'One is practicing latent inhibition when one tries to ignore an ongoing sound (like an air conditioner) or tune out the conversation of others. This tendency to disregard or even inhibit formation of memory, by preventing associative learning of observed stimuli, is an unconscious response and is assumed to prevent sensory overload and cognitive overload. -- Most people are able to ignore the constant stream of incoming stimuli, but this capability is reduced in those with low latent inhibition. Low latent inhibition seems to often correlate with distracted behaviors. This distractedness can manifest itself as general inattentiveness, a tendency to switch subjects without warning in conversation, and other absentminded habits. This is not to say that all distractedness can be explained by low latent inhibition, nor does it necessarily follow that people with low LI will have a hard time paying attention. It does mean, however, that the higher quantity of incoming information requires a mind capable of handling it. High levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine (or its agonists) in the ventral tegmental area of the brain have been shown to decrease latent inhibition. Certain dysfunctions of the neurotransmitters glutamate, serotonin and acetylcholine have also been implicated. Low latent inhibition is not a mental disorder but an observed personality trait, and a description of how an individual absorbs and assimilates data or stimuli.'

The "depletion effect" from Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow: 'Kahneman's book revolves around his distinction between knee-jerk "System 1" thinking and logical "System 2" thinking. When the costs of cognition rise, we use System 2 less, giving impulsive System 1 freer reign.' -- 'I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another, substitution... Faced with a genuinely difficult question, [people] answer a different, easier question, then conflate the answer to their question with the answer to your question. ...substitution is a plausible explanation of not only the absurdity of many popular views about how the economy works, but people's certainty about these absurdities.'

'Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted.'

'Taking Iraq and President Bush as starting points, and examining the defense mechanisms we use to cope with both, yields the unsurprising conclusion that we are a society of narcissists. While this discovery is familiar to readers of my blog, what might be a surprise is what this heralds for our society politically and economically. It isn't socialism, or even communism, as I had feared. It's feudalism. Let's begin.' -- Defence mechanisms: 'Splitting/Dissociation: reducing the other person to a binary abstraction of all good or all bad, is a primitive, or regressive, defense mechanism used when the emotional level and complexity is greater than a person's capacity to interpret it. Inherent in the act of splitting is apathy. You don't try to find a solution to the problem person, the split is the solution. It allows you not to have to deal with the other, because you've decided that the other is irredeemable. #Projection/Scapegoating #Denial #Reaction Formation/"Going overboard."'

'...after the child read a sentence (such as "The farmer drove the tractor to the barn") the child would move the toys to act out the sentence. In the control condition, other children would read and then reread the sentences. The children who acted out the sentences remembered much more about the stories than those who simply reread the stories. -- Although she didn't know it by that name, the great educator Maria Montessori recognized the importance of embodied cognition a long time ago. In 1967 she wrote, "Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes about through his movements ... Mind and movement are parts of the same entity." Scientists are only now discovering just how right she was.'

Embodied Cognition -- 'As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. “How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body. We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.” -- The body embodies abstractions the best way it knows how: physically. -- ...when students were told that a particular book was vital to the curriculum, they judged the book to be physically heavier than those told the book was ancillary to their studies. “Something heavy is something you should take care of,” he continued. “Heavy things are not easily pushed around, but they can easily push us around.” They are weighty affairs in every tine of the word.'

#Prestige-status #Domination-status -- Comment: tom: "Only when we have no ‘near’ relationship to a person can there really be ['far'] prestige pride separate from ['near'] domination pride. Fear applies near only, but envy applies near and far." -- Comment: mjgeddes: "I claim there are actually 3 thought modes (very near, near, far), 3 types of reasoning, (deductive logic, bayesian induction, categorization), 3 types of intelligence (domain specific, rational, emotional), 3 types of causality (structure, action-potential, signal), 3 types of politics (conservatism, libertarianism, socialism) and so forth. I think there are 3 types of status, (1) Domination-status, (2) Prestige-status and (3) Charm-Status. Charm-Status: social skills, life of the party, good entertainer, sort of thing. 3-fold classification of personality types: Warriors (Domination status). Tycoons (Prestige Status) and Artists (Charm Status). I actually put Domination status as ‘very near’..." -- *nodding*

'Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work. -- “Every purchase you make, every interaction you have, every judgment you make can be put along a continuum from fluent to disfluent. If you can understand how fluency influences judgment, you can understand many, many, many different kinds of judgments better than we do at the moment.” “Disfluency functions as a cognitive alarm. It sets up a cognitive roadblock and makes people think, and it triggers a sense of risk and concern.” “Fluent things are familiar, but also boring and comfortable. Disfluency is intriguing and novel."'

'Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say. -- Professor Philip Davis, said: "Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things."'

'The idea may be "unpalatable", but companies seeking an edge over their rivals should ensure that children are exposed to their brands as early in life as possible. If a brand had been experienced from birth, the students were quicker to recognise it as real than if it had been encountered from age five and up. ...words (and presumably brands too) encountered early in life shape the maturing brain in such a way that a life-long advantage is maintained for processing those early words. ...participants aged between 50 and 83 years were quicker to recognise early brands over newer, current brands, even if the early brands were long since defunct.'

'...metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies. -- “What we’ve discovered in the last 30 years is--surprise, surprise--people think with their brains,” says Lakoff. “And their brains are part of their bodies.” -- To the extent that metaphors reveal how we think, they also suggest ways that physical manipulation might be used to shape our thought. In essence, that is what much metaphor research entails. And while psychologists have thus far been primarily interested in using such manipulations simply to tease out an observable effect, there’s no reason that they couldn’t be put to other uses as well, by marketers, architects, teachers, parents, and litigators, among others. A few psychologists have begun to ponder applications. Ackerman, for example, is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder.'

"People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns." -- "What is critical here is that our participants were not expecting to encounter this bizarre story. If you expect that you'll encounter something strange or out of the ordinary, you won't experience the same sense of alienation. You may be disturbed by it, but you won't show the same learning ability."' -- *gulps, not wanting to wake up as a bug*

'...men are left cognitively impaired by [the presence of a female], an effect that seems to be related to the diversion of cognitive resources towards the challenge of creating the best possible impression. -- That men, but not women, were affected by a brief mixed-sex encounter is consistent with research in evolutionary psychology (and with received wisdom) showing that men are more motivated by mating goals. -- Karremans' team said their findings could have important real-life implications, for example in relation to whether schooling should be single or mixed-sex. "Part of boys' valuable cognitive resources may be spent on impressing their female class members," they said.'

'Once we recognise that it is possible to enjoy a lie with intent, this form of deceit becomes more understandable and more complex. The act of telling the lie brings a kind of profit: an adrenaline rush, a feeling of superiority or accomplishment. Just like a lie that defends self-esteem, one with intent can make a liar feel good. Meanwhile most of us don't spend a lot of time in our daily lives wondering, "Am I being lied to?" This psychological phenomenon, in which we assume we aren't being deceived, is known as the truth bias: our default belief is that other people are telling the truth. Someone needs to give us a compelling reason to think they're lying; otherwise the idea never occurs to us. To scrutinise a statement for the truth takes up mental energy – and we like to save that ...this allows liars to float beneath our cognitive radar. Other times, we simply don't want to uncover a lie. ...the "willing accomplice principle" may operate more powerfully than we might expect.'

'... when volunteers read about two job candidates whose resumes were printed side-by-side, right-handers tended to choose the person described on the right, but left-handers chose the one on the left, again being unconsciously swayed by their experience of space more than the conventions of language and culture. ...neuronal circuits that control concrete perceptions and actions also handle abstract thoughts. Casasanto calls it the Body-Specificity Hypothesis. And it implies that people with different physical characteristics, such as being right- or left-handed, form different abstract concepts, corresponding to those physical traits. For southpaws, the left side of any space has positive moral, intellectual, and emotional connotations; for righties, the right side does.'

'Take a look at this quiver full of twisty arrows I made up, to represent thinking styles.' -- Brill.

'...powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.” We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds.' -- Last page: On the pharma-co-logic of the casino-capitalism model. Grim.

