MRI Used to Scan Brains of Meditating Monks

        I love functional MRI (fMRI) machines, MRI machines which give a real-time view of which parts of the brain are active while subjects perform cognitive tasks.   In the last week, there seems to be a theme of "What scientists learned about meditation by putting Buddhist monks into fMRI machines."
    
       According to one BBC article, it appears that the human mind is separated into two cognitive networks, one internal and the other external.  The internal network deals with thoughts about the self.  The external network handles thoughts about everything outside of oneself.    Meditation, it appears, breaks down the barriers between these two networks.  Instead of using one network or another for a particular task, people in a meditative state use both at the same time.

         USA today also had an article about putting Buddhist monks into fMRI machines.  The article covers a recent paper in Frontiers of Neuroscience that looks at the effects of meditation on rationality.  It appears that people who meditate frequently, are more "rational" when thinking about rewards.  When playing the Ultimatum game, mediators used entirely different parts of their brain in deciding how to act.  

        There is a lot to criticize about fMRI.  They actually take an indirect measure of activity by observing blood flow, and the resolution is relatively low.  Because blood flow is measured, not electrical activity, there is a time delay of seconds between thought and detection..   Regardless, the ability to observe physical activity correlated to mental activity is a huge step in understanding.  For instance, we now know there is an actual physical difference in the mind of someone who frequently meditates.
        
           The secret of brain-imaging research is that the major advances don't come from the imaging technology, which has remained largely unchanged over the last decade, but from advances in computing power.

Digital Human Brain Map Unveiled

     A change of pace from looking at how ICT is changing how we think, today we look at how ICT is changing our understanding of the mind itself.  Microsoft founder Paul Allen funded a project called the Allen Human Brain Atlas, which recently revealed the worlds first computerized brain map.  From the website:

     The Allen Human Brain Atlas is a unique multi-modal atlas of the human brain that integrates anatomic and genomic information, coupled with a suite of visualization and mining tools to create an open public resource for brain researchers and other scientists across a wide range of specialties.
     Data modalities incorporated into this resource include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), histology and gene expression data derived from both microarray and in situ hybridization (ISH) approaches.

   This Atlas should prove a critical component in understanding the human mind.  The atlas maps over 1,000 unique sites correlated with their known function and chemistry.  The information is available for free online.   This is map is part of a $55 million undertaking, and is a major step forward in understanding the structure of the human brain.  Not only will this help scientists working on curing neurological diseases like Alzheimer's, but it will also push forward research on cognition and thought.

Why is Anonymous' Latest Action so Pathetic

Over the course of the last week, Anonymous decided to move against Sony for going after someone who hacked their PS3.  The result has been less than impressive, described by Sony spokespeople as a minor annoyance.

To explain what is going on here, lets start with two key phenomena, de-individuation  and online dissociative disorder, critical linchpins of the Anonymous personality.

Deindividuation is the loss of individual identity experienced by members of a group or crowd.  This phenomena has been known to the world of psychology since 1895, with the publication of Gustav Le Bon's work on crowd theory.  The theory explains why crowds of people will often do things, like encourage would be suicide victims to jump, that individual members of a crowd would not.  Three elements are key to deindividualtion: anonymity, lack of responsibility and crowd size.  This effect is commonly used to indoctrinate people into the military, and religions.   It turns out that it can be equally effective online.

Online Disinhibition Effect  is the phenomena whereby people are willing to say and do things online that they would not otherwise do.  This effect has been attributed to common use of racist and homophobic speech online.  This effect is compounded when people are speaking online under anonymity.  

Now look again at Anonymous.  Knowing how individuals act when online and as part of groups, the organization, by its very structure, foments erratic and destructive behavior.  The rule organizing participants is simple, anyone can be Anonymous, all they have to do act in its name.  Working together, users are part of a cause, but are encouraged not to feel responsibility for their actions, instead those actions are the action of  the collective known as Anonymous.

This can lead to a lot of contradictory actions.  Factions within the Anonymous community play out as Anonymous fighting itself.  Since anyone can be Anonymous, there is no one true Anonymous.  This also means that not all actions will be executed with equal skill.  All it takes for Anonymous to do something is for a small group to decide to act as Anonymous, and suddenly "Anonymous is Attacking Sony."  This leads to all sorts of problems for law enforcement trying to stop the organization, you can't simply arrest the leaders - there are none.
      

