Cosmic to Quantum

jtotheizzoe:

In an incredible intersection of digital connection and modern neuroscience, over 100,000 people recently took part in the largest test of intelligence and cognitive ability ever undertaken. The results might disprove that there’s any one measure, like IQ, that truly captures the broad range of mental talent seen in the world’s population.

Instead of “IQ” or any one component, it took at least three components to rate someone’s mental performance: Short-term memory, reasoning and verbal acuity.

To make things even more interesting, these three components all seem to map out to separate brain “circuits”. You may excel in one and not in the other two, or be balanced among all three. To put it another way, intelligent people are still intelligent, but now we can appreciate our place on that spectrum with greater depth and color. They even peeled back another layer, using their huge sample size to link performance to certain behaviors. Smokers did poorly on memory and verbal components, while computer gamers did well on memory and reasoning.

Anyone who’s looking knows that there’s variation in people’s cognitive abilities and individual “intelligences”, and trying to score that with one number doesn’t seem to do anyone much good. What sort of talents have we accidentally suppressed by failing to stamp people officially “intelligent”? Who have we discouraged by failing to include their intelligence in the “score”?

On the surface, it comes as no surprise. That in a world full of incredible individuals and unique combinations of passions, knowledge and curiosity… all of them powered by a tangled neural web of unparalleled cognitive complexity, that our “intelligence” would not be well quantified by a single measure. It is difficult to distill a rainbow and still appreciate its colors.

Check out more here, including interviews with the researchers.

neurosciencestuff:

May 11, 2012

Regenerating sensory hair cells, which produce electrical signals in response to vibrations within the inner ear, could form the basis for treating age- or trauma-related hearing loss. One way to do this could be with gene therapy that drives new sensory hair cells to grow.

…

did-you-kno:

Take a look at this image, You see embedded spirals of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spiralsare the same color.

The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding  colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the “blue” spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the “green” one. Here’s a zoom to make this more clear:

The orange stripes go through the “green” spiral but not the “blue” one. So without us even knowing it, our brains compare that spiral to the orange stripes, forcing it to think the spiral is green. The magenta stripes make the other part of the spiral look blue, even though they are exactly the same color.

Source

jtotheizzoe:

Could a brain injury unlock an unknown talent? A look at the phenomenon of the “acquired savant”:

There’s Orlando Serrell, who was struck in the head with a baseball as a 10-year-old and found he could remember the weather for each day following his accident. There’s Derek Amato, who woke up after hitting his head at the bottom of a pool and became a master pianist at 40, despite lacking any sort of musical training. There’s Alonzo Clemens, whose verbal and cognitive abilities stopped developing at the age of three due to a head injury but who can assemble incredibly detailed sculptures of animals in a matter of minutes. […]

It wasn’t until recently that scientists began figuring out what actually causes savant syndrome. In 2003, Bruce Miller, a professor of neurology at the University of California-San Francisco, discovered that some patients with a degenerative brain disease gained incredible artistic abilities as their condition worsened. The disease is called frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and it primarily affects the front-left portions of the brain.

FTD’s limited pattern of degeneration is a crucial detail; patients who suffer from Alzheimer’s, for example — a disease that affects the entire brain — don’t generally show savant-like abilities. Why might savant syndrome be linked to a very specific kind of brain damage? One theory has it that since FTD leaves the rest of the brain alone, the unaffected regions step in to compensate for the loss of tissue, leading to what Treffert calls “the three Rs”: recruitment, rewiring, and release.

“What happens is that there is injury,” said Treffert. “There is then recruitment of still-intact cortical tissue. There is rewiring [of brain signals] through that intact tissue, and then there is the release of dormant potential within that brain area.” In other words, savants may be unlocking parts of the brain the rest of us simply don’t have access to.

Or do we?

It strains belief, but completely ordinary people are in fact capable of gaining savant-like skills for short periods of time. Thanks to a piece of equipment called the Medtronic Mag Pro, one researcher has managed to temporarily replicate the kind of brain “damage” seen among FTD patients in healthy humans:

A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ”What would you like to draw?” he said merrily. ”A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.”

