It’s Not Just RoboCop, It’s Your Grandmother With a Pacemaker

Cyborgs are hybrid creatures, unsettling by nature. They have been used in the arts as symbols of both the progress and dangers brought by scientific discoveries. They are objects of both fascination and disgust. They are, therefore, often a great testimony to the preoccupations of the period and give us an idea of how our ancestors imagined the future of humanity, our present.

The word „cyborg“ is the contraction of cybernetic organism. For the purposes of this article, we will define it as an organic being with mechanic body parts. It applies to an organism that has restored function or enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on some sort of feedback.The term was created in 1960 by Manfred E.Clynes and Nathan S.Kline to refer to the enhanced man who could survive in extra-terrestrial environments [1]. But more on space exploration later…
First, we have to go back to the earliest occurrences of cyborgs in arts which date back from the mid-XIX century.

The steam concert by Grandville, Jean-Jacques, 1844 

Rust, Bone and Steam - the Early Cyborgs
The first visual appearance of cyborgs dates from 1844. Le concert à vapeur (The Steam concert) presents a band of musicians that have integrated their instruments into their bodies, and have steam coming from their heads. It’s a strange, humorous and an enticing idea if you ever had to carry around a heavy cello or a tuba [2].
The master of the fantastic, Edgar Allan Poe, also tackled the concept of cyborg in a beautifully written short story The Man That Was Used Up (1839). Obsessed by the physical perfection of the mysterious Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith (including his moustache [3]), the protagonist runs around the city to learn his story, only to discover that the handsome officer is more a puzzle than a man. At the time of the colonial wars and the industrial revolution, Poe plays with the imagery of the strong warrior and questions the increasingly important place of mechanisation in everyday life.

A Pacifist Dystopia
In the aftermath of World War II, artists tried to think of solutions to ensure a lasting peace. In Limbo (published in 1952 but set in 1990), Bernard Wolfe imagines a world where humans try to suppress their aggressive impulses by performing voluntary amputations of their arms and legs. Unfortunately, the science of prosthetics progresses too, and the new limbs end up being better for war than the natural ones. The description of this society of limbless men extends to social, sexual and philosophical problems as well. This satire is also a severe critic of totalitarian thinking and acting [4].
In his 1963 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K.Dick imagines a bleak future for humanity. In the year 2010, the earth has become so warm that one must carry an individual cooling system to venture outside during the day. Mars and a few other planets are inhabited by human colonists forced into exile by a draft. Their only escape from their life on a desolated planet is to chew a hallucinogenic drug: Can-D that “translates” them into a parody of the earth. Then Palmer Eldritch, an enigmatic cyborg space explorer believed to be dead comes back from a system far away. He brings with him an incredible new drug, whose potential to create hallucinated worlds goes far beyond what could be experienced with Can-D. However the nature of the drug and his motive soon appear to be very sinister. In this rich novel, the character of Palmer Eldritch is presented as a futuristic incarnation of the devil, coming to tempt and judge humans.
“The elevator arrived. The doors slid aside. Inside the elevator waited four men and two women, silently. All of them were Palmer Eldritch. Men and woman alike: artificial arm, stainless teeth… the gaunt, hollowed-out grey face with Jensen eyes.” [5]. 

https://bit.ly/2IFpT3c via pixabay

Welcome to the Era of the Macho-Cyborg
Of course, there are multiple examples of cyborgs in Sci-Fi television series such as Star Trek, Doctor Who as well as in the Marvel universe. Too many in fact, to present here. However, I feel I should mention the The Six Million Dollar Man which aired between 1973 and 1978 as it remains a reference in popular culture. Steve Austin, former astronaut with bionic arms is a friendly cyborg, who looks completely human most of the time and works for the US government. Contrarily to earlier examples of cyborgs, there is nothing scary about him.
Austin was soon followed by another righteous cyborg: Robocop. In Paul Verhoeven’s movie of the same title, (1987), RoboCop is a police officer killed by a gang of criminals and later revived as a powerful cyborg who violently fights crime and corruption. However my favorite “cyborg civil servant” character has to be Inspector Gadget. I grew up watching the excellent animated series (which originally aired between 1982 and 1986), which has the best theme song ever. I dare you not to immediately google it. Of course, there is also a 1999 movie directed by David Kellogg.
These three different characters are examples of the late 70’s-80’s concept of a cyborg as an improved man, ultra-masculine without the satire of earlier depictions (from E.A. Poe or B. Wolfe). Moreover, the cyborg is not seen as a threat anymore, but as the next step in the human evolution, helping to solve the problems of our society.

