Spirited Thought

The human relationship with music is an interesting one. For all of its meaning in my life, it is not something I consider a passion. I have always admired friends who are musicians or loved and immersed themselves in music. One of the projects my team has worked on over the last twelve months is an internal media library, a corporate youtube if you will. The parts that have me engaged are the social interactions and the implications of leaving tracks in online spaces.

I was listening to Regina Spektor, Lucinda Williams and Rickie Lee Jones this morning. The first I heard about from my mom, the latter two from CBS Sunday Morning. Both cases were high-touch interactions, my listening to the direct recommendation by sources I trust. Finding the music on iTunes to buy and then transfer to my iPod is actually a subtly intimate affair. I have to remember the artists, find them in the iTunes store, identify the album, part with my money and then transfer to my device so I can experience the music. iPods are inherently personal. They offer custom engraved messages letting the world know mine is mine. They communicate through an 1/8th inch jack and often into ear bud speakers directly into my head. That is the bridge from the artist’s inspiration to my brain. Now the music has access to my innermost ticking.

There is plenty of work done on the impact of music on the human being – playing classical to babies in the womb to Tibetan singing bowls. Listening to music is intimate in that we construct relationships both with those who share and we share it with but also the artist, the words and sounds that resonate with us. We time code life with it and connect with other people through gifts and gifting. In addition, we are now annotating it with ratings, tagging, comments and play lists.

WNYC runs a series called Radio Lab, a curious investigative exploration of the world that distinguishes itself with an immersive layering of sound and narration. I recently listened to the Radio Lab podcast, specifically show number 202, Musical Language, originally aired on April 21, 2006. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich host a trip looking at how the brain processes sound, and a fascinating trip it is.

Our hosts focus on how we perceive music and how language is actually very close to song. Most of us are verbally expressive and we are expert in changing the execution of our speech to communicate overtones and undertones. They interview a series of academics to explore what we understand about sound and how it is understood.

Diana Deutsch, is a professor in University of San Diago’s psychology department studying tone languages, where the same word has different meanings depending on the tone they are spoken in. Anne Fernald, Stanford Associate Professor of Development Psychology, has looked at how specific tones communicate to young infants – universal across languages. “Sound is more like touch at a distance.” Tone is a fundamental component in communication and it begs the question - What happens if you are tone deaf? Does a person of perfect pitch understand language differently?

Jonah Lehrer, author and Rhodes Scholar with a degree in neuroscience, helps us understand how sound transmits from speaker to ear. The voice box compresses air, sends waves to the eardrum, vibrating the bones, rippling fluid in the ear, releasing electricity and then our brain interprets that as sound. Mark Jude Tramo, Harvard Assistant Professor of Neurology, actually listens to the electricity and even at this low level, pleasant sounds have consistent meter, while unpleasant sounds have inconsistent meter. The word pleasant is obviously subjective, but establishes a point for discussion, after all people seem to be able to appreciate even the unpleasant – the pleasant can often become pleasant with repetition, time and linking to other highly valued experiences.

What happens when you cannot hear? Obviously, these electrical pulses are not stored along with other information in the brain. Yet it is common to read how people with disabilities develop higher sensitivity with their other senses. Considering that these tuned senses reflect the human potential, can everyone develop heightened senses, or do we need to lose one to gain development in another? Do people who do not have the use of one sense store additional information – understand and experience at a richer level, or is it just different – can it be richer if it is missing a key sense such as smell?

What is it that we find pleasant and why is it that we can so easily shift the unpleasant to the pleasant? Lehrer describes how our brains are always trying to assimilate foreign changes in audio input. Can we extrapolate that to other senses? People have different pain thresholds, derive a certain level of enjoyment from it – an outdoor hot tub in the winter can be particularly biting, but relaxing all the same. Different types of alcohol require an acquired taste – whisky is not exactly hot chocolate. Almost all alcohol varieties cultivate experts that can discern even the most subtle elements from seeing, smelling and tasting. One person’s Syrah is another person’s Sancerre, yet to a new wine drinker both might offend.

