IdeaFestival

Seeing what you see

Can the epic problem of the mind, "the experience of our matter," the first-person experience, be modeled?

Jonah Lehrer writes about one attempt to do just that, the Blue Brain project.

Physics has a long history of breakthroughs fueled by conceptual ambition. Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein could conceptualize problems and answers by building abstract models using the accurate symbology of math, or drawing upon artful metaphors to visualize the unknowable. As Lehrer has pointed out elsewhere, one of Niels Bohr's central insights was that the world of electrons was essentially a Cubist world.

Information age: what happens to the "cognitive surplus?"

Making the rounds in support of his new book, Here Comes Everybody, digital media theorist Clay Shirky has been asking some provocative questions lately - for example, is there a cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped? 

Put another way - and I think this is a Shirky formulation from several years ago and a question for which I certainly have no answers - what happens to society when everything knowable can be known? He elaborates on these and other issues in the video above.

Wayne

Unwinding "Bolero"

What do the composer Maurice Ravel and Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist-turned-artist who died of a rare disease last year have in common? Both suffered from the same brain disorder and both produced memorable art at the age of 53 - Ravel composed "Bolero" and Dr. Adams painted it. New York Times:

'Bolero' alternates between two main melodic themes, repeating the pair eight times over 340 bars with increasing volume and layers of instruments.  At the same time, the score holds methodically to two simple, alternating staccato base lines.... [building] without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale.

Adams translated the music thusly:

Dr. Adams, who was also drawn to themes of repetition, painted one upright rectangular figure for each bar of 'Bolero.' The figures are arranged in an orderly manner like the music, countered by a zigzag winding scheme.... The transformation of sound to visual form is clear and structured. Height corresponds to volume, shape to note quality and color to pitch. The colors remain unified until the surprise key change in bar 326 that is marked with a run of orange and pink figures that herald the conclusion.

Because of the way one variant of the disease progresses, some individuals develop artistic talents as the brain literally reorganizes. For Adams that meant an area of the brain known to be responsible for the integration of perception such as color, sound, touch and space took on a larger role to compensate for the diminished capacity of the frontal cortex, resulting in an overwhelming creative urge and an ability to cross-scribe sense. Over a ten year period, Adams gave medicine unprecedented insight into that urge by undergoing periodic scans that documented the changes in her brain.

Her art may be found here and here.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Synesthesia

Business is getting real five different ways

While reading a variety of business related articles lately, it occurred to me that commerce is getting real in five different ways. To wit:

Describing the video streaming site Hulu, BusinessWeek had this to say about what characterizes Gen-Y design.

  Hulu's chief design theme, one that clearly appeals to this market, says David Wertheimer, executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California, is its pared-down aesthetic, which 'gets at the bare essence of the product.' Hulu's simple pages are unencumbered by advertising, while the user interface is uncomplicated and intuitive. "There are no blinking lights, no flashy buttons all over the place," says Wertheimer. 'It's a simple, high-quality streaming experience.'  

In contrast, other streaming television services, from ABC, CBS, as well as Fox and NBC's own branded sites, are advertising-heavy, often work poorly, and are generally more complicated to navigate.

One commenter in the story added that "being fake is worse than being uncool."

In other words, consumers are demanding that economic transactions must somehow be believable - whether buying a product's storyline or being directly involved in a good story, people increasingly want - my view - to have faith in their transactions. And from my experience as well, younger people are less likely to purchase from individuals and organizations that substitute blinking lights for solid content.

Elsewhere, Hugh MacLeod has posted the third installment of Hugh & the Rabbi. Gathered 'round a data connection, the group, which includes Hugh, Rabbi Pinny, Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls - freely use words like "infinite" and "love" and "purpose" and "playful" and "belief" to elaborate on the idea that fake is the unforgivable business sin.

And as I've discovered more recently, economics and economists are getting real too.

I recently finished a book, Pulse: the Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things, that has an interesting and lengthy chapter on the impossibility of divorcing macro economics and monetary policy from physical reality. The author, Robert Frenay, calls on economists to get outside their heads and into the nature of business. The basic idea is that the story of free enterprise is (partially, thus far) the successful story of adapting economic transactions to the ways of the world, to the reality all around us. How loosely joined activity can result in a common good is, of course, Adam Smith's central insight. And Frenay builds on this point by suggesting monetary policy be built around a clearer understanding of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics! It's as unlikely a comment on money as you'll find.

And finally, the understanding of people as rational economic beings is undergoing a revolution. Behavioral economists are ditching the idea that people make obviously rational decisions. As it turns out, you and I as consumers aren't terribly logical. But you already knew that, right?

