I can see what you're thinking…

Holy S*%t (via Pinktentacle):

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

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ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”

The next step would be to go in the other direction – planting images in the brain – and then we’d pretty much have the foundation laid for the Matrix.

Japan, a country that can’t take care of it’s old people, is laying the groundwork for turning us all into batteries.

Thanks Japan.

Body Swapping Experiment

(hat tip Nicholas)

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This reminds me of a New Yorker article that my friend Jason told me about the other day.

The article tells the story of a woman who contracted HIV, then got shingles, and eventually developed an insatiable itch on her head:

She simply felt itchy, on the area of her scalp that was left numb from the shingles. Although she could sometimes distract herself from it—by watching television or talking with a friend—the itch did not fluctuate with her mood or level of stress. The only thing that came close to offering relief was to scratch.

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One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

Doctors, having tried all kinds of other stuff, decided to sever the remaining nerves to the itchy region on her head.

The itch went away for a while but eventually returned.

In the end, the itch was not a sensation rooted in her body. It was rooted in her brain.

The article goes on to discuss a new way of looking at how our brain relates to the body:

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

I’d argue that all of this is evidence that the mind and do not run in sequence, they run in parallel. The mind keeps it’s own representation of the body, separate from the actual nerves in our flesh.

A mental avatar of sorts.

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Just as the swedish study demonstrates how our bodily perceptions are very malleable, the story of this lady’s itch shows how the mind maintains a separate representation of the body which can sometimes get messed up, or possibly even hacked.

I was disappointed with AP’s treatment above.

The philosophical and metaphysical ramifications of this research are pretty rich and it’s lame that AP didn’t pick up those threads.

National Geographic’s treatment was a lot more in depth…

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Radiolab did a really good show called ‘Who am I‘ on some of these themes of the mind-body connection and what happens when wiring gets off.

In the show, they talk to U.C. San Diego Neurologist, V.S. Ramachandran who has done some really awesome research and treatment with people suffering pain in their phantom limbs.

I met my girlfriend online…

…so I thought it might be interesting to read a study about online dating and throw some academic critical analysis at that fateful day when i hit send on the email responding to her Craigslist post.

I’ve gotten my hands on this study published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication that looks at self presentation in ‘the online dating environment’.

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Researchers interviewed 36 volunteers about their online dating profiles on a site I’ve never heard of – Connect.com (which appears to have gone under twice over).

The best part of the study is the number of excerpts taken directly from interviews where people talk about their thought processes when setting up their profiles and interacting with strangers.

One girl intentionally avoided sexually explicit language:

I really analyzed the way I was going to present myself. I’m not one of these people who write all cutesy type things, but I wanted to be cute enough, smart enough, and not sexual at all, because I didn’t want to invite someone who thought I was going to bed with them as soons as I shook their hand. (PaliTOWW, Los Angeles Female)

One guy intentionally inserted sexually explicit language:

The reason I put the language in there is because I had some experiences where I got together with someone, we both really liked each other, and then it turned out that I was somebody who really liked sex and she was somebody that could take it or leave it. So I put that in there to sort of weed those people out. (imdannyboy, Los Angeles Male)

This dude didn’t want to sound desperate:

In the course of corresponding with others on the site I became aware of how I had to present myself. Also, I became quite aware that I had to be very brief…More often than not when I would write a long response, I wouldn’t get a response…I think it implied…that I was too desperate for conversation, that I was a hermit. (joet8, Los Angeles Male)

Here’s a lady that lost a bunch of weight (we can only hope she achieved this through proper nutrition and exercise):

I’ve lost 44 pounds since I’ve started online dating, and I mean, that’s one of the reasons I lost thet weight so I can thank online dating for that. Because the first guy that hit on me, I checked my profile and I had lied a little bit about the pounds, so I thought I had better start losing some weight so that it would be more honest. That was in December, and I’ve lost ever week since then. (MaryMoon, Los Angeles Female)

One participant exclaimed sarcastically “I’ve never known so many incredibly athletic women in my life”…

The dude that didn’t want to sound desperate above is quoted again as he learns the complexities of female body image:

There was one gal who said that she had an “average” body shape.… When I met her she was thin, and she said she was “average,” but I think she has a different concept of what “average” is. So I then widened my scope [in terms of search parameters] and would go off the photographs. What a woman thinks is an “average” body and what I think is an “average” body are two different things. (joet8, Los Angeles Male)

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The study goes on to make some interesting claims:

Although much of the public debate about online dating has centered on the medium’s inability to ensure participants’ truthful self-descriptions, our interview data suggest that the notion that people frequently, explicitly, and intentionally “lie” online is simplistic and inaccurate. Exploring the question of whether participants created a playful or fantastical identity online or were more open and honest, we found that the online dating participants we spoke with claimed that they attempted to present an accurate self-representation online, a finding echoed in our survey data. This study highlights the fact that creating an accurate online representation of self in this context is a complex and evolving process in which participants attempt to attract desirable partners while contending with constraints such as those posed by technological design and the limits of self-knowledge.

