Category Archives: Readings

“Perfect Circles: Why We Can Spot Them, But Can’t Draw Them” by Rachel Nuwer

Article featured in BrainDecoder

“(…) Most people can quickly pick out an imperfect circle, but the ability to draw a perfect one freehanded seems to elude all but the legendary Giotto and similarly accomplished masters. This is because the seemingly complimentary tasks of recognizing imperfection and then correcting it to produce perfection actually have little to do with each other—at least so far as our brains are concerned. While the visual cortex handles image processing involved in detecting off-kilter spheres, completely different parts of the brain responsible for coordination and fine muscle control, combined with the complexity of the arm’s structure, are to blame for our inability to draw a perfectly round sphere.Continue reading→

“The free-will scale” by Stephen Cave

published on aeon

“It is often thought that science has shown that there is no such thing as free will. If all things are bound by the same impersonal cosmic laws, then (the story goes) our paths are no freer than those of rocks tumbling down a hill. But this is wrong. (…) Instead of using an electron microscope or a brain-scanner, we should go to the zoo.

(…)  animals need to weigh different factors, explore available options, pursue new alternatives when old strategies don’t work. (…) We are complex organisms actively pursuing our interests in a changing environment.

And we are starting to understand the cognitive abilities that underpin this behavioural freedom. Like most evolved capacities, they are a matter of degree. Take, for example, the ability to delay gratification. (…) Experimenters measure this ability by testing how long an animal can resist a small treat in return for a larger reward after a delay. Chickens, for example, can do this for six seconds. (…) A chimpanzee, on the other hand, can wait for a cool two minutes – or even up to eight minutes in some experiments. (…)

 

(…)  The concept lies at the heart of how we see ourselves: assumptions about the extent to which we choose our own fate inform everything from social policy and criminal justice to our personal motivations and sense of life’s meaningfulness. (…)

One prevalent idea is that freedom requires a supernatural ability to transcend the laws of nature, because otherwise we would appear to be mere puppets of cause and effect. This makes free will into something mysterious, which would set us apart from the rest of creation. As this notion contradicts everything we know about the world, it is no surprise that ever more people are concluding that free will must be an illusion.Continue reading→

“Most New Psychology Findings Can’t Be Replicated. So Now What?” by SIMON OXENHAM

posted at big think

“The field of psychology has been shaken by a massive replication effort, which has found that out of 98 papers published in the top three psychology journals only 39 could be replicated.

(…) Whenever you hear the words “new study,” alarm bells should ring. It isn’t new studies that you should base your opinions on; it is old studies that have been replicated again and again, and the results reported in meta-analyses and systematic reviews.

(…) we have every indication to believe that new research is similarly difficult to replicate across many areas of science. For example, 30 percent of the most widely cited randomized controlled trials in the world’s highest-quality medical journals have later been found to be wrong or exaggerated and that number rises to five out of six for non-randomized trials — a number that is in fact worse than the rate found by the psychology reproducibility project.

(…) The solution is to take a skeptical approach to the world around us, to treat every new claim not as a problem solved, but as an open question.Continue reading→

“20 Years Later, the Tetris Effect Has Turned Life into One Big Video Game” by Megan Gannon

“Some people credit Neil Gaiman with first describing the Tetris effect in a 1987 poem “Virus in digital dreams,” but the expression is usually traced back to a 1994 Wired article (…)

Over the last two decades, the Tetris effect has worked its way into gaming vernacular, but considering how many people play video games, it may be surprising how little the phenomenon has been studied.

(…) Perhaps the most famous example is a 2000 study by Harvard psychiatrist Robert Stickgold. (…) As Stickgold told Australia’s ABC News in an interview, this made him think there must be something going on in the brain that is producing these intrusive images. (…)

He found that students who were made to play Tetris reported, quite consistently, that they saw Tetris pieces floating down in front of their eyes as they were going to sleep. Stickgold also included five amnesiacs in the experiment who could play Tetris just fine, but due to a specific brain damage, couldn’t later recall playing it. But they, too, said that they saw blocks floating or turning on their side—even though they couldn’t explain the origin of those shapes. One patient, for example, reported seeing “images that are turned on their side. I don’t know what they are from. I wish I could remember, but they are like blocks.”

Continue reading→

Your brain during orgasm – and how it relates to performance anxiety, by Max Plenke

Article by Max Plenke, featured in .Mic

“You are your own worst enemy in the bedroom. (…)  You can’t shut off a certain part of your brain. (…)

To understand performance anxiety, you first have to understand what orgasms do to the body — and why reaching them is so easy when we’re alone, but often harder with a partner.

When you orgasm, it takes near-total control of your brain and nervous system (…) from head to toe.

