A New Start

FT: Japan's quest for innovative freedom

Japan's quest for innovative freedom

By Jonathan Guthrie and Robin Harding

Published: June 12 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 12 2008 03:00

Nodding politely, a mechanical doll created by Toshiba founder Hisahige Tanaka totters across a tabletop and offers a visitor a cup of tea at the company's research and development centre near Tokyo. Ingenious and intriguing, the automaton was produced in the 19th century, portending the renaissance in Japanese applied technology that followed the second world war. This delivered such consumer boons as Toshiba laptops, Toyota cars and Nintendo games.

Now Japan is questioning wheth- er its innovation system can serve it as well in the 21st century as in the 20th. There are doubts over whether Japan's Y18,000bn ($168bn) annual R&D budget is well spent. Reformers want an environment that is more entrepreneurial and less dominated by big companies. Corporate R&D bosses and academics are struggling to put aside long-standing grudges.

If Japan were a technology company it would be worried about its pipeline. The job of replenishing this has traditionally fallen to big corporations such as Toshiba. Ichiro Tai, a jolly, bespectacled man who runs Toshiba's R&D centre, says: "We have 1,000 researchers and they should have far more ideas. The number of patents [one each a year] is far too small."

Dissatisfaction is as much a management tool for Mr Tai as it is for a sales boss driving his team towards ever-higher targets. Tosh-iba could nevertheless do with some high-profile breakthroughs after losing its battle with Sony to set the standard for high definition video players. Mr Tai duly shows off hopeful new technologies to awed visitors. One is a system that uses quantum physics effects to encrypt data. Another is a battery that can be recharged in five minutes which could be used to power electric vehicles.

Mr Tai muses that greater freedom could spur the creativity of company research staff. Yet Toshiba is characteristic of Japanese technology companies in protecting its elite scientists from commercial pressures more than many western ones. The electronics group, which had sales of about Y7,000bn in the year to March 2007, uses a tripartite structure. The R&D centre and its academic satellites do blue-sky research. A second tier of labs commercialise new technologies. A third layer engages in the nitty-gritty of improving existing products within business units.

Politicians and bureaucrats are now asking whether Japan is over-reliant on such corporate ideas factories. Like every country with a decent science base, Japan envies the global success of Microsoft in PC operating systems and Google in internet search. Surely, the argument runs, Japan would produce new global gorillas of its own if its innovation system were more like that of the US.

The Japanese government has accordingly announced a Y100bn venture fund to invest in fledgling technology businesses. The idea is to encourage more private and institutional investors to pump their money into start-ups too.

However, there are formidable barriers to injecting some of the pep of Silicon Valley into the commercialisation of new technology in Japan. The biggest is that Japan does not have an Anglo Saxon-style enterprise culture. Would-be entrepreneurs have few role models apart from Masayoshi Son, founder of communications group Softbank. Aspiring to become very wealthy is regarded as faintly unJapanese.

Equally, "business failure is seen as shameful in Japan, though that perception is beginning to erode", says Seiichi Yoshikawa of Nippon Keidanren, Japan's powerful business lobby. When new technology ventures fail, it tends to be as units of large corporations, rather than as standalone companies. This cushions the impact. The downside of the system is that it can suppress maverick talent.

At Japan's ministry of economy, trade and industry, Yuji Tokumasu, who works on science and technology policy, is fretting over a parallel problem. According to a chart he brandishes, even as Japan's spending on research and development has soared in the past 20 years, value added in the manufacturing sector has stagnated.

Japan already spends more than 3 per cent of its gross domestic product on R&D - more than any other country. One way of reading the chart is to surmise that diminishing returns have set in, that every extra yen spent on R&D goes to employ less talented researchers, who study less promising approaches to the same problems. Japanese universities' poor record on turning research funding into results published by top scientific journals suggests that government money can be more efficiently spent. It could be that rather than spending too little on R&D, Japan spends too much.

However, Mr Tokumasu and others in the technology establishment take heart from R&D expenditure data. If only Japan could convert all of this spending into scientific breakthroughs, new businesses and saleable products, they argue, it would prove a powerful source of economic growth.

The country has a world-class science base, as exemplified by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University. In 2006 Professor Yamanaka created cells resembling embryonic stem cells from other tissue in mice. Last year, in parallel with US researchers, he repeated the feat for humans. The technique has huge potential to advance gene therapy, given moral strictures on using real embryonic cells. Prof Yamanaka has a chance of winning a Nobel Prize.

But businesses can be impeded from working with university researchers such as Prof Yamanaka by historically chilly relations. During the growth years of the 1960s and 1970s, corporations sought independence in R&D. Public service anti-corruption rules made it difficult for academics to hobnob with business people. It is telling that two of Toshiba's most important academic collaborations are with British universities - Cambridge and Bristol.

In 2004 universities were incorporated and gained ownership of the intellectual property created in their laboratories. The change irritated some people. "Before, they got research for free," says Takafumi Yamamoto, plain-speaking boss of Todai TLO, Tokyo University's licensing organisation.

Mr Yamamoto believes the dominant role of large corporations in business life is weakening. Partly thanks to entrepreneurship education "young people do not all want to be soldiers for big companies", he says. Flotations of university spin-outs have increased enthusiasm for the commercialisation of research among academics. They are meanwhile likely to become more assertive in protecting their intellectual property rights following the establishment of a new division of the High Court specialising in IPR. Mr Yamamoto says: "There could be an increasing number of cases brought by the universities against the companies."

So is traditional Japanese consensus under threat? Not according to Yutaka Asai, chief technology officer of Oki, the telecoms and printers group, who neatly reconciles the spat between business and universities. Companies may wind up with a smaller share of revenues from individual academic collaborations, he says. But, at the same time, a fairer division of the spoils should prompt more tie-ins, making everyone better off.

A 'technique' for managing academics is vital for collaboration

Yukinori Kida, owner of a small Toyko-based components business, has some advice for big Japanese companies forging collaborations with universities. Making it work depends on "technique" in managing academics, he says.

