My crazy Jungian-influenced friends and I really were bul^H^H^Htheorizing about the Gungan's slapstick arete after we saw The Phantom Menace. But that's not important -- the Brunching Shuttlecocks predicted Jar Jar's shocking fate long ago.
- laborit
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
I think that if these machines are going to be used for market research, the networks should pay the bill, and they should be free to everyone.
You're getting worked up over market research? It's a far sight better than my television, which is in my home solely to do marketing[1]. Don't you think commercials -- the real point of television -- are reason enough we should be getting the damn things for free?
[1] well, it would be if I used it to do anything other than watch movies and play Tetris Attack.
We've gotten very, very good at going faster. The next step is to get where we want to go very fast, then stop.
Empty, harried multitasking can certainly reduce quality of life. One great problem is that it fosters a sense that one always has to be doing something, that relaxation and mindfulness in everyday activities is decadent. Humans were not built for constant stress and mental occupation, though, and a shame-driven call to utilize every moment can lead to dangerous levels of stress. Physical health becomes frankly involved when one applies this ethic to sleep, as Americans (myself included) often do. Sleep debt is not only dangerous, it can impair memory and alertness to the detriment of the very things we skimp on sleep to accomplish! Another unfortunate outgrowth of our ever-bustling society is the feeling that simple things are no longer worth doing well. Too many people live on fast food, have cheap and shallow relationships, and neglect to exercise, read, or think because there is always so much work to do, so many places to shop, so much web to browse. After a certain point, quantity is a poor replacement for quality. So Gleick is doing a valuable service in pointing out how driven we've become. However, we must not take his reaction too far. I maintain that the technological genie is out of the bottle, that we don't even want it to go back, and that the only solution is to become intelligent and well-informed information consumers. Because all the negative things that technology does have positive counterparts. If one is properly discriminating, multitasking doesn't necessarily mean important tasks will suffer -- it simply requires the discipline to recognize them. I was opening my mail while reading/., but when I thought I had something to say about Faster I put it down and gave the computer my whole attention. Here, the ability to do many things at once helped me find the one thing I wanted to do right. Similarly, the modern profusion of books, magazines, journals, websites, television programs, experts, expert systems, entertainers, celebrities, commercials, politicians, fortune cookies, religious leaders, and weatherpeople who want to tell us what to think can lead to an endless, indiscriminate information grazing which doesn't really enrich or enlighten. The ease of pulling up a page on the Ames test for carcinogens allows thousands of recreational browsers to waste their time, feeling like they're learning something useful... but for a few biologists, it may be just the right information, at just the right time. Technology is only dangerous if we try to adapt ourselves to it. Just because we can live lives divisible in nanoseconds doesn't mean we have to.
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
What a great description of psychopharmacology! Can I use it when I teach undergrads?
For all the chemicals it pumps out, the body is surprisingly parsimonious sometimes. You can take Prozac(TM) or ecstasy to raise your mood, and end up with high blood pressure, confusion, tremor, possibly death (admittedly more likely if you take both at once). Serotonin syndrome occurs because lots of receptors throughout the brain and body have the same chemical as a signal to do different things. But if we had a substance that could stimulate receptors with the serotonin-seeking shape and tell the difference between a mood-affecting receptor and a blood-pressure raising receptor, we could get the benefits without the side effects. This is only crudely possible with dumb chemicals. But nanomachines could communicate with a transmitter at a known location on the subject's body, using it to position themselves and either stimulate receptors or release chemicals at a single, tightly controlled locus. Such micromanagement is already used in neuroscience experiments, but at this time they require inserting a catheter directly into the desired part of the brain (yeah, we can treat your depression if you don't feel like getting out of bed anytime soon...). If the drug could place itself...
- laborit do you know more now, or not?
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
It's true that a normal, healthy individual who's been getting the RDA of vitamins can go without for a few days and show no signs of deficiency. However, there are many things about wartime that are abnormal and unhealthy. Overexertion, fatigue, and psychological stress play hell with the B-vitamins, which are important for proper energy metabolism. Maintaining a steady, high plasma level of B-complex may improve performance, and will certainly help prevent soldiers from collapsing or falling ill following their ordeal. Vitamin C usage also increases under high stress, and ensuring an adequate intake is valuable in preventing toxic metabolic byproducts from causing ogran damage, cancer, and such.
This is probably less significant in the case of fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, and E, since they're stored in adipose tissue and doled out slowly. But B and C are water-soluble, and are constantly being excreted. A transdermal patch is probably superior to getting them from food or pills.
Another possibility for this technology is infusion of essential amino acids. These are required in gram quantities to enable the repair and growth of muscle tissue. Given the kind of beating muscle takes during long marches and heavy exertion, a lot of sprains and tears (and the associated loss of active time) could be prevented if we made sure that maintenance abilities were optimal.
So yes, you can get along without vitamins daily -- but the tradeoffs aren't always desirable.
- Michael Cohn "Take a man out of a pestilential jungle where people he doesn't know are trying to kill him for reasons he doesn't understand and surprise! His need to shoot smack goes away." - Dan Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors_
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
>Your freedoms end when they infringe on the rights of others. This includes your freedom of speech.
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement, but I cannot see how my freedom of speech can infringe on your rights, unless I do something like set up a loudspeaker outside your home. The freedom to publish on the internet doesn't seem like a clear example of impingement upon human rights to me.
People in power will always seek to censor, if they are able to. One of the easiest ways to do this is to go after people who say unpopular things. As long as this is possible, free speech will be in danger.
Equating freedom of speech with child pornogragphy is, in my opinion, one of the least responsible uses of free speech that I can recall seeing recently. ****
Before making assumptions about WAVE being used to persecute geeks, let's see what they have to say about what happens after you call WAVE.
After your call, the WAVE Line prepares a written report and sends it to the responsible person at your school for review. If you choose to remain anonymous, great care is taken to ensure that neither your name nor any identifying details are included in this report. Your school handles reports received from the WAVE Line in the same manner that they handle reports received through other direct communication channels.
As others have pointed out, there is nothing wrong per se with giving kids a chance to report bullying, threats, and dangerous behavior. The big question is whether the information goes to ignorant, intolerant, "peace through conformity" administrators or to well-trained, sympathetic counselors who can distinguish nonconformity from psychological distress from sociopathy. That's what we need to be asking WAVE. How do they determine who, in the school system, gets the information? Do they have any requirements for training or education? Do they preface the information with sufficient disclaimers and encourage the recipients to verify it and act with caution? Or do they bill themselves as an infallable window into the inner workings of the school population?
They'll have to do a lot to win my confidence after offering corporate partners the chance to "significantly impact the safety and success of our nation's youth, while gaining expansive marketing exposure in the process." Some assurance that they were paying a little attention to the quality of their information's recipients would go a long way. ****
My father got a Dreamcast last Channukah. We spent many hours trying to get that box 'o tripe connected to the internet through our local ISP, something they repeatedly trumpeted as perfectly possible. When it began connecting, only to spit out repetitive strings of gibberish and then discoonect, I called tech support. The first time, they plead ignorance. On my second try...