[…]

Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.

In fairness, a few drawings don’t prove very much. But Allan Snyder — whom, Treffert confirms, has worked with Bruce Miller, the FTD scholar, before — is developing new, more objective ways of recording the changes the Medtronic causes in his subjects.

“He calls it the ‘thinking cap,’ ” Treffert joked.

The prospect of willfully inducing creativity conjures images of an augmented future, one where people carry around portable brain machines and give themselves a zap when circumstances demand an extra burst of intelligence. Maybe some people will choose to be permanently buzzed, at the cost of some verbal ability.

It sounds like science fiction. But the reality may be even more outlandish. Now that scientists understand how savant syndrome occurs, new research is turning to the underlying origins of the special abilities themselves. Most of it remains a mystery — a loose collection of questions more than anything resembling answers. For example, how is it that somebody like Derek Amato, who’d never demonstrated any musical talent before hitting his head at the bottom of a pool, could suddenly handle jazz and classical pieces of astounding complexity without training? How is it that someone can suffer a stroke and wake up later only to discover that their English is tinged with a foreign accent?

Treffert thinks this could be the result of something called genetic memory.

“Some savants are very disabled,” said Treffert, “yet they know the rules of math, they know the rules of music, they know the rules of art. But they’ve never been taught that. Well, how can that get there? The only way it can get there is genetically.”

If Treffert’s hypothesis is true, it potentially upends a lot of what we know about genetics — not disproving it, necessarily, but vastly expanding the boundaries of what we think our DNA to be capable of. Could genes be more than a way to pass on physical traits? Could they, in fact, also be used to transmit knowledge from one generation to another? If so, what kind?

aminotes:

The Difference Between Online Knowledge and Truly Open Knowledge. In the era of the Internet facts are not bricks but networks

Image: Library of Congress

“The digitization of 21st-century media, Weinberger argues, leads not to the creation of a “global village” but rather to a new understanding of whatknowledge is, to a change in the basic epistemology governing the universe. And this McLuhanesque transformation, in turn, reveals the general truth of theHeideggarian vision. Knowledge qua knowledge, Weinberger claims, is increasingly enmeshed in webs of discourse: culture-dependent and theory-free.

The causal force lying behind this massive sea change is, of course, the internet. Google search results — “9,560,000 results for ‘Heidegger’ in .71 seconds”) — taunt you with the realization that there are still another 950,000-odd pages of results to get through before you reach the end. The existence of hyperlinks is enough to convince even the most stubborn positivist that there is always another side to the story. And on the web, fringe believers can always find each other and marinate in their own illusions. The “web world” is too big to ever know. There is always another link. In the era of the Internet, Weinberger argues, facts are not bricks. They are networks. (…)

The most important aspect of Heidegger’s thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links. (…)

If our starting point is that all knowledge is networked, and always has been, then we are in a far better point to start talking about what makes today’s epistemological infastructure different from the infrastrucure in 1983. But we are also in a position to ask: if all knowledge was networked knowledge, even in 1983, than how did we not behave as if it was so? How did humanity carry on? Why did civilization not collapse into a morass of post-modern chaos? Weinberger’s answer is, once again, McLuhanesque. It was the medium in which knowledge was contained that created the difference. Stable borders around knowledge were built by books.

I would posit a different answer: if knowledge has always been networked knowledge, than facts have never had stable containers. Most of the time, though, we more or less act as if they do. Within philosophical subfield known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) this “acting-as-if-stability-existed” is referred to as “black boxing.” One of the black boxes around knowledge might very well be the book. But black boxes can also include algorithms, census bureaus, libraries, laboratories, and news rooms. Black boxes emerge out of actually-existing knowledge networks, stabilize for a time, and unravel, and our goal as thinkers and scholars ought to be understanding how these nodes emerge and disappear. In other words, understanding changes to knowledge in this way leaves us far more sensitive to the operations of power than does the notoriously power-free perspective of Marshall McLuhan. (…)

Why don’t I care that the Google results page goes on towards infinity? If we avoid Marshall McLuhan’s easy answers to these complex questions, and retain the core of Heidegger’s brilliant insights while also adding a hefty dose of ontology to his largely immaterial philosophy, we might begin to understand the real operations of digital knowledge/power in a networked age.

