Human Complexity Lab

Proximity will connect to Personality

I am currently working out my academic future. So listening to a professor drone on about numbers and symbols that represent nothing in his presentation nearly killed my spirit to live. As it did half the class. I wonder if a part of them died each day in class?

I had wanted to pursue Cybernetics, but I came to realize in my second bout with college Calculus that I have no interest in converting sequential symbols with no context Into visual spatial concepts. My deficit includes auditory sequential processing also.

 HOW DO I KNOW> HOW CAN I BE SO SPECIFIC?

Well, I have taken many intelligence tests, and I have a major deficit. If the auditory and symbolic sequencing was the sum average of my Intelligence Quotient, I would be just above mild mental retardation. Luckily, my other mental attributes are well above average enabling me to qualify for MENSA, in which I am a member.

These Tests I mentioned, include WAIS-III, the Strong Interest Inventory, and the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator tests. I am according to the Strong Inventory:

 Investigative, Social, Artistic or ISA which makes me well suited for the following careers: 

As you can see I am very good fit for a job as a psychologist. As well as physical therapist, which is also apropos since I wish to get my masters in Fitness/Nutrition. 

Now what do gadgets have to do with this blog entry?

As anybody who is watching social network sites like Facebook, MySpace or even dating network sites like Dating.com can see they all lack empirical data sets. If I want to hang out with other Investigative, Social, Artistic people I am out of luck...

 Take a look at my Myer-Briggs profile:  

I turn out to be an ENFP or what they call an Extraversion, Intuition, Feeling, Perceiving and "ENFPs are typically enthusiastic innovators, always seeing new possibilities and new ways of doing things. They have a lot of imagination and initiative for starting projects" according to MBTI studies.

So we have Web 2.0 technologies being powered by survival of the fittest, articles abound about those in network sites that have to fight to get seen.

Now enter my gadgets, I have an Ipod Nano, a Swatch smartwatch, and Audiovox Smartphone. (Not to mention tabletPC and desktops) At any moment I will be alerted by my synchronized gadgets, from WiFi to Broadcast Smart Object via FM radio signals, I am never forgetting minor sequential data.

Now a string of GPS and WiFi enabled tools are out in the Market. Proximity connected to Personality?   Meet HP's answer:

So where are we going? Both MBTI and the Strong Inventory tests were web based, and my gadgets are now sync to web interfaces. So why aren't my gadgets working to integrate with my social profile?

Already web interfaces have been developed to present complex networked data seamlessly.   Here is one of my favorites LivePlasma:

We have syncing of data, we have intuitive data interfaces, wireless gadgets, and extensive personality profiles, all we need is to get all of our offline intelligence's connected to each other.

Seems pretty simple, in that all the tools and building blocks are already there.

Here is where meetup meets neuro-cognitive testing, 5 years from now wine tasting for ENFP's or Introverts photo group. What new dynamics will arise from social groups based on proximity, personality, and pursuits?

Do we want to group together persons with sequential deficits? Would we generate greater bonds? I need to sleep on it.

The Holiday Meetup for BionicPulse: The Cognitive Science Enthusiasts Group is coming up so click here to RSVP (Its FREE!).

Sneak Preview:

Welcome psychology, neuroscience, consciousness, health, nutrition-fitness, and technology enthusiasts. This is the first Holiday Meetup for BionicPulse. The place were real cognitive science and technology "meets up" with overall wellness. If you have an interest to meet others in a causal setting, and talk about how technologies and mankind mix to help us live better,  then this is your Meetup!

No PhD's required, all levels of interest are welcome.

This Week of Holiday Shopping:
Discuss and discover "hands on" with some cool ideas that use the latest in neuroscience, health science and technology. This "Hot Chocolate" break is a show and tell to help others get ideas for tech gifts for the holidays. There are lots of interesting technologies that mix brain science, medical science and even the science of consciousness into great gift ideas.

As host I will get the show and tell started with real life examples of biofeedback relaxation video games , the new Nike-Ipod trainer, and latest Microsoft Smartwatch Live tools to see how they work. Check them out then Go Shopping!