Laborit:...and then it disconnects. TS: Yeah, it does that sometimes. Laborit: So what should I do about it? TS: Just keep trying to connect. Laborit: I've tried ten times in a row without success. TS (perky): Yes, you said that. Just keep trying! Laborit: This can't be right. TS: Yes, we have a model right here in the office. It does the same thing. Laborit: You're telling me I should be satisfied with a product that only works as advertised one time in eleven, at most? TS (perkier): Just keep trying! Laborit: I find this unacceptable. TS (threateningly perky): Keep trying! Laborit: Are you saying... TS:PERK PERK PERK!!!
My reaction to the offer: maybe if they paid me twenty-two bucks a month... ****
The people here who are defending copyright don't seem to get the point. Freenet isn't about violating copyright -- it's about giving people the power to share information anonymously and inviolably. Freenet can be used to trade MP3s the same way that a 1 GHz Pentium III box can be used to bash someone's brains out.
It's tempting to try to stamp out IP violations (not to mention terrorism and kidd1e pr0n) by regulating probable channels of distribution, but history shows that when the government has that kind of power, it's never used as it was intended. I'd rather have an internet with Freenet and illegally distributed music than an internet where copyright is sacrosanct but everyone who downloaded DeCSS or visited Peacefire.org or looked for harm-reduction information on ecstasy could be traced and have the law loosed against them.
Fantasy? You know the corporations and the government would do this if they could. We need hardcore privacy protection not to permit immoral acts but to preserve our freedom to act morally.
note: if you prefer, "unreasonable/reasonable," "unsustainable/sustainable," and "antisocial/prosocial," among others, can all be substituted into the above paragraph for the controversial m-word... ****
I hate to sound like a gun manufacturer or a child pr0nographer, but it seems like the eToothpaste eDelivery eServices and the trade-stocks-at-3-AM and dancingsquidtitties.com wouldn't be there if people didn't want them. Their movement into the web is more or less the inevitable result of the common folk moving into the web. So, while I understand the frustration of one of the most empowering communication and information-transforming tools ever created being used to sell crap even more useless than the crap we sold last week, it may be a great opportunity for those with brains. The eOverload lowers the noise-to-signal ratio, but it doesn't drive good information out. If little Johnny's dad gets a shiny new computer and a DSL line so that he can buy underwear at the speed of light using the Business Model of the Future, that doesn't stop Johnny from visiting GNU or Bartleby or the DXM FAQ. I'm talking about guerilla education here. Let's let the dots put a computer in every nook and cranny, build powerful internet backbones and make everyone need high-speed reliable access as one of life's basic requirements.
1) Extra activation != increased brainpower A variety of conditions, such as seizures, frontal lobe damage, and schizophrenia can all produce increased neurological activity. Now, I'm not saying that what we see here is of this pathological variety. The release states that sleep-deprived subjects who showed more abnormal activation did better than those with less -- but not better than those who showed none at all as a result of having adequate sleep. As Gillin suggests, it seems to be some sort of compensatory mechanism, rather than an overall advantage.
2) Extra activation is not necessarily healthy More neurological activity is not necessarily sustainable or healthy. In extreme cases, brain cells can even be killed by overexcitation, although personally I'm only aware of drug models for this phenomenon.
3) Take Gillin's general comments on sleep deprivation with a grain of salt The author of the study editorializes a bit towards the end of the release. There's no doubt that sleep deprivation impairs concentration and mental ability, or that many people do suffer from the condition. But her suggestion that sleep deprivation is endemic and terribly costly to society is not yet an established fact. Here are a few articles that challenge her stance, without disagreeing on the basic nature of sleep deprivation.
Some popular sites go down for a few hours. I really have difficulty trembling over this. Yes, it's illegal and yes, it's wrong, but I can't think of any.com that will seriously harm us, or undergo serious harm itself, by being out for a little while. ebay lost millions, but that was due to skittish investors, not to anything inherently destructive about being unavailable. The best way to encourage things like this is to give the perpetrators lots of publicity and make them feel like like Big Scary L337 HaX0rs. Dignified silence (and law enforcement) will make them realize how stupid this all is.
Seems like there are two issues here: Censorware in general, and the specific issue of hiding the block-lists. If censorware is used in the home, by parents, I don't think we have any civil-rights grounds on which to criticize it. The recent discussion on pornography is filled with people howling about the need for parents to exercise their own discretion with regards to what their kids see and do, and I'm sure this discussion soon will be as well. But isn't one way of fulfilling that duty to restrict access to material they deem unacceptable? I don't agree with this tactic, mind you. I think it's more likely to breed misinformation and rebellion than complete openness and _personal_ involvement. But I don't see any way we can force parents not to use it. I don't see any way the majority political opinion on/. can even advocate trying to circumvent it -- if we want to keep the government out of our homes, if we want to preserve families as independent units with diversity and experimentation in terms of how children are raised, we have to have some stomach for ways that we dislike. And yes, this does make me question the rightness of sites like Peacefire (their disabling information, not their watchdog capacity), just a little...
Censorware in public libraries is, of course, another matter. It is intolerable to restrict adult computer users to material which is suitable only to the most sheltered and restricted child. Yet at the same time, we do want parents to feel secure letting their kids use public computers. They should be able to feel secure because they've raised their kids well enough that they can handle informational freedom, but some have not, or feel they haven't. Given a choice between completely unrestricted libraries and libraries where kids with less-than-wonderful parents can go for intellectual nourishment, I'm willing to make some concessions. At the main library in Austin (at least, last time I checked), the web terminals have blocking software -- except for one which is recessed into the desk, to hide the display, and requires proof of age to use. Make those the majority, and allow a note from parents to get access, and I'd call that a reasonable compromise. Again : I don't like the idea of allowing parents' biases to follow kids into what should be a freeport -- but it's better than allowing those biases to keep them out entirely.
Encrypted block-lists: totally unacceptable. No software at all would be preferable to the abusive, idiotic things we've seen current censorware doing. I can only hope that at some point, companies will stop trying to milk parents' hysteria and come up with the right kind of software. What if we had something that could accept plaintext blocking lists? Different groups could come up with their own lists, applicable to different communities and different age groups. More importantly, individual parents or librarians could examine lists and criteria themselves, making seriously unjust blocks rectifiable.
One more thing to dislike about this kind of ad-pushing is that it works on the premise that the only way to get people to do something is to trick, cajole, or manipulate them (everyone seen Office Space ?). What if we cut out the advertisers and sold our allegience to companies directly? What if, instead of having to sit through ads for Ritz(TM) crackers, you received a plaintext e-mail at the beginning of the month from your ISP:
Send us 3 UPC symbols from Ritz(TM) cracker boxes by the end of the month, or a surcharge of $3.00 will be added to your bill.