Weinberger, however, does not care about power, and more or less admits this himself in a brilliant essay 2008 on the distinction between digital realists, utopians, and dystopians. Digital utopians, a group in which he includes himself, “point to the ways in which the Web has changed some of the basic assumptions about how we live together, removing old obstacles and enabling shiny new possibilities.” The realists, on the other hand, are rather dull: They argue that “the Web hasn’t had nearly as much effect as the utopians and dystopians proclaim. The Web carries with it certain possibilities and limitations, but (the realists say) not many more than other major communications medium.” Politically speaking, digital utopianism tantalizes us with the promise of what might be, and pushes us to do better. The political problem with the realist position, Weinberger argues, is that it “is … [a] decision that leans toward supporting the status quo because what-is is more knowable than what might be.”

The realist position, however, is not necessarily a position of quietude. Done well, digital realism can sensitize us to the fact that all networked knowledge systems eventually become brick walls, that these brick walls are maintained through technological, political, cultural, economic, and organizational forms of power. Our job, as thinkers and teachers, is not to stand back and claim that the all bricks have crumbled. Rather, our job is to understand how the wall gets built, and how we might try to build it differently.”

— C.W. Anderson, Ph.D, an assistant professor in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), researcher at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, The Difference Between Online Knowledge and Truly Open Knowledge, The Atlantic, Feb 3, 2012.

See also:

☞ David Weinberger, To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data, The Atlantic, Jan 3, 2012
☞ Rebecca J. Rosen, What the Internet Means for How We Think About the World, The Atlantic, Jan 5 2012.
☞ When science becomes civic: Connecting Engaged Universities and Learning Communities, University of California, Davis, September 11 - 12, 2001
☞ The Filter Bubble: Eli Pariser on What the Internet Is Hiding From You 
☞ A story about the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) (video)
☞ Vannevar Bush on the new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge (1945)

aminotes:

The time machine in our mind. The imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time

“Our ability to close our eyes and imagine the pleasures of Super Bowl Sunday or remember the excesses of New Year’s Eve is a fairly recent evolutionary development, and our talent  for doing this is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. We are a race of time travelers, unfettered by chronology and capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present. (…)

Why did evolution design our brains to go wandering in time? Perhaps it’s because an experience is a terrible thing to waste. Moving around in the world exposes organisms to danger, so as a rule they should have as few experiences as possible and learn as much from each as they can. (…)

Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once and then have it again and again at no additional charge, learning new lessons with each repetition. When we are busy having experiences—herding children, signing checks, battling traffic—the dark network is silent, but as soon as those experiences are over, the network is awakened, and we begin moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn—for free.

Animals learn by trial and error, and the smarter they are, the fewer trials they need. Traveling backward buys us many trials for the price of one, but traveling forward allows us to dispense with trials entirely. Just as pilots practice flying in flight simulators, the rest of us practice living in life simulators, and our ability to simulate future courses of action and preview their consequences enables us to learn from mistakes without making them. 

We don’t need to bake a liver cupcake to find out that it is a stunningly bad idea; simply imagining it is punishment enough. The same is true for insulting the boss and misplacing the children. We may not heed the warnings that prospection provides, but at least we aren’t surprised when we wake up with a hangover or when our waists and our inseams swap sizes. (…)

Perhaps the most startling fact about the dark network isn’t what it does but how often it does it. Neuroscientists refer to it as the brain’s default mode, which is to say that we spend more of our time away from the present than in it. People typically overestimate how often they are in the moment because they rarely take notice when they take leave. It is only when the environment demands our attention—a dog barks, a child cries, a telephone rings—that our mental time machines switch themselves off and deposit us with a bump in the here and now. We stay just long enough to take a message and then we slip off again to the land of Elsewhen, our dark networks awash in light.”

— Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Essay: The Brain: Time Travel in the Brain, TIME, Jan. 29, 2007. (Illustration for TIME by Jeffery Fischer).

