Humanity is made in God's image, and shares 96 percent of its DNA with chimpanzees. Does that mean that the Supreme Being is even hairier than most of us imagine Him? No. These are two incompatible points of view, the extremes in the tug-of-war over our species' self-image: half angel, or wholly animal.
There is an interesting third option: men and women as “the most competent machines in the world.” That point of view was pretty popular just under a century ago in Central Europe. It gave us the word "robot," the movie Metropolis, and this map.
Der Mensch als Industriepalast ("Man as an Industrial Palace") was a free insert in Dr. Fritz Kahn's best-selling series of books, entitled Das Leben des Menschen ("The Life of Man"). The five-part series, published between 1922 and 1932, was a success not just in Kahn's native Germany — it was translated in many languages and published the world over. Check your attic for a mint-condition copy of the map: In 2013, Christie's auction house in London sold one for £3,750 (app. $4,800).
Measuring 37½ x 19 in. (95 x 48 cm), the poster uses the industrial processes of the early 20th century as a metaphor for the workings of the human body. Kahn's diagram in effect shows us the body as factory: The head is staffed with decision makers and switchboard operators, who dispense orders to the workers, who operate the heavy machinery in the body.
The two top offices are for Verstand, where a solitary figure is studying, and one for Vernunft, in which three operators are conferring on urgent and/or important matters. Both concepts can be translated superficially as "reason," but Verstand connotes a more general, abstract common sense, whereas Vernunft implies a cleverness to solve practical problems. At least, that's my understanding (Arthur Schopenhauer seems to disagree).
One floor down are the Drüsenzentrale ("Glandular control room"), where six dials and needles tell an operator whether the organs are up to snuff; the Muskelzentrale ("Muscular control room"), a switchboard for managing arms, legs and hands; and Wille ("Will"), another meeting room where three executives are trying to decide whether to go out for Bratwurst or stay in and heat up yesterday's Eintopf.
Another floor down, an Atemzentrale ("Breathing control room") keeps check on breathing, heartbeat, and coronary function; the operator of the Gehörorgan ("Ear") is trying to make sense of the static coming in from outside; and the Auge ("Eye") looks at the world through an old-fashioned folding camera. The Nervenzentrale ("Nerve center"), at the bottom of the head, relates all commands to the workforce via the Rückenmark ("Spinal cord").
A fantastic array of shiny pipes and tubes, conveyor belts, and storage tanks make the lungs (Lunge), liver (Leber), stomach (Magen), kidneys (Niere), spleen (Milz), and other organs and glands look like the moving, clanking parts of a factory. Two main processes animate the workfloor: respiration, with the intake of oxygen (Sauerstoff) and the expulsion of carbonic acid (Kohlensäure); and nutrition, i.e., processing food (Nahrung) into ingredients that can be used to keep the factory humming and the lights burning.
In January 1927, around the time this map was drafted, Fritz Lang's film Metropolis premiered at the UFA Palast, not far from Kahn's Berlin gynecology practice. The parallels between map and movie are striking, and not just because both their creators are called Fritz. Both were influenced by Futurism, the early-20th-century artistic movement that celebrated technological progress. Both used the cogs and gears of contemporary industry as prominent elements of their creation. Those creations were both utopian — one corporeal, another social.
The capitalist society in Lang's movie is also vertically structured, like a body: Those in charge are physically at the top, and the workers are down below. Only the middle is missing — and that is the central theme of the movie. One of the protagonists is the Maschinenmensch — one of the earliest cinematic depictions of a robot. That word, by the way, was first used just a few years earlier, in 1921, by Czech author Karel Čapek, for an anthropomorphic machine designed to work (robota is Czech for hard labour).
Kahn's mechanical allegory of the human body, repeated throughout his various books in many other drawings, was in step with the spirit of the time. His works were very popular, but he slipped into obscurity, at least in his homeland, with the rise of Nazism.
Kahn was born in Halle in 1888 into an orthodox Jewish family. He studied medicine at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelm University, specialising in microbiology. Kahn worked as a German army doctor in the First World War. Overworked and undernourished, he was invalided in 1918 while in Italy, and cared for by local farmers. After the war, he spent some time revalidating in Algeria.
Returning to Berlin, he worked as a surgeon and a gynecologist and in 1920 married Irma Glogau. Kahn was interested in a wide range of scientific and philosophical subjects, wrote articles for the popular science magazine Kosmos, and later expanded into a series of popular scientific books, mostly about medicine.
Kahn is credited with founding conceptual medical illustration. Earlier medical illustrations were purely realistic, and used mainly by medical students. Kahn wanted his work to be educational beyond purely academic circles. His work was aimed at popularising a scientific understanding of the workings of the body.
