June 19, 2008
My Brain Is Changing (Put That Phone Away)
It made its rounds last week, but I only just got to Nick Carr's Atlantic article on Google, brains, books, reading, and thinking.
I liked it a lot, and I think his central premise -- that using the web so much, for so long, is changing the way our brains work -- is correct. As with every kind of change like that, it's a mixed bag: terrific in some ways, awful in others.
Generally of course I'm a fan of the web way of thinking, but as it has wormed its way into the walking, talking physical world -- mostly via mobile phones but also via laptop if you're in an office like I am -- it's started to freak me out.
William Gibson's got this line that goes something like: "Our descendants are going to think it was quaint that we distinguished at all between the virtual and the real." And, oh man, to sit around a table at a bar these days, with people phasing in and out to flip open phones and tap text messages to invisible companions -- it's here. For a certain kind of person in a certain kind of place, the virtual suffuses the real and sits alongside it.
And jeez, it's distracting!
We're in this odd phase now where technology far outpaces manners and mores, so I think part of the problem is just that nobody knows how to act. (I am no paragon here; I paw my phone for texts, tweets, emails, alerts, and who-even-knows-what as much as anybody else, and mine doesn't even have a swooshy touch-screen or anything.)
I'm sure we'll develop better instincts for this stuff. Or get used to it. Or both.
But either way, it's a pretty special thing for this to be happening so quickly (it's happening quickly, right?) and to be so aware of it: to see the texture of our inner and outer lives warp and change before our very eyes.
November 5, 2007
Problem Solving
Robin says,
It's been widely linked, but I just watched Malcolm Gladwell's recent talk about genius and it's super-interesting. Quote:
Modern problems require quantity over quality. You're better off with a large numbers of smart guys than a small number of geniuses.
Gladwell talks at length about Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who solved Fermat's Last Theorem. He didn't really do it alone, though, and he didn't do it quickly: In fact he literally sat down with the problem for like seven years straight.
I'm fairly enamored of this very specific, very determined identification of My Problem to Solve. It seems like Larry Lessig is doing something similar with the problem of corruption. It's like: "This is my new thing. I'm going to study up, apply myself, and figure it out. Oh by the way, I expect it to take ten years." Very cool.
October 29, 2007
Music and Movement
Robin says,
Some of the strongest bonds in our society are formed by people who march together in military units, as William McNeill, the historian, has pointed out. Members of orchestras and performing groups today likewise develop bonds. As Frank Zappa told me years ago, playing music with other people can be more intimate than any other activity. The turn-taking and accommodation involved call for great amounts of empathy and generosity.
Hmm. By this logic, the strongest bonds of all must be formed in... marching band!
September 16, 2007
The Memory Police
Matt says,
Whenever I think about our reflexive distrust of emerging technology, I remember Plato's Phaedrus, in which Socrates argues that writing is inferior to rhetoric. Socrates recounts a legend in which the Egyptian king Thamus refuses the gift of writing from the god Theuth, saying that writing will be deleterious to true wisdom. We will read, but never know, Thamus says. Writing may remind us, but it can't educate us, the way a speaker can. The irony in this passage, of course, is that Phaedrus is itself a written work.
There's a lot to be said about the curious intersection between technology and memory -- how technology seems to allow us to both retain more and forget more -- but Jenny Lyn Bader managed to leave out all the interesting parts in her NYT Week in Review essay ("Britney Spears? That's All She Rote") on how people can't remember anything anymore. And along the way, she manages to fit Britney's lip-synching, organ transplant recipients, and "The Vagina Monologues" into this tortured half-argument. it's kind of a train wreck. I really have nothing especially profound to say about this essay, it just seemed a blogworthy exemplar of the awful our-culture's-going-to-hell/wasn't-it-better-when form. And she cites Phaedrus too, with no nod to the irony therein.
August 12, 2007
Synchronicity
Robin says,
Jan Chipchase has a fun anecdote about our pattern-seeking brains. It involves dance clubs and movies playing backwards.
