Through Other's Eyes . . .

Giant Pacific Octopus

In an interesting NYT article - "At our core, emotions" (February 23-24, 2019) - Sy Montgomery describes her last meeting with an old friend:

A few years ago, I found myself in a [sad] situation . . . . My friend Octavia was old, sick and dying. We hadn't looked into each other's eyes for a long while - nearly a fifth of her life span. I came to say goodbye. When she caught sight of me, Octavia, with great effort, using some of the last of her limited strength, rose to greet me and enveloped me in her arms . . . . My friend and I had last shared an ancestor in the Precambrian Era - before limbs or eyes had evolved, back when practically everyone was a tube . . . . Octavia's mouth was in her armpits, she had no skeleton at all and her arms were equipped with 1,600 suckers. Octavia was a giant Pacific octopus. Yet she and I cared for each other - enough for both of us to delight in one last, tender, emotional embrace.

As I said, interesting. Interesting, what we're learning about animals, particularly what we're learning about their intelligence, intelligence that in some ways challenges our own. Maybe even exceeds our own . . .

Franklin was very smart!

Lucky Franklin

He even wrote his own autobiography!

Problematic Proverb: "A fool and his money are soon parted."

"A fool and his money are soon parted."

Now, I don't like to pry into some private priorities, but I can see how even though parting money is a simple and arguably good thing to do, parting a fool entails not only being not even a dubiously good thing but, in point of fact of a certainty, being a horrendous, difficult, unhappy task fraught with severe consequences for the state of one's soul.

Proverb Rewritten: "Concerning a fool and his money, parting the money is acceptable, but parting the fool is not, as it constitutes murder."

Shifting Paradigms?

Think So?

Google Images

Great minds think alike rarely when thinking.

Alien Intelligence on Earth?

Amazon

Or in water . . .

The philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith, who appears to have a deep interest in the origin of consciousness, has written a book titled Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which the conservationist and writer Carl Safina has reviewed in the NYT (December 27, 2016) under the title "Thinking in the Deep: Inside the Mind of an Octopus." The review begins with reflection upon a question about alien intelligence elsewhere in the universe, namely, as to whether we would understand intelligent extraterrestrial life, or even recognize it as intelligent. Godfrey-Smith suggests that we first look closer to home for a very alien intelligence, and then observe how we interact:

"If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, . . . [t]his is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien[, for] . . . . the minds of cephalopods are the most other [to ours] of all [other intelligent earthly creatures]."

But how do we interact? Well, they can certainly react to us in recognizably friendly ways:

"You reach forward a hand and stretch out one finger, and [watch as] one octopus arm slowly uncoils . . . [and clasps] your finger as it draws it in[, . . . while]. . . . [b]ehind the arm, large round [octopus] eyes watch[, and the] octopus . . . [pulls on the clasped] hand and . . . [you follow as if] being led across the sea floor by a very small eight-legged child [who wants to show you its home]."

Godfrey-Smith actually observed this scene just described, so these alien creatures, can definitely be friendlier than the aliens we dream up for Hollywood to scare ourselves with. Be that as it may, we humans and octopuses seem to recognize and even to understand each other's intelligence, to some degree.

It's a start.

Ravens as Birdbrains?

Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield, commissioning editor of The Spectator, asks, "Just how clever are ravens?" (The Spectator, October 22, 2016), and as regular readers know, I am interested in animal intelligence, so let's see what Ms. Wakefield has discovered:

Until recently, neuroscientists had little time for birds. It was assumed that brain size (relative to body size) was the most significant factor in animal intelligence. What good could any bird brain be? Plus birds have no neo-cortex, which in mammals is vital for intelligence. A seven-year study at Duke University, North Carolina, tested 36 species for their ability to inhibit impulses (a significant part of being clever) and the results were presented, in 2014, as a league table of animal IQ: great apes top, dogs honourably middling, birds at the bottom.