Innovation has helped KDA keep going in the face of Chinese competition. Six years ago, with help from the University of Tokyo, the company found a better way of moulding the ceramic bolts used in equipment exposed to high temperatures. The breakthrough allowed Mr Kida to cut costs and won him a valuable market niche.

KDA, which employs 50 staff including Kaori, Mr Kida's daughter and expected successor, made a profit of Y30m on sales of Y1bn last year. It is now working on new plastics and ceramics moulding methods with researchers from Tokyo and Nagoya universities. "In three years we hope to double sales," Mr Kida says.

KDA spends a healthy 3 per cent of sales revenue on new product development. Mr Kida uses students as researchers, believing they are open-minded as well as cheaper: "University professors are strong on narrow subject areas, but if you need to study a problem from a new perspective, they are really not that good."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

By Alan Cane

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Amore incongruous sight would be hard to imagine, particularly in 1951. There, at the heart of a vast catering empire devoted to tea and cakes, was a pulsing sci-fi monster with endless rows of tubes filled with half a ton of mercury. The monster's name was Leo. It was the world's first business computer and its master, David Caminer, who has died at the age of 93, was one of the great pioneers of commercial computing.

Sixty years ago, nobody would have seen anything like Leo. Official secrecy meant that the public knew nothing of the spectacular progress made by British scientists in developing the code-breaking digital computer, Colossus, which helped win the second world war. Civilian computers did not exist and nor did the software to run commercial applications. Caminer was the intrepid, determined person who invented the first business programmes.

What made his achievements as the world's first commercial systems analyst so extraordi-nary was that he started from scratch. At the time he was the systems manager for J. Lyons and Company, then Britain's biggest caterer. The Lyons board had heard about the development of "electronic brains" in the US but those were all being used for scientific or military purposes. Lyons, which prided itself on its efficiency, took the remarkable decision to develop its own digital computer to automate the running of its catering business.

Caminer was the key member of a team of bright young technologists responsible for bringing to life the vision of the Lyons board. Leo - Lyons Electronic Office - ran a programme for the first time in September 1951. Under Caminer's tutelage, the Lyons team developed systems and ways of working that were groundbreaking for the time and are still relevant today. Indeed, if the rules for systems development laid down by Caminer had been taken to heart by succeeding generations, fewer computing disasters would have tarnished the image of the industry.

Caminer programmed Leo to take over routine office tasks and do them in a fraction of the time taken by clerks. Where it had taken eight minutes to calculate an employee's pay - Lyons had 30,000 workers - Leo could do it in 1.5 seconds. Leo was programmed to handle the daily deliveries from Lyons bakery to 200 retail outlets, to organise restocking, to calculate the overnight production requirements, such as how many miles of Swiss roll had to be made, and even to work out delivery routes for vans. Later, Caminer ran programmes that could detect patterns in the till receipts and pinpoint when the company's restaurants were busiest and which of its chocolate cakes and iced fancies were selling best. Today, businesses analyse such information as a matter of course but in the 1950s this marked a retail revolution.

Soon other major companies such as Dunlop, Ford and Imperial Tobacco were coming to look at Leo and learn from it. Lyons set up a subsidiary to make computers and 80 Leos were sold all over the world.

Caminer, a charming individual with exquisite manners and a delightful sense of humour, had a short fuse where programming standards were concerned. More than one of his colleagues had work literally thrown back for failing to meet his expectations. Yet Caminer himself had had no training in computing - hardly surprising because the subject was so new that everybody involved in Leo learned on the job. What was unusual was that Caminer was not even a mathematician and had no formal academic qualifications.

Born David Tresman in 1915, he was the son of a Lithuanian immigrant. His father died fighting on the Marne when he was three. When his mother married again, he adopted his stepfather's name. Raised initially in London's East End, he later went to the Sloane School in Chelsea but by his own admission he was not a natural student. He was more engaged by unemployment and the rise of rightwing dic-tatorships in mainland Europe. He spent his youth pamphleteering and, as he put it, "generally fostering the revolution". He marched against Oswald Mosley, the anti-Semitic British fascist leader.

Having failed to get into Cambridge - he said later that "university seemed an irrelevance in the days of mass unemployment and hunger marches" - he became a management trainee at Lyons through a contact of his mother's. The catering group, which served millions of meals every year, was known for its tea shops and Corner House restaurants with waitresses known as "nippies".

On the outbreak of the second world war, Caminer joined up and served at El Alamein, where he recalled the "wondrous sight of a desert fox crossing the shimmering sands at first light on the morning of the battle". After being wounded in the western desert and losing a leg, he returned to Lyons, becoming manager of the company's systems research office. It was then that he became involved in its computer project - on a salary of £5.05 a week.

Leo eventually became part of what was then the British computer champion, International Computers - ICL - and Caminer was appointed head of market development. He was asked to take charge of software for ICL's New Range 2900 series, its flagship through the latter part of the last century. He specified the ICL operating system VME/B, a brilliant concept that was in some ways too advanced for the machines on which it was expected to run.

Caminer completed his career by implementing the European Union's computer and communications network in Luxembourg. He was awarded the OBE in 1980.

He always believed that small, close-knit teams of the sort that worked on Leo were the ideal: "These days the spirit has changed," he complained just before his death. "Computer staff have become nine to five workers. Teams are so large I'm surprised they ever get anything done."

He is survived by his wife, Jackie, whom he married in 1945, and by their three sons and two daughters.

Alan Cane

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Economist: Circumcision - Cutting the competition

Circumcision

Cutting the competition

Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Mutilating male members may mar men’s mischievous matings

CIRCUMCISION and other forms of male-genital mutilation are commonplace in many societies around the world. The origin of these practices, however, puzzles anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. They wonder what benefit they could bring, especially given the obvious risks of infection and reduced fertility.

Explanations have ranged from the pragmatic (a ritual that marks the beginning of adulthood and bonds men together) to the Freudian (having something to do with the pain of the separation from the mother). However Christopher Wilson, a neurobiologist at Cornell University, has a different idea. In a recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior he suggests that male-genital mutilations are actually intended to prevent younger men from fathering children with older men’s wives.