How Twitter and Google Turn Individual Thoughts into Actionable Knowledge

Think of every Google search and every Tweet, as discrete units of  thought.  Today I want to share two examples of how analyzing this information is improving  decision making.

The first is tracking flu trends through the analysis of Google search query data.   CDC and Google researchers discovered that there is a direct correlation between flu related search queries in Google and an eventual flu outbreak.  Even more interesting, the query data precedes the data collected by health care providers, meaning outbreaks can be detected in an area before they are realized by the healthcare system. 

The second use of aggregating human thought is the correlation between twitter and stock performances.  Economists at the Technical University of Munich (Technische Universitaet Muenchen, TUM) discovered that twitter buzz is an accurate predictor of stock performance, with twitter buzz leading the market by about a day. The scientists have created a website where you can go to see what their model is predicting based on real time information.

These devices have important implications for how knowledge is realized.  The internet is making the process less formal, and more accurate.  Take the declaration of a flu outbreak.  The traditional system is for hospitals to aggregate information on people coming through their doors.  This skews the statistics by only capturing the people who are sick enough to bring themselves into hospitals.  Information is then collected from hospitals by the CDC and an outbreak is declared.  This declaration requires a huge formal structure and the involvement of multiple experts.  Contrast that with Google Flu Trends, where the process covers a wider data set, is real-time and automatic.

The twitter case is interesting for the same reasons as Google Flu Trends, but it also includes a tacit voting system, in which the volume of information is also a statement on the quality of information.  Users that give better tips are more likely to be repeated by other users.  Unlike the Google Flu Trends system, this information doesn't precede the traditional sources, it incorporates them.  Information that comes from outside sources, such as financial media or stock tips from friends, makes its way back into the system  through twitter users where it is put on an equal footing with all other data.

Unfortunately these systems are vulnerable to misuse, and the Twitter system be less useful the more popular it becomes.  While there is little advantage for anybody to flood Google to create a false declaration of a flu outbreak, the incentive to manipulate the Twitter stock pick system will rise as the system becomes more popular.    The more popular the service, the more effectively the system can move the market.   It is easy to see how someone could benefit by  creating a false move in a stock by injecting bad information through zombie twitter accounts.

In both cases better decisions can be made using systems that rely on what the mass of individuals are thinking, rather than the declarations of a few experts.

Sakawa

          This video is an interesting follow-on to the idea of cyberspace as a psychological phenomena.  In it Sakawa, scam artists in Ghana, elicit the help of Juju shamans to make them more effective at their work.  On some level, this may not be wholly futile.  Anthropologists have argued that shamans are a form of primitive psychologist, their only true power being their ability to shape the thoughts of their followers. The scams the Sakawa practitioners run are a form of mind game.   Victims readily give up money, believing that someone they never met will bring them love or riches.  The internet is the medium but the events take place inside the victims heads.  

         Why shouldn't a mind-game benefit from a psychologist's skill at building confidence, even if it takes place online and the confidence building involves beheading a chicken.  

Cyberspace

Cyberspace. Everyone knows what it means; no one has a clear definition.  Like the blind men trying to describe an elephant, the “official” definitions vary widely.  I argue that cyberspace is a psychological phenomena not a technological one:  Cyberspace is a metaphysical realm; the place our minds go when we interact with others using the global communications network.   

The important distinction between that definition and the myriad others is that it is not about the infrastructure, the equipment, the way we interact with the internet, or the information we interact with.  It is about what happens inside our minds when we interact with the ICT system.

To see what I mean, let’s start with cell phones.   The detrimental effect of cell phone usage on reaction time while driving is well documented.   Talking on a cell phone while driving increases perception response time by about .36 seconds – about the same amount of time as DUI.   While the effects is thoroughly documented, there is scant attention paid to why.  To explore what is happening during these conversations, try this thought experiment.  The next time you  have an involved phone conversation, take a break and take note of where your mind is.  How much of it is devoted to your immediate surroundings, how much to the conversation itself?  Where were you mentally?  Did you feel your attention shift into and out of your surroundings at the onset and end of the conversation?

Unlike talking to a passenger in the car, where you both share the same experimental environment, talking on a phone puts you and another person in the same mental space.   If you've ever had a phone conversation while driving, and found yourself at your destination without fully remembering for how you got there, you know exactly what I mean.

