Keith Barry and Hacking the brain

Cognitive Psychology is always fascinating! Keith Barry is an absolute treat to watch.

Numenta Platform

Interesting article this one:

Jeff Hawkins and Numenta

It reflects both the skepticism that people now display when they learn about something new in the field of AI and the confidence of someone in his technology.

Jeff Hawkins - I wish you all the best with this one.

Emotional Impulse

Just wondering on how the brain reacts when posed with an emotional pressure. I sense that it decides on what to do first and blinds every other plausible option out of its courses of action matrix. I guess that is why decisions made based on emotion are generally bad or just not properly thought out enough. What is funnier, is the fact that after you have simmered down or shall I say, cooled down and think it through you come up with amazing things that you should have said or done in the first place. It never strikes us before, does it?! I guess throughout the human evolution the ones that have survived are the ones that have been driven by impulse rather than the ones waiting to pause, think and then act! Picture this, two characters, one Intelligent Human and the other the Impulsive Human in primitive age.

Intelligent Human: Look there is some rustling in the bush!

Impulsive Human: Yup, I am outta here! Running for the tree there!

Intelligent Human (still standing there looking at the bush): Let us take this one step at a time! Now how big can a thing be to cause so much noise! Hmm....Damn! Its a lion! Game over! Intelligent one gets eaten!

Impulsive Human (Peeping from the tree above): Bye Bye Friend! Gosh! I am good!

So as you can see, the impulsive ones survived and hence our nature of acting stupid under any kind of emotional pressure.

Coefficient of reorganization and intelligent systems

For long now, we have known and acknowledged that human brain is a self organizing map. The speed and depth of the re-organization or shall I say reconfigurability of the mental map slows down with age. That is why, we always say, that kids learn faster than the adults. I was recently pondering on these lines to once again differentiate between the intelligent and the not so gifted individuals. With the mental maps, we hold faiths and beliefs that allow for some rigidity in our behavior. You don't want to be dealing with a person who behaves very differently every time you meet just because he/she is learning do you?! But at the same time the difference in behavior is accepted in case of a child since we attribute it to learning or growing. I believe that as we grow older we inculcate so many faiths and beliefs that it ultimately starts hindering the re-organization of the mental map itself, slows us down, and makes us more reluctant to accept change. Hence I define, in the true spirit of creativity, a term, "coefficient of reorganization". It merely indicates the capacity of an individual to revise his/her beliefs based on exposure to new information. Higher the coefficient more the reconfigurability of the mental map. It appears that intelligent people generally posses higher coefficients of reorganization thus making them more adaptable to change. This is not a rule of thumb though and is completely based on my observations of the world I live in. Nevertheless, I believe this is one of the possible parameters that can be used in defining intelligent systems.

Latent Genius in everybody

I have been observing this strange phenomenon in humans for quite some time but was not sure if I was getting it right. It has taken me very long to convince myself of the theory that I am about to propound here. I believe that there is a latent genius in everybody. Yes - that includes you. As most of you perhaps know, our brain is based on neural networks or network of cells. I am beginning to realize that the connections are so fuzzy in the brain that it is very very tough for anyone to predict one's capability in anything to any amount of precision. This ties back to my original theory that intelligence is not measurable at all. Coming back to my latent genius thread, I feel that everybody has an unrealized potential in their areas of competence. By areas of competence, I do not mean the area you work in. It could be anything - a software professional's flair for music, a construction worker's flair for painting, etc. This area of competence is in turn dependent on the structural makeup of the brain. The better the brain is geared towards the activity, more the unrealized potential. Notice, that I am constantly referring to this potential as 'unrealized'. This is because I am talking about people who are unaware of this functionality in their brains. People who have realized their potential are either prodigies (who realized this at a very early age) or are proclaimed genius in their fields. It is in this spirit, I appeal to everyone reading this to take time to evaluate their areas of competence within the brain and leverage it to utmost use. Needless to say, I hope you always use it for the good. All the best with the effort.

Humans and the attention syndrome

Humans love attention. There is just no doubt about that. When you go to a party, you want everybody to come and talk to you. You want to be the center of attraction. But funny as it may sound, if everybody wants the same thing then we enter the tricky situation of not knowing who makes the first move. That is, who would first go to the other person and initiate a conversation. In my humble analysis, I have understood that people of outgoing nature initiate conversations well (as it is expected of them!) and then once they know that they have set the ball rolling, they go back into a shell. This is when I see others (I personally call them attention feeders) who want to be part of the conversation and thus make an impression on others and start talking around the initiator. This is where things can go out of hand. Why? Because this is where the class of people I dread can monopolize the conversation. They are called "Intellectual Masturbators"!

These are people who are more than willing to demonstrate their knowledge about something or the other irrespective of any need for the same. They love to monologue and expose their intellectual self to the entire world. There are times that I do not mind to be monologued but then this phenomenon clashes with the attention syndrome. Obviously if one person talks all the time, the attention is not being shared by the other attention feeders. Thus throwing them out of the game.

Through this writing, it is my attempt to help all the intellectual "you-know-what"s. I want them to realize that attention is a common pursuit among all other mortals and it is important that they allow it to be shared.

Is Music a Language?

I love music - Classical, Pop, Jazz, Rap, Reggae. All of them in varying degrees ofcourse. Sometimes it even becomes difficult to decide which genre I want to listen to. Anyways, here I am pondering about Music in general and it struck me today that Music is actually very expressive just like Vocabulary of any Language. You have different styles of music for different occasions. Some tunes sound divine and soft, some sound sad, some sound happy and chirpy while some others can even sound cruel and rude! I could find so much similarity between music and language that I have stopped distinguishing between the two now which as you might have deduced already answers the title of my article.

For example, Music has a vocabulary (in terms of chords) and Language has a vocabulary too. Music has a grammar (tonalities, etc) and Language has it too. Another interesting note about their similarity is that good music and good language leave a better (a.k.a happier) impresssion on the listener than bad music and bad language (although bad music is a very subjective call and varies from person to person).

Now for my final blow! In the spirit of going overboard with my argument I can also conclude that Music happens to be the only universal human language of our planet. I obviously do not mean to imply that music everywhere in the world is the same but music as a phenomenon binds all and can even be used to communicate emotions where other verbal or sign based human languages fail!