Kahn was one of the world's first writers who aimed scientific knowledge specifically at as large an audience as was possible. He was a terrible draughtsman, though, so he instructed the artists in his atelier to design the drawings for him, to his very precise specifications. Those drawings did go on to inspire Walter Gropius, the architect and founder of the Bauhaus school.
As a committed Zionist, Kahn bought land on Mount Carmel and in Jerusalem in 1921 in what was then still Palestine. Back in Berlin, he founded a Jewish lodge. His travels, both for science and for his health, took him from the Polar Circle to the Sahara desert.
The rising tide of antisemitism forced Kahn from his job, and led to the burning of his works, which were placed on the list of "harmful and undesirable books." One, Unser Geschlechtsleben ("Our Sex Lives") was singled out for an active ban, with all available copies sought out for destruction. Some of Kahn's drawings were "recycled" by Gerhard Venzmer, a medical writer favoured by the Nazis.
In 1933, Kahn emigrated to Palestine, where he got married for the second time, to Erna Schnabel, in 1937. They later returned to Europe, settling in Paris. When the Germans invaded France, he fled to Bordeaux. He was interned as an enemy alien by the French, but Erna secured his release and fled with him across the Pyrenees. In 1941, with help from Albert Einstein, they obtained a U.S. visa.
Kahn settled in Manhattan, but eventually moved back to Europe after the war, living mainly in Switzerland – with his Danish collaborator Ellen Fussing, after Erna had left him. In 1960, Kahn survived a major earthquake in Morocco — by sheltering in a sarcophagus. In 1962, he settled in Denmark, setting up an atelier in Copenhagen. He died in 1968 in Locarno.
Der Mensch als Industriepalast has become Kahn's most influential work. In 1951, Barbara Jones selected the poster as part of her exhibition of popular art in the Whitechapel Gallery in London, inspiring Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi to some of his best-known works.
But, doubtlessly due to the burning of his books, and also to the diminished appeal of his post-1945 work, Kahn remained largely unknown in post-war Germany; until 2010, when the Berlin Medical Historical Museum, attached to the famous Charité hospital, mounted an exhibition entitled Menschmaschine, focusing on his work and that of the other Fritz. Der Mensch als Industriepalast had a central place in the show, and the poster would also figure prominently in subsequent exhibitions in the New Museum in New York (Ghosts in the Machine) and London's Wellcome Collection (as part of Superhuman).
The wave of Futurism that propelled both Fritzes upward has long since crested and broken, but the human-controlled-by-tiny-humans trope survives in popular culture. One of the funniest examples is in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, when sexual arousal and performance is presented as an industrial effort by the 'little men' operating the human body. A more recent, but rather less funny example is the Eddy Murphy vehicle (in more ways than one) Meet Dave.
Dr. Kahn's map of the Menschmaschine found here on Industriepalast, a website hosting the fantastic animation made by Henning M. Lederer based on the map.
Strange Maps #741
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
David Schmidt, a geology professor at Westminster College, had just arrived in the South Dakota Badlands in summer 2019 with a group of students for a fossil dig when he received a call from the National Forest Service. A nearby rancher had discovered a strange object poking out of the ground. They wanted Schmidt to take a look.
"One of the very first bones that we saw in the rock was this long cylindrical bone," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "The first thing that came out of our mouths was, 'That kind of looks like the horn of a triceratops.'"
After authorities gave the go-ahead, Schmidt and a small group of students returned this summer and spent nearly every day of June and July excavating the skull.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"
Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about 8.2 feet long.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a Triceratops prorsus, one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the Tyrannosaurus rex. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made headlines after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.
Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the New York Times.
Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
The Badlands aren't the only spot in North America where paleontologists have found dinosaurs. In the 1870s, Colorado and Wyoming became the first sites of dinosaur discoveries in the U.S., ushering in an era of public fascination with the prehistoric creatures — and a competitive rush to unearth them.
Since, dinosaur bones have been found in 35 states. One of the most fruitful locations for paleontologists has been the Morrison formation, a sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock that stretches under the Western part of the country. Discovered here were species like Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus, to name a few.
Triceratops illustration
| Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
As for "Shady" (the nickname of the South Dakota triceratops), Schmidt and his team have safely transported it to the Westminster campus. They hope to raise funds for restoration, and to return to South Dakota in search of more bones that once belonged to the triceratops.
Studying dinosaurs helps scientists gain a more complete understanding of our evolution, illuminating a through-line that extends from "deep time" to present day. For scientists like Schmidt, there's also the simple joy of coming to face-to-face with a lost world.
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "You don't ever think that these things will ever happen."
Pixel art scene
- YouTube www.youtube.com
The human brain is a pretty lazy organ. Although it's capable of remarkable ingenuity, it's also responsible for nudging us into bad behavioral patterns, such as being impulsive or avoiding difficult but important decisions. These kinds of short-sighted behaviors can hurt our finances.
