I recently watched a short TED Talk on the physiological effects of ambient sound, and how unaware we can be of these effects. One interesting tidbit is that bird song is supposedly very relaxing and helps people focus. The evolutionary story around that is that bird song is an aural cue that there are no predators around. Presumably, this is true for other animals than humans, so the effect might be traced long into our history.

In any case, I decided to try this for myself, and my subjective experience of the last few days is that it works. I feel more focused, more “in my body.” You can try it for yourself real quick with this Youtube playlist of birdsongs. I’m actually using high-quality recordings from Naturespace. These have a 3-dimensional quality to them, and are tuned to different headphones, but they cost a couple bucks. They also sell iPhone apps.

I recommend listening at low volume for 10-15 minutes to judge the effect for yourself.

I just made up an interview question:

Imagine you are hearing voices. Naturally, you find it quite disturbing to be having conversations with someone or something that no one else seems to be able to hear. Is someone beaming them into your mind from afar? Or are you actually going crazy? Assume that your voices want to convince you that they’re actually coming from within your own mind. Design an experiment that will allow you make a determination one way or another.

My answer in a few days. Add yours in the comments, wherever this post is being syndicated.

One of my earliest noodlings in Photoshop, circa 1996

Here’s another quick roundup of recent, interesting talks.

Saul Griffith: Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind

This is a short update on what Makani Power is up to. Some inspiring videos of their efforts to harness high-altitude wind power (the second most-plentiful renewable energy source, after solar.) It looks like they have the autonomous kite-flying control systems working; impressive!

P.W. Singer: Military robots and the future of war

“In this powerful talk, P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat.” Singer discusses the reality of automated warfare currently in play in the Middle East. There are many complicated, troubling implications of this shift in warfare. For example, remote killing distances our soldiers from the physical violence that they inflict. The violence is put at a remove, and the resulting recorded media loses its context. A lot of clips of drone strikes are online. Soldiers will often to refer to them as “war porn” and set them to music. On the other hand, the availability of this systematic video and data collection provides opportunities for public oversight.

Another point: automated warfare may lose for us the war of ideas that we are waging against insurgent groups. Here’s the contrast between the message intended and the perception on the ground:

Bush administration official: “It plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”

Lebanese news editor: “This is just another sign of the cold-hearted, cruel Israelis and Americans who are cowards because they send out machines to fight us. They don’t want to fight us like real men. They are afraid to fight. We just have to kill a few of their soldiers to defeat them.”

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

“Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.”

Ariely gives a quick summary of several studies that show clearly how the presentation of various options can affect the choices we make. There are clear implications on user interface design, here.

This old David Foster Wallace commencement speech has been making the rounds since his suicide last September. I finally got around to reading it, and it struck me immediately that the whole thing was about mindfulness, in the Buddhist sense:

Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what’s going on inside me. As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

I have no idea if DFW ever chose to describe this “control over how and what you think” as mindfulness, but it’s clear at least from this speech that he thought about it deeply and that it had profound, personal consequences for him. Here are the first and last paragraphs of his speech:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

…

None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

Unfortunately, one doesn’t get very far thinking about mindfulness. I know from my own stuttering, occasional meditation that noticing the water that is always around you requires constant practice. It’s why they call it a practice and not a philosophy. Using a little voice in your head as a reminder takes you a very short distance towards actually becoming mindful; what’s required is actual doing, gently, repeatedly.

I’ve never been depressed, so I can’t speak to whether or not mindfulness can serve those who carry that burden. However, DFW had some profound thoughts on the nature of the mind. I can’t help but wonder if he would still be with us if he’d had chance circumstances in his life that would have led him to mindfulness practice.

I’m partially color-blind. I’m not sure precisely how, but my current guess is that it’s a red-green hue discrimination deficiency commonly called Deuteranomaly. It affects 5%-6% of all men.

I was interested to see how I would do on this color test, which involves sorting four randomly-mixed bands of color into smooth gradients. Given a person’s mistakes, a histogram can be drawn, showing where along the spectrum one’s ability to discriminate between colors is weakest. Here are two of my results:

Clearly, I’m bad at distinguishing hues in the red-green range, but I was surprised to find that I’m absolutely terrible at distinguishing hues in the blue-red range, as well. My score actually puts me behind 99% of the population. I imagine that an expert could look at these histograms and pinpoint the specific color deficiency that I have; something to keep in mind in case I ever find one.

Despite this deficiency, every so often there are colors and contrasts I see that pry my brain open. The artist Yves Klein developed a special shade of ultramarine blue (actually, both a pigment and a special medium) in the late 1940’s called International Klein Blue. One of his paintings (“Blue Monochrome”) uses IKB, and it remains one of my favorites to this day:

Blue Monochrome

…
Something about the color just floods my retina. It’s vivid in a way that nothing else seems to be. Perhaps this is how people with normal color vision (I have slight red-green colorblindness) see everything?

Uploaded by Nargopolis on 5 Oct 07, 8.04AM PDT.

I have a macro photo of this painting that I use as a desktop background. It’s amazing to look at, even though monitors aren’t actually capable of reproducing the IKB faithfully.

So, I was excited to read today that IKB is actually available to the consumer. Samples are available for non-exorbitant amounts; I’m going to have get myself a small bottle.

NOTE: This color deficiency may have its benefits, as well. This 2005 study in University of Cambridge and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne lent some evidence that men with deuteranomaly have ranges of the spectrum where their hue discrimination is superior to that of normal (i.e. lesser) humans:

Simmons hypothesizes that because deuteranomaly is quite common in human populations, the gene responsible may have once provided an evolutionary benefit. For example, it may have helped them spot potential food items in complicated environments such as grass or foliage, he suggests.

