaur found in 1878 suggests it might have been twice as heavy as Patagotitan. The estimate is contentious, but if correct it would make Amphicoelias fragillimus, between 80 and 120 tonnes
On average, every square metre of land is home to 130 spiders
Jumping spider (Hypaeusbenignus) seen in rainforest of Costa Rica.Avalon.red/Alamy
Recent studies of web building and other spider behaviours have revealed that these arachnids possess unexpected intelligence. Their cognitive abilities include foresight and planning, complex learning, memory and the capacity to be surprised. Today, more than 48,000 spider species have been identified. They are hugely adaptable, living everywhere from the most northerly islands of the Arctic to deserts, caves, seashores and bogs. The Himalayan jumping spider even flourishes at altitudes above 6 kilometres, making it one of the world’s highest residents. On average, every square metre of land on Earth is home to 130 spiders.

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By Michael Marshall

Woven wrist cuffs found at a Viking burial siteAntiquity Publications Ltd/Rimstad et al/R. Fortuna, National Museum of Denmark
The remains of a Viking have been rediscovered after being missing for more than a century. They were safely stored in a museum the whole time, but had been mislabelled.
The person was buried with expensive grave goods, suggesting they were an elite person or even royalty. They also seem to have been wearing long trousers with elaborate decorations.

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The story begins in 1868, near the village of Mammen in Denmark. A local landowner named Laust Pedersen Skomager enlisted local farmers to help him remove the topsoil from a mound on his estate. They found it concealed a wooden Viking burial chamber, now called Bjerringhøj. The farmers dug up the contents and shared them out – so when academics arrived on the scene soon after, they had first to recover the remains from their new owners.
A re-excavation in 1986 determined that the burial took place in 970 or 971 AD, during the Viking Age, but recovered few new artefacts. When the researchers looked for the original remains in the National Museum of Denmark, they could not find them – and a search in 2009 of archives at the University of Copenhagen did not turn them up either.
However, since 2018 Ulla Mannering at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and her colleagues have been studying Viking-era textiles. As part of this, they examined the remains from another burial called Slotsbjergby. One box held human bones along with textiles – yet the descriptions of the burial site made no mention of bones being found with associated textiles. “I was puzzled about it,” says Mannering.

It slowly dawned on the team that the bones might be the missing ones from Bjerringhøj. “We were all wow with this idea,” says Mannering. She says the team knew this could be controversial, so they had to do several analyses to verify the finding.
They found that the number and types of bone match the Bjerringhøj set exactly, as do the textiles. “We don’t doubt that these must be the things that actually belonged to Bjerringhøj,” says Mannering.
The team says the Bjerringhøj Viking was an adult and probably male. He was buried with various textiles including wrist cuffs, a fragment of embroidered wool, and several woven pieces that were seemingly used in ankle cuffs. This implies that the man was wearing long trousers, although the trousers themselves are not preserved.
Furthermore, the wrist cuffs and pieces from ankle cuffs are strikingly similar, says Mannering. “Of course it was not the same object, but there seems to be an overall design idea.”
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.189
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By Ibrahim Sawal

There are 1000 ancient monuments across one region of Saudi ArabiaAAKSA and Royal Commission for AlUla
A vast site in north-west Saudi Arabia is home to 1000 structures that date back more than 7000 years, making them older than the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge in the UK.
Named after the Arabic word for rectangle, mustatil structures were first discovered in the 1970s, but received little attention from researchers at the time. Hugh Thomas at the University of Western Australia in Perth and his team wanted to learn more about them, and embarked on the largest investigation of the structures to date.

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Using helicopters to fly over north-west Saudi Arabia and then following up with ground explorations, the researchers found more than 1000 mustatils across 200,000 square kilometres – twice as many as were previously thought to exist in this area. “You don’t get a full understanding of the scale of the structures until you’re there,” says Thomas.
Made from piled-up blocks of sandstone, some of which weighed more than 500 kilograms, mustatils ranged from 20 metres to more than 600 metres in length, but their walls stood only 1.2 metres high. “It’s not designed to keep anything in, but to demarcate the space that is clearly an area that needs to be isolated,” says Thomas.
In a typical mustatil, long walls surround a central courtyard, with a distinctive rubble platform, or “head”, at one end and entryways at the opposite end. Some entrances were blocked by stones, suggesting they could have been decommissioned after use.
Excavations at one mustatil showed that the centre of the head contained a chamber within which there were fragments of cattle horns and skulls. The cattle fragments may have been presented as offerings, suggesting mustatils may have been used for rituals.