Entering the Cyberspace
Then, there are the cyborgs whose bodies are entirely artificial. Let’s talk about Ghost in the Shell. Before the recent Hollywood adaptation, Ghost in the Shell was a manga from Masamune Shirow published in 1989 [6]. The protagonist Motoko Kusanagi is a woman whose mind (her “ghost”) now lives inside and artificial body (the “shell”). Here, the body and the mind are presented as two different entities. Indeed Motoko is able to leave her body and enter the cyberspace to hack computer systems or find other “ghosts”.
Motoko: “Just as there are many parts needed to make a human a human, there’s a remarkable number of things needed to make an individual what they are. A face to distinguish yourself from others. A voice you aren’t aware of yourself. The hand you see when you awaken. The memories of childhood, the feelings for the future. That’s not all. There’s the expanse of the data net my cyber-brain can access. All of that goes into making me what l am. Giving rise to a consciousness that l call “me”.”
This duality has been perhaps best introduced by William Gibson in his iconic novel Neuromancer. In this 1984 (so pre-internet) thriller, Gibson develops the concept of cyberspace (a term he invented). In this world, most people are cyborgs. However, implants are not enough to render life bearable, and when the protagonist is not able to enter cyberspace, because his nervous system is damaged, he feels trapped.
“For case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. […] Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”[7]
I cannot conclude this article without a few honorable mentions to pop culture characters who are cyborgs, even though you might not see them that way: Darth Vader, Edward Scissorhands but NOT the Terminator (despite what he says repeatedly during the movie, he is a robot – not a cyborg).

https://bit.ly/2DLDrH6 via pexels

When Reality meets Science Fiction
To misquote Gray, Mentor & Figueroa-Sarriera, science-fiction writers and the editors of the Cyborg Handbook [8]: "It’s not just Robocop, it is (y)our grandmother with a pacemaker“.
Today, cyborgs are living among us. A British man -Niel Harbisson- is the first official human cyborg. Born colour-blind, Niel Harbisson had an antenna implanted into his occipital bone in 2004. It allows him to hear colours including infrared and ultraviolet. The antenna detects the wavelenghts of the colour in front of him and produces a sound that he hears through bone-conduction [9]. Since the antenna now appears on his passport, he has been recognized in 2018 has the first human cyborg by the Guinness Book of World Records.
Although the term cyborg now officially also refers to a real being, reality has yet to catch up with fiction. Artists have been dreaming up cyborgs for over 170 years. In addition to being highly entertaining, science fiction novels and movies inform and alert us to the shifting of our society by imagining worlds with different possibilities for the evolution of humanity.

Aliénor Ragot
PhD Student, AG Holtkamp

[1] Clynes and Kline, Astronautics 1960.
[2] Grandville and Taxile Delord, Un Autre monde : transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions.1844
[3] "You perceive I cannot speak of these latter without enthusiasm; it is not too much to say that they were the handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun", The Man That Was Used Up p.361

[4]  Anonymous, Psychiatr Q, 1953
[5]  The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch p. 171
[6] Shirow, Ghost in the Shell, 1989 (manga); Oshii 1995,2004,2008 (animated films); Sanders 2017 (live-action film)
[7] Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984
[8] Gray, Mentor & Figueroa-Sarriera, The Cyborg Handbook, 1995 p. 2
[9] https://bit.ly/2L5nyjA

The Evolution of Love

Let me tell you about the birds and the bees. And the flowers and the trees. And a thing called love…
But hey … what is LOVE, except for the most popular topic of song lyrics?

