Zombie Fud

Hack 1. Find Out How the Brain Works Without Looking Inside

How do you tell what’s inside a black box without looking in it? This is the challenge the mind presents to cognitive psychology.

Cognitive psychology is the psychology of the basic mental processesthings like perception, attention, memory, language, decision-making. It asks the question, “What are the fundamental operations on which mind is based?”

The problem is, although you can measure what goes into someone’s head (the input) and measure roughly what they do (the output), this doesn’t tell you anything about what goes on in between. It’s a black box, a classic reverse engineering problem.1 How can we figure out how it works without looking at the code?

These days, of course, we can use neuroimaging (like EEG [Hack 2], PET [Hack #3], and fMRI [Hack #4]) to look inside the head at the brain, or use information on anatomy and information from brain-damaged individuals [Hack #6] to inform how we think the brain runs the algorithms that make up the mind. But this kind of work hasn’t always been possible, and it’s never been easy or cheap. Experimental psychologists have spent more than a hundred years refining methods for getting insight into how the mind works without messing with the insides, and these days we call this cognitive psychology.

There’s an example of a cognitive psychology-style solution in another book from the hacks series, Google Hacks (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/googlehks). Google obviously doesn’t give access to the algorithms that run its searches, so the authors of Google Hacks, Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest, were forced to do a little experimentation to try and work it out. Obviously, if you put in two words, Google returns pages that feature both words. But does the order matter? Here’s an experiment. Search Google for “reverse engineering” and then search for “engineering reverse.” The results are different; in fact, they are sometimes different even when searching for words that aren’t normally taken together as some form of phrase. So we might conclude that order does make a difference; in some way, the Google search algorithm takes into account the order. If you try to whittle a search down to the right terms, something that returned only a couple of hits, perhaps over time you could figure out more exactly how the order mattered.

This is basically what cognitive psychology tries to do, reverse engineering the basic functions of the mind by manipulating the inputs and looking at the results. The inputs are often highly restricted situations in which people are asked to make judgments or responses in different kinds of situations. How many words from the list you learned yesterday can you still remember? How many red dots are there? Press a key when you see an X appear on the screen. That sort of thing. The speed at which they respond, the number of errors, or the patterns of recall or success tell us something about the information our cognitive processes use, and how they use it.

A few things make reverse engineering the brain harder than reverse engineering software, however.

Biological systems are often complex, sometimes even chaotic (in the technical sense). This means that there isn’t necessarily a one-to-one correspondence in how a change in input affects output. In a logic-based or linear system, we can clearly see causes and effects. The mind, however, doesn’t have this orderly mapping. Small things have big effects and sometime big changes in circumstance can produce little obvious difference in how we respond. Biological functionsincluding cognitionare often supported by multiple processes. This means they are robust to changes in just one supporting process, but it also means that they don’t always respond how you would have thought when you try and influence them.

People also aren’t consistent in the same way software or machines usually are. Two sources of variability are noise and learning. We don’t automatically respond in the same way to the same stimulus every time. This sometimes happens for no apparent reason, and we call this randomness noise. But sometimes our responses change for a reason, not because of noise, and that’s because the very act of responding first time around creates feedback that informs our response pattern for the next time (for example, when you get a new bike, you’re cautious with your stopping distance at first, but each time you have to stop suddenly, you’re better informed about how to handle the braking next time around). Almost all actions affect future processing, so psychologists make sure that if they are testing someone the test subject has either done the thing in question many times before, and hence stopped changing his response to it, or he has never done it before.

Another problem with trying to guess how the mind works is that you can’t trust people when they offer their opinion on why they did something or how they did it. At the beginning of the twentieth century, psychology relied heavily on introspection and the confusion generated led to the movement that dominated psychology until the ’70s: behaviorism. Behaviorism insisted that we treat only what we can reliably measure as part of psychology and excluded all reference to internal structures. In effect we were to pretend that psychology was just the study of how stimuli were linked to outputs. This made psychology much more rigorous experimentally (although some would argue less interesting). Psychology today recognizes the need to posit mind as more than simple stimulus-response matching, although cognitive psychologists retain the behaviorists’ wariness of introspection. For cognitive psychologists, why you think you did something is just another bit of data, no more privileged than anything else they’ve measured, and no more likely to be right.2

Cognitive psychology takes us a long way. Many phenomena discovered by cognitive and experimental psychology are covered in this bookthings like the attentional blink [Hack #39] and state-dependent recall [Hack #87] . The rigor and precision of the methods developed by cognitive psychology are still vital, but now they can be used in tandem with methods that give insight into the underlying brain structure and processes that are supporting the phenomenon being investigated.

