Humans

Ending a relationship by disappearing without explanation, known as “ghosting”, seems to be a distinct form of social rejection – and psychologists are discovering why it is so painful

Humans

20 April 2022

By Amelia Tait
Offwhite
IT WAS 2015 when Jennice Vilhauer’s clients started telling her ghost stories. The Los Angeles-based psychotherapist had more than 10 years of experience helping people with their depression, anxiety and relationship issues – but suddenly, clients began telling her about a new problem, one that left them extremely distressed.
They were victims of ghosting, where one person ends all communication with another, disappearing like a phantom. Messages are ignored and just like that, the person you had a connection with – typically a romantic partner, but sometimes a friend or colleague – chooses to disengage with no explanation. But when Vilhauer searched for more information, she found little research on this phenomenon. So she started publishing her own observations online and was soon inundated with emails from people who had been ghosted. “There’s been an enormous explosion of interest in this because it’s happening so frequently,” she says.
Which begs the question, what is uniquely painful about ghosting? After all, it nearly always hurts when a relationship ends. Is being ghosted any more distressing in the information age than, say, in the Wild West, when your lover hopped on their horse and left you in a trail of dust without so much as a forwarding address? We are now beginning to find out, as well as building a picture of why people ghost, how quirks of the brain can make it feel worse than it ought to and how, counter-intuitively, ghosting may be getting less painful.
Unexpected disappearance
Back in 2015, ghosting hurt so badly because it was completely unexpected, says Vilhauer – it wasn’t something people mentally prepared for when entering a … More

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

20 April 2022

Watch
The Velvet Queen herself – the snow leopard – comes to selected UK and Irish cinemas on 29 April, accompanied by wolves, bears, yaks, birds and the fabulous and untouched landscapes of the Tibetan plateau.

Read
Wild by Design by environmental historian Laura Martin examines how we ended up casting ourselves as the “managers” of wild spaces, and goes on to ask whether we can design natural places without destroying wildness.

Watch
The philosophy and science of the disrupted mind are explored by philosopher Noga Arikha and neuroscientist Katerina Fotopoulou in this online talk by The Royal Institution at 7pm BST on 26 April.Advertisement More

The new science fiction novel from Station Eleven’s author is mostly set centuries into the future – but also contains scary glimpses of a pandemic-strewn past

Humans

20 April 2022

By Clare Wilson
Time travel isn’t all fun and games in Sea of TranquilityShutterstock/Tomertu
Sea of Tranquility
Emily St John Mandel
Picador
IT SAYS a lot about Emily St John Mandel’s imagination that while there are multiple instances of time travel in her new book, Sea of Tranquility, this is only one of several intriguing plot strands.
The novel, Mandel’s sixth, is a welcome return to science fiction after her contemporary outing, The Glass Hotel. Her highly successful fourth novel, Station Eleven, is set 20 years after a deadly pandemic, and … More

The heavens wheel above us, but at least we can rely on the North Star, aka Polaris, to provide eternal stability, right? Afraid not, says Abigail Beall

Space

20 April 2022

By Abigail Beall
Igordabari/Alamy
ONE of the most iconic stars in the northern hemisphere is Polaris, also known as the North Star. If you can spot this star, you will always know which direction is north, because it is a steady point of light in a changing sky. No matter where you are in the northern hemisphere, it will never move. Or will it?
The North Star hasn’t always been, and won’t always be, Polaris. At the moment, it is our North Star because of the tilt of Earth: the north pole faces the same direction in space – towards Polaris – even as Earth moves around the sun … More

In 12 psychological experiments with a total of 942 participants, 82 per cent overestimated the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups

Humans

14 April 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
A stock image of a group of people of a range of ethnicitiesShutterstock/Rawpixel.com
People may subconsciously overestimate the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups, even if they belong to those groups, which could create illusions of diversity within populations.
“Individuals from the minority group are by definition less frequent,” says Rasha Kardosh at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. “Therefore, we are more likely to notice them and so are more likely to remember their presence, and so we end up overestimating their presence.”
Previous studies suggest people in … More

The earliest evidence of calendar use by the Maya may have been found in the remains of an ancient temple in Guatemala