What is Love?
The urban dictionary gives the following definition: “Love is nature’s way of tricking people into reproducing” [1]. Hm… why didn’t we just continue to be self-copying RNA as described in “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins, or simply procreate by cell division [2]? The clue is that sexual reproduction brings enormous advantages in terms of fitness: Mutations occur naturally in every organism all the time. Some may be harmful, some without impact and others may be highly beneficial. Maybe a mutation in a structural protein could give a protist sturdier ciliaries, allowing it faster movements and a great advantage in escaping predators. However, only the individual carrying the mutation will benefit from it unless it is shared. And basically, sexual reproduction is nothing else but sharing your genome with someone else. This someone will not benefit in person, but his and your offspring will. Thus sharing is caring. But does caring equal love?

Source

I'm Too Sexy...
In general, mating means higher cost for an individual at first, but pays off with increased fitness of its progeny and gene propagation. But of course, not every individual wants to mate with any other. Hence, mating strategies developed to maximize benefit. Mating strategies vary in complexity: a pretty straightforward strategy is to release attractive molecules to acquire a random partner. However, the more costly the reproduction itself, the more prudence in partner choice is advised. The decision about a partner is usually made by the female, thus males of many animal species have developed specific attributes and/or courtship behaviors that may not serve any practical purpose other than attracting a female’s attention and influencing her choice.
Birds give great examples of this: peacocks grow their beautiful and immense tails to impress females. These have no use other than to signal “I am so fit and healthy, I can afford an entirely useless, giant plumage!” (see also 'You Have Beautiful Eyes, Hundreds of Them'). Similarly, bowerbird males construct little lodges from sticks, grass, and leaves, which they even decorate with flowers, shells, and other colorful and shiny things they collect. If the lodge is impressive enough and the female decides to mate, they entirely abandon the lodge to build a nest suitable for breeding elsewhere.
Humans, too, possess attributes that serve reproductive rather than survival purposes. Compared to other primates, humans have features such as “concealed ovulation, extended female sexuality when not fertile, large visible breasts even when not lactating, large spongy boneless visible pensises relative to body size even when not sexually aroused, relative hairlessness that reveals skin quality, full lips that may mimic female genitalia by exposing skin that simulates mucosal membranes”, as discussed in detail by psychologist Lawrence Josephs [3].

You and Me, Forever
But mating alone does not yet guarantee successful procreation. A lot of further effort needs to be invested by parents to actually ensure the survival of offspring, especially in higher mammals. For humans, this can be up to twenty years! For this purpose, nature developed strategies beyond the "hit and run" approach to make mating partners cooperate until their progeny can survive on its own. Bonding mechanisms cause partners to team up and cooperate until descendants can survive independently [3,4]. This may lead to monogamy (or serial monogamy) as a favored type of relationship.
Nowadays, psychologists discuss compassion, a feeling most of us would also associate with love. Compassion also developed to ensure survival chances for vulnerable offspring because it motivates individuals to join forces and cooperate for the sake of their progeny [5]. Even early evolutionists such as Darwin considered what he called “sympathy” to be one of the strongest human instincts. While all of this totally makes sense, it does not really fit our modern-day definition of “love”.

LOVE IS THE ONLY SOCIALLY ACCEPTED FORM OF MADNESS

Maybe, it is more appropriate to talk about the psychological term “romantic love”. Psychologist James Leonard Park provides a sarcastic explanation of romantic love as a hoax or urban legend [6]. Indeed, considering archeological finds from the beginning of mankind, there is evidence for different forms of courtship behavior and for the concept of marriage, i.e. partnership between man and woman in order to maintain monogamy and raise children. Still today across the globe, people get married for practical reasons only, without any romantic consideration. Where does romance come into play then? Apparently, it is the relatively modern invention of medieval troubadours and minstrels in France [7]. Since then, European culture has spread all over the world, the newly invented concept of romantic love has entered folk psychology and is ubiquitous in songs, novels, television, and movies. Cultural imprinting, one could say.