1.2.1. End Notes
Daniel Dennett has written a brief essay called “Cognitive Science as Reverse Engineering” (http://pp.kpnet.fi/seirioa/cdenn/cogscirv.htm) in which he discusses the philosophy of this approach to mind.

A psychologist called Daryl Bem formalized this in “self-perception theory.” He said “Individuals come to know their own attitudes, emotions and internal states by inferring them from observations of their own behavior and circumstances in which they occur. When internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or uninterpretable, the individual is in the same position as the outside observer.” Bem, D. J., “Self Perception Theory.” In L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, volume 6 (1972).

Taken From : Mind Hacks

Chapter 1. Inside the Brain

1.1. Hacks 1-12

It’s never entirely true to say, “This bit of the brain is solely responsible for function X.” Take the visual system [Hack #13], for instance; it runs through many varied parts of the brain with no single area solely responsible for all of vision. Vision is made up of lots of different subfunctions, many of which will be compensated for if areas become unavailable. With some types of brain damage, it’s possible to still be able to see, but not be able to figure out what’s moving or maybe not be able to see what color things are.

What we can do is look at which parts of the brain are active while it is performing a particular taskanything from recognizing a face to playing the pianoand make some assertions. We can provide input and see what output we getthe black box approach to the study of mind. Or we can work from the outside in, figuring out which abilities people with certain types of damaged brains lack.

The latter, part of neuropsychology [Hack #6], is an important tool for psychologists. Small, isolated strokes can deactivate very specific brain regions, and also (though more rarely) accidents can damage small parts of the brain. Seeing what these people can no longer do in these pathological cases, provides good clues into the functions of those regions of the brain. Animal experimentation, purposely removing pieces of the brain to see what happens, is another.

These are, however, pathology-based methodsless invasive techniques are available. Careful experimentationmeasuring response types, reaction times, and response changes to certain stimuli over timeis one such alternative. That’s cognitive psychology [Hack #1], the science of making deductions about the structure of the brain through reverse engineering from the outside. It has a distinguished history. More recently we’ve been able to go one step further. Pairing techniques from cognitive psychology with imaging methods and stimulation techniques [Hack#2] through [Hack#5], we can manipulate and look at the brain from the outside, without having to, say, remove the skull and pull a bit of the cerebrum out. These imaging methods are so important and referred to so much in the rest of this book, we’ve provided an overview and short explanation for some of the most common techniques in this chapter.

In order that the rest of the book make sense, after looking at the various neuroscience techniques, we take a short tour round the central nervous system [Hack #7], from the spine, to the brain [Hack #8], and then down to the individual neuron [Hack #9] itself. But what we’re really interested in is how the biology manifests in everyday life. What does it really mean for our decision-making systems to be assembled from neurons rather than, well, silicon, like a computer? What it means is that we’re not software running on hardware. The two are one and the same, the physical properties of our mental substrate continually leaking into everyday life: the telltale sign of our neurons is evident when we respond faster to brighter lights [Hack #11], and our biological roots show through when blood flow has to increase because we’re thinking so hard [Hack #10] .

And finally take a gander at a picture of the body your brain thinks you have and get in touch with your inner sensory homunculus [Hack #12] .

Taken From : Mind Hacks

Recommended Reading

If you’re interested in getting a general overview, rather than chasing the details of a particular story, you might like to start by reading a book on the subject. Here are some of our favorite books on our own pet topics, all of which make specialist material accessible for the rest of us:

Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human by Paul Bloom (2004). Lively speculation from a leading researcher.

Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence by Andy Clark (2003). Clark asks whether intelligence is bounded by our skulls or is part of the tools and technologies we use.

Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence Deacon (1997). A dizzying, provocative integration of information across different disciplines.

Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett (1991). Psychologically informed philosophy. Consciousness isn’t explained by the end, but it’s a fun ride along the way.

Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing by Richard Gregory (1966). Erudite and good-humoreda classic introduction to vision.

The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris (1998). The Evolutionary Psychology of child development, a great read that challenges the assumption that parents are the most important influence in a child’s life. See also the web site at: http://home.att.net/~xchar/tna.

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson (2004). How the latest developments in brain science and technology inform our individual self-understanding.