Radiocarbon dating of the skulls shows that they date to between 5300 and 5000 BC, indicating that this was when this particular mustatil was built – and maybe the others too. If so, the monuments would together form the earliest large-scale, ritual landscape anywhere in the world, predating Stonehenge by more than 2500 years.
“This could completely rewrite our understanding of cults in this area at this time,” says team member Melissa Kennedy, also at the University of Western Australia. She says that further south, religious groups became focused in homes, with families displaying small shrines, but the opposite was happening in ancient Saudi Arabia with the mustatils.
There may also have been a relation between the construction of mustatils and the environment. They were built during the Holocene Humid Phase – a period between 8000 and 4000 BC during which Arabia and parts of Africa were wetter, and what are now deserts were grasslands. But droughts were still common, and Kennedy says it is possible that cattle were herded and used as offerings to the gods to protect the land from the changing climate.
Mustatils were typically clustered in groups of two to 19, suggesting that gatherings may have been broken up into smaller social groups.
“The mustatils themselves are probably associated with an annual or generational coming-together of people who would normally be out with their herds and cattle,” says Gary Rollefson at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, suggesting that these rituals were important for bringing communities together. “But there’s no indication that these guys spent a lot of time around the mustatil.”

“These structures are enigmatic,” says Huw Groucutt at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. He says they show that remarkable human cultural developments took place in the Arabian peninsula.
But despite all the new findings, there is still much to learn. “People are going to understand these structures even more in the future,” says Thomas. “It’s nice to be at the forefront, but we’re also excited to see what other people find.”
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.51

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By Karina Shah

Forest regrowth in the Amazon basin before AD 1350 suggests people had left the regionStefan Huwiler/imageBROKER/Alamy
Fossil pollen records from the Amazon hint at a surge of regrowth in forests of the Amazon basin around 300 to 600 years before European colonisation of South America, suggesting that Indigenous peoples may have been leaving the region at that time.
Following European arrival in South America in the mid-16th century AD, millions of Indigenous people lost their lives in the face of unfamiliar disease, slavery and warfare in an event known as The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.

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Previous studies have shown a dip in carbon dioxide levels in the region in 1610, known as the Orbis spike. This has been associated with the population decline that occurred after Europeans landed in South America, as forests regrew on land previously inhabited by Indigenous people, decreasing carbon dioxide levels.
But the pollen record suggests forest regrowth in this region happened earlier. Mark Bush at the Florida Institute of Technology and his colleagues analysed sediment samples from 39 lakes in the Amazon, in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. They recovered pollen from the lake sediment – the deeper the sediment, the older it is.

They found that forest regrowth in the Amazon basin may have begun around 300 to 600 years before the Orbis spike. They didn’t see a pattern of reforestation in the fossil records between 1550 and 1750, following European colonisation.
“Between 950 and 1350 AD, there are more sites that are gaining forest than losing forest during that time,” says Bush. This suggests that Indigenous people were abandoning land hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, he says.
“These were complex societies, they weren’t just hunter-gatherers,” says Bush. The researchers are unsure about the drivers of this early movement, but suggest climate change could have been at play.
Eduardo Góes Neves at the University of São Paulo in Brazil remains unconvinced, as the significant drop in carbon dioxide after European arrival cannot otherwise be explained. “There is extensive evidence for forest recovery from 1550 to 1750,” says Neves.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abf3870
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Sleep is an essential part of the human condition, and we spend around a third of our lives in the land of nod. But what’s really happening when we close our eyes, and why do we need to sleep? We know that without it our ability to perform even simple tasks becomes impaired, but we still don’t know why exactly. This week, Science with Sam explores the mystery of sleep, from why we, and other animals need it, to what happens if we don’t get enough.
More Science with Sam:
Is there life on Mars? 

