The Cool Blue Blog

The Sims

To be self aware, one must be able to construct a model of the world. And not only that, but one must be able to construct a model of oneself and place it within the model of the world.

There are two things about this: One, the world we carry around with us is a model, not the real thing. Two, the self we carry around with us is a model, not the real thing.

To be self aware, memory is necessary. To be self aware, there must be sufficient processing prower in excess of what is necessary to survive and procreate to to extrapolate from known facts.

In short, abstract thought is a requirement for self-awareness.

The fact that we can construct a model of the world and exist within it has its good points and bad points. Among the good points is that we are very adapatable to new situations. A bad point is we tend to view new situations in terms of similar situations we have encountered in the past even when it is inappropriate.

In many cases people forget that the World they carry around with them is a model based on a mixture of experience, information extracted from the experience of others, misinformation, and imagination. And it is often true that people can not sort out these various things believing that the model of the world they have constructed is in fact what the world is.

We also tend to make the same mistake about ourselves; that the model we have constructed to represent ourselves is in fact who and what we are.

This is one reason why mystics assert that the world is an illusion.

Our senses do not perceive the world as it is. They interpret some of the electromagnetic spectrum as visible and some we detect on our skin. And much, without clever artifacts, we can not detect at all. With slightly different attenuation, we would be able to "see" radio waves, but we don't. In fact, without special devices we would not be able to detect radio waves, or infrared or X-rays at all.

Even the information we do detect with our senses is a fraction of what exists. Humans are notorious for not being able to see what is in front of them or hear what is around them. This is because there is so much information even with the limited senses we have that we have to ignore much of it in order to not be overwhelmed. And we do a lot of this ignoring sub-consciously. We pretty much decide what is important and ignore the rest.

In addition to this, most of us are not even living in the present; we spend most of our time reliving the past or imagining the future. Whether wishing we had done things differently or designing strategies for getting a mate or a promotion, rarely do we pay attention to what is actually happening in the infinitely narrow region of the Now.

We imagine. We extrapolate. We interpolate. We model. We simulate.

Without any technology necessary, we have for centuries been simulating life.

And without thinking, we have been simulating living.

Bird brain

Birdbrained? Consider it a compliment

Avian reputation as flighty is undeserved, scientists argue

Updated: 7:50 p.m. ET Jan. 31, 2005

WASHINGTON - Birds are not stupid and their brains are not primitive so it is about time the scientific world gave them full credit, experts said on Monday.

An international group of avian experts took on the slow-moving world of scientific nomenclature, calling for a new map of the avian brain that reflects its true structure.

The current system dates back 100 years and suggests a bird's brain is mostly basal ganglia, and that this area controls primitive brain function and instinctive behavior.

In fact neither is true -- the bird brain more closely resembles human brains and even so, the basal ganglia is not a primitive region, said Erich Jarvis of Duke University in North Carolina, who led the study.

"Stop calling people birdbrains meaning stupid. Take it as a compliment," Jarvis said.

The mysteries of hypnosis

 

Soon you will enter a deep trance...
(Filed: 08/09/2004)

Hypnosis: the history

The use of hypnotism to treat medical problems is increasing, but how it works still baffles scientists. Sally Appleton reports

Some doctors use it to treat insomnia, asthma and eczema. Others to calm migraines and irritable bowels, and to reduce anxiety. Yet, even though the use of hypnosis is on the increase across the medical profession, no one understands how it works. Some experts even believe the "trance" induced by hypnosis can happen to us all when we are daydreaming, engrossed in a bestseller or commuting to work.

Autonomous

Ecobot Eats Dead Flies for Fuel

By Lakshmi Sandhana

Robots walk, robots talk and, soon, robots will eat, too.

Researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol, are working on creating autonomous robots that power themselves using substances found in the environment. Professors Chris Melhuish and John Greenman plan to give robots their very own guts -- artificial digestive systems and the corresponding metabolisms that will allow robots to digest food.

Doing away with solar cells and batteries, their robot Ecobot II has a stomach consisting of eight microbial fuel cells, or MFCs, that contain bacteria harvested from sewage sludge. The microbes break down the food into sugars, converting biochemical energy into electricity that powers the robot. With bacteria breaking the food down and a type of robotic "respiration" in which air provides oxygen to the fuel cells to create useful energy, the whole system mimics real digestion as closely as possible.

Currently being fed a diet of dead flies and rotten apples, the robot isn't one for speed, though. Ecobot II can crawl along at a top speed of about 2 to 4 centimeters every 15 minutes, fueled by eight flies that are fed directly into the MFCs.

"People have built these things before but this is the first robot that actually uses unrefined food," said Melhuish.

Earlier efforts at creating robots that could ingest food included the Gastrobot developed by Stuart Wilkinson at the University of Florida. Dubbed Chew Chew, the train-like bot was hand-fed a diet of pure sugar cubes. An earlier version of Ecobot was also powered by sugar but the team developed the fly-eating version to simulate conditions found in nature.

"If you put unrefined sugars in there like a fly, then it has to do work on the fly to generate sugar," said Melhuish. "If you put sugar in there in the first place, then it doesn't have to do any work in doing the conversion, and with a special cathode in the fuel cell you can make it 90 times faster. But then you are giving it stuff which it wouldn't find out in the wild."

Right now, though, any robot powered by MFCs can work only in short spurts, powering up in the intervals. While MFCs, with their capacity to provide a continuous power supply, seem to be the best bet to create such bots, the technology is still in its infancy, and a single fuel cell is no match for a standard alkaline battery. The cells are only capable of giving out a very low trickle of power, which must be accumulated until it reaches a level high enough to power the robot.

