you may call me A, that's all you need to know if it's your first time reading this || ADHD-I and otherwise neurodivergent || born in the passing twilight of the 20th century || agent of entropy, demi-goddess of labyrinths - always losing the red thread - typos are common and to be expected || I tag inconsistently, incoherently or straight up not at all, but if you're looking for some positivity or a quick laugh feel free to check out #cation posts and #hinged (it's mostly cute animals tbh)|| PFP by @pien-art
New research suggests the fuzzy insects may be capable of spontaneously solving problems the way animals with much larger brains do.
excerpt:
Loukola, who was at the University of Oulu in Finland at the time, first trained the bees to associate a small blue circle with a sweet treat. "Bees are super fast in associating things together," he says. "They will learn immediately that blue means reward. Then they start searching for blue stuff."
He then placed just the blue circle without any sugar water on the ceiling of a hollow puck-shaped container that was about an inch high.
"We designed the arena so that it's just annoyingly [a] little bit too high for them to stand and reach the ceiling," he says, "but too tiny for them to fly."
Loukola video recorded his experiments. "With the videos, you can clearly see what is going on," he says.
In a recording of the first experiment, a bumblebee is inside the puck alongside a small Styrofoam ball. Remarkably, bee after bee in the video grabs on to the little ball and starts moving it around.
"Bumblebees, they love rolling balls," says Loukola. "Some of them needed more time and made more errors. But then they continued."
Eventually, almost three-quarters of the bees moved the ball beneath the blue dot. They then climbed atop the ball, using it like a stepstool to touch the ceiling and reach the otherwise unreachable reward.
"I planned the experiment so that it's challenging for the bees," he says. "They really need to understand the task in order to solve it."
Cognitive flexibility
There's an alternative explanation to what motivated success in that first experiment, however. Maybe the bee wasn't purposely directing the ball towards the reward.
"It's possible that the bees don't need to understand anything," Loukola allows. "Is this really goal-directed behavior or is this just playing with the balls and solving these tasks by chance?"
So in a subsequent experiment, Loukola and his colleagues introduced barriers within the arena to block the blue dot from view. The bee could no longer see the dot unless it maneuvered around the barrier. The ball was then introduced in a different part of the enclosure.
This time, some 80% of a new batch of bees rolled the ball under the blue circle, convincing Loukola that the bees had solved the problem spontaneously. It's a first, he says, for an insect with a brain the size of a sesame seed.
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)
Bridget says she definitely approves of celebrating Pride Month. But she doesn’t approve of clothing for cats. Well, most cats. Okay, one particular cat. 🌈😼
A Bronze Koro [Incense Burner]
Muromachi-Momoyama period (16th century) , Japan
Cast in two sections and hinged, as a long eared hare looking upward with a bell around its neck
17cm. high . Christie’s
yousharknotpass
vaporwave
annaxmalina
kaledo-art
germansingergirl
origamiaround
gummygunk