But those scientists at Duke had not considered crow-kind. This year, researchers from Lund University in Sweden repeated the Duke experiment with corvids (jackdaws, crows and ravens) and found, to their shock, that these birds were the equal of apes. Ravens, Corvus corax, the smartest of all crows, scored 100 per cent on the Duke test. This was not an anomaly. All around the world scientists are discovering that ravens are alarmingly smart. They will make and use tools to get food; they can grasp abstract concepts and use imagination. Ravens will not only stash food in hidey holes to eat later, but, if they think another bird is watching, they'll fake-hide their food to fox the competition. This isn't pre-programmed behaviour - this is considered strategy.

Growing up in the Ozarks, I always knew that crows were smart. I don't recall seeing any ravens in those hills, though, but I sure wish I had . . .

High-Tech Jobs for the Autistic

MindSpark

The Daily Mail Online has published an interesting AFP article, "Autism a Silicon Valley asset with social quirks" (August 28, 2016), which tells of a company, MindSpark, that employs analysts with autism to test software:

MindSpark, located in the coastal city of Santa Monica near Los Angeles, employs analysts with autism to test software for companies. The firm has been refining its model for the past three years . . . . This week, MindSpark opened to companies around the world . . . . [It] seeks out people on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum with behaviors that, while at odds with social norms, are advantages in working with computer technology . . . . MindSpark has 27 analysts, five of them full-time employees and the rest paid based on the number of hours they work . . . . [S]oftware testing . . . [is] a learnable skill, especially if people have traits prevalent in the higher functioning end of the autism population: attention to detail, pattern recognition, and a penchant for staying focused on a task.

This is such a great idea, I marvel to think nobody thought of it before. I guess the idea requires thinking outside the box, e.g., seeing the autistic as gifted rather than disabled.

You've probably already wondered how Silicon Valley works its way into this article since Santa Monica is pretty far away - think distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco - but if you read the whole article, you'll find the answer in the part about EvoLibri Consulting founder Jan Johnston-Tyler, who locates Silicon Valley jobs that fit the autistic (or if you prefer her term, the "neurodiverse").

So . . . Elephants aren't Quite as Smart as We are?

Brains: Human and Elephant
Google Images

Writing for Nautilius (APRIL 7, 2016), Suzana Herculano-Houzel notes "The Paradox of the Elephant Brain," namely, "With three times as many neurons, why doesn't the elephant brain outperform ours?" Where did Herculano-Houzel get these numbers? She and her lab assistants calculated them based on the dissection of an African elephant's brain, and . . .

. . . Lo and behold, the African elephant brain had more neurons than the human brain. And not just a few more: a full three times the number of neurons, 257 billion to our 86 billion neurons. But - and this was a huge, immense "but" - a whopping 98 percent of those neurons were located in the cerebellum, at the back of the brain. In every other mammal we had examined so far, the cerebellum concentrated most of the brain neurons, but never much more than 80 percent of them. The exceptional distribution of neurons within the elephant brain left a relatively meager 5.6 billion neurons in the whole cerebral cortex itself. Despite the size of the African elephant cerebral cortex, the 5.6 billion neurons in it paled in comparison to the average 16 billion neurons concentrated in the much smaller human cerebral cortex.

So here was our answer. No, the human brain does not have more neurons than the much larger elephant brain - but the human cerebral cortex has nearly three times as many neurons as the over twice as large cerebral cortex of the elephant.

That answers my identical question, so I now know.

Parrots: Wise Guy Cousins to Falcons?

African Grey Parrot
"Our falcon cousins? They got no sense of self-irony."
Google Images

Natalie Angier tells us that "Parrots Are a Lot More Than 'Pretty Bird'" (NYT, March 21, 2016):