However, they don't hurt the video game industry. In 2020, video games generated more than $179 billion in revenue, making the industry more valuable than sports and movies combined. A 2021 report from Limelight Network found that gamers worldwide spend an average of 8 hours and 27 minutes per week playing video games.
Good at gaming, bad at saving
It's not necessarily bad that Americans spend millions of dollars and hours on video games. But consider another set of statistics: 25 percent of Americans have no retirement savings at all, while roughly half are either living "on the edge" or "paycheck to paycheck," according to a recent report on the Financial Resilience of Americans from the FINRA Education Foundation. Meanwhile, experts predict that Social Security funds could dry up by 2035.
So, why don't people save more? After all, the benefits of compounding interest aren't exactly a secret: Investing a few hundred bucks every month would make most people millionaires by retirement if they start in their twenties. However, the recent FINRA report found that many Americans have alarmingly low levels of financial literacy, a topic that's not taught in most public schools.
Even for the financially literate, saving money is psychologically difficult
But what if we could infuse the instant gratification of video games into our long-term financial habits? In other words, what if finance looked less like an Excel spreadsheet and more like your favorite video game?
A growing number of finance applications are making that a reality. By using the same strategies video game designers have been optimizing for decades, gamifying personal finance could be one of the most efficient ways to help people save for the future while reaping instant psychological rewards. But it doesn't come without risks.
What is gamification?
In simple terms, gamification takes the motivating power of video games and applies it to other areas of life. The global research company Gartner offers a slightly more technical definition of gamification: "the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals."
The odds are you have encountered gamification already. It's utilized by many popular apps, websites, and devices. For example, LinkedIn displays progress bars representing how much profile information you have filled out. The Apple Watch has a "Close Your Rings" feature that shows how many steps you need to walk to meet your daily goal.
Brands have used gamification to boost customer engagement for decades. For example, McDonald's launched its Monopoly game in 1987, which essentially attached lottery tickets to menu items, while M&M's gained consumer attention with Eye-Spy Pretzel, an online scavenger hunt game that went viral in 2010.
In addition to marketing, gamification is used in social media, fitness, education, crowdfunding, military recruitment, and employee training, just to name a few applications. The Chinese government has even gamified aspects of its Social Credit System, in which citizens perform or refrain from various activities to earn points that represent trustworthiness.
Finance is arguably one of the best-suited fields for gamification. One reason is that financial data can be easily measured and graphed. Perhaps more importantly, financial decisions occur in the background of almost everything we do in modern life, from deciding what we eat for lunch to where we are going to spend our lives.
Gamification doesn't just make boring stuff fun; it's also an effective way to change our behavior. Used properly, it can also disrupt our habits.
The nature of habits
It's tempting to think that we make our way through life by thoughtfully considering the information before us and making sensible choices. That's not really the case. Research suggests that about 40 percent of our daily activities are performed out of habit, a term the American Journal of Psychology defines as a "more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience."
In other words, we spend much of our lives on autopilot. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we rely on habits: our brains require a lot of energy, especially when we're faced with tough decisions and complex problems, like financial planning. It's relatively easy to rely on learned behavioral patterns that provide a quick, reliable solution. However, those patterns don't always serve our long-term interests.
Saving money is a good example. Imagine you have $500 with which to do whatever you want. You could invest it. Or you could go on a shopping spree. Unfortunately, the brain doesn't process these two options the same way; in fact, it actually processes the investing option as something like a pain stimulus.
Why gamification works
Saving is painful. But can't people simply choose to be more financially responsible? In short: Yes, but it takes a lot of effort. After all, when it comes to changing behavior, willpower is only part of the equation.
Some psychologists think willpower is a finite resource, or that it's like an emotion whose motivational power ebbs and flows based on what's happening around us. For example, you might establish a monthly budget and stick to it for a couple weeks. But then you get stressed. The next time you're out shopping, you might find it harder to resist making an impulsive purchase in your stressed-out state.
Pixel Art Lootvlasdv via Adobe Stock
"A growing body of research shows that resisting repeated temptations takes a mental toll," the American Psychological Association writes. "Some experts liken willpower to a muscle that can get fatigued from overuse." In the terminology of psychology, this is called ego depletion.
Gamification offers a way to outsource your willpower. That's because games offer psychological rewards that can motivate us to perform certain actions that might otherwise have seemed too boring, taxing, or emotionally draining. What's more, gamifying parts of your life is less of a change of mind and more of a change of environment.
A 2017 study published in Computers in Human Behavior noted that "enriching the environment with game design elements, as gamification does by definition, directly modifies that environment, thereby potentially affecting motivational and psychological user experiences."
The study argued that games are most motivational when they address three key psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and social relatedness. It's easy to imagine how games can tap into these categories. For competence, games can feature badges and performance graphs. For autonomy, games can offer customizable avatars. And for social relatedness, games can feature compelling storylines and multiplayer gameplay.
