May 30, 2009 by sean.

At this week’s 2009 I/O conference, Google gave a demo of Google Wave, game-changing platform that could integrates the functionality of email, instant messaging, wikis, blogs and more with real-time collaborative editing, playback of each message’s evolution, real-time language translation and more. You have to see the demo for yourself to begin to understand how this works:

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May 7, 2009 by sean.

Thanks to all the people who follow this blog.

When I originally started this blog a couple years ago, it was mostly as an “outboard brain” to capture ideas, notes, and comments re: augmented cognition, collective intelligence and social software. Since then, it has grown to include other topics including psychology, mathematics, games and mobile computing.

I have noticed quite a bit of recent subscriptions and greatly appreciate your support and welcome your comments.

If you have interesting stories or new items I have missed, please feel free to forward them for review.

Thanks again!

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May 6, 2009 by sean.

Researchers at Princeton discover correlations between cognitive skills, economic preferences and strategic behavior [via Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA]:

Economic analysis has so far said little about how an individual’s cognitive skills (CS) are related to the individual’s economic preferences in different choice domains, such as risk taking or saving, and how preferences in different domains are related to each other. Using a sample of 1,000 trainee truckers we report three findings.

First, there is a strong and significant relationship between an individual’s CS and preferences. Individuals with better CS are more patient, in both short- and long-run. Better CS are also associated with a greater willingness to take calculated risks.

Second, CS predict social awareness and choices in a sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Subjects with better CS more accurately forecast others’ behavior and differentiate their behavior as a second mover more strongly depending on the first-mover’s choice.

Third, CS, and in particular, the ability to plan, strongly predict perseverance on the job in a setting with a substantial financial penalty for early exit.

Consistent with CS being a common factor in all of these preferences and behaviors, we find a strong pattern of correlation among them. These results, taken together with the theoretical explanation we offer for the relationships we find, suggest that higher CS systematically affect preferences and choices in ways that favor economic success.

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May 3, 2009 by sean.

Scifi legend William Gibson has “been on Twitter for a little while now. Under the nom-de-twit GreatDismal (no space). I had not much of an idea what Twitter was, when I first went there, so signed in under a flag of convenience. Still have no idea what it is, or where it’s going, but will hang on to GreatDismal for simplicity’s sake.” [via williamgibsonbooks].

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May 1, 2009 by sean.

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April 29, 2009 by sean.

Researchers at the University of Pannonia, Hungary demonstrate how sparrrows solve problems more quickly as a group than as individuals [via scienceblogs]:

Liker and Bokony’s sparrow experiments are the first to show that large animal groups outperform smaller ones at problem-solving tasks where they have to invent new techniques. House sparrows are a good choice for a study like this. They are very social birds that live in flocks of anywhere from a few individuals to a few hundred. They are opportunists that use their relatively large brains to find food in all sorts of new environments.

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April 21, 2009 by sean.

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April 21, 2009 by sean.

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April 20, 2009 by sean.

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April 15, 2009 by sean.

“That may be so, however, new scientific studies across several animal species, including humans, are challenging the notion that brain size alone is a measure of intelligence. Rather, scientists now argue, it is a brain’s underlying organization and molecular activity at its synapses (the communication junctions between neurons through which nerve impulses pass) that dictate intelligence.” [via Scientific American]

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April 14, 2009 by sean.

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April 13, 2009 by sean.

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April 1, 2009 by sean.

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March 31, 2009 by sean.

Some language may be offensive to some listeners. Either way, not a good idea to have the song in the second half of this video playing in the workplace.

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March 30, 2009 by sean.

New research from Brigham Young University on collaboration reveals that diverse groups are more effective problem solving even though they believe they aren’t [via Newswise]:

The experiment also revealed a fallacy in the assumptions we make about our own effectiveness in groups. The subjects in the experiment were members of different fraternities and sororities. In general, when the newcomer was from the same sorority or fraternity as the other team members, the group reported that it worked well together, but was less likely to correctly solve the problem.

In contrast, when the newcomer was a member of a rival sorority or fraternity, the opposite was true — these groups felt they worked together less effectively, yet they significantly outperformed socially homogenous groups.