August 8, 2007
Pidgin to Creole
Robin says,
Huh -- I didn't know "pidgin" and "creole" were actually semi-technical linguistic terms. In reply to this question:
If we shipwrecked a boatload of babies on the Galapagos Islands -- assuming they had all the food, water, and shelter they needed to survive -- would they produce language in any form when they grew up?
We get, in part, this answer:
Nobody refers directly to the historical conversion of pidgin languages (protolanguages) into creoles (full languages). This change has happened many times in the past centuries, and Derek Bickerton established nicely that it was the children who converted Hawaiian pidgin into Hawaiian Creole. This feat was not accomplished in a nonlinguistic setting. The pidgin pre-existed the children, so these speakers were not like the lone infants on the Galapagos, nevertheless, the babbling of infants, the creation of the Nicaraguan sign language, and the conversion of Hawaiian English from pidgin to creole offers a pile of positive evidence that humans are born with more than a language-ready brain.
I think this means it's only a matter of time 'til we have to start compiling the Oxford Lolcats Dictionary.
Related: Check out the second paper here, about genetically-coded behaviors that still have to be sharpened by experience (e.g. nest-building in birds). I love the term "free-lunch learning."
July 12, 2007
This American Brain
Robin says,
WHOAH.
Aaron pointed me to Radio Lab, a public radio show about science.
Am excited to report that it is by far the coolest radio show I've ever heard -- in the truest sensory meaning of the word. I think it might be the best radio show in the world. Or in history.
Forgive me. Am caught up in the throes of enthusiasm and hyperbole. But seriously: It's great. Here's why:
- It's about science.
- It's incredibly aggressive with audio montage: dialogue overlaps and spills over, music and sound effects pile up in layers, outtakes and asides shimmer at the edges. The result is astonishing, and dense in the best possible way.
- It has a wonderful vocal style: They've completely rejected the voice-of-god format, as well as the voice-of-casual-god format, and even the voice-of-friendly-NPR-god format, and replaced it with a truly conversational, sometimes contentious tone. Very often, hosts will interrupt each other and say something like: "Wait, what? What does that even mean?"
- Lovely, lilting, IDM-y music.
- Only five episodes per season. This is an amount of media that I can actually process!
I've only listened to a few episodes but my favorite so far is Sleep. It includes: an explanation for the fact that you always sleep strangely on your first night in a new place, dolphins with parallel brains, the scourge of improperly folded proteins... and Tetris dreams.
So, I officially have a gigantic crush on this show -- both because it's good, interesting journalism, and because it's such a palpably new way of doing radio.
May 26, 2007
The Genius of Granularity
Robin says,
Our pal Chip has a great new column up over at Poynter.org. It's about the incredible reliability and productivity of "brief, daily sessions" vs. big, high-pressure, long-term goals. (Of course the two aren't mutually exclusive: long-term goals are just brief, daily sessions in disguise, per David Allen. But you've got to treat them like BDSes or you are screwed.)
May 25, 2007
Braiiins Indeed
Robin says,
Jason Kottke with an epic blog-summation: better living through self deception. It's all about the secret power of, er, just thinking. Keyed to an NYT article along similar lines. Credit to Point of Note for being my first source on that one.
May 21, 2007
Maybe the Horse Isn't So Dead After All
Robin says,
Ooh -- Cog Daily blogs a depressing finding:
Repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient's sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is.
Sounds totally plausible to me. There's this line later on: "The repetition effect observed in this research can help us to understand how our own impressions are influenced by what we perceive to be the reality of others."
I think about this phenomenon a lot in one particular context: It's amazing how fame and notoriety are so (and so increasingly?) local and subjective. Like, I think William Langewiesche is totally famous; you probably do not. I think The Shins are totally famous; if you are the blog-reading type you might agree, but it is not that widely-held a belief.
I understand that the realization that things are awfully subjective is not, like, a new thing, but come on! This is supposed to be fame! The whole point is to actually be famous!
