Look at an object within arm’s reach, a pencil for instance. Now close your eyes and reach for that object. Chances are you have no difficulty grabbing the pencil.

This is a remarkable feat. Your brain continually updates where it believes you are in the world, including where your hand is in relation to the rest of you. It holds the same understanding of where the pencil is. When you grab the pencil, the brain compares the start location (where it thinks your hand is now) with the goal location (where the pencil is), and uses that comparison to activate the correct muscles that move your arm to the desired location next to the pencil.

If you do not stand in awe of this simple ability, watch a baby feed itself with a spoon. A baby does not fully understand where anything is: his food, his mouth, the spoon. As a result, most of the meal winds up on the floor (or his face).

Nor does this ability come from our vision. Perform the same experiment (with your eyes closed again), but move somewhere new before grabbing the pencil. Relative to your body, the pencil is now in a totally different location, requiring a totally new motion from your hand. But chances are your mind still has little difficulty determining the location of the pencil. Or, if a friend snaps his fingers with your eyes closed, you can reach out and grab his hand straight away.

Granted, our mind does the input we receive from our eyes to construct an understanding of the world. Still, what our eyes “see” is only superficially related to what our mind “sees”. The bulk of what we experience is a personal holodeck or virtual-reality that our mind has created for us to live inside. When you close your eyes right now, you can still see the keyboard, monitor and mouse before you — although far less vividly for most people than with open eyes.

Should you or someone else move the mouse, your mind does not receive a new picture of the world projected onto a screen inside your mind like a movie camera does. Instead you see a mouse, and you see that it is moving at a certain speed. Your mind then updates the mouse object inside your virtual reality so that it moves at the correct speed. This is the same way programmers give life to objects with a game or animation engine.

This is how you can watch a moving car disappear behind a building, follow it along behind the building and know exactly when and where it will reappear, even though your eyes see none of this. The car object continues to exist and move inside your head even after your eyes stop seeing it.

Infants are not born with this ability. If you hide an object under one of three cups and ask him where it is, he will simply guess. In fact, a young enough infant will lose track of an object as soon as it is partially obscured. It magically “reappears” when the obstruction is cleared; the infant will giggle with surprise and delight. In America we generally call this game “peek-a-boo”.

It is not an abstraction to say your mind dedicates specific areas of the brain to motion detection and processing. People have strokes in this area. These people see the world just fine — they can close their eyes and describe the contents of their surrounding just as well as we can — but everything they see remains still. If they look at a street, the parked cars look the same as the ones rumbling down the road. They cannot pour coffee: the cup is empty one moment, overflowing with coffee the next. If you have ever played a 3D game on an old computer that can only render one or two frames per second, you can begin to understand the everyday conditions they must endure.

You do not see or experience any true reality. You create a fictitious world (with varying amounts of input from the things you experience) and live inside this.

The implications of this are profound. There is no difference — Psychologists and Neurologists have yet to find one anyway — between dreaming or imaging something from happening and it “actually” happening. When you close your eyes and imagine moving the mouse, your brain responds in exactly the same way it would if you actually did so. The only way your mind knows the difference is that normally you wake up from or snap out of your dreams. The mind reconnects to your eyes, ears and other senses, realizes the mouse never really did move and creates a new “reality” with this updated information.

People with amputated limbs will sometimes fail to update this reality. Even though we can see the person no longer has an arm, when he looks, he sees his arm and hands the same as ever. Ask him to wiggle his fingers and he will do so. These people are not simply lying. Their brains really believe they are wiggling their fingers; they activate the same parts of their brain that a person with fingers we can see do. If these people are holding a coffee cup and you quickly grab the cup out of their non-existent hands, they will experience the same real pain anyone else would in that situation.

What is going on is that these people’s minds do not update their inner-reality. Like most of us, they created and live in a reality where they have two arms and two legs. They close their eyes and — like us — know exactly where their hand is. For their whole lives, they have opened their eyes and their hand right was right where it should. Suddenly, this no longer happens. They open their eyes; their eyes fail to find the hand. They face a dilemma: either their eyes or mind is lying, despite both having a history of being right.

Most people choose to believe their eyes. Their mind abandons its old reality and constructs a new one to replace it. These people close their eyes and (generally) no longer see their missing hand.