Dr Wilson takes his cue from sperm-competition theory, which suggests that males of promiscuous primate species have evolved features that maximise their own sperm’s chances of fertilising an egg they might have to compete for. These features include large testicles which produce more sperm, and morphologically complex penises. Males of monogamous primate species, on the other hand, have smaller testicles and simpler penises. Human genitals are somewhere in between, perhaps reflecting the fact that people generally form pair bonds, but are susceptible to occasional bouts of promiscuity.

Some forms of genital mutilation have obvious effects on fertility. For instance, several African and Micronesian societies practice testicular ablation—the crushing or cutting off of one testicle. Some Australian aborigines engage in subincision, which exposes part of the urethra and thus causes sperm to leak out of the base of the penis. Circumcision does not have quite such clear-cut effects. But there are several ways it may affect fertility: most obviously, the lack of a foreskin could make insertion, ejaculation or both take longer. Perhaps long enough that an illicit quickie will not always reach fruition.

Older men are in a position to form alliances with younger men—passing on knowledge, lending them political support and giving them access to weapons. By insisting that the young undergo genital mutilation of some form as a quid pro quo, an older married man can seek to ensure that even if he is cuckolded, he will still be the father of his wives’ children. Of course, the older man has probably undergone genital mutilation too, and seen his own fertility reduced. But that, if anything, increases his incentive to make certain that the young bucks are similarly handicapped. And if all the older men in a society conclude this is a good thing, it will rapidly become a socially enforced norm.

To test this theory, Dr Wilson made several predictions. Among them, he suggested that mutilation is more likely to be practised in polygynous societies (since a man with several wives is more vulnerable to cuckoldry), and is especially likely in those polygynous societies where a man’s co-wives live in separate households from their husband. It should also take place in a public ceremony watched by other men, to avoid cheating or free-riding. And there should be a strong stigma against men who refuse it.

To test his predictions, Dr Wilson looked at a database of 186 pre-industrial societies. Some 48% of the highly polygynous ones practised a form of male-genital mutilation, and the number rose to 63% when co-wives kept separate households. By contrast, only 14% of monogamous societies practised mutilation. Moreover, and also as predicted, the mutilations were almost always carried out in public, often as part of a coming-of-age ceremony at puberty, with strong stigma attached to unmutilated men.

Dr Wilson’s paper does not definitely prove that sexual competition is at the root of male-genital mutilation. But it does provide a plausible explanation for a puzzling practice. It is not likely, however, to have much effect on attitudes toward circumcision. The men who enforce and undergo the rituals are no more aware of the underlying evolutionary motivations than of why their testicles are the size they are. Those who engage in the practice for religious reasons will surely continue to do so. Otherwise, most of the Western world has already largely abandoned routine neonatal circumcision, which is seen as an outdated and unfortunate medical fad.

The exceptions are America, where more than half of newborn boys are still circumcised, and Africa, where circumcision helps to stop the transmission of HIV, the AIDS-causing virus. There, infection really is a far greater threat to the number of children a man might have than the loss of his foreskin.

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

NY Times: A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/dining/28flavor.html?ex=1228190400&en=4cb4875dcee7443f&ei=5087&excamp=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0604-L1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=%20NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0604-L1

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A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

RADISH, WHERE IS THY STING? At flavor-tripping parties, guests find that miracle fruit makes everything sweet.

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By PATRICK FARRELL and KASSIE BRACKEN

Published: May 28, 2008

CARRIE DASHOW dropped a large dollop of lemon sorbet into a glass of Guinness, stirred, drank and proclaimed that it tasted like a “chocolate shake.”

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Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

HOW’S IT DO THAT? Franz Aliquo, who calls himself Supreme Commander, right, supplied miracle berries grown by Curtis Mozie, left, to party-goers in Long Island City, Queens, last weekend.

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Those who attended sampled the red berries then tasted foods, including cheese, beer and brussels sprouts, finding the flavors transformed. Beer can taste like chocolate, lemons like candy. Mr. Aliquo says he holds the parties to “turn on a bunch of people’s taste buds.”

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Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

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Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!”

They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.

The host was Franz Aliquo, 32, a lawyer who styles himself Supreme Commander (Supreme for short) when he’s presiding over what he calls “flavor tripping parties.” Mr. Aliquo greeted new arrivals and took their $15 entrance fees. In return, he handed each one a single berry from his jacket pocket.

“You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón.

The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.

During the 1970s, a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration dashed hopes that an extract of miraculin could be sold as a sugar substitute. In the absence of any plausible commercial application, the miracle fruit has acquired a bit of a cult following.

Sina Najafi, editor in chief of the art magazine Cabinet, has featured miracle fruits at some of the publication’s events. At a party in London last October, the fruit, he said, “had people testifying like some baptismal thing.”

The berries were passed out last week at a reading of “The Fruit Hunters,” a new book by Adam Leith Gollner with a chapter about miracle fruit.

Bartenders have been experimenting with the fruit as well. Don Lee, a beverage director at the East Village bar Please Don’t Tell, has been making miracle fruit cocktails on his own time, but the bar probably won’t offer them anytime soon. The fruit is highly perishable and expensive — a single berry goes for $2 or more.

Lance J. Mayhew developed a series of drink recipes with miracle fruit foams and extracts for a recent issue of the cocktail magazine Imbibe and may create others for Beaker & Flask, a restaurant opening later this year in Portland, Ore.

He cautioned that not everyone enjoys the berry’s long-lasting effects. Despite warnings, he said, one woman became irate after drinking one of his cocktails. He said, “She was, like, ‘What did you do to my mouth?’ ”

Mr. Aliquo issues his own warnings. “It will make all wine taste like Manischewitz,” he said. And already sweet foods like candy can become cloying.

He said that he had learned about miracle fruit while searching ethnobotany Web sites for foods he could make for a diabetic friend.