Sure, you'd then have to actually spend money on the products. Yes, they'd get even more data on your shopping habits. But I say it would be worth it not to have to hear about rich buttery goodness. . .
And yes, I do practice what I preach. I have no television for this very reason. I will not pay for those programs by sacrificing my mind to trivialized sound-bytes and deceptive adverts.
Then it sounds to me like you have a dangerously low opinion of said mind. Seeing an ad does not cause you to change any opinions or buy any products; these are things you must give your consent to. They may prevaricate; they may use subtle and manipulative tricks; but these are things that we encounter every day from every information source, including other humans. In this era of information overload, it's a vital skill to be able to choose what to pay attention to. If being exposed to advertising will really compromise you so badly, you're already in deep trouble -- you must click on every link you see, stop to read every book that has a favorable review on the cover, and offer a dinner invitation to every stranger who calls you "buddy." My point is that we can't filter out every potentially dishonest stimulus the environment is going to provide, so we'd better learn to defend ourselves (of course, learning when not to be minutely suspicious is a vital skill as well). Acting as if any exposure to persuasion will produce not only transitory impulses (which it may do) but lasting alterations thought and behavior seriously shortchanges our intelligence. Or, to adapt a famous maxim from neurology:
If the mind were simple enough that an advertisement could change us, we wouldn't be able to create advertisements.
That being said, I am in complete agreement that people tend to undervalue their time and attention. Filtering out ads does cost us something, and these "free" services probably will work to change a few brand alignments, simply because it becomes too draining to keep all the babble out. And if that disturbs you enough to keep you from subscribing, your choice is perfectly valid -- but quite different from the idea that we're tabulae rasa, defenseless against the programming of content-pushers.
This saddens me, because I just signed up for an account with citi f/i and was prepared to really like them. However, I will not be canceling my check or boycotting them in protest. I've looked at the online services offered by a number of banks, and all of them have extra fees for this "convenience."
I object to being charged for the privelege of doing something that makes my bank's life easier and saves them money.
While this putrid web-design incompetence does make me a little leary about how well their banking services are designed, I'm still in favor of the general idea of online banking enough that I'm willing to support them. Then again, It's not like they're the only online bank around. Can anyone recommend another no-extraneous-fees service that isn't stupid?
None of these really show that much in terms of wearable computers, mostly just dumb looking shiny costumes
I have to agree with that. With some exceptions, these wearables are disappointingly bulky. More specifically, they look very much like the first-wave manifestation of this technology, in which it's more important to point out its toy value than its actual usefulness. I mean, fabric keyboards are cool, but it looks like this guy's carrying conventional keyboards in his pockets! Once wearable technology spreads beyond geeks and executives, or once time and habituation force us all to calm down, perhaps it will leave the conspicuous consumption phase and start to become ergonomic and natural-looking.
I guess looking like a Jetson is a step up from looking like a Borg, but I want my wearable devices to fit into my wardrobe, not become it. __________
In reality, there is a whole spectrum of conditions
Bless you! YES, there is a continuum. And I suspect that the way out of the messy confusion that characterizes America's understanding of mental illness is not to prescribe help for fewer people, but for more.
Hear me out: I'm not talking about Prozac(TM) in the drinking water or enforced "normalization" for nonconformists. I'm talking about recognizing that most people have some maladaptive thoughts, some incorrect beliefs, and some emotional problems that they'd be better off fixing. For example: We have a prevailing belief that our emotions are an integral part of our personality and a key to how we should think and act. But many people, due to bad learning experiences, incorrect information, or some more general underlying disturbance, have emotions that are distinctly opposed to their best interests. Social phobias, for example, keep many people from forming friendships and positively interacting with others. Irrational irritation at one another keeps many couples from having fulfilling relationships. For years, I myself was disgusted by beds and slept poorly as a result. We should recognize these problems and offer treatment not in an attempt to make everyone alike, but to free them to be more themselves. Does this make sense? The idea of psychotherapy, of good psychotherapy, is not to level out differences but to help people make changes that they themselves desire. Those who characterize all psychotherapists as money-hungry pill-pushers or grown-up versions of Mosaic2K-wielding school counselors are giving great insult to a discipline that incorporates real science and a real desire to understand human nature in an ethical and useful fashion.
On the pill-pushing issue: Perhaps it is hasty to blame psychology. Look, first, to the state of medical coverage, when even a few months of therapy is considered extravagant but a lifetime course of drugs is acceptable. Next, consider the population that's getting them: these are the same people who demand antibiotics when they have a cold. People like drugs - drugs mean you're not crazy! Finally, consider who's giving out the drugs: psychologists aren't even allowed to write prescriptions in the U.S.! These prescriptions are coming from M.D.s, mostly from primary care physicians with only the most basic understanding of the issues. These are not the people I'm recommending to help ordinary, non-clinical folks become better-adjusted, and they're not the ones Satcher is talking about. He wants to increase the number of mental health professionals, people who have studied this field, who know that the literature shows psychotherapy produces lasting gains that drugs alone can't match.
But let me return to my original theme: the problem, in large part, is due to our idea that mental illness and mental health are dichotomous, infinitely separated. Even the "chemical imbalance" concept doesn't get us off the hook here, although we like to think it does. That's where you get BS like the myth that stimulants have a "paradoxical" calming effect on ADD individuals - if that's the case, why do so many college students drink coffee (or borrow their friends' Ritalin(TM)) before a test?
Following is a brief article on the nature of modern cognitive/cognitive-behavioral therapy I wrote up for a lay audience. Note the lack of intolerance, snap diagnoses of "nuttiness," profiling, or indiscriminate prescriptions of antipsychotics. Perhaps this very limited look at a few small facets of modern psychology will help clear up some of the misconceptions and prejudices regarding the field. Note that I am currently in the last year of an undergraduate education in psychology. I am far from an authority or spokesperson in this field.
One of the most important issues that must be tackled in cognitive therapy is the tendency of people to evaluate their automatic thoughts at the same level as sensory data. Since some thoughts and feelings come about quickly and without deliberation in response to a given stimulus, our natural tendency is to see them as intrinsic to the world or to our selves. This is one cause of the persistence of maladaptive behaviors, as the subject does not believe that any other response is possible (at least without violating their essential personality). Take, for example, a subject who becomes angry upon breaking hir diet. It may seem to hir that this is what makes hir become angry. However, Cognitive Therapy (CT) holds that the anger actually proceeds out of high-speed, transparent thoughts like "this means I'm stupid and have no willpower" or "now I'll have to give up on my Ph.D. and join the circus. What a waste!" If the goal of therapy is to reduce inappropriate anger, then the initial place to intervene is not the behavior, but the evaluation.