A few people refuse to give in. They see their hand as healthy as ever, whether their eyes are open or closed. They know exactly where it is, whether it is waving or holding cup. They simply ignore what their eyes tell them.

Before you think this sounds weird, realize that we do the same thing. We hear screams that our mind decides is “just the wind” and monsters that turn into “just shadows of the trees”. But before we made that the decision, the screams and monsters were as real as anything inside our mind.

When people claim to see space ships or big-foot, I agree with what Ramachandran says in his book, Phantoms in the Brain: they saw a space ship as clearly as they saw the person next to them. Whether their mind gave in to their eyes, their eyes gave into their mind, or the space ship really existed is irrelevant. The space ship is real in their mind.

Question: can people with damaged motion cortexes dream or imagine motion?

Question: if you show someone who sees a phantom limb a photograph of himself, does he still still see his missing-limb in the photograph?

Phantoms in the Brain next explains the visual cortex. We learn how we see by studying people with scotomas — blinds spots. Although our brain does have something like a one-to-one pixel of the world in our brain, it does not end there. Different areas of our brain specialize in different parts of the visual process: line-detection, texturing, motion. Psychologists have not fully enumerated all the areas, nor — for the areas they have enumerated — do they understand their exact function.

One thing is clear though: the areas are strongly interconnected, process information at different rates of speed, and do a lot of guessing. Some people have huge holes in their vision, yet when information is missing, the brain takes a best guess and what should be there and fills in the gaps. Your brain will connect broken lines, fill in corners, match colors. All of this happens in real time and uses the surrounding environment to deduce the likely outcome (question: how much of this is learned vs. innate?). It will even make up fake hieroglyphics (that you cannot read) inside your blind spot if you surround it with numbers. Motion takes longer to learn than does color or texture too. So if you have a blinking line, first your mind will connect the lines, then they will start blinking.

Yale has an interesting demonstration on some of this. I encourage you do have fun with your blind-spot.

Or if you have photoshop, you can download this file that I used to map the size of my blindspot and perform some of the same experiments.

I am busy reading Ramachandran’s amazing book, Phantoms in the Brain. The first chapters tell a great story explaining the psychology behind foot fetishes.

Brains dedicate specific regions to processing sensation in specific areas of the body. These do not always line up — the eye center is next to the thumb center — and some of the sensation from one area will spill over into another. For unknown reasons, the processing center for the feet is right above the processing center for the genitals. So whenever the feet are stimulated, a portion of that sensation cascades down into the next center; the person feels like the genitals are also being stimulated. People have a predilection for ear-kissing for the same reason: ears are next to the nipples.

More posting about this book for sure…

Usability is very important to me. It is something I harp about all day long at work, much to the malign of my coworkers. I am sure they know a few of Tog’s Pandemic Bugs by heart; I throw them around enough.

I am a firm believer that:

1. All designs have a correct user interface.
2. People who create software have the responsibility to argue about what that correct user interface is.
3. Preferences are what result when people do not think things through, or cannot clearly articulate why a solution is correct

Germans researchers meekly concluded that navigation bars belong on the right side of the page. They actually didn’t conclude that, but the evidence is right there. This study, done in 2003, shows that–once acquainted with the change–users perform better when content is on the left, structure on the right (I assume this would be reversed for Arabic and Hebrew).

Why is this better? Because we read from left to right. When menus are on the right, the content can be left-aligned, the start of each line unaltered by meta-data. A user can scan the data using a constant for the start of each line. With menus and other meta-content on the left, the starting point of each line varies; the user has to scan for the location of each line’s start point. Edge detection, although humans are incredibly adept at this, is geometrically more complicated than using a constant.

Compounding this, putting menus on the left increases the amount of data near the start of each line. All of this data (menus, logos, pictures, advertisements…) displayed next to the desired content increases the noise of the visual field. The user must actively ignore all this extra content to separate out the wheat from the chaff; this takes time.

Although this is the first time I have thought consciously about why contextual information belongs on the left side of the screen, I felt this way from the very beginning of my blogging. My first customization: moving the calendar to the right side of the page.