You Drive Me Crazy
Nonetheless, most of us have experienced romantic love, and it is commonly perceived as an altered state of consciousness or “the only socially accepted form of madness” [8]. Not only because of these definitions, involving consciousness and insanity, psychologists and neurobiologists began to explore what underlies romantic feelings in the brain. Even though research has so far correlated brain regions and autonomous nervous system activity with feelings of love and identified some brain chemistry that elicits affection, science is far from answering the question: What is love?
It's good to know that instead, there are plenty of songs still to come that can tell us the answer.

[1] http://bit.ly/1fTAtUl
[2] Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene", Oxford University Press, New York, 1976
[3] Josephs, Am Acad Psychoanal Dyn Psychiatry, 2010
[4] De Boer, Neuroscience, 2012
[5] Goetz, Keltner and Simon-Thomas, Psychol Bull, 2010
[6] http://bit.ly/1mHJD9x
[7] http://bit.ly/1g2veC6
[8]http://bit.ly/1nnGFXd

by Bettina Schmerl, PhD Student AG Shoichet
This article originally appeared 2014 in CNS Volume 7, Issue 2, Neuroscience of Love

You have Beautiful Eyes, Hundreds of Them!

What do people look for in a partner? Many of us would love to know what aspects of our appearance are of most interest to potential mates. Well, we could start by posing the question 'What do people look at in a partner?' After all, what the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over or in this case throb for.

Avian Eyetracking Shows Peahens Checking Out Males' Train Feathers
This is one of those research questions, however, where straightforward questionnaire data are likely to raise suspicions. How many people are going to admit that they look straight at someone's buttocks or cleavage? Eyetracking, on the other hand, can reveal a great deal about what people attend to, and has delivered such edifying conclusions as: Men seem to like to assess each other's crotches [1]; women check each other out as much as they do men [2]; and men look longer at larger breasts (even when controlling for the larger area of the visual field they occupy) [3].

Picture reproduced with permission from Yorzinski et al, J Exp Biol, 2013

A recent novelty, however, is the application of eyetracking to the romantic interests of birds. And no better bird to begin with than the peacock, famous for its eye-catching train of iridescent feathers, rattled in mating displays. Of course, in the animal kingdom it tends to be the women who do the ogling, so a recent study tracked peahens' eye movements while the males strutted their stuff [4].
The peahens were not especially impressed, spending less than a third of their time even looking at the male at all. Nor were they interested in everything he had to offer. The upper train, where most of the eyes are located, was of relatively little interest. Instead, the females' gaze lingered on the lower train, which they scanned from side to side in a way that suggests they were assessing its symmetry, an important feature in sexual selection [5].
So how can we make sure our next date results in love at first saccade? The authors offer a somewhat disheartening speculation. Briefer viewing times may indicate simply that a trait is much easier to assess. Peahens may look less at train eyes simply because it is very easy to see whether a male has fewer than required, and he may then be rejected without further ado [6]

[1] http://bit.ly/NCem7I
[2] Rupp and Wallen, Horm Behav, 2007
[3] Gervais et al, Sex Roles, 2013
[4] Yorzinski et al, J Exp Biol, 2013
[5] Moller and Thornhill, Amer Nat, 1998
[6] Dakin and Montgomerie, Anim Behav, 2011

by Luke Tudge,
This article originally appeared 2014 in CNS Volume 7, Issue 2, Neuroscience of Love 

The Secret of Beauty

Beauty Lies in the Eyes of the Beholder

The concept of "ideal beauty" has changed over time, based on a shift of cultural values. Beauty involves symmetry, harmony, and balance with nature and is associated with emotional wellbeing [1]. For example, women are widely acknowledged most beautiful when they are relatively young, with smooth skin and well-proportioned bodies (a waist-to-hip ratio of approximately 0.70) [2].