Parrot partisans say the birds easily rival the great apes and dolphins in all-around braininess and resourcefulness . . . . "We call them feathered primates," said Irene Pepperberg, who studies animal cognition at Harvard and is renowned for her research with Alex and other African grey parrots. "They're very good colleagues," said Alice Auersperg of the University of Vienna, who studies the Goffin's cockatoo of Indonesia . . . . Studying the yellow-naped Amazon of Costa Rica, Dr. [Timothy F.] Wright and his colleagues have discovered that different populations of the parrot communicate with one another in distinct dialects that remain stable over decades, like human languages. Just as with people, young parrots can easily master multiple dialects while their elders can't or won't bother to do . . . . Seeking to understand why the yellow-naped Amazons in northern Costa Rica had a different call from those living 18 miles to the south, Dr. Wright's team tried moving several parrots from one site to the other . . . . The youngest parrot quickly mastered the dialect of its new home and began flocking with the locals. The older transplants, however, failed to become adept bilingualists and never quite fit in. Instead, they associated with each other. "They formed a little immigrant enclave," Dr. Wright said, adding, "Vocal similarity is very important for maintaining social relationships," in parrots as in humans.

What about their famed ability at mimicry?

Dr. Wright said that captive parrots' renowned talent for promiscuous vocal mimicry -- of human speech, a multipart car alarm, a cat's meow -- is probably a byproduct of an innate desire to parrot its own kind. "It's extremely rare to find mimicry of other species in wild parrots," he said.

That would make sense. Why draw attention to oneself by mimicking other species, for instance, a cat, even if it is the cat's meow. Interestingly, parrots go not for fruit itself -- which I'd always thought they gorged on -- but for the seeds of the fruit, so they have to find fruiting trees at the right time:

Fruiting trees are a patchy and unpredictable resource, and parrots often fly many miles a day in quest of food. Under such circumstances, searching in groups turns out to be more efficient than solitary hunting, especially when group members can trade tips on promising leads. "That can mean the development of a social system, as well as the neurological capacity to share information," Dr. [Leo] Joseph said. The vocal capacity, too: parrots call to one another continually, squawkishly, over long distances and short. "They are communicating to each other all the time," Dr. [Juan F.] Masello said.

There's a lot more in the article, so if you want to learn some other tidbits of knowledge -- such as the fact that parrots are closely related to falcons -- click on the link above . . . or here.

Siri-ously?

Siri
Google Images

Our old Arkansawyer friend John Wells - of John The Beer Snob fame - was seeking out some new brews recently, using his intelligent personal assistant, Siri, for guidance, and we learn that Apple's voice-controlled, natural language interface isn't quite as sophisticated as Google's AlphaGo:

Next up was Bike Rack Brewing. I asked Siri for directions, as I knew it was within walking distance. She responded by giving me directions to 'buy crack'. I quickly canceled and clarified.

Sounds like John needs a new personal assistant, one less likely know precisely where to purchase a few crystals of crack!

But does Siri really know the way . . .

Poetry Break: Nought but Some Doggerel Defining "Smart"

Mr. Mike Roman's Shoe
Blogger Profile

A few days ago, in response to AlphaGo's second victory over Mr. Lee Sedol (currently, three victories), I posted a blog entry titled "Singularity Approacheth: 'Go going gone!'" Under this heading, somewhat facetiously, I wrote:

Computers are getting smarter than humans. Moreover, they are learning to defeat us in our own games! They are competing with us and outperforming us.

Ah, the humanity . . . er, robotity . . . uh, androidity . . . um, cyborgity . . .

In response, Mr. Mike Roman, a man of few words, dropped by and typed:

Define "smart"

I therefore did by way of posting this bit of pregnant-with-meaning doggerel:

Smart Defined

At times, it means some pain;
Some say it should mean gain;
It can mean quite well dressed,
But I am not impressed.

It's fear within my head
That brings me to this dread
AI can really do
What people can do, too!

Except more fast than us,
And that's smart double plus!

Nothing beautiful - though I've smartened it up a bit since first posting it as a comment - but I believe I've defined "smart" to everyone's satisfaction, and even worked in an allusion to Orwell's famous dystopian novel, 1984.

Singularity Approacheth: "Go going gone!"

Lee Se-dol, Professional Go Player
After Defeat at the 'Hands' of a Computer
Yonhap

As everyone knows by now, "AlphaGo defeat[ed] . . . Go champion [Lee Se-dol] in [their] first match" (Korea Herald, March 9, 2016), as reported by Kim Young-won, who quotes Lee:

I was really surprised. I didn't think I could lose . . . . I didn't think AlphaGo would play in such a perfect manner. I [would] like to express my respect to the Google team for making such an amazing program.