This is our second post of 2006 here at Erick’s blog. While we will still be covering the politics of Japan to some extent, the shift of this blog will become more Psychology oriented. The reason is because we find the subject fascinating; the human mind is so wonderfully complex. Decoding its mysteries could hardly be anything but one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Slashdot is promoting an article discussing our quick judgements of websites. This is undoubtedly a result of the same meme that produced Blink. The Canadian study concluded that people make lasting judgements of a web-site’s visual appeal within the first 50ms. These judgements generate a bias effecting all future decisions of the sites worth.

An important aspect either the Nature article or the study failed to address was the effects of visual short-term memory on the results. The image on the screen was flashed for a mere 50ms. However, unless another image was flashed to, in effect, “wipe” the memory of the website, it is likely the person simply stored a visual representation in his memory of the website to which he could refer when marking his multi-second judgement of the sites attractiveness.

The world is becoming safer because the world is getting older.

Today, Israel is forcibly removing Israeli settlers from Gaza. The LA Times reports that radical young West Bank settlers moved into Gaza and are camping there for the fight. Meanwhile the NY Times reports that Gaza youngsters are slashing tires and smashing windows in their own protests.

The Arab radicals follow the same pattern. I can think of examples of young, female suicide bombers, but no old ones. Most of the Iraqi insurgents and suicide bombers you hear about are in their 20s. On the other side, US soldiers are also generally in their 20s. It every corner of the world, the youth are the most radical, extreme and violent.

We also know that the world is aging. Stories abound detail various countries’ aging population and the problems aging causes.

It is little surprise then that global war and violence are in sharp decline by every accountable measure. The safest countries such as Japan also have the oldest populations.
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Humans process language by building larger structures from smaller language blocks. Opinions are a group of arguments, which are groups of sentences, which are groups of words. Words are a collection of word chunks that are analogous to Kanji.

When constructing a word, we sometimes combine multiple words into a single word. Examples are some-times, block-buster, book-mark. Sometimes we do the same thing but compress the words slightly. Examples are mov(e)-able. In Chinese or Japanese, these would be represented by two characters. News-paper, for example, is represented by the combination of “New” and “Gateway to the Ear”.

Over time, we begin to modify and compress these multiple words into more compact groupings. Thus, “sun (together)” and “lambanein (take)” now combine into Syllable.

I mostly thought of this because I was surprised to learn that retrieve was once “retrover (find again)”.

I was hoping these thoughts would be more organized, but they are nothing much beyond retreading earlier thoughts of mine.

Vomitoriums are the gates/exits of the colloseums. Vomit means mouth.

FYI: The chinese character for “exit” is the concatination of “out” and “mouth”. Notice how we have the same thing orally: execute, exibit, express, excommunicate all create “away/remove” images; whereas intrance, inhibit, impede, enchant all generate “toward/add” images.

Chinese characters are built using image building blocks, called radicals, to create words. Combine the radicals for person and tree to get rest/vacation/break. Combine big and sheep to get beautiful.

I would imagine sounds like “ck/x/cc” work as our atomic building blocks like radicals do in Japanese. Combine “in” and “glue” to get include (or maybe in and clue). Combine away/show and pressure to get “express”. Combine away/leave and pressure to get “oppress”. How about op/por/tune? Is this tun the same as in tunnel?

Unsurprisingly (given the attitudes of my students), people in Japan watch more TV than any other country. The five hours a day is more than half an hour more than the second place country, which the US holds with its 4:28 of daily TV viewing. This would make sense if Japanese are the most group oriented country in the world.

We as humans are becoming more of a collective entity. Individuals from each generation rely more and more on their peers than previous generations had. Television has accelerated and enabled this reliance because it can tell such a large number of minds what to think in such a short amount of time and with such little effort.

Thus it is hardly surprising that the country we Americans view as the most collective in the world, watch the most TV. But less we make any wrong conclusions, we should take the time to notice how widespread the phenomenon is. Japanese watch the most TV but are hardly unique in that regard. Americans sit behind their TV and get told what to think (or at least what to think about) for four and a half hours a day–90% of what Japanese do. Humans in every country watch at least 50% of what the Japanese do–2.5 hours daily. Think about that.

Japanese are far from the only ones heading towards a more collective structure. Everyone is headed in that direction. Japanese are merely unique in that they appear to be farther along than the rest of us. But the trend is clear. Our future societies will be more and more like ant society.

You can continue reading if you are unconvinced about this direction, its current progress or why TV enables it.
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