Humans

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

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

Until around 150 years ago, humans were relatively short – but our recent growth spurt may have more to do with social factors than dietary ones

Humans

2 December 2021

By Michael Marshall
A man measures a woman’s heightImage Point Fr/Shutterstock
For most of our history, humans have been short, a study has found. Until around 150 years ago, few people grew taller than 170 centimetres – not even the most privileged individuals, who had ready access to food. This discovery adds to growing evidence that stunting – being unusually short – isn’t a wholly reliable indicator of malnutrition. Instead of being a sign of a good diet, growing taller may instead reflect competition for dominance in some societies.
Christiane Scheffler at the University of Potsdam and paediatrician … More