Humans

Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX
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I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a time-looped psychological horror from cinema’s greatest living magician, Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). It will be on Netflix from 4 September.

Read
Net Zero: How we stop causing climate change sees economist Dieter Helm arguing that a carbon pricing system – one that applies to everything from flights to farming to food – is the only fair and sustainable way out of the climate crisis.
Listen
Science for the People, a long-running interview radio show and podcast, devotes a recent instalment to Eva Holland discussing her book Nerve: Adventures in the science of fear, inspired by her own traumas and phobias.
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John Was Trying to Contact Aliens is a 16-minute film that brilliantly captures the eccentric 1970s world of UFO hunter John Shepherd, who built kit to hunt aliens, playing jazz and reggae to lure them

Humans 26 August 2020
By Simon Ings
Beyond the UFO folk hero, Shepherd emerges as both sad and inspiring
Courtesy of Netflix

John Was Trying to Contact Aliens
Matthew Killip

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Netflix
YOU have to admire Netflix’s ambition. As well as producing Oscar-winning short documentaries of its own (The White Helmets won in 2017; Period. End of Sentence. won in 2019), the streaming giant makes a regular effort to bring festival-winning factual films to a global audience.
The latest is John Was Trying to Contact Aliens by New York-based UK director Matthew Killip, which won the Jury Award for a non-fiction short film at this year’s Sundance festival in Utah. In little over 15 minutes, it manages to turn the story of John Shepherd, an eccentric inventor who spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of kilometres into space, into a tear-jerker of epic (indeed, cosmological) proportions.
Never much cared for by his parents, Shepherd was brought up by adoptive grandparents in rural Michigan. A fan of classic science-fiction shows like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, Shepherd never could shake off the impression that a UFO sighting made on him as a child, and in 1972 the 21-year-old set about designing and constructing electronic equipment to launch a private search for extraterrestrial intelligence. His first set-up, built around an ultra-low frequency radio transmitter, soon expanded to fill over 100 square metres of his long-suffering grandparents’ home. It also acquired an acronym: Project STRAT – Special Telemetry Research And Tracking.
“In 1972, 21-year-old John Shepherd set about building equipment to hunt for extraterrestrials”

A two-storey high, 1000-watt, 60,000-volt, deep-space radio transmitter required a house extension – and all so Shepherd could beam jazz, reggae, Afro-pop and German electronica into the sky for hours every day, in the hope any passing aliens would be intrigued enough to come calling. He could also monitor any returning signals and UFOs.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Killip to play up Shepherd’s eccentricity. Until now, Shepherd has been a folk hero in UFO-hunting circles. His photo portrait, surrounded by bizarre broadcasting kit of his own design, appears in Douglas Curren’s In Advance of the Landing: Folk concepts of outer space – the book TV producer Chris Carter says he raided for the first six episodes of his series The X-Files.
Instead, Killip listens closely to Shepherd, discovers the romance, courage and loneliness of his life, and shapes it into a paean to our ability to out-imagine our circumstances and overreach our abilities. There is something heartbreakingly sad, as well as inspiring, about the way Killip pairs Shepherd’s lonely travails in snow-bound Michigan with footage, assembled by teams of who knows how many hundreds, from the archives of NASA.
Shepherd ran out of money for his project in 1998, and having failed to make a connection with ET, quickly found a life-changing connection much closer to home.
I won’t spoil the moment, but I can’t help but notice that, as a film-maker, Killip likes these sorts of structures. In one of his earlier works, The Lichenologist, about Kerry Knudsen, curator of lichens at the University of California, Riverside, Knudsen spends most of the movie staring at very small things before we are treated to the money shot: Knudsen perched on top of a mountain, whipped by the wind and explaining how his youthful psychedelic experiences inspired a lifetime of intense visual study. It is a shot that changes the meaning of the whole film.

Simon also recommends…
Films
The Diatomist (2014)
Matthew Killip
An introduction to Klaus Kemp, whose fascination with German microscopist J. D. Möller inspired him to recreate the Victorian art of arranging diatoms in extraordinary patterns.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Steven Spielberg
Ufology was a global phenomenon by the time this blockbuster arrived. Countless imitations followed, but none with the charm and sincerity of the original.

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All of us harbour biases resulting from the associations we learn implicitly from the societies we live in and how our brains work, but there are ways to overcome them

Humans | Leader 26 August 2020
Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

FEW ideas from social psychology have captured public attention in recent years as much as unconscious bias, the catch-all term for the assumptions we make about other people without being consciously aware of the process.
That reach is partly down to the Implicit Association Test (IAT) created by researchers at Harvard University in the 1990s. Available online, it is widely seen as a quick and easy way to see how implicitly biased you are. The results can be unsettling: you may not think you are racist or sexist or ageist, but, in many cases, your unconscious preferences, … More

Confronting our unconscious biases requires concerted effort. Fortunately, there are simple things everyone can do to avoid the cognitive shortcuts that underpin them

