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

Biology of stress: ouch

Scientific American: stress is bad for you. Speaking of Faith follows up on that idea:

After the discovery of antibiotics, a new assumption arose that treatment of infectious or inflammatory disease requires only the elimination of the foreign organism or agent that triggers the illness. In the rush to discover antibiotics and drugs that cure specific infections and diseases, the fact that the body's own responses can influence susceptibility to disease and its course was largely ignored by medical researchers....

"The opposite of play is not work, it's depression"

Making it her goal to make sure a game designer wins a Nobel Prize by 2032, Jane McGonigal is a well known designer herself, and is studying how virtual worlds and gaming can be used for serious play to solve, perhaps, a few real world problems. Games and their outcomes - play, focus, life-in-the-moment - are increasingly seen as important in their own right, methodologies and taxonomies are being explored, and their application to health care and business communications are being discussed.

Play is big.

McGonigal has a long list of game projects to her credit, most recently winning an award at SXSW for best alternative reality game for "World without Oil," and will be at the IdeaFestival in September. All-access pass are currently on sale.

My favorite quote from her web site is this one: "the opposite of play is not work, it's depression." It also goes to the question of what motivates little scientists.

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

Great minds she'd like to devour

I've heard of food for thought, but thought for food? Following each entry with a single hyper-linked demand - "learn!" - game designer Jane McGonigal suggests a list of people whose minds she'd like to devour. You may devour her mind at the IdeaFestival in September.

Wayne

Do we possess "a universal moral grammar?"

Seed pairs documentary filmmaker Errol Morris and evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser in the latest in a series of dialogs in which representatives of the left and right hemispheres address Big Questions.

At issue here: Do we possess a universal moral grammar?

By way of suggesting an answer, the two cover a wide range of territory - from the Milgram experiments to game theory to what science can truly say about the human condition - and the biologist Hauser argues that our bodies do indeed code for a universal set of ethics. Give it a read.

Wayne

"I, Gamer"

In a brief post at Terra Nova, Ren Reynolds wonders what the societal impact will be of a generation of game players that self-identify as "gamers." Without providing any answers - are there any now? - I just thought it was an interesting question, as was the title of his blog post.

Wayne

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

What are the digital literacies?

Initial results from one of the largest ethnographic studies of kids in their native, digital environment are now available. Could the cheap availability of media be creating a new generation of creatives?

Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.

The case studies discussed last Wednesday are part of a $50 million long-range MacArthur Foundation initiative, the digital media and learning project, to study whether - and how - digital media might be changing kids. Full results will be available later in the year.

More on the results of this study can be found on C|NET.

Wayne

I want to be foolish like this

Writing about the death of MIT computer science professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, Harvard crank Nicholas Carr and Discover columnist Jaron Lanier use Eliza's tale to assay against errors of the computational kind.

Let me explain.

In the 1960's Weizenbaum created a program called Eliza that would rephrase statements as questions and pose them to test subjects in what became an infamous test of computer-human interaction. Some individuals came to believe that the computer program was a human and lessons drawn from the episodes found their way into Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, which Carr references in his post, Eliza's World:

Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems — the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world — may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest. We must also learn that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally detached from authentic human experience, and particularly in those sciences that insist they can capture the whole man in their abstract skeletal frameworks [emphasis supplied].

It's easy now to poke fun at the subjects who came to believe that Eliza was human. But the larger lesson that I take - and the one suggested by Carr - is that reason and logic are only part of the human experience.

That is particularly true when it comes to thinking because it is belief - and theatrically, the suspension of disbelief - that makes us human. Belief combined with experience holds out possible worlds for our examination; it is on the superstructure of belief that we can absorb wisdom, practice empathy, strive for justice and extend mercy where none may be merited.

As cheaply amusing as it might be in hindsight, what Eliza demonstrated was not that we can foolishly ascribe feelings to objects, but that it is the suspension of the facts that makes foolishness - as well as soul-stirring grace - possible. The rules be damned.

An interactive Web-based version of Eliza is here.

Wayne