April 30, 2007
Thinking and Feeling
Robin says,
The Boston Globe's Ideas section rocks out with a great piece on emotional reasoning -- with quite a bit of history of cognitive science thrown in:
Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at USC, has played a pivotal role in challenging the old assumptions and establishing emotions as an important scientific subject. When Damasio first published his results in the early 1990s, most cognitive scientists assumed that emotions interfered with rational thought. A person without any emotions should be a better thinker, since their cortical computer could process information without any distractions.But Damasio sought out patients who had suffered brain injuries that prevented them from perceiving their own feelings, and put this idea to the test. The lives of these patients quickly fell apart, he found, because they could not make effective decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. These results suggest that proper thinking requires feeling. Pure reason is a disease.
Somewhat similarly, I've heard claims that our embodiment -- the fact that we have fingers and toes and torsos and a defined, physical 'self' -- is crucial to our intelligence, and that the whole notion of an ephemeral intelligence (like, some Google A.I.) is untenable because of that. Hmm.
April 27, 2007
Look at Me
Robin says,
Ooh, cool research summary over in Cognitive Daily: persuasion, eye contact, differences between men and women, and virtual worlds. Awesome. The specific finding is really interesting; it's worth a peek.
(The brain category on Snarkmarket has been too quiet... trying to rectify.)
March 15, 2007
The Artist's Eye
Robin says,
From Cognitive Daily:
These two pictures represent the eye motions of two viewers as they scan a work of art with the goal of remembering it later. One of them is a trained artist, and the other is a trained psychologist. Can you tell which is which?
March 13, 2007
Don't Think of a Viral Video
Robin says,
They can quantitatively predict media virality now. Crap. It involves hooking sensors up to your brain. Crap crap crap.
January 1, 2007
Optimism
Matt says,
John Brockman's got his crew of deep thinkers he commissions with answering humankind's big questions, I've got mine. So how 'bout it, folks? What are you optimistic about? Why?
April 19, 2006
To Be Continued, NOVA-Style
A bunch of brain-related stuff to chew on this morning:
First, the 3 Quarks Daily digest of Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence. Now, Matt linked to this in his Five Words links (new feature!) on Monday but it's worth another shout-out, and not just because it's such good info. The piece also takes the unexpected form of a non-narrative cliffhanger!
There isn't any story, really; it's just abstract explanation. But at the end, author Abbas Raza sets up a four-point bullet list, starts cranking through them... and then doesn't finish the last one. He's just suddenly all like "Oops, out of time, see you in three weeks." What??!
This is Dan Brown-caliber suspense. For nerds.
Second, the blog Creating Passionate Users (they can't all be named Snarkmarket) has a long post about brain stuff, including two items of particular interest:
- Mirror neurons. CPU explains: "It's what these neurons do that's amazing--they activate in the same way when you're watching someone else do something as they do when you're doing it yourself! This mirroring process/capability is thought to be behind our ability to empathize, but you can imagine the role these neurons have played in keeping us alive as a species. We learn from watching others." The crazy thing, though, is that we do it unconsciously. That means you mirror whether you like it or not.
- Emotional contagion. Turns out we really are deeply affected by the moods and attitudes -- not just the words and actions -- of the people we're around. Choose carefully!
All right. I am going to go watch Battlestar Galactica DVDs until the next part of that 3 Quarks Daily piece gets posted.
April 11, 2006
High-Stakes Life
Robin says,
You know those moments when you suddenly realize you have made a mistake that is not just annoying but in fact irrevocable and costly? You've missed a flight, maybe, or lost your wallet. It's a very distinct feeling: Cold. Clenching. Tires screech in the distance.
Well, now brain scientists say something distinct is happening in the physical brain, too. A specific part of the brain called the rACC lights up when errors are costly, not just annoying -- unless you have OCD, in which case the rACC always lights up, regardless of how serious the error is!
I love mental exercises that help you empathize with unfamiliar (and often unreachable) mental states. Mark Haddon's book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time does a great job of it with autism. And maybe this experiment is a window into OCD: Imagine that every possible error, no matter how small, felt like it would be costly. Hmm.
