Pamela L. Geller, University of Miami

When I started my research on the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection, a librarian leaned over my laptop one day to share some lore. “Legend has it,” she said, “John James Audubon really collected the skulls Morton claimed as his own.” Her voice was lowered so as not to disturb the other scholars in the hushed archive.

As my work progressed, I uncovered no evidence to substantiate her whispered claim. Audubon had collected human skulls, several of which he then passed on to Morton. But birds and ornithology remained Audubon’s passion.

Nevertheless, the librarian’s offhanded comment has proven useful – a touchstone of sorts that continues to remind me of the controversy and confusion long surrounding the Morton Collection.

Morton was a physician and naturalist who lived in Philadelphia from 1799 until the end of his life in 1851. A lecture he delivered to aspiring doctors at the Philadelphia Association for Medical Instruction outlined the reasons for his cranial compulsion:

“I commenced the study of Ethnology in 1830; in which year, having occasion to deliver an introductory lecture on Anatomy, it occurred to me to illustrate the difference in the form of the skull as seen in the five great races of men … When I sought the materials for my proposed lecture, I found to my surprise that they could be neither bought nor borrowed.”

He would go on to acquire almost 1,000 human skulls.

Morton used these skulls to advance an understanding of racial differences as natural, easily categorizable and able to be ranked. Big-brained “Caucasians,” he argued in the 1839 publication “Crania Americana,” were far superior to small-skulled American Indians and even smaller-skulled Black Africans. Many subsequent scholars have since thoroughly debunked his ideas.

Certainly, condemnation of Morton as a scientific racist is warranted. But I find this take represents the man as a caricature, his conclusions as foregone. It provides little insight into his life and the complicated, interesting times in which he lived, as I detail in my book “Becoming Object: The Sociopolitics of the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection.”

My research demonstrates that studies of skulls and diseases undertaken by Morton and his medical and scientific colleagues contributed to an understanding of U.S. citizenship that valued whiteness, Christianity and heroic masculinity defined by violence. It is an exclusionary idea of what it means to be American that persists today.

Yet, at the same time, the collection is an unintended testament to the diversity of the U.S. population during a tumultuous moment in the nation’s history.

Men of science and medicine

As a bioarchaeologist who has studied the Morton Collection for many years, I have sought to better understand the social, political and ideological circumstances that led to its creation. From my work – analyzing archival sources including letters, laws, maps and medical treatises, as well as the skulls themselves – I’ve learned that, over a lifetime, Morton fostered a professional network that had far-reaching tentacles.

He had plenty of help amassing the collection of skulls that bears his name.

The physician connected with medical colleagues – many of whom, like him, received degrees from the University of Pennsylvania – gentleman planters, enslavers, naturalists, amateur paleontologists, foreign diplomats and military officers. Occupational differences aside, they were mostly white, Christian men of some financial means.

Their interactions took place during a pivotal moment in American history, the interlude between the nation’s revolutionary consolidation and its violent civil unraveling.

Throughout this stretch of time, Morton and his colleagues catalyzed biomedical interventions and scientific standards to more effectively treat patients. They set in motion public health initiatives during epidemics. They established hospitals and medical schools. And they did so in the service of the nation.

Not all lives were seen as worthy of these men’s care, however. Men of science and medicine may have fostered life for many, but they also let others die. In “Becoming Object,” I track how they represented certain populations as biologically inferior; diseases were tied to nonwhite people, female anatomy was pathologized, and poverty was presumed inherited.

From person to specimen

Such representations made it easier for Morton and his colleagues to regulate these groups’ bodies, rationalize their deaths and collect their skulls with casual cruelty from almshouse dissecting tables, looted cemeteries and body-strewn battlefields. That is, a sizable portion of the skulls in Morton’s collections were not culled from ancient graves but belonged to those of the recently alive.

It is no coincidence that Morton began his scientific research in earnest the same year Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Men of science and medicine benefited from the expansionist policies, violent martial conflicts and Native displacement that underpinned Manifest Destiny.