I am interested in the application of this theory to emotional states, not just reactions. It seems to me that a close parallel can be drawn to the way in which people interpret daily and essentially meaningless fluctuations in their attitudes as much more significant than they really are. For no reason at all (or, shall we say, due to a transient chemical imbalance due to a minor infection or a bee sting or an extraterrestrial anal probe), a person might wake up one morning feeling unusually irritable. This could lead to pointless squabbles, inconsiderate behavior, and a snowballing host of minor nastiness which will lead to a much greater depression in mood than was necessary. Or they might decide that they must be angry about something, leading to their placing a lasting misinterpretation on a formerly neutral element of their life.
But the other option is for them to conclude that they're experiencing a temporary change in affect, and if they ride it out things will no longer seem as they do. This is the natural response to exogenous difficulties. If you got up one morning and found that your usual bus stop had changed to another route, you'd find a way to get where you were going despite the inconvenience. But to be angry just because you feel kinda angry is like getting on the bus even though it's now going to Katmandu, because that's what I do in the morning
Of course, persistent unexplained emotions may be a sign of something deeper, which does require attention. This model merely recommends that the long-term trends carry weight, not the day-to-day wackiness.
I hope that as biochemistry's role in consciousness becomes more accepted, ideas like this will seep into the collective definition of self, or that perhaps we will adopt a distinction between the essential self and the contingent one - that is, between the broad ideas and styles that persist over time, as opposed to day-to-day changes in response to circumstances up to and including quantum phenomena. There may even be a neurological basis for this. Although the brain is structurally differentiated into hundreds of distinct modules, on a cellular level its work is done through connections, and its communication is probabilistic in nature. That is, losing any number of cells will weaken the possibility that a strongly-potentiated pathway will be able to activate, but it's never really removed (unless a whole area is summarily lesioned). Oliver Sacks writes about profoundly disabled Parkinsonian patients who would occasionally awaken from a near-coma to temporarily display the same integrity of intellect, emotion, and character they had before their brains started to dissolve.
Ns of 1 are like demons. . . they can be used to win great fame and fortune, but the psychologist who treats them carelessly will end up being dragged down to Hell My point is that I hope to see people gradually give up the idea that their emotions are to be given supreme confidence. This goes for both momentary fluctuations and for persistent but senseless reactions (for example, that rack of sunglasses at the University Co-op that makes me feel scared and threatened). A common objection is that this would lead to a loss of humanity, of people being treated like computers / rats / tabulae rasa who can be molded as The Man sees fit. But if we put the tools in the hands of the subject, wouldn't the result be more individuality? Right now we tend to cherish even senseless impulses, because they seem to come from the same place as our valued beliefs and complex thoughts. What if we chose to take control of them, in the same way that we accept that obesity, high blood pressure, and skanky hair can (to a great extent) be changed rather than changing us?
I suppose all psychotherapy has this premise somewhere inside it. After all, the very idea that there is a "person" with a "problem" implies a division between the individual and certain of hir mental phenomena. Different schools, however, make widely differing assumptions about just where the division cuts. They rarely seem to articulate this, and I'm beginning to think it may be a significant source of their disagreements. Psychodynamic therapies in general (Freud, Jung, Erickson) seem to have a fairly robust role definition for the healthy individual, and consequently see a great deal of the subject as garbage to be shoveled away. Cognitive/behavioral theory leaves the individual and the therapist great discretion in deciding which habits to break and which to leave, and also avoids the issue of whether elements of the latter set are intrinsic nuances of the self, habits that happen to be useful, or "problems" that have just escaped the axe for now. At the other extreme, humanist therapy (Rogers, Maslow) takes a deliberately hands-off approach, working to establish a daoistic flow in which the personality can resolve itself and foreign elements will naturally sift through. Much seems to depend on whether humanity's intrinsic self-programming is seen as being broadly useful but often inappropriate, undifferentiated and requiring educated application, or universally healthy but misdirected by pathological environments.
Interestingly, there is one theory which entwines the idea of emotional lability and the question of what is essential to the self, although they are somewhat encrypted. The interpersonal psychology of Tim Leary (and later psychologists) directly suggests that people adopt a wide range of personalities and attitudes, depending on the situation. In order to get a handle on an aggressive subject, the therapist should actually become dominant and aggressive, forcing them to experience submission. To reach a severely insecure or spiteful subject, the therapist should express love and consideration (he wrote extensively on whether to expect similar or opposite responses from various behaviors). The concept of health which emerges from this is of an individual with a stable core, such that seemingly inconsistent personalities can be put on as the situation dictates.
I see this as the next natural step after acknowledging that sometimes traits and emotions can be taken off.
It's this kind of shit that makes we want to write my own tactical simulations, designed to piss off the militant patriotic yahoos for which these things seem to be marketted. My favorite idea is a slave uprising in the American South, in an alternate history were the South won the Civil War, played in a sort of resource maanagement/tactical simulation engine.
I like the idea of using violent games to teach the concept that there are multiple sides to most stories. My brother wants to produce a two-part FPS: In the first part you're the wise and benevolent leader of a small nation, trying to accumulate weapons and traps to fend off a psychotic terrorist fanatic who's coming after you with a two-by-four with a nail in it. In the second part, you're a brave freedom-fighting guerrilla warrior trying to assassinate the mad dictator who is strangling your nation by hitting him with a two-by-four with a nail in it...
I think some of the people writing about "emotional control" are taking things a little too far, too fast. We already have an intuitive understanding that some emotions are undesirable and worth manipulating as external objects. Example: subject has had a Dilbert-esque day at work and is brimming with frustration; doesn't want to take it out on significant other later on.
Subject A lays down and thinks pleasant thoughts.
Subject B drinks a glass of herbal tea Subject C pops a valium Subject D has biofeedback / systematic relaxation training, and can cause complete psycho-somatic relaxation by tapping left temple three times.
Which of these people are manipulating their emotions naturally and which are doing it "artificially"? To an extent. since our consciousness doesn't have direct control over the emotions, we're always left to indirect methods like this - kludges which differ only in degree from pressing a button and having an implant do it electrochemically. Naturally, there would be negative consequences to relying too heavily on automated intervention, but I doubt that anyone could condemn this in theory (forget the big-brother applications) but defend drinking coffee.
What this experiment offers is an interesting change to our current emotion-control paradigm. Right now, we try to tweak levels of neurotransmitters which seem to be causally related to the desired emotion. But the brain has many fewer transmitters than it has tasks, and so there are always side effects (e.g., SSRIs often cause appetite disturbance, because serotonin mediates both emotion and satiety). If we could deliver stimulation to a targeted population of neurons, we might be able to achieve transmitter release into just the desired area. Another possibility is to give the computer its own transmitter reservoir, so that it could micromanage the chemical balance itself. This would be advantageous in people who had suffered brain damage and lost critical pieces of tissue.
As for the "how do we know Kevin isn't moving his own arm" question, the answer is a blind experiment: Kevin is in one room; the guy with the "move arm" button is in another. Of course, this doesn't rule out the possibility that he could feel a little stimulation and decide to help it along. For that, I put forward that humans already have a built-in paralysis mode: it's called REM. The brain clamps down on higher motor neurons to make sure that those dreams about supermodels don't result in damage to your housepets. But the chip is presumably located further down, at the neuromuscular junction. If pressing the "move arm" button made his arm move even during REM sleep (and he didn't have a history of sleepwalking), we could reasonably credit the machine.