Some Other Cool Holiday Ideas If you can't RSVP:

 http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060622_migraine_zapper.html

http://www.smartbraingames.com/view_products.asp

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2006/11/shoji-symbiotic-hosting-online-jog-instrument/

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/12/wii-sports-training-and-fitness/

http://www.wilddivine.com/WisdomQuest/

***Remember: Please bring in ideas and or stuff you have or would like to have for the holidays. Anything cool and techy is welcome we all need ideas.

Meet and share with others your interest in new science, in cool technologies for human consciousness and for the joy of the holidays!

As I trudge through Calculus, I realized why America is failing to compete in math and science. The fact remains in mathematics as in other schools of higher learning we have departmentalized these institutions to such an extent that science has lost much of its creative force and art departments have lost a lot of their relevancy.

Yet before I rant about Film schools that won't let you touch a camera until you get a PhD in cinematic studies. I am going to focus on Mathematics.

Math is a language, an amazing language that paints by numbers.It is a language and should be taught as a French, German or Italian is taught. It should be taught for the purpose to be used in situations that require precision and accuracy. "Where is the train station" needs to be precise. Where English or french approach precision, math provides the language to describe any object moving or not within the smallest degree possible. Something is small in English, but 1.2 X 10^-32 is more accurate and leaves even our best words like tiny in the dust.

Math is not a set of symbols to recognize specific operations to manipulate more symbols, so that after a series of more symbolic tricks we get less symbols. It is not a set of exercises to recognize rational equations to reduce to simplest means for fun and profit. Nor was Calculus created to test your memory of tangent and cosine functions as a value approaches a limit.

Yet that is what is taught. Newton did not develop Calculus to test someone's skill in applying algebraic functions that are to be tested with specific definitions or theorems. Rather he created it, to model the universe. But you would be hard pressed to find a professor to teach the modeling of any environment with math using calculus as a tool. In fact I doubt you could find it at all. Unless you are not in a math class, and I am sure then in Astro-Physics it will appear. And I know of so many horror stories of students that loved science only to die in advanced classes due to weak math skills.

This not to say practice of using polynomial rational equations is not needed. Obviously it is, you can't model motion or many other phenomenon without them.Yet...

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THE EQUATION REPRESENT???!!!!

No one will tell you, why because the man or woman teaching math has little idea what it means. Not to say they do not know what a limit of a function is, but rather what in the world it represents. Is it the growth of a virus? The economic cycle of a third world nation? Is it the feedback from two gears shifting?

But that, that right there requires some of that right brain stuff. That part of the emotional and gestalt part that you would be hard pressed to find from a mathematics professor. Imagine a math professor with emotion or passion, I can't seem to remember a single one. I am sure they exist, a few rare weird apples...

Why what happens? Why are there right brains so under utilized? Let's take a look at the differences:

Right Hemisphere Style

Rational

• Responds to verbal instructions
• Problem solves by logically and sequentially looking at the parts of things
• Looks at differences
• Is planned and structured
• Prefers established, certain information
• Prefers talking and writing
• Prefers multiple choice tests
• Controls feelings
• Prefers ranked authority structures

Sequential

• Is a splitter: distinction important
• Is logical, sees cause and effect

Draws on previously accumulated, organized information

Left Hemisphere Style

Intuitive

• Responds to demonstrated instructions
• Problem solves with hunches, looking for patterns and configurations
• Looks at similarities
• Is fluid and spontaneous
• Prefers elusive, uncertain information
• Prefers drawing and manipulating objects
• Prefers open ended questions
• Free with feelings
• Prefers collegial authority structures

• Is a lumper: connectedness important
• Is analogic, sees correspondences, resemblances

Draws on unbounded qualitative patterns that are not organized into sequences, but that cluster around images

//////

Imagine a math class that had used feelings to illustrate time critical problems as drawings that fit patterns, and all variables were objects as if x or y were not just variables but actually stood for something like a spaceship or a virus, and imagine a teacher asking how do we get to Mars? Or how can we slow the rate of growth to save a population?

But so far I have not seen a college math teacher capable of any of these qualities. Yet why do I care?, what could my reasoning be, I should just shut up and learn the seemingly random non-sensical symbols that require operations from past math classes because I am told to use when I see this specific set of math symbols?