That's losing with grace, but the evident strain on Lee will likely grow in the next four matches, for the more AlphaGo plays, the more it learns. One expert commentator observed:

AlphaGo's skill has drastically improved even after its first victory against a human player months ago.

As I noted, the Singularity approacheth. I told my wife that translation programs will soon be competing with us. She thinks that's a long way off, but I think such programs are much closer than most translators think. For some languages, Google Translate is already pretty good . . .

Incidentally,  I've learned in the last hour that Lee lost the second match. That settles the issue. Computers are getting smarter than humans. Moreover, they are learning to defeat us in our own games! They are competing with us and outperforming us.

Ah, the humanity . . . er, robotity . . . uh, androidity . . . um, cyborgity . . .

The Kindness of Creatures . . .

Serenity Park

In an article titled "What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD?" (New York Times Magazine, January 28, 2016), Charles Siebert writes of some very special parrots who help soldiers deal with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). After some time of getting acquainted, Siebert says good-bye to Cashew (not depicted above), "a six-inch-tall female caique parrot from the Amazon Basin":

Nearing Serenity Park's exit, I decided to turn back and step inside Cashew's quarters for a moment. I had only to nestle close to her perch and she immediately hopped on my back. Crisscrossing my shoulders as I had watched her do with Lilly Love, she stopped at one point for what I assumed would be the parrot equivalent of a kiss. Instead, she began to clean my teeth: her beak lightly tapping against my enamel, the faint vibrations strangely soothing. Immediately afterward, she took a brief nap in my shirt's left breast pocket - it felt as if I'd grown another heart - then re-emerged and crawled to the top of my head. She strolled about there for a time before plucking out one of her own deep blue-green feathers and then descending to gently place it on my left shoulder. I have it still.

And to think that we used to call them birdbrains . . .

Personhood: Going to the Dogs?

Cathleen Kaveny

Boston College

In a blog post on "The Status of Animals" (Commonweal, January 27, 2015), the Catholic scholar Cathleen Kaveny, a Boston College professor who studies the interconnections of of law, religion, and morality, wrote the following about her dog Molly:

Over the past several months, I have been increasingly convinced that Molly is a person - a non-human person, but a person nonetheless. She has emotions. She has moods. She has reason, and will. She has goals - and she pursues them with astonishing success.

Is she building a legal case for the personhood of dogs? Hmmm . . .

Joseph A. Komonchak

Anyway, in a comment to Kaveny's remarks, Joseph A. Komonchak, a professor emeritus of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and an expert on Vatican II, wrote the following about a dog with whom he used to play frisbee:

We once had a brown Labrador Retriever who would fetch for hours. One day I threw a frisbee and she raced after it. It happened to land, upside-down, near a tennis ball that had occupied her at another time. She looked from ball to disk, from disk to ball, and then picked up the ball, placed it in the disk, picked up the disk, and trotted back to me with both treasures. Surely a sign of some intelligence.

Significantly so, I'd say. Dogs are truly special. For more on dog intelligence, see Wikipedia - and be amazed.

"I have seen the future, it is murder"

Smarter Weapons
Long Range Anti-Ship Missile
Designed to Maneuver without Human Control
Photo Credit: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
NYT

Speaking of the Singularity and Deep Learning, let's listen to what John Markoff has to say on "Fearing Bombs That Can Pick Whom to Kill" (NYT, November 11, 2014):