In other brain news: Not only does a pretty face earn you preferential treatment -- it does so instantly. Blink indeed.
February 16, 2006
One Day Soon, Every Hormone Will Have Its Own Blog
Robin says,
Now this is niche: Susan Kuchinskas writes a blog entirely about oxytocin. (That's the so-called "hormone of love.")
(For the record, this is not a snark-out: I thoroughly approve of super-niche blogs, especially ones about brain chemistry.)
June 29, 2005
Rememory
Matt says,
From JKottke, scientists posit that the reason we can't remember our early youth is because we don't have the language skills to encode events into memory.
March 13, 2005
American Analog Set
Robin says,
Adam Cohen on the new analogy-free SAT:
Obviously, every American should be able to write, and write well. But if forced to choose between a citizenry that can produce a good 25-minute writing sample or spot a bad analogy, we would be better off with a nation of analogists.
But then again... analogies are like soups.
February 20, 2005
A savant speaks
Robin says,
In The Guardian, an autistic savant named Daniel Tammet describes how his mind works with really amazing specificity. Fascinating. Go read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time," too, for it is also fascinating and about autistic savants, and has the additional virtue of being a fun murder mystery.
February 13, 2005
'Shivering and Laughing and Glowing in the Dark'
Robin says,
Warren Ellis, one of the most distinctly modern writers around (check out his comic book "Transmetropolitan" for a great taste) explains where his ideas come from. I will tease you with this:
... suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.
From his blog, but originally posted to his reliably-weird Bad Signal e-mail list.
December 30, 2004
Mind Hacks: The Snarkmarket Review CONTEST!
Brains: They are as amazing in their limitations as in their capabilities.
Yes, a brain can recognize a human face -- and its mood -- with a speed and accuracy to make Google weep.
And yet:
(P.S. Both central dots are the same size.)
Mental misdirection and optical illusions are fun; they're also really useful tools.
In the foreword to the book Mind Hacks -- which O'Reilly sent to Snarkmarket for FREEEEE suckas -- Stephen Johnson writes:
These hacks amaze because they reveal the brain's hidden logic; they shed light on the cheats and shortcuts and latent assumptions our brains make about the world. Most of the time, these mechanisms are invisible to us--or so ubiquitous we no longer notice their existence. A brain hack is a way of pulling back the curtain of consciousness to glimpse -- however fleetingly -- the machinery on the other side.
"The machinery on the other side."
We might be the first generation to be totally down with that idea. The soul, the oversoul, the trinity of the id/ego/superego, the Incredible Homunculus... forget it. We don't have to settle for a theory that just sounds sensible, or makes us feel good, or harmonizes with some broke-ass theology. Thanks to new tools, we can actually investigate.
That's, er, not to say we've got everything figured out. No way. Brain science -- and Mind Hacks -- is more questions than answers.
There's a Mind Hacks blog if you are sufficiently intrigued.
AND NOW: Actually, O'Reilly sent El Snark two copies of the book. This may have been a clerical error... or it may have been their way of saying, "Have a contest!!"
Clearly we will choose door #2.
I’ll send a pristine copy of Mind Hacks to the person who comments with the best research finding and/or anecdote from the intersection of brains and romance. Deadline is Friday, January 7, at midnight PST. It can be about "your friend" if you want.
October 9, 2004
The Matrix! Vision! Reality! FERRETS!
Recently, a University of Rochester scientist sat a bunch of ferrets down in front of a TV and had them watch "The Matrix."
That could be the whole post right there, but I got more!
It's really interesting: He discovered that their visual cortexes worked like crazy even in the total absence of visual stimulus. (He observed this as the ferrets were watching Keanu Reeves emote. Wait, no, they were in a dark room.)
Here's the implication:
"This means that in adults, there is a tremendous amount of real-world processing going on--80 percent--when there is nothing to process," says Weliky. "We think that if you've got your eyes closed, your visual processing is pretty much at zero, and that when you open them, you're running at 100 percent. This suggests that with your eyes closed, your visual processing is already running at 80 percent, and that opening your eyes only adds the last 20 percent. The big question here is what is the brain doing when it's idling, because it's obviously doing something important."