Because I think it is important that America succeed in science, and if we are to solve energy problems, and fix the pollution problems, and deal with diseases that plague us, then maybe we should develop a system of math that uses the whole brain rather than the half.

We also know that emotion, patterns, and connections's increase plasticity in neural networks, and there is a real biological reason you can't remember those trigometric identities.

To often those real world problems are left to be solved by the left brain people, Oh you know, the ones that use only emotion and conjecture to explain why global warming does not matter. Or other non-scientific stuff like stem-cell research or in-vitro fertilization.

I will write on future blogs on the splitting of left and right brain systems in academics and how it has put science on the defensive, against leaders who use very little left brain logic. For I do not advocate one side over the other, in science or politics.

And sure we can import minds, and we do, just listen to a math lecture at a major university, chances are the accents are so thick it will take three TA's and an independent study group to decipher. Why do we have to import them?

But as we approach the end of the first 21st century decade, what systems have we installed to prepare the 21st century generation for the problems we have left?

My last blog on the details of war. This lacks my focus on cognitive brain science and technological culture. So forgive me.

First Kudos to the Cheney administration, they flipped a netwar of non-state actors, requiring diplomacy and subvert actions into a full blown cold war with the same proxy players China and Russia. And by doing so set a far more difficult War on Terror into a highly connected psycho-cultural battle which turns British subjects into dangerous subversives.

In an August 9th article "Fighting by Proxy" by Michael Hirsh is missing the real proxy. It is not Iran and Syria's influence that will loom over a larger conflict between the Lebanon's Hizbullah and Israel. The real players are China and Russia.

China and Russia are big traders with Iran. To Michael Hirsh's credit he does mention the sale of missiles. But let's not forget the building of a nuclear reactor in the city of Bushehr worth nearly a billion dollars.

Just off the wire, Russia is not going to back sanctions against Iran for nuclear violations. Hmmm... I wonder why? Hirsch misses this and the much larger aspect. If the Bush administration had any international clout left it could have stopped the billion dollar sale of arms to Venezuela's Chavez from Russia.

The question really becomes why do we have so few chips on the international table to negotiate with? Again oil enters the picture. High oil prices help Russia. They are no where as efficiently as Saudi Arabia. So Iraq offline helps Russia as well as Venezuela and of course Saudi Arabia.

How do we get more chips on the table? Well pundits are focused on Iran and Syria, we really need to focus on Russia and China, whom until we can pressure them, they will veto any sanctions on Iran.China needs the oil, Russia needs the technology trade partner.  

This is where technology plays a key role.

Reagan used Star Wars as a threat. However critical to getting the Russians back to the table is negotiate. But it was an imaginary force that was hotly debated as a chip on the table.

We have two chips that might bring China and Russia back to the table, in regards to Iran. One Robotic Manufacturing, if we were to begin say a US-Japan initiative to replace all outsourced manufacturing to China by Robotics by say 2024, that might get China to wake up. It's a long shot, but hey, where is our Star Wars defense missile shield?

Next Russia, If we set in motion The Energy Project, where we declare the building of the largest sea wave generators from Maine to Miami and from Anchorage to Los Angeles, along with major announcements to Hydrogen, wind and solar, the announcement alone could drive the oil markets down even only briefly.

Again a lot of this is smoke and mirrors, but hey look at the downside? More domestic energy resources? And look of the upside, if we can convince the Chinese to share this technology we could spare them a catastrophic depression in 2015, and Russia booming oil bonanza could go bust if we did actually build to reduce our need for oil releasing pressure on already strained oil supply that China needs.

But how likely is this to occur? Bush is the last president to suggest such things, although I do remember a guy named Albert who suggested the same things in 2000.

As we in the United States approach midterm elections. We Americans are given the sad choice of either Democratic or Republican representation.

As Chris Matthews plainly attempted to decipher the difference between Democratic Iraq policy and the current administration's policy. Watch Howard Dean wiggle around.

As this blog is about the nexus between neuro-biology and technological culture, the Democrats need to fork the development of the War on Terror. In open source development, or any software development forking is when another party makes significant changes to how a platform functions. Primarily but not exclusively changing the definitions of specific functions.

