Defining the Self
- The fascinating books, Phantoms in the Brain (if you haven't read it, do) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, really illustrate how much of our selves is a construction of our brain, and how even recognising your mother (or rather, associating another physical human with the mental representation you have of your mother) is a construct of the brain, and one that can be disrupted. Even in the absence of serious medical conditions - self is constructed, and dependent, on brain formation - and many medical conditions illustrate how very defining parts of what we call our selves are constructs in a reasonably modular brain system.
- Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, presents some awesome meta study results of twins, separated twins, siblings and adopted siblings, demonstrating how much of a person's personality (his "openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, antagonism-agreeableness, and neuroticism") is heritable. A not-insubstantial part of your personality is right there in your genes. Parents like to think they play a substantial part in the defining of a child's self. Their role, in a normal upbringing, is not that defining.
- You've probably heard of parasites that change brain behaviour: the lancet fluke that induces ants to climb up stalks of grass so as to more easily get eaten by a cow, end up in faeces, bore through a snail and back into an ant. Or toxoplasmosis, which makes infected mice and rats less afraid of cat urine, and more likely to end up as a meal, and back in a cat. It turns out that toxoplasmosis can also affect the behaviour of humans. Drugs obviously do the same thing - but the notion of that reckless adrenaline-junky simply having some parasitic infection, feels a little more fascinating.
- Mirror neurons are mind boggling, and are currently being examined as a basis of empathy, and a theory of mind. Which leads one to think of psychopaths, which may be seen as a mental disorder in which empathy is absent, which makes one think about neuroscience and justice - for if someone is mentally afflicted in such a way, are they "responsible" for their behaviour? Which leads to a great lot of thought about ethics and morality, and how many different cultures share many moral foundations instinctively (moral psychology is awesome). Mirror neurons, as part of our brain make-up, appear to go a long way to defining us and our empathy to others.
Games, Design, User Experience and Getting People to Do Stuff
- Progression - the more I do, the more progress I make. Isn't it great to make progress! Forward momentum. I must be doing something right. I'm sure this is tugging at a lot of my internal psychology.
- A finite, achievable goal - the best kinds of goals. Look, right there, all I have to do is X, Y and Z and I'll complete it. The goal posts aren't vague. They're concrete, and I know what I have to do and how far I have to move to get there.
- Reward. Well, I'm sure all of the above are rewards, but imagine the reward (and I have to, not having completed mine) of reaching the goal. Accomplishment. Aaahh.
- Do a good deed/kindness/help (not sure what to call this) - I can help Jill by suggesting something. "She's not there yet, poor thing. Here, Jill, don't you know Carl?"
Edge 313: Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously
27. Returning to our fundamental riddle: if this is the information age, what do our children know that our parents didn't? The answer is "now." They know about now.28. Internet culture is a culture of nowness. The Internet tells you what your friends are doing and the world news now, the state of the shops and markets and weather now, public opinion, trends and fashions now. The Internet connects each of us to countless sites right now — to many different places at one moment in time.
29. Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike.
30. As I wrote at the start of this piece, no moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than "now." As we learn more about now, we know less about then. The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all. (Some scientists talk about artificially increasing the power of minds and memories — but then they are no longer talking about human beings. They are discussing some new species we know nothing about. And in this field, we would be fools to doubt our own ignorance.) The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past.
There are some fantastic insights in this contribution to the always fascinating Edge. Gelernter also talks about Life Streaming, and how we need to really starting thinking about the Internet.
