http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1478/the-struggle-for-the-possible-soul-of-david-eagleman There’s a struggle inside the brain of David Eagleman for the soul of David Eagleman.

That is, there might be such a struggle if Eagleman’s brain believed that Eagleman had a soul, which he is not sure about. In fact, Eagleman’s brain is not completely sure that there is an Eagleman-beyond-Eagleman’s-brain at all—with or without a soul, whatever that term might mean.

Welcome to the world of “possibilian” neuroscientist-writer David Eagleman, to life in the space between what-is and what-if, between the facts we think we know and the fictions that illuminate what we… ]]> Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:36:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1478/the-struggle-for-the-possible-soul-of-david-eagleman http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1424/discovering-the-virtues-of-a-wandering-mind In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:49:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1424/discovering-the-virtues-of-a-wandering-mind http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1425/the-perils-of-progress Pinker, true to type, opens his piece: "New forms of media have always caused moral panics. The printing press, newspapers, paperbacks, and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber."

Just as these, in Pinker's estimation, proved to be false alarms, so, too, he confidently predicts, will be the case with the current moral panic over new electronic technologies. When I read his list of "reality checks" that are supposed to mollify critics—for example, "the decades of television, transistor radios, and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:48:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1425/the-perils-of-progress http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1414/the-writer-who-couldnt-read "In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided to create a short video to let you see his story. Our narrator and animator is San Francisco artist Lev Yilmaz.

On July 31, 2001, Engel woke up, dressed, made breakfast, and then went to the front door to get his newspaper. "I wasn't aware," he says in our NPR interview, "that it was any different from any other morning."

But it was.… ]]> Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:03:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1414/the-writer-who-couldnt-read http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1377/smarter-than-you-think-ibms-supercomputer For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because… ]]> Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:31:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1377/smarter-than-you-think-ibms-supercomputer http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1378/in-the-singularity-movement-humans-are-so-yesterday While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.

The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked… ]]> Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:26:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1378/in-the-singularity-movement-humans-are-so-yesterday http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1366/delete-the-virtue-of-forgetting-in-the-digital-age In 2006 Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, was denied a teaching degree just days before graduation. University officials had discovered a photo of her, captioned “Drunken Pirate,” on MySpace. The photo showed Snyder wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, and the university accused her of promoting underage drinking. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger tells the story in his new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Snyder lost control over the photo when it was indexed by Google and other search engines: “the Internet remembered what Stacy wanted to have… ]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:59:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1366/delete-the-virtue-of-forgetting-in-the-digital-age http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1364/my-bright-idea-guy-deutscher Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world.

An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old… ]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 05:33:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1364/my-bright-idea-guy-deutscher http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1360/the-three-christs-of-ypsilanti-what-happens-when-three-men-who-identify-as-jesus-are-forced-to-live-together In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected,… ]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:18:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1360/the-three-christs-of-ypsilanti-what-happens-when-three-men-who-identify-as-jesus-are-forced-to-live-together http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1356/should-this-be-the-last-generation Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents? For most people contemplating reproduction, those are the dominant questions. Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself.… ]]> Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:45:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1356/should-this-be-the-last-generation http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1252/thinking-again Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word “I” and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception, and thought. For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose… ]]> Sun, 16 May 2010 16:17:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1252/thinking-again http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1245/eureka-neural-evidence-for-sudden-insight A recent study provides intriguing information about the neural dynamics underlying behavioral changes associated with the development of new problem solving strategies. The research... supports the idea of "a-ha" moments in the brain that are associated with sudden insight.

Our daily lives are filled with changes that force us to abandon old behavioral strategies that are no longer advantageous and develop new, more appropriate responses. While it is clear that new rules are often deduced through trial-and-error learning, the neural dynamics that underlie the change from a familiar to a novel rule are not well understood.
… ]]> Fri, 14 May 2010 02:28:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1245/eureka-neural-evidence-for-sudden-insight http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1183/zombie-renaissance Zombies are “characters” in the sense recently revived by the critic Aaron Kunin—they are a type whose existence extends beyond any one work or even medium. This is why we can speak of “the zombie” in the first place, and why the specter of the ludicrous hovers even over the realist commitment to character. In his book on laughter Henri Bergson observes, “In one sense it might be said that all character is comic, provided we mean by character the ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element which resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and… ]]> Sat, 01 May 2010 09:44:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1183/zombie-renaissance http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1135/the-soul-of-the-scientist-of-man ow does the character of the scientist differ from that of the humanist? The past century has seen an acceleration in the “scientization” of the humanities. The roots of this trend, as other contributors to this symposium have noted, are entwined with those of modernity itself. And while the tale of this turn has been told broadly before — the story of entire disciplines adopting the name, the method, and the underlying assumptions of modern science — little has been said of the change in the educators themselves. It is not just the method of inquiry and the substance of… ]]> Sun, 04 Apr 2010 06:54:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1135/the-soul-of-the-scientist-of-man http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1096/are-animals-people The recent fatal attack of a SeaWorld trainer by the orca Tilikum has led to renewed questions about how humans should deal with potentially intelligent animals. Was Tilikum’s action premeditated, and how should that possibility influence decisions on the animal’s future treatment? Orcas, like their close relatives, dolphins, certainly seem smart, though researchers debate just how intelligent these cetaceans are and how similar their cognition is to humans. Should we ever treat such creatures like people?

For centuries it seemed obvious to most people what separated them from other animals: Humans have language, they use tools, they… ]]> Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:18:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1096/are-animals-people http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1089/the-brain-look-deep-into-the-minds-eye When the scientists tested the mind’s eye of MX, though, the difference was stark. The researchers gave all their subjects a standardized test called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. They asked each participant to picture things like a landscape and a friend. Then the scientists had each man rate the image that came to mind. If it was as vivid as normal vision, he was asked to score it a 5. If there was no mental image at all—if the subject knew only that he was thinking of an object—he was to give it a score of 1. Most… ]]> Fri, 26 Mar 2010 05:53:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1089/the-brain-look-deep-into-the-minds-eye http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1036/incredible-journeys Some animals can instinctively solve navigational problems that have baffled humans for centuries. Now, researchers are uncovering how. The nervous system of the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, with around 100,000 neurons, is about 1 millionth the size of a human brain. Yet in the featureless deserts of Tunisia, this ant can venture over 100 meters from its nest to find food without becoming lost. Imagine randomly wandering 20 kilometers in the open desert, your tracks obliterated by the wind, then turning around and making a beeline to your starting point—and no GPS allowed! That’s the equivalent of what the desert… ]]> Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:17:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1036/incredible-journeys http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/932/sleep-talkin-man My mild-mannered English husband Adam lives quite a colorful existence in his dreams. Having benefited from hours of delight at his dead of night musings, I thought it was only fair to share them with the world. ]]> Sat, 09 Jan 2010 07:24:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/932/sleep-talkin-man http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/930/the-world-question-center-2010-how-is-the-internet-changing-the-way-you-think Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge ... Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. Technology… ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:55:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/930/the-world-question-center-2010-how-is-the-internet-changing-the-way-you-think http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/879/the-cognitive-benefits-of-time-space-synaesthesia SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which there is a merging of the senses, so that activity in one sensory modality elicits sensations in another. Although first described by Francis Galton in the 1880s, little was known about this condition until recently. A rennaissance in synaesthesia research began about a decade ago; since then, three previously unrecognized forms of the condition have been described, and hypotheses for how it arises have been put forward. Two new studies now provide some insight into time-space synaesthesia, the least researched of all the forms of this fascinating condition. One is a case study… ]]> Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:11:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/879/the-cognitive-benefits-of-time-space-synaesthesia