Humans

13 April 2022

By Carissa Wong
An ancient fragment of a Maya calendarHeather Hurst/Skidmore College/Saratoga Springs
Two pieces of an ancient wall may preserve the earliest evidence of the Maya calendar. The fragments are decorated with a dot and line above a deer head – representing one of the dates from the 260-day calendar – and they are from a temple built between 2300 and 2200 years ago in what is now Guatemala in central America.
Several ancient communities living across the Americas – including the Aztecs, Maya, Mixtecs and Zapotecs – tracked the time using cycles of 13 days denoted by numbers, alongside cycles of 20 days named after gods. In this calendar, a specific day is assigned both a number and a name, producing 260 unique days before the cycle repeats. It is thought that people used the calendar to decide when to hold ceremonies, to mark important dates or to attempt to predict future events.
Until now, most previous early evidence for calendar use by these ancient people had been found on stone monuments dating to around 100 BC. David Stuart at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues have now found evidence that the Maya people may have used this calendar over a century earlier.Advertisement
The team previously discovered the San Bartolo archaeological site, which includes a pyramid called Las Pinturas – meaning “the paintings” – back in 2001. Excavations then revealed that the Maya completed several phases of construction, with earlier structures eventually knocked down to form the foundations of the pyramid.
When the researchers were sorting through pieces of plaster collected from the pyramid’s foundations, they realised that two pieces fit perfectly together to form a date symbol.
“That was a stunner – we believe that this is the earliest example of the use of the Maya calendar, showing the day seven Deer,” says Stuart.

The fragments came from the remains of a long platform that was probably built to track astronomical events as well as the time. “This platform may have acted as an observatory for looking at the rising sun or other astronomical bodies in the sky, or for just keeping track of time. Like a kind of architectural clock,” says Stuart.
By radiocarbon dating charcoal found alongside the fragments, the team dated the symbols to between 300 and 200 BC. Stuart believes the symbols may have been used to denote the date of a new year, but they may also have been used to reference a person or deity.
However, some archaeologists question whether this is really the earliest evidence of the 260-day calendar. Mary Pohl at Florida State University believes that a previously discovered roller stamp from Tabasco in Mexico shows this date notation was used in 500 BC. But Stuart thinks the symbols on the stamp from 500 BC aren’t necessarily a form of date notation comparable to the Maya system.
“Early evidence of the… calendar has been debated, but in this study they present clear evidence of the 260-day calendar use. This is very important work,” says Takeshi Inomata at the University of Arizona.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl9290
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An analysis of bones from about 500 individuals who died between 1830 and 1867 in Middenbeemster suggests women in the dairy farming community did not breastfeed

Health

13 April 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Engraving from From The Five Senses by Fredrick Bloemaert, after Abraham Bloemaert, 1632-1670F. Bloemaert/A. Bloemaert/N. Visscherimage/Rijks Museum/Public Domain
Women from a 19th-century farming community in the Netherlands probably didn’t breastfeed their babies because they were too busy working. It is the first time that widespread artificial feeding has been discovered in a farming community from this period.
Andrea Waters-Rist at Western University in Canada and her colleagues analysed the bones of about 500 individuals who died between 1830 and 1867 in Middenbeemster, a rural village in the north of the Netherlands.
The remains were dug up because a church was expanding into the cemetery, and Waters-Rist and her team were offered the chance to analyse them. They also had death certificates for about half the people. “It’s really rare to have such a large sample size and to have all this amazing archival information,” she says.Advertisement
The researchers wanted to find out more about the diets of the women and children in this village, which mainly consisted of dairy farmers at this time. “One of the main reasons behind this type of research is to rectify the historical record about the lives of women and children,” says Waters-Rist. “Traditional archaeology has focused on what adult males were doing and women were just seen as passive actors.”
The team was able to determine whether the children were breastfed by analysing the chemical isotopes in their bones. Children who are breastfed have different carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios to their mothers.