Wayne

Polish priest, cosmologist wins Templeton Prize

The Templeton Prize has been awarded to Michael Heller, a Polish priest and cosmologist. Having fled with his family from the Nazis only to be exiled by Stalin, he has spent his adult life exploring some of humanity's biggest questions, such as "Does the universe require a cause?" and "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

My favorite answer to the latter might be that oblivion is unstable. I suspect that Heller's answers are better.

Wayne

Wikipedia: noncommutative geometry

Smile if you understand

Does sentient intelligence require a body? Speaking as someone who can become completely absorbed in the pleasure of hand-planing Walnut and who also loves the act of rational introspection, I think the answer is yes. It seems to me that the common element in such wildly different endeavors as childhood education, sport and theater is embodied cognition.

Does smiling actually help one understand better a sentence describing a pleasant event? Scientific American has more on an emerging idea.

Wayne

The story of intelligence is the story of compassion

Could the secret to human intelligence be our willingness to cooperate, to restrain the competitive instinct, to set aside societal inequality? Primatologist Brian Hare, recently named by Smithsonian Magazine as one of America's top young innovators, believes the answer may be yes. 

Unlike Chimpanzees, dogs are able to infer human intentions. A dog can, for example, understanding what its owner means when she points to food or to a favorite chew toy hidden from view across the room. And as the result of some really fascinating tests he's developed, Hare believes that dogs - and bonobos, another of his subjects - have developed this ability to read intentions through cooperative strategies that minimize - or at least temporarily set aside - social hierarchies in favor of a mutual goals. Chimpanzees, which are live in strict social orders, often fail, surprisingly, to cooperate to problem solve even when there is a clear benefit for all that can be obtained by working together.

That willingness - or unwillingness - to set aside differences may have enormous consequences.

Smithsonian:

Hare and others have speculated that social and emotional skills led to the evolution of intelligence in the great apes and humans. Since the 1970's, some scientists have claimed that animals are more likely to survive and reproduce if they are able to read social cues - to keep track of what other group members are up to and to deceive them if necessary. But Hare focuses on a slightly different type of social intelligence, the ability to work with others, regardless of whether they are strangers or rank lower in the social hierarchy.

There's a lesson here for us Hare says: 'It's true humans have bigger brains and language, and so forth. But we would not have evolved the kind of intelligence we have - the kind that allows us to use our brains together, to build things, to be mentally flexible - if we hadn't had a shift in temperament....' Controlling one's fears, paying attention to others, finding joy in working with others - that's the path to intelligence, he says, whether for dogs, apes or humans.

Bringing the story forward, Yale psychologist Daniel Goleman has pioneered this understanding of emotional intelligence in his work and publications, and discusses the idea in a popular TED video that may interest you. Have a great weekend,

Wayne

If Facebook sneezes does the network catch a cold?

Via the Norman Lear Center for Entertainment this interesting thought: Can you "catch" altruism or benevolence - or overindulgence or obesity - from a social network? The provocative question links to a piece at the Edge that describes a unique experiment by sociologist Nicholas A. Christakis. If it is true that the tools we create create change in us, then how will social networks and pervasive connectivity alter our behavior?

Wayne

The biggest questions are human questions

Covering the presentations at this year's TED, Ethan Zuckerman has wrapped up his marathon liveblogging effort with posts that drive home the point that the Big Questions that were theme of TED08 have all-too-human dimensions.

One post points out the lack of political diversity at TED and describes why people of all political persuasions need humility.

Using the famous Zimbardo experiments and, more recently, the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, another post describes the latent capacity of everyone to engage in behavior that under normal circumstances we wouldn't even contemplate. Why, indeed, do ordinary people do evil things?

And lastly, read Ethan's post about why John Francis didn't speak for 17 years. What did he - what can we - learn by not talking?

Wayne

"Charter for Compassion"

Since I mentioned TED, please have a look at Ethan Zuckerman's blog where he's live blogging what's happening. For variety, see Bruno Giussani's list of people blogging TED. 

Ethan's latest entry at the time of this writing was about author Kathleen Norris, a writer on faith and religion who makes a sharp and important distinction between the two. The former is about believing - which, suitably enough, is a deep subject for rationalists - the other about behaving. It's a mandate supported explicitly by my own faith tradition and, speaking as a nerd and introvert, one that I wrestle with. I struggle to do and not just think about doing.

Norris also makes known her TED wish - part of the newly announced TEDPrizes - to create a "charter for compassion" that might be circulated worldwide to emphasize that the Abrahamic faiths hold "doing unto others" in common.

The other winners, Dave Eggers and Neil Turok make similarly inspired wishes. Please check them out.

Wayne