“What’s really distinct about this research is that, from a self-reporting perspective, what people perceive to be beneficial turns out to be dead wrong, Liljenquist says. “The teams that felt they worked least effectively together were ironically the top performers!”

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March 18, 2009 by sean.

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March 17, 2009 by sean.

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March 17, 2009 by sean.

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March 12, 2009 by sean.

Might “God” be an evolutionary abstraction of the collective intelligence of all humanity [or at least one’s local “tribe”]?

Research at the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland suggests that human capacity for religion is based in lateral frontal lobe regions and other theory-of-mind areas, “the same recently evolved brain regions that divine the feelings and intentions of other people” [via New Scientist]:

“It’s not surprising that religious beliefs engage mainly the theory-of-mind areas, as they are about virtual beings who are treated as having essentially human mental traits, just as characters in a novel or play are,” comments Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford.

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March 4, 2009 by sean.

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February 22, 2009 by sean.

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February 19, 2009 by sean.

[via LA Times Blog]

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February 19, 2009 by sean.

“In a study published online today in Nature, researchers at Vanderbilt University report that from fMRI data alone, they could distinguish which of two images subjects were holding in their memory–even several seconds after the images were removed. The study also pinpointed, for the first time, where in the brain visual working memory is maintained.” [via Technology Review]

Posted in innovation, science, augmented cognition | No Comments »

February 18, 2009 by sean.

Could transparency of government data itself [see Recovery.gov] help boost the private Numerati [via Wired]?

[A]ccessible government information—particularly databases released in machine-readable formats, like RSS, XML, and KML—spawn new business and grease the wheels of the economy. “The data is the infrastructure,” in the words of Sean Gorman, the CEO of FortiusOne, a company that builds layered maps around open-source geographic information. For every spreadsheet squirreled away on a federal agency server, there are entrepreneurs like Gorman ready to turn a profit by reorganizing, parsing, and displaying it…

[O]bvious economic benefits, however, will come from innovations that pop up around freely available data itself. Robinson and three Princeton colleagues argue in a recent Yale Journal of Law and Technology article that the federal government should focus on making as much data available as RSS feeds and XML data dumps, in lieu of spending resources to display the data themselves. “Private actors,” they write, “are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.”

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February 18, 2009 by sean.

New research ties social isolation and brain fucntion [via Science Daily]:

Researchers found that the ventral striatum—a region of the brain associated with rewards—is much more activated in non-lonely people than in the lonely when they view pictures of people in pleasant settings. In contrast, the temporoparietal junction—a region associated with taking the perspective of another person—is much less activated among lonely than in the non-lonely when viewing pictures of people in unpleasant settings.

“Given their feelings of social isolation, lonely individuals may be left to find relative comfort in nonsocial rewards,” said John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Professor in Psychology at the University. He spoke at the briefing along with Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at the University.

The ventral striatum, which is critical to learning, is a key portion of the brain and is activated through primary rewards such as food and secondary rewards such as money. Social rewards and feelings of love also may activate the region.

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February 5, 2009 by sean.

One word: wow! [via wired]:

Pattie Maes of the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group demonstrated a wearable computing system that turns any surface into a display screen, becoming a kind of “sixth sense” for the user. The prototype involves an ordinary web cam and battery-powered 3M projector with an attached mirror that are all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The set-up, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface — walls, the body of another person or even your hand.

Maes showed a video of her student Pranav Mistry who she describes as the genius behind the project. Mistry wore the device on a lanyard around his neck, along with colored Magic Marker caps on four fingers, each one red, blue, green or yellow to allow the camera to distinguish the four fingers. The caps help the camera recognize his hand gestures with software that Mistry created. The gestures can be something as simple as using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which is saved to his mobile phone. When he gets back to an office, he projects the images onto a wall and begins to size them.

When he encounters someone at a party, the system calls up information about him and projects a cloud of words on the person’s body to help him remember the person or provide more information about him, such as his blog URL, the name of his company, his likes and interests. “This is a more controversial [feature],” Maes said over the audience’s laughter.

