Lone Gunman

Look­ing pri­mar­ily at the research of Ali­son Gop­nik, Jonah Lehrer looks at the devel­op­ment of the infant brain.

Gop­nik argues that, in many respects, babies are more con­scious than adults. She com­pares the expe­ri­ence of being a baby with that of watch­ing a riv­et­ing movie, or being a tourist in a for­eign city, where even the most mun­dane activ­i­ties seem new and excit­ing. “For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time,” Gop­nik says. “Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You’ll quickly real­ize that they’re see­ing things you don’t even notice.”

via Mind Hacks, which itself has a word of cau­tion about the claim that babies have more neu­rons than adults.

While the arti­cle lacks in cer­tain places, this brief look at Bill Gates Sr. and his rela­tion­ship with his son is an inter­est­ing read with a few amus­ing anec­dotes about the mostly elu­sive Gates family.

[Bill Gates Sr.] and Mary brought their son to a ther­a­pist. “I’m at war with my par­ents over who is in con­trol,” Bill Gates recalls telling the coun­selor. Report­ing back, the coun­selor told his par­ents that their son would ulti­mately win the bat­tle for inde­pen­dence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him. […]

They enrolled their son in a school that they thought would give him more free­dom. That was the pri­vate Lake­side School, now known as the place where Bill Gates dis­cov­ered computers.

Mr. Gates says he began to real­ize, “Hey, I don’t have to prove my posi­tion rel­a­tive to my par­ents. I just have to fig­ure out what I’m doing rel­a­tive to the world.”

With spam­mers hav­ing already writ­ten soft­ware to match humans at solv­ing some CAPTCHAs, many are pre­dict­ing the end of the CAPTCHA. Not so, says Luis von Ahn (devel­oper of the reCAPTCHA sys­tem) in a New Sci­en­tist arti­cle that asks why not set the spam­mers fur­ther AI tasks that they can solve inad­ver­tently.

Soft­ware that can solve any text-based CAPTCHA will be as much a mile­stone for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as it will be a prob­lem for online security. […]

“If [the spam­mers] are really able to write a pro­gramme to read dis­torted text, great – they have solved an AI prob­lem,” says von Ahn. The crim­i­nal under­world has cre­ated a kind of X prize for OCR.

That bonus for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence will come at no more than a short-term cost for secu­rity groups. They can sim­ply switch for an alter­na­tive CAPTCHA sys­tem – based on images, for exam­ple – pre­sent­ing the eager spam­ming com­mu­nity with a new AI prob­lem to crack.

via Richard Holden

There are many sub­stances in the brain thought to be respon­si­ble for main­tain­ing long-term mem­o­ries. Now, research is show­ing that by block­ing one of these sub­stances, the enzyme PKMζ (PMKzeta), we could ‘erase’ cer­tain mem­o­ries. The hope is that the oppo­site could work, too:

The drug [ZIP] blocks the activ­ity of a sub­stance that the brain appar­ently needs to retain much of its learned infor­ma­tion [PKMζ]. And if enhanced, the sub­stance could help ward off demen­tias and other mem­ory problems.

How­ever, should we really be try­ing to erase mem­o­ries (trau­matic expe­ri­ences, an addic­tion, etc.)? Another group of researchers say no, and instead are look­ing at how a cer­tain neu­ro­trans­mit­ter recep­tor (mGluR5) may allow us to over­ride or ‘unlearn’ mem­o­ries, pos­si­bly help­ing with con­di­tions such as PTSD, pho­bias, and anx­i­ety.

We don’t need to anni­hi­late bad mem­o­ries to get over them. A nor­mal brain is able to take in new infor­ma­tion that over­rides or “unlearns” trau­matic experiences. […]

“It’s more appro­pri­ate to remem­ber [a trau­matic] event, […] you just don’t want it to affect your daily life.”

On the other end of the spec­trum, a study pub­lished in the Psy­cho­nomic Bul­letin and Review in 2002 looks at how researchers suc­cess­fully cre­ated false child­hood mem­o­ries using doc­tored pho­tographs (pdf).

In prior research on how adults can be led to report false child­hood mem­o­ries, sub­jects have typ­i­cally been exposed to per­son­al­ized and detailed nar­ra­tives describ­ing false events. Instead, we exposed 20 sub­jects to a false child­hood event via a fake pho­to­graph and imagery instruc­tions. Over three inter­views, sub­jects thought about a pho­to­graph show­ing them on a hot air bal­loon ride and tried to recall the event by using guided-imagery exer­cises. Fifty per­cent of the sub­jects cre­ated com­plete or par­tial false mem­o­ries. The results bear on ways in which false mem­o­ries can be cre­ated and also have prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions for those involved in clin­i­cal and legal settings.

via @jakeybro, @rightthought and @mocost

By get­ting vol­un­teers to walk around cities with biofeed­back machines and GPS devices, Chris­t­ian Nold has cre­ated a series of ‘emo­tion maps’ of cities around the world, includ­ing San Fran­cisco, (East) Paris and Green­wich, Lon­don.

Par­tic­i­pants are wired up with an inno­v­a­tive device which records the wearer’s […] emo­tional arousal in con­junc­tion with their geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion. Peo­ple re-explore their local area by walk­ing the neigh­bour­hood with the device and on their return a map is cre­ated which visu­alises points of high and low arousal. By inter­pret­ing and anno­tat­ing this data, com­mu­nal emo­tion maps are con­structed that are packed full of per­sonal obser­va­tions which show the areas that peo­ple feel strongly about and truly visu­alise the social space of a community.

Emo­tional Car­tog­ra­phy: Tech­nolo­gies of the Self, a book cre­ated about the project, is a col­lec­tion of essays from “artists, design­ers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futur­ol­o­gists and neu­ro­sci­en­tists” and is avail­able as a free, CC-licensed PDF.

via Mind Hacks