The collection reveals these acts of nation-building as necropolitical strategies – techniques used by sovereign powers to destroy or erase certain, often already vulnerable, populations from the national consciousness. These skulls attest to precarious existences, untimely deaths and trauma experienced from cradle to beyond the grave.

In the specific case of Native Americans, skeletal analysis testifies to the violent effects of U.S. military campaigns and forced removal. Native skulls that Morton labeled “warriors” have evidence of unhealed fractures and gunshot wounds. Children’s skulls bear the marks of compromised health; such pathology and their young ages at death are evidence of long-standing malnutrition, poverty and deprivation or stress.

To effectively transform subjects into objects – human beings into specimens – collected crania were ensconced in the institutional spaces of medical school lecture halls and museum storage cabinets.

There, Morton first numbered them sequentially. These numbers along with information about race, sex, age, “idiocy” or “criminality,” cranial capacity and provenance were inked on skulls and written in catalogs. Very rarely was the person’s name recorded. If used as teaching tools, Morton drilled holes to hang the skulls for display and notated them with the names of skeletal elements and features.

As dehumanizing as this process was, the Morton Collection does contain evidence of resilience and heterogeneous lives. There are traces of people with mixed-race backgrounds such as Black Indians. Several people may have also bent gender to navigate dire conditions or in keeping with social norms, such as native Beloved Women, who were active in warfare and political life.

What these bones mean today

As anthropologists now recognize, it is through the repatriation of the remains of the people in the Morton Collection to their descendants, among other types of reparations, that current practitioners may begin to atone for the sins of intellectual forebears. Indeed, all institutions housing legacy collections must contend with this issue.

There are other, valuable lessons – about diversity and suffering – that the Morton Collection has to impart in today’s interesting times.

The collection demonstrates that the American body politic has always been a diverse one, despite efforts of erasure by men like Morton and his colleagues. Piecing together the stories of past, disenfranchised lives – and acknowledging the silences that have made it difficult to flesh them out – counters past white nationalism and xenophobia and their current resurgence.

The collection, I believe, also urges the repudiation of violence, casual cruelty and opportunism as admirable attributes of masculinity. Valorizing men who embody these qualities has never served America well. Particularly in the mid-1800s, when Morton amassed skulls, it led to a nation divided and hardened to suffering, an unfathomable death count and the increasing fragility of democracy.

Pamela L. Geller, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Miami

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jaeyeon Chung, Rice University

Think back to a time when you needed a quick answer, maybe for a recipe or a DIY project. A few years ago, most people’s first instinct was to “Google it.” Today, however, many people are more likely to reach for ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational AI, which is changing the way people look for information.

Rather than simply providing lists of websites, ChatGPT gives more direct, conversational responses. But can ChatGPT do more than just answer straightforward questions? Can it actually help people be more creative?

I study new technologies and consumer interaction with social media. My colleague Byung Lee and I set out to explore this question: Can ChatGPT genuinely assist people in creatively solving problems, and does it perform better at this than traditional search engines like Google?

Across a series of experiments in a study published in the journal Nature Human Behavour, we found that ChatGPT does boost creativity, especially in everyday, practical tasks. Here’s what we learned about how this technology is changing the way people solve problems, brainstorm ideas and think creatively.

ChatGPT and creative tasks

Imagine you’re searching for a creative gift idea for a teenage niece. Previously, you might have googled “creative gifts for teens” and then browsed articles until something clicked. Now, if you ask ChatGPT, it generates a direct response based on its analysis of patterns across the web. It might suggest a custom DIY project or a unique experience, crafting the idea in real time.

To explore whether ChatGPT surpasses Google in creative thinking tasks, we conducted five experiments where participants tackled various creative tasks. For example, we randomly assigned participants to either use ChatGPT for assistance, use Google search, or generate ideas on their own. Once the ideas were collected, external judges, unaware of the participants’ assigned conditions, rated each idea for creativity. We averaged the judges’ scores to provide an overall creativity rating.

