brain scan

Our thoughts must be encoded somewhere in our neurons – not IN neurons but in the way they wire up and fire up. Would it be possible to scan those connections – in essence probing the circuits to reveal their structure? We do this in conversation when trying to get answers, but could we diagnose a person (e.g., as holding certain ideas, or thought patterns) by running a script of sorts rather than ‘mechanically’? Thoughts are, of course, not static things contained in a brain but rather ever changing within the neural landscape.

I wonder how much of our thinking is deterministic. Could we ask a person the same question, something totally mundane like: ‘do you like blue?’ and get a consistent answer on different days (assuming they haven’t changed their ‘mind’). More to the point, linguists have shown that by activating certain ‘frames’ respondents will answer questions differently. This is quite interesting and alludes to the idea of ‘priming’ when it comes to manipulation. But my interest here is not explicit manipulation but rather the self-delusion of, let’s call it self-reporting. We tell ourselves narratives, about the world, about ourselves, and surely believe them to an extent.

Perhaps the most empirical of people, then, are those that recognize and can’t believe their own silly stories.

Portland 1

Up from Ashland Oregon.a blown tire. Drinks with a flight attendant. Dinner at the farm. Friendly people. Full serve gas. Powell books. Vw dealership. Shakespeare festival in Ashland. Cheap rents.

It’s like someone designed a city to appeal to my favorite things: warm people; walking; mellow with option for intensity. Love this place.

Sadness1

Sadness is missed opportunity. How many of us go through our lives not knowing: our families, our lovers, our surroundings, ourselves? And how sad. What do we fear? We will all be dust soon enough. To not know – rather to not care to know is the issue. All it takes is a little effort, a little diligence and a little curiosity. Fear not. Learn about it! Explore.

Slowly, Surely

His mind is lumbering. To an outsider he might even seem slow and simple. But I assure you this is as keen a mind as you’ll meet (he is a scientific giant and has been privately nominated for the Nobel prize). What is so remarkable about his relative slowness, and a large contributor to his greatness, is the elementary fact that he is wrong much less than those around him. This may seem an understated complement but it is not. He is like a hunter that catches prey by just sitting there and waiting, rather than darting around for the next meal. He knows it will come to him.

In working with this man I have realized several things. The first realization is how insanely (over)confident most people are about things they believe. After spending countless hours in meetings and debates with our man, I feel like an alien observer when I go to the bar or the restaurant. I never realized how much I did it until I was caught several times. People state opinions on this and that, but most of which is really plain nonsense. This brings me to the second realization which is that when our man makes mistakes, they are always data-driven mistakes. And so while this leads to many blind alleys (to quote Einstein: everything that counts can’t be counted, and everything that can be counted doesn’t count), on average this methodology bears more fruit than other approaches, such as a completely intuition-based approach (in reality both are necessary: intuition to drive inquiry; analysis to interpret results). The third realization is that tangled webs of evidence are always distilled back to first principles – frequently undergraduate-level science principles that everyone learns but few take to heart. These basic principles are sometimes the most powerful and broadly applicable. A little bit of science can go a long way.

Concrete examples in a later post…