IdeaFestival

Jonah Lehrer on the science of art: Better questions

Filmed shortly before his presentation at the 2008 IdeaFestival, Jonah Lehrer describes how through a process of experimentation and intense curiosity artists have anticipated discoveries about the mind later confirmed by science. Sure, were he alive today Proust wouldn't synthesize the next miracle drug, but his investigation and subsequent art musters something more vital to the human experience - the right question asked at the right time. Have a listen.

Wayne

"You really shouldn't have!"

How would you like to have been able to read minds this holiday season as your gifts were opened? How about, instead, having your mind read?

Useful of course as a diagnostic tool, a downsized MRI might be employed in the future to communicate with sufferers from ALS or others who are otherwise physically unable to describe what they are thinking. The technology has been used recently to connect certain brain states with thoughts, and now the technique is getting better, incorporating predictive software that researchers can use to "read" minds, or make predictions about subsequent meditations instead of simply correlating current brain states with mental states.

David Chalmers, perhaps the best known thinker about thinking, describes such efforts as one halting step toward understanding the deepest of human mysteries, conscious reflection.

Wayne

Screwing up well

Far too often unwelcome information is tossed aside in favor of the answer we're seeking. That's no surprise, really. But in an age of ubiquitous information, when failures are fast and cheap, it's the discordant data, outliers and paradoxes that can be more informative.

The experiment would then be carefully repeated. Sometimes, the weird blip would disappear, in which case the problem was solved. But the weirdness usually remained, an anomaly that wouldn’t go away.

This is when things get interesting. According to [University of Toronto Psychology Professor Kevin] Dunbar, even after scientists had generated their 'error' multiple times — it was a consistent inconsistency — they might fail to follow it up. 'Given the amount of unexpected data in science, it’s just not feasible to pursue everything.' Dunbar says. 'People have to pick and choose what’s interesting and what’s not, but they often choose badly.' And so the result was tossed aside, filed in a quickly forgotten notebook. The scientists had discovered a new fact, but they called it a failure.

The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Philosophy of Science

Specular reflection, Titan lakes!

Published last week in the photo journal kept by the robotic emissaries currently touring Eden, the specular reflection captured by Cassini in this image is further proof of liquid lakes on the surface of Titan, a moon with an atmosphere, an active hydrology and host, as well, to the diminutive lander Huygens. The moon has been referred to an organic chemical factory.

At the highly recommended blog Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster comments on what has quickly become an iconic image.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/DLR

Avatar's moon, Paradox of Choice and Flying Cars

Encountered this morning in the seasonally-adjusted, dwindling number of items in the IdeaFestival feed reader:

• Forget the $100 PC, the e-book reader might be a better learning tool in underdeveloped countries.
• Avatar has brought attention to the work of exoplanetologists pondering whether a habitable moon might orbit a gas giant such as our Jupiter.
• A neuroscientist interested in developmental intelligence in children has discovered that a $13 investment in the popular video games provided a big jump in certain kinds of intelligence, according to the MacArthur Foundation site "Spotlight on Digital Media." A more expensive gift this holiday season might be an $80,000 flying car
• Given the ubiquity of information and computing power, citizen science is becoming quite popular.
• Ethics also has a neurological signature, according to "generosity is natural for kind-hearted people." Next up, neuroscientists look in vain for the kind heart.
• When faced with a sizable number of choices, some people will simply choose not to choose. This Wharton article suggests, however, that more choices can lead to better choices. Not sure I'm buying that.
• Microeconomic rhyme might be one way to learn about price elasticity. And finally,
• Santa has one tricked-out sleigh.

Wayne

The literal meaning of metaphor: X = Y

Author and aphorist James Geary describes how metaphor may lead to unexpected decision making in this just released TED video.

The elliptical faculty of metaphor enables ranking and comparison; it is both richly informative and misleading, as Geary suggests. In contrast to an earlier understanding, recent research has also shown that we are born with some innate sense of number and language - we are not blank slates onto which all subsequent knowledge is imparted afresh, but equipped from the beginning with this ability to relate things, one to another.

If the subject of this interaction between mind and world interests you, check out Embracing the Wide Sky by prodigious savant and synesthete Daniel Tammett, who describes the sense-making power of language and number from his rather unusual and direct vantage. Highly recommended.

Wayne

"For sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn"

"For sale: Baby shoes, never worn." This iconic six-word story from Hemingway works its way into a MacArthur Foundation Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning post on how texting, tweeting might be incorporated into the classroom, which links, in turn, to a Wired article on Abilene Christian University's strategy of incorporating the iPhone into the classroom.

These are the specific educational problems Abilene is targeting with the iPhone. Instead of standing in front of a classroom and talking for an hour, Rankin instructs his students to use their iPhones to look up relevant information on the fly. Then, the students can discuss the information they’ve found, and Rankin leads the dialogue by helping assess which sources are accurate and useful.

Wayne

Dear Santa: Can I have a dog or pony, PLEASE?

What can we learn from letters to Santa?

The missives were scrawled or painstakingly handwritten on every type of paper and in every shade of ink. Many were decorated with drawings, stickers or glitter; some children gave Santa not only their addresses but their phone numbers, parents' cell phone numbers and their school pictures — just to make sure the Big Guy knew how to find them on Christmas.

And living with a menagerie of animals on a working Kentucky farm, the mysterious appeal that horses and ponies have for little boys and girls is something I completely get.

Wayne

Astronomers find Water-world

In recent years, astronomers have cataloged over 400 planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy, and, as techniques are continuously refined and new missions carried out, more are being discovered regularly. Targeting a rich area of the Milky Way, scientists, for example, are pouring over the data returned by the newly launched observatory Kepler, which is seeking transiting terrestrial worlds in the habitable zone of their parent star. Follow-up missions that might directly observe these planetary finds are being considered.  

Yesterday, however, news emerged that the ground based telescopes of the MEarth Project in Arizona had located a transiting water world orbiting a star very much like ours. Though the second so-called super-Earth, this one is interesting because subsequent observations in South America have demonstrated that this planet has an atmosphere - though perhaps not for long, given the proximity to its host. Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams provided this other bit of interesting news.

At a distance of 1.3 million miles, the planet orbits its star every 38 hours, with an estimated temperature a little over 200 degrees Celsius. Because GJ 1214b transits the star, astronomers are able to measure its radius, which turns out to be 2.7 times that of Earth. The density derived from this suggests a composition of about three-fourths water and other ices and one-fourth rock.

The atmospheric pressures and resulting lack of light reaching the planet's surface make life improbable, or at least unlike anything we might know, but it's another step along the path toward what could be truly extraordinary find in our lifetimes.

Wayne

The credit for the artist's impression of GJ 1214b goes to ESO/L. Calçada.

Richard Florida: Creativity, the fundamental business force

Describing how he arrived at the idea of a "creative class" and placing it in economic and historical context, Richard Florida talks about the fundamental economic force reshaping modern economies today - an ability to innovate, or to add creative value based, in part, on mental alacrity and a certain social IQ, but more importantly, in a larger willingness to view people as a potential to be maximized instead of costs to be minimized. Put another way, while it's certainly true that many agricultural or industrial activities can and will continue to provide jobs, today it's human creativity that is adding wealth.

A link to a text summary may be found here.
Wayne