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker (1995). Compelling argument for our innate language ability and brain structure being reflected in each other.

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V. S. Ramachandran & Sandra Blakeslee (1998). Tales of what brain injury can tell us about the way the brain works.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1995). Informative and humane anecdotes about patients with different kinds of brain damage.

If you’re looking for something a little deeper, we recommend you try:

The Oxford Companion to the Mind, edited by Richard Gregory (1999). Authoritative and entertaining collection of essays on all aspects of the brain.

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979). The classic exploration of minds, machines, and the mathematics of self-reference. The back of my copy rightly says “a workout in the finest mental gymnasium in town.”

How to Think Straight About Psychology by Keith Stanovich (1997). How to apply critical thinking to psychological topics.

Taken From : Mind Hacks

How to Use This Book

You can read this book from cover to cover if you like, but each hack stands on its own, so feel free to browse and jump to the different sections that interest you most. If there’s a prerequisite you need to know, a cross-reference will guide you to the right hack.

We’ve tried out all the demonstrations in this book, so we know that for most people they work just as we say they do; these are real phenomena. Indeed, some are surprising, and we didn’t believe they’d work until we tried them ourselves. The explanations are summaries of the current state of knowledgeoften snapshots of debates in progress. Keep an open mind about these. There’s always the chance future research will cause us to revise our understanding.

Often, because there is so much research on each topic, we have linked to web sites, books, and academic papers to find out more. Follow these up. They’re fantastic places to explore the wider story behind each hack, and will take you to interesting places and appear interesting connections.

With regard to academic papers, these are bedrock of scientific knowledge. They can be hard to get and hard to understand, but we included references to them because they are the place to go if you really need to get to the bottom of a story (and to find the cutting edge). What’s more, for many scientists, evidence doesn’t really exist until it has been published in a scientific journal. For this to happen, the study has to be reviewed by other scientists working in the field, in a system called peer review. Although this system has biases, and mistakes are made, it is this that makes science a collective endeavor and provides a certain guarantee of quality.

The way journal articles are cited is quite precise, and in this book we’ve followed the American Psychological Association reference style (http://www.apastyle.org). Each looks something like this:

Lettvin, J., Maturana, H., McCulloch, W., & Pitts, W. (1959). What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain. Proceedings of the IRE, 47(11), 1940-1951.

Before the year of publication (which is in parentheses), the authors are listed. After the year is the title of the paper, followed by the journal in which you’ll find it, in italics. The volume (in italics) and then the issue number (in parentheses) follow. Page numbers come last. (There’s a crib sheet online: http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/workshop/citapa.htm.) One convention you’ll often see in the text is “et al.” after the main author of a paper. This is shorthand for “and others.”

Many, but not all, journals have an electronic edition, and some you can access for free. Most are subscription-based, although some publishers will let you pay per paper. If you go to a library, generally a university library, make sure it not only subscribes to the journal you want, but also has the year in which the paper you’re after was published.

If you’re lucky, the paper will also be reprinted online. This is often the case with classic papers and with recent papers, which the authors may have put on their publications page. A good query to use at Google (http://www.google.com) for papers online in PDF format using a query like:

“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” filetype:pdf

Alternately, search for a researcher’s name followed by the word “publications” for papers, demonstrations, and as-yet-unpublished research, a gold mine if you’re learning more about a particular topic.

Taken From : Mind Hacks

Why Mind Hacks?

The term “hacking” has a bad reputation in the media. They use it to refer to those who break into systems or wreak havoc with computers as their weapons. Among people who write code, though, the term “hack” refers to a “quick-and-dirty” solution to a problem, or a clever way to get something done. And the term “hacker” is taken very much as a compliment, referring to someone as being “creative,” having the technical chops to get things done. The Hacks series is an attempt to reclaim the word, document the good ways people are hacking, and pass the hacker ethic of creative participation on to the uninitiated. Seeing how others approach systems and problems is often the quickest way to learn about a new technology.

The brain, like all hidden systems, is prime territory for curious hackers. Thanks to relatively recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, we’re able to satisfy a little of that curiosity, making educated explanations for psychological effects rather than just pointing those effects out, throwing light on the internal workings of the brain.

Some of the hacks in this collection document the neat tricks the brain has used to get the job done. Looking at the brain from the outside like this, it’s hard not to be impressed at the way it works. Other hacks point to quirks of our own minds that we can exploit in unexpected ways, and that’s all part of learning our way round the wrinkles in this newly exposed technology.