Humans 26 August 2020
By Pragya Agarwal

People Images/Getty Images

We are still getting to grips with the most effective ways to identify and address bias. What is clear is that it is a difficult task that requires concerted, consistent effort. But there are strategies that make a difference.
A first step is to make biases visible. This can include taking the Implicit Association Test to raise awareness, but this needs to be complemented by active reflection – including recognising triggers for bias and examining how our life experiences have shaped our biases.
Research has shown that using blind or anonymised hiring practices may help weaken biases that can limit opportunities for women and minority groups. One study found that using blind auditions increased the likelihood that women musicians were hired by an orchestra by up to 46 per cent. Research in France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands has showed that removing names from applications increases the likelihood that candidates from minority groups will be invited to interview.
We can tackle generalised assumptions by being clear that a particular attribute is associated with an individual rather than their whole group, for example “This boy is good at maths”. This approach can help to diminish stereotypes and the pressure to conform to them.
Taking our time with important decisions can also help us avoid cognitive shortcuts that perpetuate bias. When this isn’t possible, rehearsing reactions to high stress situations can help prevent biased snap decisions, research with police has shown.
Finding ways to identify with members of different groups by forging links with your own sense of self can diminish bias. In one study, nurses from diverse … More

Psychologists have shown that reflexive biases influence our perceptions of others, potentially explaining the persistence of various forms of prejudice. But reliably measuring our implicit biases is trickier than it first appeared

Humans 26 August 2020
By Pragya Agarwal

Timo Kuilder

YOU are biased. So am I. We all discriminate. It is both a source of concern and comfort that we don’t necessarily do so deliberately and that our prejudices aren’t always wilful.
If societies are to truly confront the pernicious effects of racism and prejudice, the importance of examining these biases and how they become etched into the brain is becoming increasingly clear. The death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May shook the world to attention, but it was no isolated incident. Every day there are stories of people being treated with suspicion – or far worse – based on their skin colour while going about their daily lives.
This is in spite of the fact that, for the past 40 years, opinion polls show a steady decline in racist views in the US, UK and other countries. That has led some researchers to suspect that, as explicit racism has been driven underground, unconscious bias is playing a critical role. This suspicion inspired the creation of the Implicit Association Test, a tool that aims to reveal unconscious biases with a few clicks of the mouse.
Unfortunately, the accuracy and reliability of this widely celebrated test isn’t what it once seemed. Pinning down the nature and extent of hidden bias is proving to be extraordinarily complicated. Eradicating it is far from straightforward, too – and it turns out that some efforts to do so may further entrench the very prejudices they are meant to uproot. But we are making progress, not least in understanding the processes in our brains that perpetuate … More

We are more aware of how “unconscious” biases work than ever before, says neuroscientist Lasana Harris – and we can use our conscious brains to override them

Humans 26 August 2020
By Lasana Harris

Stephanie Singleton

WHY are we prejudiced? What happens in our brains when we make assumptions about people who look or speak differently to us? As movements such as Black Lives Matter work to expose the systemic racism in the US and Europe, such questions are taking on new and long overdue urgency. If we are to overcome our biases, we need to understand their neural and psychological roots.
Lasana Harris, a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at University College London, is among those striving for such an understanding. His research focuses on how we think about other people’s minds, known as social cognition, and more specifically on how we perceive others. Working with Susan Fiske at Princeton University, his research on the brain mechanisms underlying dehumanisation has revealed the surprising ease with which we can stop ourselves from having empathy for the plights of others.
Such insights have informed his thinking on racism, too. Harris views what many people call unconscious bias as an inevitable result of the associations we learn and the way our brains react to perceived threats. Rather than something we engage in unconsciously, he argues that it is something we know we are doing but struggle to control.
Here he tells New Scientist why societies condition people to be prejudiced and what the science says we can do about it.
Daniel Cossins: Dehumanisation is a horrifying word and yet your work suggests it is something we all do. Why is that?
Lasana Harris: Firstly, if I want to do something to another human being that is something I don’t typically like doing to human beings, then I’m … More

By Colin Barras
This ancient burial style is difficult to understand
A.M. Herrero-Corral, et al.

AN UNUSUAL 3700-year-old grave unearthed in Spain shows how little we know about some ancient burial practices.
At the Humanejos site, 20 kilometres south of Madrid, there are about 100 ancient tombs. None is quite as strange as grave 31.
Inside the 1.2-metre-deep grave, the body of a 15-year-old youth was placed, sitting upright. He was then partially buried, leaving his head and shoulders exposed to the elements. Eventually, the body decayed and the youth’s upper body collapsed – at which point more dirt was added to the … More

By Douglas Heingartner
In the DESIGMA-Advanced test, a respondent must work out which shape logically comes next in several series like the ones shown here
Benedikt Schneider

People who are given instructions on how to succeed at a widely used type of IQ test end up with far higher scores than those who take the test without learning these tips beforehand – throwing into question the validity of these kinds of tests and contributing to critiques of IQ tests in general.
That’s the main finding of a study that looked at “progressive matrices”, a kind of IQ test that displays a series of changing … More