Slashdot Mirror
My crazy Jungian-influenced friends and I really were bul^H^H^Htheorizing about the Gungan's slapstick arete after we saw The Phantom Menace. But that's not important -- the Brunching Shuttlecocks predicted Jar Jar's shocking fate long ago.
- laborit
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
I think that if these machines are going to be used for market research, the networks should pay the bill, and they should be free to everyone.
You're getting worked up over market research? It's a far sight better than my television, which is in my home solely to do marketing[1]. Don't you think commercials -- the real point of television -- are reason enough we should be getting the damn things for free?
[1] well, it would be if I used it to do anything other than watch movies and play Tetris Attack.
The Product is Laborit
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
We've gotten very, very good at going faster. The next step is to get where we want to go very fast, then stop.
/., but when I thought I had something to say about Faster I put it down and gave the computer my whole attention. Here, the ability to do many things at once helped me find the one thing I wanted to do right.
Empty, harried multitasking can certainly reduce quality of life. One great problem is that it fosters a sense that one always has to be doing something, that relaxation and mindfulness in everyday activities is decadent. Humans were not built for constant stress and mental occupation, though, and a shame-driven call to utilize every moment can lead to dangerous levels of stress. Physical health becomes frankly involved when one applies this ethic to sleep, as Americans (myself included) often do. Sleep debt is not only dangerous, it can impair memory and alertness to the detriment of the very things we skimp on sleep to accomplish!
Another unfortunate outgrowth of our ever-bustling society is the feeling that simple things are no longer worth doing well. Too many people live on fast food, have cheap and shallow relationships, and neglect to exercise, read, or think because there is always so much work to do, so many places to shop, so much web to browse. After a certain point, quantity is a poor replacement for quality.
So Gleick is doing a valuable service in pointing out how driven we've become. However, we must not take his reaction too far. I maintain that the technological genie is out of the bottle, that we don't even want it to go back, and that the only solution is to become intelligent and well-informed information consumers. Because all the negative things that technology does have positive counterparts.
If one is properly discriminating, multitasking doesn't necessarily mean important tasks will suffer -- it simply requires the discipline to recognize them. I was opening my mail while reading
Similarly, the modern profusion of books, magazines, journals, websites, television programs, experts, expert systems, entertainers, celebrities, commercials, politicians, fortune cookies, religious leaders, and weatherpeople who want to tell us what to think can lead to an endless, indiscriminate information grazing which doesn't really enrich or enlighten. The ease of pulling up a page on the Ames test for carcinogens allows thousands of recreational browsers to waste their time, feeling like they're learning something useful... but for a few biologists, it may be just the right information, at just the right time.
Technology is only dangerous if we try to adapt ourselves to it. Just because we can live lives divisible in nanoseconds doesn't mean we have to.
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
dumbassed chemicals just doing their thing.
What a great description of psychopharmacology! Can I use it when I teach undergrads?
For all the chemicals it pumps out, the body is surprisingly parsimonious sometimes. You can take Prozac(TM) or ecstasy to raise your mood, and end up with high blood pressure, confusion, tremor, possibly death (admittedly more likely if you take both at once). Serotonin syndrome occurs because lots of receptors throughout the brain and body have the same chemical as a signal to do different things. But if we had a substance that could stimulate receptors with the serotonin-seeking shape and tell the difference between a mood-affecting receptor and a blood-pressure raising receptor, we could get the benefits without the side effects.
This is only crudely possible with dumb chemicals. But nanomachines could communicate with a transmitter at a known location on the subject's body, using it to position themselves and either stimulate receptors or release chemicals at a single, tightly controlled locus. Such micromanagement is already used in neuroscience experiments, but at this time they require inserting a catheter directly into the desired part of the brain (yeah, we can treat your depression if you don't feel like getting out of bed anytime soon...). If the drug could place itself...
- laborit
do you know more now, or not?
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
It's true that a normal, healthy individual who's been getting the RDA of vitamins can go without for a few days and show no signs of deficiency. However, there are many things about wartime that are abnormal and unhealthy. Overexertion, fatigue, and psychological stress play hell with the B-vitamins, which are important for proper energy metabolism. Maintaining a steady, high plasma level of B-complex may improve performance, and will certainly help prevent soldiers from collapsing or falling ill following their ordeal. Vitamin C usage also increases under high stress, and ensuring an adequate intake is valuable in preventing toxic metabolic byproducts from causing ogran damage, cancer, and such.
This is probably less significant in the case of fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, and E, since they're stored in adipose tissue and doled out slowly. But B and C are water-soluble, and are constantly being excreted. A transdermal patch is probably superior to getting them from food or pills.
Another possibility for this technology is infusion of essential amino acids. These are required in gram quantities to enable the repair and growth of muscle tissue. Given the kind of beating muscle takes during long marches and heavy exertion, a lot of sprains and tears (and the associated loss of active time) could be prevented if we made sure that maintenance abilities were optimal.
So yes, you can get along without vitamins daily -- but the tradeoffs aren't always desirable.
- Michael Cohn
"Take a man out of a pestilential jungle where people he doesn't know are trying to kill him for reasons he doesn't understand and surprise! His need to shoot smack goes away." - Dan Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors_
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
>Your freedoms end when they infringe on the rights of others. This includes your freedom of speech.
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement, but I cannot see how my freedom of speech can infringe on your rights, unless I do something like set up a loudspeaker outside your home. The freedom to publish on the internet doesn't seem like a clear example of impingement upon human rights to me.
People in power will always seek to censor, if they are able to. One of the easiest ways to do this is to go after people who say unpopular things. As long as this is possible, free speech will be in danger.
Equating freedom of speech with child pornogragphy is, in my opinion, one of the least responsible uses of free speech that I can recall seeing recently.
****
They'll have to do a lot to win my confidence after offering corporate partners the chance to "significantly impact the safety and success of our nation's youth, while gaining expansive marketing exposure in the process." Some assurance that they were paying a little attention to the quality of their information's recipients would go a long way.
****
My father got a Dreamcast last Channukah. We spent many hours trying to get that box 'o tripe connected to the internet through our local ISP, something they repeatedly trumpeted as perfectly possible. When it began connecting, only to spit out repetitive strings of gibberish and then discoonect, I called tech support. The first time, they plead ignorance. On my second try...
...and then it disconnects.
Laborit:
TS: Yeah, it does that sometimes.
Laborit: So what should I do about it?
TS: Just keep trying to connect.
Laborit: I've tried ten times in a row without success.
TS (perky): Yes, you said that. Just keep trying!
Laborit: This can't be right.
TS: Yes, we have a model right here in the office. It does the same thing.
