Pinky and the Brain Anatomy Song

Attention detector; new economy imminent.

So we can now detect when someone is paying attention. In the future there will be head-band like devices that people will wear that record when and where they’re paying attention, and the market in which attention-events are bought and sold will form the basis of the global economy.

the change I wish to see in the world

I would like to see the entire human population be able to ask about, discuss, and vote on things to do.

This implies several preconditions that the entire human population must have:

Adequate nutrition and freedom from toxins

A healty adult human of whole mind is the consequence of a host of material prerequisites. It comes as no surprise that the absence of these material needs during the development of the mind can substantially impair its function. These needs are remarkably simple to meet given modern technology. In what can only be considered a colossal failure of morality, some two billion people suffer from some form of malnourishment today.

• Humans that are deprived of nutrition, particularly at a young age, are prone to a constellation of neurological disorders that limit their ability to think and communicate. This sort of developmental handicapping cannot be reversed by current medicine or social practice, and therefore needs to end.
• Humans that are exposed to environmental toxins suffer from a variety of developmental maladies that are also permanent.

Heath care sufficient to be free of illnesses that impact their ability to communicate, cogitate, and choose.

While much health care extends individuals abilities, a basic level of lifetime preventative care is the most significant variable in illnesses’ tendency to cripple decisionmaking.

Freedom from abuse

Humans subject to slavery and other forms of abuse suffer permanent neurological consequences that make them particularly subject to unethical forms of suasion.

Access to communications technologies that allow freedom of association.

Humans expend a good deal of effort in limiting individual freedom of association. Assotiation is an important prerequisite to community participation. Communications technologies have already enhanced association in ways that are difficult to suppress through social action; bringing these technologies in a distributed fashion to all will help minimize the effects of sequestration and segmentation tactics.

Energetic resources

Individuals must be able to cause material changes in their environment in order to “do” anything. Lack of access to energy resources keeps many communities from enacting changes that have already been discussed and agreed upon.

Making things tick.

I have succumbed to the desire for a technological fix to my mental malaise and acquired a fossil abacus. I intend to start by running doing
and if that doesn’t work writing something myself.

The presumption is that if I just had some quantifiable data I could more readily understand my patterns of behaviour and be able to review the day’s attention expenditure from the dispassionate view of morning.

I’ve tried a Palm before; it never worked on account of me eventually leaving it somewhere and/or not using it because I have to take it out of a backpack. Gods willing, if I have the device strapped to my wrist I will manage to not leave it at home, a trick I still don’t manage with my cellphone.

It’s funny, how much I wish I could be a robot sometimes. My body betrays me, my mind betrays me, my spirit was sold to preternatural agents long ago; it makes me wish I could just slide into cool, deterministic waters and float to Destiny on the back of my Turing-machine minions.

Of course, it’s really more that I’m their bitch than vice versa. I’m basically installing a timer circuit to compensate for my own baroque experience of unfolding. With this spiffy watch at least I can let the pre-planning part of me beep at the ‘in-the-moment’ part of me and remind me that nobody ever changed the world with a pipedaydream.

Happiness: warm gun, or cognitive affect?

I just finished reading an excellent review of the current research on happiness, which led me to this interesting site called reflective happiness. They claim that for $10/mo, they can help you create a plan that will help innoculate you from the effects of stress.

The first month is free, and hey, it’s cheaper than the co-pay on a shrink. Might be worth trying, for those of us that would like to reduce the amount of stress and anxiety in our lives.

You’ve got fewer than 10 billion cycles left.

You can hold 7 +/- 2 variables, or “chunks” in working memory, and actively think about 4 of them at once.

There is little evidence that we can reliably construct a conscious thought in less than 1/6 second. This means you can have a maximum number of 6 context switches, or cycles, a second.

Using an average human lifespan of 77 years, and an average sleep-time of 8 hours a day, we get approximately 51 years of consciousness. There are 1.609 billion seconds in that time. Multiplying that by the maximum speed of a conscious response gives us 9.654 billion context switches in a human lifetime.