I do think they could have been more tactful in their prescriptions for online dating sites:

Online dating sites could adopt some of the design features used in e-commerce sites, such as testimonials, user rating systems, or social network visualizations…

And here they get kind of deep:

Online dating sites may need to reconsider the ways in which profiles are structured and the characteristics they include; as Fiore and Donath argue, “the features of a person that Match.com presents as salient to romance will begin to have some psychological and cultural influences if 40 million Americans view them every month” (2004, p. 1395). If we accept this claim, then it stands to reason that participants’ vision of self may be impacted by their online self-presentation, especially if these presentations are constrained.

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Monet and I still get looks of bewilderment when we tell people we met online. She likes to preemptively tell people that we met in a strip club to flank the inevitable how-you-met conversation (which usually works pretty well).

In any event, I think Craigslist is the way to go…you can keep the upfront communication short and sweet and use the site as the bulletin board it’s designed to be, avoiding the issues wrought by having to maintain a profile among a zillion profiles.

I once was chided by a girl I met on Match.com who called me on continuing to log into the site even after we had been on a date or two…

In any event, while I may not be able to literally hunt online yet or ever, searching for a significant other online worked for pretty well for me.

The Psychology of Voting

NY Times: voting has benefits beyond getting your candidate elected…

“It may be a form of identity construction for individuals,” Dr. Gailmard wrote in an e-mail message. “Or it could be a duty to do the right thing, or a social norm.”

Sounds postmodern. I buy it. Voting maintenances a narrative of individuality and informs our sense of who we are.

Casting a ballot clearly provides a value far higher than its political impact. The benefit may include side payments — say, the barbecues and camaraderie of a campaign, or the tiny possibility that a single vote may be decisive.

But recent research suggests that it has more to do with civic duty and the maintenance of moral self-image. In a series of experiments, researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley, have had study participants play a simple election game involving monetary rewards. A group of designated voters cast their vote for Choice A, an equal distribution of money among voters and nonvoters in the study; or B, a payout to be split only among the designated voters — a smaller group, so a higher amount. It cost money to vote, and participants could abstain at no cost.

The study authors, led by Sean Gailmard at Berkeley, called Choice A “ethical” and Choice B “selfish.” They found that ethical voting ran highest, at about 20 percent, when individual votes were least likely to affect the outcome. Selfish voting ran highest, also about 20 percent, when individuals’ choices were most likely to change the outcome.

This finding could explain why people might vote against a local tax increase but for a Congressional candidate who was likely to raise their income taxes: their vote carries far less value in a national race than in a local one.

This has got me thinking about voting for Obama.

If voting plays a role in identity construction, could Obama being on the ballot be helping us reconstruct our sense of who we are as individuals?

In the same way that this study showed that we are more likely to vote for people who look like us, I wonder if there is a pull effect on a symbolic level as well.

Could we be more likely to try and identify with people that we vote for – potentially moving us into new territory where we can construct our identities?

I feel like you could argue that this is an effect of Obama getting elected…he’s helping us to reconstruct our own identities as Americans, on an individual level.

Narrative and Memory

Children of Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, have the earliest memories of any culture studied:

New clues to why Māori adults tend to have the earliest childhood memories of any culture studied so far are being revealed by University of Otago research.

The study by Department of Psychology researchers found that Māori mothers appear to talk with their children in richer ways about significant events involving them, such as their birth.

This brings of questions of storytelling or narrative and memory formation.

It could be simple: exposure to powerful narrative – especially about your own birth – makes a lasting impact on the memories you bank.

Or it could expose what types of stories prove more memorable:

After categorising conversations for the level and type of detail mothers provided, they found that Māori mothers provided more references to time and emotions in their birth stories than European mothers, she says.

“We found that the richness of the style in which mothers related the birth stories strongly predicted how good children were at talking about more recent past events they had experienced.”

In the end, it confirms that from an extremely early age we respond to well-told stories.

Another reason to drop the baby talk.