Another question: What is it when we develop addictions and what are we addicted to – the signals to the brain or the experiences we engage in? What does it mean to abuse an experience? Society tends to see harmful behavior, such as smoking and excessive drinking as addictive and abusive. If my addiction is to coffee, reading or love then it is generally accepted, even though I might actually be damaging something unknown or unseen. I am not convinced that there is anything substantially different from one compulsive behavior to another – our brains (and our bodies through our brains) create custom drug cocktails of pleasure and the vices we have affinity for might very well be arbitrary.

For my birthday, I received a new book that I had been eyeing, Happiness by Richard Layard. I am about a quarter through it and while I am not so hip to his writing style, I am enchanted by the information presented. You see, Layard is actually an economist that worked with a variety of others – psychologists, philosophers, sociologists etc. Just as you get through the initial premise you begin to think, “yeah, but how about this other aspect, you cannot discount that?!” and then he answers you before the chapter is over. You feel smart until you realize that Layard has done his home work and you, well I, get giddy being the student.

On the way into New York City, on an early train, I started scribbling some thoughts on the back of an old business card. They apply to more than just happiness and obviously resonate with my current outlook.

It is not how good it is, it is how good people think it is.

This came out of a section where Layard presents how over time people have become wealthier while happiness has stayed constant. He presents a series of examples where people show that wealth relative to others is more important than absolute increase in wealth – it is all about where people perceive they are in relation to others. Given the opportunity to have more relative to others, people elect that over an increase in wealth and no upward mobility.

It is not how good it is, it is how good people think it is.

This seems to be all that matters and all that is important in so many circumstances – politics, relationships and commercials to name a few. Everything is impression management and very often, the altruistic among us (that includes me) feel like there should be some kernel of purity worth worshiping beyond the manufactured experience. Relating this to the field of user experience design, all that matters is what users think.

What people experience is not our reality it is theirs. We do not get to decide, which really refocuses the importance of other related elements. Very often technology gets a lot of focus when, for the most part, a user rarely interacts with it – even more so when on the web. What server, middleware or backend is employed, the user has no idea or cares. As technologists, we use technology as a way of expressing ourselves, but fail when all we see is a technical problem. In the end, all that matters is what people think, in which case, as technologists we need to be far more sensitive to how we create delightful experiences. Extend that to any relationship.

Every day, we have the opportunity to create life-long memories, even more so if we pay attention to how people experience us. Who doesn’t want to be that impactful?

I heard today that hugs over twenty seconds create more trust. A little research shows that oxytocin [ok-si-toh-suhn] is at the heart of this thinking – a neurotransmitter in the brain expressed in women during labor, breastfeeding and when males or females orgasm.

Zack Lynch, someone who seems to be well regarded, highlights the research of Paul Zak and Ahlam Fakhar which shows that increases in oxytocin and estrogen affects country wide levels of trust. Lynch summarizes the findings ending with “trusting people are happier.” Dr. John Schinnerer, added that Shelly Taylor’s research links oxytocin as the foundation for the difference in innate reaction to fear when comparing males and females. Taylor et al. conclude:

It is now well-established that both animals and humans show health benefits from social contact (e.g., House, Umberson, & Landis, 1988). Positive physical contact in the form of touching, hugging, cuddling, and the like is known to release oxytocin which, in turn, has anti-stress properties. The present analysis suggests some mechanisms whereby social support may provide health protection … accompanying relaxation. As such, oxytocin may confer health benefits (cf. Ryff & Singer, 1998).

Dr. Schinnerer gives us the winning quote:

…oxytocin can be produced via hugs longer than 20 seconds which creates more trust in women.

Simple lesson of the day, hug more and hug longer.

Music has the wonderful property of time coding life. At first, I thought maybe that was because music is released over time, but I think that is only a partial contributor. This would be most noticeable if you are a fan of contemporary music, regardless of genera. I am a sucker for pop hits, and so for me, it is very obvious that what I am listening to is associated with different periods of time, because the music itself gained popularity over the course of a specific year. I like a lot of music and tend to experience it in bursts, almost obsessively. When this happens the music is not specific to a time period. Usually, it is music that someone has shared with me and was good enough to not put down. So, the other part of associating music with life is tied to the act of listening enough to imprint the experience alongside memories.