Ideal Meets Reality 

Surprisingly, scientists have found that “ideal beauty” can be found in "averageness" [2]. When averaging images of human faces to form a composite image, they are perceived as more attractive. In contrast, cultural values and the media influence “real beauty”. For example, in ancient China, women with small feet were considered more beautiful. Girls bound their feet tightly to inhibit their growth and appear attractive. Contemporary western media has extended this ideal of “slimness” to the whole body, often featuring very slender women and promoting eating disorders as a side effect.

An ideal beauty arrived in reality – Nefertiti. Her name means "a beautiful woman has arrived". Nefertiti, regarded a legendary queen of beauty, has been honored not only for her beautiful face, but also her kindness and intelligence. The definition of beauty is not only based on external features (i.e. facial and physical attractiveness), but also the inner beauty (i.e. personality, intelligence, grace, and charisma). Even cloaked in ugliness, we humans tend to prefer inner beauty to outward appearances [1].

Nefertiti bust in Neues Museum, Berlin, taken by Philip Pikart

The Value of Beauty

Beauty cannot be understood without ugliness. To be ugly is to deviate highly from “ideal beauty”. Ischizu and Zeki (2011) formulated a brain-based theory for this duality: our brain may have at least two different judgment systems for experiences involving beauty and ugliness [3]: The experience of beauty engaged the medial orbito-frontal cortex, an area containing the centers of desire, pleasure, reward, and value judgments in the brain. The experience of ugliness was confined to the amygdala and the motor cortex [3]. Gotshalk said that ‘‘beauty is a value’’, that it evokes desire and that whatever is desired has value [4]. This implies an intimate link between beauty, value, and desire in cortical processing.

BEAUTY CANNOT BE UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT UGLINESS.

What is Beautiful?

Our judgments of beauty are not arbitrary, but are slanted towards highly phenotypical and genetic quality to enhance survival and reproductive success [5]. A healthy, fertile mate offers considerable benefits over an unhealthy, infertile one in evolutionary terms. One example is that of mens' preference for women with high reproductive value (young and healthy) [6]. Thus, perceptions of beauty are likely evolutionarily determined by a “mate-quality hypothesis” [5].

Perceptual biases and associative learning also regulate beauty preferences [7]. Face recognition is not innate, though the ability to develop this skill is. Infants can discriminate between individual monkeys and human faces at 6 months, but not at 9 months without continued learning [7].

Given the same input (i.e. the existence of men, women, variation in age and features), we might expect to find generally similar preferences across cultures [8]. This can be tempered by associative learning of local conditions (age­‐specific fertility). Ghirlanda et al. (2002) showed that chickens share some of the same beauty standards as humans and that they prefer beautiful humans [9]. This result seems to speak against the mate-quality hypothesis, which suggests that preferences are species-specific. It might, however, be that similar preferences could develop by learning. 

CHICKENS PREFER BEAUTIFUL HUMANS.

Show, Do Not Tell 

Beauty seems to be about many obvious, but also subtle things and it might well be that beauty is not about anything except itself. If someone wanted to make sense out of beauty, it would kill what is great about it. But those who accept beauty on its own terms will find it a fascinating experience. Samuel Clemens said, “Don't tell us that the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream." Through interactive action instead of passive reception, it enables individuals to have their own experiences, interpret it in a way that they understand and lets them draw their own conclusions. Regardless of the complexity of beauty, its simple secret lies in the fact that you feel that you and someone (or something) can understand each other even without explicit communication.

[1] Umberto Eco, History of Beauty, 2004

[2] Little et al, Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2011

[3] Ishizu and Zeki, PLoS One, 2011

[4] Gotshalk, J Philos, 1935

[5] Andersson, Sexual Selection, 1994
[6] Smith, Perrett et al, Proc Biol Sci, 2006
[7] Pascalis et al, Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci, 2011
[8] Coetzee et al, PloS One, 2014
[9] Ghirlanda et al, Hum Nat, 2002

by  Shuyan Liu, PhD Student AG Heinz
This article originally appeared 2015 in CNS Volume 8, Issue 2, Art. And the Brain.