On a bright fall day last year off the coast of Southern California, an Air Force B-1 bomber launched an experimental missile . . . . Initially, pilots aboard the plane directed the missile, but halfway to its destination, it severed communication with its operators. Alone, without human oversight, the missile decided which of three ships to attack . . . . Warfare is increasingly guided by software . . . . [S]ome scientists say, arms makers have crossed into troubling territory: They are developing weapons that rely on artificial intelligence, not human instruction, to decide what to target . . . . As these weapons become smarter and nimbler, critics fear they will become increasingly difficult for humans to control - or to defend against . . . . After launch, so-called autonomous weapons rely on artificial intelligence and sensors to select targets . . . . Britain's "fire and forget" Brimstone missiles, for example, can distinguish among tanks and cars and buses without human assistance, and can hunt targets in a predesignated region without oversight. The Brimstones also communicate with one another, sharing their targets . . . . In recent years, artificial intelligence has begun to supplant human decision-making in a variety of fields, . . . [b]ut technological advances [are occurring] in three particular areas[, namely, in] . . . [n]ew types of radar, laser and infrared sensors[, all of which] are helping missiles and drones better calculate their position and orientation. "Machine vision," resembling that of humans, identifies patterns in images and helps weapons distinguish important targets. This nuanced sensory information can be quickly interpreted by sophisticated artificial intelligence systems, enabling a missile or drone to carry out its own analysis in flight.

Reading of such technological developments, I can almost imagine the reality of the Terminator movies' dystopian vision of a future ruled by military machines!

This is the future . . .

Singularly Deep Learning

Roh Soh-yeong
Director, Art Center Nabi

Google Images

I read in yesterday's JoongAng Ilbo an article by Roh Soh-yeong on "The advent of 'Singularity 99'" (November 12, 2014), beginning with these fateful words:

Pandora's box is finally open: 2014 is likely to be recorded as the year that humanity has crossed the river of no return. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come out of the box. With the name tag, "Deep Learning," the AI technology that resembles the human thinking and decision-making process has been introduced. Just as a network of countless neurons perceives, processes and judges information, a computer can perceive, infer and decide by itself. The future when a computer surpasses human thinking is approaching.

I wasn't aware that 2014 is so significant, though I've previously encountered the term "singularity," but not the expression "Deep Learning." Maybe because it "has been introduced" only recently? "Singularity" refers to the moment that AI "surpasses human intelligence," as Ms. Roh explains - and as I've known for some time - but she never again refers to "Deep Learning." I therefore turned to Wikipedia:

Deep learning . . . is a set of algorithms in machine learning that attempt to model high-level abstractions in data by using model architectures composed of multiple non-linear transformations.

Hmmm . . . I'm not sure I followed all that, but I do understand that it has something to do with Al Gore's rhythm, which is rather machine-like, and that's maybe enough for me to know, in order to know that I want no part of such a future, no matter what wonderful things that imminent future's super-intelligent, Al-Gore-rhythmic, calculating cyborgs can do, for example, take away my job, take away my future, leave me redundant!

But who says computers will outpace human intelligence? Biogeneticists will be monkeying around - so to speak - with improving human intelligence as well.

We'll be getting a lot smarter, too, I fear.

Stranger than paradise?

Mickey and Minnie?

Google Images

Carolyn Arends, writing an article titled "When God Wears a Costume" (Christianity Today, January 8, 2014), tells of being a teenager babysitting a 2-year-old girl squirming in a high chair and whom she tried to pacify by holding up the little girl's laminated placemat featuring a photo of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and the following dialogue took place:

"Is this a picture of Donald and Daisy Duck?" I asked.

"€œNo," she giggled.

"Is it Goofy and Pluto?"

"Nuh-uh!" she squealed.

"Well, who are they?" I asked, gearing up for the inevitable right-answer celebration. But her reply caught me off guard.

"Strangers in costumes."

Ms. Arends says that she's been reflecting on Laura's pragmatism as a toddler already capable of offering a no-nonsense view of the world, inadvertently providing an example "of what sociologist Philip Rieff and philosopher Allan Bloom both" termed a "€œlow symbolic hedge," i.e., a maze formed with hedges, such that a low one would be too easily seen through and solved. One need not use imagination to find one's way, so imagination remains undeveloped. Thus, because "our culture lacks potent symbols" and has merely Mickey Mouse symbols, we suffer a paucity of imagination.

Well, maybe, but there's a sense in which that two-year-old toddler Laura was using her own burgeoning imagination to demystify a mundane reality behind a prominent, powerful cultural image.

The kid deserves some praise . . .

Internet as Brain-Booster?