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February 4, 2009 by sean.

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February 4, 2009 by sean.

Interesting article on hypothetical relationship of social and biological energy patterns [via wired]:

The human race may be caught in a biological catch-22, in which sustainable reproduction rates can only be achieved by consuming more energy.

So hypothesizes Melanie Moses, a University of New Mexico computer scientist who wonders if human societies are bound by size-dependent rules of network efficiency seen elsewhere in the biological world.

If the implications of this seem bleak, take heart: people are born to break the rules.

Moses invokes the Metabolic Theory of Energy, which explains the relationship between mammalian size, lifespans and reproduction rates — the bigger a body, the longer it lives, with fewer offspring — as a function of cardiovascular networks. As the sum length of capillaries and arteries increases, nutrient flow efficiency drops. The less efficient an animal’s networks, the more difficult it becomes to acquire the energy needed for raising a child.

Compare the size-lifespan-reproduction curve to the relationship between human economic growth and reproduction rates, and the parallels are eerie.

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February 3, 2009 by sean.

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February 3, 2009 by sean.

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January 28, 2009 by sean.

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January 26, 2009 by sean.

Bringing everything to the cloud [via xxx]:

Google is to launch a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection, according to industry reports. But campaigners warn that it would give the online behemoth unprecedented control over individuals’ personal data.

The Google Drive, or “GDrive”, could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user’s personal files and operating system could be stored on Google’s own servers and accessed via the internet.

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January 25, 2009 by sean.

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January 25, 2009 by sean.

Researchers from Sweden and Denmark find that drinking coffee may reduce risk or Alzheimer’s and age-related dementia [via medheadlines.co]:

[P]articipants who drank between three and five cups of coffee a day were 65% less likely to develop dementia than those who drank less…

While not advocating someone start drinking coffee as a preventive measure, Dr. Miia Kivipelto, associate professor of neurology at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, suggests the following factors may be involved:

Previous studies have found drinking coffee decreases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, a disease that raises the risk of dementia

Animal studies have shown that caffeine reduces formation of amyloid plaques in the brain. These plaques are a distinguishing characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.

Coffee may be a bloodstream-protecting antioxidant that protects the vascular system enough to reduce the likelihood of dementia

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January 20, 2009 by sean.

New research on the relationship between social interaction and the brain [via msnbc.com]:

Socially active people who were not easily stressed had a 50 percent lower risk of developing dementia compared with men and women who were isolated and prone to distress, they reported in the journal Neurology.

“In the past, studies have shown that chronic distress can affect parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, possibly leading to dementia,” Hui-Xin Wang of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who led the study, said in a statement.

“But our findings suggest that having a calm and outgoing personality in combination with a socially active lifestyle may decrease the risk of developing dementia even further.”

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January 7, 2009 by sean.

Brain research on playing video games to overcome grief [via lifehacker]:

According to researchers at Oxford University, playing the popular, classic puzzle game Tetris after a traumatic experience could significantly reduce emotional scars. Apparently Tetris—which requires serious brain power on your part—blocks your brain from storing those bad memories. The catch: It needs to be played immediately following the traumatic event

…while urban life may dull our brains [via boston.com]:

Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

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December 28, 2008 by sean.

LiveScience.com explores brain prosthetics, artificial cells, regrown bone, wearbale kidneys and even new corpora cavernosa [you’ll have to look it up] in Top 10 Technologies for the Bionic Human.

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December 28, 2008 by sean.

Dr. Jerald Block writes in the latest issue of the American Journal Of Psychiatry that “people who send large numbers of text messages and emails may have a mental disorder” [via smh.com.au]:

“[I]nternet addiction” was a “common disorder” that deserved inclusion in a manual of mental disorders used by health professionals.

Those with the condition suffered withdrawal symptoms of anger and tension when a computer was inaccessible, and often lost their sense of time through excessive use… Other symptoms included feeling “the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use”, and having arguments, lying, social isolation and fatigue.”

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December 28, 2008 by sean.