The party last week was his sixth “flavor tripping” event. He hopes to put on a much larger, more expensive affair in June. Although he does sell the berries on his blog, www.flavortripping.wordpress.com, Mr. Aliquo maintains that he isn’t in it for the money. (He said he made about $100 on Friday.) Rather, he said, he does it to “turn on a bunch of people’s taste buds.”

He believes that the best way to encounter the fruit is in a group. “You need other people to benchmark the experience,” he said. At his first party, a small gathering at his apartment in January, guests murmured with delight as they tasted citrus wedges and goat cheese. Then things got trippy.

“You kept hearing ‘oh, oh, oh,’ ” he said, and then the guests became “literally like wild animals, tearing apart everything on the table.”

“It was like no holds barred in terms of what people would try to eat, so they opened my fridge and started downing Tabasco and maple syrup,” he said.

Many of the guests last week found the party through a posting at www.tThrillist.com. Mr. Aliquo sent invitations to a list of contacts he has been gathering since he and a friend began organizing StreetWars, a popular urban assassination game using water guns.

One woman wanted to see Mr. Aliquo eat a berry before she tried one. “What, you don’t trust me?” he said.

She replied, “Well, I just met you.”

Another guest said, “But you met him on the Internet, so it’s safe.”

The fruits are available by special order from specialty suppliers in New York, including Baldor Specialty Foods and S. Katzman Produce. Katzman sells the berries for about $2.50 a piece, and has been offering them to chefs.

Mr. Aliquo gets his miracle fruit from Curtis Mozie, 64, a Florida grower who sells thousands of the berries each year through his Web site, www.miraclefruitman.com. (A freezer pack of 30 berries costs about $90 with overnight shipping.) Mr. Mozie, who was in New York for Mr. Gollner’s reading, stopped by the flavor-tripping party.

Mr. Mozie listed his favorite miracle fruit pairings, which included green mangoes and raw aloe. “I like oysters with some lemon juice,” he said. “Usually you just swallow them, but I just chew like it was chewing gum.”

A large group of guests reached its own consensus: limes were candied, vinegar resembled apple juice, goat cheese tasted like cheesecake on the tongue and goat cheese on the throat. Bananas were just bananas.

For all the excitement it inspires, the miracle fruit does not make much of an impression on its own. It has a mildly sweet tang, with firm pulp surrounding an edible, but bitter, seed. Mr. Aliquo said it reminded him of a less flavorful cranberry. “It’s not something I’d just want to eat,” he said.

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Sciam: The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

Scientific American Mind -  May 15, 2008

The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

Achieving sexual climax requires a complex conspiracy of sensory and psychological signals—and the eventual silencing of critical brain areas

By Martin Portner

 

She did not often have such strong emotions. But she suddenly felt powerless against her passion and the desire to throw herself into the arms of the cousin whom she saw at a family funeral. “It can only be because of that patch,” said Marianne, a participant in a multinational trial of a testosterone patch designed to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder, in which a woman is devoid of libido. Testosterone, a hormone ordinarily produced by the ovaries, is linked to female sexual function, and the women in this 2005 study had undergone operations to remove their ovaries.

After 12 weeks of the trial, Marianne had felt her sexual desire return. Touching herself unleashed erotic sensations and vivid sexual fantasies. Eventually she could make love to her husband again and experienced an orgasm for the first time in almost three years. But that improvement was not because of testosterone, it turned out. Marianne was among the half of the women who had received a placebo patch—with no testosterone in it at all.

Marianne’s experience underlines the complexity of sexual arousal. Far from being a simple issue of hormones, sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals. And many of those influences are environmental. Recent research, for example, shows that visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men. Mari­anne’s desire may have been invigorated by conversations or thoughts about sex she had as a result of taking part in the trial. Such stimuli may help relieve inhibitions or simply whet a person’s appetite for sex.

Achieving orgasm, brain-imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions and control in which the brain’s center of vigilance shuts down in males; in females, various areas of the brain involved in controlling thoughts and emotions become silent. The brain’s pleasure centers tend to light up brightly in the brain scans of both sexes, especially in those of males. The reward system creates an incentive to seek more sexual encounters, with clear benefits for the survival of the species. When the drive for sex dissipates, as it did with Marianne, people can reignite the spark with tactics that target the mind.

Sex in Circles
Biologists identified sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone in the 1920s and 1930s, and the first studies of human sexuality appeared in the 1940s. In 1948 biologist Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University introduced his first report on human sexual practices, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was followed, in 1953, by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. These highly controversial books opened up a new dialogue about human sexuality. They not only broached topics—such as masturbation, homosexuality and orgasm—that many people considered taboo but also revealed the surprising frequency with which people were coupling and engaging in sexual relations of countless varieties.

Kinsey thus debuted sex as a science, paving the way for others to dig below statistics into the realm of biology. In 1966 gynecologist William Masters and psychologist Virginia Johnson—who originally hailed from Washington University before founding their own research institute in St. Louis—described for the first time the sexual response cycle (how the body responds to sexual stimulation), based on observations of 382 ­women and 312 men undergoing some 10,000 such cycles. The cycle begins with excitation, as blood rushes to the penis in men, and as the clitoris, vulva and vagina enlarge and grow moist in women. Gradually, people reach a plateau, in which they are fully aroused but not yet at orgasm. After reaching orgasm, they enter the resolution phase, in which the tissues return to the preexcitation stage.

In the 1970s psychiatrist Helen Singer Kaplan of the Human Sexuality Program at Weill Medical College of Cornell University added a critical element to this cycle—desire—based on her experience as a sex therapist. In her three-stage model, desire precedes sexual excitation, which is then followed by orgasm. Because desire is mainly psychological, Kaplan emphasized the importance of the mind in the sexual experience and the destructive forces of anxiety, defensiveness and failure of communication.