I can revisit a feeling or memory just playing a tune, like Ella Fitzgerald singing Baby its cold outside with Louis Jordan. It takes me back to a winter season about the same time the movie Elf came out – which had a fun rendition of the duet. Another example is the first time I heard Father and son by Cat Stevens. I was in Switzerland, coming down from hiking glaciers in the Alps, heading toward the hostel in the town of Interlaken. A friend had told me find her bag and borrow her cassette mix. I cannot recall all of the songs, but I know them when I hear them. The memories are strong enough that I know how I felt listening to them and the excitement of having connected with a life-long friend. Most recently, I have been obsessed with the same few songs, one in particular, Major Label Debut by Broken Social Scene. I am sure years from now this song, along with others, will let me recall this time, this year.

Anyone living a Web 2.0 lifestyle – using applications like Flickr or Technorati – is sure to have seen a tag cloud. Typically tag clouds depict the frequency a tag has been used within a system. The larger the word, the more times that tag has been used. The idea is that tag clouds are a good indicator of community behavior, which is very misleading.

Tag clouds do provide a navigation interface which requires almost zero learning. Relative size seems like a universal concept for importance. Clicking on a tag usually shows a collection of items tagged with that word. The cloud is often contextual to a given page so digging into a collection is as simple as clicking tags in the cloud.

Tag clouds as we know them are actually not very useful. They are, in fact, a tease – so easy to use and communicating just enough to be interesting. The problem is that just because a tag is used in high frequency is not an indicator for what a community finds interesting. It is literally a display of how often a tag is used within a given context. In many cases the word flower is distinguished from flowers, even though they are obviously very similar in spelling and meaning.

A friend and colleague pointed me to a blog posting discussing how clusters were introduced to Flickr – groupings of related tags without the use of a high-level label or facet. If clustering can be done well, it offers a more interesting possibility for tag clouds. Instead of simply reflecting the use of a given tag, tag clouds could display the activity for a given cluster. It might very well be that the community is interested in food, but more people are using the tags “family”, “friends”, and “porn” so, as a user, you would never know. The use of clusters is an opportunity to reveal the higher level topics a community is actively working with. Flickr has chosen not to label their clusters. You can actually explore Tags / clusters / clusters. However, all you are really doing is browsing clusters of tagged images that are also tagged clusters. A less confusing example is exploring Tags / summer / clusters which limits the clustering to all images tagged with summer, which can be seen as a facet – a folk-facet. Certainly the URL convention makes it feel like a facet, but, is it really?

[digression starts]

Taxonomists seem to be fascinated with the emergence of folksonomies, but are quick to remind you that they are very different things. So, a facet that is applied by a user is different that one used by someone versed in the science of classification. Again, at first glance, Flickr appears to be automatically identifying facets, but is really just generating clusters from leftover tags. For example, look for clusters on Bergdorf Goodman and you get items tagged nyc, newyorkcity, newyork, etc. A typical faceted browse might show a breakdown within that category of clothing lines (i.e. mens, womens, childrens etc). Instead you are left with the breakdown of whatever the collection has been tagged. So, while it is possible to select a tag that might be a facet, for Flickr, it is not a facet, it is a tag. However, I would maintain that a user could intend to apply a facet through tagging, but the usefulness of that tag as a facet is lost because the system itself is unaware of the higher level categorization. Additionally, it would require that the tags, if clustered browsing was going to return a faceted collection would need to be limited to those expected from a faceted collection. (i.e. In the case of Bergdorf, mens, womens or childrens) Otherwise, the faceted browsing would be a mess, worse than not having the ability at all, because there would be no science to the tagging.

Taxonomies and formal faceted browsing are different activities from tagging and need separate user experiences. In that last example, it is clear that a user could intend a tag to have a higher level grouping property, but unless the system understands this then it is in fact, just a tag. If categorization was important in Flickr, I would expect a different interface from tagging to facilitate the classification.

