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.

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.

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.

How much information? 2003, Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian

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.

Aric Sigman authored an interesting article in the February issue of Biologist titled, “Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, where he presents various findings and side effects of our social affliction.

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”.

“Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, Aric Sigman, Biologist

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.

Teens’ nude photos get unexpected results, Irene Sege, Boston Globe

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?

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.

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.

I have experienced through reading, administering developmental and behavioral experiments in college and, best of all, life, a variety of people with their demons. In every case, even when they were labeled with the same words, the demons were different and more importantly, the people were different. I start listening as if I know nothing, because for any given person it might be different and who am I to put my baggage on them.

For all the desire to master the brain through therapy and psychopharmacology, everyone is a unique case that we flounder to understand, the most talented among us saving our fellow man. Add to that my general feeling that we all have demons, even the most blessed and hopefully you get a sense that I am not against medication. I am, however, against what is a growing trend of medicating without answering why we are suddenly in the position of having to do so at such an alarming rate. A recent New York Times article, Proof Is Scant on Psychiatric Drug Mix for Young, by Gardiner Harris, pulled together some great research on medicating children.

Antidepressants are commonly paired with stimulants, but antidepressant use has declined over the last year after the F.D.A. warning about suicide risk. In their place, physicians are prescribing combinations that include antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs, according to Medco. From 2001 to 2005, the use of antipsychotic drugs in children and teenagers grew 73 percent, Medco found. Among girls, antipsychotic use more than doubled.

As with almost anything worth thinking about, there is plenty of complexity below the surface. This article is about how we medicate our children, apparently 1.6 million of them with 280K under 10 years old. To be counted, they needed to be prescribed two psychiatric drugs.

More than 500,000 were prescribed at least three psychiatric drugs. More than 160,000 got at least four medications together, the analysis found.

Harris tells us that some studies show adults benefiting from two drug cocktails specifically around depression, OCD, and the mania associated with bipolar. As with any study, others show no conclusions of import.

The use of two-medicine combinations in children is on much shakier ground. Even for single drugs, the effectiveness of some psychiatric medications in younger patients is questionable: most trials of antidepressants in depressed children, for instance, fail to show any beneficial effect. But hardly any studies have examined the safety or the effectiveness of medicine combinations in children. A 2003 review in The American Journal of Psychiatry found only six controlled trials of two-drug combinations. Four of the six failed to show any benefit; in a fifth, the improvement was offset by greater side effects.

If the evidence for two-drug combinations is minimal, for three-drug combinations it is nonexistent, several top experts said.

As members of one of the most developed societies, it is safe to say even the adults are struggling to make sense of their world, even the non-medicated. We have data showing that since 2001 we have begun heavily medicating our children in ways our best psychiatrists are unable to rationalize. If the reality we create in our minds, arguably the only reality that exists, is unnecessarily affected by doping, what is the affect on our ability to construct a different one?

For some, medication brings them closer to center, often with side affects, but more desirable than being consumed with self-destruction. I have heard that relative to their un-medicated state, some drugs slow things down too much or keep people in a fuzz. I think it is probably worth it if you suddenly have the opportunity to ponder the world of your design – for all you know you might be living in someone else’s.

For those of us who are challenged with loved ones who need medication, may we have the wisdom to withhold our own discomfort and psychological effects, so that medicating is done, not for us, but for you. As for the overly medicated children among us, may we not screw you up to the point where you can no longer consider what is real.

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.

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.

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.

This morning on CNN a story ran on a child who never felt pain. I made a comment that it reminded me of the stories one might find by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and more specifically the one about the woman who could not feel her own body.

CIPA (congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis) is an inherited degenerative disorder affecting the autonomic nervous system – a big deal, as this is where the heart comes in and the nervous system lives. Two key symptoms surface as the lack of feeling pain and the lack of perspiration. In CNN’s story about Roberto, they mention he can not be held, because he sucks the heat out of you. My comment was not speaking to the scientific characteristics; instead it was one of the social impacts of not feeling.

What kind of mental model for pain would a person who can not feel it, have? What kind of mental model for world pain (not individual human suffering) would they have? If they do not have the concrete knowledge of pain, how would they work with the abstract concept when applied to thoughts, imagination, inanimate objects or abstract concepts like a country?

Reach back into a psychology class and thinking about Skinner and conditioning. Try and recall the experiment where the animal, I think it was a rodent, was provided food when it hit a lever – reward the rat and the rat will continue. Map this back to people with CIPA. In the absence of sensory stimuli and limited interactions with others (not being able to be held, presumably cuddled), what is created to match the Skinner-stimuli we all use to operate in the world? Roberto might be aware of a lava stone massage one might get at a spa, but not think much of it. For those who see touch as healing and the need for it, what does it mean for those with CIPA?