Laborit: You're telling me I should be satisfied with a product that only works as advertised one time in eleven, at most?
TS (perkier): Just keep trying!
Laborit: I find this unacceptable.
TS (threateningly perky): Keep trying!
Laborit: Are you saying...
TS:PERK PERK PERK!!!
My reaction to the offer: maybe if they paid me twenty-two bucks a month...
****
The people here who are defending copyright don't seem to get the point. Freenet isn't about violating copyright -- it's about giving people the power to share information anonymously and inviolably. Freenet can be used to trade MP3s the same way that a 1 GHz Pentium III box can be used to bash someone's brains out.
It's tempting to try to stamp out IP violations (not to mention terrorism and kidd1e pr0n) by regulating probable channels of distribution, but history shows that when the government has that kind of power, it's never used as it was intended. I'd rather have an internet with Freenet and illegally distributed music than an internet where copyright is sacrosanct but everyone who downloaded DeCSS or visited Peacefire.org or looked for harm-reduction information on ecstasy could be traced and have the law loosed against them.
Fantasy? You know the corporations and the government would do this if they could. We need hardcore privacy protection not to permit immoral acts but to preserve our freedom to act morally.
note: if you prefer, "unreasonable/reasonable," "unsustainable/sustainable," and "antisocial/prosocial," among others, can all be substituted into the above paragraph for the controversial m-word...
****
I was just wondering how this little tidbit got out... then I noticed the article just before this one.
So that's what MI5's been doing!
or
Maybe we need this dotshit
I hate to sound like a gun manufacturer or a child pr0nographer, but it seems like the eToothpaste eDelivery eServices and the trade-stocks-at-3-AM and dancingsquidtitties.com wouldn't be there if people didn't want them. Their movement into the web is more or less the inevitable result of the common folk moving into the web.
So, while I understand the frustration of one of the most empowering communication and information-transforming tools ever created being used to sell crap even more useless than the crap we sold last week, it may be a great opportunity for those with brains. The eOverload lowers the noise-to-signal ratio, but it doesn't drive good information out. If little Johnny's dad gets a shiny new computer and a DSL line so that he can buy underwear at the speed of light using the Business Model of the Future, that doesn't stop Johnny from visiting GNU or Bartleby or the DXM FAQ. I'm talking about guerilla education here. Let's let the dots put a computer in every nook and cranny, build powerful internet backbones and make everyone need high-speed reliable access as one of life's basic requirements.
That's when we move in...
The people complaining that Nintendo shouldn't have to provide safety gloves are missing the point:
Game causes blisters --> play game less --> find meaning in life --> play less Nintendo
Game doesn't cause blisters-->no reason to stop-->collapse into shroomy dreams-->wake up, buy more fine Nintendo products
Which do you think Nintendo wants?
A few caveats about interpreting this study:
1) Extra activation != increased brainpower
A variety of conditions, such as seizures, frontal lobe damage, and schizophrenia can all produce increased neurological activity. Now, I'm not saying that what we see here is of this pathological variety. The release states that sleep-deprived subjects who showed more abnormal activation did better than those with less -- but not better than those who showed none at all as a result of having adequate sleep. As Gillin suggests, it seems to be some sort of compensatory mechanism, rather than an overall advantage.
2) Extra activation is not necessarily healthy
More neurological activity is not necessarily sustainable or healthy. In extreme cases, brain cells can even be killed by overexcitation, although personally I'm only aware of drug models for this phenomenon.
3) Take Gillin's general comments on sleep deprivation with a grain of salt
The author of the study editorializes a bit towards the end of the release. There's no doubt that sleep deprivation impairs concentration and mental ability, or that many people do suffer from the condition. But her suggestion that sleep deprivation is endemic and terribly costly to society is not yet an established fact. Here are a few articles that challenge her stance, without disagreeing on the basic nature of sleep deprivation.
- Michael Cohn
Some popular sites go down for a few hours. I really have difficulty trembling over this. Yes, it's illegal and yes, it's wrong, but I can't think of any .com that will seriously harm us, or undergo serious harm itself, by being out for a little while. ebay lost millions, but that was due to skittish investors, not to anything inherently destructive about being unavailable. The best way to encourage things like this is to give the perpetrators lots of publicity and make them feel like like Big Scary L337 HaX0rs. Dignified silence (and law enforcement) will make them realize how stupid this all is.
Seems like there are two issues here: Censorware in general, and the specific issue of hiding the block-lists. If censorware is used in the home, by parents, I don't think we have any civil-rights grounds on which to criticize it. The recent discussion on pornography is filled with people howling about the need for parents to exercise their own discretion with regards to what their kids see and do, and I'm sure this discussion soon will be as well. But isn't one way of fulfilling that duty to restrict access to material they deem unacceptable? I don't agree with this tactic, mind you. I think it's more likely to breed misinformation and rebellion than complete openness and _personal_ involvement. But I don't see any way we can force parents not to use it. I don't see any way the majority political opinion on /. can even advocate trying to circumvent it -- if we want to keep the government out of our homes, if we want to preserve families as independent units with diversity and experimentation in terms of how children are raised, we have to have some stomach for ways that we dislike. And yes, this does make me question the rightness of sites like Peacefire (their disabling information, not their watchdog capacity), just a little...
Censorware in public libraries is, of course, another matter. It is intolerable to restrict adult computer users to material which is suitable only to the most sheltered and restricted child. Yet at the same time, we do want parents to feel secure letting their kids use public computers. They should be able to feel secure because they've raised their kids well enough that they can handle informational freedom, but some have not, or feel they haven't. Given a choice between completely unrestricted libraries and libraries where kids with less-than-wonderful parents can go for intellectual nourishment, I'm willing to make some concessions.
At the main library in Austin (at least, last time I checked), the web terminals have blocking software -- except for one which is recessed into the desk, to hide the display, and requires proof of age to use. Make those the majority, and allow a note from parents to get access, and I'd call that a reasonable compromise.
Again : I don't like the idea of allowing parents' biases to follow kids into what should be a freeport -- but it's better than allowing those biases to keep them out entirely.
Encrypted block-lists: totally unacceptable. No software at all would be preferable to the abusive, idiotic things we've seen current censorware doing. I can only hope that at some point, companies will stop trying to milk parents' hysteria and come up with the right kind of software. What if we had something that could accept plaintext blocking lists? Different groups could come up with their own lists, applicable to different communities and different age groups. More importantly, individual parents or librarians could examine lists and criteria themselves, making seriously unjust blocks rectifiable.
- Michael Cohn
The plural of tabula rasa is tabulae rasae
Thanks for the correction. I have to use the expression often enough that it won't go to waste.
- Michael Cohn
One more thing to dislike about this kind of ad-pushing is that it works on the premise that the only way to get people to do something is to trick, cajole, or manipulate them (everyone seen Office Space ?). What if we cut out the advertisers and sold our allegience to companies directly?
