Lone Gunman

Unac­count­abil­ity and anonymity on the Inter­net has brought about “the end of empa­thy”, says Jason Cala­ca­nis, as he dis­cusses the ‘con­di­tion’ of Inter­net Asperger’s Syn­drome:

This dis­ease affects peo­ple when their com­mu­ni­ca­tion moves to dig­i­tal, and the emo­tional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expres­sion and the so called “blush response”–are lost. […]

In this syn­drome, the afflicted stops see­ing the human­ity in other peo­ple. They view indi­vid­u­als as objects, not indi­vid­u­als. The focus on repet­i­tive behaviors–checking email, blog­ging, twit­ter­ing and retir­ing andys–combines with an inabil­ity to feel empa­thy and con­nect with people.

[…] In IAS, screen names and avatars shift from rep­re­sent­ing peo­ple to rep­re­sent­ing char­ac­ters in a video game. Our 2600’s and 64’s have trained us to pound these char­ac­ters into sub­mis­sion in order to level up. We look at blog­gers, peo­ple on Twit­ter and pod­cast­ers not as indi­vid­u­als, but as challenges–in some cases, “bosses”–that we must crush to make it to the next phase.

A good arti­cle dis­cussing the per­ils of liv­ing our lives in pub­lic, although I feel it loses some­thing toward the end when it takes on a more per­sonal tone.

via LA Times

The ‘Nun Study’ is a lon­gi­tu­di­nal study of age­ing and Alzheimer’s that uses data gath­ered from over 600 nuns over the past 20+ years. Some inter­est­ing cor­re­lates are start­ing to appear:

The nuns make for a very unique pop­u­la­tion to study […] because of their sim­i­lar lifestyles.

“They don’t smoke, they don’t drink, so you can reduce the effects of some of these other envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, and focus in on other fac­tors that might be harder to get your hands around in other pop­u­la­tion studies.” […]

Among the study’s find­ings are a rela­tion­ship between early child­hood edu­ca­tion and reduc­ing the sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to Alzheimer’s dis­ease, [and] a rela­tion­ship between trau­mas to the brain, such as strokes, and an increased sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to Alzheimer’s. […]

Another inter­est­ing find­ing has been that some of the nuns brains look like they have Alzheimer’s but the women weren’t exhibit­ing symp­toms before they died.

“If that’s the case, there may be things you can do, even though you have the dis­ease to slow down or pre­vent the expres­sion of the dis­ease symptoms”.

Read­ing this arti­cle, I’m not sure what I enjoyed the most: learn­ing about this fas­ci­nat­ing study, or the pic­ture of the neu­ropathol­o­gist stand­ing in front of over 600 plas­tic con­tain­ers each hold­ing a nun’s brain!

For more infor­ma­tion on this study, Time wrote a com­pre­hen­sive arti­cle back in 2001, and there’s a ded­i­cated sec­tion on the Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota’s site.

via @mocost

The ‘cock­tail party effect’ is the name given to our unusu­ally adept abil­ity of sep­a­rat­ing out con­ver­sa­tions from one another. How­ever it appears that we are unusu­ally bad at retain­ing infor­ma­tion from the dis­carded conversation(s):

Cherry [1953] found his par­tic­i­pants picked up sur­pris­ingly lit­tle infor­ma­tion [from the ‘rejected’ con­ver­sa­tions], often fail­ing to notice bla­tant changes to the unat­tended mes­sage. When asked after­wards, participants:

• could not iden­tify a sin­gle phrase from the speech pre­sented to the rejected ear.
• weren’t sure the lan­guage in the rejected ear was even English.
• failed to notice when it changed to German.
• mostly didn’t notice when the speech to the rejected ear was being played back­wards (though some did report that it sounded a bit strange).

via Mind Hacks

The Econ­o­mist looks at whether Dunbar’s num­ber, the sup­posed limit of sta­ble social rela­tion­ships, holds true on social net­work­ing sites.

That […] online social net­works will increase the size of human social groups is an obvi­ous hypoth­e­sis, given that they reduce a lot of the fric­tion and cost involved in keep­ing in touch with other people. […]

Pri­ma­tol­o­gists call at least some of the things that hap­pen on social net­works “groom­ing”. In the wild, groom­ing is time-consuming and here com­put­er­i­sa­tion cer­tainly helps. But keep­ing track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of men­tal com­pu­ta­tion. You need to remem­ber who is allied with, hos­tile to, or lusts after whom, and act accord­ingly. Sev­eral years ago, there­fore, Robin Dun­bar, an anthro­pol­o­gist who now works at Oxford Uni­ver­sity, con­cluded that the cog­ni­tive power of the brain lim­its the size of the social net­work that an indi­vid­ual of any given species can develop.

Two items of note: Face­book has an “in-house soci­ol­o­gist”; and this man, Dr Cameron Mar­low, reveals that the aver­age num­ber of friends cor­re­lates pretty closely to Dunbar’s number.

via Mind Hacks

A child is acci­den­tally left in the back seat of a car and dies from hyperther­mia: a parent’s worst night­mare, I imag­ine, and some­thing many believe wouldn’t hap­pen to them (itself a big part of the problem).

In an arti­cle debat­ing the legal ram­i­fi­ca­tions of such an acci­dent, The Wash­ing­ton Post presents not only a heart-rending story, but offers some fas­ci­nat­ing insights into risks and com­pro­mise; pos­si­ble tech­ni­cal solu­tions; and neurological/psychological the­o­ries of why a child may unin­ten­tion­ally be left in a car.

via Schneier (which itself is a good overview if you don’t have time to read the full article.)