Kurt Stocker: The time machine in our mind (2012)

                                          (Click image to open research paper in pdf)

Abstract:

“This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time—for the time machine in our mind. It is argued that language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it. Findings from a range of cognitive fields are theoretically unified and a recent proposal about spatialized mental time travel is elaborated on. The following novel distinctions are offered: external vs. internal viewing of time; “watching” time vs. projective “travel” through time; optional vs. obligatory mental time travel; mental time travel into anteriority or posteriority vs. mental time travel into the past or future; single mental time travel vs. nested dual mental time travel; mental time travel in episodic memory vs. mental time travel in semantic memory; and “seeing” vs. “sensing” mental imagery. Theoretical, empirical, and applied implications are discussed.”

“The theoretical strategy I adopt is to use language as an entree to a conceptual level that seems deeper than language itself (Pinker, 2007; Talmy, 2000). The logic of this strategy is in accordance with recent findings that many conceptualizations observed in language have also been found to exist in mental representations that are more basic than language itself. (…) 

It is proposed that this strategy helps to uncover an imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time—that this strategy helps us to uncover the time machine in our mind.

A central term used in this article is “the imagery structuring of time.” By this I refer to an invisible spatial scaffolding in our mental imagery across which temporal material can be splayed, the existence of which will be proposed in this article. At times it will be quite natural to assume that a space-to-time mapping in the sense of conceptual metaphor theory is involved in the structuring of this invisible scaffolding. (…)

It is thus for the present investigation more coherent to assume that mental time is basically constructed out of “spatialized” mental imagery—“spatialized” is another central term that I use in this article. I use it in the sense that it is neutral as to whether some of the imagery might be transferred via space-to-time mappings or whether some of the imagery might relate to space-to-time mappings only in an etymological sense. An example of temporal constructions that are readily characterized in terms of spatialized temporal imagery structuring are the conceptualizations underlying the use of before and after, conceptualizations that are often treated as having autonomous temporal status and as relating only etymologically to space.

The current investigation can refine this view somewhat, by postulating that spatialized temporal structures still play a very vital role in the imagery structuring underlying before and after. (…)

The theoretical strategy, to use linguistic expressions about time as an entree to conceptual structures about time that seem deeper than language itself, has been applied quite fruitfully, since it has allowed for the development of a rather comprehensive and precise conceptual account of the time machine in our mind. The theory is not an ad-hoc theory, since linguistic conceptualizations cannot be interpreted in a totally arbitrary way—for example language does not allow us to assume that a sentence such as I shopped at the store before I went home means that first the going home took place and then the shopping. In this respect the theory is to some degree already a data-guided theory, since linguistic expressions are data. However, the proposal of the theory that language has helped us to uncover a specific system of spatialized imagery structuring of time can only be evaluated by carrying out corresponding psychological (cognitive and neurocognitive) experiments and some ideas for such experiments have been presented. Since the time machine in our mind is a deeply fascinating apparatus, I am confident that theoretical and empirical investigations will continue to explore it.”

— Kurt Stocker, The time machine in our mind (pdf), Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2012

See also:

☞ T. Suddendorf, D. Rose Addis and M C. Corballis, Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind (pdf), The Royal Society, 2009.

Abstract: “Episodic memory, enabling conscious recollection of past episodes, can be distinguished from semantic memory, which stores enduring facts about the world. Episodic memory shares a core neural network with the simulation of future episodes, enabling mental time travel into both the past and the future. The notion that there might be something distinctly human about mental time travel has provoked ingenious attempts to demonstrate episodic memory or future simulation in nonhuman animals, but we argue that they have not yet established a capacity comparable to the human faculty. The evolution of the capacity to simulate possible future events, based on episodic memory, enhanced fitness by enabling action in preparation of different possible scenarios that increased present or future survival and reproduction chances. Human language may have evolved in the first instance for the sharing of past and planned future events, and, indeed, fictional ones, further enhancing fitness in social settings.”

☞ George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language(pdf), The Journal of Philosophy, Vol 77, 1980.
☞ Our sense of time is deeply entangled with memory
☞ Time tag on Lapidarium notes