When you don’t understand why someone you like isn’t famous

I’m rereading I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. I wouldn’t say it’s his best work, but it’s still damn good. It’s essentially a summary of his thoughts on how a self, an ‘I’, a ‘light on inside’, a mind’s eye can come from a lump of squishy grey stuff.

I’m only a couple chapters in, but I keep feeling compelled to write notes about what he’s written, on account of it triggers so many thoughts and ideas in mine head. In fact, if I go through with this audacious, yet bodacious plan, I’ll have a book by the end of it! It could be the first ever book written entirely in response to, and while reading, another book. At least I assume so. The working title is I Know You Are But What Am I: Reflections on DRH’s I Am A Strange Loop. Another working title is I Agree, And Here’s Why…

Look, what I’m trying to say is I get sick and sleepy with having to all the time explain who Douglas Hofstadter is. To my way of thinking, he’s one of the clearest, most perceptive, easy to read, riveting authors out there, and he’s written about many a topic that would interest many and many a person. Yet he just isn’t up there with the Richard Dawkinses, Carl Saganses and Tim Flanneryses of this world.

Likewise in music, there are phenomenal performers who go unheard of, unrewarded, and unsullied day in, day out. I must confess I make no claims to know and like any obscure but brilliant bands (but watch this space for Looking Glass). Though they are in an overall minority, I know there are thousands of others who, like me, really dig the Mars Volta, Crash Test Dummies, Split Enz and Ween (almost certainly not this combination though).

In fact, I believe that each and every person that this sentence refers to could list several awesome authors, musicians and whoevers that have touched their lives, delicately and deeply, but that can’t seem to get no respect, or at least general public awareness. I challenge these people to make that list.

These days the situation isn’t so bad with the internet. F’cryin’ out loud, I can now find people with a mutual interest in my newly acquired, top 10 All Time Coolest book, Codex Seraphinianus. Without the internet, I challenge anyone, anywhere to have heard of this amazing book (yes, I know the challenge was issued using the internet, a’F’eh!).

I guess this is all about information – how we get it, who controls its flow, and what it smells like. It’s also about personal differences in the kinds of things that profoundly resonate with (in?) our minds and hearts.

One last thing, it’s interesting to note that there is no analogous situation in sports. The best basketballers, sprinters and football players aren’t competing in D-Leagues, mid-week suburban track meets and lower grade Auckland comps. Aside from the scouts’ mythical undiscovered sporting geniuses tending sheep in a field somewhere, this phenomena just doesn’t happen in sport.

Free Won't

They say we have free will. They say we are free to choose how we act. The things we say, the thoughts we have, the things we like. However, it is self-evident that we are not free in many ways. We are not free to flap our arms and start flying. We are not free to hurt people we don't want to hurt, or like food we don't like. In short, we face some pretty hefty roadblocks to freedom, roadblocks inherent in the way our bodies and minds work.

We're freer, they say, to not do things. Free not to go here, not to buy that, not to kiss that. That has lead some(one?) to coin the term "free won't". That is, it is more fitting to define our special kind of freedom in terms of what we are free not to do.

I like this idea, although it is subject to the same criticisms as free will. Sometimes we're not free to not do something e.g. spill the beans about our friends' lovelives to our partner.

Perhaps we could rephrase the whole thing. Instead of having free will, maybe we have free tryingness. This new term has the added benefit of catchiness. It means that we are free to try to do (or not do) certain things. Delta Goodrem encapsulated this deep philosophical position in a very melodious way with her hit single Born To Try. Who said she has absolutely no idea about the human condition? Not I. No, not me, not I.

You could probably see this coming, but I'm afraid we're not always free to try (or try not to do) certain things. You might think I could try to enjoy Robbie Williams for a minute, but it's just not possible. Try as I might (hehe), I could not try to consider JW Howard Australia's finest Primer Minister since Keating. OK, this isn't the best example, but my point is this: There's always strings attached to our freedom. So the next time you're at the Philosophical Diner on Main St, don't forget to order Strings Attached with your Free Will. Ah, yeah.

Brain = Google ?

A microcosm of all that's good and bad about science in the media.



