Lone Gunman

Mind Hacks points us to a recent arti­cle in Psy­chi­atric News argu­ing that the cur­rent def­i­n­i­tion of ‘major depres­sion’ has led to mis­di­ag­noses of ‘nor­mal sad­ness’.

They argue that the diag­no­sis con­tains no qual­i­fi­ca­tions about whether the reac­tion is appro­pri­ate in the con­text of the person’s life, mean­ing that peo­ple who have suf­fered unem­ploy­ment, rela­tion­ship break up or other forms of per­sonal tragedy are con­sid­ered equally as ‘men­tally ill’ as peo­ple who have sim­i­lar mood dis­tur­bances but with­out a spe­cific trigger.

This reminded me of the Holmes and Rahe list of stress­ful life events. With a score of 162, my risk of ill­ness is ‘moderate’.

The “bro­ken win­dows” the­ory of crime, dat­ing back to an arti­cle in The Atlantic from 1982 and more recently pop­u­larised by Mal­colm Glad­well in The Tip­ping Point and Rudy Giu­liani (mayor, NYC), sug­gests that signs of petty crime, like lit­ter­ing and bro­ken win­dows, trig­ger fur­ther crim­i­nal behaviour.

Now, recent research is start­ing to sug­gest that the the­ory is cor­rect.

Keiser thinks that it’s unlikely that peo­ple inferred a reduced police pres­ence by the pres­ence of lit­ter or graf­fiti — cer­tainly, lit­ter is gen­er­ally tol­er­ated by the police [in the area where the research was under­taken]. Instead, he thinks that one trans­gres­sion was actu­ally fos­ter­ing another. This isn’t a sim­ple case of imi­ta­tion — lit­ter­ing doesn’t just beget lit­ter­ing. Keiser’s idea is that see­ing the break­down of one social norm makes it eas­ier to ignore oth­ers, by weak­en­ing our gen­eral resolve to act appro­pri­ately and strength­en­ing our temp­ta­tions to act in our own self-interest.

Via Link Banana, there’s also an inter­est­ing write-up on the same research in The Econ­o­mist.

After read­ing a recent issue of Cor­tex, Mind Hacks goes into some detail dis­cussing the Ganzfeld pro­ce­dure:

The Ganzfeld pro­ce­dure exposes the par­tic­i­pant to ‘unstruc­tured’ sen­sa­tions usu­ally by plac­ing half ping-pong balls over the eyes so they can only see dif­fuse white light and by play­ing white noise through headphones.

It is prob­a­bly best known for its uses in para­psy­chol­ogy exper­i­ments, but it is also used to induce hal­lu­ci­na­tions and sen­sory dis­tor­tions which are much more likely to occur in the absence of clearly defined sen­sory experiences.

The post goes on to vividly describes some hal­lu­ci­na­tions before let­ting us know how we can try this at home.

Wun­derkam­mer, or Cab­i­nets of Curiosities/Wonder, could be classed as col­lec­tions of objects that fas­ci­nate or inter­est the col­lec­tor. I sup­pose you could say that Jay Walker’s per­sonal library is a type of wun­derkam­mer, and quite an impres­sive one at that.

Heather McDou­gal sug­gests that blogs are a type of wun­derkam­mer, and I’m inclined to agree. I def­i­nitely view Lone Gun­man as a “per­sonal taxonomy”.

Blog­ging, more than any cul­tural tech­nol­ogy, allows for an approach to won­der in an inti­mate and often appar­ently whim­si­cal envi­ron­ment: blog­gers present a col­lec­tion of images, ideas, and objects in a style and order spe­cific to his or her own vision: a per­sonal tax­on­omy. The soft­ware encour­ages the col­lec­tion to be accessed accord­ing to flex­i­ble para­me­ters, allow­ing move­ment through dif­fer­ent kinds of “rooms”, depend­ing on the viewer’s interests.

Sine wave speech

Essen­tially, what ini­tially sounds like ran­dom whistling sounds comes together as coher­ent speech when you know what you’re lis­ten­ing out for.

via Mind Hacks