(…) activation in the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center of the brain, [and] the hypothalamus, which excretes oxytocin,(…) in the cerebellum, which is involved in muscle tension; we see activation in the insular and cingulate cortex, which are interesting because those same areas react to pain, so it may be inhibiting pain in its processes; we see activation in the amygdala, which increases heart rate and blood pressure and sweating. They’re all activated, and they’re all activated maximally.”Continue reading→

Apes’s visual illusions

Audrey E. Parrish,   Sarah F. Brosnan, and Michael J. Beran published a comparative investigation of the Delboeuf illusion in humans and a couple of monkeys species.   Theis research bring evidence of relative size perception illusion across those species.

Parrish and Beran’s previous research on how both humans and chimpanzees misperceive food amounts based on plate size target a similar topic.

Interestingly, in the case of the chimpanzees studies it was possible to observe not only a visual illusion.  Feeding and consumption behavior changed accordingly as well.  It is not out of the ballpark to characterize greed and accumulation in excess resulting in illusory perception.  Perhaps understanding better the foundation of such illusions help humans distancing our behaviour in a more conscious fashion.

3D qualitative spatial representation

Alex Burmester’s article on How do our brains reconstruct the visual world provides a short introduction of brain perception process.  Selective processes, visual attention, and inattentional blindness are key to understand how our mind build an schematic version of the environment as images in our minds.

Taking a more conceptual – and from an opposite side – tackle into the problem is the paper by Till Mossakowski and Reinhard Moratz on Relations Between Spatial Calculi
About Directions and Orientations.  They describe how relation algebras help us understand the transition from qualitative approaches of the environment to relative direction.

Linking the two is the effort to understand how we see.  Our brain combines each eye receives a limited, partially colourless signals at the retina into a seemingly continuous 3D experience.  Something that is very handy, to say the least.

This would not be possible if brains were not trained to continuously construct this environment.  There is much to learn from this process about our subjective stance towards objects and our consciousness.

“A movement in the making”

BY John Hagel, John Seely Brown & Duleesha Kulasooriya

” “Making”—the next generation of inventing and do-it-yourself—is creeping into everyday discourse, with the emerging maker movement referenced in connection with topics ranging from the rebirth of manufacturing to job skills development to reconnecting with our roots. As maker communities spring up around the globe, a plethora of physical and virtual platforms to serve them have emerged—from platforms that inspire and teach, to those that provide access to tools and mentorship, to those that connect individuals with financing and customers. (…) Continue reading→

“Whole Brain Emulation: Reverse Engineering a Mind” By Randal A. Koene

As fiancés know, setting a date is a double-edged sword.  Goals seem more tangible and apt to plan around, but unkept promises usually end with someone looking foolish.

Pushing the envelope and making plans about the future is what was intended at Among the high-profile thinkers speaking at Global Future 2045: Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution, Randal A. Koene delivered a speech on brain emulation:Continue reading→

“The hand-held’s tale” by Joyce E Chaplin

article published at aeon

“Whatever the finer social distinctions in pre-industrial societies, the main one divided those who worked with their hands from those who did not – ever. Anything hand-held made the bearer’s status clear. Egyptian rulers went into the afterlife clutching the flail and sceptre they had borne in real life. Sceptres and orbs would continue to represent earthly rule. Swords advertised military might. Books stood for the word of God and the ability to interpret it. Keys represented access to real or unearthly realms. These were things worth holding precisely because they symbolised freedom from quotidian effort, to which the vast majority were consigned. And yet the hand-held device is now the great equaliser. The squillionaire clutches the iPhone 6, but so might the underpaid worker who assembled it in semi-gulag conditions somewhere. The development of the hand-held’s marvellously tiny technology is interesting, of course. But our shared willingness to fill our hands openly and daily with these devices is the more important historical transformation.Continue reading→

What have you been telling yourself?

Nicholas Epley’s article on Nautilus brings more evidence on Why We Can’t Get Over Ourselves.  Among others: cognition biases, egocentrism,  and otehr selfish reasons.  This is not a core case of immanence debate, but telling of cultural landscape that seems to be a reversed cocktail-party problem: too many people talking about themselves and no one trying to listen.

 

And while you listen to yourself, take Shruti Ravindran’s on aeon about how ‘Hallucinated voices can be helpful life guides, muses of creativity, and powerful agents for healing the fractured self‘.

As a society, we may also benefit from improved listening.  Instead of cold forecasts, organic stories may be more effective.  As Adam Frank posted on Nautilus, we need to go beyond predicting the future and begin telling the future.

“What Desires Are Politically Important?” – Bertrand Russell

From Bertrand Russell’s Nobel prize acceptance lecture

“All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

(…)  man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite (…) : four in particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
Continue reading→

“Light dawns” by Sidney Perkowitz, on fundamental constants

Article published at aeon.