Video is another good example.  When you watch TV or play video games, at some point your attention is completely inside the screen.  Regardless of the size of the screen, you are attuned to the information, not the environment of the delivery device.  Watching and becoming immersed in video on a cell phone demonstrates this effect.    

Video games, chat channels, web surfing are all examples.  They take you out of your surroundings to some other place.  This is not dissimilar to the celebrated effect books have of taking the reader to far off realms.   The effect of immersing ones attention is a fundamental part of being human: reading, meditation, theatre are as old as history.  What differentiates cyberspace is that it is external, two way and ubiquitous.  It isn't really possible to be half immersed in a book from the moment one wakes until the moment one sleeps, unlike cyberspace, where smart phones and augmented reality are making constant partial immersion a fact of life.

While the definition of cyberspace as a metaphysical realm,   the place our minds go when we interact with others using the global communications network, may differ from most , the concept is not completely new.  Science Fiction Author Bruce Sterling once wrote:

Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones. [...] in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own. 

What is Anonymous?

Often referred to as a group of hackers, the phenomena known as Anonymous is rarely understood by the people it comes in conflict with, or the general media that report its exploits.  Anonymous first gained notoriety outside of internet when it decided to go after the Church of Scientology.  Learning from its early success, the phenomena became a regular subject of media attention for its actions in the Wikileaks scandal.  These actions include:

• Publicly humiliating the  HB Gary company because of their attempt to "infiltrate" Anonymous.  
• Attacking the websites of MasterCard and Visa after they closed Wikileak's accounts.
• Planning to publicly reveal personal information of individuals in the military in protest of the treatment of Bradley Manning. 

If Anonymous is not a hacker group, what is it? The best place to start is Encyclopedia Dramatica, the Wikipedia of 4chan, the site that gave birth to anonymous.

Anonymous is not a person, nor is it a group, movement or cause: Anonymous is a collective of people with too much time on their hands, a commune of human thought and useless imagery. A gathering of sheep and fools, assholesand trolls, and normal everyday netizens. An anonymous collective, left to its own devices, quickly builds its own society out ofrage and hate. Anonymous can be anyone from well-meaning college kids with highly idiosyncratic senses of humor trying to save people from Scientology, to devious nihilist hackers, to clever nerds...  http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Anonymous

In short, Anonymous is an emergent sentience.

 To explain the phenomena in psychological terms:  Anonymous was born out of an internet based social affinity group, but is separate from the people that constitute it.  Improvisation rules guide people under the influence of deindividuation and the online disinhibition effect allowing them to perform action which, taken collectively from an external perspective, constitutes a wholly separate entity. This entity has its own distinct personality, interests, and history separate from its constituents. 

Explaining what this means will be the subject of the net few blog articles

Kasparov Vs. Carr

How is information technology changing the way we think?  Is it making us dumber- decreasing the depth of our knowledge at the same time it increases the speed with which we process information?  Or is it a tool?  A form of mental augmentation, the combined wealth of human opinion and knowledge ubiquitously available, relieving us of the burden of rote memory?

On one side, you have the nostalgics, their position well summed in the famous essay by Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  The arguments are known well enough as to now be cliché. To paraphrase, “Using the web has robbed me of my ability to read long works like War and Peace.” and “What is happening to our ability to concentrate and focus?” 

This viewpoint is popular in the press.  Lamentations of yesterday’s bygone genius will never go out of style.  These articles can be written based on personal experience and they explain why so much in the world is broken:  newspapers can’t make money, the author’s book sales are down and of course the declining test scores of today’s youth.

For the other side we should turn to Garry Kasparov.   In a much less famous article than Carr’s, published in the New York Review of Books, Kasparov reflects on the lead up to, and eventual loss against deep blue.  In it Kasparov describes how a computer that could see all possible outcomes for up to 20 moves ahead, eventually beat him.  Rather than regret the passing of human supremacy, Kasparov recognized the opportunity it presented.  He had a theory that a human paired with a computer could be a more powerful opponent than either, thus Advanced Chess was born.   In a freestyle match on Playchess.com, in which any combination of players and computers could compete, it was a pair of amateur chess players and three computers that won, beating dedicated chess supercomputers, and grandmasters with state of the art laptops.  As Kasparov put it, “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”