I often ask what the difference is between content that is tagged or categorized “dog”. If I were surfing facets I might have different breeds under “dog” and maybe items tagged “dog” without a breed. If I were surfing tags, I would expect all dogs and if interested in a breed, I would enter it as a tag. Combine the two and I might browse a collection by facet, “dog” and then filter by tag, “flatfaced.” Is this any different than compound tagging, where one tag is ANDed to another tag? (i.e. dog AND flatfaced) Is the difference limited to the intention of the user who assigned “dog” as a facet and not as a tag? What happens when a user applies the same word to both the category and tag? Are they plugged into formal classification enough to distinguish the differences in meaning? Should they be? Should they care?

[digression ends]

Someone needs to birth version 2.0 of the tag cloud where the visualization is driven by the clustering of tags and not just the use frequency of a tag. Maybe someone has. I can even imagine layering user activity of browsing tagged items on top of the activity of users tagging. A fabulous side project!

I once heard that eighty percent of what we think of today, we thought of yesterday. I enjoy optimizing my world, so increasing the percentage of new thought seems a worthy goal.

Wikipedia lists the United States having a 99.9% literacy rate, citing the CIA World Fact Book. Check the footnote reading that 44 million people (one in seven) can read but not to level of understanding a job application, a food label or utility bill. Consider the fact that when I consider literacy, I do not include this group of 44 million.

Among the educated workforce – college level and above – I routinely witness great disparities in literacy. Being able to read and write are the single most important capabilities of an educated mind and those who write well often read.

Reading is an activity where the brain is engaged. Active readers comprehend the content, exploring what it means. The content influences the formation of language and founds our ability to create more complex conceptual relationships. This complexity adds layers of depth to our thinking and appreciation of the world around us.

Add to the list of what it means to be literate the appreciation of art and music and we get closer to what real literacy is about. There is a texture that only can be felt by wide exposure to new ideas through the mediums of text, images and sound. More importantly is for us to share the pieces of our overwhelming vast and growing collection of media that we believe are of meaningful quality.

The more we read the more we change and the less yesterday’s thinking is today’s.

Being better together is part of healthy relationships. Without one of the two something possible is suddenly not. Life in general has always struck me as an endless list of Choose Your Own Adventure. Pick something, live it and pick another. Anything is possible and some of the best choices are who we pick to connect with, to relate to.

We automatically get our parents, regardless of their availability and quality. No matter their condition, parents form foundational psychological artifacts creating a relationship. The impossibility was your existence and any psychological reality they provided you with, at a minimum their absence or presence.

An obvious relationship is that of the significant other, the wife, husband, girl-friend, boy-friend or lover. These are the people with whom you are truly better with than without and the one that society will identify as your other half. Together quality of life is often enhanced and more psychological artifacts are created, offering future possibilities to work through our reality and conceptions therein. We hope this person will deliver the trust, security and love it requires to break down deeper fears and barriers to wonderment.

Other fantastic relationships are those who are our mentors. Mentors are objects in the mirror that are closer than they appear. They are often individuals who can see something about you that you desire for yourself or they know you need and can help you achieve. In business, mentors are invaluable. They should be sought after even more in life. Even the bad ones teach some of the best lessons. The best transform in a way that no one else could – the envy of a significant other, the one who desires to be all things to their partner. While a significant other might be a mentor, they tend not to have the objectivity or know-how to articulate the required personal change. Mentors are often reverse mentored receiving from the relationship, not just giving. Together, both individuals have the opportunity to grow, create some more psychological artifacts, hopefully more building blocks than plaque.

Muses are a bit tricky. A muse inspires. Together the fruits of that inspiration better the world, regardless of the significance. The psychological artifacts come from both the interactions with the muse and the resulting product of the inspiration. For some a muse helps create better poetry and art. In other instances it is a significant other inspiring to create a better life, be a better person. Mentors could be muses, both helping move in a specific direction and acting as the model and inspiration for how to execute (i.e. how to act a certain way by replicating seen behavior). They can be people we do not know well or those who are our closest friends. Muses are important to have so that we may dream the next turn in our adventure instead of just turning the page to find out what happens.