Ben Wiseman
The New York Times

As a follow-up to yesterday's news about stimulating our brainpower, I report today on Walter Isaacson's review ("Brain Gain," The New York Times, November 1, 2013) of Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson's book on how technology is making us smarter. We humans might have felt collectively dumber back in May 1997, when the chess-playing computer Deep Blue apparently defeated Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest grandmaster ever, but most of us missed what happened next:

The year after his defeat by Deep Blue, Kasparov set out to see what would happen if he paired a machine and a human chess player in a collaboration. Like a centaur, the hybrid would have the strength of each of its components: the processing power of a large logic circuit and the intuition of a human brain's wetware. The result: human-machine teams, even when they didn't include the best grandmasters or most powerful computers, consistently beat teams composed solely of human grandmasters or superfast machines.

Interesting . . . but what of it?

Thompson's point is that "artificial intelligence" -- defined as machines that can think on their own just like or better than humans -- is not yet (and may never be) as powerful as "intelligence amplification," the symbiotic smarts that occur when human cognition is augmented by a close interaction with computers. When he played in collaboration with a computer, Kasparov said, it freed him to focus on the "creative texture" of the game. In the future, Thompson writes, we should not fear being beaten in chess by Deep Blue or in "Jeopardy!" by Watson. Instead, humans will find themselves working in partnership with the progeny of these supercomputers to diagnose diseases, solve crimes, write poetry and become (as the clever double meaning of the book's title puts it) smarter than we think.

Better poetry through cooperating with a computer? As if that weren't scary! But against pessimists who would worry that such interaction is making us dumber, Isaacson lets Thompson speak for himself:

Thompson counters that . . . [pessimists have ever failed] to foresee "the types of complex thought that would be possible once you no longer needed to mentally store everything you'd encountered," [such as also happened with the mental relief provided several thousand years ago through the invention of writing, deplored by the pessimists of those days,] and he surmises that the same will turn out to be true of our ability to digitally store and easily access huge amounts of information and memories outside of our own brains. "What's the line between our own, in-brain knowledge and the sea of information around us?" he asks. "Does it make us smarter when we can dip in so instantly? Or dumber with every search?"

His answer is that our creative minds are being strengthened rather than atrophied by the ability to interact easily with the Web and Wikipedia. "Not only has transactive memory not hurt us," he writes, "it's allowed us to perform at higher levels, accomplishing acts of reasoning that are impossible for us alone."

Isaacson agrees, and again quotes Thompson:

"Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college . . . . This is something that's particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace. But until the late 1990s, this simply wasn't true of the average nonliterary person."

True, everybody's writing more nowadays, but I suspect that this phenomenon is a transitional stage between no internet and software that can understand spoken language perfectly, when the vast majority can stop text-messaging and return to chatting out loud.

But Thompson is right about the Internet as "transactive memory" -- it has enabled me to perform at a higher level, assisting me greatly when I was writing my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, which I basically hammered out in a couple of weeks, sped up by instant access to literature online for checking the accuracy of my literary allusions.

A Truly Effective Thinking Cap

An Extra Jolt of Brainpower?
Nigel Parry
The New York Times

For all of you readers -- like Thomas Pynchon and me -- who are slow learners, there's hope! Dan Hurley, in "Jumper Cables for the Mind" (The New York Times Magazine, November 1, 2013), reports astonishing findings from the world of science on something called transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS). No, sorry, there's nothing about transcranial alternating-current stimulation even though that would've made for a better acronym (tACS). Anyway, the electrifying news is that weak volts of electricity to the scalp can enhance your learning and stimulate hair growth. Okay, I lied about hair growth, but the enhanced learning is true. This is no bolt from the blue, either! Research goes back thirty years:

In 1981, Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen, Germany, reported that by applying extremely low doses of direct-current electricity -- one-third of a milliamp, not enough to power a hearing aid -- to the heads of healthy volunteers, he could speed their response on a simple test of reaction time.