"Until today, the maximum open circuit voltage of a microbial fuel cell is not more than 0.75 volts and that goes down in current production, which is not enough to power most of the electronics, including many handheld devices," said Swades K. Chaudhuri, a professor in the University of Massachusetts microbiology department. "However, with further discovery of a novel bug that can quickly oxidize organic material or by modifying existing bugs genetically there may be a way to enhance power output."

The colossal leap forward

Human brain took great leap forward, gene study finds

By Ronald Kotulak
Chicago Tribune
  Posted December 30 2004

The first study of genes that build and operate the brain shows that humans underwent a unique period of rapid brain expansion that endowed them with a special form of intelligence not shared by any other animal, according to University of Chicago researchers. The colossal leap forward grew the human brain to three or four times the size of that of a chimpanzee -- man's closest genetic relative -- when body sizes are equalized.

Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth

Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, research shows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior

By Roy F. Baumeister, Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger and Kathleen D. Vohs

People intuitively recognize the importance of self-esteem to their psychological health, so it isn't particularly remarkable that most of us try to protect and enhance it in ourselves whenever possible. What is remarkable is that attention to self-esteem has become a communal concern, at least for Americans, who see a favorable opinion of oneself as the central psychological source from which all manner of positive outcomes spring. The corollary, that low self-esteem lies at the root of individual and thus societal problems and dysfunctions, has sustained an ambitious social agenda for decades. Indeed, campaigns to raise people's sense of self-worth abound.

Consider what transpired in California in the late 1980s. Prodded by State Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, Governor George Deukmejian set up a task force on self-esteem and personal and social responsibility. Vasconcellos argued that raising self-esteem in young people would reduce crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, school underachievement and pollution. At one point, he even expressed the hope that these efforts would one day help balance the state budget, a prospect predicated on the observation that people with high self-regard earn more than others and thus pay more in taxes. Along with its other activities, the task force assembled a team of scholars to survey the relevant literature. The results appeared in a 1989 volume entitled The Social Importance of Self-Esteem, which stated that "many, if not most, of the major problems plaguing society have roots in the low self-esteem of many of the people who make up society." In reality, the report contained little to support that assertion.

Face time

How the brain recognises a face

                                                                                    

  The brain goes through three separate stages to decide if it recognises a face, scientists claim.

A team from University College London says the first assesses a face's physical aspects.

The second decides if it is known or unknown. If it is a recognisable face, the third part puts a name to it.

The researchers say their study, published in Nature Neuroscience, could help those people with dementia who lose their ability to recognise faces.

How a 50s film star became an 80s prime minister In pictures

The researchers say analysing how we respond to the stages of "morphing" a recognisable figure such as Margaret Thatcher into Marilyn Monroe gives clues as to how we process the facial features we see.

 

Their study found the brain tries to pin a single identity on a face, even if it looks like a mix of two people.

A face that was 60% Marilyn Monroe and 40% Margaret Thatcher will be identified as an older version of Marilyn Monroe.

But an image which is 40% Marilyn and 60% Maggie will be seen as the "sexier" side of Margaret Thatcher, say the researchers.

The wisdom of crowds

Common Sense

Surprising new research shows that crowds are often smarter than individuals

By Michael Shermer

In 2002 I served as the "phone a friend" for the popular television series Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. When my acquaintance was stumped by a question, however, he elected to "poll the audience" instead. His choice was wise not only because I did not know the answer but because the data show that the audience is right 91 percent of the time, compared with only 65 percent for "experts."

Although this difference may in part be because the audience is usually queried for easier questions, something deeper is at work here. For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals. This is contrary to what the 19th-century Scottish journalist Charles Mackay concluded in his 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a staple of skeptical literature: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." This has been the dogma ever since, supported by sociologists such as Gustave Le Bon, in his classic work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind: "In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated."

Au contraire, Monsieur Le Bon. There is now overwhelming evidence, artfully accumulated and articulated by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki in his enthralling 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday), that "the many are smarter than the few." In one experiment, participants were asked to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar. The group average was 871, only 2.5 percent off the actual figure of 850. Only one of the 56 subjects was closer. The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

 

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For a group to be smart, it should be autonomous, decentralized and diverse.

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Remember me

Chips Coming to a Brain Near You

By Lakshmi Sandhana

In this era of high-tech memory management, next in line to get that memory upgrade isn't your computer, it's you.

Professor Theodore W. Berger, director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California, is creating a silicon chip implant that mimics the hippocampus, an area of the brain known for creating memories. If successful, the artificial brain prosthesis could replace its biological counterpart, enabling people who suffer from memory disorders to regain the ability to store new memories.

And it's no longer a question of "if" but "when." The six teams involved in the multi-laboratory effort, including USC, the University of Kentucky and Wake Forest University, have been working together on different components of the neural prosthetic for nearly a decade. They will present the results of their efforts at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in San Diego, which begins Saturday.

Divine Designs

Discerning Divine Designs

Clerics, Scientists, Architects Connect Neural Stimulation and Faith

By Ken Kusmer
Associated Press
Saturday, July 31, 2004; Page B07

COLUMBUS, Ind.

Why is it that the arches and open spaces of a cathedral inspire faith, yet so do the comfort and familiarity of a small country chapel?

The connection between design and devotion is under study by a group of clerics, neuroscientists and architects who are trying to understand how the mind reacts to the sensations of entering a house of worship. The result, they hope, will be better designs that enhance the meeting of the sacred and earthly.

"This whole quest is more than learning that things do happen -- but why do they happen?" said Norman Koonce, chief executive of the American Institute of Architects and founder of the partnership.