I just came across an article at New Scientist talking about research that compares our brains to Google's page rank procedure. The idea of the brain being googlesque is quite catchy, the kind of thing you could drop into conversation and seem quite intelligent for doing so. But before we go spreading that meme, it's worth taking a closer look. When we scratch the surface, things get a bit murky, although hopefully my scratching around clears some things up too.



It's only a short article, so I might as well let it speak for itself, with my self speaking for me in between. I will deal with the ideas as they are presented, but the problem is that without reading the journal article it's about, who's really to say what's going on? Very few readers will ever take the time to read the original journal article, and I'd bet that very few writers do either - at least to the level that allows a bit of perspective and criticism. This issue is absolutely ubiquitous in science writing, but I don't have time to address it now. Suffice to say it places a huge burden on the science writer's measly shoulders. Anyway....



Our memory for words can be modelled as a network in which each point represents a different word, with each linked to words that relate to it.



Ok, so we're talking about a model. Here in a nutshell is the daily focal point of most scientists - a model. It stands before them, naked and exposed to the world, doing its best to represent reality. Of course, scientists are equally (hopefully more, maybe less) focused on the reality their model is modelling too. In this case, we're trying understand... what? Something about the way our mind uses words. So let's build a model. It is a clearly fallacious to represent a word as a solid, defined entity in its own right, but we'll forgive them that because all models must necessarily simplify somewhere. Still, I can't help wondering whether they're putting the cart before horse in already specifying which words are related to which. Isn't how the mind super-specially figures this out for us a mystery worth investigating?



Psychologist Tom Griffiths and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether the ease with which the brain retrieves words is similar to the way that websites are ranked by PageRank: by the number of sites that link to them.



It's essential for a science writer to mention the author, and preferably host institution, of the research. That way interested folk are just a hop, click and jump from finding the original research article, or the researcher's general interests, or commercial interests, or whatever.



I couldn't help but wondering just where Google popped up in all of this. Did it drive the research? Did it emerge unbidden from the pure experimental results? Was it a cute rejoinder in the original paper's discussion, aimed at lightening the tone? Was it added by the researcher or someone from their uni's PR department to get the mercilessly fickle attention of media Monitors in science mags? Anyway, it seems like a reasonable hypothesis - the more words that "link to" a given word, be it in terms of spelling, etymology, the sound of the word or whatever, the easier the word will be to retrieve. The more hits it will get!


It seems it might. In tests against other word-retrieval algorithms, PageRank most clearly matched the human model (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 1069).



Ok, so the crucial missing ingredient is some, any kind of description of a) the other word-retrieval algorithms, and b) some perspective as to how big a deal this is in the field. Was it unexpected? Was there another model that previously occupied the position of best model, that has now been ceremoniously (publishing results is a ceremony of sorts!) dumped in favour of the PageRank model of human word retrieval? Just what the Dickens are the implications of all this??



The results suggest human memory studies could be improved by examining the tricks that search engines employ, and vice versa, says Griffiths.



Ok, there they are. Just who is going to follow this new approach? The authors? Anyone else? Ultimately, they rely on the validity of the analogy between human brains and computers/internets.

Is the effect of the rhythm method slight?

Alright, so it's not really about the rhythm method. It's about cycles of life and all that jazz.

Published at Cosmos 22 March 2007.

I've lost my memory

Did you know that some people with hippocampal amnesia find it hard to imagine things? Shock!

Published at Cosmos 16 January 2007.

Potent potable

- I mean painkiller discovered in saliva. I love it because just when people think they know about the body, they discover a totally new compound right there in somebody's spitball. Of course, you'd have to be a Pavlov's dog (or padlocked door) to drool enough to get any kind of effect.

Published at Cosmos 14 November 2006.

Intervention bad?

Some psychologists believe that if scared rats are any indication of human behaviour, we shouldn't rush in to treat the fears of recently traumatised people. Hmmm.

Published at Cosmos 8 November 2006.

Surprise, surprise: erotic images are popular

This story about attention, racy pictures, and undergrads received thousands of hits. Did it deserve them?

Published at Cosmos 24 October 2006.

Is colour blind?

This story is about whether people partition colours into the same lexical space across cultures. Read it, if you can.

Published at Cosmos 17 October 2006.