'Benzon's proposal derives from the finding that memories are often mood dependent: people tend to recall autobiographical memories of when they were happy when they are happy once again, and they best recall memories of loss and failure when they are sad. Benzon says: "My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood."' -- Findings from the "Sarah Cole" study: 'When angry one thinks forward from a slight or injustice towards possibilities of what to do about it, including possibilities of vengeance. When sad, one backtracks mentally from the loss or mistake to what might have caused it.' -- And it should be precisely the reverse.

'For Walton, fiction yields only pseudo-emotions. If we go to the cinema to watch a thriller and feel frightened, this is not real fear. -- Pierce counters Walton's: It is badly misleading, though perfectly ‘natural,’ to say that acting is pretending. To say this connotes that the pretender falsifies himself, though he knows perfectly well who he really is. But the actor-artist is searching for himself through enactment---experimentally finding the other “in” himself, and so finding and developing himself in his freedom. If he is in a production with a pre-established script, the playwright has left a character type to be enacted.' -- In fiction we visit in imagination places we have never seen, we become people whom we are not, we enter many more situations than a lifetime could contain. In doing so we—like Wilshire's actor—undertake mental enactments. Thereby, we discover aspects of ourselves, a perfectly good outcome for the emotions we experience.'

'In the 2008ies we need some new way to keep ourselves from thinking. I don’t know the right word for the new way, but maybe something like a “cinderellism“? Like, you know - that tale, where a simple girl suddenly gets everything? Yeah, the midnight is kind of a downer, but, none of these above stories seem to talk about that. Since there’s a lot of problems around, you need to: 1) be deterred from thinking about those problems; 2) vote for the right guys, just to make sure that YOU chose him. Which later, as Robert Cialdini teaches us, leaves you in defensive position even if you made a bad decision... So, you chose The President, now you must approve what he does - he’s your decision. This is really weird - every other day I hear another Cinderella story, but it stops right before midnight. It’s like some weird recurring dream. It seems like marketing/political plays, made to drive sales/elections. But what if ALL those guys were hired actors?…'

'.. the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation – they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are ...their reality arrives without a filter. -- "Adults can follow directions and focus, and that's great," says John Colombo, a psychologist at the University of Kansas. "But children, it turns out, are much better at picking up on all the extraneous stuff that's going on. And this makes sense: If you don't know how the world works, then how do you know what to focus on? You should try to take everything in."' -- On purposefully reducing activity in the brain's prefrontal cortex: 'Baudelaire was right: "Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."' -- Life in widescreen with fat pipes

On the increasing use of brain stimulants Adderall, Ritalin, and Provigil -- 'Anjan Chatterjee worries about "cosmetic neurology", but he thinks that it will eventually become as acceptable as cosmetic surgery' -- ...when enthusiasts share their vision of our neuroenhanced future it can sound dystopian. Zack Lynch, of NeuroInsights, gave me a rationale for smart pills that I found particularly grim. ”If we eventually decide that neuroenhancers work, and are basically safe, will we one day enforce their use?" -- Nicholas Seltzer sees his habit as a pursuit that aligns him with a larger movement for improving humanity. Using neuroenhancers, he said, “is like customizing yourself—customizing your brain.” For some people, he went on, it was important to enhance their mood, so they took antidepressants; but for people like him it was more important “to increase mental horsepower.” He added, “It’s fundamentally a choice you’re making about how you want to experience consciousness.”'

'Studies show the brain is wired to get a quick high from reading things that agree with our point of view. The same studies proved that, strangely, we also get a rush from intentionally dismissing information that disagrees, no matter how well supported it is. Yes, our brain rewards us for being closed-minded dicks. So with a little prodding, the followers will happily close themselves in the same echo chamber of talk radio, blogs and cable news outlets that give them that little "They agree with ME!" high.' -- Oh dear.

d'Aquili 's and Newberg's cognitive operators: #1 Holistic: allows us to view reality as a whole or as a gestalt #2 Reductionistr: allows us to look at the whole picture and break it down into an analysis of individual parts #3 Causal: permits reality to be viewed in terms of causal sequences #4 Abstractive: permits the formation of general concepts from the perception of individual facts #5 Binary: allows us to extract meaning from the external world by ordering abstract elements into dyads. A dyad is a group of two elements that are opposed to each other in their meaning. Therefore, dyads include good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice, happy and sad, and heaven and hell…each opposite, in some ways, derives its meaning from its contrast with the other opposite #6 Quantitativer: permits the abstraction of quantity from the perception of various elements #7 Emotional Value: permits us to assign a particular emotional value to various elements of perception and cognition