In the late 1980s gynecologist Rosemary Basson of the University of British Columbia proposed a more circular sexual cycle, which, despite the term, had been described as a largely linear progression in previous work. Basson suggested that desire might both lead to genital stimulation and be invigorated by it. Countering the idea that orgasm is the pinnacle of the experience, she placed it as a mere spot on the circle, asserting that a person could feel sexually satisfied at any of the stages leading up to an orgasm, which thus does not have to be the ultimate goal of sexual activity.

Dissecting Desire
Given the importance of desire in this cycle, researchers have long wanted to identify its key ingredients. Conventional wisdom casts the male triggers in simplistic sensory terms, with tactile and visual stimuli being particularly enticing. Men are drawn to visual erotica, explaining the lure of magazines such as Playboy. Meanwhile female desire is supposedly fueled by a richer cognitive and emotional texture. “Women experience desire as a result of the context in which they are inserted—whether they feel comfortable with themselves and the partner, feel safe and perceive a true bond with the partner,” opines urologist Jennifer Berman of the Female Sexual Medicine Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet sexual imagery devoid of emotional connections can arouse women just as it can men, a 2007 study shows. Psychologist Meredith Chivers of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and her colleagues gauged the degree of sexual arousal in about 100 women and men, both homosexual and heterosexual, while they watched erotic film clips. The clips depicted same-sex intercourse, solitary masturbation or nude exercise—performed by men and women—as well as male-female intercourse and mating between bonobos (close ape relatives of the chimpanzee).

The researchers found that although nude exercise genitally aroused all the onlookers the least and intercourse excited them the most, the type of actor was more important for the men than for the women. Heterosexual women’s level of arousal increased along with the intensity of the sexual activity largely irrespective of who or what was engaged in it. In fact, these women were genitally excited by male and female actors equally and also responded physically to bonobo copulation. (Gay women, however, were more particular; they did not react sexually to men masturbating or exercising naked.)

The men, by contrast, were physically titillated mainly by their preferred category of sexual partner—that is, females for straight men and males for gay men—and were not excited by bonobo copulation. The results, the researchers say, suggest that women are not only aroused by a variety of types of sexual imagery but are more flexible than men in their sexual interests and preferences.

When it comes to orgasm, simple sensations as well as higher-level mental processes probably also play a role in both sexes. Although Kinsey characterized orgasm in purely physical terms, psychologist Barry R. Komisaruk of Rutgers University has defined the experience as more multifaceted. In their book The Science of Orgasm (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), Komisaruk, endocrinologist Carlos Beyer-Flores of the Tlaxcala Laboratory in Mexico and Rutgers sexologist Beverly Whipple describe orgasm as maximal excitation generated by a gradual summing of responses from the body’s sensory receptors, combined with complex cognitive and emotional forces. Similarly, psychologist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has described sexual pleasure as a kind of “gloss” that the brain’s emotional hub, the limbic system, applies over the primary sensations.

The relative weights of sensory and emotional influences on orgasm may differ between the sexes, perhaps because of its diverging evolutionary origins. Orgasm in men is directly tied to reproduction through ejaculation, whereas female orgasm has a less obvious evolutionary role. Orgasm in a woman might physically aid in the retention of sperm, or it may play a subtler social function, such as facilitating bonding with her mate. If female orgasm evolved primarily for social reasons, it might elicit more complex thoughts and feelings in women than it does in men.

Forgetting Fear
But does it? Researchers are trying to crack this riddle by probing changes in brain activity during orgasm in both men and women. Neuroscientist Gert Holstege of the University of Gro­ningen in the Netherlands and his colleagues attempted to solve the male side of the equation by asking the female partners of 11 men to stimulate their partner’s penis until he ejaculated while they scanned his brain using positron-emission tomography (PET). During ejaculation, the researchers saw extraordinary activation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a major hub of the brain’s reward circuitry; the intensity of this response is comparable to that induced by heroin. “Because ejaculation introduces sperm into the female reproductive tract, it would be critical for reproduction of the species to favor ejaculation as a most rewarding behavior,” the researchers wrote in 2003 in The Journal of Neuroscience.

The scientists also saw heightened activity in brain regions involved in memory-related imagery and in vision itself, perhaps because the volunteers used visual imagery to hasten orgasm. The anterior part of the cerebellum also switched into high gear. The cerebellum has long been labeled the coordinator of motor behaviors but has more recently revealed its role in emotional processing. Thus, the cerebellum could be the seat of the emotional components of orgasm in men, perhaps helping to coordinate those emotions with planned behaviors. The amygdala, the brain’s center of vigilance and sometimes fear, showed a decline in activity at ejaculation, a probable sign of decreasing vigilance during sexual performance.

To find out whether orgasm looks similar in the female brain, Holstege’s team asked the male partners of 12 women to stimulate their partner’s clitoris—the site whose excitation most easily leads to orgasm—until she climaxed, again inside a PET scanner. Not surprisingly, the team reported in 2006, clitoral stimulation by itself led to activation in areas of the brain involved in receiving and perceiving sensory signals from that part of the body and in describing a body sensation—for instance, labeling it “sexual.”

But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.

Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”

But that lack of emotion may not apply to all orgasms in women. Komisaruk, Whipple and their colleagues studied the patterns of brain activation that occur during orgasm in five women with spinal cord injuries that left them without sensation in their lower extremities. These women were able to achieve a “deep,” or nonclitoral, orgasm through mechanical stimulation (using a laboratory device) of the vagina and cervix. But contrary to Holstege’s results, Komisaruk’s team found that orgasm was accompanied by a general activation of the limbic system, the brain’s seat of emotion.

Among the activated limbic regions were the amygdala and the hypothalamus, which produces oxytocin, the putative love and bonding hormone whose levels jump fourfold at orgasm. The researchers also found heightened activity in the nucleus accumbens, a critical part of the brain’s reward circuitry that may mediate orgasmic pleasure in women. In addition, they saw unusual activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula, two brain areas that Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher has found come to life during the later stages of love relationships. Such activity may connect a female’s sexual pleasure with the emotional bond she feels with her partner.