What if, instead of having to sit through ads for Ritz(TM) crackers, you received a plaintext e-mail at the beginning of the month from your ISP:
Send us 3 UPC symbols from Ritz(TM) cracker boxes by the end of the month, or a surcharge of $3.00 will be added to your bill.
Sure, you'd then have to actually spend money on the products. Yes, they'd get even more data on your shopping habits. But I say it would be worth it not to have to hear about rich buttery goodness. . .
- Michael Cohn
Author of the GHB FAQs
And yes, I do practice what I preach. I have no television for this very reason. I will not pay for those programs by sacrificing my mind to trivialized sound-bytes and deceptive adverts.
Then it sounds to me like you have a dangerously low opinion of said mind. Seeing an ad does not cause you to change any opinions or buy any products; these are things you must give your consent to. They may prevaricate; they may use subtle and manipulative tricks; but these are things that we encounter every day from every information source, including other humans. In this era of information overload, it's a vital skill to be able to choose what to pay attention to. If being exposed to advertising will really compromise you so badly, you're already in deep trouble -- you must click on every link you see, stop to read every book that has a favorable review on the cover, and offer a dinner invitation to every stranger who calls you "buddy."
My point is that we can't filter out every potentially dishonest stimulus the environment is going to provide, so we'd better learn to defend ourselves (of course, learning when not to be minutely suspicious is a vital skill as well). Acting as if any exposure to persuasion will produce not only transitory impulses (which it may do) but lasting alterations thought and behavior seriously shortchanges our intelligence. Or, to adapt a famous maxim from neurology:
If the mind were simple enough that an advertisement could change us, we wouldn't be able to create advertisements.
That being said, I am in complete agreement that people tend to undervalue their time and attention. Filtering out ads does cost us something, and these "free" services probably will work to change a few brand alignments, simply because it becomes too draining to keep all the babble out. And if that disturbs you enough to keep you from subscribing, your choice is perfectly valid -- but quite different from the idea that we're tabulae rasa, defenseless against the programming of content-pushers.
- Michael Cohn
Author of the GHB FAQ
I resolve to spend more time on important things and less reading Slashd
This saddens me, because I just signed up for an account with citi f/i and was prepared to really like them. However, I will not be canceling my check or boycotting them in protest. I've looked at the online services offered by a number of banks, and all of them have extra fees for this "convenience."
I object to being charged for the privelege of doing something that makes my bank's life easier and saves them money.
While this putrid web-design incompetence does make me a little leary about how well their banking services are designed, I'm still in favor of the general idea of online banking enough that I'm willing to support them.
Then again, It's not like they're the only online bank around. Can anyone recommend another no-extraneous-fees service that isn't stupid?
None of these really show that much in terms of wearable computers, mostly just dumb looking shiny costumes
I have to agree with that. With some exceptions, these wearables are disappointingly bulky. More specifically, they look very much like the first-wave manifestation of this technology, in which it's more important to point out its toy value than its actual usefulness. I mean, fabric keyboards are cool, but it looks like this guy's carrying conventional keyboards in his pockets! Once wearable technology spreads beyond geeks and executives, or once time and habituation force us all to calm down, perhaps it will leave the conspicuous consumption phase and start to become ergonomic and natural-looking.
I guess looking like a Jetson is a step up from looking like a Borg, but I want my wearable devices to fit into my wardrobe, not become it.
__________
In reality, there is a whole spectrum of conditions
Bless you! YES, there is a continuum. And I suspect that the way out of the messy confusion that characterizes America's understanding of mental illness is not to prescribe help for fewer people, but for more.
Hear me out: I'm not talking about Prozac(TM) in the drinking water or enforced "normalization" for nonconformists. I'm talking about recognizing that most people have some maladaptive thoughts, some incorrect beliefs, and some emotional problems that they'd be better off fixing. For example:
We have a prevailing belief that our emotions are an integral part of our personality and a key to how we should think and act. But many people, due to bad learning experiences, incorrect information, or some more general underlying disturbance, have emotions that are distinctly opposed to their best interests. Social phobias, for example, keep many people from forming friendships and positively interacting with others. Irrational irritation at one another keeps many couples from having fulfilling relationships. For years, I myself was disgusted by beds and slept poorly as a result.
We should recognize these problems and offer treatment not in an attempt to make everyone alike, but to free them to be more themselves. Does this make sense? The idea of psychotherapy, of good psychotherapy, is not to level out differences but to help people make changes that they themselves desire. Those who characterize all psychotherapists as money-hungry pill-pushers or grown-up versions of Mosaic2K-wielding school counselors are giving great insult to a discipline that incorporates real science and a real desire to understand human nature in an ethical and useful fashion.
On the pill-pushing issue: Perhaps it is hasty to blame psychology. Look, first, to the state of medical coverage, when even a few months of therapy is considered extravagant but a lifetime course of drugs is acceptable. Next, consider the population that's getting them: these are the same people who demand antibiotics when they have a cold. People like drugs - drugs mean you're not crazy! Finally, consider who's giving out the drugs: psychologists aren't even allowed to write prescriptions in the U.S.! These prescriptions are coming from M.D.s, mostly from primary care physicians with only the most basic understanding of the issues. These are not the people I'm recommending to help ordinary, non-clinical folks become better-adjusted, and they're not the ones Satcher is talking about. He wants to increase the number of mental health professionals, people who have studied this field, who know that the literature shows psychotherapy produces lasting gains that drugs alone can't match.
But let me return to my original theme: the problem, in large part, is due to our idea that mental illness and mental health are dichotomous, infinitely separated. Even the "chemical imbalance" concept doesn't get us off the hook here, although we like to think it does. That's where you get BS like the myth that stimulants have a "paradoxical" calming effect on ADD individuals - if that's the case, why do so many college students drink coffee (or borrow their friends' Ritalin(TM)) before a test?
- laborit
Following is a brief article on the nature of modern cognitive/cognitive-behavioral therapy I wrote up for a lay audience. Note the lack of intolerance, snap diagnoses of "nuttiness," profiling, or indiscriminate prescriptions of antipsychotics. Perhaps this very limited look at a few small facets of modern psychology will help clear up some of the misconceptions and prejudices regarding the field.
Note that I am currently in the last year of an undergraduate education in psychology. I am far from an authority or spokesperson in this field.
One of the most important issues that must be tackled in cognitive therapy is the tendency of people to evaluate their automatic thoughts at the same level as sensory data. Since some thoughts and feelings come about quickly and without deliberation in response to a given stimulus, our natural tendency is to see them as intrinsic to the world or to our selves. This is one cause of the persistence of maladaptive behaviors, as the subject does not believe that any other response is possible (at least without violating their essential personality).
Take, for example, a subject who becomes angry upon breaking hir diet. It may seem to hir that this is what makes hir become angry. However, Cognitive Therapy (CT) holds that the anger actually proceeds out of high-speed, transparent thoughts like "this means I'm stupid and have no willpower" or "now I'll have to give up on my Ph.D. and join the circus. What a waste!" If the goal of therapy is to reduce inappropriate anger, then the initial place to intervene is not the behavior, but the evaluation.