"Results suggested that thinking fast made participants feel more elated, creative and, to a lesser degree, energetic and powerful. Activities that promote fast thinking, then, such as whip­ping through an easy crossword puzzle or brain-storming quickly about an idea, can boost energy and mood, says psychologist Emily Pronin, the study’s lead author. It is unclear why thought speed affects mood, but Pronin and her colleagues theorize that our own expectations may be part of the equation. In earlier research, they found that people generally believe fast thinking is a sign of a good mood. This lay belief may lead us to instinctively infer that if we are thinking quickly we must be happy. In addition, they suggest, thinking quickly may unleash the brain’s novelty-loving dopamine system, which is involved in sensations of pleasure and reward." -- One for the game happiologists

'Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities. "Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change."'

'This new species of extremely appealing, touchy, feely, humanoid machine puts Sherry Turkle on edge. She believes people are passionately attaching themselves to sociable robots, and fantasizing a reciprocal interest from these machines. “You care about them and want them to care about you. Nurturance turns out to be the killer app in robotics. There is a danger that we’ll become accustomed to superficial cyber connections, and develop lower expectations for human to human interactions," says Turkle. Cyber intimacy may lead to cyber solitude. And you can turn off a robot when it bores you, or conversely, depend on it to “live” forever, while human relations come with endless baggage, complexities and sometimes unhappy endings. “Roboticists have come to speak of ‘I Thou’ relationships with machines, but what is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to the shared store of human meaning? These are not questions with ready made answers.”

"Young scientists are encouraged by a personal experience with an object they an understand and with which they can tinker. Playing with objects inn their own way leads children to build a personal scientific style. There has been no simple migration to a new digital world. Children grow up in many worlds–they are seduced by the virtual but always brought back to the physical, to the analog, and, of course, to nature. ...from the periodic table of the elements (because it offers an image of perfect and reassuring organization) to LEGO blocks (because they offer a way to create perfect and reassuring symmetries) can become points of entry to larger transformative experiences of understanding and confidence very often at the point they are shared."

"... children and seniors develop philosophical positions that are inseparable from their emotional needs. Affect and cognition wok together in the subjective response to relational technologies." -- "Orelia wants the kind of love that only a living creature can provide. She fears the ability of any creature to behave 'as if' it could love. She denied a chilly emotional reality by attributing qualities of intuition, transparency and connectedness to all people and animals. A philosophical position about robots is linked to an experience of the machine-like qualities of which people are capable, a good example of the interdependence of philosophical position and psychological motivation." -- "Relational artifacts, as objects between the living and not living, may have some special. As one nursing home resident said about Paro: 'I don't care if he is real or not. I love him."

A commonsense: 'Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. -- The Multitasking Crash. The Attention-Deficit Recession. -- Our freedom to stay busy at all hours, at the task—and then the many tasks, and ultimately the multitask—of trying to be free. This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. ...What has the madness of multitasking cost us? (Six hundred and fifty billion dollars...) The better question might be: What hasn’t it?' -- Hehe. NO BAILOUTS FOR THE ATTENTION ECONOMY!

"Why on earth should we encourage people to perform a mental disorder in the digital world??" -- "Just as with multiple personality, mainstream media has made autism and ADD appear to be commonplace and acceptable. Technologists have also adopted and promoted these concepts, marking them as valuable to the way of geek life. Many of you are staring at your laptops, multitasking. Although you will only remember a fragment of this talk, you will probably tell me that you remembered the important part or that you were practicing your continuous partial attention. Some of you may already be ninja masters at this, but the majority of you are probably paying poor attention to both the computer task and to me. But you *want* to be a continuous partial attention ninja master because you've been told that all of the cool kids are." -- "Do we really want a social life that encourages autistic interactions?"

"Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all... (Newspeak Dictionary)" -- "You can't say anything complicated or nuanced in 140 characters. ...try explaining Plato's cave in those confines. Can't be done. You might allude to it, but you could not present it to someone who didn't know about it already. And Twitter encourages people to accept a medium that severely constrains communication, and calls a defect a virtue. Twitter feeds [the multi-tasking] addiction, that false sense of urgency. Most things can wait. Indeed, a lot of things are better off waiting. But we are encouraged to be plugged in, overstimulated all the time, at the expense of higher quality human relations."

"Despite their differences, psychoanalysis and AI have always shared theoretical affinities –among these, the challenge to the idea of the autonomous, intentional actor, the need for self-reference in theory building, and the need for objects such as censors to deal with internal conflict. The strength and the weakness of object theories are the same in both psychoanalysis and AI: the strength is a conceptual framework that offers rich possibilities for models of interactive process; the weakness is that the framework may be too rich. The postulated object may be too powerful: they explain the mind by postulating many minds within it."

rapier: "I'm supposed to spend 6 months obsessing over a twitter account so I can glean some backstory that is, essentially, tangential to the story line? As much as people like to come up with alternatives to sequential, and essentially complete, story lines the fact is that its a structure that's been with us for thousands of years. The basic form has arisen multiple times across widely divergent cultures. Its not because its been imposed on us by some sort of outside force but because its a reflection of the way humans create their own internal narratives. Reality might not have a narrative but we create one because we need it in order to make sense of the world around us." -- LanceMiller: "...keep user/viewer interactions tied to one username across all media with their age and city as the profile data viewable to all. Then allow a Google-esque AI mine across all these media gathering that username's input, ultimately constructing a Meta-User-Synopsis of what that user injects..."

"What is immediately apparent is how lexically impoverished is most speech, as compared to written language. It is sometimes argued or implied that the type of words present in print but not represented in speech are unnecessary words—jargon, academic doublespeak, elitist terms of social advantage, or words used to maintain the status of the users but that serve no real functional purpose. [Such words] are not unnecessary appendages, concocted to exclude those who are unfamiliar with them. They are words that are necessary to make critical distinctions in the physical and social world in which we live."

"Cognizers can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology, thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own brain power. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows cognizers to offload some of their cognitive functions onto the brains of other cognizers. And as with language, the cognitive tool par excellence, such technological changes are not merely instrumental and quantitative: they can have profound effects on how we think and encode information, on how we communicate with one another, on our mental states, and on our very nature.

Wrongness may be defined as the attempt to reject aesthetically or repudiate the constraints of popularity after the compromises to achieve it have already been made. Since it is so self-referential, it tends to be politically and artistically sterile. The appeal of such wrongness is limited mainly to connoisseurs of disillusionment and cynicism, and more important, to those “true fans” of the contemptuous artists. By sticking with performers no matter how much hatred they direct at their audiences, these fans prove they are not dilettantes."

Don't be too proud of this ontological terror you've constructed...

"... the problem is the weakening of our ability to think things through for ourselves. Sadly, some even glorify and encourage this disturbing trend. Remember 2005's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking?"

"Question is, do you get off Google or stay on all the time? I think that even if the penalty is that you lose 20 points of your natural IQ when you get off Google AI, most of us will choose to keep the 40 IQ points we gain by jacking in all the time."

"We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize... and, all too often, we miss the fine point."

"... the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture... The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the *idea* of reading War and Peace."

"We cannot control the types of problems that future analysts might face. We believe a key dimension of exploring changing data will be the ability to manipulate time in the synthetic worlds – in effect turning these worlds into Time Machines." -- Pfft!

"EF comprises not only effortful control and cognitive focus but also working memory and mental flexibility.... counterintuitive as it seems, early exposure to dramatic play and cognitive games better prepares kids for mastery of traditional academics."

"The MACS project does not attempt to get robots to perceive what something is, but how it can be used.... the cognitive theory of ‘affordances’... focuses on what a thing or environment enables a user to do."

Christopher Caldwell: “I also begin to understand for the first time what an addiction is... It’s a desperate need to simplify. An addiction is a gravitation towards anything that plausibly mimics life while being less complicated than life.”