Gamification and the brain
Games can motivate us by satisfying our psychological needs and giving us a sense of reward. From a neurological perspective, this occurs through the release of "feel-good" neurotransmitters, namely dopamine and oxytocin.
"Two core things have to happen in the brain to influence your decision-making," Paul Zak, a neuroscientist and professor of economic sciences at Claremont Graduate University, told Big Think. "The first is you have to attend to that information. That's driven by the brain's production of dopamine. The second thing, you've got to get my lazy brain to care about the outcomes. And that caring is driven by emotional resonance. And that's associated with the brain's production of oxytocin."
Cheerful Father And Son Competing In Video Games At HomeProstock-studio via Adobe Stock
When released simultaneously, these neurotransmitters can put us into a state that Zak calls "neurologic immersion." In this state, our everyday habits have less control over our behavior, and we're better able to take deliberate action. It's an idea Zak and his colleagues developed over two decades of using brain-imaging technology to study the nature of extraordinary experiences.
As he wrote in an article published by the World Experience Organization, neurologic immersion can occur when experiences, including video games, are unexpected, emotionally charged, narrowing one's focus to the experience itself, easy to remember, and provoking actions.
"The components of the extraordinary come as a package, not in isolation from each other," Zak wrote. "It's the 'action' part that is key to finding immersion. Extraordinary experiences cause people to take an action, whether it's donating to charity, buying a product, posting on social media, or returning to enjoy an experience again."
Games can invoke these types of immersive experiences.. But how exactly are financial organizations using gamification to help people "level up" their financial futures?
Gamifying personal finance
Banks and financial companies have been using gamification for years. What started with simple concepts, like PNC Bank's "Punch the Pig" savings feature, has evolved into a diverse field of games that are helping people stick to budgets, save money, and pay off debt.
What's surprising about the gamification of personal finance is that some of the most successful apps are redirecting destructive financial behaviors, like buying lottery tickets, toward positive outcomes. One example is an app called Long Game, which uses an approach called "lottery savings."
"People actually really love the lottery," Lindsay Holden, co-founder and CEO of Long Game, told Big Think. "The lottery today is a $70-billion-dollar industry in the U.S., and the people that are buying lotto tickets are the people that least should be buying lotto tickets. And so how can we redirect that spend into something that's helping them in their lives?"
Long Game's answer is to encourage users to make automatic or one-time investments into a prize-linked savings account. As users make investments, they earn coins that can be used to play games, some of which offer cash prizes. But unlike the real lottery, the prize money comes from banks that are partnered with Long Game, meaning users can't lose their principal investment.
Blast is a savings app aimed at traditional gamers. The platform lets users connect a savings account to their video game accounts. Users then set performance goals in the video games, such as killing a certain number of enemies. Accomplishing these goals triggers a pre-selected investment into the savings accounts. In addition to earning interest, users can also win prize money by accomplishing certain missions or placing high on public leaderboards.
"Gamers tell us they feel better with the time they spend gaming when they know they are micro-saving or micro-earning in the background," Blast co-founder and CEO Walter Cruttenden said in a statement.
Young gamer playing a video game wearing headphones.sezer66 via Adobe Stock
Fortune City takes a different approach to gamified finance. The app encourages users to track their spending habits, which are represented by visually appealing graphs. As users log expenses, they're able to build buildings in their own virtual city. The expense categories match the types of buildings users can construct; for example, buying food lets users construct a restaurant. It's like "SimCity" meets certified public accountant.
The risks of gamification
Gamifying your finances might help you save money, but it doesn't come without risks. After all, receiving extrinsic rewards when we perform a behavior can affect our intrinsic motivation to repeat that behavior both positively and negatively. It's a phenomenon called the overjustification effect.
In addition, gamified finance apps can also be addictive and encourage risky financial behavior. Robinhood, for example, uses visually appealing performance metrics and lottery-like game elements to incentivize the trading of stocks and cryptocurrencies. But while investing in these assets might be a good financial decision for some people, Robinhood arguably encourages its users to be "players" in the difficult world of trading, not necessarily rational investors.
What's more, gamification doesn't seem to work for everyone.
"From social psychology and behavioural economics, we know that the most likely [result of] gamification [is that you] will motivate some people, will demotivate other people, and for a third group there'll be no effect at all," noted a 2017 study on gamification and mobile banking published in Internet Research.
But given that 14.1 million Americans are unbanked, and millions more struggle with financial literacy, it's reasonable to think that gamified finance apps could help many people work toward financial independence.
"One of the most interesting things we've found is that people want help when it comes to making difficult decisions," Zak told Big Think. "In my view, any app that helps you be a more effective saver is probably a good app. But I think we have to do a lot more work to really understand the underlying neuroscience of gamification. And so we need to continue to design games that teach you more about how to 'level up in life,' not just level up in the game."