I am interested in the application of this theory to emotional states, not just reactions. It seems to me that a close parallel can be drawn to the way in which people interpret daily and essentially meaningless fluctuations in their attitudes as much more significant than they really are. For no reason at all (or, shall we say, due to a transient chemical imbalance due to a minor infection or a bee sting or an extraterrestrial anal probe), a person might wake up one morning feeling unusually irritable. This could lead to pointless squabbles, inconsiderate behavior, and a snowballing host of minor nastiness which will lead to a much greater depression in mood than was necessary. Or they might decide that they must be angry about something, leading to their placing a lasting misinterpretation on a formerly neutral element of their life.
But the other option is for them to conclude that they're experiencing a temporary change in affect, and if they ride it out things will no longer seem as they do. This is the natural response to exogenous difficulties. If you got up one morning and found that your usual bus stop had changed to another route, you'd find a way to get where you were going despite the inconvenience. But to be angry just because you feel kinda angry is like getting on the bus even though it's now going to Katmandu, because that's what I do in the morning
Of course, persistent unexplained emotions may be a sign of something deeper, which does require attention. This model merely recommends that the long-term trends carry weight, not the day-to-day wackiness.
I hope that as biochemistry's role in consciousness becomes more accepted, ideas like this will seep into the collective definition of self, or that perhaps we will adopt a distinction between the essential self and the contingent one - that is, between the broad ideas and styles that persist over time, as opposed to day-to-day changes in response to circumstances up to and including quantum phenomena. There may even be a neurological basis for this. Although the brain is structurally differentiated into hundreds of distinct modules, on a cellular level its work is done through connections, and its communication is probabilistic in nature. That is, losing any number of cells will weaken the possibility that a strongly-potentiated pathway will be able to activate, but it's never really removed (unless a whole area is summarily lesioned). Oliver Sacks writes about profoundly disabled Parkinsonian patients who would occasionally awaken from a near-coma to temporarily display the same integrity of intellect, emotion, and character they had before their brains started to dissolve.
Ns of 1 are like demons. . . they can be used to win great fame and fortune, but the psychologist who treats them carelessly will end up being dragged down to Hell
My point is that I hope to see people gradually give up the idea that their emotions are to be given supreme confidence. This goes for both momentary fluctuations and for persistent but senseless reactions (for example, that rack of sunglasses at the University Co-op that makes me feel scared and threatened). A common objection is that this would lead to a loss of humanity, of people being treated like computers / rats / tabulae rasa who can be molded as The Man sees fit. But if we put the tools in the hands of the subject, wouldn't the result be more individuality? Right now we tend to cherish even senseless impulses, because they seem to come from the same place as our valued beliefs and complex thoughts. What if we chose to take control of them, in the same way that we accept that obesity, high blood pressure, and skanky hair can (to a great extent) be changed rather than changing us?
I suppose all psychotherapy has this premise somewhere inside it. After all, the very idea that there is a "person" with a "problem" implies a division between the individual and certain of hir mental phenomena. Different schools, however, make widely differing assumptions about just where the division cuts. They rarely seem to articulate this, and I'm beginning to think it may be a significant source of their disagreements. Psychodynamic therapies in general (Freud, Jung, Erickson) seem to have a fairly robust role definition for the healthy individual, and consequently see a great deal of the subject as garbage to be shoveled away. Cognitive/behavioral theory leaves the individual and the therapist great discretion in deciding which habits to break and which to leave, and also avoids the issue of whether elements of the latter set are intrinsic nuances of the self, habits that happen to be useful, or "problems" that have just escaped the axe for now. At the other extreme, humanist therapy (Rogers, Maslow) takes a deliberately hands-off approach, working to establish a daoistic flow in which the personality can resolve itself and foreign elements will naturally sift through. Much seems to depend on whether humanity's intrinsic self-programming is seen as being broadly useful but often inappropriate, undifferentiated and requiring educated application, or universally healthy but misdirected by pathological environments.
Interestingly, there is one theory which entwines the idea of emotional lability and the question of what is essential to the self, although they are somewhat encrypted. The interpersonal psychology of Tim Leary (and later psychologists) directly suggests that people adopt a wide range of personalities and attitudes, depending on the situation. In order to get a handle on an aggressive subject, the therapist should actually become dominant and aggressive, forcing them to experience submission. To reach a severely insecure or spiteful subject, the therapist should express love and consideration (he wrote extensively on whether to expect similar or opposite responses from various behaviors). The concept of health which emerges from this is of an individual with a stable core, such that seemingly inconsistent personalities can be put on as the situation dictates.
I see this as the next natural step after acknowledging that sometimes traits and emotions can be taken off.
- laborit
It's this kind of shit that makes we want to write my own tactical simulations, designed to piss off the militant patriotic yahoos for which these things seem to be marketted. My favorite idea is a slave uprising in the American South, in an alternate history were the South won the Civil War, played in a sort of resource maanagement/tactical simulation engine.
I like the idea of using violent games to teach the concept that there are multiple sides to most stories. My brother wants to produce a two-part FPS: In the first part you're the wise and benevolent leader of a small nation, trying to accumulate weapons and traps to fend off a psychotic terrorist fanatic who's coming after you with a two-by-four with a nail in it. In the second part, you're a brave freedom-fighting guerrilla warrior trying to assassinate the mad dictator who is strangling your nation by hitting him with a two-by-four with a nail in it...
- Michael
Naturally, there would be negative consequences to relying too heavily on automated intervention, but I doubt that anyone could condemn this in theory (forget the big-brother applications) but defend drinking coffee.
What this experiment offers is an interesting change to our current emotion-control paradigm. Right now, we try to tweak levels of neurotransmitters which seem to be causally related to the desired emotion. But the brain has many fewer transmitters than it has tasks, and so there are always side effects (e.g., SSRIs often cause appetite disturbance, because serotonin mediates both emotion and satiety). If we could deliver stimulation to a targeted population of neurons, we might be able to achieve transmitter release into just the desired area. Another possibility is to give the computer its own transmitter reservoir, so that it could micromanage the chemical balance itself. This would be advantageous in people who had suffered brain damage and lost critical pieces of tissue.
As for the "how do we know Kevin isn't moving his own arm" question, the answer is a blind experiment: Kevin is in one room; the guy with the "move arm" button is in another. Of course, this doesn't rule out the possibility that he could feel a little stimulation and decide to help it along. For that, I put forward that humans already have a built-in paralysis mode: it's called REM. The brain clamps down on higher motor neurons to make sure that those dreams about supermodels don't result in damage to your housepets. But the chip is presumably located further down, at the neuromuscular junction. If pressing the "move arm" button made his arm move even during REM sleep (and he didn't have a history of sleepwalking), we could reasonably credit the machine.
- Michael Cohn