One task involved brainstorming ways to repurpose everyday items, such as turning an old tennis racket and a garden hose into something new. Another asked participants to design an innovative dining table. The goal was to test whether ChatGPT could help people come up with more creative solutions compared with using a web search engine or just their own imagination.

The results were clear: Judges rated ideas generated with ChatGPT’s assistance as more creative than those generated with Google searches or without any assistance. Interestingly, ideas generated with ChatGPT – even without any human modification – scored higher in creativity than those generated with Google.

One notable finding was ChatGPT’s ability to generate incrementally creative ideas: those that improve or build on what already exists. While truly radical ideas might still be challenging for AI, ChatGPT excelled at suggesting practical yet innovative approaches. In the toy-design experiment, for example, participants using ChatGPT came up with imaginative designs, such as turning a leftover fan and a paper bag into a wind-powered craft.

Limits of AI creativity

ChatGPT’s strength lies in its ability to combine unrelated concepts into a cohesive response. Unlike Google, which requires users to sift through links and piece together information, ChatGPT offers an integrated answer that helps users articulate and refine ideas in a polished format. This makes ChatGPT promising as a creativity tool, especially for tasks that connect disparate ideas or generate new concepts.

It’s important to note, however, that ChatGPT doesn’t generate truly novel ideas. It recognizes and combines linguistic patterns from its training data, subsequently generating outputs with the most probable sequences based on its training. If you’re looking for a way to make an existing idea better or adapt it in a new way, ChatGPT can be a helpful resource. For something groundbreaking, though, human ingenuity and imagination are still essential.

Additionally, while ChatGPT can generate creative suggestions, these aren’t always practical or scalable without expert input. Steps such as screening, feasibility checks, fact-checking and market validation require human expertise. Given that ChatGPT’s responses may reflect biases in its training data, people should exercise caution in sensitive contexts such as those involving race or gender.

We also tested whether ChatGPT could assist with tasks often seen as requiring empathy, such as repurposing items cherished by a loved one. Surprisingly, ChatGPT enhanced creativity even in these scenarios, generating ideas that users found relevant and thoughtful. This result challenges the belief that AI cannot assist with emotionally driven tasks.

Future of AI and creativity

As ChatGPT and similar AI tools become more accessible, they open up new possibilities for creative tasks. Whether in the workplace or at home, AI could assist in brainstorming, problem-solving and enhancing creative projects. However, our research also points to the need for caution: While ChatGPT can augment human creativity, it doesn’t replace the unique human capacity for truly radical, out-of-the-box thinking.

This shift from Googling to asking ChatGPT represents more than just a new way to access information. It marks a transformation in how people collaborate with technology to think, create and innovate.

Jaeyeon Chung, Assistant Professor of Business, Rice University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ian McDonough, Binghamton University, State University of New York and Michael Dulas, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Some 2.3 million of U.S. adults over 65 – more than 4% – have a diagnosis of dementia. But even without a diagnosis, a certain amount of cognitive decline is normal as age sets in.

And whether it’s due to fear of cognitive decline or noticing lapses in cognition when we are stressed, many of us have had moments when we thought we could use an extra cognitive boost.

The good news is research has shown that people can make changes throughout adulthood that can help prevent or delay cognitive decline and even reduce their risk of dementia. These include quitting smoking and properly managing blood pressure.

In addition to these lifestyle changes, many people are turning to brain-training games, which claim to optimize your brain’s efficiency and capacity at any age. The makers of brain-training apps and games claim their products can do everything from staving off cognitive decline to improving your IQ.

But so far these claims have been met with mixed evidence.

We are cognitive neuroscientists who focus on brain health across the adult lifespan. We study how the brain informs cognition and the ways we can use brain imaging to understand cognitive and brain-training interventions. We aim to understand how our brains change naturally over time as well as what we can do about it.

Ongoing research shows what actually happens to the brain when it is engaged in new learning, offering a window into how people can sustain their brain health and how brain-training games can play a role. We believe these studies offer some strategies to train your brain the right way.

Brain training fact vs. fiction

Brain training is a set of tasks, often computerized, based on well-known tests to measure a type of cognition, but in a gamified manner.