Pleasure Pill?
Disentangling the connections between orgasm, reproduction and love may someday yield better medications and psychotherapies for sexual problems. As Marianne’s case illustrates, the answer is usually not as simple as a hormone boost. Instead her improvement was probably the result of the activation or inactivation of relevant parts of her brain by social triggers she encountered while participating in an experiment whose purpose centered on female sexual arousal. Indeed, many sex therapies revolve around opening the mind to new ways of thinking about sex or about your sexual partner.

Companies are also working on medications that act on the nervous system to stimulate desire. One such experimental compound is a peptide called bremelanotide, which is under development by Palatin Technologies in Cranbury, N.J. It blocks certain receptors in the brain that are involved in regulating basic drives such as eating and sex. In human studies bremelanotide has prompted spontaneous erections in men and boosted sexual arousal and desire in women, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has held up its progress out of concern over side effects such as rising blood pressure.

Continued scientific dissection of the experience of orgasm may lead to new pharmaceutical and psychological avenues for enhancing the experience. Yet overanalyzing this moment of intense pleasure might also put a damper on the fun. That is what the science tells us anyway.

 

Further Reading

• Infected with Insanity: Could Microbes Cause Mental Illness?
• Brain Injury's Toll
• Calendar: April / May 2008
• Are Immune System Molecules Brain-Builders—And Destroyers?

 

• Why Do Some People Sleepwalk?
• Blood Flow May Be Key Player in Neural Processing
• Disease for Darwinism
• Getting to Know Nutraceuticals

NY Times: Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All

Advertising

Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All

An ad for Apple was used for a study of consumers’ biometric responses.

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By STUART ELLIOTT

Published: March 31, 2008

 

NEVER mind brainstorms. These days, Madison Avenue is all about brain waves.

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Related

Accounts, People, Miscellany (March 31, 2008)

   

That may be overstated, but it is no exaggeration that agencies and advertisers are growing more interested in neuroscience in their never-ending efforts to improve effectiveness.

The ardor of the ad business to adopt the technical tools of biometrics — measuring brain waves, galvanic skin response, eye movements, pulse rates and the like — is increasing as consumer spending, the engine of the American economy, slows.

In other words, in hard times ads must work harder to move the merchandise.

“Instead of hypotheses about what people think and feel, you actually see what they think and feel,” said Joel Kades, vice president for strategic planning and consumer insight at Virgin Mobile USA in Warren, N.J.

“I’m not such a huge fan of ad testing,” he added, but measuring biological responses is “absolutely useful.”

The curiosity about neuroscientific ways to determine how ads work — or fail to work — will be on display this week at the 54th annual convention and exposition of the Advertising Research Foundation. The agenda for the conference is filled with presentations on better methods to determine how consumers engage with ads (and vice versa).

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“In many ways, we’re testing advertising the way we were testing advertising when I was at Procter & Gamble 22 years ago,” said Frank Stagliano, executive vice president for the Nielsen Entertainment Television Group in New York, part of the Nielsen Company.

Neuroscience can provide “a more accurate way to understand what consumers really like,” Mr. Stagliano said, which helps to produce ads and programs that “break through the clutter” rather than contribute to it.

Last month, Nielsen bought a stake in NeuroFocus, a company that specializes in brain-wave research and works for clients like Scottrade, the brokerage firm.

“We measure attention, second by second; how emotionally engaged you are with what you’re watching, whether it’s a commercial, a movie or a TV show; and memory retention,” said A. K. Pradeep, chief executive at NeuroFocus in Berkeley, Calif.

A company that competes with NeuroFocus, the EmSense Corporation, hopes to demonstrate such usefulness in a discussion on Monday at the research foundation’s convention.

Executives of EmSense, which also tries to measure consumer response to ads through biometric techniques, will present the results of a study of how award-winning ads.

For the study, EmSense surveyed 200 people, ages 18 to 54, in New York and San Francisco. The study measured their biosensory responses to 19 commercials that won awards last year at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France, and ads that won Effie Awards last year from the New York the American Marketing Association.

The study looked at spots like a commercial for Apple with characters playing “PC” and “Mac”; the “I Feel Pretty” spot for Nike, with Maria Sharapova, and  a commercial for Tide with a talking stain on a man’s shirt.

On Madison Avenue, Cannes awards, known as Lions, are usually perceived as honoring creativity and Effie winners are typically deemed to reward effectiveness. The EmSense study sought to weigh the value of those emotional and cognitive approaches.

Some findings reinforced the conventional wisdom, said Elissa Moses, chief analytics officer at EmSense in Westport, Conn., which works for clients like Virgin Mobile USA and Coca-Cola.

Winners of Effies “tend to be a little less emotional and use rational claims a bit more” than winners at Cannes, Ms. Moses said, and ads that won Lions tended to be much better liked than their Effie counterparts.

But surprisingly, “there are very important similarities” between the two types of winners, she added, which can help guide future campaigns.

Fifteen of the 19 Cannes and Effie winners engaged consumers faster than average spots, Ms. Moses said. “Typically, a spot engages with viewers in 5 to 7 seconds. The Cannes and Effie ads engaged, whether emotionally or cognitively, in 1.5 seconds.”

Whichever award the commercials won, they had an equal effect on purchase consideration and on brand favorability, Ms. Moses said.

Although winners of Lions are replete with emotional appeals meant to engage viewers, they also use what Ms. Moses called a “cognitive jolt,” a twist or surprise, to earn interest.

For example, viewers were startled by a car crash in a Volkswagen spot and by a dropped call in a Cingular ad.

Some consumer advocates question the role of biometrics in ad research. They worry that blending “Weird Science” with “Mad Men” will give marketers an unfair advantage over consumers.

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“The role of neuromarketing is to understand how people feel and react,” Ms. Moses said. “It in no way sets out to meddle with normal, natural response mechanisms.”

Her opinion was echoed by Robert E. Knight, the director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also the chief science adviser at NeuroFocus.

“We’re not trying to predict an individual’s thoughts and actions and we’re not trying to input messages,” Dr.  Knight said.