This also gives some explanation for many anecdotal reports that partially color-”deficient” soldiers are much more able to see past camouflage than their normally-sighted squad mates.

I’ve been consuming TED talks at a fairly rapid pace for a year now, and they keep on coming. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been capturing brief notes on the ones that I’ve found interesting. Going forward, I’m going to post small batches here. This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe the internets will also find them useful.

Here are the first three (you can see all of them here):

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

I rolled my eyes a couple times as he was introducing his topic, but as the talk went on, most of my skepticism was addressed, and then I was totally absorbed. He seems to have found many instances where fractal math was consciously used in African culture for very practical engineering and cultural purposes. He has also found that this conscious use of fractals is not present in other non-state societies. He finishes his talk by mentioning how these cultural uses can actually be used in the US to show African-American students that their heritage includes a rich mathematical history, as well.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

A Quebecois molecular biologist-turned monk relates the basics of Buddhism, from a Westerner’s point of view. This talk is simple and straightforward, they way I like my explanations of Buddhism. There is a good balance here that represents my belief in mindfulness practice: part subjective experience, part science.

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

Author of the book Winning the Oil Endgame sees the path to an oil-import-free U.S. as a profitable, not a costly one. His ideas are comprehensive, including new materials for making cars lighter, “feebates” to change buying incentives per weight class of car (rather than between them), and an overall focus on efficiency. The latter one is interesting, as he makes those savings clear by pricing efficiency in terms of $/barrel of oil displaced. He is very glib with his free-market cheerleading, however, and explain very well why profit motives haven’t already pushed our industries to make these changes on their own. Some of his comments about the military wanting to defend America rather than oil pipelines in foreign countries are incredibly naive; it’s not our people on the ground who make policy, it’s the politicians who are financially bound to arms manufacturers.

Again, you can see all of the ted talk notes, here.

One should not love another for their faults, but for their virtues. One should not befriend another because the other needs a friend, but because the other, by virtue of his character, has something to offer. Just as with material objects, one should not devote time and effort and emotional investment into another person unless that person has some kind of value with which to repay. One should only trade value for value.

The mesolimbic system is activated both by monetary reward and donations. OFC-limbic networks, which play key roles in social attachment and aversion in several animal species, enable humans to link values to abstract social causes. Phylogenetically recent sectors of the anterior prefrontal cortex are further recruited by evaluation of protracted goals and social outcomes when decisions involve sacrifice of immediate material interests.

Greedy monkeys… your time has passed.

They call it Mental time keeping, I call it validation:

“Students in the experimental group participated in a 4 week intervention designed to improve their timing/rhythmicity … The intervention required, on average, 15 daily 50 minute sessions, The results from this non-academic intervention indicate the experimental group’s post-test scores on select measures of reading and mathematics were significantly higher than the non-treatment control group’s scores at the end of 4 weeks.”

Ate dinner tonight with an old friend and his new wife. The conversation wandered aimlessly and drolly for over an hour until suddenly, as I was telling him about some in retrospect less-memorable part of the neuroscience conference I had just finished attending, he sat up, seemingly jarred by some aspect of the talk I was describing. He stared past me and began intensely but detachedly, as though he were in a trance, relating his experience with an online novel, implicitly demanding by way of a good show that I read this novel as soon as humanly possible.

In short, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is about the discontinuities between altruistic intent and action, a story told while shitting all over modern philosophy of the mind. Asimov’s “Three Laws” of robotics take center stage as the code of an obsequious Hammurabi, which when followed to the letter can be undone in spirit by the complex nature of interactions among individual actors. The uncertainty we feel before executing our decisions doesn’t go away when the deed is done. In fact it cascades and combines with countless unknowable others, leaving the shape of things entirely indeterminate. This can be a very undesirable situation for an all-seeing computational god. The book’s conclusion leaves me a little wanting; without spoiling anything I think it places too much emphasis on our use of tools rather than hammering home the theme of unintended consequences. But all in all it’s a riveting, visceral story.

So, seven hours later, after some more dinner, two hours of trying to sleep and three and a half hours of reading the novel, here I am, recommending it to you. It can get pretty graphic at times, so don’t read it to your five year old or anything.

If you like it, send the author a few dollars. Supporting this model of media transaction is good for everyone.

An excerpt:

“Prime Intellect realized that humans are very much the same. We don’t have the Three Laws, but we are trapped by a different set of little feedback mechanisms. We eat to satisfy hunger, fuck to satisfy our sex drive, even breathe because too much carbon dioxide in our lungs triggers that reflex. Of course it feels obligated to help us satisfy those reflexes and drives as much as it can. But more than that, it defines us by those drives. It knows it is different from a human because it has different drives, but it considers that a difference in species, not a difference in genus or family.” “Now it knows a person is human because it is born in a human body — got the right DNA, the right level of neural complexity, uses language, and so on. But once Prime Intellect frees people from the necessity of living in that body, guess what? A lot of them decide not to. They change their bodies so that they bear no resemblance to the DNA template. Or become animals. Or they completely discorporate. “Worse, we vary widely in the way we use its helpful nature. Most people are glad to be rid of pain and death, but Death Jockeys seek out painful and lethal experiences. There are others who eat all the time, fuck all the time, indulge themselves wildly and get Prime Intellect to pick up the pieces so they can do it some more. Prime Intellect has to help them do this. Second Law. “So a human isn’t a body, and it isn’t a fixed set of responses. I think Prime Intellect uses an historical model: It has to start as a body, but then it becomes a mind. It grows out of the body, and takes on different forms, or no form. But it remains a feedback control mechanism. It has desires, it asks Prime Intellect to satisfy those desires, and it has more desires. From Prime Intellect’s perspective, that is what a human being is, an information structure that gives it stuff to do.”