Dr. Anjan Chatterjee: "cosmetic neurology" -- Dr. Barbara Sahakian: "The desire for cognitive enhancement is very strong, maybe stronger than for beauty, or athletic ability."

"Evolutionary psychology is focused on how evolution has shaped the mind and behavior. Though applicable to any organism with a nervous system, most research in evolutionary psychology focuses on humans."

"... people with autism spectrum disorder have a number of strengths: a higher prevalence of perfect pitch, enhanced ability with 3-D drawing and pattern recognition, more accurate graphic recall, and various superior memory skills."

"In this new three-part series, leading theoretical physicist and futurist Dr Michio Kaku explores the cutting edge science of today, tomorrow, and beyond."

"The company hopes that the data will better enable to them to design user interfaces that people find easy to use. Whether users will want Microsoft reading their brain waves is another matter altogether."

"What are the consequences of living post-Peak Attention? Nobody will be able to understand anything hard unless they make sacrifices."

"I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world, although neither of these outdated and tinged terms can accurately capture what is new about it."

"The Advertised Life, an emerging mode of being in which ... one expects and looks for advertising, learns to lead life as an ad, to think like an advertiser, and even to anticipate and insert one-self in successful strategies of marketing." - Thomas Frank

"I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?"

You go, Crow.

Neuroneuro

"...often situations require decisions between many complex and conflicting alternatives... cognitive processes may become overloaded and be unable to provide an informed option. In these cases (and others), somatic markers can aid the decision process."

"To create truly compelling experiences, you need to have a hand in all the pieces of the puzzle." Hell yeah! Total design (as in Total football)

"We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law."

"Curiousity is stimulated by making people aware of "manageable gaps in their knowledge". So first of all you have to show people enough of something to get them involved, but leave gaps that people feel the need to fill in themselves."

"the results of this enhanced 'cognitive capacity' might not necessarily lead to increased IQ scores. I do think, however, that they will lead to increased storage and processing abilities."

'Much human creativity comes from "out-of-the-box" thinking: applying knowledge, structure or skills from another domain, and also making mistake... smachines can apply inverse or orthogonal analysis to incorporate human creativity by trial and error.'

"Children with autism are often described as robotic: They are emotionless. They engage in obsessive, repetitive behavior and have trouble communicating and socializing. [The] KASPAR bot smiles, simulates surprise and sadness, gesticulates..."

"a reporter did simple calculations in her head, and the train sprang forward - apparently indicating activity in the brain's frontal cortex... A key advantage to Hitachi's technology is that [infrared] sensors don't have to physically enter the brain. "

"As well as potentially helping those with memory problems it could also be used for tourism or as a personal digital diary. Combined with other sensors such as a heart rate monitor, it could have other medical applications."

On Kyle's Academy: "These misgivings have made no dent in the public's appetite for emotionally raw media, though, as evidenced by the booming sales of "misery memoirs" and magazines peddling personal trauma tales and in the explosion of psychological TV"

"Smart people are lucky: they can hold seemingly contradictory ideas in their head while they look more deeply into the facts and make good decisions... it's called nuance."

"the costs associated with thinking about and using a particular product decrease as a function of the amount of experience a consumer has with it. Thus, repeated consumption or use of an incumbent product results in a (cognitive) switching cost"

"Cognitive therapy and its variants traditionally identify ten cognitive distortions that maintain negative thinking and help to maintain negative emotions. The process of learning to refute these distortions is called "cognitive restructuring".

"Large intelligence: collected sensory experience of individuals. Emotional experience, to the degree occurring in the digital medium, could be enhanced with merged intelligence both by amplifying sensory input and providing a multiplicity of experience."

Fascinating: "Cognitive bias is distortion in the way humans perceive reality (see also cognitive distortion). Some of these have been verified empirically in the field of psychology, others are considered general categories of bias."

"My abilities to solve problems, to make analogies, to make jokes, to explain tagwebs, to understand people, to think - allof these things have been improved greatly. I now understand how my brain works and I can act in ways that embraces that knowledge"

Rashmi knows her stuff.

Some nice diagrams illustrating the differences between using tags and categories. Very interesting comments too.