Jonah Lehrer’s post this past Friday, Dreaming and Remembering, shares research around the role dreams play in sorting, consolidating and strengthening memories. In a New York Times post from March, Lehrer relates an experiment from Jan Born that showed sleeping between problem solving increased their pattern detection ability allowing the participants to use a short-cut instead of the more complex brute force method.
Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming “set the stage for the emergence of insight” by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.
Lehrer ends presenting…
One of the main remaining controversies for sleep researchers is whether or not REM dreams are a mere side-effect of a subterranean process – this would suggest that the narratives themselves don’t matter – or are actually a core feature of the sleep-remembering cycle. This is an academic question with plenty of practical relevance, as it will determine whether or not it’s worth recounting our dreams in polite conversation.
Regardless of the potential findings people respond to storytelling as a method of engagement and understanding. Stories provide context for other more important content. Done well it involves the listener in a mentally interactive exercise making it easier for them to find meaning and relate the underlying messages to other important ideas. Dreams may be a “side-effect of a subterranean process” but it would be such a waste of fantastic stories.
Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.
N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)
The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”
N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)
For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.
Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.
In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.
There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.
Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?
Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.
What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.
Last month I finished authoring a chapter submission on how social artifacts mediate the deluge of content a social network consumes and how diversity of participation is an imperative to keep us from French inhaling our tweets. We are living in a time of content explosion – this was news back in 2003 when a UC Berkeley study summarizes the prior year’s information detonation:
1. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
2. We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years [1999-2001].
3. Information flows through electronic channels — telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet – contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls – including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.
All of which is insanely outdated considering YouTube alone was only founded in 2005 and yet the community produces and views more content than all the commercial production houses – consider in 2008 10 hours of video per minute were uploaded to the site. Since the 2003 study of 2002’s information explosion, we can safely say it has only grown in magnitude since. The eruption of information could easily bee seen as an individual’s need to communicate, which brings us to the modern day where a considerable amount of content is being created, vetted and spread by social networks.
Britons now spend approximately 50 minutes a day interacting socially with other people (ONS, 2003). Couples now spend less time in one another’s company and more time at work, commuting, or in the same house but in separate rooms using different electronic media devices.
The Office for National Statistics has just reported that “over the last two decades the proportion of people living alone doubled”, a trend now highly pronounced in the 25-44 age group.
A study by the Children’s Society recently found that television alone is displacing the parental role, eclipsing “by a factor of five or ten the time parents spend actively engaging with children”. Another ongoing study reports that 25% of British five-year olds own a computer or laptop of their own. In particular, the study noted an enormous increase in ‘social networking’ among younger children which “has overtaken fun (online games) as the main reason to use the Internet”.
All of this is shown to affect health and for that matter society. Family is a historically critical element of survival. It is the embedded network that should be active for life. Yet, we see that even among married couples there is less interaction even when sharing the same physical spaces. Consider that population of 25-44 year olds that are living alone and likely having less long-term intimacy and as such fewer babies. One could see this as an expression of independence. Either way, it is an alarming trait. We are expressing more than ever, constructing our identity, in some cases identities, and yet are physically more alone than ever. The Internet equals social equals the primary content of our youth, bypassing the parental input that has developed generations prior.
One-third said they have posted or sent racy images of themselves, and almost half have received them.
It is not surprising that teens would use their devices to express their sexual curiosity and interests. The porn industry paved the way for almost all commercial transactions, streaming video technology and collaboration tools. Scary, but true. Mobile devices make it easy for our pervy teens to be more out there than ever. If you can see it on FaceBook, you know the real material is floating over the mobile network. One might conclude that this level of openness is part of a generation change and thus a societal shift. There are likely others hoping our virtual fetish means teens are not having sex, clearly not the case. Sigman (the guy who write the article for the Biologist) was making a point, that it is not common for a physician to advise on a patients sex life, and yet he feels that is exactly what needs to happen. As we grow further apart, we lose some of what keeps us healthy (sexual intimacy being part of that). Teens sext, teens have sex and yet as a society we have less meaningful relationships. What exactly would Sigman have to say about this? Maybe we need to do a study on our youth, as they are the future of the world, we just get to help avoid self-destruction a while longer.
The information explosion and social networking storm are replacing the therapeutic and developmental tools of the past. Instead of parents and therapists, people are in a constant creation and editing of their identities through new media. If the online world is the safe place to explore one’s self, then why has it become a destination to a better reality? What is fascinating is that our growing immersion into a hyper-virtual-reality, where we mentally masturbate around all things “me”, is removing us from our social reality where our developed selves act and all the while, evolving into a sexually explicit twittified frenzy. Forgive me, I missed the sexting revolution, I was too busy typing on my BlackBerry, what was that?
Chris Chase, a neuropsychology professor back in college, enjoyed introducing concepts with the notion that humans are more alike than they are different. It is a useful foundation for deciding what is important to study, fundamentals that apply to everyone or the anomalies, certainly not unimportant, just narrow. And yet, humans are fascinated with differences and in particular our faces and our bodies.
Slavko Milekic, the chair of my undergraduate thesis on child friendly interfaces, evolved the face flipbook into kid-friendly touch-screen interfaces. Earlier on, in a self-study project I implemented the more traditional version of a face flipbook, allowing someone to switch parts of faces but in a more literal representation to the kid books I grew up with.
Reminder: There are too many examples of literal expression in virtual spaces that fail. It amazes me that we tend to not take on the larger challenges of inventing something new instead of replicating what we know.
Slavko introduced gesture and touch based interactions to the traditional computing environment enabling object switching, size shape and position. Certainly one of his successful creations was that of assembly of faces out of a variety of common objects like vegetables. Even at a young age, even when working with vegetables – something often seen as a challenge for children – we are fascinated with the construction of human form.
Move to the more taboo example of human nudity in art or even pornography. There are books dedicated to human genitals – again, the differences. Even when considering the world of fantasy and identity, nudity and pornography depict other people doing things that you yourself could do, by yourself, with others you know and increasingly others you do not know. So why that fascination, if not for the differences. What is it like to see an attractive someone with a certain set of features? It is all about the distinguishing marks, regardless of it being labeled art or smut.
My recent move back to New York City, more specifically Brooklyn, reminded me of the diversity I missed. A great Walt Whitman quote on a Barnes & Noble ad in my subway car read,
Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?
That must be what outgoing is, talking to the diversity around you instead of just observing. But, in fact, almost no one speaks to strangers – we even teach our children not to. However, everyone has the pleasure of enjoying diversity visually at fire hose volume in New York City and for me on my morning commute on the F train.
Professor Chase is still right, we are more alike than we are different and while we are consumed by those curious differences, I posit that our fascination exists because our distinguishing marks appear on a relatively common canvas.
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.