But other scientists -- doubtless needing scalp stimulation themselves -- were slow to react to Birbaumer's findings and conduct experiments of their own, with over a decade passing before more work was done, this time by a certain A. Priori, whose work not only confirmed Birbaumer's but, in doing so, also demonstrated that one's name is not necessarily one's fate:

The Italian neurophysiologist Alberto Priori began his own experiments in 1992, applying just a tiny bit more electricity, about half a milliamp. He found that enough of the electricity crossed through volunteers' skulls -- electrons flowing from the cathodal electrode to the anodal electrode -- to cause brain cells near the anodal to become excited.

But those other scientists couldn't get excited over Priori's findings:

Despite repeating the experiment multiple times to be sure of the results, it took Priori six years to get his findings published in a scientific journal, in 1998. As he told me, "People kept telling me it can't be true, it's too easy and simple."

Finally, though, those other scientists began to focus on the findings:

One of the first researchers to take Priori's results seriously was Michael A. Nitsche, a clinical neurophysiologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany. "There were two lines of criticism that I heard in those days," Nitsche said. "One line was that it couldn't work, because it's a very weak stimulation and it couldn't get through the cranium. The other was that it should be very dangerous." [But in] . . . a paper published in 2000, Nitsche showed that the stimulating influence of tDCS lasts for at least five minutes after the electricity stops flowing [and with no harm done to scalp or brain].

Since then, there has been an overwhelming current of confirming results, including data showing enhancement not only of reaction time but also of various cognitive functions. But how can such a tiny jolt of electricity to the scalp for a few minutes improve our thinking? Hurley asked Roy Hoshi Hamilton, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation. Hamilton began with a question:

"What is a thought? . . . A thought is what happens when some pattern of firing of neurons has happened in your brain. So if you have a technology that makes it ever so slightly easier for lots and lots of these neurons, these fundamental building blocks of cognition, to be active, to do their thing, then it doesn't seem so far-fetched that such a technology, be it ever so humble, would have an effect on cognition . . . . There's this mantra in neuroscience, coined by Donald Hebb: Neurons that fire together wire together. So I have this tool that makes it more or less likely your neurons will fire. Now, while I'm applying the current, I'm going to have you engage in some behavior, a working-memory task, say, or attempting to name objects even though you have aphasia following a stroke, which is my area of interest. So now that network of neurons is being activated in an environment that slightly nudges it, makes it slightly easier for the neurons to fire and the behaviors to be successfully carried out. Then it's not too far-fetched that, when that happens over and over again, during weeks of practice, those pathways will be reinforced."

That sounds plausible, so I might need to get myself one of those thinking caps and learn to 'cerebrate' the body electric . . .

Spot the Bigoted, Idiotic Jerkwad!

Idiot
The Free Dictionary

I noticed a jump in the number of visits to my blog recently, and upon checking my site meter for clarification, I discovered that visitors were being sent from another blog, one that had linked to my recent post on Islamophobia, so I clicked over to the other blog, only to find these words in a blog entry:

A brainless jerkwad who has the gall to call all Muslims stupid is so idiotic that he doesn't even know the difference between ethnicity and religion. This is as blatant a case of projection as I have ever seen. And I'm sorry for linking to yet another idiot but the world has got to know its bigots.

I won't link to the blogger who posted this since I wouldn't want that individual to receive nasty comments. Readers can peruse my blog entry on Islamophobia to arrive at their own conclusions as to whom the insults are directed at, but I think that "brainless jerkwad" refers to Richard Dawkins and "another idiot" means me, which implies that Dawkins is also an idiot, but what does "jerkwad" mean? I had to check slang dictionaries to be certain about the specific meaning of that one -- though I had a general idea from looking at its roots -- and I learned that it means semen caught in tissue paper.

At such a seminal stage of development, one lacks any organs at all, so I'd argue that "brainless" is redundant here and that Richard 'Haploid' Dawkins would anyway be even less than an idiot! But since I'm an unqualified idiot, my IQ may reach as high as 30! Why, that's the mental age of a three-year-old child! I at least have a brain and am therefore brighter than Dawkins! Smart enough to be a bigot!

But why isn't Jeffrey Tayler included among us jerkwads, idiots, or bigots? Or is he implicated by the company he keeps? Birdbrains of a feather flop all together?