Allen Institute for Brain Science encouraging open collaboration and personal philantropy re: brain research [via economist.com]:

Clearly the model of providing a freely accessible database is a successful one. In a sense, we have challenged other researchers to offer greater access to their findings. Will they take the challenge? My bet is that over the next 18 months we are going to see more open access and more collaboration.

In the next decade we will make great strides in uncovering the complex network of gene interactions that govern every major brain disease and will create effective therapies through traditional drug discovery or new methods for modifying gene activity. Just as the use of cardiac pacemakers or artificial knees is common today, a new generation of implantable pacemakers for the brain will be widely used to treat everything from depression to addiction and Parkinson’s disease.

Our increasing knowledge will shed light on how information is processed and stored in the human brain at a molecular level. Even now, scientists are already mimicking the brain’s information-processing capabilities to create a new generation of computer processes. We are going to get far better at this as our understanding of the brain improves.

Private philanthropy will continue to grow and help to accelerate scientific discovery. I believe we are nearing a tipping-point in brain research where the discoveries, treatments and cures will come more quickly than the questions. Private dollars, combined with broader adoption of open collaboration and data-sharing models, will help push us over the top. Success will follow.

Posted in science, neuroscience, collective intelligence, social networks | No Comments »

December 26, 2008 by sean.

Researchers at Northwestern University show that insufficient glucose may be tied to Alzheimers [via livescience.com]:

[W]hen the brain doesn’t get enough of the simple sugar called glucose — as might occur when cardiovascular disease restricts blood flow in arteries to the brain — a process is launched that ultimately produces the sticky clumps of protein that appear to be a cause of Alzheimer’s…

“This finding is significant because it suggests that improving blood flow to the brain might be an effective therapeutic approach to prevent or treat Alzheimer’s,” Vassar said.

The best ways to improve blood flow to the brain and thereby reduce the chances of getting Alzheimer’s is to reduce cholesterol intake, manage high blood pressure and exercise, especially entering mid-life.

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December 26, 2008 by sean.

New findings re: regeneration of brain tissue [via dailygalaxy.com]:

Contrary to popular belief, recent studies have found that there are probably ways to regenerate brain matter.

Animal studies conducted at the National Institute on Aging Gerontology Research Center and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for example, have shown that both calorie restriction and intermittent fasting along with vitamin and mineral intake, increase resistance to disease, extend lifespan, and stimulate production of neurons from stem cells.

In addition, fasting \ has been shown to enhance synaptic elasticity, possibly increasing the ability for successful re-wiring following brain injury. These benefits appear to result from a cellular stress response, similar in concept to the greater muscular regeneration that results from the stress of regular exercise.

Physical exercise may also have beneficial effects on neuron regeneration by stimulating regeneration of brain and muscle cells via activation of stress proteins and the production of growth factors. But again, additional research suggests that not all exercise is equal. Interestingly, some researchers found that exercise considered drudgery was not beneficial in neuronal regeneration, but physical activity that was engaged in purely for fun, even if equal time was spent and equal calories were burned, resulted in neuronal regeneration.

Exercise can also help reduce stress, but any stress-reducing activity, such as meditation and lifestyle changes, can help the brain. There is some evidence that chronic stress shrinks the parts of the brain involved in learning, memory, and mood. (It also delays wound healing, promotes atherosclerosis, and increases blood pressure.)

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December 23, 2008 by sean.

A team of international brain researchers report on “so-called blindsight, the native ability to sense things using the brain’s primitive, subcortical — and entirely subconscious — visual system” [via New York Times].

Scientists have previously reported cases of blindsight in people with partial damage to their visual lobes. The new report is the first to show it in a person whose visual lobes — one in each hemisphere, under the skull at the back of the head — were completely destroyed. The finding suggests that people with similar injuries may be able to recover some crude visual sense with practice…

Scientists have long known that the brain digests what comes through the eyes using two sets of circuits. Cells in the retina project not only to the visual cortex — the destroyed regions in this man — but also to subcortical areas, which in T. N. were intact. These include the superior colliculus, which is crucial in eye movements and may have other sensory functions; and, probably, circuits running through the amygdala, which registers emotion…

In time, and with practice, people with brain injuries may learn to lean more heavily on such subconscious or semiconscious systems, and perhaps even begin to construct some conscious vision from them.