Most brain-training games were designed to help participants master one or more specific skills. One example is a game that shows you a letter and number combination, where sometimes you must quickly identify whether the letter is even or odd, while other times you must switch to deciding whether the letter is a consonant or vowel. The game may increase in difficulty by requiring you to accomplish the task within a set time limit.

Such games are designed to require a high level of attention, fast processing speed and a flexible mind to alternate between the rules, known as executive functioning.

But it turns out that the specific skills learned in these games often do not translate to more general, real-world applications. Whether brain games meet their end goal of lasting cognitive improvement across a number of areas is still highly debated among psychologists. To make such claims requires rigorous evidence that playing a specific game improves cognitive or brain performance.

In 2016, in fact, the Federal Trade Commission issued a US$50 million penalty to one of the most popular brain-training games at the time, Lumosity, for misleading consumers into thinking that they could achieve higher levels of mental performance at work or at school and prevent or delay cognitive decline by using its product.

If improving on a brain game helps the player get better only at that or highly similar games, maybe game developers need a different approach.

Put some challenge into it

In a study dubbed the Synapse Project, in which one of us, Ian McDonough, helped assess the final outcomes, one group of participants were tasked with engaging in a new activity with which they had little experience. They were assigned to either digital photography or quilting. Though these activities were not games, they were meant to be engaging, challenging and done in a social environment.

Another group was assigned activities that involved little active learning, such as engaging in themed activities related to travel or cooking, or more solitary activities such as solving crossword puzzles, listening to music or watching classic movies. These groups met for 15 hours a week over 14 weeks. All participants were tested at the beginning and end of the study on various cognitive abilities.

Those assigned to the new, challenging activities showed significant gains in their memory, processing speed and reasoning abilities relative to those assigned to the less challenging activities. None of the participants were directly trained on these cognitive tests, which means that the challenging activities enhanced skills that transferred to new situations, such as remembering a list of words or solving abstract problems.

Brain scans of participants showed that over the course of the study, those engaged in the more challenging activities increased their neural efficiency. In other words, their brains didn’t have to work as hard to solve problems or recall information.

The study also showed that the more time participants spent on their projects, the bigger their brain gains and the better their memory was at the end of the 14 weeks.

One difference between the types of activities engaged in the Synapse Project and traditional brain training is whether activities are done in a group or alone. Although other studies have found a benefit to social interaction, the Synapse Project found no difference between the social and solitary activities in the low-challenge group. So, challenge rather than the social components seems to be the driver of maintaining cognitive and brain health.

What you can do to maintain a healthy brain

You might be thinking it’s time to take up digital photography or quilting. But in the end, it’s not about those specific tasks. What matters most is that you challenge yourself, which often comes naturally when doing something new.

The new learning that often is accompanied by a sense of effort – and sometimes frustration – requires accessing the resources in the frontal lobe, which manages thinking and judgment, and the parietal lobe, which processes attention and combines different sensory inputs. These regions constantly talk to each other to keep the mind adaptable in all kinds of situations and prevent the brain from going into “habit mode.”

Where does this leave us? Well, on the one hand, games touted as “training your brain” may not be the best solution compared with other routes to improving cognition.

Ironically, you might already be training your brain by playing effortful games that are not marketed as “brain training.” For example, games such as Tetris or real-time strategy games such as Rise of Nations have shown improvements in players’ cognition. Research has even shown that playing Super Mario 64 can result in increases in brain volume in regions such as the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain.

While little evidence suggests that any brain-training game or program globally improves cognition, some may improve specific aspects of it. As with other activities, challenge is key.

If you’re a word person, try a numbers-based game. If you love math, consider a word game or puzzle. Choosing a task that makes you feel uncomfortable gives you the best shot at maintaining and even improving your cognition. Once you start feeling a sense of ease and familiarity, that’s a sign that it’s time to switch tasks, change the game or at least add some challenge by advancing to a new level of difficulty that feels just beyond your reach.

Ian McDonough, Associate Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York and Michael Dulas, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.