Out of 20 children who had died before the age of 1, 15 showed no evidence of breastfeeding. “Even the five who did show some sign – it did not seem like they were breastfed for long,” says Waters-Rist.
And out of 35 children aged between 1 and 6, 29 showed no signs of breastfeeding in their bones. The team believes this was probably due to the fact that women predominantly worked the farms in this community, milking and raising the cows.
“We think it’s a sign of how hard the women were working and that they were just really busy,” she says. “Also, there was always fresh cow’s milk.”
Waters-Rist says this has never been seen among farmers from this period before. “We’ve only seen this behaviour in really large cities where women were working in factories and couldn’t take their babies with them,” she says.
“The findings of this study are intriguing for an agricultural community where mothers and infants would not have spent long periods apart,” says Ellen Kendall at Durham University in the UK. But she says the results may be skewed by only looking at children who died before the age of six – it could be that children who weren’t breastfed were more likely to die early.
Journal reference: PLOS One, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265821

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This moving book sees neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo explore the effect on her cognitive functioning when she fell in love with a fellow scientist

Humans

13 April 2022

By Elle Hunt
Stephanie Ortigue and John T. Cacioppo tracked their burgeoning loveJoe Sterbenc/University of Chicago
Wired for Love: A neuroscientist’s journey through romance, loss and the essence of human connection
Stephanie CacioppoRobinson
SHE studied love, he researched loneliness – it was such a perfect match it could have been made in a lab. When Stephanie Ortigue met John T. Cacioppo at a neuroscience conference in Shanghai, both knew their whirlwind romance would be influenced by their research and inform it in turn.Advertisement
It was 2011. Stephanie was 36, and publishing papers on pair-bonding and romantic love, despite having never known it herself. “I assumed I would never experience romance outside the laboratory,” she writes. John was an expert on the dangers of loneliness to physical and mental well-being, and, at 60, was twice divorced, “not lonely, but by myself”, he said.
Both were self-avowed workaholics until they found love, and almost at first sight. “And once I did, my life and my research were changed forever,” writes Stephanie (who took her husband’s name). Now, in Wired for Love, Cacioppo moves away from case studies and turns her scientific attention onto her marriage. Her book is “both the story of my science, and the science behind my story”.
As a tale of romance, it is epic, culminating in a spur-of-the-moment wedding in the Luxembourg Garden in Paris and a profile in the popular Modern Love column in The New York Times. But what takes the Cacioppos’ story beyond a heart-warming reminder to never lose hope are their professional insights into our brains in love.
Through their courtship and marriage, Stephanie and John studied themselves, observing and noting “the intention, the subtext underlying every step we took as a fledgling couple” and its effect on cognitive functioning.
In Wired for Love, Cacioppo explores their findings with critical distance. What was behind their instant attraction? How could they feel so close when they were often oceans apart? Would they have fallen in love if they hadn’t found each other physically attractive? What part did their expectations play? And for two people who thought themselves in love with their work, how did the real thing compare?
Cacioppo, a psychiatrist and behavioural neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, enlarges her experience with studies (her own, and others) for the sake of non-scientific readers who may be seeking to understand and perhaps cultivate romantic connection themselves. The appetite for these scientific insights into our personal lives is evident in popular non-fiction such the recent Heartbreak: A personal and scientific journey by journalist Florence Williams. And it is even shown by the bashful requests by Cacioppo’s students to use her “love machine”, a patented computer test that aims to reveal their unconscious preferences of partner from their brain activity.
Yet Cacioppo – who became the first female president of the Society for Social Neuroscience – describes struggling to be taken seriously early in her research of romantic love, with most neuroscientists devoting themselves to the darker side of the emotional spectrum.
In the early 2000s, a male faculty adviser told her that to study love would be “career suicide”, that the subject was too lightweight to be the basis for academic research. She was first able to overcome that bias by substituting the word “love”, in a grant proposal, for “pair-bonding”.
And by studying the brain in love, we can see it as a complex and hardwired neurobiological phenomenon, suggesting to Cacioppo that “love is not merely a feeling but also a way of thinking”.
Her early career experience speaks to the snobbery and sexism at play in what is deemed worthy of study, as well as how much we don’t know about what might be considered a universal experience and an essential need.
As covid-19 laid bare, writes Cacioppo, “the need for love might be less immediate than the need to avoid danger, but it is by no means a luxury”. Indeed, John’s death from cancer in 2018 shows love’s potential to both devastate and endure. Cacioppo confronts her loss boldly, concluding that “love is a much more expansive concept than we give it credit for”, not all of which can, or should, be explained by chemistry.

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