Figments are things of our own creation. We are the lone creators of the psychological artifact. They help articulate the relationship we have with ourselves. Figments can be dreams or visualizations of our how we want the world to be.

One of the best questions I recently started asking of any relationship, is why am I looking for something here instead of somewhere else. It forces you to articulate the purpose of your actions and identify meaning specific to this relationship and in turn, the connections you have with others. With the multitude of relationships we create in the world, knowing why we seek the company of one and not another can deepen our understanding and connection to all.

In recent years, the topic of social networking has gained a considerable amount of buzz. I wish a week could go by without someone showing me yet another graph visualization of an individual’s contacts and concepts they share with others.

I approach this kind of exploration with a more fundamental reasoning which purports that the most efficient social network is powered by people. We do not know who we do not know someone else knows and that is one of the reasons people are fascinated with social networking visualizations.

If you could show me the people my friends know and their friends know, I would know so many more people! On the other hand, deliver semi-random connections, like the introductions from Monster.com, and they are as good as or better than the contacts resulting from people who know people I know. Is it possible a semi-random introduction is as valuable as an introduction that was sent through a social network meat grinder?

Consider friends-of-friends and so on, and my list of potential contacts grows exponentially with very little effort. People marvel at the volume of connections six degrees of separation yields. How valuable are contacts that do not know me and know someone I do not? It is not about the network. It is about the people acting in the network.

I have participated in social network communities and have seen a lot of visualizations showing my connections to others, but let’s face it, I already know my network and the topics I share with others. Accordingly, my network nourishes itself bringing people together around any topic inside or outside the inner circle, in a way only human intention can. Do I really expect that a computer’s analysis will provide unique and unexpected connections?

I am not a complete naysayer, there is merit in this work, but the current state of eye candy provides little value, showing people what they already know. If, by chance, users discover something new, the value of the system diminishes, because there is even less to unveil – a tough proposition for social systems to overcome.

The Big Moo is a book that I found refreshing, both in format and in content. It had many authors, each with their own story and that was part of what made it compelling. After the read I started looking up the authors of interest and landed on Amit Gupta’s blog. Amit has been involved with several ventures, one of them called ChangeThis.com.

ChangeThis starts with the premise, that in a world of brief MTV moments, where the attention span of almost every modern human would qualify for Ritalin, there are actually people who have a voice, an argument, one that is well thought out and crafted to be declared a manifesto. Manifestos worthy of reading will propagate organically through the digital waves into the hands of people that get turned on by thinking and possibly changing their point of view. Published in Adobe Acrobat format means virtually universal accessibility. The design, common across all manifestos, is easy to read on digital screens. Each inherits the same navigation and focus on the content. The best part is that ChangeThis is not about making a buck, something that is rare in our jazzed Web 2.0 sphere.

While my blogging is not habitual, this certainly was a delayed post. It came inspired by a most recent The Rewritten Rules of Management by Tom Ehrenfeld. Funny enough, Ehrenfeld rated Moo a “B,” which is actually quite fair– it probably depends on how any one of the 33 stories impacts the reader. The person that gained irreversible insight probably gave it an “A+.” The manifesto is about Bill Swanson’s recent plagiarism. Which reminded me of an article in the Communications of the ACM, “Plagiarism on the Rise” by Ronald Boisvert and Mary Jane Irwin. It discusses the general reasons for the increase in plagiarism and introduces the new ACM Plagiarism Policy. One would think it goes without saying that taking another persons work and calling it your own is problematic. In fact, I thought this type of behavior was already prohibited in the ACM Code of Ethics under the section of honesty. Conceiving and nurturing an original idea is hard work and for some impossible.

A professor once told me, there are no new ideas, and for the ones that are genuine there is someone on the other side of the world that thought of the same thing at the same second and its all a race to see who is capable of communicating it first. I have seen so many people hand me documents that were from a website verbatim, that I think it might actually be part of a new generation of thought – why actually try to think when others have thought for you… just remember to give credit to the people who took the time to think. And, by the way, Ehrenfeld’s manifesto is about a “B.” It could have been shorter, tighter and delivered with more consequence.