 The forking must be the War on Terror is a psychological warfare, one were actions like Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, or spying on ourselves, or X-Raying our our naked bodies in public, or dumping white phosphorus on the citizens of iraqi towns, or secret prisons, or simply occupying a Middle East Muslim nation, changes the thought process of the intended neuromarket of minds.

These acts, all done for "our safety" causes more harm, not just idealogical harm, but in the global neuromarket of minds. As you increase mortality salience, (I am mortal I fear death) the complex comprimises of the cerbral cortex, begins to give way to the base instincts of the amygdala.

And why not? Evolutionary speaking, if you are being chased by a tiger, do you want the reptilian brain to make microsecond decisions or the paleo-mammaliant o think how the orange stripes on the tiger remind you of a persian carpet at home.

But let's get back to the fork in the road.

Democrats need to articulate that the War on Terror is about connections, culture, and actions. Blowing up arab villages, with even the most "surgical" weaponary is a creating blowback from the War on Terror.

To decrease Terror, simply decrease Terror...

Because the global neuromarket of minds will polarize, not along heady cerebral ideas of democracy or cabinet posts, but along ethnic and religous lines. We know this based on 100's of studies in Terror Management Theory.

We protect our own. We defend the invincible center, when mortality salience increases. We do so as to extend our line of selfish genes. Our minds have simple built in neural networks that quickly delineate US versus THEM. Or as social psychologists say "in and out groups".

So the only fix in Iraq is to decrease the mortality salience, decrease the glucocorticoids, and get the lights, water, and oil running as fast as possible.

Iraq solution is right in their backyard. It's called Sunni Saudi Arabia, and other moderate middle east nations who do not want the Iran-Iraq alliance to become too strong.

Sadly Iraq the formerly 2nd largest producer of oil, being offline, helps both Russian crude with smaller margins as well as Saudi Arabia with huge margins. So a complex set of incentives and manuevers may be out side the skill set of Dr. Rice. But not outside the rhetoric of Democratic leaders.  

Thus the deadline or timetable is not for the Iraqi people it is for the entire middle east. There is of course alot of work to get a summit of arab nations to help Iraq. But with Turkey dealing with its border problems with Kurdistan rebels and the rise of Shia Iran next to Saudi Arabi, the very least Dean could have delineated is assemblage of a plan.

Forking the War on Terror from Iraq, into a globally connected, psychological based campaign of emotional shocks to the hearts and minds of poor disenfranchised muslims is just the beginning.

The Democrats need to explain, that Gitmo, the torture, the occupation is fueling the hearts and minds of British subjects who instead of seeing themselves as subjects of the British Empire, instead as fMRI's and social psych tests reveal, the reptilian brain we all have will strike out against THEM...

Two Wars one biologically evolved mind...

One fails to realize that "The War on Terror" is an information War. Seperate from the fighting in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Not seperate in technology, not seperate in overlapping idealogical philosphies, not seperate in the minds of certain politcal leaders and thinkers, yet seperate still the same.

How, then are the seperate?

The Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars from a strategic military standard are completed. Afghanistan and Iraq have had elections and some assemblage of governance. Lebanon has a government, and all indications look as if a UN force will hopefully keep Hezbollah forces from raiding Israel's border towns.

The problem is that blowing up towns, villages, destroying infrastructure like water and power, has an effect on the other war, that war on terror.

Leaders such as the United States Republican adminstration, wish to continually blurr the two wars. The blur is constant and the opposition has not assembled a language to counter it.

Yet the recent foiled British attack using liquid fuel, by British subjects indicates that this is not a war that strategic military minds can solve.

The US via NSA is trying it, by literally attacked our civil rights, and so far as we know not one public announcement has been made to suggest it is working. Regardless, democracy in Iraq, Lebanon and even governments in Iran and now Somalia have radical islamics in power.

These turn of events suggest that the other war, the information war we as freedom loving americans can see is lost. Because, unlike WWII where channels of information were tightly controlled, we are now all connected.

To operate in this theater of war, information works on two platforms one on silicon and copper and the other on wet circuits of neurons and chemcial transmitters.

When you blow up a house next to yours, you now need to understand what chemicals will be released and change the platform's function.

This blog is about the interface between the changes of those two platforms, the technology man uses and how it effects the mind of man.