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Josie Ford
But is it art?
In a former life, Feedback’s daily doings regularly took us across a windswept plaza on a university campus that, through no fault of its own, had been built in the 1960s. Adding to a general air of faded cold war chic was a huge, rusting iron sculpture on a concrete plinth, on which the words “Vorsicht! Kunst” had been graffitied in yellow paint.
This was in Germany, we perhaps should have said, but the warning to beware of art has stayed with us. We are reminded of it when we read that a Sotheby’s auction of non-fungible tokens by the crypto-artist Pak has brought in $16.8 million, including a single grey pixel that went for $1.36 million worth of Ether.
If, to you, that sounds like just words with a few numbers thrown in, then we can only assume you are not au fait with the worlds of art collection or cryptocurrency, and certainly not the uniquely important new conjunction of the two.

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The true value of art, of course, lies not in aesthetics, but in someone else not having it. This is problematic in the world of digital art, with pixels being so readily copy-and-pastable. Non-fungible tokens, digital widgets that can be added to an unfalsifiable blockchain to assert sole ownership of a digital asset, are the answer to this problem you didn’t know you had yet.
Following the sale of a gif of a flying cat in February for some $600,000, selling the rights to a single pixel represents some sort of progression, if only towards a logical singularity. “This single pixel is one of the most significant pieces of Art imo,” wrote someone who had drunk the Kool-Aid on Twitter. “The future will be very kind to the value of this piece”.
Others have been significantly less kind. Feedback is wary not only of art, but change and new things generally. We will stick for now with the stuff that looks like it will hurt if it falls on your foot – plus those couple of Rothko gouache-on-papers we have stashed behind the photocopier for a rainy day.
Moral fibre
Colin Nicholson of Stockport, UK, doesn’t say why he is receiving regular emails from a US provider of “alternative” views about health and healthcare. Mind you, seeing the unwanted emissions that fill our litter – apologies, “in-” – box, we aren’t one to cast aspersions.
Colin expresses surprise at an item highlighting the very real problem of discarded protective face masks in the environment, “due to the size of the fibres used in their manufacture – between 1mm and 10mm thickness”.
Polymer extrusion processes aren’t our strong point, but we agree that something needs to happen with a centimetre-thick fibre before it is any use against nanosized viral particles. Then again, clicking through to the site that the email links to, so you don’t have to, it seems aimed at those who would prefer to reduce viral transmission probability via a paper bag secured by a tin-foil hat. On that basis, anything will do.
The real Sean Carroll
In our item last week on our theory that people with the same name are actually all the same person, we missed the example under our nose.
We discovered this when a colleague wrote in agitation querying the publicity shot for a New Scientist pixelated happening on the origins of life with scientist Sean Carroll. “My god he’s aged suddenly – and we’re still using the more familiar clean shaven pic of him on the Big Ideas in Physics page,” they wrote.
Indeed, we see that this younger version of Sean Carroll is speaking next week on “How time works”, so we shall watch with interest for clues. Alternatively, it might be that these aren’t the same Sean Carroll. Then we recall that one, or perhaps both, of the Sean Carrolls is a noted proponent of the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory. Perhaps they can tell us which branch of the multiverse we are in, unless it’s both at the same time.
DIY AI
“Deep Learning-based Online Alternative Product Recommendations at Scale” is a preprint that was just posted on the arXiv server, with its authors based at the US’s largest home improvement retailer. “We’ve reached the stage of AI ubiquity where I’m just like “cool, makes sense” when seeing a deep learning paper published by researchers at Home Depot”, tweets Miles Brundage, head of policy research at OpenAI.
Nothing wrong with a do-it-yourself approach, after all. Pausing only to note the appearance of late writer and literary critic Rebecca West on the author list, Feedback congratulates the researchers on how their algorithm combines textual analysis of product data with historical customer behaviour patterns to improve purchase completion rates by 12 per cent. If you liked that product recommendation algorithm, you’ll love this one.
Solar intruders
A product we do like the look of is the Solar Animal Repeller pointed out to us by reader Chris Webster. With the sun’s activity due to hit a periodic peak shortly, it is as well to be prepared for whatever heat-hardened critters coronal mass ejections may fling our way.
The Home Depot offers quite a few that are also effective against gophers, chipmunks and groundhogs. Just the thing to ward off intruders to Feedback’s stationery cupboard, along with that supersized pack of snake glue traps. Or is that the product recommendation algorithm talking?
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