IdeaFestival

Seeing Memories to Come

In the course of procedures to prepare epilepsy patients for surgery, medical science has for the first time mapped mental time travel, recording the firing of individual cells responsible for recall. The understanding of the responsible biology may eventually lead to help for sufferers of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

In this case epilepsy patients were asked to watch a series of brief video clips. Then:

After briefly distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to think about the clips for a minute and to report 'what comes to mind.' The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And when they recalled a specific one — say, a clip of Homer Simpson — the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come.

The discoveries are being reported today in the journal Science, according to the New York Times.

Wayne

SEED profiles "revolutionary minds" working between sciences

Covering young pioneers in emerging scientific fields such as immunocomputing, stochastic biology, genetic acculturation, neuroarchaeology and astronomical medicine, SEED Magazine is running a terrific piece on how science increasingly "hybridizes" multiple fields of study, how insight so often happens between fields of study.

Seeing the article about how the concept of information is under new scrutiny because of insights derived from the study of the immune system brought to mind recent experiments confirming that "information" travels faster than the previous limit - the speed of light - between entangled particles hundreds of kilometers apart. 

SEED is also, of course, home to one of my favorite science writers, Jonah Lehrer, who will be at the IdeaFestival this month.

Wayne

Quantum entanglement exceeds speed (of light) limit

3quarksdaily: Scientists in Switzerland recently conducted another in a series of tests related to entanglement, the little understood quantum property whereby two entangled objects - in this case, photons - immediately share the same informational state once one of the objects is measured. In 2007 experiments, this "spooky action" was confirmed at a distance of 89 miles.

The Swiss test wanted to rate the speed at which this communication might take place. It turns out to be quite a bit faster than the speed of light, which raises questions about the nature of quantum communication since ordinary communication cannot exceed the universal speed limit of 186,000 miles per second.

In the everyday world, objects can organize themselves in just a few ways. For example, two people can coordinate their actions by talking directly with each other, or they can both receive instructions from a third source.

In both these cases, the information is communicated at or below the speed of light, in keeping with Einstein’s axiom that nothing in the Universe can go faster. But quantum mechanics allows for a third way to coordinate information (emphasis added)....

Scientific American - "Entanglement clocks in at 10,000 times the speed of light?" - has more on the story:

Theoretical physicist Terence Rudolph of Imperial College London, author of a commentary on the new paper, says that putting bounds on faster-than-light entanglement [which the Swiss experiment seems to have done] is useful for researchers trying to imagine theories that might extend beyond quantum mechanics.
 
What might such a theory look like? Rudolph says we're probably stuck with instantaneous entanglement, which seems impossible to us because we're stuck in everyday space and time. 'We need to understand how quantum mechanics sees space and time,' he says. 'I think there's probably much deeper issues.

In physics history, Einstein used the fact that communication was fast, but not infinitely fast, to question and to ultimately revolutionize Newtonian physics, which implied that gravitational effects were instantaneous over vast distances. Einstein's re-conception led to his spectacularly successful and empirically confirmed theories of special and general relativity, which show how space and time is a thing, bent and twisted.

In the current example, "quantum communication" may hint at limits subtler than those imposed by space and time, and, perhaps, at revolutions to come.

Wayne

Wikipedia: quantum entanglement

IF Conversation - Jeffrey Schwartz, "The Mind and Brain"

In the latest IF Conversation, Jeffrey Schwartz, psychiatrist, neuroscientist and author of The Mind and the Brain, describes the primary difference between the two. Hint: you're soaking in it right now.

Wayne

Before the Big Bang?

In a blog post at the Foundational Questions Institute, William Orem is peeved by the idea that "nothingness" is an operable term when it comes to cosmological beginnings:

It’s at least worth noting that the word 'nothingness' itself contains a postulate that is by no means self-evident: namely, that '-ness' can meaningfully be attached to the term 'no-thing' in the way it might be attached to 'red' or 'happy.' When we agree to the attachment we are ceding the strange point that there is a state or condition of being in no state or condition, something very much like 'being not being.' Viewed this way, 'nothingness' appears to be a round square.

In a similar vein I would submit that the phrase 'emerged out of nothing' is grammatically sound but has no meaning, just as we can speak with perfect clarity but no content about a room full of married bachelors. The point is that the only quantum fluctuations with which we are familiar are embedded in spacetime, or are themselves expressions of spacetime, which we offhandedly refer to as 'nothingness' or 'emptiness' at our peril.

