Mad science: The uncanny leaps the species barrier.

Seed magazine has a nice piece on neuroscience research aimed at transforming the century-old psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny into a data-supported and more strictly defined phenomenon.

Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical evidence to assess the validity of these ideas.

The article discusses Sigmund Freud's 40-page essay on the concept and the 1970's essay by roboticist Masahiro Mori that introduced the "uncanny valley" concept. It then goes on to discuss new findings from Princeton researcher Asif Ghazanfar.

Last spring at Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute, Asif Ghazanfar developed a computer model of a macaque monkey designed to interact with real macaques. But the monkeys weren’t fooled. Further testing revealed that, much to Ghazanfar’s surprise, his model was eliciting an uncanny valley response from the monkeys. It was the first time scientists had ever observed such a response in a non-human species.

“By showing that monkeys can do it, several things become plausible,” Ghazanfar says. “One is that there is an evolutionary explanation for the uncanny valley and the other is that it is not something specific to our human, cultural experience.” These findings may for the first time allow scientists to go back through a century’s worth of peculiar ideas about the origins of the uncanny valley and begin putting them to the test.

Ghazanfar puts forth his own non-Freudian theory of the uncanny:

Ghazanfar rejects all of these hypotheses. “What is really going on is much simpler,” he says. He believes the uncanny valley response occurs because an animal—human or nonhuman—is evolutionarily inclined to develop an expectation of what members of its species should look like, a supremely important skill, as it lets the animal know with whom it can and cannot interact.

In this sense, life-like robotic and computer-generated models occupy a weird middle ground in an animal’s mind: They are familiar enough for the animal to consider the possibility that they are of the same species, but strange enough that they don’t quite meet the expectation the animal has developed for members of its species. “Any face that violates that expectation is going to elicit the uncanny response,” Ghazanfar says.

There does appear to be some experimental evidence in support Ghazanfar’s theory. Studies with children have shown that at a very young age, babies do not react negatively to human-like robots. As children grow older, such robots become more bothersome. This, Ghazanfar suggests, might be an indicator that infants have not yet developed a narrow expectation for what a human should like. As of yet, however, he has not tested his theory explicitly.

All praise to the wonderful Mind Hacks blog, source of neuroscience brilliance.

Comics: Take a number.

In Das Unheimliche, Freud's book-length mediation on everyday weirdness that popularized the term "uncanny," the father of psychoanalysis touches on the weirdness of unexpected numeric patterns.

If we take another class of things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise by innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’. For instance, we naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together — if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number — addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains — invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.

For Freud, the uncanny was an in-head toxic spill of grokked, but suppressed knowledge. (His theory works better in German, where the root word of "uncanny" can be taken to mean both "home" and "hidden.") When we encounter seemingly meaningful repetition, we dig for hidden meanings and approach all the nasty things we hide in our mental attics. Because we can't unearth any of those demons and remain sane, we project our feelings of uncanny recognition onto an external source, essentially scapegoating others for our odd sense of familiarity. In folkloric terms, these scapegoats become witches, fairy-folk, goblins, boogymen, or anything one can imagine Hellboy shooting. Less creatively, the conspiracy-minded use the appearance of false patterns to implicate the Jews, the Bush administration, the Gay Agenda, the Bohemian Grove bunch, the Federal Reserve Bank, the forgers who created Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate, those Papists that snuck a supposititious child in the birthing chamber of Mary II, Scientologists, or what have you.

In general, the march of neuroscience has not been kind to the theories of Freud. Like Bohr's model of the atom, the image of a clumpy nucleus and moon-like electrons traveling in neatly circular orbits that persists mainly because it is easy to explain and makes a nice iconic image, Freud's theories persist in the public imagination because they are easy to digest, have a poetic resonance with our personal understanding of the world, and have been embedded in key cultural landmarks by generations of creators who intentional created works off his philosophical template. Outside of English departments and philosophy courses, Freud doesn't get much love. Despite this general downgrading of Freud's ideas, modern research into how the brain works suggest Freud wasn't totally off the mark on the whole uncanny thing. In grotesquely simplified terms, the sense of import one gets around repetition might be an evolved reaction in our very sensitive pattern-seeking apparatuses in our brain. Pattern-recognition is such an important trait, the thinking goes, that false positives due to over-sensitivity would be an acceptable level of increased noise given the overall system's greater receptivity to genuine signals. Studies show that the uncanny sense of the irrational portentous is real, if unconnected to any notions of suppressed emotions or memories.

Ironically, the uncanny – the Fruedian concept that has the strongest scientific support – is the one least respected in the world of arts and letters. Instead of Freud's concept of the unfamiliar familiar, the term "uncanny" has come to mean something along the lines of "the inexplicable" or "that which should not be." The sense of eerie, but perhaps meaningless repetition, is hardly evoked anymore.

This makes Thomas Ott's graphic novel The Number: 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 an oddity: Ott's fashioned a noir-ish tale of fate, dames, murder, and madness that is, in the old Freudian sense, genuinely uncanny.

The plot of the The Number is a tight, elliptical, almost O. Henry-ish story about a schlubby state executioner who finds one of his victims, a murderer sentenced to death by electric chair, left behind a mysterious string of numbers: the titular 73304-23-4153-6-96-8. The executioner pockets the number and things nothing of it. Slowly, the numbers in the sequence begin to appear throughout his daily routine. At first, their appearance seems more benevolent than sinister. The numbers appear to lead him to a new love interest and, later, he makes a killing in a small gambling club by exploiting his knowledge of the number sequence. But the numbers giveth, and the numbers taketh away. Before the executioner knows what hit him, his new bird's flown the coop, she's taken the dough, and the numbers seem hell-bent on getting him into increasingly dangerous jams. The resolution, a phantasmagoric and sanity-questioning scene of revenge, leaves us pondering whether the numbers were, in fact, reoccurring or whether the execution was imposing the pattern on the randomness around him.

While the plot might not be the most original idea, Ott carries it off with a stylish confidence that gives the story real force. The art is rendered in a stark black and white, halfway between the gritty realism of the Ashcan School and the expressionism of Peter Kuper. This mix is especially potent near the end of the story, when the visuals grow more intensely surreal. Ott also mostly restricts himself to a stingy number of panels per page, all of which float in a deep field of surrounding black. These simple layouts – always a simple mix of quarter-, half-, or full-page rectangles that always keep a small amount of negative space between them – contribute to both the down-and-out, hardboiled visual aesthetic and the claustrophobic sense of fated repetition. Finally, Ott's "acting" is strong enough that his characters can carry the story without a single line of dialogue.

The finest moment in the whole book – and an excellent example of Ott's sly storytelling – comes when, searching for a sign, the executioner takes handful of French fries off of his plate and places them in a series on a table top, one after the other, in neatly aligned rows. Staring at that picture, I tried to puzzle out just what section of the sequence we were looking at. Unable to immediately grasp it, I added up the number of fries and then added up the digits in the repeated sequence. No dice; they didn't match. Had I missed something? Or was the executioner free of the numbers? Free or abandoned? But maybe there was something there and I just wasn't seeing the pattern . . .

And in that panel Ott's story went from being a story about the uncanny to being, itself, uncanny.