“It’s not clear how sharp it would be,” Dr. Held said. “Probably a vague, low-resolution spatial sense. But it might allow them to move around more independently.”

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December 23, 2008 by sean.

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December 23, 2008 by sean.

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December 20, 2008 by sean.

Colorado Springs doctor finds a small foot and intestines inside the brain of a newborn [via denverchannel.com]:

Dr. Paul Grabb, a pediatric brain surgeon, said he was surprised when he discovered a small foot growing inside the brain of 3-day-old Sam Esquibel.

“The foot literally popped out of the brain,” Grabb told TheDenverChannel Wednesday.

The appendage threatened the newborn’s life.

When Grabb performed the life-saving surgery at Memorial Hospital for Children in Colorado Springs, he was in for another surprise: he also found what appeared to be parts of an intestine in the folds of the infant’s tiny brain, in addition to another developing foot, hand and thigh.

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December 19, 2008 by sean.

This process is the mechanism by which the brain regulates these networks from uncontrolled growth, however; as a consequence, the central nervous system is unable to reorganize itself in response to injury or disease.

New research suggests that re-generation of neurons may not weaken with age, rather the protien capain may hinder re-growth [via xxx]:

“This discovery is exciting because we now know that neurons haven’t lost their capacity to re-grow connections, but instead are under constant repression by the protein calpain,” says Ana Mingorance-Le Meur, postdoctoral fellow in [The University of British Columbia’s] Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences, who has led the investigation along with UBC Professor Timothy O’Connor. “If we can target therapies that block this mechanism, then neurons should be able to sprout new connections, therefore stimulating the brain’s ability to repair its wiring network.”

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December 18, 2008 by sean.

University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists building a “cognitive computer” [via physorg.com]:

The idea is to create a computer capable of sorting through multiple streams of changing data, to look for patterns and make logical decisions…

There’s another requirement: The finished cognitive computer should be as small as a the brain of a small mammal and use as little power as a 100-watt light bulb. It’s a major challenge. But it’s what our brains do every day…

(T)he ideal artificial brain will need to be plastic, meaning it is capable of changing as it learns from experience. The design will likely convey information using electrical impulses modeled on the spiking neurons found in mammal brains. And advances in nanotechnology should allow a small artificial brain to contain as many artificial neurons as a small mammal brain.

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December 18, 2008 by sean.

Interesting–yet polemical–article on scientists who advocate use of “cognitive-enhancing drugs” [via mercatornet]:

Nature conducted an informal survey earlier this year which found that about one in five scientists was using them for help in concentrating or memorising. Although most did not use stimulants, 80 percent defended the right to use them.

Dr Campbell and his colleagues calmly counter and dismiss the obvious objections to their zany proposal: that these drugs are not safe, that parents will force feed their children, that peer pressure will compel people to use them, that poor people can’t afford them and so on. Like all new technologies, cognitive enhancement can be used well or poorly. We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function, they explain.

Even though a couple of the authors have links to pharmaceutical companies, their ultimate goal is not making money by marketing a Viagra for the brain. Some of the enhancements they propose are not drugs at all, but other new technologies like brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips. Rather, it is to promote the notion of human enhancement, or as it is sometimes called, transhumanism. One of the article’s co-authors is a British transhumanist, John Harris, who seems to have been anointed as Nature’s house ideologue. A sign of the increasing credibility of this idea is that he was described recently by the London Times as one of the “top fifty people who influence the way we eat, exercise and think about ourselves” and one of the world’s top three bioethicists.

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December 17, 2008 by sean.

“(A) European endeavor called the Nepomuk Project will soon see the effort take new steps onto the PC in the form of a ‘semantic desktop‘…software that can spot meaningful connections between the files on a computer (by generating) semantic information by using ‘crawlers’ to go through a computer and annotate as many files as possible. These crawlers look through a user’s address book, for example, and search for files related to the people found in there. Nepomuk can then connect a file sent by a particular person with one related to the company that person works for.”

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December 14, 2008 by sean.

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