Learn about how studying World of Warcraft helped researchers learn how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic; how scientists described mouse facial expressions for the first time; and how social rejection can fuel creativity.
Learn about how studying World of Warcraft helped researchers learn how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic; how scientists described mouse facial expressions for the first time; and how social rejection can fuel creativity.
Scientists studied a "pandemic" in World of Warcraft to learn how to fight a real virus by Grant Currin
Scientists have described mouse facial expressions for the first time by Steffie Drucker
In some people, social rejection can fuel creativity by Kelsey Donk
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/world-of-warcraft-could-help-fight-covid-19-social-rejection-can-fuel-creativity-and-what-mouse-facial-expressions-teach-us-about-emotion
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how studying World of Warcraft helped researchers learn how to fight the coronavirus; how scientists described mouse facial expressions for the first time; and how social rejection can fuel creativity.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
You know the video game World of Warcraft? It’s an extremely popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game that might have caused your college roommate to fail a class or two. And believe it or not, here’s something else it did: it helped researchers understand how to fight the coronavirus pandemic. Yeah. Let’s talk abou the “Corrupted Blood incident.”
On September 13, 2005, a plague devastated the cities of Orgrimmar and Ironforge. It quickly spread to other cities, which made the number of deaths skyrocket. Before long, more than four million were affected by the outbreak. Orgrimmar and Ironforge may be fictional, but this digital disease was real — even if it only existed in the online servers of World of Warcraft. And in the years following this plague, researchers published multiple published peer-reviewed papers about the unusual event — to study how people behave when faced with an outbreak. Like I said: incredible, right?
Lemme get into the details of what happened. Unlike our current outbreak, the World of Warcraft pandemic really was the product of an experiment gone wrong. It originated in an update that let experienced players encounter a winged serpent called Hakkar the Soulflayer. He would occasionally infect opponents with a digital disease called Corrupted Blood. It wasn’t a big deal for the powerful players who’d earned access to the new area of the game. They could recover in a few seconds. But the disease was fatal to weaker players. And when a programming error allowed it to jump into broader digital society, that became a very big deal.
The Corrupted Blood incident paralleled real-life pandemics in a lot of ways, including in how it spread. The disease jumped from player to player when they were in close proximity. Players were able to spread the disease further, faster, because they had the ability to instantly transport themselves from one location to another — kinda like the hazards of real-world air travel. And there were non-playable characters that could transmit the disease but would never die of it, which echoes the idea that COVID-19 might be able to spread through people who don’t show symptoms.
Getting the pandemic under control proved incredibly difficult. Interventions like voluntary quarantines failed to stop the outbreak, and the company behind World of Warcraft was eventually forced to restart the game’s servers.
This would be just another story about a video game glitch, if not for the fact that researchers actually studied it. Nina Fefferman is one such researcher. She’s a mathematical biologist at the University of Tennessee, and she co-wrote a paper on the lessons epidemiology could take from the incident. She recently said that researching the digital pandemic, quote, “led me to think really deeply about how people perceive threats and how differences in that perception can change how they behave,” end quote. She says the event has helped inform her current research into predictive modeling around COVID-19.
So if you’re playing a few more video games to pass the time these days, be proud. You just might be helping science in the process.
Scientists have identified mouse facial expressions for the very first time. And that opens the door to further discoveries about how emotions happen in the brain.
Have you ever seen those videos of a baby tasting something for the first time? That’s basically how the scientists conducted this experiment: They set up a tiny camera near a drinking spout to record the rodents’ faces as they drank. Sometimes the solution they drank would be sweetened with sugar, other times it would be salty or bitter. Other times, it was less pleasant: the mice might get a painful shock, or be injected with a chemical that made them feel lousy. Next, the researchers processed the footage with a machine-learning algorithm that knew which expression was triggered by which stimulus. The algorithm was able to group those expressions into five distinct emotions: pleasure, disgust, nausea, pain, and fear.
Of course, those facial expressions could have just been reflexes — they weren’t necessarily expressions of emotion. So to probe further, the researchers played with the intensity of each stimulus (stronger or weaker shocks, say) and with each mouse’s own internal state (like giving them sugar water when they were thirsty versus hydrated). Sure enough, their facial expressions were more intense when the shocks were stronger and their throats were parched. The same was true when the team tried to trigger the same emotion with two different stimuli: very salty and very bitter water both made their little mouse faces go “yuck!”
Finally, the researchers went to the source: they measured brain activity while the mice made those faces. The team zeroed in on the insular cortex, a part of the brain known to play a role in emotions, in mice as well as humans. By measuring activity in individual neurons, they found brain cells that reacted at the same time and strength as the animals’ facial expressions. They also found other neurons that each reacted to one specific emotion, though these didn’t overlap with the facial expression neurons.
The scientists point out that past research has shown it’s not as simple to link human facial expressions to specific emotions, possibly because humans have more conscious control over their faces. Still, these findings give researchers a road map for future studies on how emotions are processed in the brain and how those processes sometimes go awry, leading to things like anxiety and depression. But one thing’s for sure: the cartoon face of Fievel/Mickey Mouse/Pinky and the Brain was closer to reality than we thought.
We’ve all heard the stories of wildly successful people who were loners and outcasts when they were young. Bill Gates, Tyra Banks, Steven Spielberg, and Taylor Swift are just a few of the many famous creatives that were bullied or rejected in high school. But what if that rejection actually fueled their success? According to a new study from Johns Hopkins and Cornell University, that just might be the case. In the right kind of person, social rejection can boost creativity.
To start, researchers “rejected” some of the study participants by telling them they weren’t picked to work as part of “the group.” But there wasn’t actually a group to be rejected from. Everyone was working alone for the experiment. The researchers just wanted to make some participants feel more isolated and rejected than others.
Then they measured their creativity. They did this by having the participants determine what a series of words had in common, which required thinking of the words in new ways, and by having them draw an alien — the less it looked like a human, the more creative it was judged to be.
The people who had been rejected before taking the tests ended up being more creative than those who were included. But there was a catch. The advantage was only there when the person had what researchers call an “independent self-concept” — that is, they thought of themselves as unique and separate from other people, and tended to value their own goals over those of the group. When these people weren’t rejected, they weren’t any more creative than people who valued fitting in and maintaining group harmony. But when these free spirits got a rejection letter? Hoo boy. Their loner self-image combined with that real-world rejection to stoke a creative fire within them.
The big takeaway, then, is not that you should reject people to make them more creative. If fitting in is important to them, that won’t work. But if you already consider yourself an outsider, the pain of rejection just might fuel you to do great things.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Grant Currin, Steffie Drucker, and Kelsey Donk, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!