Congnitive Surplus and the Information Revolution

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, has an interesting speech tying together the industrial revolution, sitcoms and the current Web 2.0 revolution. The transcript is here, while a video can be found here.

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

Meditation and the Mind

Now this is exciting: a scientific abstract of the impact of meditation on the brain and behavior, as described by Richard Davidson, the director of the Waisman Brain Imaging Center at the University of Wisconsin. I haven't read the paper, but it's always interesting to think about the impact of conscious thought on our physical bodies...

Meditation can be conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Among these various practices, there are two styles that are commonly studied. One style, focused attention meditation, entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. The other style, open monitoring meditation, involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. The potential regulatory functions of these practices on attention and emotion processes could have a long-term impact on the brain and behavior.

Free Will: Part 1

Last week both New Scientist and ScienceNow had articles on free will and conscious decision-making. Both focused on work being done by John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. First the bad news:

Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. The pattern predicted a left or right decision with about 60% accuracy and occurred about 10 seconds before the conscious choice, the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience. "We weren't expecting this kind of lead time," Haynes says. Even though the predictions weren't perfect, "there's not very much space for operation of free will," Haynes says. "The outcome of a decision is shaped very strongly by brain activity much earlier than the point in time when you feel to be making a decision."

Then the good news:

Experiments to test whether a choice can be reversed are in the works, Haynes says. "We can't rule out that people might be able to change their minds."

Recapturing Youth

Both Neatorama and Boingboing have posts on YoungMe/NowMe, a website where people upload childhood photos of themselves and then recreate the photos with their grownup selves. It's really cute. Check out the full gallery here.

The Start of a Beautiful Friendship

Craigslist Ann Arbor has possibly the best Missed Connection of all-time.

You: the guy who answers the phone at cottage inn pizza
Me: Hungry and stoned out of my gourd

I called you from my cell phone but had completely forgot who I was calling by the time you answered the phone. Of course, you were also baked to bajeezus and forgot to tell me that I had called Cottage Inn.

When you answered and said, “Whatsup?” I thought about it, and after a 20 second pause I told you that was hungry. You suggested I try a pizza, and I agreed that it was probably a good idea.

Then I asked you if you sold pizza and you said that you could make me one. I said I wanted anchovies and something else on my pizza. You asked me what that something else was.

We spent five minutes listing toppings until we figured out that I was trying to remember how to say: “Sun dried Tomatoes.” When you said: “We'll bake that right up for you,” we both started laughing uncontrollably.

It was the best pizza I ever had; I just wanted to thank you for helping me out.

Killer Strangelets: Best Physics Name Ever

Gizmodo pointed me to a fantastic article in New Scientist about CERN's Large Hadron Collider, set to turn on in June, and the people who think it might, accidentally, blow up the entire universe.

It won't.

But it's interesting to read the worst-case scenarios. They're pretty bad.

Wagner and Sancho's court papers raise theoretical scenarios in which the LHC could create particles that gobble up the Earth, such as "killer strangelets". Strangelets are hypothetical blobs of matter containing "strange" quarks, as well as the usual "up" and "down" types that make up ordinary matter.

If a strangelet were stable and negatively charged, it might begin eating the nuclei of ordinary matter, converting them into strange matter. Eventually the menacing chain reaction could assimilate our entire planet and everyone on it.