Mind Hacks is for people who want to know a bit more about what’s going on inside own heads and for people who are going to assemble the hacks in new ways, playing with the interface between ourselves and the world. It’s wonderfully easy to get involved. We’ve all got brains, after all.

Taken From : Mind Hacks

Preface

Think for a moment about all that’s happening while you read this text: how your eyes move to center themselves on the words, how you idly scratch your arm while you’re thinking, the attention-grabbing movements, noises, and other distractions you’re filtering out. How does all this work? As one brain speaking to another, here’s a secret: it isn’t easy.

The brain is a fearsomely complex information-processing environment. Take the processing involved in seeing, for instance. One of the tasks involved in seeing is detecting the motion in every tiny portion of vision, in such and such a direction and at such and such a speed, and representing that in the brain. But another task is seeing a face in the light that falls on the retina, figuring out what emotion it’s showing, and representing that concept in the brain, somehow, too.

To an extent, the brain is modular, so that should give us a way in, but it’s not that clean-cut. The processing subsystems of the brain are layered on top of one another, but their functionality mingles rather than being organized in a distinct progression. Often the same task is performed in many different places, in many different ways. It’s not a clear mechanical system like clockwork or like a computer program; giving the same input won’t always give the same output. Automatic and voluntary actions are highly meshed, often inextricable. Parts of vision that appear fully isolated from conscious experience suddenly report different results if conscious expectations change.

The information transforms in the brain are made yet more complicated by the constraints of history, computation, and architecture. Development over evolutionary time has made it hard for the brain to backtrack; the structure of the brain must reflect its growth and repurposing. Computation has to occur as fast as possiblewe’re talking subsecond responsesbut there are limits on the speed at which information can travel between physical parts of the brain. These are all constraints to be worked with.

All of which leaves us with one question: how can we possibly start to understand what’s going on?

Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain biology behind our mental functions. It is a collection of methods (like brain scanning and computational modeling) combined with a way of looking at psychological phenomena and discovering where, why, and how the brain makes them happen. It is neither classic neurosciencea low-level tour of the biology of the brainnor is it what many people think of as psychologya metaphorical exploration of human inner life; rather, it’s a view of the mind that looks at the fundamental elements and rules, acting moment by moment, that makes up conscious experience and action.

By focusing both on the biological substrate and on the high-level phenomenon of consciousness, we can pick apart the knot of the brain. This picking apart is why you don’t need to be a cognitive neuroscientist to reap the fruit of the field.

This book is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment works of the brain. It’s not a textbookmore of a buffet, really. Each hack is one probe into the operation of the brain, one small demonstration. By seeing how the brain responds, we pick up traces of the structures present and the design decision made, learning a little bit more about how the brain is put together.

Simultaneously we’ve tried to show how there isn’t a separation between the voluntary “me” feeling of the mind and the automatic nature of the brainthe division between voluntary and automatic behavior is more of an ebb and flow, and we wield our cognitive abilities with unconscious flourishes and deliberate movements much as we wield, say, our hands, or a pen, or a lathe.

In a sense, we’re trying to understand the capabilities that underpin the mind. Say we understand to what extent the holes in our vision are continually covered up or what sounds and lights willwithout a doubtgrab our attention (and also what won’t): we’ll be able to design better tools, and create better interfaces that work with the grain of our mental architecture and not against it. We’ll be able to understand ourselves a little better; know a little more, in a very real sense, about what makes us tick.

Plus it’s fun. That’s the key. Cognitive neuroscience is a fairly new discipline. The journey into the brain is newly available and an enjoyable ride. The effects we’ll see are real enough, but the explanations of why they occur are still being debated. We’re taking part in the mapping of this new territory just by playing along. Over the course of writing this book, we’ve spent time noticing our own attention systems darting about the room, seen ourselves catching gestures from people we’ve been talking to, and played games with the color of traffic and peripheral vision. That’s the fun bit. But we’ve also been gripped by the arguments in the scientific literature and have had new insights into facets of our everyday lives, such as why some web sites are annoying and certain others are particularly well-made. If, through this book, we’ve managed to make that world a little more accessible too, then we’ve succeeded. And when you’ve had a look around and found new ways to apply these ideas and, yes, new topics we’ve not touched on, please do let us know. We’re here for the ride too.

Taken From : Mind Hacks

Web 2.0 Concept in Presentation

Here it is: Web 2.0 Slideshow. Enjoy and learn!!!!!