“We have now fixed the speed of light in a vacuum at exactly 299,792.458 kilometres per second.

Why this particular speed and not something else? Or, to put it another way, where does the speed of light come from?

(…) thanks to Maxwell and Einstein, we know that the speed of light is connected with a number of other (on the face of it, quite distinct) phenomena in surprising ways.Continue reading→

“The Man Who Wasn’t there” book review by Alun Anderson

Review of “The Man Who Wasn’t There: Exploring the science of the self” by Anil Ananthaswamy.

“For ordinary folk, a unified sense of self is taken for granted. We sit comfortably inside a body we feel is ours, seeing, hearing, touching and smelling. Gloomy or happy, our feelings plainly belong to us.(…) This self appears to us seamlessly and effortlessly as a whole.

The Man Who Wasn’t There could be described as a dedication to a different group – those whose unity of self has fragmented – and to the way they have helped us understand the self through their cooperation with scientists and philosophers, and their long hours in brain scanners.Continue reading→

More on how brain adapts to internet

In “How has the Internet reshaped human cognition?“, Kep-Kee Loh and Ryota Kanai move forward the debate on how cognitive processes and brain structures are adapting to our interaction with the instant access to information through internet.

They study information processing, memory consolidation, brain circuitry, multitasking, distractions, addictive behavior, and other promising lines of research.  To their credit conclusions are often that more research is required.  Having such broad view on the matter is welcome.  There are signs of some precipitated condemnation as ‘internet is bad for people’ we expect from resistance to change.

 

Nicholas Carr book ‘The Shallows” was part of growing criticism on how the internet was affecting negatively our brains.  One typical culprit was the excessive multitasking.  When studies showed heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability those critics felt vindicated.  Then as studies with shorter titles are cited more often by other scientists more people were certain: ‘even’ scientists were affected by the shallow effect.

How can we tap this shallow information pool to go deeper into our minds?

A.I. weakness: relevance

As a friend told me and we are getting used to, an AI algorithm can match the average American on real SAT questions, and more of it is bound to come.  Should we worry?  If I had to guess I would say sometime in the future we will see SAT as a short-lived bad way to assess anything really relevant about humans.

What about human dominance on creativity?  taking Brazilian composer Chico Science “Computers make art, artists make money” insight: SATs are an easy field to yield to computers – not sure if left to opt between money and creativity which would artists yield…

If we have an option at all.  Algo trading is making money already – and Margaret A. Boden makes the point on MIT review that computers aren’t close to being ready to supplant human artists:Continue reading→

“Telling Is Listening” review at brainpickings

Maria Popova on “Telling is Listening”, part of Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection of nonfiction writings published at “The wave in the mind : talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination”

“Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening.Continue reading→

“The Art of Not-Having-to-Ask” review by Maria Popova

Originally published as a postscript of Amanda Palmer’a The “Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help”

Below an excerpt – read full post at brain pickings.

“We are embodied spirits who need raw material, both physical and spiritual, to create. But we forget that we are also social beasts who need not slash through the bramble of those needs alone.

In Buddhism and other ancient Eastern traditions, there is a beautiful concept connoted by the Pali word dana (pronounced DAH-nah), often translated as the virtue of generosity. But at its heart is something far more expansive — a certain quality of open-handedness in dynamic dialogue with need and organically responsive to it. The practice ofdana has sustained the Buddhist tradition for two and a half millennia — monks give their teachings freely, and the lay people who benefit from them give back to the monks by making sure their sustenance needs are met.Continue reading→

“Future reading” by Craig Mod

Craig Mod’s tale of rise and fall of his enchantment over digital books.  A critical view on how current closed ebooks platforms controlled by Amazon and Apple contributes to stagnating digital books development.  Article from aeon magazine.

“From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. (…)

By 2009, it was impossible to ignore the Kindle. (…)

The Kindle was all of that and more. Neatly bundled up. I was in love.

(…) Granite, wood, wax, silk, paper, metal type, the Gutenberg press, Manutius’s octavo editions, Penguin paperbacks, desktop publishing software, digital type, on‑demand printing, .epub: the evolutionary path of ‘books’ has been punctuated by technological changes large and small. And so, too, with the Kindle.

(…) Containers matter. They shape stories and the experience of stories. Choose the right binding, cloth, trim size, texture of paper, margins and ink, and you will strengthen the bond between reader and text. Choose badly and the object becomes a wedge between reader and text.

(…) I was critical of Kindle typography and layouts from day one, but I assumed that these errors would be remedied quickly. My book notes felt locked away in Amazon’s ecosystem, but I assumed they would eventually produce better interfaces or export options for more rigorous readers.

(…)  But in the past two years, something unexpected happened: I lost the faith. Continue reading→