Now, it's well-established that what we see is not just raw visual stimulus. When my eyes register a blob of brown light, my brain quickly recognizes that blob as a ferret, based on previous experience*. The two inputs merge in my field of vision.
*And believe me... I've got an eye for ferrets.
That's why optical illusions work: They screw with the relationship between image and idea, putting our eyes at odds with our brains.
But I don't think anyone suspected that the "idea" part of vision might account for eighty percent of what we see.
But then, I also don't think anyone suspected that small woodland creatures would identify so strongly with Neo's quest to discover the true nature of reality.
August 4, 2004
It's Raining Brains
Coming soon from the people that brought you "Google Hacks" and many others:
Oh yes.
At first I was afraid this was going to actually be, like, ways to mess with your brain. (I feel like that subject has been well-documented elsewhere.) Instead it sounds to be more of a user's guide:
I'm talking about minute-by-minute stuff: This is why you scratch your face when somebody else does. This is what will grab your attention in the corner of your eye, and this is what won't. Why the status icons in the corner of your desktop should be black and white and not in colour. That's what Brain Hacks is about, letting you see how all that works, from a standing start.
We, the nerdy public, have been treated to many good brain books in recent years.
Steven Pinker's excellent "How the Mind Works" was one of the best books I read in college, and Steven Berlin Johnson's "Mind Wide Open," which I kinda stalled out on in the middle of the second chapter, still looks really good -- he uses his own brain as a lens to explore and explain modern neuro- and cognitive science.
Malcolm Gladwell is coming out with a brain book, too, though his has a different angle. I actually heard about it back in November 2002. Here's a re-enactment:
Setting: a large house in Cambridge, Mass., full of journalists.Robin: (sidles up) Hey, Malcolm. Nice speech.
Malcolm: (with huge afro) Thanks.
R: So, whatcha working on now?
M: Book on intuition.
R: Cool.
End scene.
Now Jason Kottke has the deets from Amazon.com:
Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus.
Apparently Gladwell "leaps boldly from example to example" as well.
I think all these books are actually very important insofar as they all seem to be based on actual science and not just neat-sounding theories.
As Matt Webb, a co-author of the new "Brain Hacks" book, explains, there really is all this new knowledge -- generated only in the last few years -- that has yet to be absorbed by the public, even the smart book-readin' Web-surfin' public. We really do have access to way, way more legitimate information about our minds than Kant could ever have dreamed of -- now we just have to learn it.
So, "Brain Hacks" looks fun. "Blink," too.
I'm sure there will a "Your Brain for Dummies" before long.
March 31, 2004
Eudaemonia
What's a happy life?
It can be three things, psychologist Martin Seligman says.
There's the pleasant life: the life full of positive emotions. That's the life buoyed by sunshine and smiles and, perhaps, Prozac.
There's also the meaningful life: the life connected to something greater than itself. That's the life devoted to an insitution, a religion, a family, a looong-term project.
And then there's this one:
... [E]udaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about [the new-ish psychological theory of flow], and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music.
I've been watching these nature documentaries lately and feeling vaguely jealous of all the creatures of the sea. Pardon the tautology, but they behave so naturally. Even fleeing from, you know, ravenous leopard seals, they seem somehow light and free.
And I don't want to get all anthropomorphic, but that's how flow feels. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (or Mihaly C., as I call him), the guy who wrote the book on flow, describes it like this:
The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.
I love that.
Seligman's essay isn't just about eudaemonia; he also talks about a new trend in modern psychology: a push to consider ways to increase happiness, not just ameliorate psychological suffering. It's really interesting, so go print it out and read it tonight.
... Read more ....February 8, 2004
Faking It
Robin says,
I totally just got got 19 out of 20 correct on this "Spot The Fake Smile" quiz over at BBCi.
I attribute this in part to my own proficiency at fake smiles.
That, and I am a genius.
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