Before Nielsen teamed up with NeuroFocus, Mr. Stagliano said, “we were concerned how people would respond,” but after a test at the CBS Television City research laboratory in Las Vegas, the reaction was “overwhelmingly positive.”

“Respondents didn’t feel like they were being probed or anything,” Mr. Stagliano said.

FT: Silicon feels the power of the sun

Silicon feels the power of the sun 

By Chris Nuttall

Published: March 24 2008 19:08 | Last updated: March 24 2008 19:08

Applied Materials is winning itself a place in the sun with a high-stakes gamble on expansion into the solar industry.

As the world’s biggest maker of equipment for the semiconductor ind­­ustry, Silicon Valley-based Applied Materials is used to providing tools that help others to be creative. But a $1.9bn (£959m, €1.2bn)factory order, understood to be from a Chinese consortium, impressed analysts this month and showed Applied becoming more directly involved with solar.

The order is more than five times bigger than any order the company has ever received for chip tools and demonstrates that the company’s contribution to the success of the technology could be far bigger than occurred in semiconductors. But to achieve this, Applied is undergoing a transformation of its business that includes acquisitions and offering to fit out production lines.

Mark Pinto, Applied’s chief technology officer and head of its new energy and environmental business, speaks with the enthusiasm of an inventor freed to make his dreams come true. “What is exciting about solar for our employees is that we feel like it’s in our hands, we can play a very big role,” he says.

In his previous career as a scientist in Bell Labs, the research division of phone company AT&T, Mr Pinto was frustrated by a company culture that could not get great ideas into the marketplace. Now he is seeing the impact of combining his research efforts with business development in a fast-growing industry eager to embrace new methods and technology.

With semiconductors, he says, Applied has been dependent on oth­ers to come up with “killer applications”, such as Apple and its iPhone, in order to drive industry innovation and sustain demand for transistors and the equipment that makes them. “Solar provides way less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of the world’s energy needs, so the potential market is huge. The killer app is already there – if you lower the cost of solar, the market is there,” he says.

Applied believes its technology is key to making solar energy cheap­er. Announcing its expansion into solar in September 2006, Mike Splinter, chief executive, promised to cut the cost per watt of generating solar power from $3-$5 to $1. “We plan to change the cost equation for solar power through adaptation of our existing technology and new innovation in order to help make solar a more meaningful contributor to the global energy supply,” he said.

In other words, in changing its own business, it is also changing the economics of a new industry. Ap­plied was in a unique position to do this because of its knowledge of handling silicon – a base material for both semiconductors and solar panels – and because of a separate foray into making equipment for flat-panel display makers.

Applied entered this business in 1991. In semiconductors, Applied’s core expertise is in making equipment that can create depositions – thin layers of insulating material on chip wafers. A similar deposition process is needed for flat-panel displays. Applied Materials and display manufacturers discovered they could be made more cost-effectively the bigger the size of glass from which the screens were cut. Applied’s machines for making the panels have grown so big they can no longer fit even on 747 jumbo jets and are mainly assembled on site. Now variations on this equipment have been adapted for solar panels.

Mr Pinto says the company initally assumed only panels small enough to be carried up ladders and fitted on residential roofs would be needed. But the industry has told it that bigger panels are re­quired for utilities to assemble solar farms and for other commercial installations. He says a kind of Moore’s Law is at work, referring to Gordon Moore of Intel’s 1965 paper that predicted the number of transistors on a chip would double around every 18 months. This was really about costs coming down with miniaturisation. With display and solar panels, the economics are also about cost per area, with the costs falling if the panels can be cut from bigger sheets. Installation is also much cheaper with fewer, larger solar panels.

Applied is focusing on thin-film solar, which exploits the photovoltaic effect of sunlight being absorbed by materials and converted directly into electricity. Silicon only 2-3 millionths of a metre thick is deposited on a glass substrate in the thin-film process. But Applied has also hedged its photovoltaic bet by buying companies that are expert in crystalline silicon, whose cells need more silicon, around 175 millionths of a metre thick. Its acquisitions in the past two years include Italy’s Baccini, which makes test systems for manufacturers of crystalline silicon, bought for $330m, and HCT Shaping Systems, a Swiss company that cost Applied $475m for technology that cuts silicon into pieces thinner than the slimmest salami slice.

Paula Mints, solar analyst with Navigant Consulting, says Applied has done the right thing, since she expects thin-film will grab no more than 50 per cent of the market. “There is always a cost/efficiency trade-off,” she says, alluding to the fact that thin-film is cheaper in needing less silicon, but it is less efficient in converting the sun’s rays to electricity.

In thin-film solar factories, Applied’s deposition equipment ac­counts for 70 per cent of the costs. It has therefore offered to equip com­plete factories for panel-makers, while integrating the other 30 per cent worth of equipment such as conveyor belts, sourced from other suppliers. The full solar production line it offers is another departure for Applied, says Mr Splinter: “We have changed the business model here too – when we started in thin-film solar there was basically no industry, so we started off a complete line. We’ve never done this before.”

Tim Arcuri, Citigroup semiconductor equipment analyst, says the Chinese order shows Applied’s stra­tegy of offering large-scale complete solutions is working. “It has been something of a holy grail to build monster gigawatt factories using these big pieces of glass to achieve a very low cost per watt,” he says.

The first Applied-fitted factories are coming on stream this month, equipment orders are expected to be worth more than $2.5bn by 2010, and Mr Arcuri says he can easily see solar accounting for a quarter of Applied’s revenues by then. But the company faces competition from rivals such as First Solar and Oerlikon Solar and the future path of solar technology has yet to be determined.

“This is a huge gamble for us,” cautions Mr Splinter. “We are betting a lot of shareholders’ money as well as our own research and development that this is going to be big and very successful. So far, so good – it’s the greatest opportunity the company has had in many years, but I think we still have a long way to go.”

The whys and hows of cutting what a watt costs

Applied Materials’ venture into providing manufacturing equipment for the solar panel industry is part of a surge of interest in Silicon Valley in the alternative energy.