Now that I’m 29, I’ve burned off my spare change, with 3.624 billion context switches out the window. I have only 6.03 billion context switches left before I expire.

Really big numbers are hard to get a feel for, so let’s zoom in closer. One thirty second television commercial consumes 180 cycles.
Now let’s look out at the world. The sun (solar, wind, fossil fuels), and the moon/earth system (geothermal, tidal, mineral reduction), are responsible for all the energetic inputs into life. These inputs are effectively boundless; they could meet the energy needs for personal nutrition and to operate artifacts of an arbitrarily large number of human beings.

Humans did not evolve in a phenomenal universe quite so boundless. For most of history we have had extremely limited abilities to manipulate the world around us. That limitation is rapidly falling away. For most of the people reading this, including myself, scarcity itself is already scarce.

However, the one thing that remains scarce in an “abundance economy” is attention. Scarcity tends to push a market away from a reciprocal and towards a transactional economy; one prerequisite of such an economy is a unit of measure.

So now we’ve got an idea of what one would measure in an attention economy, the question that occurs to me is how would you have a reliable system that allowed for the exchange of such coinage?

I suspect I may know an answer to that question, but that will have to wait for a further installment.

You’ve got fewer than 10 billion cycles left.

You can hold 7 +/- 2 variables, or “chunks” in working memory, and actively think about 4 of them at once.

There is little evidence that we can reliably construct a conscious thought in less than 1/6 second. This means you can have a maximum number of 6 context switches, or cycles, a second.

Using an average human lifespan of 77 years, and an average sleep-time of 8 hours a day, we get approximately 51 years of consciousness. There are 1.609 billion seconds in that time. Multiplying that by the maximum speed of a conscious response gives us 9.654 billion context switches in a human lifetime.

Now that I’m 29, I’ve burned off my spare change, with 3.624 billion context switches out the window. I have only 6.03 billion context switches left before I expire.

Really big numbers are hard to get a feel for, so let’s zoom in closer. One thirty second television commercial consumes 180 cycles.
Now let’s look out at the world. The sun (solar, wind, fossil fuels), and the moon/earth system (geothermal, tidal, mineral reduction), are responsible for all the energetic inputs into life. These inputs are effectively boundless; they could meet the energy needs for personal nutrition and to operate artifacts of an arbitrarily large number of human beings.

Humans did not evolve in a phenomenal universe quite so boundless. For most of history we have had extremely limited abilities to manipulate the world around us. That limitation is rapidly falling away. For most of the people reading this, including myself, scarcity itself is already scarce.

However, the one thing that remains scarce in an “abundance economy” is attention. Scarcity tends to push a market away from a reciprocal and towards a transactional economy; one prerequisite of such an economy is a unit of measure.

So now we’ve got an idea of what one would measure in an attention economy, the question that occurs to me is how would you have a reliable system that allowed for the exchange of such coinage?

I suspect I may know an answer to that question, but that will have to wait for a further installment.

Last Post

Afore I come back, most likely. Here are two papers – my term paper for Writing, written to be accessable to the general public, and my term paper for Psychology, written to be accessable to my professor. The first is Media in Mind; the second is The Topology of Semantic Memory. Both have some rough edges, and are in the dreaded PDF format; more polished web-accessable versions will arrive when I’m back from the Danish wilds.

Hyperlexia

The extra amusing part about this article on hyperlexia is that the subject child has my name. Sounds awfully familiar, really.

Auditory Illusions

The auditory system is interesting, especially relative to vision. Unlike vision, where you can look at something again if you weren’t sure what it was, something once heard is forever gone. This means that the auditory system has to do a good deal of processing and have what researchers call “sensory memory” to retain what has just happened.

Here are three classic audio illusions you can explore; they have explanations towards the bottom of each page.

Demonstrations of Auditory Illusions, a site by some Japanese researchers, does an excellent job of going through a series of auditory illusions and explaining them. Even better, their site requires only that your browser can play .wav files. They use technical language to describe the experience of the sounds, which may be a bit confusing.

Another, more end-user oriented site is the auditory illusions section of the Illusion Forum.

Please explore these illusions, and feel free to ask me any questions you may have.