I'm certainly guilty of this, as astronomer Pamela Gay, a.k.a. "Star Stryder," has pointed out to me.

Thanks to some interesting new work that Orem points out, "what came before the Big Bang?" might someday be addressed. By clearing up a little semantic confusion, we are expanding not only what we know, but adding to what we know how to know.

I just picked up Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos, which I'm enjoying immensely.

Wayne

"Nudge:" Public policy and the science of choice

What public policy suggestions might flow from the developing field of behavioral economics, the science of choice?

The central idea in this Freakonomics post about the book "Nudge," is that freedom of choice can be preserved even while public policy influences the decisions people make, that economic behavior can be altered for the better with certain well designed "nudges."

While at first blush the idea would appear alarming - authors Richard Thaler, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law, use the off-putting term "libertarian paternalism" - it would be more alarming to believe that choices aren't already influenced by numerous social and commercial cues. You and I are not rational. Moreover, armed with a growing body of research psychologists, game theorists and philosophers tell us that we are not nearly as transparent to ourselves as we'd like to believe. We are unaware in many cases why we do what we do.

Choice in the free-to-make-all-possible-choices sense does not exist. The Freakonomics post linked above interviews the authors, who discuss at some length how choice can be preserved in that context.

Although its subject matter may not touch on behavioral economics, IF is hosting a discussion of freedom that is open to the public. It's a free event and passes (you will need one) will be available beginning July 15. I hope to see you there.

Wayne

Why little scientists love virtual games

The Prospect (UK) has published an article, "Rage Against the Machines," that discusses at some length the leadership issue mentioned in yesterday's post on leadership and virtual games.

I wanted to comment on the following passage, which brought to mind someone special in my life.

Since the publication [of Everything Bad is Good for You] in 2005, [Steven] Johnson's argument in favour of what he labels the "Sleeper curve"—the steadily increasing intellectual sophistication of modern popular culture—has become something of a shibboleth for futurologists. To some, such as Malcolm Gladwell writing in the New Yorker, the book was a delightful piece of "brain candy"; to others, like the Guardian's Steven Poole, it was "an example of a particular philistine current in computer-age thinking." Johnson's thesis is not that electronic games constitute a great, popular art to be set alongside the works of Dickens or Shakespeare, but that the mean level of mass culture has been demanding steadily more cognitive engagement from consumers over the last half century. He singles out video games as entertainments that captivate because they are so satisfying to the human brain's desire to learn.... Where [some] sees an identity-dismantling intoxication, Johnson finds 'a cocktail of reward and exploration' born of a desire to play that is active, highly personal, sociable and creative. Games, he points out, generate satisfaction via the complexity and integrity of their virtual worlds, not by their robotic predictability. Testing the nature and limits of such in-game 'physics' has more in common with the scientific method than with a futile addiction, while the complexity of the problems children encounter within games exceeds that of any of the puzzles of logic and reasoning they might find at school. [Emphasis and hyperlink supplied]

My wife and I have recently had a discussion several times in regard to our youngest son, who is soon to turn seven and spends considerable time playing video games. He has become quite skilled at making his way past the challenges and roadblocks that litter his virtual path.

How much is too much?

So far we've set fairly generous limits. But the answer, as suggested in the quote, about why he spends that time perched on his stool next to the living room family computer might be more straightforward. It's simply more rewarding than cracking the logic that is putatively meant to develop the little scientist in him as he sits in his chair in a formal class setting.

That's not good.

Wayne

Research: Online multiplayer gaming cultivates business leaders

Recent Harvard Business Review research says we shouldn't be surprised if future business leaders come from players of massively multiplayer online games, which reward speed and risk taking and confer leadership positions temporarily, which, I'm guessing, the authors would say is because such positions are earned in virtual worlds through merit and expire once better leaders come on the scene.

I'm guessing because, unfortunately, only the executive summary is available.

Wayne

Nicholas Carr: How is the 'Net programming us?

[T]he Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different.

If we create new tools and our tools in turn recreate us, what will be the lasting impact of the Internet? In The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr wonder if Google is making us stupid.

Reading.... is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Thanks to brain plasticity, adaptation to the Internet is happening at a biological level. Carr's question: How is the 'Net programming us?

Wayne

IF Conversation - Google's Craig Nevill-Manning

Google's engineering director in New York, Craig Nevill-Manning, is featured in the latest IF Conversation discussing the Internet titan's mission. As always, you may find all conversations on YouTube.

Wayne