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

New digital tribe discovered in the wired, wired west: us

In the wired age, retrospectives come early. Like David Weinberger's seminal 2004 suggestion that thanks to the Internet, "everything is miscellaneous," this Kansas State professor goes deep, deep, deep on mediated culture, providing an anthropological introduction to YouTube.

Weinberger suggested that there was a new order for ordering, that a "folksonomy" (as opposed to a formal, top down taxonomy) was emerging; Michael Wesch describes that new digital tribe.

Wayne

Latest from Neuroscience: Brain scans find F. Scott Fitzgerald

Responding in the transcript of a SEED salon featuring Tom Wolfe and the founder of The Law and Neuroscience Project, Michael Gazzaniga, to a question on the state of neuroscience, Wolfe recounts what another scientist had to say on the subject of what we really know about the human brain:

'The human brain is complex beyond anybody's imagining, let alone comprehension.' He said, 'We are not a few miles down a long road; we are a few inches down the long road.' Then he said, 'All the rest is literature."

Now I realize that a celebrated author like Wolfe would say that, but the remainder of the discussion is quite good, taking its cue from that remark as the two tackle literature, social standing, why, alone among our cultural achievements, speech should be celebrated, and the role of human narrative in defining and, in one amusing anecdote relayed by Gazzaniga, expanding ethical boundaries.

They also question whether or not an understanding of the relevant science, such as it is, renders the idea of free will obsolete. And in a welcome nod to the futility of that discussion, Gazzaniga gets to the heart of the matter by asking rhetorically, "free from what?"

Gazzaniga is the author of a brand new book on the science of the unique, as well as The Ethical Brain.

An edited video of the latest SEED paring is here.

Wayne

Language origins

If you enjoy reading about the origins of words and phrases, you might like Wordorigins.org. Understanding why we use phrases such as "bats in the belfry" or why we drink "cocktails" is an interesting pastime. Although some of the words and phrases are somewhat outdated, it does give an interesting linguistic history of most of the more common ones. Reading this can help one understand the development of word usage over time. 

What used to be unacceptable becomes common place when used by enough people.

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

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

"Life examined" confers life skills

Don't look now, but a certain subject is making a comeback in American universities, and one reason is that it offers an extremely important skill in an era characterized by the need to incorporate and make sense of a wide range of information.

David E.  Schrader, executive director of the American Philosophical Association, a professional organization with 11,000 members, said that in an era in which people change careers frequently, philosophy makes sense.  'It’s a major that helps them become quick learners and gives them strong skills in writing, analysis and critical thinking,' he said.

Chaucer told it like it was

As most of our literary attention is often given to the bard, William Shakespeare (and rightly so) I thought it only fitting to spend some time discussing one given the title "The father of English Poetry", Geoffrey Chaucer. If Chaucer and Shakespeare were side by side, Shakespeare would get the limo and Chaucer would be left to search for a cab.

Large Hadron Collider to write modern chapter in creation story

In the latest in a series of terrific TED presentations filmed and posted to YouTube, particle physicist Brian Cox explains why the Large Hadron Collider matters.

Twelve particles of matter stuck together by four forces of nature interact in ways that have resulted in the mind and the eyes you are now using to read this post. To complete the mathematical equations in the Standard Model, which, as Cox says, elegantly describes why the sky is blue and could, given enough computing power, suggest why DNA is shaped the way it is, particle physicists want to uncover the Higgs Boson, which the last remaining undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model.

He concludes the 17 minute video with a three minute description of what particle physics means to him. Pointing to the stage props around him, he memorably says that everything from Saturn V rockets, to great literature to DNA to science itself "are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years." What's more, this narrative, which has only come into focus in the past fifty years, leaves him feeling privileged to be a part of this moment in history.

But to answer the question with which he begun, the LHC matters, he says, because it will write the next chapter of the creation story. Enjoy.

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