Venture capitalists have funded start-ups trying new materials and methods to convert the sun’s rays into electricity, while Cypress Semiconductor span off solar-panel provider SunPower in 2005.

Google has the largest solar panel installation of any US corporate campus and has launched an initiative to explore solar thermal power – concentrating the sun’s heat to produce electricity.

With silicon currently the key material used in both semiconductors and solar panels, the Valley is in a good position to put its expertise to good use.

Mike Splinter, Applied’s chief executive and a Valley veteran, says solar reminds him of the early days of semis.

“People are jockeying for position; there are different technologies and materials and we are feeling our way,” he says.

“As the cost comes down, the solar market should scale much faster as there’s a huge market electricity, whereas then there was no computer market.”

According to Citigroup analyst Tim Arcuri: “There’s going to be a shake-out, with there being four or five different technologies and their different supply chains. But when there’s a scrum like this, I would not bet against the Valley.”

Paula Mints, solar analyst at Navigant Consulting, offers a different perspective: “Silicon Valley is a marketing term.

“I don’t think we have any more sand or processed sand than anywhere else. But we do have an area that draws interesting, capable, brilliant people to it.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The age of seance

The age of seance

By James Lovegrove

Published: March 8 2008 00:22 | Last updated: March 8 2008 00:22

Servants of the Supernatural: The Night Side of the Victorian Mind
By Antonio Melechi
William Heinemann £20, 276 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life after Death
By Deborah Blum
Arrow £8.99, 370 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.19

Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
By Andrew Lycett
Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20, 527 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Conversations with Eternity
By Victor Hugo, translated and with a commentary by John Chambers
New Paradigm $13.95, 260 pages

In 1848, a series of mysterious knocks and bangs began resounding through the timber walls and floors of a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. The two daughters of the Fox family who owned the reputedly haunted house began addressing the unseen source of the noise. The girls identified it as the spirit of a dead man and gave him the somewhat unnerving name Mr Splitfoot. Through a simple code – two knocks for yes, silence for no – they were able to engage in conversation with him. Word soon spread. People came from far and wide to talk to Mr Splitfoot and pose questions about the afterlife. They inquired about loved ones who were dead. His replies convinced. The spiritualist movement had begun.

A fascination with communicating with the dead continues to grip us today. Television shows such as Most Haunted and Crossing Over With John Edward, both hosted by mediums, get good ratings. Stage mediums remain a box-office draw in provincial theatres. Ours is an age that is pleased with its own rationality, yet we have retained an appetite for messages from the great beyond.

Two recently published books cast an eye over the early years of spiritualism and explore how the phenomenon was regarded in its infancy. Antonio Melechi’s Servants of the Supernatural and Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters both show how Victorian intellectuals were at pains to consider spiritualism from a scientific standpoint and use it to form a bridge between fact and religious faith.

Melechi is a visiting fellow at the University of York whose previous book, Fugitive Minds, explored mental disturbances such as deja-vu and sleep paralysis. Servants of the Supernatural delves into what its author winningly calls “the golden age of the Victorian seance”. The opening sections of the book are concerned with mesmerism (a forerunner of modern-day hypnotherapy), which in the first half of the 19th century evolved into a powerful medical tool that could help the mind restore itself to health. It could even be harnessed in surgery. Operations were carried out successfully on patients under “mesmeric sleep”, a far better method of anaesthetisation than ether. For the public, however, mesmerism was best known in its bastardised form, stage hypnotism, and its association with low entertainment meant the high-minded medical establishment would not take it seriously.

The controversy over mesmerism set the pattern for the problems that attended spiritualism. During the latter half of the century, table-turning, inspired by the Fox sisters, became a widespread parlour fad. Sitters would gather around a small tripod table and hold it down with their fingers while invoking the spirits of the dead. One leg of a small tripod table would rap against a larger table below, counting through the letters of the alphabet to form words.

“Mediums” soon emerged. These were people who were especially “sensitive” to the presence of the spirits and who found that they could charge money for their services. They devised a less labour-intensive method of communing with the other side, by going into a trance and speaking in the voices of the dead. The pronouncements they relayed were cryptic and often bizarre, but usually carried a reassuring message to the living. To enhance the effect, mediums would manifest a whole array of remarkable physical phenomena: glowing hands that danced in the air, extrusions of ectoplasm from various orifices, musical instruments played by unseen beings, and so on.

Investigation by scientists, among them Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin, failed to prove conclusively whether any of these miraculous feats were genuine. While some clergymen condemned spiritualism as heretical, there was a general feeling that it was a harmless pastime for the middle and lower classes. Establishment figures were welcome to treat it with a level of seriousness, but they risked their reputations if they dared to give it full credence. This was the fate of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who would not admit that some mediums were flagrant fakers, even when they were taken to court and exposed as such.

Servants of the Supernatural picks its way through the history of spiritualism in the Victorian era carefully and with an understated wit. If there’s a flaw, it’s that Melechi’s tone is austere, at times sober verging on the teetotal. That isn’t a criticism that can be levelled at Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters, which brings a zesty transatlantic flavour to the material.

Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin who has won a Pulitzer for her writings on primate research, chooses as her chief focus William James, older brother of Henry the novelist. The senior James sibling, though American-born, was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in the UK, and later its president, and as a psychologist spent much of his life applying empirical scientific methodology to spiritualism.

If a doubter at first, James became a convert to spiritualism after the death of his infant son Herman. The prospect that the dead did live on came in the form of Leonora Piper, whom James reckoned to be the one genuine medium in a field littered with impostors. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he wrote, “you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove a single crow to be white.”

Piper was his white crow. Years of repeated and intensive testing by the SPR and its American offshoot failed to find fault with her talents. Even when being subjected to all manner of undignified probings and jabbings while in her trance, this Bostonian shopkeeper’s wife was calmly able to furnish information she could not have come by through normal means, facts known only to the investigators or the impartial witnesses they brought with them. For example, Frederick Myers, a founder of the SPR, was utterly c